#181: The Slow Creep of Institutional Entropy (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
*****Watch on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v2y8952-bret-and-heather-181st-darkhorse-podcast-livestream.html***** In this 181st 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. In this episode we discuss higher ed—its goals and freedoms, how it is failing, what can be done to fix it. We discuss a thought experiment regarding the Special Olympics. We discuss new research on sex ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 180.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying.
It is July 5th, 2023.
It is.
Yeah, it is.
It's the day after Independence Day.
I must say, Independence Day has become a rather poignant event for those of us who are concerned about this marvelous nation of ours.
Yeah, I feel more explicitly patriotic than I recall feeling before.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I don't feel a difference in the patriotism, but I feel a difference in the urgency, which maybe that's a distinction without a difference.
No, I get it.
I think I understand.
I think even though we did a lot of international traveling early in our 20s and our 30s, and it was in those travels that I came to understand how much value there was in our home country and how much we had going on even while there were flaws.
I think that in combination with what you are identifying as an urgency, a sense of, wow, this may actually be at serious risk due to many people's failure to recognize what it is that we have, has caused it to feel at this point like it's Like, we all need to find our patriotism, honestly.
Yeah, yeah.
I've been having many conversations with people that we know, and I think this is a dawning collective realization about the moment we live in.
And I think about the fact that the jeopardy is even, it's well beyond the Republic.
Yes.
It's obviously a global phenomenon.
It is obviously a political jeopardy in the sense that authoritarianism seems to be taking root.
Lots of regressive belief structures seem to be returning with a vengeance.
And I think also across the board, people are also recognizing that the structures that drive the world biotically are not healthy.
Yeah.
But there is no shortage of jeopardy.
There is no shortage of jeopardy, yes.
Unfortunately, that is true.
Okay, let's get to just top-of-the-air logistics stuff before launching in.
This is Livestream 181, as you said, second half of the Twin Prime with 179.
Yep, now you can, yeah, you just Twin prime are primes that are only one digit apart.
They have only one digit between them.
They only have one integer between them.
I should tell the people at home who are, you know, perhaps those who are just listening and therefore cannot see that I am fighting seasonal allergies.
And I'm, let's say I am fighting valiantly, but I am not winning.
No, you have your moments.
You win occasional battles, as far as I can tell.
Oh, I do.
I win some battles.
I win some battles.
And ultimately, I will survive to sneeze another day.
But it ain't pretty sometimes.
So yeah, that's sort of a preemptive apology for the sniffles.
Yes, and you know, it's possible.
Again, people who are just listening will never detect it because of my amazing levels of professionalism, but people who are watching could see a kind of a snot-a-palooza.
I'm not guaranteeing that won't happen.
I am.
Okay, good.
Wow.
Because we have a producer here who will cut to black.
Oh, I thought you were implying you had some sort of a big clothespin over there.
You were gonna rush in and prevent such a thing.
Okay, so if you're watching on YouTube, please consider joining us on Rumble and subscribing to our channel there.
We've got another live stream this coming Saturday on July 8th, and then no more until Wednesday, July 19th.
We've got some things that various people have to do, and then we're going to be coming to you regularly on Wednesdays at 11.30am Pacific from then on.
So we're moving our live stream schedules to Wednesdays, 1130 a.m., with the exception that this coming Saturday will be our last regular Saturday podcast.
And we have chat live on Rumble today, as we've been doing since we moved to Rumble a little while back.
But we're going to go on chat hiatus for two weeks and then we'll return on July 19th with no chat.
We're going to stop chat and we are going to instead encourage locals only live conversation.
We're going to call it a watch party.
Watch party. - Yeah, so we have not, Locals is there, You can go there.
We have not yet set up what the amounts will be, so at the moment you can go and there are people there having good conversations, but we're going to basically see if we can help improve what we are hearing is a not as fabulous level of conversation as some people in the chat would hope for by moving it into Locals.
So one last live chat today.
And we're not going to do a Q&A today, but we will on Saturday.
Today's topics include, we're going to talk a little bit more about freedoms in higher ed, Brett is going to present a thought experiment, and we're also going to talk about some research and reporting on cancer rates that vary by sex.
We have some new merch, PsyOp Until Proven Otherwise.
