In this 164th 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 science, race, death and sex. No, really. Science: why it is critical—in science and in sense-making in general—to separate the observation of a thing, from the interpretation of what it means. Race: why acting to protect yourself from individual bad actors is different from avoiding whole demogr...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream extreme edition. welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream extreme edition.
We are working, as we have in the past, without Annette, who once again did not show up for work today.
We fired her, we talked about this.
She still didn't show up for work, okay?
Now what I realize about Annette is that actually I've never even met her.
I don't think she's ever showed up for work.
And I drove by... You keep different hours.
I drove by the place that we send her checks.
It's a bowling alley.
So I don't know what's up, but...
Worse than that, however, we are working without Zach.
Yes.
Now Zach is... I probably shouldn't say this widely, so let's keep it between us and our audience.
Zach is on the lam.
He is on the run from the Marshal Service, and he is in... pick a continent.
He's on the other side of the equator at the moment.
Pick a continent.
Any continent?
Yes.
Antarctica.
Okay, he is at the Brown Station in Antarctica, And I'm sure the Marshals Service will be able to find him there.
It's not a highly populated place.
He shouldn't be hard to spot, even if he's in disguise.
So, anyway, Zach is not present behind the producer's desk, which means I'm doing a few extra things that I don't usually have to do, and I partially understand.
So, anyway, it's all good.
We'll see how it goes, though.
Indeed.
Yeah, we will.
And this is an unusual week for a lot of reasons.
We are also not doing a Q&A today, so it's going to be this.
We're going to try to keep it tight and... Constrained and just like that.
I should point out, I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, which I forgot to mention.
You are Dr. Heather Hying, which they mostly know, but some may not.
Some may not.
And this is LimeStream number... are we still in the... it's a 1000... Did you just call it a LimeStream?
Yeah, it's a lime.
Actually, I mean, if you've got to pick a flavor for a stream, lime isn't bad.
Totally.
LimeStream.
164, I believe.
164.
164.
So we are going to talk a little bit about sort of, let's see, the nature of science, race, death, sex.
All those things today.
Yeah.
A little bit different, a little bit philosophical.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Usually when people talk about sex and death, it's in the other order, but I guess... But I think this is the order in which we're going to take it today, I think.
I believe it is wise for us to separate ourselves from those other conversations in any case, so...
Yeah.
All right, this is all good.
Now I have to remember some more things.
Not yet.
Why?
Not just yet.
Okay.
No, you get cooking, and I will prepare over here.
You won't even notice I'm doing it.
No, excuse me, I won't.
We are grateful to you, our audience, always, and I am grateful to the remarkable number of new subscribers to Natural Selections this week.
That was a prompted part, I believe, by Substack, thank you, making Natural Selections their number one featured newsletter for a spell this week, for a few days early in the week.
By the way, hell yeah and congratulations.
Hell yeah, that was great.
And then the piece that I posted on Tuesday called Apparently We're the Bad Guys, Basically attempted, you know, I was not attempting to be thorough.
I knew that I was not being thorough.
I would love for someone else to be thorough, but I just, you know, it's getting really old.
It's getting really old that people continue to tell us that we are the ones who are, you know, killing people and making errors across the board.
And I said, you know, Here's some things that we said throughout the spell that we've been doing this.
And, you know, we got some things wrong.
Here are a couple things we got wrong.
Here's a hell of a lot of things we got right.
And I linked, I don't know, maybe a tenth of what I could have linked and just ran out of time.
But people have really liked that piece and I encourage you to go and check it out if you have not.
Share it, like it, subscribe there.
Subscribe here on Brett Weinstein's YouTube channel, which is the main one that we're streaming from.
Also on Odyssey and the Clips channel too, where you can find, uh, briefer, briefer things that we talk about.
Right.
Like, subscribe, comment.
In the comments, we actually want to know why it is unlikely that Annette lives in a bowling alley.
So if you feel like telling us... Do we?
Okay.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
We do.
Yeah, we talked about this.
Yeah.
I mean, it wasn't even like a, you know, there was a second story where she might be renting an apartment.
There's just nothing.
It's a bowling alley.
Seller.
Uh, we can't.
We could fire her.
Nope.
Basement.
Oh!
Cellar!
Got it.
Right.
Okay.
I'm on track.
Yes.
All right.
Uh, so you could also, uh, consider joining one of our Patreons.
Uh, next week before the livestream, you will be having one of your Patreon conversations.
Uh, we have private monthly Q&As at mine, and you can also access our Discord community at either of our Patreons, where People are having honest conversations on all sorts of topics through many different media, and it's really quite wonderful.
You can even have an honest conversation about dishonest conversations.
Indeed.
And you will have your pick.
There are so many that you could choose from.
Yes.
Sure.
Okay, now you're about to be up.
We also are supported by our sponsors who we carefully pick and curate and we only read ads for sponsors that we actually approve of and really vouch for, so here we go.
All right, we are about to transition into ad mode.
Here it is.
Boom.
Okay, there it is.
Ad mode.
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Tree nuts are delicious and nutritious.
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But each piece of nut is different, and for many of us, macadamias are the best.
Macadamia nuts take a very long time to grow, and because they are both rare and highly sought after, they have both the dubious distinction of being the world's most expensive nut, and, um, both.
I just read both there for no good reason.
They have the dubious distinction of being the world's most expensive nut.
Between the taste and the health benefits though, they're worth it.
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Well, in pursuit of the truth.
Try it in English.
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Before you read the second ad, I am, as you read, just going to go off screen for a moment and advise our other son that we can hear him.
All right.
Okay.
I bet you can't guess who our next ad, though, is.
I can't.
If you do guess, I will buy you dinner.
Okay.
Oh, awesome.
Well, we seem to have a nut theme going, so maybe it's like nuts or seeds or something?
Seed.
Very good.
All right.
All right.
Fair and square.
All right.
I was excited to read this one this week because after COVID, who knows whether they're related, but I had some gut distress.
And as all of you know, gut biota are Very, very important to all sorts of aspects of health for reasons that we are only beginning to fully understand.
But in any case, our next sponsor is Seed.
Seed is a company focused on bacteria and the microbiome.
They make a probiotic called DS-01, daily symbiotic.
Here at Dark Horse, we always prefer eating real food to taking pills, but we really love this product.
If you've tried probiotics before and they haven't worked, or you've wondered about them and haven't ventured in, this is a different kind of probiotic and it's fantastic.
There are a lot of things you can do to enhance your health.
Our sign-off here at Dark Horse includes three of them.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
But a lot is hidden in those words.
What constitutes good food, for instance?
Good food is real food.
one word in that.
It's almost beyond a phrase.
What constitutes good food, for instance?
Good food is real food, food, whole food, food that has been alive recently and was grown with care in conditions as ancient as possible given the constraints of the 21st century.
But even many people who eat such a diet are missing something.
We contain multitudes.
Every individual human contains so many other organisms, some of which may harm us, but many of which exist with us in harmony.
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And that's why you've likely never felt a difference.
Seed is designed differently.
That's why it works.
It's designed to protect the important stuff so it passes through that very acidic environment and gets to the place where you actually need them.
It's one of these obvious, in retrospect, things, right?
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It's built to get through that first line of defense because these are good things that you need.
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And yes, I did experience a difference.
Always hard to know whether I was just moving that direction or not, but it felt likely to have been responsive to this probiotic.
Yeah, it's great stuff.
All right, and our final sponsor this week is Mudwater.
And before I start reading, I'm going to just show the can, and I will say that all of our sponsors this week actually have great packaging, and that's in some way trivial, but it's nice, right?
It's nice to feel like the seed comes in these nice glass jars, and then they send you the replenishment in biodegradable bags.
And this is a nice tin, and the macadamia nuts come in these nice little pouches.
I will advise though, from personal experience, when you use the mud water, take it out of the tin.
Yeah, so if you just put this tin directly into your mug of hot water, you're not going to get the taste sensation you're looking for, and you're also likely to chip your teeth.
Yes, but it will last longer, but it's a trade-off.
It is a trade-off, although you will be heating the contents in the tin by submerging it.
It will last less long than if you don't do it, but a lot longer than if you use the product.
Than if you actually use the product.
Yeah, all right.
I think we've now thoroughly confused the matter.
Yes, I recommend actually using mud water.
It's fantastic.
