#174: Take Care (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 174th 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. The Press Secretary said this week that “These are our kids. They belong to all of us.” Conservatives had a predictable meltdown. Is she right, or is she wrong? What are the “sides” in this debate? Are there more than two sexes? Can a human transition between sexes? Are we sliding back towards regressive gender norms,...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number 174.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying.
We are in our seats despite all odds and much chaos, but nonetheless, we're ready to go.
We're ready to go.
174, unlike 173, is neither prime nor sexy.
It is neither prime nor sexy nor perfect, which is a term that I learned this morning that mathematicians use to hype certain numbers that they like because of the fact that you can add their factors and get them to sum up to the numbered question or something like that.
Feels like you're casting aspersions on mathematicians and suggesting that they live in this social world where all you have to do is name things something and then we'll feel differently about those things which exist whether or not we've given them names.
Now...
I believe, I do not know, this may be apocryphal, it is almost certainly misattributed, but, and I may even have mentioned it before, but I believe the ultimate aspersion has been properly cast and will never be exceeded when it comes to mathematicians.
How's that?
It is frequently attributed to Darwin, who almost certainly did not say that a mathematician is like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there.
Which I think you can't beat an aspersion like that.
I mean, that is just wicked.
Doesn't sound like Darwin, though.
No, it doesn't sound like Darwin.
I don't know.
Frankly, I would think he was, you know, maybe not super enthused with the math side of things, but he would certainly be friendly to it.
Yeah, I know he was just sort of a very gentle, easy-going guy all around, too.
There's that, too.
Yeah, he had a bulldog for a reason.
Exactly.
He had a fellow ape who could do, who'd say that sort of thing.
Absolutely.
Get himself into hot water.
Well, here we are.
It is May 20th.
Well, my notes still say May 30th.
I am a week behind the times.
And we've got new things coming soon, new platforms, new plans, and we're also going to start doing Q&As only twice a month.
So we're not going to do one this week, but we will next week, and it will make it easy for you to figure out where to find all of that.
But you may want to find a cubby or something in which to put cues that have to wait a week for them to meet up with Ace.
And we wonder sometimes internally why people have a hard time figuring out how to do what we are asking them to do.
We do wonder.
No, we really don't.
No.
We really don't.
You don't.
No.
Nor does our producer sitting over there in the corner.
Okay, so we do have the private Q&A though on my Patreon once a month as well.
And the question asking period for that is open as of last night, so if you if you like, and those are those feel different, those are a little those are smaller, we pay attention to the chat, we engage with the chat, so if you if you join us at my Patreon you can you can get access to that.
You can also find weekly, usually weekly, writings from me at Natural Selections.
That's naturalselections.substack.com.
This week I wrote a piece called It's Not Too Late about the realization that is dawning on many people who have been Following the science, who bought into the pronouncements and the promises that if you just do what we tell you to do, you too will be freed from the shackles that we have put you in.
And increasingly, I and we are running into people who acknowledge, yeah, there is certainly a lot of heart problems and Cancers and even babies are getting myocarditis.
I ran into this morning and that does seem to be potentially related to the things that the mRNA treatments, which I am increasingly loathe to call vaccines because they are not,
Uh, that were rolled out fast and furious, and we were assured were safe and effective, and as we've talked about almost endlessly here before, there was no way to know that they were safe, and therefore one had to wonder if the claim that they were effective, which was sitting right next to the known lie, safe, could also perhaps not be true.
And of course, as it turns out, they're not.
So it's not too late this week on my on my sub stack at Natural Selections.
I encourage you to join me there.
Free subscribers get access to almost everything.
Paying subscribers get additional perks like some audio reads from me and a few additional written pieces and the ability to comment on posts.
You wanted to say something?
Yeah, I do.
I, as you know, have been go-go-go traveling and not had a chance to read your piece yet, so it's possible that this is redundant, but I feel it is always worth saying in the context of It's Not Too Late that everything we know about the types of damage that we see suggests it's cumulative, and therefore not only is it not too late in the sense that there's still something to salvage, but there's every reason to think
That if you have shown no symptoms of anything so far, that stopping now is potentially the key to future health.
Absolutely.
And I think that is absolutely true.
The tenor of the piece is more about the social and behavioral aspects of belief.
So as I finish the piece with, it's not too late to change your mind.
Right?
And if you do, and if you vilified people, you owe them that acknowledgement.
And even if you did not vilify people, as so many did, if you do change your mind, just try in the you know the many among the many other things that everyone is no doubt doing to be a bit more aware and awake to what you're being told and assured of that is coming in under the guise of expert guidance that perhaps is no such thing.
uh we've seen it in in abundance in the last over three years now but of course it is happening all the time and increasingly uh when you are told just do this thing we've looked into it it's behind closed doors don't worry about it we got your back they probably don't have your back Yeah, I think something is in the air.
I don't know if you're noticing it as well, but what happened with Crystal Ball and Bobby Kennedy Jr.
and the reaction to it, to me, is actually quite heartening.
The fraction of the world that is now awake to something is quite large, and so I'm beginning to I'm beginning to feel like the assessment that we get from looking at the world as it's presented to us, of what it is that people believe, is so wildly off that you're better off to just discount it.
Yep, I agree.
And I don't know what you're talking about.
I was also traveling this week, and I do not pay attention to most of the stuff happening on social media.
But yes, it does feel like there's a lot in the air.
Before we embark on that, let's just get through the rest of the top of the Top of the hour and get to our sponsors and then start talking in earnest.
We have darkhorsestore.org, which is through a print shop who makes all of our merchandise right here in the United States.
It's a couple of American entrepreneurs Um, who both, uh, create the products and run the shop, and, uh, so supporting darkhorsestore.org with products like Pfizer, the breakthroughs never stop, um, supports not just us, but, uh, but them, and, uh, and they will never censor us, uh, unlike the previous outfit that we sold our merchandise at.
We are supported by our audience.
We appreciate you subscribing, liking.
By this time next week there will be more places to find us and we look forward to talking about that then.
But you can also subscribe, like, share videos at the moment on YouTube and on Odyssey and through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, all of that.
And to support us in another way, consider joining one of our Patreons, where Brett has some monthly conversations on his, and we have a private monthly conversation on mine, and we also have access to the Discord server where this conversation is taking place all the time.
And one of the things that the Discord server gives you access to is they figure out each time that we have a Q&A in advance which question or questions they'd most like us to answer, and we start off all of our Q&As that way.
And they are reliably excellent questions, honestly.
So all of that is happening through our Patreons, and then of course we have sponsors.
All of whom have products that we actually vouch for or have close friends who vouch for them if they make a product that we don't, that we can't assess ourselves.
So, three sponsors at the top of the hour, as always, here we go!
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Not that you put footbeds on a rack, but I don't know how they make them.
Maybe they do.
Footbeds in a rack, but not weapons of mass destruction.
Yeah, it's a different rack, but yeah.
It's how I heard it.
Okay, yeah.
The dog is snorting back there, so maybe that's how she heard it as well.
The dog, only whose rump we can see at the moment.
She's turned the wrong way.
They're made from recycled cork too, which is cool.
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Yeah, I have also been using the footbeds, which I did not do at first.
I loved the couple pairs of shoes that I had, and I've really used them a lot, especially when traveling and needing something a little fancier.
The fit is fantastic, but I've started upgrading other shoes that I have occasion for, like I've even upgraded some extra tough boots, you know, here on the... I did say that I had done that myself.
Oh, sorry, I missed that part, but yeah, the upgraded rubber boots, like you wouldn't think a rubber boot, you know, I've done a lot of walking in rubber boots and it's often a sloppy experience, but You can upgrade them with these things and it's super cool.
Yeah, as you know, we spent a week in Alaska recently and I was mostly wearing my extra tough souls in them and they were amazing.
Yeah.
Okay, our second sponsor this week is new to us this month, Cured.
Cured makes no tropics and a market increasingly full of such products, but Cured sent us several of their lines and I have tried and benefited from many of them.
I want to specifically talk about their product called Rise.
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That's their line.
But I need to say it in a good way, because you don't normally want your brain to be on fire.
Better on your brain than your pants.
Nope, I think I'd rather have my pants on fire.
Especially if I'm not wearing them at the time.
On the internet, that is considered a fatal indictment.
Pants on fire.
Pants on fire by PolitiFact or whatever it is.
Yes, yes.
Okay, let's, after this.
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How about that?
I'll just elide the brain on fire bit.