Check it out at darkhorsestore.org.
And we're going to tell you about all the rest, natural selections, Patreons, all that at the end.
But what we will do before launching into the main part of the podcast is, as usual, present to you our sponsors, all of whom we Truly and thoughtfully do vouch for.
We have three of them as usual at the top of the hour.
Here we go.
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Yeah, so am I.
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Now I already read that paragraph, didn't I?
Wow.
Yep.
It's like we've been hurdled backwards in time.
Yes, by like 12 seconds.
Not very far, but any regression in time is significant.
Yeah, it's Groundhog Minute.
Not a thing, but okay.
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No.
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Now, I don't actually know that they're hypoallergenic, but I can say I wear them all year and I only sneeze during grass pollen season.
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Oh, man.
I'm so sorry.
It's alright.
It wasn't my fault.
I didn't invent the monocots.
No, you didn't.
No, you didn't.
And thank you for not.
Yeah, they were around long before I was.
Yes.
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Point of order?
Yes.
Zebra housing laws?
Yes.
Do they make shoes for hooved animals?
I do not believe.
Zebra shoes, horseshoes, anything like that?
I think horseshoes and zebra shoes are the same shoes.
I would think so.
They're just rebranded for a different market.
Absolutely.
Probably at an increase in price for the zebras.
Or a decrease in price.
No, I'm thinking higher.
I guess there are fewer zebras, so the cost per unit.
Sure, okay, higher price for the zebra shoes, but I don't think so.
Also, just fancier, fancier animals in general may be more concerned about their looks, just like the same product is rebranded for women and the price goes up.
I expect that zebra shoes are more expensive than horseshoes, but I do wonder if Evo makes zebra shoes.
See, here's the thing.
It's not just the rebranding for women.
It's the pH balancing and the rebranding for women.
So there's work involved.
It's not for nothing.
Oh, man.
What a planet, huh?
Oh, gosh.
You know, I don't know if Millennials or Gen Zs will get like, this is such a Gen X targeted deodorant commercial, right?
This is secret.
Yes.
P.H.
Branded.
P.H.
Branded.
P.H.
Balanced.
P.H.
Branded would have been more accurate truth in advertising.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Oh, good Lord.
Not to say that there aren't sweat differences between men and women, but for fuck's sake.
Yeah, exactly.
FFS.
Yeah.
All right.
OK, let's start.
I have a correction to make from last time, which then I would hope that we can just talk a little bit about, a little bit more than I discovered.
So we talked extensively last time about the Supreme Court's recent ruling that universities cannot use race as a factor in admissions.
And I mentioned, I'm not sure I mentioned by name, but I mentioned that in 1957 in Sweezy versus New Hampshire, a ruling of the Supreme Court then in a concurring opinion, Justice Felix Frankfurter enumerated the four essential freedoms of university.
And I've now gone back, and it was actually surprisingly difficult to find his complete opinion.
He's quoted a lot of places, but it's excerpted.
And I've now got the complete opinion, and it turns out he didn't say that.
And so one of the lessons here is even when you are, you know, quoting something out of, for instance, the Supreme Court itself, you need to go back and find your original sources or, you know, lay the trail so that it's clear, like, where the error may have happened.
He does, those words do show up in his opinion, but he is quoting someone else.
He himself is quoting a statement from a conference of senior scholars at the University of Cape Town and Vitvatersrand, I don't know, don't speak Afrikaans, I don't know.
I was compelled.
Okay, both in South Africa.
So these aren't his words, but theirs, and I want to share what the whole thing that he's actually quoting here in this opinion.
So Zach, you can go ahead and share my screen here if you like.
This is again a concurring opinion by Justice Frankfurter in New Hampshire in 1957.
And he's quoting from this conference of scholars at open universities in South Africa.
In a university, knowledge is its own end, not merely a means to an end.
A university ceases to be true to its own nature if it becomes the tool of church or state or any sectional interest.
A university is characterized by the spirit of free inquiry, its ideal being the ideal of Socrates, to follow the argument where it leads.
This implies the right to examine, question, modify, or reject traditional ideas and beliefs.
Dogma and hypothesis are incompatible, and the concept of an immutable doctrine is repugnant to the spirit of a university.
