In this 168th 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 twitter mobs, and Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society, with example after example of how the media filters reality and creates fiction while burying reality: from famine to homelessness, gun control to unemployment. We also discuss science, a field—like journalism—that is supposed to be work...
- Hey folks, welcome to the 168th Dark Horse Podcast live stream with me, Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying.
And we are ready.
I don't know about that.
Our producer does not think we're ready, but we are ready.
In light of all that has taken place in our lives this week, we are shockingly ready.
Let's put it that way.
This is true.
This is true.
Yes.
A lot of things.
Including, I spent several days looking like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
Really?
Yeah.
You weren't here, so... I wasn't here, but... And you didn't sound like you looked like that on the phone.
Oh my god.
I did not know.
I just got so puffy, and I was trying not to be vain about it, and I didn't say anything to anyone I was meeting, and I was like, wow, I look ridiculous.
And I saw my amazing osteopath yesterday.
He was like, oh man, you've got some blockages.
It just drained away.
There was fluid caught up there in the tissues.
So yeah, remarkable.
Remarkable that sort of thing can happen to a person.
Yeah, physiology is surprisingly complex.
The diagrams in the intro textbook, they just don't do it justice.
They really don't, in part because they're, you know, diagrams.
I guess that's kind of it.
Static 2D doesn't quite, I mean, physiology is intrinsically dynamic.
Anatomy also, but less so.
But physiology is like the dynamic downstream stuff associated that is built on the foundation of anatomy.
Not only that, but inherently the most complex stuff in the universe is the biology, and in order to get it simple enough to get you to understand anything new, they have to purge so much of the complexity that it creates a false impression inherently.
I've always thought this was A fascinating defect in our cognitive model of neurons, because the number of dendrites that connect them to other neurons is spectacularly large, often in the thousands.
And yet, in order to see the picture of the neurons so you can understand how the signals come in, you know, it's eight Right.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, one input and eight outputs.
Like, oh, that could be thousands.
Yeah.
You could be off by orders of magnitude, which then puts you off in terms of imagining what kind of emergent properties are possible and what level of complexity is possible.
Yeah.
It does not properly represent the system.
All right.
Let us start with logistics.
Well, so today we're going to talk a little bit about Thomas Sowell.
And you're going to come back to the topic of AI a bit.
And we're going to finish the hour by talking, or the hour, two hours, whatever it is, by talking a little bit about penises.
Peni, I think.
Or not, buni.
All right.
Penis.
As in hemipenis.
Right.
Or ballpenis.
Hammers.
You know, as a woman, which I am, I don't identify as one, I just am one.
And you identify as one.
I would never have introduced ball-peen hammers into a discussion of penises.
Yeah.
Wouldn't have done it.
Doesn't seem safe, doesn't seem kind.
Just saying.
If you were going to get hit with a kind of hammer, actually a ball-peen hammer would be It's not good, but it's definitely... I just, for the record, I did not introduce the idea of hitting, of hammers, of hand tools at all.
All right.
For the record, I regret having introduced any of these topics into the discussion that you were attempting to seed, so yes, I seed control.
Oh wow, different seed, okay.
Don't tell me, they're spelled differently.
So differently.
Are they?
Yes!
Oh, all right!
I was, you know, today years old when I learned that they were spelled differently.
Yes, and yes, okay.
So, all of that is yet to come, but first we follow these live streams mostly, but today we are going to be following this live stream with a live Q&A.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com, Next week we will not be having a Q&A and the week after that we're actually going to be off entirely, so this is your last chance to ask questions for the live Q&A for three weeks, I guess, and do so if you have questions for us again at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Please consider checking out my weekly writing at Natural Selections.
This week, I did not update my notes here, I wrote about the sleep of seals, which I will just drop this little tantalizing nugget, is how I ended up wanting to talk about penises today.
All right, the sleep of seals.
You know, the seals sleep with the fishes.
They do.
As do we.
Yes, true.
All right, now this has gotten suddenly so phylogenetic that people are changing the channel.
Leaving in droves.
Yes, yes, yes.
Okay, so we also have a store.
It is store.dark... Yes, please show it and tell me what the URL is because I always forget.
store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
The store is both run by and the print shop is owned and run by this wonderful couple in the middle of the country, and they have put one of the newer products is they put together a pin-on button set.
You get these 12 little buttons for only 10 bucks, and it's some of our best, our most popular visuals.
So these look great.
I haven't seen them yet, but They look great.
And if I may remind us of a conversation we discussed before, the dark horse pin is an excellent way of subtly broadcasting to other people that you might be wrong, but you're not crazy.
And if people who might be wrong but are not crazy were to find each other and have conversations, it might make the world a better place.
It might.
It might.
So, indeed.
Okay, you can take that down now if you like.
We've got, of course, Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which there are signed copies available at Darvel's here in the San Juans on Orcus.
You can get it anywhere.
Books are sold unsigned.
And we are supported by you, our audience, for whom we are eternally grateful.
We appreciate you subscribing to the channels.
We're here on YouTube.
We're on Odyssey.
We've got Clips channels as well, Dark Horse Podcast Clips.
Please subscribe, like, share, and you can also support us by joining either of our Patreons.
Brett had one of his Patreon conversations this morning, and you're going to have another one tomorrow.
Yes.
And I assume it, as always, went very well.
Fantastic.
They are always surprising.
I love meeting the new people who show up.
There's long-standing folks who've been there for years.
And anyway, it's a very interesting experiment in gathering people around loosely shared beliefs and then having vigorous conversations over what we differ and where we're aligned.
Anyway, it's very good stuff.
A group of people who are willing to be wrong but aren't crazy.
Yes, willing to be wrong, but not crazy.
Yeah, that's awesome.
And we had our private Q&A associated with my Patreon last week, and those are always fun as well.
So consider joining us there on either of our Patreons.
You also get access to our Discord server where there are always people talking in ways that suggest that, once again, willing to be wrong, not crazy.
Um, so check that out.
Check any of those things out.
And, of course, we have sponsors, to whom we are also very, very grateful.
For whom we are grateful.
We pick and choose our, um, the organizations with which we affiliate, uh, carefully.
And this week, as always, we have three.
It's Seed, American Hartford Gold, and Mindbloom.
And without further ado, let us do these ads.
There's a little bit of ado.
Yeah.
It got done, though.
What is a do?
It's just Shakespeare for do?
Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna be ending, I was gonna quote Shakespeare, but I think this is the wrong spot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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That's seed s-e-e-d.
As in intercede, right?
I know.
Okay, now I'm being confusing.
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Did you know that without skin, podcasting would be impossible?
Amazing.
How about chemistry?
Skin itself would be impossible.
Oh, good.
Yes.
Now this is, I can't say meta anymore.
We can't say Trump and we can't say meta.
Anything else you want to take out of the large language model that most of us use to communicate?
Woman.
That one I still use.
Oh, well, but you also say all these other things, don't you?
That is true.
That's true.
But you're not supposed to.
Not supposed to.
That's kind of my thing.
I know.
Okay.
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It starts to sound ridiculous on the tongue after you say it that many times.
You know, it's funny.
I have this as a lifelong recovering dyslexic or whatever the hell I am.
Every time I read something new out loud, there is a kind of terror that I will lose my access to whatever mental processing equipment it is that allows a person to read and I suddenly will be staring at a bunch of letters and not know how to string them together and it only rarely happens.
Well, I think in order to call yourself recovering, you need to know how long it's been since you've just dyslexed.
I'm not sure you count as recovering.
No, I'm planning to recover.
Let's put it that way.
Well, good luck with that.
Thank you.
All right.
Right now, as we speak, as we live and breathe, midday, Saturday, April 1st, Um, the hashtag Boycott60Minutes is trending on Twitter.
And I saw this, uh, also Leslie Stahl is twending, it's twending on Twitter.
That was Barbara Walters intruding on the Leslie Stahl discussion.
That's right.
Leslie Stahl is also trending on Twitter, and she's, of course, one of the hosts of 60 Minutes.
60 Minutes being this long-running, hour-long show on Sunday evenings on CBS that, before podcasts became a thing, was kind of the longest-form visual media way that you ended up with stories, with interviews.
Not that long, but it was really substantial.
I used to watch it regularly when I was a kid, back when there was journalism.
Right, right.
And thus, you became informed.
I became largely informed, occasionally misinformed.
I was sometimes mal-informed, and that was not terrorism at the time.
No, no, no, not at all.
But right, yeah, both the MacNeil News Hour, back when PBS was alive and kicking.
It's a little dry!
Yeah.