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30-party testing would be a little excessive, I think.
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Oh, you're not talking about just me?
No, no, not just you.
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It's very hard for me now to edit this.
I'm going to go back to your.
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Again, the axis of awesome.
Apologies to all involved, but I'm having a good time.
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Geez, you designed this to trip me up, didn't you?
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I get it.
I see the distinction clinically versus scientifically.
It's perfectly well stated.
Thank you.
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Awesome.
You did, you did.
All right, shall I start or should you start today?
Why don't you start?
All right.
The press secretary, Corinne Jean-Pierre, got into trouble with the Conservatives this week, as she is wont to do.
And Fox News, as it is wont to do, took her to task.
You may show my screen here, Zach.
Fox News tweeted, quoting Corinne Jean-Pierre, in which she was talking about bans on trans treatment for minors.
She said, these are our kids, they belong to all of us.
Okay, if I may have my screen back now.
These are our kids, they belong to all of us.
And many people online, conservatives I expect, had a predictable meltdown as a result of this.
Not today Satan!
The Dems are communists, they're saying the quiet part out loud.
Right, these were some of the kinds of responses that she got for, and this is just based on that one tweet from Fox, I'm sure there was all sorts of other similar stuff all over the web.
I don't think the conservatives have it right either, because the press secretary, while objectively wrong at one level, right?
These kids aren't all of ours.
You know, our producer sitting over there is not your child, he's our child, and he's never going to be anyone else's child, right?
Even as he's not a child anymore, he's still our offspring, our child.
But it's also true that the children are our future.
And that sounds boo and silly, but it's true.
Collectively, we owe it to the children.
We owe it to the children, not just our children, but all of the children, to not let them destroy themselves.
We do.
We also owe them a functional world, and this is part of why people like us are interested in preserving and conserving natural resources and wildness, so that people in the future can have a world in which it is possible to actually see wildness and learn something from it.
And the madness masquerading as care and kindness in trans activism world that is puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and surgeries for minors is something that we as a society are obligated to protect our children from.
So we have a quandary, right?
Both sides, both sides in this, and just this really does seem to fall into sides, but it's not left versus right, it's not.
It's not liberal versus conservative.
Both sides in the should children be allowed to medically transition to appear more like the sex they are not, yes that's the language of our side, uh debate, that is both sides in the should we let children decide to stop development and then start taking cross-sex hormones and have surgery.
That is irreversible.
Both sides in that debate seem to truly believe that they are on the right side of history, right?
That this is about protecting children.
I'm sure there are people on both sides.
I know there are people on the side whom the press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre thinks she is representing who are acting cynically and are not working on behalf of children.
And presumably there's people on on both sides who aren't, but mostly People really do think that they are advocating for an underrepresented, disempowered group that needs their support on both sides of this.
And frankly, for conservatives to forget that they also care about all children in order to, you know, dump on the press secretary for making a claim that the children belong to all of us.
is a little disingenuous and a little hypocritical, even though I get it.
Like, I understand that the response is, you know, no, no, no, no, stay the hell away from my children, right?
But we do really have a quandary here, because we, as people who are liberal in almost all of our beliefs, but who absolutely are certain that children need to be protected from their fantasies, their delusions, and their social contagion, and not be allowed
to block their own puberty and thus cause themselves, or certainly any of the things farther down that road, and thus cause themselves a lifelong medicalization that may have yielded infertility, among many other problems.
We are certain, in fact, as presumably are the people on the other side, that we're on the right side of history and that we're protecting people.
So what do we do?
It's not so simple.
It's not a not-today Satan question.
I want to argue that The conversation that you're trying to have is obviously exactly the right one, but when I see that quote deployed by Fox, apparently quoting the press secretary accurately as to what she said, I have the sense that something else is going on.
Can we then do that after I finish talking about this?
Sure.
Or, I mean, unless... Nope, I can keep it.
So, you know, we've ended up talking about trans activism a lot on Dark Horse, and I've written about it a lot, and we have always been careful to distinguish it from what we call true trans, which is an exceedingly rare condition, which in a few cases may actually be genetic, such as in a little village in the Dominican Republic,
Uh, and in a few cases, uh, maybe due to, um, developmental things that happened, uh, in utero, for instance, but it is exceedingly rare.
And increasingly, this conversation, uh, I'm certain, uh, is not about, is not about those people, by and large, who want to stay out of the limelight and want to be left alone to live the lives that they need to live in order to be their best selves.
The vast majority of what is passing for trans right now uh is comprises this resurgence of regressive gender norms that will reinforce disempowering lifestyles for women.
That's one.
Social contagion, mental delusion, or some combination of all three.
So let me just talk about these three briefly.
With regard to regressive gender norms, if you're a man, you should feel free to be a sensitive poet who likes to dress in flowy clothes and discuss your feelings for hours over tea and scones or wine and ice cream or whatever it is you want to discuss it over, right?
And do that.
Be that guy.
Do not mistake this for being a woman.
It doesn't make you a woman.
Makes you a guy who doesn't fit into traditional gender norms.
That's fine.
You're a guy.
You're a man.
If you're a woman, be free.
Actually be free.
To be a risk-taking electrician, perhaps, who does not want to answer the question, how are you feeling today?
Like, ever.
Maybe.
Don't mistake that for being a man.
You're a woman who doesn't fit into traditional gender norms.
I've said this many, many times.
When we were growing up in the 70s and 80s, that was increasingly fine.
I was a girl and became a young woman who did not fit traditional gender norms and I was lucky to have parents who thought that was just fine.
And if I were growing up today, my desire to never wear dresses and when I was put in a dress to get it pretty dirty because I was outside playing in the mud, It would have resulted in someone, perhaps privately at school, informing me that probably what I was revealing was that I wasn't a girl at all, but that I was a boy.
No?
Wrong.
I never mistook myself for a boy.
And I'm also not, as some number of people who are gender non-conforming are, homosexual.
Just not.
Right?
There are lots and lots of ways to be a girl or a boy.
a woman or a man.
And none of those different ways of being mean that what you are revealing is that you're actually the other thing.
You're not, okay?
You're not.
So, returning to regressive expectations about what it means to be a man or a woman, and if you don't play well with the gender norms of your society, well then you have to be the other thing?
Wrong.
And regressive.
And really bad, especially for women.
Without breaking your flow, I can add a point there.
I'm getting something from what you're saying that I hadn't seen before.
Just game theoretically speaking.
If we take a bunch of stuff and we say, hey, here's some guy stuff, and then here's girl stuff.
And, as you point out, in the 70s and 80s you were free to do whichever of those things you really wanted to do, and it didn't cause anybody to question your sex, right?
Right.
If we now say, well, that's guy stuff, and we take every person who is born female and is doing some guy stuff and has guy-like instincts or whatever, and we say, oh, you know what that means?
Guess you're a boy, right?
And so we force some large fraction of those people to jump the gap into transition, whatever that is, leaving on the female side people who express these more traditionally female patterns.
Then the point is actually somebody like you who encountered that world, if you arrive in that world after you've already done that, then the point is if you Want to be out there playing rough and doing whatever, right?
And you see that the only people who get to do that who are born female are people who are trans and go through some transition.
And the point is that becomes like a, you know, either you're going to have to go do a bunch of stuff that you didn't feel like doing in the first place, or transition is the alternative.
It creates a false choice.
That's right.
And it pushes you to Thinking, well, the only reasonable option here is to declare myself trans because then I get access to the stuff.
And there's something in, you know, I'm talking about girls and women who come to believe that they are boys or men specifically.
And, you know, which is not the sort of the predatory direction of the trans problem.
The predatory direction is the other direction.
But it's also true that in modern times many people would have you believe that to be a woman is to, you know, almost inherently end up being raped.
And, you know, the Me Too movement, which could have been amazing and was completely taken off the rails, suggests that, you know, everything is bad for girls and women all the time.
The workforce is, you know, replete with sexism and groping and harassment, and you'll never get to the top, and women are paid less, and it's exhausting and terrifying and awful, and like, well, why don't I just become a man?
Why don't I just become a man?
Okay, this is terrible.
And also, I don't even get to do the things I want to do if I know that I'm this.
So I'll just do that.
I'll just be that thing.
And what isn't being said, I mean, a lot of us are saying it's like, Actually, there's a whole lot of false narrative out here.
You're being given a whole lot of false choices that you didn't have to make before, and the one that you're being pushed into is actually not an option.
That's a failure to recognize basic basic.
Reality.