It's a coffee alternative, but I think that's sort of what we're told to say.
It's a coffee alternative, but really it's a delicious It's a delicious drink.
I mean, you can add it to lots of stuff, as we'll talk about here, but it's a delicious drink for the morning with a little bit of caffeine, about a seventh the amount of coffee.
But, you know, if you have a tendency to want to drink warm drinks during the day, and sometimes it's coffee, sometimes it's tea, put this into your rotation.
It's really fantastic.
It's made with four medicinal mushrooms, plus herbs and spices.
Spices?
With a seventh of caffeine as a cup of coffee, you'll get energy without the anxiety, jitters, or crash of coffee, if that sort of thing happens to you.
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If you like the routine of making and drinking a cup of warmth in the morning, but don't drink coffee or trying to cut down, try this, Mud Water.
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It's really excellent.
And they also make a non-dairy creamer.
It comes in this little bag.
I was going to say fancy.
It's like the opposite of fancy, which is nice.
You don't want a fancy bag to have your creamer.
Um, it's made out of coconut milk and MCT, and it's, it's great.
And they also make a sweetener out of coconut palm sugar.
Wait a minute.
Do I have the, no, I have the creamer here.
Yep.
A sweetener out of coconut palm sugar and lucuma, which is the fruit of an Andean tree used by the Inca, to add if you prefer those options.
I don't know how much the Inca use lucuma anymore, but it was used by the Inca.
In the subjugation of their neighbors.
Yes.
Which wasn't as bad as it might have been.
Really?
Yeah.
No, actually— That's where we're going?
Perhaps we should have that conversation later, but there was a kind of federating effect.
So, okay, let's go through here and let's actually start the top of the hour with a brief discussion of the Inca, okay?
Sure.
Rather than adding that into the middle of the Mudwater ad.
All right.
Or you can mix and match.
Add a bit of their coconut milk and MCT creamer with some honey from your favorite bees, and if you don't have favorite bees, get some honey from your favorite beekeeper.
As we've talked about before, find a favorite beekeeper if you don't have one, or use their lakuma and coconut palm sugar sweetener and skip the bees entirely.
We've been known to add Mudwater's coconut milk and MCT creamer into their hot drinks as well, and it's delicious.
Mudwater's flavor is warm and spicy, with a hint of chocolate, ginger, cardamom, nutmeg, cloves, as I've already gone through.
It's also delicious blended into a smoothie.
This is not, in the northern hemisphere, not really the smoothie season, but try it with banana and ice, milk or milk-like substance, mint, and cacao nibs.
At any point that the mint is growing outside where you live is probably a good moment for this smoothie, and it's fantastic.
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All right.
Do it.
Boom.
We did it.
All right, we are back in regular Dark Horse mode.
All right, so... Dark Horse Halla mode, we're gonna call it.
Are we?
And yet you haven't brought me any ice cream.
No, I should have thought of that.
But anyway, perhaps next week.
It won't happen.
I know this.
Probably true.
If you're talking about the ice cream on camera, it would melt.
Oh, but it wouldn't attract the cats.
Where are the cats?
Where are they?
I don't know.
Yeah.
Anyway, should we start with a brief discussion of the Inca?
Yes, a brief discussion for which I have not properly prepared, but I will say that the Incan Empire was a true empire that stretched over Many hundreds of miles, at least.
Many hundreds of miles.
I'm tempted to think it might have been a thousand, but in any case... Let's say it was linear down to the coast.
Not so much.
They didn't drop over into the Amazon Basin so much.
No, it's definitely a mountain.
A lot of the Andes.
Yeah.
But in any case, what they did was they They subjugated many a people, but in the subjugating of those people, they also linked them into a vast trade network, and they also brought with them a kind of wisdom about how to provide for the people who were linked together in this large collaborative entity, including
The creation of these larders, which were basically excess food, was stored in a stable way for times of famine.
So the point was, if you were conquered by the Inca, you became part of this thing that had actually a degree of at least robustness, if not anti-fragility to it.
So anyway, I think, you know, you and I have said that in some sense the Maya were very much like the Greeks of the New World, and the Inca were like the Romans, but in both cases there were substantial differences, and the nature of the empire that the Inca had, I'm not saying it didn't have degrees of brutality.
Obviously, people don't, you know, get conquered by empires easily, but it deserves a fresh look because it wasn't simply a new world version of the Romans.
It was a very different kind of empire.
Well, I mean, I think no empire is simply almost no longstanding empire is simply brutal and evil, right?
So I don't... we did not prepare this at all.
There's just a line in the ad read that we just did about Lukuma, this tree, this fruit from this tree that the Inca apparently used.
And I guess what I can pull up from memory, since we did not think that we could be talking about the Inca today, Two of the cultures who were either incorporated into or ended up sharing space with the Inca before the Spanish arrived, with whom we had some
you know, interaction much later on, right, in terms of what kinds of traces they left, are first the Yumbo, whose foot trails in In a particular amazing spot that we've spent time with students in Ecuador, the name of which I've now briefly blanked on.
Wait.
It starts with an M. Makebucuna.
Makebucuna, yes.
So Makebucuna, which is a giant reserve very close to Quito, has in it these ancient yumbo trails.
And this is volcanic soil, but also sort of a little bit clay-y, but very extraordinarily rich Soil that also when you walk a trail over and over and over again, the trail does not, unlike in the jungle, unlike in the lowland jungle to either side, the west or the east, is not going to disappear over time.
It will basically just deepen and deepen and deepen.
And so you can literally walk.
And I actually I wrote a piece about this that I can link to.
Um, in the footsteps of the Yumbo who were walking these trails hundreds of years ago.
And you know that you are walking in their footsteps because these are very narrow paths that in some cases are are so worn in that the sides of the trails are four, five, even six feet on either side of you.
Oh, higher than that?
They can be, and often they're not very high at all, but these trails are ancient.
They are absolutely ancient.
So in Ecuador, the Inca weren't present for very long.
It was something like 80 years before the Spanish showed up.
So to some degree, because we've spent time in Ecuador and we haven't spent time in Peru, Our Bolivia, our understanding of the Incan influence is kind of a kinder gentler, if you will, because they just didn't have that much time before, you know, the next the next empire came and slaughtered them.
So the Yumbo were, as we came to understand being at Macapacuna, They were effectively employed, not enslaved, but employed as trail runners to deliver messages and to some degree, I think, goods between distant places by the Inca and then the Cañari.
They were ironically the Amazon of their day, even though they were way too high for that to be the case.
They were the headwaters of the Amazon is the way to think of them, I guess.
It's too far north to be probably near the headwaters of the Amazon, and also just over on the western side rather than the eastern side.
The theme, the pun was worthwhile.
It was in the ballpark, enough to be justified, which few puns are.
This is true on this point.
You and I will agree.
And then a little farther south in Ecuador, you have Ingapurca, which is the largest, it's called an Incan ruin in Ecuador, but in fact what it is,
is a shared ruin of the result of a royal wedding between, I don't remember which sex is which, but let's call it like an Incan prince and a Qunyari princess, or maybe it was the other sexes, but the Inca came in tried to try to conquer the Qunyari.
The Qunyari were having none of it and they actually were able to resist And the Inca did what sometimes will happen in such a case.
They said, okay, well, never mind then.
How about we join forces?
And so you end up with, uh, you ended up with not just Inca Puerco, which was a center of culture, uh, but it was, it was a, it was a hub for many, for many places, including, you know, maybe Yumbo trail runners, but also down to the coast.
Where there were additional, like the Valdivians and such, they were doing trade with the Valdivians.
So the Inca were hardly the only people in pre-Columbian Andean America.
And yeah, they were brutal, and definitely did a lot of nasty things to people whom they were hoping to subjugate.
And also, that's not the only thing they were.
Yep.
The degree to which they were brutal needs to be thoroughly analyzed because it's, I think, my sense is that it is quite different than the standard.
Anyway, we don't have to dwell here, but the degree of the brutality is well worth a deep dive.
Okay, so, um, there are three things that we were hoping to talk about this week.
Uh, I'm gonna go ahead and start.
Sure.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Is that okay?
Yes, I'm just making sure that I'm not forgetting to do something that needs to be done, but I believe we are, we are where we need to be.
Okay.
Last week on episode 163, the final thing we talked about was the newest way that Scott Adams was making the news, right?