Yeah, 60 Minutes was more, um, more entertaining, but, um, often some, you know, remarkably hard-hitting stories.
And also they, um, they are effectively reflecting back, because they're doing journalism, they're supposed to be reflecting back some of what the biggest stories are that people are thinking about or should be thinking about, uh, in, in the world at the moment.
So, you know, high production values, you know, big budget.
Large stopwatch.
very large stopwatch and you know you got to know about how that would sound if it was in your living room.
If you were any good at math you could figure out how much of a television program was commercials by the fact that 60 minutes contained something like 43 minutes of content.
Well I was going to say it was often two or three interviews plus some preamble plus was it Andy Rooney at the end?
Is that right?
Andy Rooney, yes.
And so and yet, you know, maybe these are sort of 12 minute total content wise, these interviews, but again, this this was as deep as you would go in in mainstream media and until until podcast mostly.
So, hashtag boycott 60 minutes.
What did they do?
Well, what they did, apparently, and it hasn't even happened yet, this segment is going to air tomorrow.
Oh, we're in the pre-crime segment.
We're in the pre-crime segment, but the crime has already been committed, it's just not public yet.
So on April 2nd, apparently they are going to, for their Sunday show, they are going to reveal the, again, high production value results of the set of interviews that Leslie Stahl did with, wait for it, the gall of the woman, the inhumanity She interviewed Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, if you've been living under a rock, is an elected official, a congresswoman in the House of Representatives of the United States of America, representing Georgia.
We don't live in Georgia.
We didn't vote for her.
Probably wouldn't have voted for her if we did live there, but I don't know.
Right?
She's there.
She's an elected official.
She has some remarkable views.
She's the AOC of the Red.
She's the AOC of the Red Team.
She's the AOC of the Red Team, and you know, I think that both of those women have something to offer, and a lot of what they are is a dog and pony show.
Both of them.
Ah, that seems dangerous, but I'm all for it.
Yeah, a dog and pony show.
I'm not calling either of them dogs or ponies.
I'm saying that so much of it is for show, and yet at base, both AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene appear to have some fundamental values that I share.
And I probably won't watch this, just like I probably wouldn't watch a Leslie Stahl interview with AOC, but the idea that Leslie Stahl just sitting down and talking with An elected official in the House of Representatives in the United States of America is enough to get the Twitter mob out in force and say basically, for shame, for shame, how could you?
You do not talk to those sorts of people is, I think, really indicative of the moment that we are living in.
And that was the segue by which I wanted to introduce some of this Thomas Sowell thinking.
So it's a tell.
The point is, let's say that you think Marjorie Taylor Greene is some sort of a terrible disaster, an affront to good governance or something like that.
That's a reasonable thing to think.
You should want her interviewed.
It will reveal itself, or you will discover that it isn't true, right?
But that's the danger, isn't it?
What if some people discover it's not true?
Well, so this is, in fact, one of the central tools of the moment, is penalizing people for open-mindedness, right?
And this, you know, we of course were cast into the public eye with exactly such a thing, right?
We were beyond the pale for questioning a policy change at our college that we were actually obligated as faculty members to question if we thought it was questionable.
So, you know, deplatforming people, driving up the costs of voicing skepticism or nuance, which is really what it is, right?
That tool is the kind of thing that you would want if the division of, let's say, Americans, was serving your interests.
If you needed Americans divided, because if Americans were to actually talk to each other, they would find that they were, for example, all being shafted by the duopoly, and that because it is a majority of Americans whose interest lies in overthrowing the duopoly, that they might do that.
So if you needed the duopoly to maintain its position so that it could do your bidding at the expense of the public, Then you really wouldn't want people listening to the other side.
And so whether it's, you know, Donald Trump is so evil that you dare not listen to what the man says, or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or AOC, or you and me, right?
It's all of us.
This is their tool.
And so, you know.
I will say.
The correct principle is read the books they wish to burn.
Right?
Listen to the people they don't want you to hear.
And you know what?
Sometimes you will find that they are stark raving mad.
And sometimes you will find they are a little bit of each.
Right?
A little bit of what?
What's the each?
Stark raving mad with some insight.
Insight.
Right?
So anyway, by listening, you're not agreeing to what they say.
You're just, I mean, maybe you're even just listening to hear why they are persuasive to others.
Oh my god, there are so many reasons to both let everyone speak and to in fact listen to those with whom you are certain you disagree.
And I cannot actually come up with any legitimate reason to shut down the ability for people to be interviewed on 60 Minutes, for instance.
And, you know, I think I saw, I then went and looked at the 60 Minutes tweet about this and at Marjorie Taylor Greene's either retweet or, you know, going public with this.
And they're both just very reasonable.
You know, I think 60 Minutes, because it's not a person, it's this entity, doesn't state this.
And so I think it was Marjorie Taylor Greene who says, look, Um, I had a great set of conversations with Leslie Stahl, and we don't agree about a lot of stuff, but, um, but here we go.
I feel honored to have been invited to have the conversations and, uh, you know, please listen.
Yeah.
Good.
Yes.
Please listen.
The people your enemy are the people who don't want you to listen to the people who are supposed to be your enemy.
Exactly.
Right.
Listening to them is not, you know, you have a mind for so that you can discern what's reasonable and what is not.
And somebody can say terrible things and it doesn't have to persuade you and you don't have to feel jeopardized by it.
And you should know what they're saying.
That's right.
So, three episodes ago, I guess, episode Dark Horse 165, we discussed and read a few excerpts from Paul Tillich's work.
Tillich was a German-born theologian who came to the United States before World War II and then did these radio broadcasts with the help of the U.S.
Office of War Information that were broadcast into Germany during the Third Reich to help, basically, he was trying to wake up the German populace to what was happening.
And he's really an extraordinary thinker, and in the wake of that, I gotta say acquaintance at this point because we haven't interacted a lot, but I hope that we meet in real life at some point and become friends with the amazing, extremely talented Clifton Duncan, who was an up-and-coming singer and actor, just remarkably talented, and I'll put a link to his YouTube channel in the show notes,
His blossoming career on stage and screen was cut short by his refusal to comply with vaccine mandates.
So you will find him, like, you should check out his YouTube channel and you can also find him on Twitter.
Avon just railing against the stupid and the certainty of the people who are so sure they're on the right side of history and keeping people like him from being in front of those of us who would be interested in hearing a fabulous voice and seeing the talents of Such an actor!
Anyway, he reached out to me and said, you know, what you were sharing about Tillich has been explored in some depth by Thomas Sewell.
And he referenced a couple of works that I had, but also this massive book, Intellectuals and Society, which I had not owned, and he specifically pointed me to a few things.
So I bought it, and I want to share just a few excerpts from it here today for us to talk about.
There are four excerpts, I think after each of them we can we can discuss a little bit, and they are all from chapter 10.
And so this was a 2011 book, first published in 2011.
It's been updated with some chapters added for republication in 2021, but the original text is from over 10 years ago at this point.
And it was this bad already then.
Just keep that in mind.
Okay, so chapter 10, all of these are from chapter 10, which is called Filtering Reality.
This first excerpt is the beginning of the chapter Filtering Reality in Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals in Society.
I think it's Sowell, isn't it?
Sowell?
I think so.
I keep trying to say Sowell, and then I see how it's spelled, and I can't do it.
Yeah, the problem is we have a Sowell right in our, uh, that's... So it is, I think, like Alma.
Like, I'm going to go Sowell, like, I'm going to pronounce it like that, and then I can't.
Right.
Thomas Sowell.
Thomas Sowell.
Not Sowell right.
Okay.
Filtering Reality.
The preservation of the vision of the anointed has led many among the intelligentsia to vigorous and even desperate expedience, including the filtering out of facts, the redefinition of words, and for some intellectuals, challenging the very idea of truth itself.
Many among the intelligentsia create their own reality, whether deliberately or not, by filtering out information contrary to their conception of how the world is or ought to be.
Some have gone further.
J. A. Schumpeter said that the first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.
It is not necessary to lie, however, in order to deceive, when filtering will accomplish the same purpose.
This can take the form of reporting selective and atypical samples, suppressing some facts altogether, or filtering out the inconvenient meanings or connotations of words.
With regard to selective samples, Sowell writes, Filtering the sample of information available to the public can take many forms.
For example, Bennett Kerf, the founder of Random House Publishers, at one time during the Second World War, suggested that books critical of the Soviet Union be withdrawn from circulation.
When the American economy was recovering from a recession in 1983, and unemployment was down in 45 out of the 50 states, ABC News simply chose to feature a report on one of the five states where that was not so, or as they put it, quote, where unemployment is most severe.