Like, you just, you cannot become a man if you're born female.
You cannot.
You can't do it.
You can't even have the thing, even if it's the thing that you want.
You can do something, but it's not what you're being promised.
Right, and the people who I think privately, and I think they know that I think of them as, you know, true trans, actually trans, I read them as, I engage them as, the gender that they are living as, even though it is not the sex that they actually are.
And they do not deny biological reality.
The people who are actually truly struggling with a gender dysphoria and gender dysmorphia that is persistent and consistent and painful and awful for them, such that they really feel that they need to live as the thing that they are not, the sex that they are not, even though they cannot ever actually become the sex that they are not, are not the ones on the streets doing the activism.
That's not what is happening.
So So I had something else I wanted to add.
I'm imagining a scenario in which a girl like you were In modern times.
We just sort of transport your situation into modern times.
And the girl who is enjoying doing stuff that's traditionally boy stuff reveals this and then gets a reaction from the female role models in her world that is predicated on the nonsense narrative that's being pumped through the New York Times, Scientific American... The Biden administration.
The Biden administration, in which those females who should say, you know, what's the natural thing to do?
The natural thing to do is to be supportive of this girl.
Frankly, there may be a little good natured chiding of the fact that you're a tomboy.
I don't think that's even out of keeping.
The fact that a girl is, you know, hanging with the boys is something that is worthy of comment.
It's interesting.
And so anyway, this girl should be getting feedback from her female elders about what she's doing, what its implications are.
Obviously, that's, you know, she's hanging out with the boys are probably something she needs to know earlier than she might need to know them otherwise.
And instead of that, I'm imagining that these female role models are suddenly going to have the sense of, okay, He's trans.
What does that mean?
Well, it means we're in danger of a suicide if we're not supportive, right?
That is the trump card that is used to sell this whole thing.
The point is, OK, nobody do anything dumb.
All right.
We are completely supportive of her transness.
We are there for her 100 percent.
And so now we need to broadcast that at her.
So that she understands, we're there, we're gonna get her through this, there's lots of help available, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
And so the point is, the feedback that would ordinarily, under any normal circumstances, at the very least, even if the girl thought she was trans, be like, Are you sure?
Can we talk about this?
Lots of people have the sense that they are one thing or another and it, you know, naturally goes away in most people.
So can we just, you know, slow down and figure out what it means?
But the Somehow we've experienced a reversal of the default assumption.
And the default assumption isn't a mild default assumption.
The default assumption, which is that you're the sex you are, I thought's the default assumption.
And the very, very, very exceedingly rare thing, which is, you know, okay, maybe you're intersex, extremely rare, or you are the sex you are, but maybe you really are going to be better off living life as the other thing.
We know some of those people because we were teaching at extremely liberal college, right, at the point that this was becoming more of a thing.
Most people Probably would never meet someone who was actually trans in the true way, unless they happen to live in a small population where there's a particular genetic thing going on, like, as I mentioned, this little village in the Dominican Republic.
So the fact that high schools Right?
One girl declares herself trans and suddenly all of her friends are trans.
That's not trans.
No.
No, that's social contagion.
That's what that is.
That's like anorexia.
And that's like cutting.
And unfortunately, that's like suicide.
Right?
Those are the things that we see spreading contagiously Through teen groups, especially female teen groups.
Male teen groups as well, but female teen groups.
And, um, when it's anorexia or other eating disorders or cutting or, God forbid, suicide.
We don't encourage it, do we?
No, we do not encourage it.
That would be criminal, as so is the encouraging of this social contagion that is happening.
So, I want to fill that in a little bit.
One, the examples you mentioned are exactly what you're saying.
Social contagion is the right version of the story.
There is another version of the story in which the same pattern exists, but it's not inherently pathological.
Right?
So we see lots of trends.
Trendiness is a thing, especially in the young, right?
Whether it's a trend about, you know, how you wear your hair.
Hem, hem, hem length.
Whether it's the style of music that you like, or the style of dancing that you're doing, or, you know, the expression, you know, nobody says daddy-o anymore.
So the point is, um, I never know anyone who did.
Right.
We are too young for Daddy-O to have been a thing, so it was always hilarious.
It was always a go-to.
But the point is, it is very natural for social experiments.
In fact, this is Dawkins' understanding of what memes are.
They're these flashes of something spreading horizontally across a population.
And it can be very, you know, terrible stuff like cutting or worse.
Or it can be benign stuff, right?
Like the inflection of your voice or whatever.
And so the point is that is a natural feature of that age.
And we have taken something... And let's talk a little bit about why.
Yeah, well, let's get there, but we have taken something in which the consequences could not possibly be more dire and long-term, right?
You are talking about committing this, you know, a tattoo is bad enough, right?
You get a tattoo of something you thought was cool when you were 15, and it's like, oh god, do I have to live with that thing or get it removed, right?
But We're talking... Stakes are low.
Right, the stakes, the tattoo stakes are low compared to, you know what, I think I might be trans, right?
And then suddenly we're, you know, permanently modifying you in a way that actually takes functional stuff and replaces it with, at best, a simulation that isn't functional, right?
This is in no, you know, the whole... Well, people are becoming People are becoming living avatars.
That's it.
It's the online rules.
They are aspiring to be a facade.
To be a presentation.
To be an avatar that will pass.
And especially the younger these kids do this, the more likely they are never to have experienced their body as an adult.
The more likely they are never to have experienced sex with another human being.
The more likely they are never to have experienced moving around the world and seeing how it is that the world engages with them as they are, as opposed to as they imagine they could be in their heads.
And the idea that I know, as someone who has not yet even fully gone through puberty, that I need to be a thing, which I have no empirical understanding of either Being a man or a woman because I'm too young to have experienced either yet?
I'm going to block my ability permanently from becoming either?
That's horrifying.
Everyone is born with very rare exceptions.
Everyone is born such that they will become a man if they were born a girl or a woman Did I just say that wrong?
A man if they're born a boy or a woman if they were born a girl.
And if you were born a girl, you can't become a man.
If you're born a boy, you can't become a woman.
And if you wanted it differently, I'm sorry, like you just you can't have everything you want.
That's not reality.
So by allowing children to block their puberty, Even that is sufficient to, if they just stop it at that, if they're just on puberty blockers for a couple years and then something intervenes, like yeah, actually I'm not going to go on the cross-sex hormones, I'm not going to have the surgery, even just the puberty blockers will render them Less completely what they would have been, absent that ceasing of development on some channels for some number of years.
Because it doesn't just put you in stasis.
We aren't metamorphic creatures in the same way that a butterfly is, but we are developing along all of the possible axes, along all the possible domains, throughout, especially throughout our adolescence.
And puberty blockers slow down some of it, halt some of it, don't affect others of it, and at the point that you come off of it, if that's the only thing that you did, You might never obtain full fertility.
You might never obtain your full form that you would have.
You might not have the same voice that you would have.
You might not have the same behaviors and brain that you would have.
And furthermore, no one, including you, will ever know.
So this is a series of experimental manipulations of humanity for which there is no possibility of full
of a full understanding because the intervention itself prevents there being a control so which brings us back to the question of uh contagion being the pathological version or just horizontal transmission of culture in young people and
And I think what I'm realizing is you wanted to come back to the question of why it is that things spread so readily, you know, cultural traits spread so readily in young people, why we see that pattern.
And I think actually this really gets at something new, which is There is a reason that trends spread in young people and a lot of the trends that spread are nonsense and they're triggered by you know advertisers who are looking to manipulate the young into spending money and so in some sense I think we miss the importance of why it is that the young are so susceptible to patterns of behavior spreading horizontally where that would be much less likely to be true in adults although maybe more so
Susceptible, a more apt word when it's pathological.
Innovative, perhaps, when it's creating a new cultural way of being and is, maybe this is where you're going, but is responsive to, actually, I don't live in the world that my parents did.
Like, the world is changing such that I, as an adolescent, need to look out into the world and say, this is my world to frame as I need to understand it, and what my parents are telling me, what my elders are telling me about what is right and good, may not be the best way forward if the world isn't entirely static.
So there was a documentary, and unfortunately, because I didn't know we were going here, I don't remember the exact title.
It was a PBS documentary called, was it The Merchants of Cool or something like that?
Of Cool was definitely in the title, and it was a group of Advertising folks, especially some folks who looked much younger than they actually were, who were part of a project to figure out who the trendsetters were amongst these teenagers and to figure out what it was they were doing that caused them to be able to set a trend and then the advertisers picked up on it and they did that thing, right?