That he had read a poll that claimed that nearly half of black people who were asked don't feel safe around white people.
He advised white people to move away from black people into their own neighborhoods.
We talked about this.
And we talked about the fact that he is advancing the cause of segregation.
And, you know, much ink and, you know, airwaves have been spilled.
That's not what happens to airwaves, but I don't know what the right analogy is over this.
You know, it's been over a week now, and it continues to have repercussions, including that apparently Dilbert's been dropped by, you know, almost every newspaper.
I think it may be all of them.
Yeah.
So that's just something that happened as a result of Scott Adams saying what he said, which we talked about last week.
We suggested that this was, among other things, un-American, what he was proposing.
Wait, wait.
In fairness, what he was proposing is un-American.
The idea that it is not okay to be white is also un-American.
Right.
And I believe those two things have to travel together in this story.
Right.
We're getting there.
Okay.
So I saw a few comments that scoffed at us in response to what we had said, including one in particular that said, and this was the theme of all of them, didn't you guys just move to an island to escape living near people who hate you?
As if this is a response.
I mean, it is posted as if it's a response.
And so I have, you know, the answer is no.
No, we didn't.
But it raises a couple of interesting issues that I think are worth us exploring, because Although this would not seem to be in, you know, the wheelhouse of how to think scientifically, which is a large part of what we do here on air.
We explore things scientifically.
I think it actually makes this point surprisingly well.
Which is that, so that's the first of two points, and the second is actually about race.
Um the first then is um again the comment and this is just one of a few that showed up.
Didn't you guys just move to an island to escape living near people who hate you?
Well there's an observable fact.
We just moved to an island.
That is true.
Did we move to an island to escape living near people who hate us?
No.
No, we didn't.
So there are a lot of reasons we moved to an island, and I think we've talked about some of them, and there are others that we haven't talked about, and we might continue to do so in the future, but that's not the point here.
The point is that there's an observable fact we recently moved to an island, and onto that is an assertion of interpretation of what our motives were, which are then conflated as if the fact of the observable fact inherently means the second thing, the interpretation.
And this is a pretty common but really important to avoid error that people make in science and in interpreting things in general, right?
Is that, and, and, you know, specifically since most of my empirical, uh, scientific experience is in the field doing animal behavior, this is absolutely one of the things that you have to train yourself to, and when you're teaching students to do animal behavior, have to really Really drum into them and no one is going to be perfect.
But the point is, you're going out to look at what is happening, to see what is actually happening, to observe what is actually happening.
And even our language tends to add interpretations to it.
And so I'll give an example from the work that I did in Madagascar with these, you know, I was working on these poison frogs, which have As it turns out, I was the first person to work on them.
You know, incredible social systems with different kinds of territoriality, and these extended fights that can go on for like more than an hour, and really intricate courtship, and a lot of parental care, like all of these things, which I had hypothesized, and if I'm being honest, hoped that I might see.
But if it wasn't true, it wasn't true.
That's, you know, that's the way of nature.
Um, but when I first went, because, um, the not closely related but very, um, similar in terms of some of the other aspects of who they are, dart poison frogs in the New World do these things.
That was part of why I hypothesized that I might be seeing these things.
But when I first went, and I marked the frogs, and so I knew who I was looking at, and I would see them, you know, two what I understood to be males, wrestling with one another for a very long time.
It was important that I not write into my notes, light.
Now, that seems like it's ridiculous, right?
Why do I have to go through all of that trouble to write down exactly what I'm seeing, and some of it I recorded on video, but really describing actually what is happening and who's doing what to whom, who's on top of whom, who's chasing whom, who's knocking whom off a piece of bamboo.
And over time, I came to be able to say, okay, I have these types of fights, and now when I see this thing that I've carefully defined over here, I can say, okay, that's this type of fight, and I can just write that into my notes while I'm watching, and I can know for sure that what I was seeing was this.
But I had to spend a lot of time watching first, because if I just started out by saying, well, obviously that's a fight, then when I say later, ah, well, I always saw these fights between such and such individuals under these conditions, there's no way for anyone, including myself, to know if I actually know what I'm talking about, because I've added the interpretation in in the beginning.
I've encoded my interpretation of what I thought I was seeing and conflated it with, inextricably interwoven it with the interpretation, and at that point you don't have data anymore.
You have your interpretation and you can't find the data separate from the interpretation, and you really have to go back to step one and start everything from scratch.
In order to do scientific work well, the mind is sort of built for science, but it is not built for the formalisms that are required to do it well, right?
It's built to informally do something scientific.
Yeah.
And the formal part actually requires you to break normal human habits, right?
So, as I think we've discussed before, the mind works based on Hundreds of, probably thousands of heuristics.
Even the visual system works based on heuristics, where you're not processing everything pixel by pixel.
You're processing things based on, you know, things that our tables tend to look like tables.
And anyway, the point is it makes doing the difficult stuff possible by skipping all of the stuff by making assumptions that tend to be a good bet, which is why Optical illusions are so interesting, because you can detect any place where you have a perfect ambiguity between two interpretations, the heuristic will wobble back and forth, or it will pick one and not be able to see the other, whatever it is.
So the point is, look, heuristics are the key to not being paralyzed by the number of things that you would otherwise have to analyze.
But!
But!
In order to figure out something that's truly difficult, you're on an island far away, Or truly new.
Completely new to you.
And you're trying to map it onto things that you already know.
That's the error.
And what you're after is really stuff that isn't Intuitive and obvious.
Right?
The important stuff that comes out of the investment in what we call science is the stuff that you didn't know to expect.
Right?
And so, in order to do that well, you have to train yourself out of leaping to the conclusion that what you're seeing just maps onto the heuristic that would ordinarily take care of it.
Right.
And so I really like your point here about, yes, we moved to an island.
And, you know, it wasn't about, it's not entirely wrong that The discomfort with what was going on on the mainland had something to do with it, but it was not about moving away from people who didn't like us.
We'll get to that.
That point is the second point, but let's just stick with this first.
Okay.
Well, I mean, I think we more or less got there.
The point is, breaking the bad habit of leaping to conclusions is the key to actually seeing things that you didn't walk into the situation knowing.
Yes.
Yeah, no, that's right.
And I guess I did want to say a couple things about, you know, some of our reasoning, which is, you know, we don't need to explain and isn't necessary to respond here, is that, you know, our perception that global systems are becoming less stable, and that we've been dreaming about these islands since we first came and visited them 17 years ago or so, 18 years ago now, something like that.
Yeah.
And frankly, the coyotes were driving us crazy.
I'm talking about actual coyotes, like wild canids.
And the number of coyotes in Portland was insane.
Yeah.
And that sounds like a trivial thing, but it was actually... If you have cats and they go outdoors, it's not trivial.
Yeah.
Is it true that there are some people in Portland who don't like us?
Yeah, it's true, but I will say that one of, you know, one of, I miss Portland, I've said this before, and I've gone back a couple times since we moved away, and I continue when I'm back there to have the experience that we were increasingly having before we left, which is not once in Portland have either of us had someone come up to us and berate us, but I don't know, one in two, one in three times that one of us would go out, And someone would come up to us to say, thank you.
So, um, I mean, if anything, it was, it was the opposite sort of, sort of move.
But the second point, uh, is what if we had, like, what, what if that had been the reason that we had moved?
Can I pause you there?
Because I do want to put some, uh, some flesh on these bones surrounding the concern about Portland.
Okay.
It is very different.
Okay.
So there are people in Portland who hate us.
No doubt.
Who cares?
Well, we have to care, because what happened in Portland... That literally is where we're going.
Oh, okay.
Well, I don't know that.
I thought you were moving on to this other point, but... We talked about this.
This is the other point.
The other point is, what if we had done this?
What if the reason to move, which it wasn't, but what if the reason to move had been to get away from people who don't like us?
Would this be the same thing as what Scott Adams was advising?
No.
Explicitly and formally not.
Because taking action to protect yourself against specific and particular threats from real people is not just reasonable, it would be foolish to not do so, right?
To not consider the fact that there might actually be real risks against you, right?
And imagining that that shouldn't be part of your understanding of the world is not just naive, but beyond foolish.
Whereas, lumping in all people of certain demographic markers as having a certain set of beliefs and acting as if you know what that group will do is ascribing individual-level beliefs to a population and imagining that you know what that entire group thinks, and that pretty much is the definition of racist.
