#161: They’re Making Our Point (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 161st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. This week, we discuss Godot, dogs, and science. Do the New York Times and the Brookings Institution have insight into what’s true, what’s not, and how science is done? Could they define hypothesis, prediction, or test? We think not. New “research” out of Brookings claims that we are leading purveyors of misinformation...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 161, I believe.
That's right.
Yeah, 161.
That's good.
It is.
We don't know yet.
That is a fair point.
It is February 11th.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
Wait, you're not using our credentials to sneak some sciencey stuff in and confuse people, are you?
I hadn't decided yet, but no, that was not my intent on revealing that we have a credential or two.
In fact, I'll just say I don't believe in these credentials.
It happens that your credential and my credential do mean something, but the fact of having one doesn't mean much at all.
That's something that... It's a distinction that seems lost in a lot of people.
... readily apparent inside the Academy.
I will say, before we get to any of that, though... Yes?
I am super excited.
Are you?
Yes.
About February 11th?
Exactly.
Number 161?
What about?
No, about February 11th, because unless my calculations are incorrect... Which they might be.
I don't think they are.
Okay.
I don't think they are.
I think in this case, I've just, uh, I've nailed it.
We are more than halfway through winter, no matter how you measure that.
Whether you measure, uh, from the winter solstice to the spring equinox.
Well, no.
If you measure it from, if you, if you measure the winter solstice as midwinter.
That's my, well.
Then you're, then it's not winter anymore.
Then it's spring.
Hold on, hold on.
You may have got me here.
Suffice it to say, in the worst case, in the worst case scenario, we are now halfway through the winter of 20... The northern hemisphere of 2023 that began in 2023.
Yeah, and as somebody who has... This is fascinating.
...closet prepper instincts, the thing about being halfway through winter... Oh, you think you're closeted?
It's one of those closets that you build into a room that doesn't have a deep... It's not a real hidden closet, but yeah, I'm a slightly closeted prepper type.
The halfway mark through winter...
It's actually a big deal, because it means that if things were to go haywire in a way that would require your prepping and would reveal all of the ways in which you had not gotten all the way to fully prepped, the chances that you could cobble your way through what remains are all the greater.
Yeah, I mean, for instance, we don't live in a place that's all that cold, although it gets plenty cold and it snows and everything, but we definitely have enough sun.
wood to get us to get us through the winter at this point um no matter how how cold it gets yeah and uh yeah the relationship between wood and sun is a good one because it really is like solid sun where that came from stacked i never know which sun i was talking about yeah um right i think i do know which sun you were talking about Yeah, exactly that one.
But anyway, you know, you take your choice.
But that one, yeah, it's stored up in the wood.
And so anyway, I'm just I'm excited that we appear.
It's not a slam dunk, but it looks like we're going to survive the winter.
Nice.
Yeah.
May the same be true for all of you who are listening and watching.
Absolutely, to you and yours.
All right, so we're going to get into it quickly today, but just a few reminders right off the top first.
We are not going to do a Q&A this week.
If you were looking for some Dark Horse content instead during that time, you could pick up our book, Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, or check out Natural Selections.
This week I republished an essay that was originally published in a literary magazine That's now defunct.
The essay is called Memories of a Mugging, and it's an exploration of the sensory nature of memory and told through a story that actually happened to me and three of my students on my first study abroad trip in Ecuador, where we were mugged at knife point in Quito.
I'm very fond of this piece, and it got me thinking about a number of other things as thinking about memory will do.
And thinking about the science of memory also will do.
Okay, we are supported by you.
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Trying to make sense.
Trying to make sense, indeed.
And finally, for top-of-the-hour stuff, we have sponsors!
We are very grateful to our sponsors.
We start these podcasts every week with three ads, and then we don't do any more throughout the episode.
So without further ado, here we go!
Our first sponsor this week is Vivo Barefoot.
They make shoes made for feet.
Everyone should try these shoes.
Most shoes are made for someone's idea of what feet should be.
Vivos, however, are made by people who actually know feet.
And that sounds obvious, don't we all know feet?
No, most of us don't, it turns out, including many shoemakers who are thinking about what they want a person's foot in a shoe to look like as opposed to what a foot actually is and what it needs to do in order for a person wearing these shoes to remain healthy.
Those people who do it badly are shoe mockers.
They're making a mockery of shoes, is what I think is going on.
All right, I've thrown a monkey wrench into the works.
Well, it seems to me that shoe mocker is either the German or the Yiddish pronunciation of, I think... Shoemaker, it must be.
It must be, right?
In which case, mocker...
I'm not sure this totally works, because mocker is maker in at least some related language.
Well, I think it does work as long as I... But schoo can't be the word for shoe in German, so I don't even know.
Right.
I don't even know what that means.
I apologize to our native German speakers, but otherwise I think it stands.
And not the Yiddish speakers?
There aren't that many Yiddish speakers.
And you don't apologize to them anyway?
I do, but I think it's more or less academic.
Happy Shabbat, everyone.
A word is spreading about these shoes, and we've talked about this before, but I was approached by a stranger this last week who recognized the shoes I was wearing and asked if they are as good as she had heard.
I was, of course, wearing the Vivos that I wear most times that I'm out, and yes, they are.
They are indeed as good as she had heard and as good as we are telling you they are right now.
This is, again, Vivo Barefoots.
We love these shoes.
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The tactile feedback from the surfaces you're walking on is amazing.
They cause no pain at all because there are no pressure points forcing your feet into odd positions.
They're fantastic.
Our feet are the products of millions of years of evolution.
Not just ours.
Their feet also.
Yes.
Your feet, your ears, our ears, our feet.
But we're only talking about feet at the moment.
And ears apparently.
No.
Humans evolved to walk, move, and run barefoot.
Modern shoes that are overly cushioned and strangely shaped have negatively impacted foot function and are contributing to a health crisis.
are the product of, yes, millions of years of evolution as well.
And then, no, I'm not gonna go there.
Okay, modern shoes that are overly cushioned and strangely shaped have negatively impacted foot function and are contributing to a health crisis.
People move less than they might in part because their shoes make their feet hurt.
I, you know, so this is not a standard ad read, but as long as we're talking about here.
Right?
So, one of the diagnostic characteristics of mammals, so-called synapomorphy, is having these three middle ear bones, which have moved, have migrated from being gill arches in early vertebrates.
And we don't have gill arches anymore, as many of you will have noticed.
And some of the posterior gill arches have moved.
Some of the skeletal elements of them have moved and become our middle ear bones and have allowed us as mammals to hear really well.
And it raises the question for me of what has happened with the tarsals and metatarsals in the feet.
There's going to be less modification at one level, because there's no sort of, you know, gill arches to be transformed and to move up into the skull and such, or into the upper part of the skull.
But obviously, like a horse's hoof with the reduction of digits and such, and the movement of us from being quadrupedal to bipedal is going to have transformed our feet bones a fair bit, and thus there may well be, like there are other downstream negative health consequences of being bipedal,
And then sitting down a lot, that there are likely going to be a lot of foot concerns as well that are specifically addressed by these shoes.
Yeah, there's a huge amount of stuff going on in hands and feet, which I learned a great deal about when you and I became interested in the Hobbits of Flores Island.
There's some very interesting distinctions in the hands of humans and human ancestors from our pre-human ape ancestors.
Yeah.
Anyway, it's probably not the place for that question, but anyway, it is a fascinating question because the hand really isn't what you think it is, nor is the foot, right?
All of those little bones are not incidentally separate.
They are functionally separate.
Totally.
Okay.
And let me just, um, if, if anyone thought like, wait, what did he say?
That's Homo floresiensis from Flores Island in Eastern, in the Indonesian archipelago in Eastern Indonesia.
Which is a great story that we should get back to at some point.
We should.
Yeah, probably not today.
We're not even halfway through the first ad.
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I realize that they are closer to ski boots than they should be.
Oh, the other shoes.
Yes, the other shoes.
The other shoes are closer to ski boots than they should be.
And Vivos are not.
They're not.
You definitely feel... On the other hand, you don't want to ski in them.
I have not tried that.
Yeah.
Even just attaching them.
The only negative thing I can really come up with.
Yeah.
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That's our ads for the week.
We've got a lot to talk about, but I wanted to start with a couple of lighter things before we delve into some of the.
The muck.
The muck.
Yeah.
First, I have a correction.
And it's not exactly a correction, except I mentioned Forrest Gump last week.
And I said I hadn't seen the movie.
I think what we were talking about was We're talking about whether or not there were any roles out there, acting roles, that were really ungendered, where it wouldn't really matter whether or not you were male or female.
And I said, I don't know, I haven't seen it.
Maybe Forrest Gump?
Well, I just, apparently, so wrong.
And this prompted some discussion online about whether or not it is, in fact, one of the greatest movies ever, or some people are like, it's totally overrated.
And either way, I think we clearly need to see it.
But it reminded me of why one should not say it.
I mean, at least I was careful and I said, I haven't seen it, but maybe this.
But it's just really, really ridiculously wrong to imagine that that was a character that was ungendered.
But then, in the wake of that conversation, a friend of ours pointed out that there is a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot that has been cancelled because Beckett — so this is a classic, awesome, awesome frickin' play from sort of theater of the absurd genre —
And Beckett, who is now dead, required that the characters — basically just two characters, there are a couple other really big players, but it's Vladimir and Astrakhan, I want to say, yeah — oh, and Pozo — that they be male.
And I don't know.
When I first heard it, I was like, well, I guess.
Maybe.
But whatever.
Beckett was the playwright, and he said it has to be male.
And he's gone now, and I think it's his son who oversees his estate.
And there was some Some play being done, some production of Godot being done, in which many of the people behind the scenes, many of the people who were not on the stage were actually female, and there was no injunction against that, but they were abiding by Beckett's rules that the actors, the characters are male and they actually be played by male actors, and it was shut down because this is somehow non-equitable.
Non-equitable, not fair, not okay, because we need to be present in everything, no matter what.
And this is not the story that we want to spend a lot of time talking about today, but my god, people.
Like, seriously.
Not everyone gets to show up in every place at every moment.
The idea that
Women need to be allowed to be playing characters that were written as male characters in a play in which the playwright said these are actually male characters and they need to be played by male characters is a little bit like, and I will probably take some shit for this, but a little bit like men who are dressed up as women claiming that they need to be allowed into women's music festivals or women's domestic crisis centers or women's sports, right?
Like, Nope.
Actually, there's rules, and sometimes the rules aren't what you like, and you're gonna have to deal with that.
I mean, it invalidates the entire purpose of the exercise, right?
Which, the playwright or the...?
The desire to impose rules on any given play that require openness to people of configurations, you know.
There are no children in the play, right?
No one in a wheelchair in the play!
Right.
This is, A, it's the perfect example of sophistry.
Yes.
Right, because the whole point of the play is to actually say something, or in Beckett's case, in a strange way, not to say something, but... To explore the nature of waiting, and infinity, and expectation, and hope, and humanity, and you know, all of these things.
It's not a jobs program.
It's simultaneously a tiny play in terms of, like, what happens, and the scope of space that is traveled, And enormous.
It's infinite in its implications.
Sorry to interrupt you, but I feel like — I haven't gone back and reread it, but I love this play.
I have it.
I actually have two copies of it.
I found it also in another anthology of plays on our shelf here.
It feels to me like it's explicitly a non-sexual play, right?
And so I think that — it's not mine to say, but I think that Godot would work If it were all female.