As if these states were just more severe examples of a more general condition, when in fact they were very atypical of existing trends in unemployment.
So that's the first little excerpt, just his framing of the issue and two examples of how in the past media has led, well, the first one is a call for actual censorship of books.
Um, But the idea that ABC looked at 50 states, found a trend that should make all of us feel good in 45 of 50 of them, and decided to report on one of the others while actively alighting the fact that this was the exception
is well as you said earlier you know back when journalism was happening this was this was back when journalism was supposedly happening and and still this uh filtering of facts uh while making it seem that you are getting the you know the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth has has never been the case honestly so there is a very deep question here
The license to adjust the presentation of reality in the truth-seeking realms, you know, journalism, the courts, science, the university system, all of the places where truth is sought.
There is always an argument to be made that certain truths are counterproductive and that we would be better off either adjusting them so that we present the thing that is most useful to believe or editing those which are inconvenient and presenting those that go on narrative.
There's always this argument.
It needs to be settled exactly once.
The fact is, you don't have a right to do that, because truth-seeking itself is incredibly valuable in moving forward.
And what that means, and this was obvious to the Founders, for example, what that means is that you must suffer the costs that truth inevitably brings in order to get its benefits.
Right?
Just as the enemy is always those who don't want you to hear your enemy, Right?
The enemy is always those who are arguing in favor of their right to edit the truth for utility.
Now the problem with that, that all is very clear, I think.
The problem with that, and you know, I would say for example, Literally false, metaphorically true, right?
Here you have clear, evolved stories that are not literally true.
They are, in fact, in many places in conflict with what we can discover to be literally true, but obviously have utility.
And I'm not attacking those things.
Those things are valuable, have been valuable.
What I'm saying is they don't belong in the laboratory, right?
The place where you're seeking truth is not a place for metaphorical truth, right?
It is a place for literal truth.
The problem, however, The universe is a very complex place and we understand a lot in some places and very little in some others.
You have to have a mechanism for dealing with the stuff that you don't get yet.
A lot of the stuff in the Bio 101 textbook is bullshit.
But I call it bullshit because it's not done correctly.
It does not acknowledge.
We don't exactly know what takes place here, but here is something that could fit that space and we will find out over time how much of this is right and how much of this is nonsense, right?
But putting a lot of black boxes into a bio 101 textbook.
uh will not suit the professor who doesn't want any questions will not suit the eager undergraduate maybe pre-health or um or just is you know thinks that they need the answers and they need to know exactly what they are and uncertainty is uncomfortable uh so those textbooks that have actual black boxes that say we're not sure about what goes here it might be this it might be this but we know that we start at a and we end at f and we're not sure what b through e look like
It would be a much better textbook in terms of teaching people actually how to think scientifically, but it does not fit with people's expectation of certainty.
Well, and the expectation of certainty varies with topic.
In other words, the thing that always troubled me about the bio textbook was that it was written in the same style as the chem textbook.
And the fact is, intro chem, we do have a really good idea how all that stuff works.
We are encyclopedic.
Now, there's a place You go far enough in chemistry, you get to a place where we're confused again.
But it isn't in the intro textbook.
In the bio textbook, it ought to be all over that thing.
And so they shouldn't be written as similarly encyclopedic.
I agree with you.
I will just asterisk here that chemistry also uses metaphor.
All the sciences use metaphor, and many scientists, when you say that to them, are like, I most certainly do not.
What are you talking about?
But the example for me, and you've heard this before, is orbitals.
Like, you know, it's not those neat little concentric shells like they make out to be.
And, you know, increasingly I think that there is discussion of cloud rather than shells and such.
But it is simplified, even if the actual understanding that we have is better at the level of basic chemistry than basic biology in some places.
The intro textbooks are still written as if it is more simple and less nuanced, and we are more certain than we actually are.
Yeah, it's just that the difference between the chemistry and the biology is orders of magnitude in terms of what fraction we understand.
And because of the difference in complexity.
Right, because of the difference in complexity, absolutely.
And there's another issue which we hinted at at the beginning of the podcast, How are we to depict a neuron that has, you know, a thousand, several thousand dendritic connections to other neurons?
You could have just a sea of complexity and then the student doesn't understand the neuron.
Or you could simplify it, and then they get the wrong idea of the neuron, and it gets overly ingrained.
I've become troubled by this over time.
Never figured out exactly what the right thing to do is, other than just to call attention to it.
The capacity of something, especially something visually compelling, to mislead the mind is so great that when we do diagram a neuron and it has eight dendrites and one axon, and the number of axons is right but the number of dendrites is way the hell off, We create that broken model in the mind, and the point is it's like a snowplow when you're skiing, right?
The snowplow might be how you... It's a low adaptive peak.
Yeah, it's a low adaptive peak, and it's hard to get out of it, right?
It's once you've learned that a snowplow is how you can control your speed, it's hard to pull your skis together and learn to, you know, use a turn to control your speed.
Because it requires that you are facing downhill with no brakes at some moment in every turn.
Yeah, you are crossing the fall line, and so we've got to figure out how you own up to this ahead of time.
You tell the student, look, there's a thing that you have to do temporarily, and it's not right.
But you gotta get this first, and then we're gonna fix it later.
And if we got good at saying that, we're gonna, you know, either, this is something we've learned.
Like the image comes up with an asterisk.
Like, okay, you can now visualize that neuron, but have that asterisk in your head as well.
That's part of the visual.
Right.
This is 50% wrong, or 10% wrong, or something.
I wouldn't quantify it.
Yeah, I wouldn't quantify it either, but something to indicate that there is something, that learning this thing will make you feel clever, but there's a next stage which is going to make it feel dumb, or something, right?
That is really important, and I was actually prone to think about this, our family watched It's got to be two, I think.
But in any case, really well done.
High production values.
- Dramatization.
- Two, three?
- It's gotta be two, I think.
But in any case, really well done.
High production values, they go through a lot of effort to represent the scenes and the people in ways, you know, doesn't look like JFK exactly, but close enough.
And anyway, but, you know, so I went and I looked it up.
How accurate was this portrayal?
And highly accurate in terms of narrative of the progression of the missile crisis, not highly accurate with respect to the personalities involved.
In fact, the main character is actually kind of a nobody in the White House.
So the main character in the film is brought up to tell the story, but actually wasn't particularly anything.
As far as anybody knows, he is not an important player and he was, or Not nearly so important a player, and he is used as a narrative device to make the story work.
Yeah, he gets told things, he introduces ideas that otherwise you'd have to like put script on screen or something.
Right, and he drives, you know, the Kennedys to find the best in themselves and to stand up when they have to and these things.
Anyway.
How much does the representation, because this is not a fictionalization of the Cuban Missile Crisis, because it accurately represents something that, you know, you and I didn't live through.
We're not old enough to have lived through it, much less lived through it at an old enough age to crock it in real time.
The representation of the Cuban Missile Crisis that we see on screen comes to supplant the actual history for a large number of people.
But what do you mean it's not a fictionalization?
It is.
It's fiction.
It's portrayed as historical fiction, which, you know, historical fiction is a broad genre in which I think you hope for the ability to learn some truth about history, but any particular thing that you take from historical fiction, you would want to fact check that.
Of course.
Before assuming that it was actually something that was being conveyed accurately.
But I can see that you, like I, were surprised that the main character in the film is not an important player in the Kennedy White House.
Right.
But I guess I was just objecting to, like, of course it's a fictionalization.
Well, but, you know, I guess the point is then, fiction is such a huge category from, you know, The dialogue is made up, but the events are accurate to this person is actually not really is playing a role that was not played.
But it's necessary to get the story told in two hours.
Right.
You know, that's a whole other conversation, right?
In a police procedural or something like that, what's a dramatization?
A dramatization is, as far as we are led to believe, supposed to be an actual, accurate portrayal of what happened.
But of course, no one knows for sure exactly what all happened, and this particular dramatization may value, um, the will inherently value the perceptions and the hypotheses of the person who put that together at the time.
And maybe they're right.
Maybe they're wrong.
Well, and so this, this goes back to my, my point about textbooks and things like this, the degree of damage done to our historical understanding by the movie 13 days is very tiny.
In fact, probably it is a vast upgrade in terms of the fraction of the population that understands what the events were and all of that.
The damage done by something that, you know, inverts a story, right, that makes, you know, the allies, makes the U.S.
the hero of the allies rather than acknowledging the huge amount of the winning of World War II that was done by the Russians, for example, is, you know, destructive of our understanding of history.
And the basic Underlying point is truth-seeking is about truth-seeking.