It's no more racist than what the survey suggested a bunch of people were thinking who were answering the survey, right?
It's racist either way, but it is absolutely not the same thing to understand yourself as being in a situation where there are individuals who are very interested in doing you harm.
As opposed to saying, oh, I know those sorts of people.
Those sorts of people don't like my sort of people, and so therefore I'm going to separate myself from them.
Really totally fundamentally different actions.
Totally fundamentally different.
All right, I am going to go back and make this point.
I don't think it's the point that you're getting at here.
Who cares that people in Portland didn't like us?
I care.
Do you know why?
Because those who govern Portland stopped enforcing the law.
They basically prevented the police from showing up.
They allowed the police to be demonized.
The police stopped showing up.
So it shouldn't matter that you live in a city where people hate you.
Mostly, our experience in Portland was very positive.
The fact that there are a small number of people who hate us shouldn't matter, because in general, the law protects you from that.
But if your city government stops enforcing the law, that's a serious problem.
So anyway, I just want to put that on the table.
The problem wasn't people who don't like us, who were there in tiny numbers.
The problem was the governance of the thing, which made the city, frankly, not tenable in the long term.
You can't not enforce the law and have a city continue to function.
And it was Visibly deteriorating as a result of this.
That's one thing.
And we talked a lot, especially during the summer and fall of 2020, about the ways in which the law was not being enforced.
And one of the ways that that happened was, of course, you know, the All Cops Are Bastards campaign and the defund of the police.
I cannot believe that we were there.
And, you know, mostly those policies have been reversed across the cities where they happened.
But also just providing so little support for people who were actually employed in law enforcement that they left in droves, right?
Like people retired early, they left to either go be police elsewhere where they were going to actually have some chance of being appreciated.
Um, or they found new work, and then the recruitment effort started.
It's like, come be police in Portland.
Yeah, like a lot of really awesome people are going to choose to take on a job where you are under a tremendous amount of stress and physical risk all the time, and you are going to be the one blamed almost no matter what if something bad happens.
And blamed means you actually could end up in prison for a shooting that under normal circumstances where there was not hysteria around something like race, a shooting that had to happen because it's in the normal course of policing as a result of the fact that somebody is threatening somebody else with a deadly weapon or whatever, such a circumstance could turn around on you in Portland as a result of the fact that the narrative was the problem here is the police and the city government
I think cynically went along with that insanity, which made it dangerous.
And blame is a weak word here, yes.
Held responsible for anything bad that might happen.
Which isn't to say that there isn't bad policing, but of course, you know, if that's going to be the assumption, then it's a crazy place to take up that work.
So yes, the recruitment effort was ridiculous.
Okay, second point I wanted to make is, and it's something I felt I should have said last week.
The most troubling thing to me about what Scott Adams said was, Something closing in on half of the people responding, which as you and I discussed, the survey methodology is not really defensible.
It was a tiny survey and it was voluntary self-reports.
So, okay, what does it mean that something like closing in on half?
But you really want to abandon a population in which more than half of the people are on your team?
Even if it was only 25% of the black respondents to this survey who had said it was okay to be white.
You really want to abandon those people.
Isn't that the time when it is most important to align yourself and to recognize that it's your duty as an American to stand up for other Americans who are in the minority and jeopardized?
So, in any case, The more you look at what he said, the more uncareful it is relative to even if you took the evidence at face value.
Yeah, and I guess I will just repeat that.
He is responding with racism to racism.
He's responding to racism with racism.
What is reported in the survey, if it's real, is downstream, again, if it's real, if there's close to half of black people who are saying, yeah, no, like, not Not good with people who don't look like us.
That is downstream of some amount of historic racism, right?
But a whole lot of the woke ideology that passes itself off as about, you know, love and rainbows and unicorns and is actually divisive and fundamentally racist itself.
And so, and you did say this last week, of course one of the results of such a crackpot ideology that is inherently racist and is pretending to be anti-racist is going to be that people who weren't racist, who aren't buying the ideology, But are watching people get radicalized around them.
Will themselves become radicalized and become more racist?
Like, that is going to be the result of this kind of ideology taking over.
And people will be less able to talk to one another as individuals, and more likely to focus on demographic markers that you can't change.
And accident of birth becomes much more important than what you make of yourself.
And if, you know, it's the end of merit, it's the end of kindness, and frankly it's the end of humanity.
Certainly the end of America.
I do want to say... Oh, America too.
OK.
Yeah.
For me, the jury is still out as to whether or not what Adam said is motivated by racism.
I actually don't see that as necessary.
I think it was very uncareful and very unwise.
But... I did not attribute a mental state to him.
I said the pronouncement is racist.
I think that's a distinction that is worth making, in part because some of what is coming out of the woke ideology will say that it doesn't matter at all what your intention was if, you know, this thing is inherently racist.
I will say, you know, in general I don't buy that, but arguing that you should separate yourself by race is a racist pronouncement, whether or not it's motivated by a belief in the superiority of or fear of one race or another.
You have compelled me.
You're right that it is actually not necessary that it be motivated by a a racist ideology or emotional impulse.
But the point is, my point about it being less than half, and again, even if it had been 75%, right?
It is our duty as decent human beings to stand by the 25% who aren't saying that, right?
But in this case, what he did, the thing that really did strike me as way off, Scott, if you're listening, listen carefully, was to globalize a, basically, what he said was specifically get away from black people on the basis that something less than half of them in this flawed survey seemed to have indicated that it wasn't okay to be white.
I agree with you.
You've persuaded me.
The statement is racist even if there is no racism in Scott.
And I can't say one way or the other, but I don't see the evidence of it.
Um, so, and just, just to return to the first point, because it's, it's the one that I care more deeply about, honestly, um, which is, you know, just the nature of sense-making.
Like, how is it that we understand our world and, uh, and you know, how, how do the tools of science help?
And it is, it is this one.
It is an observation and the interpretation of the observation Even if the interpretation of that observation holds 98% of the time, are two different things.
And the observation of, in this case, a factual recording of like something happened, or if you're going out into the field with a hypothesis you already have and you're actually taking data, conflating what you see, what you observe with your senses, biased though they are, to be true And as accurate and careful and factual a recording of what happened as possible.
is always different from what it means.
And I think part of the, frankly, part of the insanity of the summer and fall of 2020, and of sort of woke ideology in general, and a lot of the propaganda that we were told around COVID, was about taking, was about, you know, someone with an agenda taking a negative truth
And then wrapping it in an interpretation and pretending, or believing, some of each, I'm sure, that those two things were inextricable.
And that became the way that people got confused and convinced.
Like, oh, well, if I have to believe all women all the time, then okay, then that accusation must be true.
Oh, if, um, I know, I know that vaccines are safe, therefore these vaccines must be safe, right?
Like, there, there were just, there were these tricks constantly around taking something that, you know, may even not have been true, but like that you believe fundamentally, and wrapping it in another thing, wrapping it in the interpretation, and then presenting it as if it's a single thing.
So, to me, that became one of the things that I was thinking about a lot this week, having seen these comments.
Everyone has to, whenever being told anything, go, okay, is what you're being told the thing that they actually know?
Or do they not know anything, which is often the case, right?
Or do they know something, but they have added on to that something, and it's that add-on that's actually the thing that's making you insane, right?
The thing that is why you can't communicate.
And, you know, this happens interpersonally, right?
Everyone who's ever talked to another human being, who's ever cared about another human being, and has therefore come back at some point been like, wait, why'd you do that?
What happened?
Like, why are we having this argument, right?
Well, often, At least some part of the argument will come down to, like, well, you said this.
Like, no, I didn't say that.
What I said was X. And I see how you could have heard that that meant Y. But what I said was X. And, you know, no, I'm not being a pet ant here.
And this isn't just semantics.
Because if both of you are being honest, and both of you do actually have a good memory, And you can go back and say, Oh, okay, I see now why you're angry with me because you think that I believe this thing and it took you down that road.
But what I said was actually careful.
And no, I wasn't even trying to leave my options open.
I didn't even understand that that was an interpretation you could have had for my words.
So, you know, language is obviously different from, you know, observation of, like, move to an island, you know, male frog on top of male frog, you know, riding it around while the frog underneath calls.