The concern of its scholars is not merely to add and revise facts in relation to an accepted framework, but to be ever examining and modifying the framework itself.
Freedom to reason and freedom for disputation on the basis of observation and experiment are the necessary conditions for the advancement of scientific knowledge.
A sense of freedom is also necessary for creative work in the arts, which, equally with scientific research, is the concern of the university.
Stunning.
It is the business of a university to provide that atmosphere which is most conducive to speculation, experiment, and creation.
It is an atmosphere in which there prevail the four essential freedoms of a university, to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.
And again, that's Justice Frankfurter in 1957 quoting the open universities in South Africa.
Stunning.
Stunningly.
It's not prescient exactly.
It's just, it's stunningly on point.
Yes, well articulated.
And demonstrates how far we are falling in our understanding of what it is that universities are for, what it is that science is, what it is that we are supposedly doing and supposed to be doing at all the levels in the university from, you know, from undergraduates through, you know, senior PhD researchers.
Yeah, in fact, the line in there that hits the hardest for me, I'll be interested if it struck you the same way, is approximately dogma and hypothesis are incompatible.
Yes.
And this is the one line repudiation of the entire mania over misinformation, follow the science, all of this.
And it's what we have been trying to articulate throughout is that, in fact, one has to be able to explore without guardrails, including many ideas that will turn out to be incorrect in order to find things that we do not yet know to be true that we will ultimately understand to be true.
And for the universities to have participated, not just stood back, but participated in Trying to regulate thought over what was believed to be true in an emergency.
Right?
This was declared an emergency.
That means it's emergent.
That means nobody's an expert.
It's all new.
That's an important point.
The shared etymology of the two words.
Yeah, I mean, it's literally right there.
They're telling you this is a realm in which nobody is expert, which means that we are going to have to try out a whole group of ideas, most of which will turn out to be false.
And then some of them will be stubbornly robust and refuse to be falsified.
And we will ultimately recognize that those are the true ones.
Who the hell were these people telling their own employees and the rest of the world what they were required to think?
Right.
Yeah, no, I agree with you.
It's that long.
Dogma and hypothesis are incompatible.
And I think in part it reveals, well, that is simply true.
And what we saw among so many who claim to be people of science and people of medicine, which needs to be informed scientifically, even if it is understood to be a practical application of scientific understanding as opposed to a science in and of itself, what we saw revealed was something that we'd been seeing
Since we started out in academia, which is that unfortunately many people, even who are actively getting or have already gotten credentialed in science, don't appear to understand what it is that that means.
And so you will see people claiming, it's not about the pursuit of truth.
Really?
Well, then what is it about?
Oh, hypothesis doesn't matter.
Seriously, what does then?
And so we have the rise of insidious Seemingly obvious phrases like data-driven, data-driven science.
No, it's not how it is.
And yet, you know, from well back before we had any kind of a public stage, we were seeing this at universities that we were affiliated with.
Claims that to do science you needed to be data-driven.
That suggests that the data come first.
The data never come first.
The data are a test of a hypothesis, which means that the data come first.
You have not tested a hypothesis, in which case they're not data in support of any scientific conclusion.
Yeah, they're observations.
They can lead you to a hypothesis.
Right.
So just a few more words from Frankfurter.
These are actually his words in this In this concurring opinion from 1957, you can show my screen if you like.
Here's that.
I've just got a few little sections here.
He says, Progress in the natural sciences is not remotely confined to findings made in the laboratory.
Insights into the mysteries of nature are born of hypothesis and speculation.
For society is good if understanding be an essential need of society.
Inquiries into these problems, speculations about them, stimulation and others of reflection upon them, must be left as unfettered as possible.
Political power must abstain from intrusion into this activity of freedom, pursued in the interest of wise government and the people's well-being, except for reasons that are exigent and obviously compelling.
One more.
This means the exclusion of governmental intervention in the intellectual life of a university.
It matters little whether such intervention occurs avowedly or through action that inevitably tends to check the ardor and fearlessness of scholars, qualities at once so fragile and so indispensable for fruitful academic labor.
So here we have Frankfurt arguing for ardor, interesting word here, the ardor and fearlessness of scholars.
Once again, qualities at once so fragile and so indispensable for fruitful academic labor.
And of course, that is partly what tenure is supposed to provide, right?