Yeah.
And essentially, the trendsetters were, you know, this will come as no surprise to anybody who was paying attention as they moved through that phase of life, the trendsetters are very often the people who are a bit insensitive to what people think of them.
They do something, and they don't really care, and the point is, oh, that is kind of cool.
That's powerful that, you know, you're gonna Dress in a way that if you described it to me, I might think was ridiculous, but you're sitting there in class and you don't even care.
You don't care how people are looking at you.
That speaks of power, right?
And so, A, we've got a bastardized version of this because advertisers have been invaded every aspect of our lives.
And so I think we're misled into feeling that this whole trend-making apparatus is all some kind of weird shenanigans.
It's a con at some level, but that's not its inherent nature.
And if you imagine a high school that exists, if you impose on it the structure of civilization that existed 300 years ago, Where people didn't move very far from where they were born, typically.
Then the point is, why would you be susceptible to picking up a role that was catching on in your little social milieu as you were passing through that age?
Well, in some sense, your cohort is about to emerge into adulthood and inherit the power to run the place over time.
And you are establishing, you know, everybody is picking a role, and that changes the roles available to everybody else.
And so in some sense, being sensitive to, oh, what's working?
Well, if that's cool in your cohort, and your cohort's going to stick with that being cool, then it makes sense to be able to play in that milieu, right?
So anyway, I think in some ways this doesn't make any sense in a giant anonymous high school where you're going to leave and never see most of these people again.
But the idea that you should be very sensitive to, you know, as you point out, you're not going to live in your parents' world.
You're going to live in a new world, and in that world there will be rules, and you're discovering them as they form amongst these people who don't yet have power but are about to.
That it makes sense to jockey for where am I going to be?
Who am I in that world?
And so the point is, you want a world.
It is natural for human beings to experiment at that phase of life for reasons that may not make any sense anymore, but are nonetheless deeply built in.
The last thing that you want to do is sit there at the edge of the playground.
And look for one pattern that you're going to decide is unlike all of the other trends you're going to ignore.
And say, ah, that one's medical.
That's deep psychological stuff.
We now have absolute evidence this is a special kind of human being that requires severe medical intervention that will permanently alter who this person is into the future.
The point is, no, no, no.
That's like saying, you know, OK, you go get a haircut, and it's Wild and people are actually kind of cool with it.
You're like, okay, that's your haircut for life, right?
If it was a haircut, that would be bad enough.
If you were stuck with something that, right?
Bad enough.
But now we're talking about actually interfering with the opportunities that the person will have physiologically going forward.
That couldn't be crazier.
Yeah.
It couldn't be crazier.
It couldn't be crazier, and yet both sides, and in this case it really is a both sides, right?
It's sides, it's two sides.
It's not left versus right, liberal versus conservative.
But it is, there are two sides, and both sides are convinced that they're on the right side of history.
They're convinced.
We're both convinced.
Um so I said that there's one or more of at least three things going on here with the with the rise in um so-called trans identity.
Now it's the it's um a return to regressive gender norms, there's social contagion and there's also some mental illness uh and um Usually the mental illness is wrapped up in the social contagion, but the fact, you know what, you already mentioned this, but often parents are told, well if you don't support your child's trans identity,
Their chances of committing suicide go way up.
And what is in fact true, because that's not, is that people who become convinced that they are trans are separately also very likely to have a number of other diagnosable mental concerns such as depression and anxiety and various other things that have been named in the last 20 or 30 years.
I'm not trying to trivialize them, but there's a cluster of these sort of social anxiety things that include even the darkest of the dark, and that can sometimes lead to people committing suicide, that are clustered in among people Looking for home.
Looking for identity.
And looking for identity is a large part of what a lot of people are doing.
Looking for meaning and looking for identity in adolescence, right?
And frankly, I mean just like to be very honest, I don't recognize from myself, nor do I remember the friends that I had in high school, which included you, focusing so much on identity.
I was focused on meaning.
What are we doing?
What is this about?
How do I make meaning in the world?
How do I make it a better place and make my life have had meaning?
Yeah.
And increasingly, frankly, it's a move towards the narcissistic.
It's a move towards the interior, like, oh, how do I figure out who I am and how I'm presenting to the world?
That's more about identity.
And there's always some of those.
But it does feel like adolescents now are expected to be focused on identity and not on meaning.
And frankly, I think if we move towards More towards how is it that you can make meaning for yourself and for the world through your life, rather than how is it that you can make sure that everyone knows who you are as you understand it by making sure they get your made-up pronouns correct, for instance.
That's not going to be nearly as good a choice for you.
Regardless of whether or not the anxiousness and the sort of debilitating concerns about how the world views you that are so common now that are associated also with the rise and social media and cell phones and not spending time moving your body and outside and actually physically engaging with your friends, like in real space and time.
All of that is sort of a rise in mental illness, if you will, and wrapped in the social contagion.
We get people who have the one thing that the guy on the side of the playground in your vignette goes like, that's the one that we're going to prioritize.
That's the one that we're going to name and decide that that's not social contagion, that's not mental illness, that's the one.
That's not a trend.
That's not a trend, that's reality.
That's a reality that all of humanity until now has been missing.
We never saw it before, but suddenly in 2013, something like that, we're going to have this uptick and it's going to be happening.
And press secretary, now.
Go ahead.
The Press Secretary now refers to what is being done to children as treatment.
Treatment.
As in trans treatment.
No.
No.
That's wrong.
It's not treatment.
We don't treat anorexia by taking away food from anorexics and telling them that they're fat.
That's not how we treat anorexia.
We don't treat people who cut themselves.
by supplying with sharp knives in private space in which to get in touch with their feelings.
That's not how we treat people who cut themselves.
This is the opposite of treatment.
But the confusion on, yes, the other side is they are revealing their true selves.
They are screaming for help into the abyss and if you don't listen to them and honor their delusions then they will kill themselves.
No!
No.
There is separately suicidal ideation among some people, and those concerns need to be dealt with, but it is not this way.
It's not this way.
So I want to add a couple other things, and then I want to get back to what the press secretary said and why.
But Not only are we identifying something that might be a fad on a playground and identifying it as, oh, that person is actually a victim of a kind of oppression that we are now morally obligated, all of us, to support them in something that we understand about them, etc., etc., but we are also
Handing people who need two things from us the inverse of the two things that they need a we are handing them a Weapon with which to get that which they want at this instant which they may in the present context Urgently want and it may be their parents obligation to say no, honey I'm gonna have to override you on this one because that's my job.
My job is to create a The environment that makes you into the adult that you can be and that you want to be, not to cater to what you think you want as a child.
Sometimes you know what you want, sometimes you don't, and this is the time when I need to say no.
So handing them the idea that, oh, well, if you allude to suicide, then you get what you want, right?
A, that's going to create terrible parenting because the parents can't counter it, and B, it's going to create more suicide, right?
It is going to turn this into something, an arms race, Where they're going to have to be, you know, a credible threat and a certain number of people are going to lose their lives because of this cynical ploy.
Yeah.
A secondary contagion is being created by the people who are claiming to be trying to prevent just that.
Right.
But they're creating it.
They are creating it.
Now the other thing is, and this is going to get back to the press secretary in a second, but the The thing that people need.
Imagine the collection of truly well-intentioned women, role models, who are encountering the Heather-like girl who is expressing some boy-like preferences in the world and are motivated to think, oh God, we know who the good people have been in history and who the villains have been.
We're going to be the good people.
We're going to be as supportive as we can.
Yada, yada, yada.
Those people need to hear from women who maybe did travel a route more like yours, where they discovered actually they could do whatever they wanted, right?
It's not even that you chose a, you know, a male-like life.
I mean, you have two kids, you've done the mother thing beautifully, and you've also been a, you know, a jungle biologist.
Chosen what you wanted.
You can do that.
Somebody needs to tell the girl who discovers that she has some things she wants to do that aren't traditionally girl things.
But that's fine, right?
And the problem is that those... We used to do that.
Right.
Those women who are supposed to be the role models for that girl who is in need of advice Might find you and hear from you or somebody else who's got a similar story, right?
But they're not going to because as soon as somebody, the environment, the political environment, has been deliberately charged So that you are not an authoritative source on this, because do you know what else is wrong with your perspective?
And then a list of phony things that mean that somehow you're a cryptic conservative, despite having never been a conservative for a minute in your life, right?
I don't follow the right science.
I don't follow the right science.