Okay, yes, and there's homosexual attraction.
I don't care, right?
I think given that most of the world is heterosexual, and given that once you have mixed-sex groups interacting in a very sparse place, you raise this question of like, oh, well, what did that mean?
What was that about?
Was that interest?
What is going on there?
And so this saying like, no, you know what?
It's all male.
And I think you could equally well say, no, it's all female, except I didn't write the play, so I don't get to say that.
But I think that this would work equally well as it just like, you know what?
It's just going to be all one thing so that we don't raise the question.
So that issue is not central to the play.
Yes.
But so first off, I think it is perfectly within bounds for Beckett to say this should be staged as males only.
Totally.
I think it is perfectly valid for somebody who wishes to stage the play to say, I know what the playwright's wishes were, but it's not his to say, I'm going to stage it female or I'm going to stage it mixed sex.
I wouldn't.
Apparently the estate doesn't let that happen.
Apparently.
It's still somehow, I don't know the rules.
So there are legal, there are legal bits, but at the moment that this becomes public domain because it's existed too long, I would not fault anybody for violating the playwright's wishes.
But I do think it ought to be, you ought to do that consciously.
You ought to say, here's why, right?
Here's why I'm doing that.
And the show notes should say, if you have flaunted those things legally, then you should acknowledge that.
But that's all in the scope.
I will point out, there is one section of the play that I recall that would have to be re-figured for female characters.
If I am remembering correctly, I hope I have this correct.
I probably haven't read it since high school.
There is a point at which the futility of Waiting for Godot causes the characters to toy with the idea of suicide by hanging, and one of the arguments in favor is that it will give them erections, if I remember correctly.
That does happen.
Am I wrong?
I also did not go back.
But I think it's in there.
And I'm not going to be able to find it quickly.
And, you know, look, I'm I'm totally open, as we, I think, talked about last week to refiguring of things like plays where, you know, Romeo and Juliet is radically refigured in West Side Story, for example.
Yeah.
And so I'm up for a radical refiguring of this.
And it would be interesting to have females have that discussion and then realize that, in fact, that was not an argument in favor because, of course, it wouldn't work.
Right?
You could do that.
So anyway, it's all available for the refiguring.
But nonetheless, the idea that the play is invalid because it is inherently about males is preposterous.
Some things are.
Totally preposterous.
Yep.
Okay, so there's that, and there's one other thing I wanted to talk about before we get into the main meat here, which I said last week that we would talk about dogs a little bit, and we never got to dogs.
And this was prompted by, you know, not last week, but two weeks ago now.
I was in Portland for a few days, and hanging out in coffee shops and watching people, and also walking around various neighborhoods, watching people.
I had the thought, as I did multiple times when we lived in Portland, and less so now that we're on an island without as much commerce, without as many opportunities to run into people and to do people watching without it being really obvious that you're being watched.
I had the thought, Dogs may be the ones to save us.
Dogs may save the world, insofar as they break down the borders between people.
And it's easier if both strangers to one another have dogs, because the dogs don't care.
And, you know, increasingly, there are people who are like, Oh, no, no, don't, you know, well, my dog doesn't get along with it.
Like, okay, well, you know, I wish you had taught your dog to be a dog then.
I know that some dogs really can't do this thing with other dogs, but that's not very dog-ish of them.
But in general, dogs are curious about other dogs.
Dogs are also curious about other people.
But people tend to be interested in dogs, and dogs are definitely interested in dogs.
And whereas people, especially in cities, are quite happy to walk by each other and either pretend the other person doesn't exist or Um, often just sort of stare at them or, you know, make a scowl or something.
How dare you smile at me?
Uh, once the dog has, uh, once they've gone up to each other and investigate each other, either nose to nose or nose to butt or, you know, all the various configurations by which dogs greet each other, um, the people, especially if the dogs are leashed and are therefore sort of pulled into closer, um, closer proximity, have a much harder time being grim with one another.
They just have a much, much more difficult time.
And this is true regardless of, you know, whether or not you're one of those rare people who actually doesn't like dogs.
And I'm not saying like, oh, cat people, like, I sort of think of myself as a cat person more than a dog person, but come on, dogs, right?
Like, It's dogs.
It's the one thing we can all agree on.
I can't.
There's something with you.
We've got, as you have pointed out, something like, and there's a lot of different ways in and there's some competing hypotheses out there yet, but something like, well, many tens of thousands of years of co-evolution with dogs.
And really what that means is that we have co-evolved with them.
They have, you know, we, oh yeah, we domesticated dogs.
Dogs are, you know, our longest domesticate.
Yeah, but, you know, we have co-evolved with dogs and they are showing us, they're reminding us, if we let them, as we watch the ways that dogs interact with each other on the street and with the owners.
How to be our best selves.
And if we can listen to them and watch them and interact a little bit more like they do, we might find our way out a little bit more quickly.
Yeah, dogs, I love this point of yours and I quite agree with it.
I've seen the online version of this where people put aside their differences to remark on very often dogs and their interesting behavior.
I do think it's interesting Uh, you know, we all know examples of dogs, you know, who picked up their owner's racism or whatever.
Yeah.
Right?
Right.
That used to happen much more, I believe, because I think racism went out of fashion and, you know, it's back.
Hopefully the dogs will not pick it up this time, but But there is something, dogs are something like three times as long under our mutualism as our next closest domesticant, because their domestication had nothing to do with farming, whereas everything else is post-farming.
Dogs are older in the human lineage than rice.
By far, yeah, by far.
About three times, as you say.
But there is something, you know, No owner controls what their dog thinks of some other dog.
Dogs have their own thoughts.
So there is this way in which you are dragged into an interaction in which the nature of the human beings and even the other dog is, you know, that is beyond yours to say anything about.
And, you know, I love the idea that dogs might remind us of our more ancient selves, remind us how much is at stake and how lucky we are to even be here.
You know, what did the last 30,000 years look like that we should arrive at this moment where we do have Enough control over the natural world that we can, you know, dedicate ourselves to abstractions and the creation of art and beauty and all of these things because more or less we have the basics taken care of.
And why we would toy with wrecking that, right?
Why we wouldn't be obsessed with preserving what we've accomplished so that we can actually move forward rather than have it all detonate out from under us.
You know, a dog is a pretty good reminder of that if you tune into it correctly.
Yeah, very much so.
Okay, did you want to start?
Actually, could we finish there?
I'm happy either way, but do you want me to start there?
I thought so, but you want to start by talking about this then?
Sure.
Okay.
So, The New York Times, you remember The New York Times.
I recall them, yes.
Do you know that we still subscribe to The New York Times?
I know, this is a thorn in your side, and we can no longer get paper delivery here on the island.
By the time it gets here, it's so soggy, you just can't.
So foolish.
But no, I try to read widely, and we had been subscribers to the New York Times since we were in college, and we are still.
Back when we were in college, I don't remember ever being mentioned in the New York Times.
Do you remember being mentioned in the New York Times?
I don't think it happened.
Yes.
Okay, so you can show my screen here, Zach.
We're going to go back and forth a few times.
Here, this week, sorry, this is from February 9th, so what is that, two days ago?
Steve Bannon's podcast is top misinformation spreader, a study says.
A large podcast study found that Mr. Bannon's war room had more falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims than other political talk shows.
And they've got an unattractive picture of Steve Bannon, because of course they do.
Because of course that's what they do here.
So uh here maybe give me my screen back here so I can so I can talk a little bit about this uh actually what we'll do here the uh Yeah, you can show my screen briefly again.
This is again from the same New York Times article.
Steve Bannon's War Room podcast topped the Brookings Institution's list of political talk shows, airing false, misleading, and unsubstantiated claims.
They've got, um, they looked at a lot of, a lot of podcasts, and the top ten sources of misinformation were, um, War Room, The Charlie Kirk Show, The Rush Lumbaugh Show, The Michael Savage Show, and Bret Weinstein's Dark Horse Podcast.
My God!
Remarkable.
Yeah.
And it's remarkable.
Remarkable.
Okay.
So, um, what the actual fuck?
I mean, really, that's like, that's a, that's about where, where I land, but, um, this is based on a, uh, report from the Brookings Institute.
Okay.
And, you know, do not show my screen yet, Zachary.
Uh, Lost the section that I was at, unfortunately.
Brookings, which is a think tank, did this research on podcasts and their content, and they call this research, Audible Reckoning, How Top Political Podcasters Spread Unsubstantiated and False Claims.
And they say, for instance, that Go on.
Let me just say, when I first encountered this, a friend alerted me to the fact that we had been mentioned in the Times in this regard.
And I was unaware of it, and I went looking, and oh, it's the Brookings Institution has done a study.
And my immediate reaction was, well, I know where the bodies are buried, because in order to make such an assessment, you would need a method.
And no method is actually conceivable here.
There's no method you could justify, because what they're claiming to assess is the veracity of claims made, but what they are going to be talking about are claims in which what is true is in contention.
Well, this is exactly what I was just trying to find, which I had set up, but it disappeared on me, but you can now show, Zachary.
This is, you know, cataloging unsubstantiated and false claims.
How'd they do it?
What was their method?
Reading from the Brookings Institution Research.
In addition to systematically limiting the podcast series examined in this analysis, it was also important to restrict the number of unsubstantiated and false claims searched for across podcast episode transcripts.
Because, you know, there's just so many.
To do this, the research relied on claims compiled in two different ways.
The first was the text of claims or statements fact-checked as false by either PolitiFact or Snopes, two independent fact-checking organizations whose fact-checks are widely relied upon by the public and members of the media and academia as credible and well-substantiated.
Are they?
My very first natural selections piece, which I called Fact Checkers Aren't Scientists, went through, at that point, that was in July of 2021, went through a number of things that Plitifact had claimed were not just wrong, but egregious.
Their rating system goes from totally true to literally, they call it liar, liar, pants on fire.
They called a couple of the things that you had claimed or Dr. Malone had claimed in the podcast that you did with Dr. Malone and Steve Kirsch as liar, liar, pants on fire, level wrong.
Which then, months later, at the point that someone had decided to actually reconcile the facts with the facts, went, oops, not only not wrong or egregious, but actually right, they just quietly, not only not wrong or egregious, but actually right, they just quietly, silently switched it and didn't No public reckoning, no nothing, nothing, right?
So PolitiFact is, Brookings says, Widely relied upon by the public and members of the media and academia as credible and well substantiated.
Yeah, as is the CDC, as is the FDA, as is the WHO, as are all of these institutions which time and time and time again during the pandemic have, by us and some other people, been effectively checked.
Using what?
Using the tools of science.
And, my God.
So let's just show a couple more things here.
This is figure 12 from the Brookings Report.
Unsubstantiated or false claims about alternative treatments and prevention were more common than all other categories combined.
Oh, there we go.
So they found that, you know, even conspiracies, I don't even know what that is, right?
Conspiracies showed up almost a quarter of the time as discussion of alternative treatments and prevention, or vaccine efficacy and side effects, disease severity, government policy response, testing.
It was alternative treatments and prevention that was the biggest source of misinformation, apparently, during the During the COVID.
During the COVID.
Yeah, let's do that.
During the COVID by podcasters who are, you know, waving around their credentials like us.
And which ones are those again?
Now you talked about some of this last week, and we talked about this a lot over the last several years, but things like, oh yes, the Voldemort of alternative treatments, ivermectin, which does work, and is safe, and still I'm finding pieces in the New York Times claiming that it's not only not effective, but not safe.