Like, those are different kinds of observations than, like, here was a word and words are so often metaphorically when they seem like they're not.
Still, with language in particular, we will add our own interpretations for what that meant as a sort of a shorthand for encoding.
And downstream of that lies so many of our disagreements.
Yeah, so you got to exactly one of the points I wanted to highlight here, which is that this is another case of, it's not exactly a heuristic, but it's the same thing that creates heuristics that trips you up, where the point is, do you, you know, let's say you're reading a book.
Do you want to remember it verbatim?
That's a lot of hard disk space that that's going to take up in your mind.
Do you want to remember the plot in some condensed way that you can recover it and discuss it, but you don't have every word, right?
So the point is the efficiency gain you get from editing things down to their meaning is spectacular.
But in interpersonal communications where it's not even something that the author has carefully scrutinized and said, yes, this is exactly what I wish to say, but it's something you said off the cuff, it's very easy for the other person to say, okay, I understand what they said.
Here is the meaning.
They remember it.
And then when they have to recall what it was that was said, they will extrapolate back to what must have been said from a meaning that may have been...
I know what you said, actually often means, I know what you meant.
It's like, well, how could you have?
Or, I know what I understood you to mean at the time, and it would have sounded like this, and then it's like, well, I didn't say that.
And so this is a very normal thing.
And of course, you know, people have studied this in courtrooms, right?
You know, many times multiple witnesses will have very different versions of events.
But I also wanted to point out that humans are a special case.
The process you were talking about with the frogs, where you walk into a bamboo stand and you don't leap to the conclusion that just because it looks like a fight, it is a fight.
It may well be.
In fact, that's the most likely thing it's going to be.
And over time and repeated observations over weeks and months, you can say, okay, I have now categorized and I now have my categories and they might not be right, but here we go.
You compel yourself.
And the great thing about this is if you do it right, right, at the point that you stand up in front of a room of people and you present the thing that nobody knew before and people say, "Wait a minute." And they say, "But how do you know that was a fight?" And you say, "Well, here's how I know that was a fight." And here, you know, and so the point is you can recover how it is you became compelled that the thing that you think is a fight actually is one.
And it's all very robust.
Very often, you don't know who's making sense until you push them around.
Just a simple fact.
Oh, that's important.
Yeah.
Yes.
Very often, you don't know who's making sense until you push them around.
Yeah.
And very often, in academic settings, but I think in all settings, but we've just seen it more in academic settings, you can just tell the difference between the person who's like, well, there's no time for questions.
I don't know.
Someone else did that part of the work.
I do want to... One thing.
People are going to jump on us.
But you don't have people on Dark Horse who disagree with you.
No.
This is something that requires good faith.
And frankly, in many cases, we don't know who is acting in good faith.
And so, I am not arguing that you are forced to confront every sophist and pedant who wants to attack you.
I'm just saying, you can tell when two honest interlocutors interact, you can see whether people know what they're talking about.
It's clear.
Well, and frankly, having, again, not this week, not next week, but having live Q&As in which people we don't know ask questions, and we don't get to all of them, and occasionally we look at one and say, we're not going to read that out loud, but we invite questions from our audience every week almost.
Okay, but the thing I wanted to recover here is you and I have said many times that often In order to understand what's taking place in a human interaction, you need to effectively turn the sound all the way down, right?
And so the type specimen for this kind of problem is, let's say that you're watching a dispute between people who are romantically involved.
There is a lot that is said, right?
And that what is said is very hard not to process it.
And if you process it, then you're going to try to track the details of the he said, she said, and it may not add up and you can't recover.
An explanation of what actually must have taken place in order for these two different perspectives to exist.
On the other hand, if you turn down the sound and you treat it primatologically, it's often very clear what's going on, right?
Somebody's hurt, there's an act of contrition, it's not sufficient, whatever, you know.
The point is, it's straightforward at one level and the words are confusing you actively, right?
So that's obviously not true in every situation, presumably in International relations, there's a bit of that, but there's also a bit of what exactly does that treaty say, you know?
But anyway, the idea that the human mind can be misled by meaning that is irrelevant to the underlying issue is absolutely crucial, and it's a tough lesson to learn, but once you learn it, you'll realize, oh, maybe this is one of those situations.
Yeah, absolutely.
Is that all?
Uh, I believe that is all on that topic from me.
All right.
Uh, so you also wanted a couple things.
You wanted to talk about Daniel Ellsberg.
Yes, I did.
Who, uh, was the, oh.
Do you, you tell me if, when you wanted to.
Um.
Or if you wanted to.
Up to you.
So why don't you, this is your topic, why don't you introduce?
Okay, so many of you will know who Daniel Ellsberg is, but for those who don't, Daniel Ellsberg is the person who released the Pentagon Papers.
And in 1973, I think?
69.
The book came out in 71, 72.
I looked it up.
I may have it wrong.
I may have the date wrong, but I thought his legal jeopardy was in 73.
- The second in history. - The second in history. - He was in '73.
He was under indictment maybe early and-- - No. - In any case, doesn't really matter.
The Times started reporting, began publishing a series of articles in 71.
71.
And they contain a history of the U.S.
role in Indochina through 68.
Right, but his legal jeopardy is what I was responding to.
I think that's a little bit later.
But anyway, the point is, Ellsberg decided to release Papers that were... If you think about the way government works, right?
If you have an entity, the CIA, the Pentagon, whatever, you need to have some repository of institutional knowledge, right?
And the institutional knowledge can't be, if it's an entity that isn't telling the full story to the public, or isn't even telling a true story to the public, the institution has to internally understand what happened in order that it doesn't become confused later, right?
Um, and so anyway, what he got a hold of was the Pentagon's internal description of how Vietnam had preceded how we had ended up at war there and what it all meant.
And it was explosive, right?
It was absolutely devastating to the public narrative.
And it revealed duplicitousness on the part of the Johnson administration.
But in any case, Revealing this was obviously, in retrospect, at least a protected activity, right?
This was journalism, and the fact that this was very destructive to the federal government's narrative is beside the point.
It was, you know, this was a journalistically justifiable release, but it didn't mean that Ellsberg didn't end up in major jeopardy.
He did.
He was threatened with, I think, the Espionage Act.
And he lived in fear that he would be locked away, and in fact he, in what happened this week, he talks a little bit about the jeopardy that he felt and that he thought he might live for the rest of his life behind bars, more or less as Julian Assange finds himself.
But anyway, so he's a very courageous, interesting, patriotic guy.
He also is an important intellectual contributor to the world, which I didn't realize until I started looking back into his history.
And it turns out that even before the Pentagon Papers, he contributed basically a description of an important paradox.
And the paradox is that people tend to prefer... Actually, it's a Rumsfeldian paradox, long before there was an important Rumsfeld.
But the idea is that people tend to prefer to take risks that are known, or that they think are known, above risks that are unknown, even if the risks that are known are much greater than the unknown risks are likely to be.
Right?
So that there is basically a cognitive defect where people sense that they can quantify the size of the risk will cause them to take on more risk than they need to, that the expected return might be better on the, well, here are some things we really can't say.
That branch of the tree may be a better bet, but people are reluctant to do it.
Which is highly relevant, I believe, to much that has taken place under COVID, for example, that we may even have been played by people who understood this paradox.
Well, I've never heard this before, and so I don't know if I'm understanding correctly, but it sounds like the additional concern is certainty versus uncertainty, right?
And I mean that's maybe just built right into the thing, but it strikes me that that isn't It isn't inherently a paradox, because you're saying known risk, probably lower payoff, versus unknown risk, maybe higher payoff, but you know, the devil is in the maybe, is in the odds.
No, let's take an example, and Daniel, if you're out there, and I hope you are, there's lots I'd love the opportunity to say to you, including thanks, but Let's take the example of, do you get an mRNA vaccine or do you face COVID?
You know, back in the days when we thought that that was a choice rather than, oh, you're going to get the mRNA vaccine and then you're going to get COVID anyway, which is what we now know is the case, but.
Those who choose to get the vaccine.
Right.
So, If you have the sense that, oh, well, I can quantify the risk of a bad event from the vaccines because they were studied by Pfizer in advance of the release.
I have no idea what the risks of COVID are.
That's a brand new thing, right?
And the point is actually your risks from COVID might be much lower because If you calculate it out, well, it is a virus, and we are built to handle viruses that we've never seen before.