We don't get to tell stories that increase our valor at the expense of truth because the point is the truth-seeking is like a sacred or should be sacred, meaning we should not mess with it.
To that point, we have several more examples of exactly this from Thomas Sowell.
Again, intellectuals and society.
Homelessness, he writes, is another area where much of the media filters what kind of reality gets through to their audience.
During his time at CBS News, Bernard Goldberg noticed the difference between what he saw on the street and what was being broadcast on television.
He said, In the 1980s I started noticing that the homeless people we showed on the news didn't look very much like the homeless people I was tripping over on the sidewalk.
The ones on the sidewalk by and large were winos or drug addicts or schizophrenics.
They mumbled crazy things or gave you the evil eye when they put paper coffee cups in your face and asked for money.
But the ones we like to show on television were different.
They looked as if they came from your neighborhood and mine.
They looked like us.
And the message from TV news was they didn't just look like us, they were like us.
On NBC, Tom Brokaw said that the homeless are, quote, people you know.
If the homeless tend to be sanitized in television news, businessmen tend to be demonized in movies and television dramas, as another study found, quote.
Only 37% of the fictional entrepreneurs played positive roles, and the proportion of bad-guy businessmen was almost double that of all other occupations.
What's more, they were really nasty, committing 40% of the murders and 44% of the vice crimes.
Only 8% of primetime criminals were black.
End quote.
But continuing with what Sol writes... Sol, yes.
In real life as well as in fiction, what was presented to television audiences was highly atypical of what existed in the real world.
Another example.
During the period studied, 6% of the people with AIDS shown on the evening news were gay men.
But in real life, 58% were gay men.
On TV, 16% were blacks and Hispanics.
But in real life, 46% were black or Hispanic.
On TV, 2% of the AIDS sufferers were IV drug users.
In real life, 23% were.
This creation of a picture reflecting the vision of the anointed, rather than the realities of the world, extends to textbooks used in schools.
Publishers such as McGraw-Hill, for example, have percentage guidelines as to how many of the people shown in photographs in their textbooks have to be black, white, Hispanic, and disabled.
Moreover, the way these individuals are portrayed must also reflect the vision of the anointed.
According to the Wall Street Journal, quote, one major publisher vetoed a photo of a barefoot child in an African village, On the grounds that the lack of footwear reinforced the stereotype of poverty on that continent." End quote.
In short, the painfully blatant reality of desperate poverty in much of Africa is waved aside as a stereotype because it does not fit the vision to be portrayed, even if it does fit the facts.
Wow.
That's the second of the four excerpts I wanted to share from Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals in Society.
So I want to point to two things.
One, Michael Schellenberger did a tremendous amount in much more recent times to reveal the factual bankruptcy of the idea that what we have is a homelessness crisis.
Homelessness is a symptom of a different crisis, and it is a euphemism that obscures the problem so that lots of people labor under the misapprehension problem.
is not enough homes and rent being too expensive Yeah, and we talked about this.
His book is extraordinary, and we talked about this in some livestreams past.
Yep.
But he also did the service, as many people now are doing, but he also did the service of just taking the camera onto the streets in the Bay Area, specifically in San Francisco, and saying, yep, this is what I'm seeing.
This is what is happening.
And he interviewed people and it was amazing how open they were about their drug addictions and what kind of hospitable environment they find for their vices in San Francisco.
Yes.
I actually just anecdotally, and I'm not going to give away the specifics so that I don't, I'm just going to anonymize the person I heard this from, but I was just talking to someone in Portland who said there's an interview up with some homeless woman Who was being asked, like, why don't you go into the housing that's been erected?
Like, you know, we, there is actually some housing that has been, uh, put together, but there are a few rules.
Like, you know, you don't, there's no drugs and there's, um, and you have to keep the space clean.
And she said, well, like, why, why would I leave?
This is fantastic.
You get up, you get high, you go get your free meal, you come back, you go to sleep, you get up, you get high, you get your free meal, you come back, you go to sleep, repeat.
And, no, that's not everyone's story.
But her story, and it's very much like what Schellenberger was seeing farther south on the West Coast, in another major city, was, you know, if you make a life appealing to people who have underlying problems that are not entirely reducible to, I do not have a home, then they will continue to choose to live the life that you have made appealing.
Yeah, people navigate based on proxies for well-being.
And unfortunately, those proxies are especially easily sidelined by chemicals that interfere with the motivational architecture.
So it's not surprising that if you take the pain out of losing your home and you facilitate, you know, the pursuit of those chemicals, That lots of people will fail to find the motivation to fix their lives, and I am not claiming that there is a solution in that description.
What I'm claiming is that it is obvious that you will increase the problem, if that's your approach, is to, you know, to use compassion in a naive way is of course going to create a bigger problem than you initially had.
That's right.
Should I do the next one, or did you have something else to say?
Here, okay.
Third of four excerpts from Chapter 10 of Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals in Society.
If I can figure out... There it is.
Here we go.
Suppressing Facts.
One of the historic... Sorry, my computer... Okay.
One of the historic examples of suppressing facts was the reporting and non-reporting of the Soviet Union's government-created famine in the Ukraine and the North Caucasus that killed millions of people in the 1930s.
This is going far back, right?
New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Durante wrote, there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be.
He received a Pulitzer Prize.
The Pulitzer panel commending him for his reports, quote, marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity.
Meanwhile, British writer Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine that peasants there were, in fact, starving.
Quote, I mean starving in its absolute sense.
Not undernourished as, for instance, most Oriental peasants and some unemployed workers in Europe, but having had for weeks next to nothing to eat.
End quote.
Muggeridge, Muggeridge, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, wrote in a subsequent article that the man-made famine was, quote, one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened.
End quote.
Decades later, a scholarly study by Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, estimated that six million people had died in that famine over a period of three years.
Still later, when the official archives were finally opened in the last days of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, new estimates of the deaths from the man-made famine were made by various scholars who had studied material from those archives.
Most of their estimates equaled or exceeded Dr. Conquest's earlier estimates.
At the time of the famine, however, this was one of the most successful filtering operations imaginable.
What Muggeridge said was dismissed as, quote, a hysterical tirade by Beatrice Webb, co-author with her husband Sidney Webb of an internationally known study of the Soviet Union.
Muggeridge was vilified, was unable to get work as a writer after his dispatches from the Soviet Union, and was so financially strapped that he, his wife, and two small children had to move in with friends.
There is no need to believe that there was any conspiracy among editors or journalists to silence and ostracize Malcolm Muggeridge, nor is a conspiracy necessary for successfully filtering out things that do not fit the prevailing vision, either then or now.
Except for Muggeridge and a very few other people, A famine deliberately used to break the back of resistance to Stalin, killing a comparable or larger number of people as those who died in the Nazi Holocaust, would have been filtered completely out of history instead of being merely ignored as it usually is today.
This was not a matter of honest mistakes by Duranty and others.
What Duranty said privately to some other journalists and to diplomats at the time was radically different from what he said in his dispatches to the New York Times.
For example, in 1933, a British diplomat reported to London, quote, Mr. Durante thinks it is quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.
So when people wonder why it's important that we know what, for instance, Anthony Fauci was saying privately early in COVID, this is why.
So this is why, and it also reveals the complexity of the corruption of such systems.
And Sowell is absolutely right.
This does not require a conspiracy.
What it requires is a system of incentives that results in the story being obscured, right?
The journalist who reports it Finds themselves unable to get work.
The journalist who obscures it finds himself in possession of a Pulitzer Prize.
Actually, they should call it a Pulitzer Prize since he got... That's been done.
It's been done.
Oh, well, all right.
I feel derivative.
Well, you didn't know it'd been done.
No, I didn't.
I didn't.
But anyway, this actually is a terrific moment to point then to Jacob Siegel's new excellent article in Tablet Magazine on this very topic.
So what he has done is an exploration.
Do we have?
I have not seen.
Yeah, you have a Jacob Siegel's tablet article.
Jacob Siegel is a senior editor at Tablet Magazine.
Yep, and here is his new article, maybe a tour de force.
That's an alarming image.
That is an alarming.
For those of you who are just listening, it's an oil or something of a crow with a digital eye.
A digital eye, yep.
And the title of the article is, A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.
Anyway, it is excellent.
It's quite a long article.
We will post a link to it.
And what it does is it explores the new architecture for managing narratives, ostensibly in the national interest, but of course that's not how it works, is it?
No, it's not.
This is a nation structure that has been captured by special interests, which means interests that are counter to the public's interest, That is foisting a narrative on us that has all sorts of ramifications, be they medical, fiscal, international relations, environmental.
And so anyway, what you and I have been talking about, you know, in terms of, for example, mystics and malinformation, is discussed here.