This is a drug that's been on the list, the who's list of essential medicines for a long If it weren't safe, it wouldn't be there.
It is safe.
It has been demonstrated over and over and over again to be effective.
The first moment that we started talking about it, we already knew it was safe.
Was it effective?
Seemed probably so?
Maybe?
Unsure?
The evidence has just gotten stronger and stronger and stronger, and this discussion right now is going to increase our ranking in a future piece of research by the Brookings Institution in terms of the amount of misinformation that we are engaging in.
So let us agree that the structure here is for... let's work backwards.
You've got a news report.
Saying, okay, we've got a misinformation problem.
That news report is based on research.
Okay, research.
The research was done by the Brookings Institution.
The research had a method.
The method involved looking shit up on Snopes and PolitiFact.
Nakedly political, right?
Yep.
Snopes may not have been at the beginning, but now nakedly political.
Mm-hmm.
And so the point is, you're reading the New York Times, and you're seeing that in fact there's a misinformation problem.
And if you chase it all the way back to how you would know, there's no there there.
Now I do remember, and I stared at it for a goodly long time, because of course when I looked at it I'm like, They've just described that they've done research for which no conceivable method could exist.
So I'm going to go look at the method, and my prediction is there won't be one that is in any remote way valid, because there can't be, right?
So okay, PolitiFact and Snopes, let's call me right.
There was no method.
And then they invoke some mysterious dictionary that has terminology that would tell you.
They might as well invoke a crystal ball, right?
This is just simply... Or, you know, really, they're the ones claiming the mantle of science?
A text that no one is allowed to see?
Is the arbiter of truth?
Right.
And so the point is, look, you can even do science on what they're doing, right?
Oh, here's a claim.
I bet it's garbage.
Prediction.
There won't be a method.
Let's go look at the method because they claim there is one.
Oh, it's looking stuff up on PolitiFact and Snopes and some dictionary they don't share.
Ah, no method as predicted, right?
Science even works on this stuff, right?
Yeah.
Not that they would know.
Not that they, well, they don't care.
I also think they don't know.
I think that's part of what's going on.
I think that's part of why, you know, part of what we did in the classroom for 15 years and part of what we've been doing in the podcast is saying, you know what?
You can science this stuff.
You can apply scientific thinking, scientific rigor, scientific logic, the scientific method, to any claim.
And you may not have the tools with which to assess the claim, but you can figure out what you would need to know in order to assess it, and you can figure out what can't possibly be true, and you can figure out what the assumptions are of the people making the claim, etc., etc.
And that is what we are doing.
And we are sharing it with other people so that you all can begin to employ the same kinds of tools and assess things for yourselves.
And what the mainstream media, what the think tanks and the mainstream media who are trying their hardest to maintain the status quo are doing is saying, Look at that.
That's dangerous over there.
Those people who are talking is bad.
It's bad stuff what they're doing.
The exact flaw is pseudo-quantification.
Right?
What they want to do is claim that they made a ranking, a numerical ranking.
Right?
So what they've done is they have created the impression that there is something to be counted, and what they did is simply count it.
And here's the structure.
It's as objective as can be.
I mean, look, we've got a bar graph, right?
It's not like we took markers.
And those are digits on it.
Yeah, we asked a spreadsheet to make a bar graph, and it just simply took the number in the cell and translated it into a distance on the screen, right?
And the point is, yes, but you got it from Snopes!
It's fucking Snopes!
Right?
And worse, worse, you know, I kept digging in this thing and it's not like I read it to the end.
But hold on, the other thing I noticed, right, it didn't take long to run across the fact that this is somehow borrowing from data and society.
You remember data and society?
Here's my recollection of data and society.
Back in the early days of the so-called IDW, data and society reported that the IDW was far right, their term.
Now, the funny thing was that a lot of us looked at this and said, wait a second.
Of the named people in the IDW, more than half are left-wing.
What that means is that this report... Well, and somewhere in here, and I'm not finding it at the moment, they rank a bunch of podcasts in terms of their political leanings.
And they have us as conservative.
Well, but that's just the point.
So the report itself is guilty of egregious misinformation.
It is guilty of partnering with people who have a history of spreading misinformation about us.
None of this is apparently of a concern, though, to the Brookings Institution, because their real purpose is a bar graph that makes it look as if something countable makes us unreliable, which is, of course, not true, right?
This is really a question of keeping People inside of a mental prison.
Yes.
The point is, what they don't want is for you to start listening to voices who have been correct about things.
And the reason that you're not going to listen to them is because as you are told that actually this person got this right, you will read, oh no, they get things wrong all the time.
It must be a rare case of them being right.
It's utter nonsense, right?
It's the same attack as calling us gurus, right?
The idea is, oh, if you listen to them, you're a sucker, right?
Oh, if you listen to the Dark Horse Podcast, you are absorbing misinformation, and if you don't know that, that's because you haven't done the hard work of Uh, going to Snopes or whatever, right?
I mean, it couldn't be more muppety.
This is childish, right?
If a college student came up with a method this bad, you would sit them down and you would gently say, I understand what you're trying to do.
Here's why that doesn't work, right?
So yes, and at risk of getting into like the weeds that was evergreen, students took full-time programs, 16 credit programs, and you gave the narrative evaluations.
And you could, and sometimes in order to apply to grad school and such, there was a method by which you could turn those narrative evaluations into grades so that they could calculate a GPA.
But there weren't grades.
But what that meant was that if a student did fail to do any work at all, or the work was so absurdly missing anything of value, what you did, what I did, was, you know, with compassion, with full respect for the human on the other side of the interaction, would say, I'm not writing you a narrative evaluation for this part of the program.
You just don't get any credit at all.
This disappears from your record and that's a gift.
You should go back to zero and start over.
Because this thing isn't any good.
It's terrible.
It's terrible and so the point is in college you might write a report.
The purpose of the report you write in college is not to make it into the world and inform people about things.
It's to train you to write a report that actually has some content in it.
Here's a bunch of people who should have failed at the college level and either gone back and learned how to do this properly or they shouldn't be doing it at all in public because they don't understand how to do it.
Now the real question is Is there actually an intent inside the Brookings Institution or Data & Society or the New York Times to actually report things that are real and are they fucking it up this badly?
Or is that not the point?
Is the point pure politics?
Is the point to keep people subscribed to the same bad compromised channels of information because the idea is to feed them bad information in the future and you can't do that if they have an alternative?
Here's an extended quote from the Brookings Institute research.
Yet apart from these conspiracy theories, unsubstantiated or false claims shared at this time were far more nuanced and primarily involved, wait for it, misunderstandings of science.
Yeah.
It's quite a claim.
Several prominent podcasters carved out positions of authority during this period of high uncertainty.
For example, Heather Hying and Brett Weinstein, that's us, relied on their backgrounds in evolutionary biology to amass a wide audience for their unconventional coronavirus advice.
The pair repeated unproven claims about the prophylactic use of various treatments, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and cast doubt on vaccine safety.
Throughout their episodes, Hying and Weinstein tried to bolster perceptions of their credentials by using technical terms.
Hmm.
In one episode, Weinstein offered a little brain teaser saying that, quote, correlation is in fact evidence of causation if there was a causal hypothesis pre-existing the observation of the correlation, end quote.
I can't even read this next part with a straight face.
While it's unclear exactly what he is referencing, perhaps the most basic tenet of statistics emphasizes that correlation does not equal causation and is indeed susceptible to confounders.
Although researchers can control for potential known confounders, there may be infinitely more unknown confounding variables driving any observed relationship.
Rather than protecting researchers against confounding, a pre-existing hypothesis may instead make them more prone to confirmation bias.
Weinstein, however, may have deployed this language to appear to burnish the scientific bona fides of the hosts for a non-technical audience.
You know who's trying to burnish your scientific bona fides for the benefit of a non-technical audience?
That's you, Brookings Institute, and the New York Times, and all the rest of you.
You clearly have no idea what you're doing.
You don't understand what a hypothesis is, and that prediction changes The baseline.
Oh my god.
This is so bad.
Let me just finish reading.
This is so bad.
Okay, go on.
They have invalidated most of science in their claim because what they've done is ruled out the possibility that you could test an idea by making a prediction and then seeing whether the correlation exists.
If this is true, you can't know anything.
Ever.
There is no knowledge.
There's no basis to know anything.
What's more, the very things that they are claiming that we... The most basic tentative statistics.
Right.
But so this is a classic.
This is a classic midwit idiocy.
Yeah.
Right.
Because the point is, You come to a level of understanding which is correlation does not imply causation.
Which is shorthand for correlation alone does not imply causation.
Our brain teaser was yes, it does imply causation when you hypothesize that there would be a correlation.
The evidence is all the stronger if it is an unexpected correlation, predicted only by that hypothesis, and then, lo and behold, you find it.
And so the point is, these people are non-scientists, misunderstanding what actual science is, and deploying this syllogism without an understanding of what it even means.
And if, I mean, I guess you, I will finish the rest of this in a minute, Zak, you can take this off the screen for the moment.
If the author of this report is willing to say, I don't even know what this means, but we all know, don't we, the correlation is implied causation, why is it that we are supposed to take anything that this person says, or that the people who rely on this kind of analysis, With any kind of seriousness.
Like, this is a demonstration of a failure to understand basic scientific logic.
Right.
So basic.
The most fundamental scientific logic.
The most fundamental.
Which is that we, you know, your observation of a pattern is not a scientific conclusion.
You have to get to a hypothesis about what might cause the pattern, then you have to test that with a prediction.
Right?
That's how you discover this.
And so even their own report Should collapse under this because the whole idea that anybody knows what's true about COVID and therefore that we can say that those other things must be false, that comes from work in which people have deployed a hypothesis and then looked for a correlation.
To be fair to these people, which I think we're being very, very fair, but they're not alone.
I remember back when we were professors and I would get asked to peer review papers for journals because this is an expectation.
This is part of the unpaid work of being a professor is that you get asked to peer review papers for various journals.
And the most frequent reason that I gave to reject a paper was there's no hypothesis.
If the authors want to reframe this as, we collected a bunch of information and from that made an observation, and now we have a hypothesis but it's not been tested, Then they could rework what they've submitted, but in general, scientific journals don't like to publish things that don't claim to have results.
If you didn't have a predictive hypothesis in the first place, then what you've collected aren't data.
They're not a test of anything.
And the fact that many people who are purportedly doing science don't understand the distinction means that some person at the Brookings Institute with a PhD in something political doesn't understand it.
Maybe isn't that surprising, but it's going to destroy the planet.
it.
Like, you know, this level of the combination of, like, deviousness and ignorance is devastating to discourse and to our sensemaking.
Like, we We cannot hope to make our way through a landscape of lots of different kinds of information coming at us if we can't put a couple of simple things in order and say, I made an observation.
What are all the possible reasons that thing could be true?
Okay, I've got three possibilities.
If possibility A, let's call it a hypothesis, were true, what else would necessarily be true?
That's prediction that follows from hypothesis A. Same for prediction that follows from hypothesis B and C. Okay, are these mutually exclusive?
Super easy and wonderful if they are.
If they're not, well, the predictions from A and B aren't mutually exclusive.
But if C is, if the prediction from C is true, then we've definitely excluded those two.
And if one of these is true, we're still stuck with these two.
And on and on and on it goes.
Right?
It's not that hard.
School kills this in us?