This is the point of tenure.
Tenure has problems, for sure.
And there I have heard and I have found myself on the side of arguments on both sides of the argument with regard to tenure.
And one of the strongest arguments for tenure is that it means that the scholar, the faculty member who has tenure, Can not be gone after on the basis that his job is at risk by the administration, by his or her colleagues.
Of course, tenure doesn't turn out to be the kind of security that we might have thought it did, as we learned ourselves at Evergreen six plus years ago.
But that is what it is supposed to do.
That early in a faculty person's career, if they are tenure track, which means that they have the chance to secure tenure at some point.
And, you know, this is putting aside the fact that I think it's now a majority of faculty who aren't even tenure tracks.
So that's just a whole different kind of insecurity that is being created by a system that is just off the rails.
Um, but an early career tenure track, uh, faculty member may play it a little bit safe until they get tenure, at which point they are supposed to know that they are free.
That any fear that they had of retribution for investigating questions and problems that are considered Figured out.
We've done that.
You don't need to ask those questions anymore.
Oh, that's not the kind of questions we ask now.
Oh, good people don't ask those questions.
Well, you know what?
I've now got tenure.
I'm going to ask the questions that interest me.
That's supposed to be what tenure offers.
Yes.
The problem, of course, as we've discussed before, is that this is a system that trains people such that at the point that they get tenure, they have no recollection of how they might use it usefully.
And in fact, during COVID, the number of tenured academics who stood up and said the obvious was tiny.
Tiny.
So small.
Because basically this is a training program that is, for whatever reason, built to ensure that when you get tenure you won't use it.
Yes.
So that is a tragedy and it's not an argument against tenure itself.
It's an argument against a system that functions in such a way that it trains you not to make use of it when you attain it.
It could be resurrected if you fix that aspect of the system, but that would have to be done quite deliberately, and at the moment it's another one of these well-intended programs that has unintended consequences that render it worse than useless.
Yeah, no, I think that's right, and that is where I fall now, actually, with regard to tenure, and I'm shocked to find myself there.
No, it is necessary that something do the job of creating a zone of safety for renegades, because frankly, they're the ones who figure out where the future is.
I wanted to point out a couple things.
Evergreen, as you well know, was founded by true radicals who threw out every single component of a normal university that wasn't, you know, bolted to the floor.
They threw out departments, they threw out tenure, they built something parallel to these things, but not exactly the same.
But they also changed the fundamental logic of academic freedom.
And you can hear it in that quote that Frankfurter is giving voice to in his opinion there, where the university has the right to hire who it would hire and to say what will be taught there and in what way it will be taught.
That is not how Evergreen worked.
And who will be admitted to study.
Right.
But in Evergreen, professors literally had the right to choose what they wanted to teach and in what way to teach it, which was a disaster when a professor wasn't up to that challenge.
There was a lot of bad teaching there, but there was also a lot of excellent teaching because the administrators were not in a position to tell the professors what to do, and so a good professor could make a lot of use of that freedom.
So anyway, that is a That is, the way I see it now, that is effectively a libertarian view of academic freedom, right?
If institutions are free to hire those that they would hire to teach what they would have taught in the ways that they want it taught, that's very different than the individual they have hired being liberated to teach whatever they think needs to be taught in whatever manner they feel like teaching it.
Yeah, no, and there's this There's this incredible tension, and I've seen people who I understood to be on one side politically come down very strongly on the other side of this issue, and in both directions.
I guess I'm not so surprised anymore, but I've seen avowed conservatives saying that the choices of what to teach and how to teach it needs to be in the hands of the administrators.
And I recoil at this.
This is utter insanity.
On the other hand, Given what so many faculty are thinking now, or failing to think, and what they think is passing for scholarship, and what they are therefore passing into the brains of students, well, I don't want those faculty near, you know, the fragile new brains of people that I care about either.
On the other hand, are the administrators better?
No.
There's no solution in that pairing.
Of course they're not.
There's no solution in that pairing.
What you need is actually excellent, independent-minded, creative, analytically capable thinkers who are not just courageous about asking questions, but courageous, but Confident enough in their own selves to get up in front of a room of 18 year olds or 25 year olds or whatever and say, here's what we're talking about today.