The article does cover the shenanigans over COVID, one amongst many topics.
He's got 13 different perspectives that he describes.
Anyway, highly recommend it.
It's definitely worth the investment of time.
I also discovered this morning that there is a glossary in a tablet magazine.
I hope they are just building it.
It's not complete as it is, but they're appear to be building a glossary of terms relevant to information control.
I, of course, furiously contacted them this morning and said, you need misdism and malinformation and you need to trace it back to the Department of Homeland Security that introduced this in their memo in February of 2022.
That's right.
But anyway, follows perfectly from from Thomas Sowell's words.
Indeed it does.
Okay, one last excerpt from Sowell for today.
Same chapter, Filtering Reality, in the book Intellectuals and Society, first published in 2011, republished with a few added chapters, although not this one, I think, in 2021.
Just as it is hard to find any consistent correlation between gun ownership and violent crime rates internationally, it is hard to find any such correlation from historical statistics within the United States.
As one study noted, quote, The United States experienced an extraordinary increase in violent crime in the 1960s and 1970s, and a remarkable drop in violent crime in the 1990s.
The number of firearms, especially handguns, and private hands increased by several million every year during this period.
The relentless growth in the privately held stock of firearms cannot explain both the crime wave of the first period and the crime drop of the second period.
Few of these facts Detrimental to Gun Control Advocate's case reached the general public, although there is no organized conspiracy to block the truth.
Individual ad hoc filtering of what gets through the media to the public can readily add up to as complete a distortion of reality as if there were a conscious coordination by a heavy-handed censorship or propaganda agency, if those individual journalists and editors who do the filtering share the same general vision of what is and what ought to be.
What seems plausible to those who share that vision can become the criterion of both believability and newsworthiness.
Plausibility, however, is the most treacherous of all criteria, for what will seem plausible in a particular case depends on what one already believes in general.
It is not necessary for either individuals or a cabal to work out a plan of deliberate deception for filtering of information, to produce a distorted picture that resembles the vision of the anointed, rather than the reality of the world.
All that is necessary is that those in a position to filter, whether as reporters, editors, teachers, scholars, or movie makers, decide that there are certain aspects of reality that the masses would misunderstand, and which a sense of social responsibility requires those in a position to filter to leave out.
This applies far beyond issues of gun control.
Fantastic.
As always, he is right on the money, both analytically and also the way he presents these things.
It just hits you over the head every time.
I can't, at the moment, think of a major story to which this isn't applying, right?
Like this, certainly the last three years of COVID, in which the entire world and, you know, to some degree, us specifically, have been informed that you may not have those conversations, you may not investigate those questions, because doing so adds an element of doubt into the minds of the masses, basically.
And the argument is one of, his word, it's the anointed versus all the rest of us.
And at some level, what we have been accused of doing is breaking ranks.
Like, you got your fancy degrees.
You're the anointed.
Don't do this.
And we, Have somewhat fancy degrees, but more to the point, are scientists.
Yeah, we got degrees in truth-seeking.
Right.
And what, actually, are all of those other people with supposed degrees in truth-seeking up to?
Because either they never could do it, in which case their degrees are shams, which some of them are, or they are actively lying to themselves and or to everyone else, in which case they don't deserve to stand as if with authority and speak words that, whether or not they know it, aren't true.
What was the publication?
Initial publication?
2011.
2011.
So I did want to highlight one thing.
He's correct that you don't need a conspiracy to get these things.
We, however, are living in 2023.
We are.
And the fact that a conspiracy is not necessary to get this kind of narrative control doesn't mean that we don't have one, and in fact it's out in the open, right?
that we see the Department of Homeland Security warning us about misdisc and malinformation, and oh, by the way, it happens to be a form of terrorism which creates a whole network of laws, or I hesitate to call them laws because they're clearly unconstitutional, or I hesitate to call them laws because they're clearly unconstitutional, but anyway. - Dictats. - Yes, mechanisms are triggered by the invoking of those syllables by the executive of which the DHS is
And so by defining certain beliefs... DHS is part of the executive branch?
Yeah.
The point is the executive himself, our senile president in this case, could define you as a terrorist for speaking truth that was inconvenient to the narrative, which would be malinformation, for example.
And the fact that he couldn't remember having done so half an hour later is irrelevant.
All the better.
It's a feature, not a bug.
Yeah, so anyway, the point is we have seen conspiracies at many different levels.
We have seen conspiracies at the federal level, especially the executive branch.
We have seen Gavi, we have seen the Trusted News Initiative, we have seen Inside the Twitter Files, and the point is there's a vast bulwark attempting to control the narrative in the interests of something.
Something that inhabits the costume of our government, but is really a pretender.
That thing is exerting tremendous control.
And the point is, look, this is an authoritarian, a cryptically authoritarian state.
The idea that, yes, you don't need a conspiracy to get news organizations to broadcast something convenient to those that butter their bread.
But it doesn't mean you don't have one, and in this case, the basic point is if you lived in the Soviet Union in, you know, the 70s, you knew pretty well to ignore the official proclamations of your government, even though they came through an ostensibly journalistic establishment at Pravda.
I think so.
I mean, I'm actually increasingly, I'm very curious how people living in various, in particular spaces and times, in particular places and times actually did regard what was happening.
These last three years have been eye-opening in terms of how people will tie themselves in knots to demonstrate to themselves and to the rest of the world that they are the good people on the right side of history while explicitly being the opposite.
Well, I do think that this would have been evident to any thinking person living inside the Soviet Union in the 70s or 80s.
I think so.
I just don't know.
And I think that what we face is much more confusing, right?
Because it isn't an authoritarian state.
And so we don't expect it to lie to us at this level.
And we don't expect it to punish citizens.
Because how, of course, would you do that?
That would be illegal for the federal government to punish citizens for wrong think.
In the US, what about the First Amendment?
And yet, we see it happening through all of these public-private partnerships, as they are falsely called.
When we think of corruption, we come up with the things that we've experienced.
Trying to drive through a country in Latin America and being stopped by the police and being told that we need to give them cash before we can continue on.
Yes, the on-the-spot fine.
The on-the-spot fine, which literally had happened to us.
And like that, oh, that's what corruption looks like, right?
Being asked when I went in to get my research permits in Madagascar as a graduate student who was literally making $13,000 a year and had gotten a grant to do my research in Madagascar by the person behind the counter, where's my Land Rover?
That was the first ask.
I don't have a Land Rover.
I ended up delivering a bottle of whiskey.
It went down from Land Rover to whiskey.
Like, okay.
That's how negotiation works.
That'll do it, right?
And we went through computer.
This would have been in the 90s.
So yeah, it's like, oh, I didn't arrive in Madagascar with a mainframe for you.
Anyway, that's both the cartoon version, and yeah, it does exist.
Corruption does exist like that in countries where there is such great disparity of wealth, and officials can line their pockets a little bit by seeing who might have money and extracting it from them.
But that's not almost ever what it looks like in the weird world, and that doesn't mean that corruption isn't happening.
Right, and you know, yes, the kind of corruption where some local authority extracts funds from people is bad, but the amount of harm done by the large-scale, very polite, well-dressed, executive-level corruption is vastly greater.
I'd far rather be asked to pay in a bottle of whiskey every time I can.
Sure.
Yes.
That's a world you can live in.
Yeah.
But lest I be misunderstood, the government of Madagascar is not functional, or at least it certainly wasn't in the 90s.
Oh, it can't be.
Right.
So I'm not saying that overall it's a more functional system.
I'm saying if I had to choose between these two kinds of corruption in isolation, the simple tit-for-tat exchange that is visible and that is apparent to everyone is far easier to contend with.
Yes, and anyway, there's a much longer conversation to be had, but once you've seen truly malignant government, you cannot help but see the point of the libertarians.
Libertarians are, you know, tragically wrong on the game theory, but frankly, I would much rather live in a system harmed by the absence of necessary laws than one in which the lawmaking authority is corrupt and malevolent and effective, which is where we are.
Right.
All right.
Well, I think that brings us to the end of that little section.
That happy little diversion.
Yes.
Intellectuals and society.
That's what they'll get you.
Yep.
All of that.
So you wanted To revisit a large part of the conversation that we had last week about AI.
Yeah, I wanted to revisit one thing and then update people on some stuff that happened this week that is definitely worthy of noting.
The revisiting involved the conversation that was being had by people who think about AI and existential risk.
And what I saw, you know, we talked about a taxonomy last week of different levels of horror.
And the horrors, the three that we presented, were a malevolent AI that views humans as a competitor or a threat.