And apparently higher ed and the credentials that most of these people are walking around with completely obliterates the ability to think through basic logic.
You have something to say?
Yeah, I've got a couple things.
One, one of the things that we have done from the beginning on Dark Horse is build up people's scientific toolkit with principles that we rely on.
I don't claim that they're necessarily finished, but there are a couple principles that belong here.
One principle is every scientific paper should describe its relationship to a hypothesis.
And the relationship really comes down to one of two things.
Either it's an observation, which leads to a hypothesis, which then needs a test, or it is a test of a hypothesis that exists.
Now, part of the problem, as we've talked about, is that this is all on the honor system, and one of the ways for people who are pursuing a credential or grant money to cheat is to pretend that some observation they've made was actually a test of a hypothesis that they only came up with after.
Oh, look what my data showed.
Oh, I totally thought that all along.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This was a test of that thing that it's now shown to be true.
Uh-huh.
So the honor system is a problem here.
But when done properly, you're doing one of... there's nothing wrong with not having a pre-existing hypothesis, but the point is that says you're on step one.
You're on the observation phase.
That's right.
If you have observed and then you want to go run a test, you need a hypothesis and you need to have that You cannot test it with the observations you've already made.
You could go back to a data set and you could look for some other pattern that you've now predicted will exist there.
But you have to actually run a new test.
Otherwise, it's scientifically invalid.
So anyway, that's the process that I don't think...
You can't go back to your own data set.
You can look at other people's data and say...
You could query your data set for something else.
You can't query it for the observation that set the process in motion.
You could look for something else that you didn't know was there or not there.
You could look for some other correlation.
But the...
Clearly, these people do not understand the basics of how science works.
And it's not, you know, children do scientific thinking without having to be trained.
They don't do it perfectly, they don't do it in a Popperian way, they're not falsificationists.
But the point is, scientific thinking is natural, and as you say, it's drummed out of us by bad education.
But these people clearly either don't know or don't care, or both, right?
The second piece of the toolkit I want to point out.
Somewhere in what you read, they do what Scott Adams calls mind reading, where they say that the reason that we have used technical terms which they don't understand... Weinstein, however, may have deployed this language to appear to burnish the scientific bona fides of the host for a non-technical audience.
Is that the sentence you were after?
Yeah.
First of all, for a bunch of humanities morons, that's not even good English, right?
Weinstein, however, may have deployed this language to appear to burnish the scientific bona fides of the hosts for a non-technical audience.
Appear to burnish.
What they mean is burnish.
Appear to burnish is the revelation that the trick is faking.
And we're going to copy it at you, too!
Right.
So you're not even doing humanities well, and that's a pretty low bar.
But here's the point.
What are the chances that that accusation would land on a podcast that has the following thing as a piece of toolkit which we have deployed and tried to teach our audience repeatedly?
What's that going to be?
The distinction between jargon and terms of art.
Yeah, yeah.
Now what we say is that terms of art are a necessary evil.
If you're working on something technical, you will probably need some terms that are not straightforward.
This should be minimized.
You want as few of those things as possible.
You want them as straightforward as possible.
But if you're working on technical material, it's probably not going to be zero.
You're going to have to make some terms that are technical that need to be described explicitly.
Jargon is the abuse of the fact that you might need technical terms to do technical work, to keep people out, to keep them from knowing what you're talking about.
It is the use of unnecessarily complex language in order to limit the discussion to only insiders, right?
That is not a necessary evil.
That's just simply an evil.
So the idea that they're going to accuse us of using language.
Like correlation and causation.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Hypothesis.
Yeah, that's definitely us using jargon there.
All right.
I do have to confess that as you were talking, I thought I did just use the word synapomorphy during an ad read for shoes.
But I did define the term.
Yes, you did define it.
Exactly.
Yeah, synapomorphy is one of those things.
It's a necessary evil.
It's not an immediately intuitive term.
Since we're no longer in the ad read, and I've just used it again, a synapomorphy is a shared, derived characteristic for a particular clade.
So, hair or fur is a synapomorphy for mammals.
And that doesn't mean that we all have them, because you can lose them, but it's diagnostic for the group.
It means that it accompanies the evolution of the group, and it didn't exist in the group from which the group descended.
It doesn't exist in pre-mammal ancestors.
Four-chambered heart, also a synapomorphy of mammals.
Anyway, the diaphragm?
Yeah.
Okay, so anyway, I think, first of all, let's just be honest.
If the question was... We have been.
Of course.
Yeah.
No, but I'm just saying... Let's continue to be honest.
Hold up that.
I would like to take this opportunity to invite the staff at the Brookings Institute and the New York Times and all the rest of you guys to be honest.
Let's be honest.
Start now.
It would be good.
I would be less resentful of our New York Times subscription if you started being honest now.
Let us be honest about the score here, okay?
At a logical level, this is as stupid as a report could be.
It is an exercise in pseudo-quantification.
It is hilarious that when you get to the methods, you find Snopes, PolitiFact, and some dictionary that they don't share, right?
That is not a method.
That's garbage, okay?
They still win.
That's the problem.
Yeah, yeah.
Because most people will be scared away from podcasts like this one by the implication that somebody has done a scientific study and decided that we are saying untrue things.
So this is absolutely cheating.
What they're doing is, instead of pointing to a thing, you know, the spike protein made by the vaccines is cytotoxic, right?
That is a factual claim that I made.
Or Robert Malone made.
I can't remember which one of us made it on that podcast.
We were fact-checked, I think, by PolitiFact, who said, that's false, and then it turned out to be true, of course.
Because, logically speaking, it makes sense that because the spike protein of the coronavirus is cytotoxic, and the spike protein made by the vaccines is much more like that spike protein than it is different, and there's no reason to think its differences render it non-toxic, right?
It was a logical thing to say, but the point is, They don't want to have that discussion because they will lose, right?
Where we have gotten stuff wrong, we have corrected it.
It's not a win for them.
There's no accusation to be leveled.
What they want to do instead is pretend that actually there is a volume of information, that they have gone through it and they have discovered a pattern of being factually incorrect.
Without having... It's so hard.
Right.
Now, the funny thing is that we actually had you at one point on our podcast said that we needed better skeptics.
Folks decided to take up that challenge and they actually went through transcripts of our podcasts.
They solicited from our critics indicators of where in those transcripts we had said something that was incorrect and then they went and evaluated those claims and they did not find this pattern.
They found a few very minor places but in general they found that all the things that people were saying were false were not in fact false.
So, if done by some reasonable method, it comes out entirely differently, but the real point is the bar graph, the imprimatur on the New York Times, the imprimatur on the Brookings Institution, all of those things are designed to scare people away from things that they have no mechanism for directly challenging.
Yep.
A couple more things from this.
Just the same section that I was just reading from in the Brookings Institute thing.
You don't need to show my screen here, Zach.
Some podcasters also cited non-peer-reviewed reprints and data, which often contained faulty statistical analysis or poor research designs, to bolster their prior beliefs on the efficacy of ivermectin, for instance, while summarily dismissing similar non-peer-reviewed studies whose conclusions ran contrary to their preferences.
I read that, and then by chance, because I get Nature and Science into my inbox whenever they put out a new issue, I saw this, which you can show.
This is from Nature News.
Nature is one of the two most prominent science journals in the world, and they also have a news section.
It's a great source for science news.
COVID drug drives viral mutations, and now some want to halt its use.
Analysis reveals the signature of the antiviral drug molnupiravir in SARS-CoV-2 sequences riddled with mutations.
So, there's a lot to talk about there, and I don't know that we're going to talk about most of it right now, but I just want to point out that Nature, which is not a right-wing political podcast riddled with misinformation—is that what we are?
Nature's not, I think we can all agree.
This study was posted on the MedRxiv preprint server in January.
It has not yet been peer-reviewed, but why is Nature talking about it then?
There's probably statistical errors in there that the peers would certainly have discovered, because the peers definitely know the difference between causation and correlation.
...pretends that the effect of peer review is to vastly increase the quality of what is published, and that is actually a testable hypothesis.
I'm trying to remember.
Somebody wrote a very good, I believe it was a substack, evaluating peer review's effectiveness at this very thing.
I read it a couple weeks ago.
I will attempt to dig it up.
Assuming I can find it, we will put it in the notes of this podcast.
But the point is, peer review is actually a failure in this regard.
And we acknowledged at the point that we talked about many things on the preprint servers, that that does increase the amount of noise.
However, what it means is that you don't have all of the skullduggery that takes place in the so-called peer review process interfering with your ability to know what's going on.
You basically have a raw scientific discussion and you have to sort wheat from chaff, which is what we do.
And that's part of what we did from the beginning.
Now, we've talked about peer review many, many times on this podcast, including very early on in our discussion of COVID back in like March or April 2020.
You know, the idea sounds brilliant.
It's not inherent to the scientific process at all.
What is, is opening up your ideas to be challenged by friend and foe alike.
That is an important part of the scientific process, but peer review is not.
Peer review is basically a modern invention to deal with the fact that there's a lot of people trying to do science now and trying to get the attention of a larger number of people.
But peer review itself actually acts more like a gated community now than like an actual ability to sort wheat from chaff.
You know, I mentioned earlier that I used to do peer review.
Very often when I would say, you know, sort of the things that you can recommend are like, this is awesome, no changes necessary, this is really good, but there's a couple things, you know, I'd like to know more about what this analysis was, you know, they need to look into literature over here, this, that, and the other, you know, or recommend to reject.
There's usually more categories than that, but this is sort of the three categories that as a peer reviewer you're offered.
to recommend for a paper, and very rarely, when I said recommend to reject on account of there's no hypothesis but they're pretending there was, was the paper actually rejected.
Because, you know, peer review is often done as sort of like a majority vote.
It's like, okay, the editor is going to send this out to three possible peer reviewers, and they're going to come back, and if I'm the only one who gives a damn about there not being a hypothesis, then the paper's not going to be rejected, and it's going to, you know, go into the literature.
Yeah, it's a very arbitrary filter that often introduces errors.
It sends authors back to do things that are unnecessary.
And the differences between the peer reviewers, it's funny.
It's really a holdover from a time in which there was a limit to the amount of stuff that you could publish because ink and paper were expensive and so that space had a value.
And the fact is, this stuff is now electronically published.
Why should anyone be in a position to stop you from publishing a piece of work because it's bad?
If it's bad, it doesn't stand up.
But if it's great and somebody said it was bad because they were your competitor and they didn't want it to see the light of day, why should that have any weight at all?
Well, so, you know, if I'm in a steel man, you know, why journals?
Why editors?
Right?
There's too much information and we all have to We all have to figure out some ways to funnel our attention, to exclude some of the things that want our attention, so that we can focus on this.
I've told this story before too, but we are generalists.
We have done very focused, highly specialized work in a number of domains, but we are more or less generalists, as in general is the approach to understanding life that is evolutionary biology.
But I remember the two-day interview that I had when I was applying for the job at Evergreen.
I had an hour free between all the different interviews and such, and I went to the library.
And the library was pretty bad.
It was very bad.
It was a podunk library without very many journals at all, and this would have been Two, I guess.
And so there wasn't as much available online, and I went to one of the faculty on the committee that was deciding whether or not to hire me and said, how do you do your work here?
I don't see how you can do your work when this is the library you have access to.
And this person, who I respect greatly, said, oh, I subscribe to the three journals I need, and that's it.
That's all I need.
I thought, well, but I don't just... I don't even know which three journals I would choose.