That's a doozy of a statement.
But yes, it's exactly that.
The point is, this is just creating an environment Where everybody needs somebody to tell them what they need to know, rather than what they want to hear.
And the rules that mean that as soon as you start listening to the person who knows what you need to know, and might tell you, and the point is, well, you're not exper- Are you listening to Bobby Kennedy Jr.?
Do you realize he's an anti-vaxxer?
Right?
That thing causes you not to hear from the person who has exactly the piece of information that you need to learn.
There's two different things that you just invoked there.
We're going to attach kryptonite to that thing, whatever it is.
Whether it's me talking about being a girl who didn't like to do girl things, or it's Bobby Kennedy Jr.
running for president and getting no traction because people go, Anti-vaxxer, right?
But there's that, but there's also, I've just forgotten because I said anti-vaxxer.
I forgot where I was going.
All right.
Hopefully it'll come back to you in a second.
So I want to get back to the press secretary and what I think actually happened.
Is it that moment?
Sure, yeah.
I've got a few more things to do, but go for it.
So here's my concern.
First of all, press secretary is a very special job.
It's the job I want least in life.
It's an evil job.
It's a job that you're paid to either be stupid or lie through your teeth.
I looked a little bit into her background.
She's had a ton of interesting and reputable academic positions and this, that, and the other.
She didn't come out of nowhere.
Nonetheless, the point is, it came out of her mouth.
This is a ploy, and I think I know what ploy this is.
And the problem is that this is a ploy in which both sides get what they want.
So game theoretically, it's a funny, it's a funny object.
Um, so I want to give an example from somewhere else.
There's a documentary.
Um, I forget.
It's a, it's a basically a new atheist documentary in which there is a scene in which Richard Dawkins confronts a famous, uh, Creationist, maybe intelligent design guy.
And they have a little debate, right?
If you're a sciency person...
Dawkins destroys him.
Absolutely destroys him.
But if you're a skeptic, no.
Dawkins is absolutely obliterated, right?
And the point is... Really?
Oh yeah.
They both deliver to their audience what... So the point is they both cryptically win.
I'm not saying... I don't... Dawkins was not cynical in this.
Dawkins thought he won the debate.
He did not understand that from the point of view of the utility of the object, it changed nobody's mind.
Right?
All it did was feed each of their audiences exactly what they wanted, right?
Now, this thing that came out of the press secretary's mouth is a clever construction designed to produce this reaction.
And the point is, I'm going to- Well, I'm not- Sorry, but like, that is part of why I started with like, I went and scrolled through the comments, and I'm like, not today, Satan.
Right.
Rams are communists.
They're saying the quiet part out loud.
And I'm like, oh, but of course you're saying those things.
But aren't you the same people who do honestly want to protect children?
Aren't you?
I think you are.
Right.
But imagine how this looks from, I mean, you and I are blue dissidents, so it's very hard for us to actually feel what it's like to be a blue believer at the moment.
Yeah.
But from a blue believer's perspective, here's what happened.
The press secretary said something Actually, just noble and normal, something everybody understood two years ago.
And the conservatives are so crazy that they actually thought it was demonic, right?
So what she said was, the children are all our responsibility, right?
That's not the exact quote, but that's what people who are New York Times readers will have heard.
These are our kids.
They belong to all of us.
They belong to all of us.
My point is, they belong to all of us is the most beautiful Mott and Bailey I've ever seen, right?
There is an interpretation of they belong to all of us that is so obvious and so fundamental to the way a civilization works that no reasonable person could possibly disagree with it.
And in the present context, if you say the children belong to all of us, not my fucking kids.
You keep your hands off them, right?
So it is simultaneously the most obvious thing in the world and the most aggressive attack on children you can imagine.
And so both sides, you know, the press secretary says it.
She gets exactly what she wants.
And whoever wrote that phrase, they get exactly what they want.
Where the home team just like, yeah, of course.
And then the conservatives go, you can't possibly mean that.
And then the blue team goes, Wait, what's wrong with those people?
Are they really so crazy they don't understand that we have an obligation to children?
Right?
No, and that's why I started.
Right.
Yeah.
So anyway, my point is just, okay, everybody, can we stop being played by these assholes?
They're not on any of our teams.
Yes.
Right?
These people are about their own power and what they're doing is they're using children, they are cynically using children, completely indifferent to the harm done to them, to divide us.
Right?
They are using children to divide civilization so that they can play their fucking political games and they can win their power and they can sell it to their real constituents that have nothing to do with voters.
Right?
This is not about us.
And so it is really important that we remember that A. Yes.
Children are our collective responsibility.
The primary mechanism through which we honor that responsibility is through parents.
Right?
This is generally simple.
In general, one's parents has their own children's interests at heart and we can trust them to make the judgment calls.
We are now manipulating parents and telling them they don't understand and basically we're pulling the same kind of coup that public health pulled on medicine, right?
Civilization is now pulling on parents and is telling them you don't have the right to do what's right for your kid.
Yeah, no, and teachers are acting like the doctors who were captured by ideological nonsense during the pandemic.
Right.
Everybody is because everybody lives in fear of being on the wrong side of history, which I get in trouble for sometimes for invoking the right and the wrong side of history.
I'm a believer in these things, but I'm not a believer in them as in, oh, here is a right side of history.
That you must be on.
My point is, we should all be trying to understand how history will actually look at this.
But this makes us terrifically manipulable if we, you know, start taking people's word for what the right side is.
And we have to avoid that.
Yeah.
Especially where children are involved.
Especially where children are involved.
So a couple more things related to that, and we could go on indefinitely, and I'm going to write about a little something related in Natural Selections this week, so you'll get more.
In Florida, and I did not, I have not read the bill, but a bill passed, I think?
I'm not actually even sure, so this, I just saw this last minute before coming on air here, That combines limits on abortion to fetuses that are under, I think, 12 weeks of gestational age, with limits on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery for minors, that is, people under 18, who declare themselves trans.
Now, I wish they hadn't combined those two things in a single piece of legislation.
It certainly doesn't help the vast number of us in the middle who don't just vote by platform or by party, but who have different views on different things.
But it is what it is, right?
So let's just focus for the moment on that second part, which has been widely portrayed as denying health care to minors.
Denying health care to minors.
That's not what it is, of course, but here we go.
If you would put up my screen, this is an, you know, I don't have any idea who this guy is.
He tweeted this thing.
I'm putting it up.
Don't spam him.
He is tweeting about a report out that reports that says Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signs bill legalizing anti-LGBTQ plus medical discrimination.
law allows any medical provider or insurer to deny care based on ethical, moral, or religious beliefs.
So again, that's not actually what happened.
But this MD says, I'm an emergency medicine doctor.
When you come to my ER, I will take care of you even if your beliefs are different than mine.
My job is to take care of patients.
If you would deny patient care because they have different beliefs than you, then you should not be in medicine.
Okay.
That sounds, again, quite reasonable, and I think this may be, I think in this case unintentionally, because this is just some presumably good-faith, trying-to-do-his-best ER doc who's making a claim that sounds utterly reasonable, and there were, you know, lots of replies to him saying, it's not what the bill says, it's not, like, no, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong.
But the part of that that I want to take issue with, because I think it is a way of framing this deep and important disagreement that we have in this country, is his framing of this as taking care.
A doctor's job is to take care.
A parent's job is to take care.
The administration understands that its job is to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves and that's right, right?
It's our job to take care of our children and it's our job as a society to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves and it's a doctor's job to take care of people, that's why they come to doctors.
But for me and for us and for many of us, this amounts to a fundamental disagreement about what it means to take care, right?
Taking care of children, again, and we already did this like you know probably for over an hour at this point we've already been doing this, what it means to take care of children is to not let them Certainly not encourage them, but not let them make medical decisions that they will never be able to undo at the point that they are yet unable to understand the implications of those decisions.
What it means to take care is to protect them such that they have as many options open to them as possible in the future, which includes Alright.
Couple things.
fully capable, fully able human adult of whatever sex it was they were born to.
That's what it means to take care.
All right.
A couple things.
One, it is amazing to me how remote we have become from the Hippocratic Oath.
Yeah.
There is something about the Hippocratic Oath and the Nuremberg Code that exists above job descriptions.
Right.
These things are... I mean, we don't say oath lightly, right?
Not many jobs have an oath.
Doctors have an oath.
That oath is rather like the claim that one should be very concerned about making sure that they are on the right side of history, where it is Easier to understand the obligation than it is to operationalize it.