Existential even.
Right, and goes after us.
Not recognizing that having gotten rid of their existential threat, they will also cease to exist.
Well... Yeah, depending, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, I would say that there is a version of this story in which they figure out how to solve their needs.
Yeah.
But then there's... That's a branch maybe that I shouldn't have introduced, but okay.
Malevolent is one of your... You got malevolent AIs is the worst case.
Badly aligned AI that isn't malevolent, but follows instructions maybe too literally.
Yeah, the paperclip AI.
Yeah, the paperclip maximizer.
That's an existential threat of its own.
And then the third layer was the derangement of the humans by having this intellect to interact with, to query, to request things of, with no preparedness for how one thinks about what it knows, what it doesn't know, what effect it's having on what people think is true.
And basically, I would say, We came, we, civilization, came unglued over COVID, presumably in the pre-HEI era.
I don't think we can be certain of that, but We came unglued and now we have an accelerant dumped on that same system without us having learned seemingly any of the lessons that we should have learned for what went wrong in the information environment during COVID.
That is a disaster.
And what I wanted to point to is that I think the Folks who think about existential risk and AGI are suffering from what is called the availability heuristic, which is that you default to those things as explanations, you default to those things that are knowledgeable, that you are knowledgeable about, that are close at hand and away from things that you don't know how to think about.
And so I have the sense that you've got a bunch of folks in the rationalist community and adjacent communities Who are at least very experienced in thinking about the malevolent AI and the paperclip maximizer, and not so good about thinking about human confusion.
In fact, they really fucked up COVID pretty badly.
They got suckered and ended up on the wrong side of that discussion many times.
I feel like an analogous, standing in a slightly different place to, you can employ the availability heuristic, or you can go sort of Rumsfeldian, in that he wasn't the first person who did this, but he was the most famous person who talked about the known knowns, the known unknowns, the unknown knowns, and the unknown unknowns.
It is human nature to focus on the known knowns and to some degree on the known unknowns, but the unknown knowns or unknowns, of course, you don't focus there because you inherently don't know.
Yeah, it is.
It is that categorization.
I miss Rumsfeld, despite being a diabolical human.
But no, he was the Yogi Berra of international relations and military matters.
And, you know, Where have we arrived?
I don't know, but we do end up quoting the man more than once.
But are there others, or is it just that?
Because if I remember, I looked into it at one point, and that's not original with him, that I don't remember who it was original with.
But are there other things that he says?
Because he's not the Yogi Berra of whatever international relations, if he has one.
No, no, there are a couple others.
Are there?
Okay.
It'll take me some time to... Oh, you don't go to a war with the army you want, you go to war with the army that you have, or the army you have.
Anyway, there are a couple.
That's true.
Put that aside and return.
Yogi Bear-ish.
Yogi Bear-ish.
Yeah.
Hey hey boo boo!
I don't know where that came from.
All right, so back to the AI question.
So I do have the sense that the existential risk AGI folks are very focused on the two problems that they think a lot about and enjoy.
And not focused enough on the, hey, if you actually solved, maybe both of those are alignment problems or maybe, you know, let's call them both alignment problems, malevolent and confused AI.
Even if you solved those, we still have an existential threat in the confusion layer.
No, this now is more of a taxonomy, because before it was just a categorization.
It's like one, two, three, these all exist without any attempt to describe the relationship between them.
You just had a trisomy, right?
You just had a trichotomously branching thing.
But I think that's right.
I think what you've just done, which is to say the malevolent and the confused Well, I think I'm borrowing.
both of a type and can be dealt with by the same brains who are thinking carefully-ish about AI, but they aren't thinking evolutionarily or about the humans, the users.
Well, I think I'm borrowing, they can correct me if I'm wrong, the malevolent and confused or indifferent paperclip maximizing AI.
I believe they would group those as the existential risk AGI folks.
We group those as alignment, both of them.
So they would say that.
I'm adding something and I'm saying you've got a confusion layer, which is in and of itself an existential threat.
It's an accelerant on all of the terribleness that we saw during COVID on whatever the next thing is.
Did I say trisomy?
You did.
You meant trichotomy.
Oh, you meant... It's a polytomy.
It's a polytomy.
Yeah, all right.
Now we are... Sorry.
I was thinking about chromosomes before you went on air.
We are not even inside baseball.
We are inside a baseball.
Staring at cork and cordage.
I'm sorry.
I used totally the wrong word.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Go on.
No, you're good.
It's interesting how that stuff remains in the buffer and then you find it and you're like, damn, did I say that?
What part of me said that?
But I know exactly anyway, it doesn't matter.
But, okay, so you've got the existential threat that is not getting widely discussed because it's, you know, there aren't as... I guess there are now a couple sci-fi films that cover it, but not well, I think.
So, which brings me to the next part of this.
There was a weird kind of battle that broke out, right?
Some very important folks signed an open letter.
You want to show the open letter?
Calling for a six-month moratorium on training of AI systems above GPT-4.
Above?
What do you mean above?
They don't want GPT-5.
Downstream of?
Upgraded from... More powerful than.
Using all the metaphors.
I don't think it's vague.
I think the basic point is how much stuff did you give it to read?
Right?
And we've seen at a certain level what it can do at GPT-4 and their point is don't you dare give it a bigger library because now we know we've got a problem.
Okay?
So More powerful than is what it says.
Yeah, so more powerful means a bigger library.
Now, on the one hand, this is some really important people signed this.
Elon Musk signed it.
I saw Jim Rutt's name.
There are a lot of people whose names you would know.
Some important people in AI research.
Calling for a six-month moratorium.
And then you had some important dissenters.
Most prominently is... Not as part of the letter, but people who came out afterwards and said no wrong.
People who disagreed with the letter.
Now, disagreement with the letter came in two opposite forms.
One form... Not strong enough?
Yeah, one form was not strong enough.
So Eliezer Yudkowsky... Yeah, will you show his thing?
So this is Eliezer Yudkowsky writing, and you want to scroll down, Pausing AI Development.
Pausing AI Development something.
I didn't catch the full title here.
I'm going to scroll back.
Pausing AI Developments isn't enough.
We need to shut it all down.
Okay, and this was a It's a little hard to describe this piece.
It's rare that one sees anything written like this in a mainstream publication or something that, you know, has that as its legacy.
But he basically says, many of us who think about this question believe that the dawning of AGI will result in the extinction of all of humanity, the death of all living people.
And he goes on to clarify that he doesn't mean that there's some remote chance of it, that he thinks it's the likely outcome.
But there are also the sort of Pollyanna objections to the letter saying, it's fine, it's all gonna be fine, right?
Right.
Now, I will say, Yudkowsky goes to, Yudkowsky goes to extraordinary lengths, and he advocates for things like airstrikes on servers that don't abide by a moratorium on this kind of research.
He advocates for airstrikes on servers that don't abide by a complete shutdown of this technology.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now, that has been mocked by many people.
It is certainly... It's either the most serious existential threat to humanity, as he apparently is arguing.
I haven't read his letter.
Or it's not.
Yeah.
Now, I'm not supportive of this.
Oh, that's a bridge too far.
Well, is it or is it not, you know, the most serious existential threat to humanity right now?
I actually, like, again, I haven't read it, so I don't know that that's his claim, but it sounds like it's at least close to.
It's in the right neighborhood of his claim, right?
Yes.
There's a question about how we are to navigate such things.
Obviously, if you had a runaway AI that was threatening humanity, you know, We bomb stuff over much less than that, right?
A bit.
So, obviously there's an argument to be made.
On the other hand, it is not apparent that this style of thinking is correctly anticipating what comes.
It is certainly troubling that a large number of people who appear capable of high-quality thought and are expert in this area Believe that there is an alarming possibility of such a thing.
But, you know, are we to start bombing people over, you know, somebody's breathless claims in Time Magazine?
I don't know.
That doesn't sound like any planet I know about.
That wasn't in Time, was it?
Yeah.
Oh, it was.
Yudkowsky's.
Yudkowsky, yeah.
So, okay, so you've got a letter with many mainstream folks arguing for a six-month moratorium.
You've got Yudkowsky saying, I refuse to sign that letter because it didn't go nearly far enough, and advocating for a, you know, military-level response to anybody who doesn't abide by a full moratorium.
And full and permanent?
I believe so.
And then you have, or not permanent.
I guess it would be pending the development of strategies that are sufficient to contain this.
Not clear that any such thing is true.
And I would also, I would also point out, in this milieu, it is not surprising that something AGI-like has emerged.
That was completely obvious that that was going to happen.
When exactly it was going to happen, okay, maybe that's surprising.