I mean, I...
You've really told me you can only look at three scientific journals ever for the rest of your life.
I'd pick three, but they certainly wouldn't be in this particular little field.
It doesn't let you do generalist work.
It doesn't let you do generalist work, especially given that nature and science, all the journals are now so much crappier than they used to be and not honoring good science at all.
The idea that, oh, I look at the thing that I need to look at, that I'm interested in now.
Even if that is good for you now because the particular research program you're doing now for the next six months or a year really does take you into that space, how about letting your mind expand and go into an adjacent space and an adjacent space and over here and over here and over here?
And, you know, that is one of the things.
that the internet has allowed, that you don't need access to the Library of Alexandria or whatever its modern counterpoint is, you can say, oh, oh, okay.
And this, you know, this is actually some of the work that I did for Bob Trivers back when I was his research assistant as an undergrad before, you know, the early nineties, you know, he'd be, he'd read a paper and be like, oh, wow, what?
Oh, I'm going to see these references.
Go get them.
Bob, who was a generalist.
Bob, who's a generalist still is.
Right.
And he'd say, you know, this is, this is my job for him.
Like I would run back and forth between his office and the library and get the references and photocopy them and bring them back.
And he quickly sounded like, oh, this reference and go back.
And now you can do that without having to hire a research assistant.
Right.
And it was amazing.
And it was amazing.
And it If you really are only saying, oh, I'm only interested in these little things here, well, you're not going to be able to see the bigger picture and therefore you are inherently going to be missing at least some of what is true and maybe all of it.
Couple points.
One, the reason, though, there has been a dramatic narrowing of focus.
Graduate school narrows you to focus on a question so small that you can't get scooped because you're the only expert or there's one or two others and you know what they're working on, right?
Yeah.
And it's a terrible process from the point of view of getting the most bang for the buck out of science.
You want people as generalists.
A, they make much better teachers, right?
If you want to teach the next generation how to think and what's true, you don't want somebody who trained very narrowly.
You want somebody who trained broadly.
But B, the innovations of a generalist are likely to be much more consequential, right?
The point is they're not some narrowly focused thing, which yes, maybe, you know, there's some cure for cancer lurking in your narrow little realm, but probably not, right?
If you're going to find some general principle that is actually going to level up a bunch of different disciplines, it's gonna be a generalist who finds it.
The second thing is you bristled a little bit at my claim that why should peers be able to stop you from publishing your thing just because they say it's bad The fact is maybe... I just said I can defend why editors and journals exist.
Well, I'm not arguing that editors and journals shouldn't exist.
Maybe they should.
I think, by and large, they're terrible.
But they're not the only thing that should exist.
But the point is, that should be no bar to your putting your work somewhere where it can be of value if it takes 500 years for your work to turn out to have been prescient, right?
The fact that people were wrong for 499 years after you did it is not an argument against people reading it.
That's right.
In fact, they should be able to go back and find out, you know, this person was dismissed at the time.
Turns out they were right.
And so the whole idea that we are being taken to task Or reading the unpeer-reviewed literature as if peer review was any good at all, which it isn't, right?
It's a negative influence for many, many reasons.
But the idea that we are being taken to task, nature is not being taken to task because it obviously Uses the unpeer reviewed literature and the whole point here is to put a shackle on our ankles not to actually apply some standard generally, but But the fact is look that literature is what it is And yes, you need to realize that nobody has vetted it for you, but the vetting doesn't work.
So, okay There's a lot of there's a lot of chaff In order to get to the wheat you got to be better at it But that is the point and who's gonna be good at it generalists.
That's right Okay, one more thing about Brookings before we leave this.
Someone pointed out to me online that Brookings has been a a somewhat bought entity for a while now.
So they pointed to this article.
You can show this, Zachary.
This was in Washington Post in 2014.
This is a nine-year-old article on basically the influence that is being bought at Brookings and just a couple of things here.
Lobbyists say they warn clients not to expect that they can dictate research results from an elite think tank such as Brookings, but note that they gain a chance to make their case directly to researchers, stay in touch as papers are written, and suggest participants in public forums.
Whoa.
By enlisting Brookings and other top-tier think tanks, quote, you can amplify or raise an issue, said Ed Kotlar, a senior partner at Mercury, a public affairs and lobbying firm that has developed expertise in think tanks.
Quote, you can buy attention, but not a point of view or an outcome.
So we've talked about the nature of attention before.
You can take my screen down now, Zach.
And really what I want to say is just read this entire book.
This is The World Beyond Your Head by the awesome Matthew Crawford on Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction.
So this is the book that followed his Amazing, also amazing book, Shopcraft is Soulcraft.
This book explores the nature of attention, the attention economy, the fact that while we no longer are eagerly putting up with having polluted air, polluted water, a lot of us still put up with toxins in our food and our medicine, but increasingly people are thinking carefully about what is it that we have changed in our environment that is actually bad for us and
And making us crazy, frankly, he focuses on attention in this book.
So just a quick excerpt from this book.
You can see, if you can see on the edge there, you probably can't see all the book darts.
This book is well worth book darting, and again, I highly recommend it.
When we go through airport security, the public authority makes a claim on our attention for the common good.
This moment is emblematic of the purpose for which political authority in a liberal regime is originally instituted—public safety—and rightly has a certain gravity to it.
But in the last few years, I have found I have to be careful at the far end of the process, because the bottoms of the gray trays that you place your items in for x-ray screenings are now paved with advertisements, and their visual clutter makes it very easy to miss a pinky-sized flash memory stick against a picture of fanned-out L'Oreal lipstick colors.
I was already in a state of low-level panic about departure times, possible gate changes, and any number of other contingencies that have to be actively monitored while traveling to say nothing of the fact that my memory is tapped out with detailed concerns about the talk I'm going to have to give in front of strangers in a few hours.
This fresh demand for vigilance, lest I lose my PowerPoint slideshow, feels like a straightforward conflict between me and L'Oreal.
Somehow, L'Oreal has the Transportation Security Administration on its side.
Who made the decision to pimp out the security trays with these advertisements?
The answer, of course, is that nobody decided on behalf of the public.
Nobody with a capital N. Someone made a suggestion, and nobody responded in the only way that seemed reasonable.
Here is an inefficient use of space that could instead be used to inform the public of opportunities.
Justifications of this flavor are so much a part of the taken-for-granted field of public discourse that they may override our immediate experience and render it unintelligible to us.
Our annoyance dissipates into vague impotence because we have no public language in which to articulate it, and we search instead for a diagnosis of ourselves.
Why am I so angry?
That's fantastic.
I want to go one step farther before we leave this topic.
I want to talk about it.
Attention is one question here.
What you read from 2009 was it?
14.
14.
The 2014 Washington Post piece on Brookings basically selling influence or having access to influence and then the Matthew Crawford book is 2015, it's just the next year actually.
So, A, there's a claim in there, right?
Oh, well, you can buy attention, but you can't buy influence, right?
The point is, if it were, this is the process of capture taking place.
Yes.
If the Brookings Institution was independent, then it could check the quality of work done by others.
That's a hazard.
If the work done by others, if, you know, Pfizer has purchased bad work to advance dangerous products, and it has caused the New York Times to be blind to the obvious indications that there is a problem inside of the connection between pharma and science, right, then the Brookings Institution could spot it.
Well, pharma can't very well tolerate that, so it's going to have to capture Brookings.
So, I don't know whether the connection here is pharma, but the basic point is, look, you are watching a process unfold in which something that could credibly tell us that the system has been compromised must itself be compromised so that it will not tell us that, right?
Of course you can buy influence, right?
Once one of these entities that has a financial interest gets its way into these organizations, then the point is, well, You know, how smart do you have to be to realize that your grant is going to get funded if it leads in a direction that is pleasing to the funders, rather than is not going to get funded if it displeases them?
It's not a hard thing for people to recognize.
And so, of course, all of these things, you know, can you buy influence over a senator?
That would be illegal.
Right?
Okay, but are there a thousand ways, you know, what can you wink at a senator such that they know that they're going to get a certain job in the private sector that isn't going to require a lot from them and is going to spit a lot of money in their direction after they leave public service?
You know, it's sure hard to prosecute.
What did that wink mean?
Oh, I just have something in my eye.
Oh, I guess you're innocent.
Again, this list from the Washington Post piece from 2014 on clients accessing research being done at, for instance, Brookings, includes making a case directly to researchers, staying in touch as papers are written, and suggesting participants in public forums.
Right.
And actually, this goes back to your, however many months ago, you're talking about Ms.
Magazine abandoning advertisements, because although in theory, the advertiser should have no influence on the content, those who work in these spaces know that that can't be true.
Yeah.
And that's, you know, that's.
Yeah, that's that's a that's a whole other story, specifically, you know, back in the early 90s, advertisers felt, you know, back Advertisers felt that it was not just acceptable, but they got to demand that they could skew editorial content, specifically in publications that were deemed women's publications,
such that you didn't feel a littleicky or challenged or empowered, really, by reading such that you didn't feel a littleicky or challenged or empowered, really, by reading an article that might be next to an Right.
And just to pick on the people that Matthew Crawford already picked on.
But it's the same for any of these products, right?
The idea that if you want to help this publication survive, well, you get to change what the publication is, and not have the readers end up empowered or educated or upset or angry.
Well then, the publication is no longer what it was.
So basically, you're buying an audience that, in setting the terms for what your fees are going to buy, you are guaranteeing that the audience will disappear.
The audience that was there for challenge, for education, will not continue to stay for cute stories about what lipstick to buy.
Or maybe they will.
In which case, your population becomes dumber and dimmer and duller, and less able to tell the difference between correlation and causation, even when it's spelled out very clearly.
And those people sometimes get to write up reports for the Brookings Institute, which then get empowered by the New York Times, and then attention that could be coming to, hey, we'd like to help you become better able to make sense of your world.
That attention has been scooted that That way.
Because we're apparently dangerous zealots.
Well, in some ways I think the overarching conclusion here is that they are making our point.
Because our point from the beginning has been that the capture of the system by perverse incentives is making the information unreliable and putting you in danger as you try to follow it towards a reasonable course of action.
And the point is, what are the chances that some report is going to come out and say, don't listen to those people, they are spreading misinformation, and then you scratch the surface and you get a bullshit method and pseudo-quantification?
The point is, oh, of course, because they've been captured.
How could they not have been captured?
And why can you guarantee that something like that will be captured?
Because zero is a special number, right?
If there were think tanks that were large and had this grand imprimatur that were actually free to do their job, we'd live in a different world, because they would be commenting on all of the corruption, they would be calling it out, they would be... and we would all subscribe to the publications that look to those think tanks to point the direction, because those things would be more reliable and we'd be safer and better informed, and who doesn't want that?
And so the point is, this is the immune system of... this is the immune system of the corrupt Institution killing apparatus fighting those who frankly have to be outside of an institution even to do the work, right?
That's the thing we're out here defenseless because it's the only place the work can be done because otherwise somebody says Dr. Hi, I would like you to sit down with our funder so that they can you know point your attention to some issues with the research that you're doing Right and the point is well, where does that not happen?
Well, it doesn't happen here It doesn't happen here, and even the places that it doesn't happen in institutions, it could suddenly start to happen.
It didn't happen at Evergreen, right?
It was why the place was so magical, in part because of the remarkable, unprecedented, otherwise unknown level of autonomy that the faculty had.