What does it mean to do no harm?
Obviously a surgeon does a certain amount of harm and hopefully the point is net good is always the objective.
Yep.
But nonetheless, there is an oath here, and the surgeries in question, the puberty blockers, the interventions surrounding affirmative, so-called affirmative care, which is, you know, like vaccine, a euphemism being used to sneak something past us, but the
Kinds of interventions are very specifically destructive of non-subjective physiological function.
Right?
To go from a person that can conceive a child as either a male or a female and render them someone who cannot conceive a child at all... Do we talk about men conceiving children?
I don't think so.
I don't think we use that word for men.
Do we?
If not, I am going to bring this up at the next meeting of the Patriarchy, and we're going to get that changed because men have... Suppose we agree that although men cannot actually conceive children, that they have the right to conceive children.
Do we have to call you Loretta?
No, but Stan would be fine.
In any case...
So, I think the overarching point is that this is actually, at the operational level, genuinely difficult stuff.
I don't think the affirmative care stuff is genuinely difficult.
I think the point is young people are not in a position to know for certain enough to get involved in any medical intervention that has permanent implications at that age.
What's more, To the extent that there's any argument against that, parents have an absolute right to do what is best for their children in blocking this.
Even if medical science declares that there's some reasonable deployment of these interventions, parents have a right to say absolutely no, and schools don't get any right to override that, and government doesn't get any right to override that.
But I do want to point to the genuinely difficult underlying stuff here, okay?
When you first... I did not know that the abortion limitations and the... Not allowing medical intervention for minors who declare themselves trans.
Right, we're housed in the same bill.
On the other hand, when I hear that, I instantly get why that would have to be the case.
I thought maybe it's sneaky political stuff, but in some sense, what DeSantis appears to be trying to do is to carve out a mechanism where doctors cannot be forced into really diabolical medical interventions, right?
If society is going to say, well, we have to support these children in their transition and that means that you have to, you know, A, agree that such a thing is reasonable and B, provide the medications that set the children up and C, you know, get them into the surgical setting where this all happens.
If you're a doctor who thinks, You're talking about mutilating children on the basis that they learned something at school that made them think for, you know, some period during their teenage years that they might be in the wrong body, and I don't want any part of participating because I swore an oath that I wouldn't do that sort of thing.
That doctor has to have the right to say no, right?
And so I guess my point is, as soon as you recognize that that doctor has to have the right to say no, In some sense, you've recognized that doctors have the right to say no, and obviously you and I are in a very different place than DeSantis and others on that side of the fence with respect to the right to an abortion early in pregnancy.
I don't see a meaningful difference between a doctor's right to object to maiming children according to this trans belief structure that has so cynically been foisted upon us and the right to say no to participating in In that process.
Framed as you are an expert in a domain for which you went to school for a very long time, it is within your purview to decide whether or not you will do some procedures.
And, you know, I guess presumably Doctors have always had the right to say, actually, I don't prescribe X drug, because I actually know.
I actually know that that drug is not what they're claiming, and I don't care.
You come to my office asking for that drug, you're going to have to find someone else.
I'm sorry.
I won't do it, and here's why, and I hope you won't either.
So, uh, you know, and I hope you won't find someone else to do it, because I really don't think it's a good choice.
Similar with surgeries.
Presumably, I hope, there are doctors saying, actually, um, you know, surgery for x isn't something you should, you should get.
Oh, you've got to Tear in your meniscus, in your knee's meniscus, and it's not one of these bucket-handle tears.
It's gonna be snagging on you every time you move.
It's just a little tear.
I overrode my doctor when I had a little tear in my meniscus.
I'm not getting surgery for that.
I've had none though.
I'm not doing it.
And it was a much better choice.
I wish that I had had a doctor who had been, what, brave enough to say, hey, why would you get surgery in this case?
So I assume the doctors have the agency and I'm surprised that it is required that there be, so I don't know, you and I are not familiar with this bill well enough so you're framing this as like a doctor agency.
Protector, and I don't know that we need legislation for that so I'm not at all sure that that's what this is actually doing, but in terms of sort of understanding it philosophically, the two topics are linked, because they're both going to have a lot of People will disagree strongly about these two topics.
Abortion, so say second trimester abortions, because first trimester abortions are still facilitated, or allowed rather, not facilitated, allowed, and not allowing interventions to minors for people, for minors who think they are the sex they are not.
So I think you have just landed on a very important piece of this puzzle.
There is a phrase that has been ringing in my ears since early in COVID, and I have not quite figured out why it's bugging me.
It is standard of care.
I believe doctors are less free than you think because of the idea of standard of care, which I think standard of care is going to fit on a list of objects that seem obviously positive and it's going to be a disaster, and that list of objects includes things like Peer review, which turns out is not the same thing as review by your peers.
It is, you know, land next to things like evidence-based medicine, which is not the same thing as following the evidence to the right medical interventions.
There's a list of these euphemisms that are used to constrain the deployment of products and procedures.
And the thing about standard of care is that Doctors have the right to prescribe off-label, but the question is, if a drug is bad, and the conventional wisdom is that it is good, how much freedom do doctors have to opt out of it?
And what we saw with COVID was that in the case of certain things, that right evaporates rather quickly.
There was no opt-out of some things, and there was no opt-in to others.
Right, so that is an almost perfect, you know, you had one tool you could deploy and what's more you had to deploy it.
And the whole thing would have unfolded very differently if that had not been the case.
So standard of care, I have a feeling, is a rock that we're going to find a lot of very creepy things under.
But the other thing that I wanted to say is if you look at the quote from the press secretary, Again, it's a beautifully constructed object to create exactly this kind of Rorschach moment.
Again, these are our kids.
They belong to all of us.
Right.
They belong to all of us, which will be read by Blue Team loyalists as... Of course they do.
It takes a village.
Yeah, it takes a village, and it will be read by the Red Team as, oh, they're not really your kids.
Leave them to us, which is in fact, there's been an awful lot of that in school and elsewhere But but here's my point.
Okay, the children are It is civilization's responsibility to put children first.
Let's put it that way that is actually true.
Yep Parents are the way that we typically do that right and parents are not guaranteed to do a good job of this but in general At least we know that a parent's interests are in general aligned with their own children, whereas the government's are not, right?
The government's interests can be exactly counter to the children.
So, parents are the primary tool, but here's the issue.
Let's take an analogous situation that has nothing to do with affirmative care or COVID or any of the other controversial stuff.
In general, parents have, as they should, extraordinary rights to decide what medical interventions to expose their children to.
The Nuremberg Code says you have the right to informed consent.
In the case of a child who is too young to be properly informed and to consent to these things, the parents stand in lieu of the children.
And they must have informed consent.
But this leaves us in a quandary with things like, I believe it's Christian scientists who don't believe in doctors?
I don't know.
Maybe.
Let's just say that there's some small but significant religious sect in which I think the religious explanation is effectively for you to interfere with whatever God might be doing to you.
Yep.
Right?
Now the problem is Do we collectively have the right to intervene on behalf of a child whose parents believe such a thing and has a curable but let's say fatal condition that the parents do not want to treat?
Right?
I'm not saying I know the answer to that.
My instinct would be that we have the right to intervene, but I'm not sure of that because I'm not sure that I want to carve out that right in the face of governmental structures that will clearly abuse any opening and, you know, drive a train through it.
So I don't know.
All I'm saying is, guess what?
At the level of operationalizing the principle that you are referring to, this is a genuinely difficult puzzle.
Even if the principle itself is perfectly straightforward.
Which it is.
Yes.
There are certainly edge cases.
This doesn't feel like one.
I don't think it is.
There are edge cases, as you have pointed out, with regard to life-saving interventions.
But then, of course, there are many things that have passed as life-saving interventions that have turned out not to be life-saving interventions.
And so those things that seem really, really clear will not be clear to some people, and even some of the people for whom those edge cases aren't clear, not all of them are crazy, right?
Some of them had an anecdotal experience that is not something that is likely to ever happen again, but as a result they say, no way, no how, not that thing for any member of my family because my cousin this, right?
Well... And it's challenging.
I would say this is the other, you know, you and I have talked in general terms about this question, which is getting less, you know, we've talked about the question whether or not the Amish are right, and the short answer has been Not exactly, but they may have the right idea.
They may have spotted something and picked an arbitrary moment to step off the technological escalator, but nonetheless, it doesn't mean it's the wrong decision.