And yeah, this was a funny one.
Well, this strikes me as a strange example, though, because the certainty, the certain side of this one, was fabricated.
Oh, it was bullshit.
Right.
Not only was the certainty fabricated, but the valence was opposite.
Well, that's why I'm saying that this may have been used actually to game us.
That people who understood that we would recoil from the unknowns of some new virus, and that we would, you know, recoil into the hands of a pseudo-quantified bullshit study that said that this stuff was safe and effective, right?
They may have understood that that was coming, or maybe not.
Maybe they just demonstrated the principle without understanding it.
I think that's plausible on the basis that they may have evolved this behavior.
It may be emergent or they may have been fully aware.
I don't know.
But in any case, back to Ellsberg.
So Ellsberg has made intellectual contributions.
He certainly made a major contribution to American history in releasing the Pentagon Papers and putting himself in very serious jeopardy over them.
And then he also was targeted by Nixon's plumbers.
in the Watergate scandal.
Remember what Plummer means?
They fix leaks.
They fix leaks, exactly.
And so anyway, they targeted Ellsberg.
So he is an important historical figure.
I will also say it is a matter of pride to me that early in our being in the public eye, he began following me on Twitter.
And I always felt like, you know, To have a historically important figure like that, somebody with deep courage follow, meant something to me.
So anyway, I was struck when he announced on Twitter this week, he published a letter that he had delivered to his allies and friends in the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements.
Right, the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements that revealed that he has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.
Pancreatic cancer, there are a couple kinds, but apparently he has the kind about which there's essentially nothing that can be done and has a very short time horizon.
And so, on the one hand, that is tragic.
On the other hand, I thought that the grace with which he handled it was so extraordinary that it actually raised some other questions which I think are worth addressing.
I'm going to just share a tiny bit from the first tweet.
Do you want me to put it up?
You may do that if you like.
So this is his first.
He says, I wrote this letter recently to my friends in, as we said, in the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements.
I see it's being circulated, so I've decided to share it here.
For all of you working on these issues, thank you and please keep going.
So he says what Brett has just described, um, I'm sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live.
Of course they emphasize that everyone's case is individual, it might be more or less.
I have chosen not to do chemotherapy, which offers no promise, and I have assurance of great hospice care when needed.
Please know, right now I am not in any physical pain, and in fact, after my hip replacement surgery in late 2021, I feel better physically than I have in years.
Moreover, my cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet at the last six years.
This has improved my quality of life dramatically, the pleasure of eating my former favorite foods, and my energy level is high.
So, I don't know how much you wanted me to share of this, but He goes on, I think that's probably sufficient to get the gist of it.
So this brought a number of things to mind.
One, he reveals he is 90... He'll be 92 on April 7th.
He's closing in on 92.
And so what is one to make of a terminal diagnosis at 92?
I mean, A, he's past the life expectancy, certainly for somebody born in 30...
One, right?
Anyway, he has lived a full life, he's lived an extraordinary life, and he's made real contributions, and he now finds himself faced with the end of his life, and he is feeling good.
And this put me in mind of a couple things.
One, it put me in mind of the extraordinary year that we had with your father after his first of two heart attacks.
The second one took his life.
The first one, Well, basically, not to go back into the story which we've talked about elsewhere, but was so severe that the paramedics told us that he was gone upon seeing our children present, continued to work on him, and then revised their diagnosis later, and we did not know that he would come out of the coma that they put him into.
They cooled him down, but... So just briefly, you came to the door with our then seven and five-year-old would-have-been sons, and the paramedics had just told my mother and me that he was gone.
They've been working on him for 20 minutes.
His heart had been stopped for at least that long.
And they started working on him again, upon seeing basically the next generation who were there, who loved their grandfather deeply.
And they saved his life.
And we had another year with him.
Somehow.
Or I guess younger than that.
It was 11 years ago, so they were younger.
They were six and four.
Two little boys at the door.
Yeah.
But in any case, whatever the particulars, he
Came back, he was shaken by the experience, but he was himself, and the year that we had, and it was really almost exactly a year, was a tremendous blessing because he knew the fragile state he was in, and we all knew the fragile state that he was in, and so many of the things that needed to be said got said, and you know, it was, absent that year would have been a very different loss, I think.
So anyway, I'm, you know, thinking there are a lot worse things to happen to you than to get a diagnosis that gives you three to six months to close out your business.
And the fact is at that age, you kind of got to expect it's coming at some point.
So, um, so anyway, uh, kudos to, to Daniel for confronting it this way.
It also put me in mind of this, uh, You know, the Norm Macdonald story, which I find are McDonald, who I was also honored to be followed by.
Norm Macdonald had terminal cancer and he did something very unusual, which is he decided to tell no one.
And in so doing.
He preserved the end of his life so that it was not overrun by everybody every minute that they were talking to him thinking I'm talking to somebody who's about to disappear on me and it struck me as unusual but very much something That somebody should entertain.
And so anyway, I think the way Daniel Ellsberg is handling this is a model of a way to deal with such a thing that's marvelous.
He's not giving himself false hope.
He's eating salt, and the dangers of salt have been overrated.
So, you know, it's probably about time that he took up eating salt again.
But in any case, It's a profound moment for all of us, and that we get to share the end of his life with him, I think is meaningful.
It's a great way for a historical figure to put a bookend on his own legacy.
Yeah.
And I had one more thing I wanted to add in, as long as we're talking about death and sort of what the adult viewpoint on it might be.
Not particularly related to Ellsberg, but it's a thought that I've had increasingly, and I think it belongs on the table because, frankly, I think it might have the potential to save some lives.
So anyway, I'm open to pushback on this, but here's the thought.
The thought has to do with the mental process that I think leads many people who are in great pain to end their lives.
And what I realized is that I hadn't heard the following thing, but I'm almost certain within bounds that it's true, which is that death can very definitely end suffering.
But it cannot bring relief.
And I suspect that many people who end their lives are not doing so simply to end a torment that will never stop, right?
Obviously, if you are in terrible pain and there's no hope of recovering, then ending suffering may be a perfectly valid thing to need and to want.
But I believe many people who do this are probably pursuing A relief that our minds tell us would be there and logically just simply can't.
And so, in any case, I think that... Spell out why logically relief can't come with death.
Because relief is a somatic experience, it's a cognitive experience, and to the extent that your cognition comes to an end, there is no relief to be had.
And there is one caveat I will put on this, which is And I believe many people who end their own lives convince themselves quite falsely that their life is burdensome on others.
What they don't realize is that in most people's cases, the loss of somebody, especially the traumatic loss to suicide, is extremely burdensome.
It's a burden that loved ones often don't get past.
But the The caveat is, in my own case, if my continued existence was more of a burden to my family than my exit, and there was no chance that it was going to turn around, then I don't have any reason to want to continue, and their relief could be something.
But for most people, The idea that I just need some relief from this suffering, that's a non sequitur in the case of death, especially by one's own hand.
And I thought it was worth just simply expressing that in the hope that maybe someone or
Multiple people contemplating their own predicament might realize that actually the way they'd been thinking of it was wrong and that the best thing to do is to confront the suffering itself and not take up arms against it as Shakespeare put it.
Well, there's no real good segue to this.
Apologies.
No?
We put it in the... I got the segue.
Sorry.
I hate to have done this to you, Daniel, because I've now taken that piece, which is isolated from your story, which triggered me to explore it.
But I did want to say to Daniel Ellsberg, As an American, a deeply heartfelt thank you for what you've done, and I hope what time you have left is glorious and fulfilling, and that all the things that need to be said get said.
So, in any case, thank you.
I concur.
That's awesome.
But that's not a segue.
Um, okay.
Given what you want to talk about next, that's not a segue.
That's not a segue.
Okay.
Um, right.
Yeah, no, I see the problem.
The problem.
Yeah, we got a whole, uh, well, let's hope that everybody takes a bathroom break.
You and I will, um, uh, we'll segue in 14 seconds.
OK, so you have to introduce us.
OK, this is a totally different segment, totally different mindset.
OK, many of you will be aware of the person.
I never quite remember how she pronounced her name.
I think it's Ayla.
Her Twitter handle is Ayla underscore girl.
Ayla has made quite a name for herself.
I will say I appreciate one thing that Ayla does.