To ask the questions they wanted to ask, to teach the way they wanted to teach, and to engage with ideas and curriculum in ways that may not have been orthodox, may not have been seen before, may not have been standard.
And as long as you had respect and honor and everyone ended up okay in the end, good.
Challenge.
Make people feel uncomfortable, for sure.
Because we were doing field biology, we're going to take risks of all the sorts.
And we're going to be careful and we're going to make sure that we plan a lot of things in advance by making sure that you have on board all of the tools that you need to make decisions in tough situations.
But ultimately, this is about you and the universe and being honest about what you're seeing and what you're doing.
And that's what we continue to do now after, you know, after the school went insane and now after, you know, Government and all the three-layer agencies have gone insane, and we were commenting on those things to classes of 25 and 50 students for a long time before we were ever doing that to an audience here that was larger than that of people we don't know.
But the lessons are the same.
The idea that The institutions are captured, and they are often doing exactly the opposite of what they're claiming to do is not news to us.
We were saying those things to our students for a very long time, and it was okay to say that at a school where we weren't relying on, for instance, funds from the NSF and NIH in order to pay our salaries.
So, in some sense, you've got a pattern.
We can observe what is taking place here, we can describe the pattern, and then it makes a prediction about next time.
Right?
Yes.
If you are calling out the capture of institutions, if that institutional capture has covered everything, right, then you will be attacked by institutional stuff.
It will attempt to portray you as objectively off-base.
And when you scratch the surface, you will find bullshit in the methods.
That's the prediction.
Every time.
Snopes.
PolitiFact.
For example, Snopes.
An unnamed dictionary.
Yeah.
All right.
There's a lot of other things we could go to here, but maybe we should... You had something big and you said you wanted to finish there, but this will take a while, and why don't we save the rest of what we might have done for next week?
All right.
So I do want to warn people.
There is a way in which this could be us lost in back and forth with online discussions which don't matter.
It's not that.
I want to talk a little bit about an interaction that I've been having with Scott Adams.
Many people in the replies to this interaction have alleged that Scott is acting disingenuously, that he is not functioning in good faith.
I don't know.
I don't see that in what he's saying, but maybe it's true.
It doesn't matter.
What I want to do is recognize That his questions, to me, actually constitute a fantastic opportunity, whether they're genuine or not.
And I sincerely hope that they are genuine.
But whether they're genuine or not, they do lead us to exactly the right questions that we need to be asking.
They speak, in a sense, for an audience that is skeptical of us, but might listen.
All right?
So, Zach, if you would put up the thread that we have most recently been interacting in.
All right, so here we have Scott Adams.
So this is obviously continuing from a different thread, but he says, it's binary, Brett.
Either you have a secret way of knowing the future of long COVID and also long-term vax injury, or you guessed about the risks, same as I did.
He's responding, he's quote tweeting me saying, you are setting up the problem incorrectly, Scott Adams.
Putting your future self and your followers at unnecessary risk by doing so.
If you'd like to discuss it, I'm willing.
Assuming you'd rather know than not know, that is.
Okay, my response to his claim that I am guessing.
I say, as I said, you are setting up the problem incorrectly.
It's not a guess.
It's priors, weightings, and evidence.
And then in parentheses, hint, evidence is not synonymous with quote, data, unquote.
This can be explained well, but that is a very small fraction of the skill as it is with archery, painting, and math.
He responds, does your process not depend on knowing the main risks?
Respond to him.
Not in the way you seem to imagine.
I also don't depend on my knowledge of chemistry to keep me safe from poisons when I'm in a tropical forest.
One could of course treat everything as poisonous, but that's not what a good naturalist does.
You discover patterns and methods.
He says, this is where the rubber meets the road, science was invented so you wouldn't do that.
I don't even know what that means.
So you wouldn't... I do.
So that I wouldn't have to come up with some... Discover patterns and methods?
Well, that's just the thing.
Interesting.
You're confused in exactly the same way that I was.
So I say to him, fascinating.
It never occurred to me that you'd think I was describing an alternative to science.
You have been misled, Scott.
The grant game has turned universities into a racket.
Big science is done by people willing to attest that men can become pregnant.
Actual science is an art.
And then I want to finish on my friend Creon Levitt, who responds.
Paraphrasing Galileo, quote, science is poetry written about nature in the language of mathematics.
Then he quotes Feynman.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
And then Creon says, science is like an art, but unlike art, its supreme arbiter is nature.
And I believe Creon has slightly misstepped here, because I am saying that the practice of science is an art.
I am not saying science is art. - Right. - Okay, so what I wanted to do was proceed from this a little bit.
I think what is evident in Scott's complaint, especially where he says, "Science was invented so you wouldn't have to do that." Where I'm saying, look, I use something else to figure out where the toxins are in a tropical forest, and he says science was invented so you wouldn't have to do this.
I gotta say, like, I had not seen this, but if we're reading correctly what he means there, science was invented so you wouldn't have to do what you and I do when we're in tropical forests?
I'm now much more scared for humanity than I was.
Like, I did not think, I did not think that we were there.
That actually the outsourcing of all of the knowledge, including the stuff that actually people don't yet know, was just like, that's, that's a good, that that's like, oh, once, once we've got it boxed and it's been, you know, peer reviewed and agreed and like rubber stamped, well then, boom, that's, you just look at the, you look at the litany, you look at the list.
You don't use first principles.
You don't use logic.
You don't keep your brain alive and be thinking about possibilities.
You're like, no, that's a known thing.
That's not, that's not ever what science is supposed to be doing for us.
Right.
And so this I thought was a terrific opportunity because I don't think most people really understand what science is.
You know, we could talk about the scientific method, but that's too narrow.
That's not what science is at a meaningful level.
Right.
Right?
So they don't really know what it is that we are claiming, and so they do make missteps like this.
By the way, I forgot to mention, Creon Levitt is a NASA scientist, so he is a professional.
But anyway, so I wanted to try a little thought exercise because I believe there's some things involved in what you and I are calling science that are not narrowly in the scientific method, but are also not the trappings of science.
They're what we actually deploy, right?
And I thought the following thought experiment would reveal it.
So the idea, I've not talked to you about this before because I wanted it to be fresh, The idea is, imagine for a second that you and I were traveling by plane over a tropical forest with which we had no prior experience.
Like Indonesia, for example.
We've spent no time in Indonesia.
And suppose the plane goes down, we survive, and nobody else does.
Okay?
So, we're now in an Indonesian forest.
We don't recognize anything from our direct experience.
Never been in any forest near there.
Right?
Maybe there's the occasional plant that's so general that it has a relative there, but by and large, everything would be new to us.
And the question is, well, I was thinking a little bit about the movie The Martian, where, what's his name?
Matt Damon.
Matt Damon, at some point, at the point that he's facing certain death, says that he's gonna science the shit out of this planet, right?
Which is something, you know, every geek in the audience is like, yeah, science the shit out of that thing.
But anyway, the point is, look, you and I would immediately, without ever mentioning science, start employing the process writ large to the puzzle presented by, well, what the hell are you going to do now that you are in the situation?
And I wanted to talk about what that is, because I think it brings in some of the elements that Scott is missing here.
So, all right, you got it in your mind.
We've landed without, you know, with some random collection of artifacts that survived some plane crash.
Nobody's coming to help us.
What do you do?
How do you engage the problem?
Right?
So, A, you'd want to think about what threatens you, right?
And in what order of priority?
I'll just, before you start talking, I will say that the first two thoughts that come to mind are, do we have to engage the question of cannibalism here?
Not between us, but like the corpses.
Nope.
Okay.
So we don't have to talk about that.
You know, we could, but I don't see it.
Everyone else is okay.
So we don't have to go there.
And then, you know, if it's Indonesia, then of course, one of the things that comes to my mind is like, are we, On Borneo?
Or are we on one of the dinky little islands such that, like, actually we're going to be out of coast and thinking about, you know, setting up flares to get the attention of other people?
My intent here is that we are lost.
Let's say that, you know, you're stuck.
Rescuers come.
You see the rescuers land.
Uh, and you're, you know, you're 10 kilometers out and you book it back as fast as you can, but by the time you get there, they're gone.
So you can infer they have decided, nobody survived this plane crash.
They're not coming back.
So you know you have to survive by your wits in this habitat you don't know.
Right?
So anyway, a certain number of things, before you get to the sciency part, are like, okay, what am I threatened by in this habitat, right?
What is the order of priority of the problems that I have to solve?
What do I have at my disposal?
Did anything survive, you know?
So let's just take, for example... Well, you've got, I mean, You think through the hostile forces, right?
The hostile forces of nature that threaten you as a surprisingly undefended human out in nature, which doesn't happen to most humans most of the time, but they're the abiotic ones.
Right?
There's weather and climate.
Now you're in the tropics, so you're unlikely to freeze to death.
But, you know, there's water levels that change.
There's tree falls that can happen.
That's biotic, I suppose.
And then over in biotic space, you've got, you know, people always are like, oh, you know, what's the big thing that's going to come at you, right?
Like, what's the dangerous snake or the big carnivoran?
And really, those aren't the things, right?
So it's going to be parasites.
It's going to be chemical competition from plants.
It's going to be poisonous spines and thorns and little things that could get you out of defense rather than things that are trying to make you their lunch.
Right, so a couple things.
One, you're not going to freeze to death, but it doesn't mean you're not going to die of exposure.
Or, short of dying of exposure, you could make problem number two, which is sustenance, vastly worse.
In other words, to the extent that you are burning hard-won food in order to stay warm, the point is you're actually driving up your requirements for nutrients to the extent that you could have sheltered yourself and failed to.
Right?
So, assuming you have no ability to filter water.
Yep.
You know, your water problem is going to be one that shows up quickly, and you want to carefully, basically, titrate water intake sufficiently that you can know relatively quickly, is this source going to make me sick?
And if so, I need to find another source.
I would also say that there are some things you can do to reduce the likelihood that it's going to make you sick.
I mean, A, you don't want stagnant water.
Yeah, you look for the clear, like, clarity of water is a good visual indicator.
And flow.
And flow.
Movement and clarity are good, you know, it just has less particulate matter in it.
It probably has less stuff that you can't see in it as well.
Yep, you could also one of the things that I would think about doing since water is unlikely to be limiting but drinkable water might be if you could either with something you salvage from the wreckage Uh, carry small amounts of water so that you could use UV light to purify them, right?
A very shallow bit of water can be purified with UV light.
Now, if you're on the forest floor, it's not like there's no light, but it's not intense, right?
It's, uh...
I don't know the Indonesian number.
When I was working in Panama, there were some plant physiologists working on questions and, you know, they did all kinds of interesting things like put fisheye lenses on the floor of a tropical forest so they could actually monitor the amount of light over the course of a day because these light flecks sweep across the floor as the sun moves.
Right.
Anyway, something like 1% of the incident light, the light that hits the canopy, makes it to the forest floor.
It's a tiny fraction.
Well, but so you find a light gap.
So you find a place for one of these, um, so we're in Indonesia.
Uh, so we're like, interestingly, one of the ways it's going to be different from forest, tropical forest we've been in is that most of the trees are from the same family.
It's all, it's mostly the same.
Is it diptera carps?
Yeah.
Um, but still they're going to fall sometimes.
So you find, you find yourself a light gap and maybe you try to, um, UV, UV purify water by finding a shallow pan into which you can put, um, or fashioning out of some of the fuselage or something.
Yeah, exactly.