But I would point out, given the idea of metaphorical truth, that metaphorical truth means something that isn't literally accurate, but stands in for a belief that you can't spell out that is literally accurate, The idea that, well, who are you to interfere with God's physiological plan for you?
I don't think there's anything to the idea that there's a God that has a plan, and so there's obviously lots of cases where we can cure you of something.
If you have an infection, there's no reason to let it go to gangrene if we have an antibiotic that will cure it.
I would say that traditions that are extremely cautious about medical intervention are looking more and more prescient given the level of iatrogenic harm that we are now seeing, COVID being the most distilled and concentrated case where simply opting out of everything the medical establishment told you made you better off than following any of it, really,
Well, in some ways, and you've found this for many, many, many years, but in some ways the apparently strange bedfellows that are evolutionary biologists and the deeply religious, where we find ourselves on the same side of many issues increasingly, which is don't intervene unless you absolutely 100% know that you're not knocking down a fence a la Chesterton that has a reason that you do not yet understand.
These alignments between, for instance, evolutionary biologists and the deeply religious are about recognizing that the origin story is different.
We don't think it's God.
We think it's billions of years of evolution that have built things that are much more complex than we can know.
But there is a respect for A set of forces, if you will, selection, God, by which we can know that our belief that we simply got this and we can change it and we're good would be arrogant.
And the interventionists, which is to say most of public health now, most of modern medicine, is flying on hubris.
It's all arrogance.
Got this!
This is not, eh, you know, it's not God, we don't really get evolution, whatever, we're going to fix these things because we fixed it once, and it worked, and we fixed it twice, and it worked, and I didn't fix it that third time, but things will happen.
And those of us who are being cautious out of a sense of, you have no idea, You actually have no idea.
We are trying to have an idea, but we know the limits of our understanding here.
That, I think, is something that is shared between the people who attribute their lack of understanding to there is another entity that has created this and has done it for a reason, and those of us who say, we don't believe in the entity, but there are forces, specifically selection, that have built these
These processes and these structures and these systems over literally billions of years, and when you mess with one, you actually do not know what all you are messing with.
You know, I had a conversation, like a two-hour conversation with Zev Zelenko shortly before he died.
He was one of the earliest and most vociferous COVID dissidents, an Orthodox Jew, and it was a shocking conversation.
I mean he was incredibly thoughtful in his approach to all of the surrounding issues and at the same time deeply aware of very ancient roots of proper medical thinking.
He talked for 20 minutes about Maimonides, which is something I was I'm not even aware that there were conclusions worth looking for that far back.
But anyway, there is something.
It doesn't really matter whether your reverence for this comes from a love of the self-assembling biological universe or from a belief that somebody wanted this to happen.
Right.
The real question is, you know, are you motivated?
Are you really rooting for it?
And do you have a sort of... I mean, you're right to point to Chesterton's fence.
Do you really understand how well constructed it is and therefore how unlikely it is that your intervention, if it is anything but simple and predicated on very secure assumptions, is likely to be positive?
Right?
Do you have any idea how unlikely you are to improve that thing?
And medicine is suffering from an incredible arrogance in part because we have this huge pharmacopoeia of molecules nobody understands that were tested under conditions where the people who own the patents were also doing the testing to see if they were safe and effective Right?
And so, you know, doctors have this whole, you know, amazing medical machine to throw at people who have some sort of a complaint, and it's, you know... Imagine them throwing a really sharp and heavy machine at people.
I mean, frankly, people would be better off in many cases.
You can dodge it.
Right, exactly.
Alright, you get a little bruise, but, you know, that's not the doctor for you.
But, in any case, it was interesting to find yet another deeply religious person who, at the end of the day, you know, those who come from the secular side often expect of the deeply religious, you know, that they are inherently some sort of I mean, you know, they're quacks from somewhere else.
And the fact is, this is not the experience, right?
These are people who, yes, have a different fundamental understanding of the universe, but that motivation, just in the same way that parents are, in general, aligned with the interests of their children to an extreme degree, to the extent that you believe that there's somebody who had this as a plan and that you are part of that plan, you're probably motivated to be a pretty darn good doctor.
Yeah, that's right.
Wow, okay, one more little thing here related to some of what we've been talking about.
Did you hear about what the Editor-in-Chief of, I think she's the Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American, did this week?
Yeah, so here's the tweet.
Based on an article in Audubon called The Fascinating and Complicated Sex Lives of White-Throated Sparrows, the editor at Scientific American says, White-throated sparrows have four chromosomally distinct sexes that pair up in fascinating ways.
P.S.
Nature is amazing.
P.P.S.
Sex is not binary.
Well, she got thoroughly and appropriately dragged for this because she's just dead wrong.
And you would hope, you would hope that the editor, again, I forgot to look into it, I think editor-in-chief of Scientific American, would know that much basic, basic, basic biology, but apparently not because she is now driving an ideological and political journal, not a journal, magazine, not a scientific one, despite the name.
They're not going to change the name, I'm sure, because if they called it Political American, it wouldn't continue to get the kind of readership that it does now.
But, um, I mean everyone from Jeffrey Miller to, uh, Colin Wright, like a lot of people, you know, accurately pointed out, uh, no, no, uh, there are four different chromosomal organizations that yield two different, uh, looks and strategies among the males, and two different looks and strategies among the females, and strategy doesn't make sex, no, wrong.
So, um, That is, I think, all I'm going to say about that right now, and I may not even refer to that, but what I'm writing about for my substack this week, which I think will be fun, is about a system with which I am very, very familiar, in which multiple male strategies do not render All those different strategies, lots and lots and lots of different sexes.
No, just like in humans, males can look a lot of different ways and do a lot of different things.
So too in, as it turns out, poison frogs in Madagascar.
And just as in humans, females can look a lot of different ways and do a lot of different things.
And that doesn't mean that we have eight bajillion sexes.
We have eight bajillion, however many it is on this planet at this point, individual human beings You are all individuals, even the ones who claim not to be, but you are one or the other sex.
And trotting out examples that are interesting and unusual from non-human animals like these right-throated sparrows With two distinct, like, phenotypically distinct, but still two males types and two female types.
Doesn't make it for sexes.
Doesn't make it non-binary.
By now, she may or may not know that, but regardless, I think the magazine is lost.
Like, you know, nature and science are more important.
They're the actual scientific journals.
They're lost.
Scientific American is lost.
Like, where are we supposed to talk about science anymore?
Well, it is...
Batshit crazy!
And I use that advisedly because you used to object when people would claim things batshit crazy.
I think the bats take a lot of negative press and I just... They do.
Yeah.
They've been blamed for a lot of things lately.
Yes, they have.
But no, you're absolutely right.
And you know, unfortunately, the bad news is that the new place where we apparently have reasonable scientific discussions is on podcasts, which is a terrible place.
I mean, it's great to have Good discussions on podcasts, but obviously, you know, it can't help but be the Wild West.
Yep.
So, you know, wouldn't it be... Geez, I wonder why somebody doesn't invent an actual scientific journal, right?
Wouldn't that be popular, right?
Or an actual newspaper, or an actual university, or, you know, an actual free speech platform, and lo and behold, Once again, we're back to zero as a special number, right?
And the answer is, of course, a single reliable scientific journal that was not politicized would be the premier journal on Earth almost instantly.
It doesn't happen because something is preventing it because it also knows that.
That's right.
Okay, I'm going to step off this slippery soapbox.
Slippery soapbox, yeah.
And you had something we've gone on for quite a while.
I have one more thing.
You have something that you want to talk about.
I will try to make it efficient.
So, I'm going to return to the question of Eliezer Yudkowsky and AI.
We talked last week about the – it wasn't even a full week ago, was it?
Yeah, it was.
About the...shows what I know.
That's how you know... You and I have both been traveling this week, it just feels like less time?
That doesn't even make sense.
You were thinking about a week ago.
I know.
Okay, I'm now caught up.
A week ago, we spoke about the question of the term doomers, which I think is quite unhelpful.
Because lots of us who believe that we are in very serious trouble as a result of AGI dawning, whether it has dawned or is about to, doesn't matter.
But lots of us who think that there is very serious jeopardy to humanity from this,
would be outside of the limits of what that term apparently refers to, which is Yudkowsky and others who see the world as he does, who think that the likelihood of our complete extinction is extremely high if we do not take utterly drastic action, including a pause on all research on large language models.
And extreme governmental authority to enforce that globe-wide, including things like airstrikes on server farms that participate in experiments that are unauthorized, etc.