But to the extent That something about GPT-4 has got people talking about airstrikes on server farms.
It was obvious before GPT-3.5 that such a thing was down the road.
So I'm not saying that they didn't have these discussions.
They did, but the point is Yes, we are somewhere down this road and we can now say something about where we are, but it's not news that this was coming.
So to the extent that there is a desire to put together strategies that would contain such a thing at the point that it was developed, Where were you six years ago?
Why don't we have those things?
Why didn't you get some ready?
And you know, it's not that they weren't trying, but the point is you think your moratorium is going to work until we have those strategies, but you didn't really learn anything you didn't know, right?
I knew this was coming.
So that's one thing.
The other thing is the letter itself calling for a moratorium.
Um, Some of the folks in a rabbit hole that I sometimes go down were having a very excellent discussion about the game theory surrounding this.
And this one was bugging me from the point people started talking about, well, what do we do now that AGI seems to have dawned?
Well, the question is, anything you do at the point that these horses have left the barn may disadvantage you relative to somebody who doesn't agree to abide by it.
Right?
So, you know, who does that put at advantage?
Right?
You know, is open AI, you know, our best hope?
Or, you know?
Well, but I mean, obviously that raises the question about, okay, so Yudkowsky would have us bomb server farms that don't abide.
Worldwide?
How do we know where, like, at a practical level?
Precisely.
So, the point is, what Yudkowsky is advocating for is tantamount to a commitment to attack, let's say, China if it forges ahead.
And if we hold AI back domestically and China forges ahead, then, you know, Well, I don't think I underestimate the risk here.
I'm very, very concerned.
But how would we know?
I mean, one of the things we all should have learned in the last three years is that what China says it's doing cannot necessarily be trusted.
Like, how obvious is this?
Yeah, it's pretty obvious.
And, you know, my feeling and I don't know what to do about it.
It's not that I don't think these risks are real, that they're being overstated.
I think we are now across the event horizon.
I think the quality of what virtually everybody is saying on this matter is low, right?
Predicting across this event horizon is just not working, right?
We don't know where we just landed.
We don't know how fast it's going to progress.
The answer, the only things that we know, I think, are we aren't prepared, and we now have a potential emergency on our hands.
Well, maybe the metaphor, which is not in its original a metaphor, but the metaphor, the way that we use it, of Event Horizon.
is inadequate.
We have to combine it with what we propose in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide with regard to hyper-novelty and the accelerating rate of change.
It's not that we are over the event horizon.
We may be over an event horizon, and there are how many more?
And they are coming at us with how much more rapidity than they did in the past?
That even if we find our footing here, the next one will hit us, and then we will have lost our footing again.
That's right.
Now, the problem, I mean, of course, as co-participant in the creation of that idea, of course, the point is we've created a conveyor belt where we keep getting hit with things that upend all of the important stuff in civilization.
And, you know, we see all of the great things that it will do for us, and we don't see the hazards until it's too late.
And in fact, even if you do see the hazards, until you can prove that the hazard, you know, until you can be specific and prove it, there's no mechanism for restraining this stuff.
And at the point you can see the hazards and prove it, it's too late.
And I just, I, I specifically am trying to make the point that event horizon still seems to everyone, I think.
And, And, you know, you just used it, because it seems like the most, like, that is going to be the thing that snaps us all to attention.
Like, oh my God, we are nowhere that we have been before, and we don't know what we're doing, and we don't know how to do it.
Or we're approaching it, and we won't know necessarily at what point we cross it, but suddenly we will not have the skills and the tools that we need.
But it's this iterated event horizon thing, that hyper-novelty.
Combine the accelerating rate of change and hyper-novelty with the event horizon metaphor, and you're like, oh, it's event horizon after event horizon after event horizon.
How do you plan?
What do you do?
So, the series of major disasters emerging from industrial and other processes that were taking place at a scale that nobody in the public understood until it was too late, right?
That pattern of things from Deepwater Horizon, Fukushima, financial collapse of 2008, Aliso Canyon leak, All of these things have the same characteristic, right?
We're doing something, when it works it works, and then at some point something happens that causes the disaster to become apparent and All of these things have been at a scale that, while terrible, is manageable.
Well, and the piece that we've written about, and that you've specifically talked about at some length in various places, is also that at the point that it explodes in some way, and the whole world is made aware suddenly, the vast, vast, vast majority of us are like, wait, they're doing what?
What?
That's a thing?
How did, how was this, upon the success of which, upon which we all depended for it to just continue to thrum along in the background if they were going to do it at all, how was that allowed to happen without any buy-in, right?
And so that, it does feel like the AI conversation is like those, right?
That like, oh this, this has been happening and this does pose an existential risk and we just didn't know.
Well, unfortunately, the one I left off that list of major disasters is COVID.
Right.
What were we doing?
Gain-of-function research.
Gain-of-function research on viruses we didn't, you know, have a fraction of the knowledge necessary to create.
We took something from nature and turbocharged it.
No, we were just keeping ourselves safe.
Right.
And the point is, oh, how bad a virus did you create?
Real sucky, not going to get rid of it, but, you know, survivable, right?
It's a terrible self-inflicted wound.
Yeah, but boy, it's not going to look like anything else.
It's going to shorten lives, you know?
Well, I mean, it outright kills some people.
Yeah.
Shortens lives and that causes death and people and it may shorten all of our lives but um but nonetheless that should have been our wake-up call because you know what it had the characteristics in order to see the puzzle right it was contagious right and therefore a tiny little you know you've got a little process taking place literally in a room Right?
That results in a little microscopic thing finding its way into a cell, and then the point is, oh, now the world's stuck with this thing, it circulates between people, it evolves on its own, completely out of control.
Right?
Global scale.
This is part of why origins is so important to these monsters.
Frankly, monsters.
Because if the world comes to understand for sure What at this point should be obvious to everyone.
This does not have a zoonotic origin.
Then obviously we shut down gain-of-function research!
Right.
You should.
Obviously.
On the other hand, I mean, believe me, we should have shut down gain-of-function research, and we should figure out the big puzzle is, okay... I mean, like, Obama put a moratorium on this stuff back in, what was it?
2015.
2015, 14, yeah.
And, like, it was not unlike, I think, I have not read this letter, but it, you know, The moratorium was eight years ago on gain-of-function research was like, whoa, can we just slow it down seriously for a while while we assess, while we figure out what this means?
Well, but it reveals the elephant in the room, as it were, which is that you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, right?
Gain-of-function research isn't that hard.
And so the fact of, oh, we've got a process.
We are now technologically sophisticated to take a virus and make it infective of humans where it wouldn't be and contagious between humans, etc.
Oh, well, that would be pretty useful to anybody who could figure one out and figure out a remedy that only they had, right?
You know, that obviates the need for militaries, frankly.
And so the question is, how could you possibly have the sophistication to do this work and the ability to control that nobody else does it if you decide it's a bad idea?
So the answer is, hey, guess what?
Your globe does not have governance structures sophisticated enough to deal with a problem you have now just technologically created.
That is not where we are with COVID and other infectious diseases.
It's where we are with this AGI thing.
And so once again, we are in the position of how do we lock the barn now that the horses have escaped?
Right.
Maybe this time the existential risk AGI folks are right, and the point is up.
Those horses have escaped, and there's very little we can do.
But, at the very least, let us understand the lesson of this, which is, you know, the governance structures of the 18th century are not up to the challenge of navigating this landscape.
They foresaw a lot of stuff.
But they couldn't foresee this.
And so anyway, that is a terrifying problem to have.
And I think people feel entitled to have a solution, right?
They felt entitled to have a solution to COVID, and the fact is they didn't have one.
Yes, yes.
So, anyway.
That's important.
People feel entitled to a solution, and there may not be one.
And for some people, that's not a possible answer.
And so, they assert that there is, or there must be, a solution, and march on blindly with that belief.
And they think it's airstrikes against server farms, or something, right?
Or a six-month moratorium which causes the AGI of the West to fall behind the AGI of the East, or I don't know what.
But anyway, I guess, at what point Do we get to say, you know what?
This was visible before, and we are sick of having conversations after the fact.
Yeah.
Right?
This was visible before, and if you are right, and I think your formulation is correct, we are over an event horizon, but it is not the event horizon, it is an event horizon, then we survive this, Do we get now to have the conversation about the fact that we do not have governance structures that are up to dealing with these things?
And believe me, having been through the tyranny of COVID, I am not excited about stronger governance structures, right?
I'm terrified by them.
You know, what we have is absolutely malignant and we can't afford to have it stronger.