And so then you're gonna have to transport it which is gonna be a waste of time and energy So you're gonna try to get efficient about that you're gonna try to find a get light gap or create a light gap big enough to do the job and Anyway, so okay.
That's gonna be one issue water Obviously for most of your needs it doesn't need to be drinkable, but the drinkable stuff needs to be pure You could use UV light Okay second thing Food, right?
So it seems to me that... Ron, you said something in that thread, right?
Maybe I inferred because I know, you know, I do and you do and we've been together occasionally tasting of neotropical forests, right?
Of neotropical... Neotropical forests.
tasting in neotropical forest.
I said tasting of, tasting of neotropical forest.
I would rarely approach the forest to taste the whole thing, but you know.
Tasting of, not tasting the whole thing, tasting of.
And you do so with great care and parsimony and a little bit and you wait and you wait and you wait and you see and a little bit more of anything.
Now, you can't be as completely careful if you have nothing.
When the plane went down, it took out all of, you know, if you really have no food at all, You have some time, but not a ton of time to figure out what all you can eat.
It's tougher to hunt than people who have never hunted without the tools that they are accustomed to hunting with, no.
You learn that, but it's far easier to forage.
This is one of the things I was hoping would emerge here.
Part of what it is to science the shit out of a forest like this in order to survive is taking a model that is robust, figuring out which elements of it apply to your new situation, and then applying it in a way that you can reverse course to the extent that you discover something about the model isn't right.
Yeah.
So you and I have a method, right?
The method involves The recognition that there are fruits in a forest, especially a tropical forest.
Those fruits are relatively easily recognized.
You can identify a fruit, which does not mean you can eat it.
Some fruits are edible.
Some fruits are not edible.
Not because they aren't fruits designed to be eaten, but because the plant in question has decided to exclude certain animals which are not good dispersers in favor of other animals which are.
This can be A trick, as it is with chili peppers, where chili peppers give you the impression that you are being damaged, like you're lacerating your mouth, but it's not true.
That is designed to drive away mammals and give birds this particular fruit.
They're not actually poisoning you.
Right.
But if you were to find a rando fruit in the Indonesian forest that you and I knew nothing about, right?
Some little red berry hanging off of something.
Yep.
Right?
One thing you could do is you could take it and you could touch it to your tongue.
Well, but before you do that though, you use your other senses, right?
So you use the color and say, okay, well if it's green actually, it's either not meant for me or it's not ripe yet.
Probably a no.
Uh, if it's one of the colors that humans tend to like in fruits, okay, maybe.
Although red fruits, especially little red berries, are more often bird fruits.
Uh, because birds see- birds see red particularly well, you know, even in the- in the dark understory.
If it has an aroma that smells, well, fruity.
Pleasant.
If it smells pleasant to you as a human being, that plant is communicating to you.
Even if it didn't know you were coming, it knew it was communicating to a potential mammal disperser of its seeds, and it's giving you the gift of the fruit to entice you to disperse it.
And if it smells like, you know, there are in the Indonesian forest, there are like these corpse flowers, right, that attract flies.
I guess that's the pollination stage.
I don't even know what the fruits of that plant look like, but I'll bet it's not about mammal dispersal.
I may be wrong, but like, you know, if the fruit smells like poop or a dying corpse, like, yeah, that plant is communicating something to you.
And maybe the plant is trying to obscure that it's got a great value there and you should override your first reaction and go for it.
But don't start there.
Yeah, for example, durian.
Right.
Durian famously has a nasty smell, but it's very good mammal fruit.
So you could also, you know, do something like, if you were to observe monkeys eating a fruit in a tree, and very often there's fruit dropped at the bottom of the tree, it's almost certain that that fruit is going to be safe to eat.
Run the monkeys, invite them to dinner.
Well, you can follow the monkeys around a little bit.
That would be pretty useful.
Yep, totally.
Your green fruit is a great test case because one hypothesis is that that green fruit is not ripe.
And if you touch it to your tongue, you will get an astringent feel or a very bitter taste.
And it will tend to be hard.
Right, so touch as well gives you a sense.
The key here is that the model is fruits you shouldn't eat give you a warning.
They have an interest in you knowing very quickly that you shouldn't eat them because the whole reason that they're toxic is to dissuade you.
And the conversation about fruits is going to be different from, say, you know, what else might you find that's not just a whole organism?
Well, a fungus, right?
No fungus has as a strategy to disseminate itself in the world being eaten by something.
I think?
I think that there are some occasional things.
Okay, so in broad brush, you can assume that you run into a fungus...
You might be able to eat it.
There's a really good chance it'll kill you.
A decent chance it'll get you high.
But there's almost no chance, if not no chance at all, that its strategy is to entice you to eat it so that you can help it.
With its propagation into the world, whereas there are, and we talk about this in Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, there are very few things that we eat that are actually designed by the organisms to be eaten, and fruit is one.
Fruit, milk, and yeah, fruit and milk.
Okay, so two things.
It's funny, but not by us, by the baby bees.
But if you can figure out how to extract it, the fact that it's... I'm just saying, like, honey is not designed to be eaten by a mammal, but it is designed as food.
Yeah.
Okay, so your green fruit hypothesis is... and hypothesis doesn't mean I believe this to be true.
I mean, this might be true and... So obvious!
It could be.
The point is, one hypothesis is that that fruit is not ripe, and that when it is ripe it will be edible to me, but it will be counterproductive if I eat it before it's ripe.
Now, did we have the foresight to crash with flagging tape or not?
I would really like to mark trees and be able to come back to them.
Of course you would.
Well, but we're going to get good at that.
That's part of the answer, is that the test for the hypothesis that that is an unripe fruit that I can eat when it's ripe is to keep checking up on it, right?
The test for the hypothesis that that fungus is edible to me, right, might involve, for me, I would say, watching an animal that is similar to me physiologically eat it, and, you know, this is a survival question, feeding it to an animal, right?
Now the question is, how do you feed it to an animal in this forest?
That might be a trick, but... Yeah, that seems like several stages of unlikely, but Well, but there are ways you could do it.
You could pair it with something, right?
Also, it is true that many things that are toxic can be detoxified with methods that you could innovate here.
So, for example, many of the things like a potato is not a good thing for you to eat, but a potato that has been boiled is a good thing for you to eat.
Unlikely to run into potatoes in the Indonesian forest.
No, but you may run into something that is potato-like, a storage organ, and the point is... Is it taro or manioc?
No, that's also nowhere on... Anyway, there's going to be some underground storage organ that the plant is storing energy for its own use, does not want someone else to come along and eat it, but may have put something in which could be, maybe it's The proteins are toxic and they can be denatured by cooking them.
You can denature them by cooking them or you can dissolve them out with water.
Those are the two big mechanisms.
Or dissolve them out with water and acid.
Right.
But also true that to the extent that there's some number of calories that you need, that number can be driven way down with a technology that you would want for this other purpose also, which is fire.
I would argue one of your top priorities, if you think you're long-term stuck in a situation like this, is how to make fire.
Now let's say that nothing from the plane gives us any leg up in that regard.
Well, and you also, you know, once we start talking about, you know, how are we also going to start getting meat, which is going to bring in a lot more calories, you then get a lot more nutrition out of the meat once... Exactly.
No, you get more calories out of the meat once you've cooked it.
Yeah, you get more nutrients out of the meat, especially calories.
I'm not... I think the nutrient analysis may go the other way, but you get more calories.
I don't think so, but anyway, it's an interesting question.
But in any case, you need a source of fire, okay?
You're in an Indonesian, a lowland Indonesian forest, okay?
One of the ways to make fire is out.
You can't use an ice lens to A what?
An ice lens, the way you would use a magnifying glass.
Maybe something from the airplane.
Ice.
Yep, can be done.
Yes, I was not imagining that you could.
Yeah, well, it's one of the best.
I wasn't even on my list of possibilities.
Okay, that leaves, from my perspective, that leaves, assuming nothing from the plane is capable, you know, there are no lighters or something like that.
Yeah.
You've got two options, and I think they're priority reverses based on what you did recover from the plane.
Okay, the two ways would be bow drill and fire plow.
I don't know what a fireplow is.
Fireplow is basically a piece of wood that you rake across a surface that you have flattened and generate enough heat to create a spark that can light some of the fire starting material.
You know, I just saw a video just before we came on.
While I was watching this video, I'm not sure.
This is an iron guy, an iron worker.
So he's got hard metal surfaces.
But the premise is, you know, how do you start a fire with nothing but mechanical force from a hammer?
Now, in this case, you've got two pieces of metal, so you don't have that necessarily.
You've got the fuselage of the plane, or no, I don't know what all you've got.
But he's got some anvil-like thing.
Sorry, I don't know the language here.
He's got a hammer, and he's got some sticks and some paper.
First, he Pounds the wood into lots of little pieces and puts it aside.
Yep.
And then he takes just a like a poker and he just pounds the poker with the hammer against the other metal until the poker is hot enough that it can set the paper on fire that that can set the kindling and that can set the... I can totally see that.
Yeah, using mechanical force to start a fire.
Right, and a fireplow basically allows you to do something like this with wood, where you generate enough friction.
Now, of course, the whole thing is dependent on... I've now forgotten what the term is for the stuff that you accumulate that lights very easily, because once you have a little bit of forest fluff lit, then you can light... I don't know.
Don't know.
What?
Tinder?
Yeah, I guess Tinder is probably the right term.
There may be another term in the case of bow drills and stuff.
But anyway, one of the key things to do, one of the things that I would do first in this scenario, Is find stuff that looks like it should be flammable and put it in a place that it will continue to get drier and drier and drier, no matter what the weather does.
Right?
Because that's going to be the hard part.
Often you can find stuff that will burn, but it's too wet in the state that you find it.
And so... Yeah.
Well, and that's, you know, one of the things that will be challenging in such a situation, which won't be obvious to people who haven't spent a lot of time in lowland tropical rainforests, which is to say jungles, is how wet everything is.
Even if you're in a little mini drought and it hasn't actually rained for three weeks and there's no sign that it's going to rain again, it's still just wet.
Everything is wet and it gets wetter.
The things we haven't talked about is how do you keep the fungus away?
How do you keep the pathogens away?
How do you keep yourself free of the organisms that want to encroach on you that aren't the big charismatic things that want to bite you and eat you for lunch.
But, you know, it's the, oh, my foot's going to fall off because I had a tiny little wound and now something has gotten into there and, oh, gangrenous.
Yeah.
So it's not your first priority after the plane crashes, but it's very high on the list that you figure out how to generate fire.
And the thing about generating fire is it's very, very difficult.
However, it is much easier.
And I think would be one of the, you know, Top three or four jobs in the whole, how do we keep ourselves alive scenario is starting fire.
Very, very tough.
However many hours it takes you, it's worth it.
Once you've got the fire started, keeping it alive enough that you can constantly revive it is going to be the key to survival.
What you don't want to have to do is restart it more times than you need to, right?
You want to be able to revive it.
And that means in this scenario, You're going to have to start banking dry fuel so that you can keep something on it.
And if you have to go out for three or four hours to go look for food, when you come back, there's enough of a smoldering, which also means you need a place to burn it that if it rains, it doesn't suddenly turn to mush.
But anyway, you would start looking for these things.
Your point about meat is a good one.
One of the things, you know, part of the scientific model that you would bring to this forest, in which you knew none of the creatures, is the idea that meat is edible, right?
There are a couple of mammal species and at least one bird species that have toxins.