So, the reason I bring it back up.
Is that an exchange unfolded on Twitter.
Yudkowsky responded to a clip of us talking about an example that he deployed in which he had argued that the AI might order up a virus that would infect a large fraction of the human population by being very contagious while not being highly virulent.
That it would make a small modification to the brain such that people would become highly susceptible on playing of a certain tone.
I took him to task.
I said, there's lots of bad things that can happen here.
That's not one of them and that he has some obligation.
If he's going to say, look, there are lots of ways that this could go very, very wrong, that he has to deliver examples that are plausible, and that when it comes to biology, I just think he is displaying that he misunderstands.
So, Zach, do you want to show the... So, here, Eliezer says, at Brett Weinstein, one, what is your understanding of my claim that a superintelligence could design a virus that Okay, now that is not what I was objecting to.
large chunk of the population to what do you think is impossible about your version of that claim.
Okay, now, that is not what I was objecting to.
I tried to be as complete as I could inside of a single tweet, and I said, quote, design won't work in the foreseeable future, but specify modifications to existing viruses is clearly possible.
Just ask EcoHealth Alliance, who participated in work that did just that, which very likely escaped the lab in Wuhan, creating the COVID pandemic, is what I'm alluding to.
I continued.
The part I found preposterous was that a virus leads to cognitive control of all infected or post-infection humans.
That doesn't square with reality.
Eliezer responds.
He says, why not?
Toxoplasmosis is not a thing, question mark.
No virus can possibly damage or modify brain structures.
I don't get what you think you know can't happen.
He continues.
Is your objection more like, one, It is not physically possible for there to be such a thing as a viral syndrome that e.g.
damages the amygdala and modifies the auditory nerve, or two, not even a super intelligence can design, or if you weirdly prefer, modify, a virus which does.
We won't continue his tweet.
You want to go to the next screenshot?
Um, I think I can almost get it.
Let's skip the one on the top there.
So Eliezer, oh no, so another account, yeah, another account responds from Brett's video, quote, the idea that it is going to produce a novel, novel biota that is going to embarrass natural selection.
This is a dead end.
The AI is constrained to the same biological logic that creatures are.
Um, I think that this is closest to one of two, the biologically impossible alternative that Eliezer spells out.
Eliezer responds, cool, then it should be no trouble for Brett Weinstein to tell us those key facts of which I am ignorant, by which it is known to him that a superintelligence may not do that.
May no more do this.
May no more do this than travel faster than light.
Okay, I will not continue reading his tweet.
I think that's the substance of it.
Then I respond, stunning that you think it's a matter of facts about which you are either aware or not.
You're misunderstanding fundamentals of a complex process and projecting into the gap logic about a roughly analogous complicated process.
while demanding action that is sure to increase the risk.
He says, "Okay, so you don't actually know of any reason a superintelligence can't build a virus that infects a lot of people in a month, or why that virus can't tweak brain structures." Next screenshot.
Okay.
Then another account, Yair Levy responds, Brett, respectfully, this is the mother of all event horizons, and you are not treating it as such.
I respond to him, I wish that was the case, but the difference in our perspectives apparently leads to nearly opposite prescriptions, so I don't think it's minor at all.
Eric Thornburg responds, you and Eliezer Youkowsky should discuss this on Dark Horse or some other discussion forum.
Happy to be helpful.
I said I'm willing.
Could be very productive.
And then as far as I know, no response from Eliezer.
I can't remember what the last one is.
Show it?
Oh, okay.
This is Yair Levy again.
I hope I'm pronounced... It's going to be Lavi.
Lavi, sorry.
It's hard to read at this distance, who quote tweets a Wittgenstein quote.
Wittgenstein is a favorite of mine, actually, and the quote is, when I hear people arguing So this is Lavi talking.
He says, When I hear people arguing about what a superintelligence could or could not do, I'm immediately reminded of Wittgenstein's immortal words, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
All your speculations are meaningless here.
Okay, so.
Was he speaking to you?
Yes.
So, first of all I want to respond to him and say this can't possibly be meaningless if the prescriptions, if the thing about which we are differing results in a near inversion of what we think the right course of action is.
If two people who believe that we face something very serious and that we must take the most reasonable action going forward disagree on what that action is, then settling small differences like this is apparently important.
Well, it also seems like, you know, this is – you hadn't shown me these before – the Wittgenstein quote seems to be taken in its like sensu stricto, narrowest sense, that is, to again, as Yudkowsky suggests, be looking for just the facts.
Just tell me what I need to know and then I'll go ahead and do it.
I'd have to remind myself of all of what Wittgenstein did, but I don't think that he was actually a sensu stricto sort of a thinker.
He was much more expansive, and I don't think that he would have interpreted his own words here to mean, if you can't tell me exactly, prescriptively, what it is that will happen if X, then we ought not be talking about it, or I don't remember exactly what the end of the quote was.
So, I mean, it feels to me like you and Yukowsky are having a – well, frankly, it's a biologist versus an engineer's understanding of the universe.
It's a complex systems versus machines understanding.
Versus complicated systems.
Versus complicated systems understanding of the universe.
And what you are saying, and what we have said also, is just because this was created and is therefore a complicated system doesn't mean that complex systems aren't related to what is going on here, and your misunderstanding, your failure to recognize the role that complex systems would play means that you will misstep.
And so I think what Yukowsky has done is he said, oh, I'll just take some of the complex system stuff over here and make it do the thing I want it to do.
It's like you've conflated complex with complicated.
Is that...
He's conflated complex with complicated.
And there has been a radical but subtle inversion of the burden of proof as a result of this, He's saying, can you prove this is impossible?
And the point is that in no universe is that my obligation.
You have alleged something, it doesn't square with the biology, right?
And his focus, I'm not going to get too deeply into this because at the end of the day I think we need to have that conversation and we need to have it out because, and I will say this up front, If you are correct, Eliezer, I want you to win that debate.
I have children.
I have an interest in them having a planet.
If you're right, I want you to win the debate.
But if I'm right, you should want me to win the debate, because it changes what we ought to do.
That matters a great deal.
And so...
There is a lot to say about A, his invoking the facts, his inverting the burden of proof.
These things speak to what error I believe he is making.
I'm certainly aware of toxoplasmosis and will be happy to talk about its relationship to this puzzle.
You know, it certainly does suggest that modifications of behaviors by pathogens are readily possible.
You know, it was well known to me when I weighed in on this discussion, of course, and I can come up with a bunch of other examples if you'd like them.
But the question is... Zombie ants.
From cordyceps.
Right, from cordyceps, we talk about rabies, we can talk about all sorts of things.
But, nonetheless, I think we have to have that debate.
I don't know whether it is necessary.
It's possible in light of the difficulty of even following the threads on Twitter, given the way replies make it hard to find things.
It's possible Eliezer didn't see that, but I suspect that he just basically walked away from the discussion with, oh, well, then you don't have the goods, do you?
And that forces me to take... I mean, they're desperate times.
Desperate measures are warranted.
I'm going to take drastic action.
Oh, God.
Perhaps you should sit down.
Should I get on the floor?
Eliezer, I double-dog Daria to talk about this with me.
Oh, no, you didn't.
Oh, I did.
I did.
There's no going back from that.
So, flagpole at three o'clock.
Or, I don't know, somewhere.
I don't know.
I'm not good at this, but hopefully we could have a very productive discussion.
I would, in all seriousness, say I don't love the idea of debate.
I think debate is pointless.
I think dialectic is the way to do it, but most people don't really have a relationship with that concept.
Debate might be a decent shorthand, but let's just have a discussion about what this is and why you come to the conclusion that you do and why I come to a different one and what part we agree on and why the prescriptions differ so radically.
Great.
I hope he takes you up on it and that this happens.
I think it would be, yeah.
There are far too many topics which seem to pose existential threats at the moment, and certainly large language models are one of them, is one of them, be one of them.
Large language models are, yes.
But they won, are one.
R1s are where all the peer review stops.
I almost descended back into a rant about peer review.
We are done.
We are done, and I do need some sleep, which I will get at some point.
I don't think so.
Wow.
That's bleak!
All right, we are not going to do a Q&A today.
We'll be back next week with some new stuff, new places to be, new things on offer.
In the meantime, consider joining us on our Patreons where you can get access to the Discord server, read our book, Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and my Natural Selections, which is naturalselections.substack.
Where I'll be writing about different male strategies and how that doesn't mean that you have more than two sexes this upcoming week.
And until we see you next time, and forever, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