Ayla, who describes herself as autistic, has specialized in essentially Publicly sorting out uncomfortable topics.
She runs polls, she asks people questions that no one will ask, and these things often have a, I have found, useful consequence, right?
Causing people to think carefully about stuff that their minds There have certainly been cases where she's asked stuff that just feels like, oh geez, why would you even go there?
But in any case, I will say that there is a part of me that appreciates that aspect of what she's doing.
But in this case, Ayla has gone on a rant, a multi-tweet thread, I've got a couple to read if you want.
Yeah, let me just say what she is clearly exasperated that what she has been doing and talking about has resulted in other people who she regards as traditional or dismisses as traditional has caused them to respond negatively to her.
And anyway, why don't you read a few tweets?
I think you buried the lead, which is that I don't know if she's a sex worker or she's just – or just – I don't even know what the other – what the just would be.
But so I'm going to – even though we swear here sometimes, I'm going to just elide the cursing.
So the opening tweet is, "Okay, what the F is going on with the neo-treads?
I was just over here enjoying this free life, individualism, subversive, unwoke, cultural movement, and I thought everybody was on board, but suddenly, bam, we got a bunch of them spawning into sex-negative tradcasts, Or whatever.
I don't know what Cath is.
I don't either.
And then a couple later, it's not too long a thread, but a couple of the tweets in the thread that struck me as particularly indicative of what she's on about.
This reminds me of, this is again Ayla, if that's how you pronounce her name, Um, on her little tweet rant, as I think she describes it.
Um, this reminds me of the time I joined to lurk some trad Christian chat room, and I actually did it under my alien name, and the Christians sent me DMs threatening me that if I tried to seduce any of the men there, they'd ban me.
But like, why would I want to seduce them?
In their terrified little minds, I'm a she-demon prowling hornily around their frantically buttoned jeans, cackling when a man inevitably surrenders to his primal nature, sucking the morality out of his little chunk and scampering off with his hard-earned 401k.
So I read those two because they strike me as, um, just really inconsistent with one another.
Um, in terms of, uh, for someone who is supposedly very self-aware of, of her impact on the world.
Um, I joined to lurk some trad Christian chat room and like, why would I want to seduce them?
Yeah.
Why would they assume you didn't?
Like, what are you, what are you doing there?
You just used the word lurk in Trad Christian chat room.
And, um, anyway, you had, you had a number of things you wanted to say about this.
Well, so first off, I actually, you know, I don't know whether Ayla is for real.
Okay.
The fact is she has broadcast something into social media space that, um, Definitely makes a stir.
And she is monetizing it.
And part of what her online persona is, is somebody who is deeply interested in the underlying truth of things like the, you know, the truths around sex, for example.
To the extent that this is for real, right, that this is really just who she is and that whatever errors she may be making they're honestly made, I actually think she deserves an answer as to why people would be upset by what she is doing and, you know, whether or not they are in some sense justified to be upset because there's something to be upset about or whether they are, as she
Portrays it simply infringing on her freedom as a human who is entitled to do what they want as long as she doesn't violate the law, right?
So anyway, I sort of wanted to take up the challenge and you know Just describe why it might be that people would be upset and not without some cause and I wanted to revisit Something I happen to see she tweeted
Maybe a couple weeks back and she was talking so she's of course polyamorous and she was talking about how she Not only is she gonna go screw other people while she's in a relationship with somebody but she would be kind of turned on if her Partner was also getting laid, right?
and So anyway, this is the kind of vibe that she's putting out.
And, you know, let's steel man it.
The fact is, you're a human being.
You're the descendant of some species.
You get one life.
There's obviously something good about freedom.
Who is in a position to tell you how to value your sexual self?
Right?
If you feel like going to orgies and behaving this way, who gets to tell you not to?
That's kind of the question.
Right?
And I don't think it's... I think it's kind of a profound question.
Right?
You get one life.
When we tell you you can't do something, there better be a good reason.
Right?
And so that's the question.
Is there a good reason?
Or, as she puts it in that first tweet, is the right way for us to view this?
Hey, or maybe actually it was in a tweet you didn't read.
She basically says, look, I'm perfectly fine with you behaving in a traditional way.
I have no problem with monogamous people.
Just so long as you have no problem with what I'm doing, right?
And so that's the question.
Does either camp get to comment on what the other camp is doing for good reason, or is that an infringement in either direction?
Okay.
Are there externalities that can't be abided through either of these sets of behaviors?
That's exactly what I think this conversation does.
So let us first just notice the following things.
In an ancestral circumstance, right?
So we, none of us can be hunter-gatherers, right?
It's actually just not legal.
You can't take up hunting and gathering because you need a hunting permit and a gathering permit and where would you do it?
And, you know, you're either on public land or private land.
And so the point is, civilization took that that birthright of yours.
And it took it away and it gave you some things in exchange.
It gave you leverage in the world, right?
You're much less likely to starve.
There's a police force that, unless you live in Portland, will show up if somebody tries to hurt you, right?
That kind of thing.
But, so the point is, you give up some freedoms in civilization and you get some stuff.
And I wanted to point out first, before we get to any of the externality stuff.
If somebody decided to deploy ALA's program in some past circumstance, a thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago, it'd be a pretty short ride, right?
Because they'd end up almost immediately pregnant.
And if they weren't careful about how that happened, they wouldn't end up raising offspring alone or depending heavily on family.
And so there's a reason that all of those ancient cultures, and in fact every culture that's ever been, has had rules about sexuality and how you deploy it, right?
That's not window dressing, that's not inherently oppression.
If I may, it may be that sort of the core tension is, what do we do with the freedoms that are made available by technology?
That's it.
So to the extent that one can control their own conception of offspring, and that that opens up a whole range of possibilities, the question is, are those all open to you to choose?
Or does civilization have an interest in saying, actually, here's the way we're going to address this.
And I would just point out, you know, you and I have described that there is a subtle difference between the world that you and I were born into and the modern world.
In the sense that people, there are no longer any rules.
Just because you're married doesn't mean you're not on the mating and dating market.
Who knows?
Maybe you're polyamorously married and you're available to somebody else, right?
So the point is, everybody is potentially fair game, right?
Older men targeting younger women, hey that's fine as long as they're 18, right?
It's all on the table.
Is that good?
Or is that actually harmful to what civilization is about?
And so, okay, birth control makes it possible to do a great many things that would not have been possible in a prior circumstance.
The question is, should we be limited either self-limited by morality or limited by rules in some other way.
And I think the argument I would make, and I'm sure the argument you would make, is definitely, yes, that there are limits.
Whatever the mechanism of those limits is, there are limits.
Well, and we get back to a conversation we had a couple of weeks ago about not wanting...
A lot of what we are about as humans, we don't want to live in the law.
It's It's too permanent.
It's too hard.
It's too difficult to change.
And so we use things like morality and Shame and appreciation and support and, you know, and and the lack of support in order to, you know, nudge and move and create a world in which we all can do within limits that which is best for us while also impinging the least on others.
Absolutely.
And I think this is in the moment.
Very much the most important point, which is there are limits.
We can navigate them, but there are also different levels.
It's in fact a failure when we have to do these things by law, because nothing else will suffice.
And in most cases, we have to this point been pretty good at, we, humanity, has been pretty good at setting limits for ourselves and enforcing them based on things like, you know, shame and guilt and stuff like that.
So I wanted to just point out this thing which has fallen away from the discussion around sex in a way that it never ceases to amaze me as an evolutionary biologist, right?
Sex is obviously something way beyond reproduction for humans and that is evolutionarily true.
Evolution made humans enjoy sex when it is not reproductive and that is an adaptation, right?
So that is a major evolutionary change It's a godsend.
It's all sorts of wonderful things.
But the point is, that doesn't mean that the fundamental, right, it's, you know, we have this reproductive event that has been borrowed by selection for all kinds of other important stuff, and it's not trivial.
That's part of the problem, is the trivializing of this.
So here's the central thing.
What Ayla is doing, basically, takes civilization's fundamental purpose, and I say that without fear of contradiction, it's fundamental purpose, and sidelines it.
Which is?
The production of a stable environment that allows it to continue into the future.
Okay.
In other words, the purpose of civilization are Children and generations yet to come.
You know, we are the temporary custodians of something precious that literally stretches back three and a half billion years.