On the other hand, we can't afford to have technologies like this in which people are empowered in their basements or, you know, in a building somewhere to unleash things on the world that have profound impact on our You know, our medical well-being or on our sanity, you know, that's not an acceptable world.
And so it's time to get smart about the recurrent event horizon problem.
Yes.
Very good.
Okay, finally?
Yeah.
I realized actually that we have an armadillo behind us, and some people object to it, but this is a... It's a holy armadillo.
Holy armadillo, yes, apparently.
The armadillo whose scientific name is, and I actually don't know if it's a hard CH or if it's chaetofractis or chaetofractis.
I'm going to go with chaetofractis villosus.
Common name is the big hairy armadillo.
Okay, so the big hairy armadillo.
Um, which lives in South America.
There's more than one of them, but the species lives in South America.
They have gigantic penises.
And, uh, I came to know this in doing research for my piece that I published on my sub stack last week on the sleep of seals.
The connection may be, and indeed should be, unclear.
Yes, it is.
I promise you.
It's this side of the table.
So far, I got nothing.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
So, I am not now, nor have I ever been a man.
Therefore, I'm not in actual possession of a penis on my person.
But as I understand it, and as research confirms, men have erections during REM sleep.
Apparently, all the time.
Like, all the time.
As do all the mammals where it's been looked at.
Really?
Yes.
Erections during REM sleep.
All the animals where it's been looked at, with one exception.
Oh, I think I know what it is.
It's a big hairy armadillo.
With its gigantic penis.
I don't actually, that's probably wrong, but like seriously, its penis... Oh, because it would be a liability.
Its penis is more than half the length of its body.
Not including its tail.
Do we know for why?
No.
Right.
But they've got some weird reproductive stuff, and I did not dive deep enough into what weird reproductive stuff they have, and I think we basically don't know.
But seriously, all the mammals that have been looked at, except for the big hairy armadillo, have REM sleep erections.
And the big hairy armadillo does indeed have erections during its sleep, but only in non-REM sleep.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
I know!
I'm telling you!
So here you can show my screen if you feel like it.
Here we have the paper and questions from 2001.
This was not published on April 1st.
I know it's April Fool's Day right now, but absence of penile... so paradoxical sleep is just another word for REM sleep.
Absence of penile erections during paradoxical sleep.
Peculiar penile events during wakefulness and slow-wave sleep in the armadillo.
Now it turns out it's not the armadillo, it's just this one species, the common name of which is the big hairy armadillo.
This is one of the ways I've used myself.
Yeah, this is how you're spending your time over the event horizon.
Now, if that isn't the best list of keywords for any paper you've ever heard, I don't know what is.
Who studies this stuff?
These guys are in Buenos Aires.
These are Argentinian doctors and scientists.
Good job, guys.
Studying that?
Oh, you should check out the methods.
Studying that topic suggests that we've got so much stuff wired that I know for sure we know nothing about, right?
No, but you're not that guy.
We've both studied things.
There is no applied reason to do this, but it's out there.
It's happening.
I'm interested.
Science should know.
Now, I don't know if that applies to this question, but here's the abstract.
It sounds very science-y.
The electroencephalogram, E.E.G., together with electromyogram, E.M.G., of the, oh boy, ischiocavernosis, bulbocavernosis, and levator penis muscles were chronically monitored across behavioral states of the armadillo, cataractus venosus, again, the big hairy armadillo, if you're paying attention at home.
This animal has a very long penis, which exhibits remarkable phenomena during wakefulness, slow-wave sleep, and paradoxical sleep.
Again, paradoxical sleep just means REM.
During wakefulness, it remains retracted within a skin receptacle.
During slow-wave sleep, penile protrusion can be observed together with very complex movements.
Protrusion is a non-erectile event during which the penis remains out of its receptacle, but without rigidity.
Penile erections are observed only during slow wave sleep.
They don't mean they don't get them when they're awake, because that's wrong.
They mean during sleep.
It's their second language.
That's the excuse, I think.
Contrasting with other mammals, no erections occur during paradoxical sleep.
During this phase, the penile muscles share the atonia of the body musculature characteristic of that phase, which raises the question, Erections are apparently common in all the other mammals that have been looked at in REM sleep, and otherwise you have atonia.
Otherwise you have an inability to move any muscles except apparently for your penis, if you're that sort of person who has one.
That sort of person who has one.
Worst euphemism yet.
Non-uterus havers.
Non-uterus havers, right.
Some reflections on mechanisms of those penile events are presented.
I've just got a couple.
So, am I correct to predict that the method section involves... it's not a platysmograph.
Platysmograph?
Yeah.
I don't get it yet.
What's a platysmograph?
It's a penis blood flow monitor.
Oh, no, I think they're just looking.
I mean, they're really big.
Is the abstracted system doing things like that?
No, no, they're doing, well, yeah, actually, electromyograms.
But I think those are, they're getting readouts.
They're not, they don't think they have it, maybe they do, I don't remember, honestly.
I didn't pay, so the results I love the top of the results section.
Brief anatomical description of the penis.
This description is necessary in order to understand the results.
Like, it actually should have gone into the methods, but okay.
The protruded penis, figure one, is very long and in specimens measuring 35 centimeters in length, excluding the tail, is approximately 19 centimeters long.
Wow.
Okay, so one more little section here.
We've got, of course, a diagram.
We've got a baculum.
A baculum, of course you do.
Yeah, I mean, most mammals do.
That's the penis bone.
Yeah.
But then I like how they introduce language here.
The dominant sleep posture in the laboratory is in dorsal or lateral decubitus.
I looked it up.
It's like, that means they lie on their backs.
They sleep on their backs.
Come on, guys.
Do they?
Okay, okay.
I'm not gonna... hold on.
I think... here we go.
Erections.
Penile behavior.
Arch-like erections occur.
These are the most impressive phenomena.
They were always accompanied by transient extensions of the four limbs, together with slight changes in body posture.
The penis adopted the form of an arch, concavity downwards, when the animal slept in dorsal decan... when the animal slept on its back.
They were similar to those observed during waking states in sight of females.
I think that's it.
Yeah.
I think that's all I got.
Well, I now know why you didn't tell me this segment was coming.
I might have called in sick, I don't know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, well that's wild, very strange.
Very strange, right?
Again, I think somebody needs to, probably in anthropology, somebody needs to study these researchers and see how it is that they arrived at such a topic.
Yes, and I mean there are some notes in there that I haven't shared, too, about some particular erections that the armadillo has experienced and how they were assessed.
So, it is interesting, though, is it not?
There is, yeah.
That, A, there's been a whole lot of research into under what sleep conditions various species of man whales experience erections.
Yep.
Okay?
I mean, at one level, of course, it is.
Do they have conferences about that?
There's probably a symposium at larger conferences.
Right, right.
The size of the conference doesn't matter.
The Sleep Erection Symposia.
It does if you're an armadillo.
I guess, I guess it does.
So I don't know, I don't know if there's something, there's something reproductively interesting going on with the armadillo.
I think genetically, maybe.
I think, you know, the size, the size of the penis to body size ratio.
We know, we know from the adaptive test described in The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide.
I'm not doubting it's adaptive.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But no, there's a damn good reason for all of that architecture and the pattern of erections during different kinds of sleep.
I learned something.
I learned that armadillos have REM sleep, which I guess is not a synapomorphy of mammals, something like that.
I think we think it's a synapomorphy, which is to say a shared derived characteristic new to mammals, or maybe it's just therians, which is to say all the mammals except for the echidnas and the platypus, although it may just be that it's hard to assess REM sleep in echidnas and the platypus.
Yes, without laughing, at least in the Platypuses.
I don't know how these people did this work without laughing all the time.
Yeah, no, they probably did.
I don't think the armadillos were laughing.
No?
They were like, you pulled me out of where, and you're doing what?
No, they have quite the alien abduction story.
Yes, and they weren't in sight of any females at all.
They were just having erections during their nap.
Yeah, well, all right.
That's all very strange.
Yeah, okay.
That is where we have arrived.
We have arrived there somehow.
Yes, yep.
I think that's it.
All right.
I think we're going to do it.
We are for sure going to do a Q&A this week.
Again, not next week, and the week after that we will be gone, but we'll be back after that with more Q&A.
But if you have questions for us, we will be back in about 15 minutes.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com, and we will answer as many as we can get through in, you know, an hour or less.
Should we rename the podcast Between Two Event Horizons?
Anyway, think about that.
Yeah, just kind of rolls off the tongue.
Rolls off the tongue, yes.
Between two event horizons.
I mean, it's not inaccurate.
No.
No.
No, it's not inaccurate.
So, until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