As far as I know, the pitohui bird is toxic.
I think it's just the feathers, isn't it?
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
But, you know, if we crashed, we wouldn't have, we're not going to crash for the library.
So you can't look it up.
Okay.
Okay.
We'll take pitahui off our list.
Yeah.
Well, if we can even recognize a pitahui.
But the point is, you know, for the ratio of edible birds If I remember correctly, it's the same toxin in, I think it's just the feathers in pitohui as is in the poison frogs that I studied.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah, it's these lipophilic alkaloids that you really don't want to ingest because that's an unpleasant death.
There are some creatures that are very Distasteful.
Right?
Herbivores.
We talked about this.
Folivores often take in so many toxins that their meat is disgusting.
Yeah.
But probably edible.
Probably okay.
But you probably want to switch to something else as quickly as possible because the cost of detoxifying what you would take.
I mean, that's one of the things.
This is really what this discussion is about.
Do you need to reduce your level of toxins that you take in to zero?
No.
Your liver and your kidneys and other aspects of your physiology can deal with low levels of toxin.
What you don't want to do is take in a lot of any particular toxin, and certain toxins are quite bad, even in tiny amounts.
Which is why if you don't know your fungus, and most people just don't know anything close, that comes last on your list of dietary preferences, because the toxins that are in so many of the ones that you shouldn't be eating are enough to hurt you at a very low dose.
Yeah, very low dose.
You can take out your liver and there's no coming back from that in a scenario like this.
And, you know, frankly, even the hallucinogens are bad for you in this scenario.
Yeah.
Because you can't afford the confusion.
But that said, if, you know, if You watched a mammal consume a significant amount of a mushroom.
You could experiment with a tiny amount of it and see whether it made you sick.
Is that sure not to kill you?
I wouldn't say so.
But the point is, A, maybe you just discover, you know, if it's a fungus and it's consumed by mammals and you try a little bit and it doesn't make you sick, hey, you may have just increased the number of things in that forest you can eat to something that replenishes, that you can readily recognize.
Doesn't run away.
Not very fast at any rate.
So did you have something else you wanted to add there?
So anyway, my point here is science, observe, hypothesize, predict, test, is a smaller piece of a larger picture.
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
But the point is, the whole point of that exercise is not the production of so-called data.
Right?
The point of the exercise is the production of models.
I don't mean computer models.
You and I are both very skeptical of computer models, because it's very easy to fool yourself or others by adding in enough parameters that the model spits out plausible-sounding answers for no good reason.
Well, and you add assumptions in the same way you add data, and generally you're generating neither the assumptions nor the data, and so it's not your own work in the same way.
I have my biases, and I'm walking around with some assumptions, some of which aren't yet explicit.
But as my hit rate goes down, I have to go back and try to figure out what assumptions I don't even know exist I'm working from and get rid of them one by one.
And I mean, it's the science version of an elimination diet, right?
And figure out what you need to do to get your experience to a greater and greater match for reality. - So you do this process.
It generates models.
Those models are not an exact mirror of reality.
And in fact, in the scenario that I picked for us here, it'd be very different if we crashed in a neotropical forest.
Even a neotropical forest that we didn't know has congeners of many of the creatures that we do know.
And we know something about their behavior, you know, if they're animals, which might allow us to search for them more narrowly.
You know, you and I would know that a capybara is good eating, right?
That's something you would know.
As for, you know, a sun bear, A, how dangerous is it?
And B, how good is it to eat?
That's a tougher one, right?
It's not a familiar creature to me, other than just to know that it exists.
Yeah.
Yeah, they like avocados.
Oh no, you're talking about spectacle bears.
Oh, I thought you were still in the neotropical forest.
You're talking about spectacle bears in the neotropical forest.
I was talking about the... I was thinking you could follow spectacle bears to the avocados.
You could follow those.
Well, and that's the thing, is if we were in a neotropical forest, you know, I would know how to find figs, probably.
Whether you could access them would be dependent on who's feeding on them, because they're too high.
Spondius, you know, there are all kinds of things that I would go looking for quickly, but In a forest I really didn't know, the point is, hey, how good is my model?
Well, if I crashed in Brazil, it's better.
If I crash in parts of Sumatra, it's worse.
But it's not nothing.
It's certainly good enough to begin to set out a plan for how to allocate my time and my effort and what risks to take in order to solve the problems that accompany survival, which would be Don't die of exposure.
Don't spend more energy on staying warm than you need to.
Don't squander the resources that are in an animal that you have killed by failing to cook it properly.
Don't risk taking on the parasites by not cooking it.
You know, some things that you can't eat.
Another reason to cook, yep.
Some things that you can't eat could be rendered edible if they can be boiled.
Some things that you can't eat can be rendered edible if you can cook them.
The point is that general model, most of those parameters are not things that we discovered on our own in a survival scenario.
They are things that we have come about through studying scientifically, through coming to understand what the underlying mechanisms is, the idea that a plant might want you not to eat its storage organ and it might fill it with toxins, but if those toxins are water soluble, that you have a way of extracting them and leaving the nutrients, right?
This is the scientific model that you would crash in the forest with.
And in this case, trusting what your senses are telling you with regard to aversions and disgust and preferences and such makes good sense.
That will be a less good guide the more hyper-novel your environment is.
But just as we talked about with regard to fruit, if it smells good to you, if it looks appealing and smells good and feels good in the hand is less of a thing, but if it feels ripe Because you've eaten fruit before and you know what ripe tends to feel like, and you taste a little bit of it and it tastes sweet to you.
Still, don't eat the whole thing all at once, right?
But if you've got all these other sensory modalities telling you, you know what?
This feels right.
This feels good.
There's a really good chance that that is consistent with this is a fruit.
This is the fruit of a plant that benefits when mammals eat the fruit and disperse the seeds.
And therefore this is not going to hurt you because it was made effectively for you.
Right.
And the ability to override your intuitive sense of how something smells or tastes in the case that you have evidence that it might be all right anyway is important too.
So the point is you crash in the forest in Indonesia With a crude model and then you use science to improve that model so that when you happen on to some durian right the point is you're not dissuaded by the fact that it smells bad you know from having watched a mammal eat it and then having tried it on your own and feeling Oh, that was pretty good.
That satisfied me and it didn't make me sick.
Right?
The point is your model gets better and better.
You become expert in your local habitat and how to deal with it.
And so.
Yeah.
All right.
I think we're I think we're more or less there.
The point is you've been misled.
The degree to which you think that science is about laboratories and peer review and studios discussions and high tech equipment and that to the extent that that thing Crap money.
Doesn't work.
You're just shit out of luck.
You have been lied to.
The proper scientific thinking is a cultivated way of looking at the world.
And, you know, I was reminded as I was thinking about us doing this exercise.
That we actually did a podcast back in Portland in which we talked about this and we said, look, you misunderstood science.
For us, we are much more likely to be doing science in rubber boots with machetes than we are to be in a laboratory or looking through a microscope.
Doesn't make it less scientific.
The point is it's the same mental process being deployed in a very different scenario.
One in which you cannot drive all of the noise out.
That's what a laboratory is.
It's a noise remover that allows you to focus in on a phenomenon.
And that predicts, maybe, that field biologists, regardless of whether they think about evolution or geology or ecology or whatever, might actually be better suited to the complexity of something like a novel coronavirus and a novel set of vaccines and repurposed treatments and a political response than laboratory scientists might be.
Because laboratory science is precisely about reducing the number of variables.
so that when you get a result, you're more and more confident that it's because of the thing that you manipulated.
Whereas field science cannot have most of its variables controlled.
So you get accustomed to the practice of engaging in field science is one in which you have to figure out on your own what of the vast amount of noise that I'm experiencing is actually the pattern that I should be honing in on, and what of it might be relevant but not right now, and what of it is not what and what of it might be relevant but not right now, and what of it is not what Right, and so the laboratory is very good at removing the noise, which allows you to see very subtle
Yeah, you often get greater precision.
You do.
And sometimes you need that precision in order to see some very subtle contributor to a process.
The point is when somebody says, I would like to inject you with this liquid, which contains some mRNA messages, which are going to hijack a certain number of your cells, And it's going to cause them to produce a fragment of a pathogen, and the hope is that that is going to make you immune if you encounter that pathogen because it's a bad one, right?
The point is, which is the better model here?
The purified laboratory where the point is, oh, the only things going on in my experiment are those tiny few things that I allow to be there, or What the fuck did you just say?
Have you ever tested this on a person?
Do you have a successful such a vaccine based on this technology that you've ever deployed in a human being?
How many of those causal links that you said with authority are actually black boxes in which you're kind of crossing your fingers behind your back going like, I really hope it works the way we say it does, but the fact is that we can't possibly have the level of certainty that we claim to, which right away tells anyone who is watching you make the claims, okay, you are at the very least overstating what you know.
Right.
Why would you be overstating what you know?
Let's figure out what you actually could know and see if you're ever saying some of the things which you could know.
Huh.
Also not saying some of the things you definitely should know at this point.
What else is inconsistent?
And on it goes.
Right.
And so, you know, the straightforward argument is, look, you are talking about introducing something novel to my physiology As if you understand my physiology, which I know you don't.
Nobody understands my physiology.
Not because I'm special, but because human physiology is complex.
It's mostly black boxes.
We're very new at this and the degree to which we understand is far outstripped by the degree to which we do not yet understand.
And so the point is you're talking about intervening.
And it's every bit as idiotic as if you walked into a tropical forest and said, let me explain to you how this place works.
The answer is, oh, are you from the future?
Because nobody in the present knows how this thing works, right?
We know certain things, but we do not know how this works.
And so anyway... And yet...
And yet, we can apply a scientific understanding of the world and of the forest to have a better chance of surviving a plane crash there than if we said, well, if I don't have, you know, if science doesn't already know exactly what's going on here, I guess I'll just lay down and die.
Like, those are two extreme responses, neither of which is savvy or smart or wise.
Yeah.
Now, if we ever do find this scenario unfolding, the first thing I'm going to say to you at the point that we wrestle ourselves free of the... Somehow, miraculously, mostly unscathed, even though everyone else is dead, okay?
That's what I'm shooting for.
If that happens, right, the first thing I'm going to say to you is, well, welcome to Complex Systems.
It probably is.
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
Welcome to Complex Systems.
Here we are.
Welcome to Complex Systems.
Here we are.
Cool.
Well, I think that's it.
I think we're there.
I think we're there.
We will be back next week, and next week we'll have a Q&A.
We're not going to do one this week.
We encourage you to, you know, check out A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, because a lot of what we were just talking about is either in there, or this discussion was highly relevant to the toolkit that we introduced.
And if you are thinking it is too late, no.
Most of the 21st century still lies ahead.
There's plenty of time to get that book, read it, think about what's in it, and you can deploy it scientifically as you deal with your own plane crash scenario.
Let me be honest with yourselves.
If you're watching this and paying attention, what are the chances that you survive into the 22nd century?
Pretty low, right?
Wow.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think our producer here, our son, who was born in 2004, should definitely shoot for that.
Shoot for it.
Yeah, so for the vast majority of our audience, it's not going to happen.
Sorry.
So, you know, check out A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
Also, it's true that A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 22nd Century, probably most of the same things will apply.
Yes, it'll be hyper, hyper novelty if we're still around, and we'd like for that to be the case.
Not us individually, but humanity doing what humans do when we're at our best, largely with the help of the dogs.
Okay, until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