And our civilization is the current manifestation of this.
And if our primary job is not understood to be making that possible to continue, then we fucked up.
Right?
And so the frustrating thing about what Ayla is saying is All else being equal, you, as a human born onto the earth with a clock ticking before you go, should be as free as possible.
But as free as possible does not mean free to do anything and everything.
It means within reasonable limits, where we have an interest in regulating behavior, maybe not by law, maybe just by tradition.
But that has to come first, and to the extent that what Ayla is doing is monetizing sexuality, she may be doing something else, maybe this is fulfilling to her, or maybe it's just about money, but it doesn't really matter.
The point is, it's really bad.
For the raising of children, right?
The idea that we are going to take sexuality and we are going to turn it into this a la carte thing that anybody can re-envision in any way is definitely a threat to the much more constrained version of this in which people partner long-term For the production of a home that is hospitable to the raising of children who are then well-equipped for the world that they emerge into.
And that stability creates the room for the remarkable things about humans that other organisms don't do.
It creates the room for art and creativity and science and analysis and discovery and exploration and innovation.
Under times of no stability, you don't have time for any of that.
And maybe you get more sex with more people?
Maybe?
I'm not even convinced of that.
Long term, right?
But stability, I think, will be trotted out by people who make these sorts of arguments.
As boring, as staid, as trad.
And I guess I would say, to the degree that I still feel compelled to defend Enlightenment values, understanding, you know, more in the last few years about some of the ways that the Enlightenment can be understood to have caused some problems too, but if I am going to stand strong in defending Enlightenment values,
Which again, you know, bring in an age of greater wealth for more people because of the analysis, the innovation, the discovery, and the creativity that is facilitated therein.
That can only happen from a stable base.
That does not emerge from total chaos.
And that's not to say that individuals being chaotic can't bring uh tremendous insight into the world uh or that um after you know the the phoenixing of civilization um doesn't often produce some of the you know fastest growth of insight and such after something like war or genocide um but you don't need to burn it to the ground in order to get there
Yeah, in addition to what you're pointing to, which is that a civilization that is well-structured to function, to produce children who are competent and secure, produces an excess that we can spend on all of the most marvelous stuff, right?
That is absolutely true.
The dark side of that is that this is also necessary for the safety of civilization, right?
Civilizations need to be able to sober up when they are threatened by something.
And to the extent that we have turned civilization into a carnival, we do not have the seriousness of purpose to handle things like an enemy that, you know, Yeah.
It's a carnival.
It's this surface-level excitement.
It's fast everything, as we talk about in the book.
It's fast food, fast sex, fast media, fast everything.
It's titillating, but none of it is as satisfying or long-term pleasurable as the non-FAST versions.
And FAST is a stand-in here.
And so, you know, slow – And junk, isn't it?
Junk, yes.
Junk food, junk entertainment, junk sex.
That's better, thank you.
It doesn't – it Standing against that is not, and you know I think it comes up in this thread as well and as we have said over and over again as we write in our book, you know, the sex positivity movement is cleverly but dishonestly named.
Right?
That is not actually – the people who are engaging in the sex positivity movement by far do not have a monopoly on the people who enjoy sex.
And indeed, there are many of us who will argue that what that does is goes down a path towards more more junk sex, more objectification, more dehumanization.
And objectification and dehumanization are key components in you know really bad sexual environments and and relationships, not the other way around.
So sex positivity is actually really bad for sex as well as humans and everything else.
Yeah, and I wanted to point out a connection.
I'm not sure exactly how to describe it, but if you think about, you have a pleasure center, right?
Let's just oversimplify this neurobiologically.
You've got a pleasure center, right?
It is supposed to be triggered when you accomplish something, right?
The eureka moment scientists describe, right?
That is a reward you get for hard work thinking about something and the discovery of the answer of it, okay?
It's one example among many, okay?
You build something remarkable, you invent something, you get a burst of reward, right?
Is it good for the reward center to be triggered?
Oh, yes.
What happens if you trigger it without having accomplished anything?
Well, if you do it too much, you'll wreck your life, right?
This is why drugs that simply trigger that rush are so dangerous, is that they take the reward that's supposed to drive you to all sorts of productive behavior, and they cause it to be connected to a totally pointless, at best, activity, right?
And so the point is that We'll take somebody who might otherwise be motivated to do something productive and maybe great, and we'll cause them to do nothing useful at all.
Okay?
That's the nature of the pleasure center and the triggering of it by short-circuiting the pathway that is supposed to trigger it.
Yep.
Well, guess what?
The pleasure of sex?
Top of the list of pleasures.
This is a matter of short-circuiting it.
This is like a drug.
And it's not a chemical drug, but the point is, it is that same idea that, hey, I've got a sexual pleasure center, I should be able to trigger that thing anytime I want, with anyone I want, in any way I want.
And who's to tell me I can't?
It's my pleasure center after all.
Well, it's the same kind of advice as saying, you know, you ought to think really careful about taking, you know... About having a jar of Pringles every day.
Having a jar of Pringles.
That looks appealing.
That tastes really good going down.
Snorting a line of Coke or whatever it is, right?
Any of these things that short-circuit a fundamental motivator like that is a danger.
What's it a danger to?
Well, it's a danger to you, but it's also a danger to civilization.
And, you know, as I've...
Try to make this point.
Civilization used to run in part for a reason that's very uncomfortable, which was sex was scarce.
And in order for men to be worthy of a sexual relationship, they had to impress.
They had to be, uh, they had to achieve.
Right?
I'm not arguing that's how the world should be structured now.
That's a very biased world from a sexual point of view.
But it did accomplish a lot of shit.
Right?
It built civilization, and so the point is that was a motivator from the opposite world, right?
The world that you are describing, Ayla, is a world in which this is available to anybody who wishes to turn this into a game.
And if you make it available to anybody who is willing to turn it into a game, then many people, especially before they're old enough to have the wisdom to understand why that game might be a bad idea, are going to join that game, and they're going to have a very hard time Leaving that game.
So anyway, that is a danger to civilization.
And I guess the last thing I would say here is, again, I'm not arguing.
I really don't know to what degree Ayla is reporting her motivations accurately or to what extent her motivations are part of the allure that she is using to monetize this persona that she has built.
I don't know, and I'm not saying that I do.
But what I would point out is, this is not an opportunity that scales.
What you are doing, Ayla, is... It's density dependent.
It is fantastically remunerative to you because you're a pioneer.
And the point is, how many of those... It's like, you know, the NBA lures people who might have studied something that would have given them route out of bad economic circumstances, but because the allure of that small number of positions is so great, it causes people not to realize, actually, the chances that I'm going to get there are so low, I can't do this.
And so, in any case, the point is, look, a small number of people can do what you're doing, Ayla.
And if they do, I'm not saying it will make civilization non-viable, but you are playing with the stuff that does run that risk.
You're not the only one playing with the only set of things that put it at risk, but this is one of the things that puts it at risk.
And so, in any case, Think about whether or not the people who are reacting to you are not just having a hissy fit, but in fact are trying to explain something that isn't easily explained, which is when you do what you're doing, it becomes impossible for civilization to function in any way that it has ever functioned before.
Right?
You are gambling on the fact that some functional mode of civilization will be compatible with what you're doing, and there is no proof of that.
No civilization has ever functioned in the way that you're advocating.
And so, anyway, I think this is more than people just, you know, clutching their pearls and reaching for fainting couches.
This is actually people who can't quite explain the problem with what you're doing, but it doesn't mean there isn't one.
Indeed.
All right, well, I think we've arrived.
We will be here same time next week.
Again, next week we will not be doing a Q&A, but we'll be back the week after that, hopefully, with the time once again, when other constraints don't show up.
Next Saturday, Brett has his Patreon meeting before a live stream.
Consider joining him there.
And at either of our Patreons, again, you can find our wonderful Discord server.
And join me on Natural Selections.
I'm reprinting this upcoming week an essay that was only available in an anthology that was not widely available called, I don't know, He, She... I can't remember what it's called.
It's a bunch of pronouns.
It's not widely available, so I don't know what it was called.
No, no, you don't.
Yeah, it was in this Iconoclast anthology, and it's an exploration, another exploration, but the longest one that I've done of both trans identity and also of the thing that is being called NB, non-binary.
So that's on Natural Selections this upcoming week.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