We're talking about it because I chose for us to be talking about it and I am well versed in several aspects of it and I expect that I know more than all of you about most aspects of it, but there will be gaps in my knowledge.
I will be wrong about some things, and I encourage you to think through what it is that I'm saying, and if you find those gaps or those errors, to respectfully, carefully, don't make the sport out of this, but to bring those to my attention.
And let's figure it out together, because the point here is figuring out what is true and what is right, not having you, the audience, the students, just bow down to me because I came in here with a PhD.
And, you know, how rare are faculty like that?
But unfortunately, extremely rare.
Well, they are rare in part because of the hegemony of a system that has constructed a mechanism for distributing dogma in the guise of science.
In other words, the university has been broken for a very long time.
It's now in collapse, and obviously so.
But that was true.
The collapse was beginning back when you and I were college students.
We could see it.
And so what happens if... So who knows how long before that?
Academic generation after academic generation passes with a system of power being used to train people not to use tenure, right?
So what you don't have is a institution full of scholars who are used to, you know, rattling each other's cages and, you know, discovering errors and thinking and, you know, moving the ball forward.
What they are is compliant with a political order inside the university that pretends to be something else.
So when they train their students, those students pick up this cowardice, and that's what we saw, an epidemic of cowardice in the university system in the face of obvious nonsense, that is analytical nonsense, which it was unable to call out.
And it is not surprising that two or three academic generations later, you can say, well, do I want the faculty empowered, or do I want the administrators?
I don't want any of those idiots empowered, right?
I want something else.
I want people who actually know what they're doing, and there aren't enough of them.
Not that faculty, not those administrators, and frankly, and this, you know...
I was reminded of this.
You and I have both talked about the following many times.
You, in part, in front of Congress, and me, in part, at the Department of Justice.
And we have been asked, and less so the longer it gets since the Evergreen blow-up, but, you know, what do you have to say to the faculty?
What do you have to say to the administrators?
What do you have to say to the students?
And so many people are like, oh, these students, they're so reprehensible, they just don't know what to do.
Like, you know what?
What we saw was that students were reachable.
They're young yet.
They're not ideologically captured.
Increasingly, they are being more and more ideologically captured because they're being preached at in the K-12 system.
Even that is changing.
But they are still less likely to be ideologically captured than people whose very careers depend on them continuing to spew the party line.
And so, you know, administrators have a particular set of jobs that they need to do and need to fix.
And faculty have a ton of work to do, and many of them are not going to be savable, honestly.
But most of the students are.
Most of the students are.
But you have to meet them with conviction that might change, with courage, with respect, and with pushback when they say dumb things.
And everyone will say dumb things.
Well, I felt the entire time that we were teaching college that, on the one hand, it was marvelous what we were able to accomplish.
We found lots and lots of students who were very reachable, and we reached a great many.
On the other hand, it was an uphill battle at the point you get to college because so much damage had been done earlier.
This is true.
And that the right place to intervene is, you know, in grade school.
Right.
the system that damages people as they advance through the supposed educational environment is, you know, it robs you of developmental capacity.
And it may be more fun to teach college in a sense, because the material is richer, but it's the wrong place to save people, right?
The system is broken early on.
And what you have is a cascading failure that at the point that you get to college has people who are increasingly empowered and have been betrayed by those who told them how you figure out what's true.
No, and it's part of why what's happening in K-12 is so important.
And, you know, the obvious things around trans ideology, which actually threaten to and do physical irreparable damage to children when it's taken to its now apparently accepted medical extent, It's a perfect encapsulation of the set of risks.
But even absent that, using children as tools in your own ideological battle, as opposed to Giving children experience, real physical experience of the real physical world, and the tools to do the relatively few things when they're very young that they really will need to do, like read and write and do some math.
And then get them outside gardening, and get them outside playing sports, and have them make art, and have them consider patterns.
and try to figure out what it is that is could possibly be causing those patterns and when they propose ideas that you know if they're five maybe you don't call it a hypothesis but maybe you do we certainly did with our kids when they're 10 you do and you reveal to them how deeply personally they feel about any hypothesis they come up with even if it's something they didn't even know existed 10 minutes ago
And it's that sort of, once you can begin, once you can begin to reveal to people how much they've taken on a belief, even one that they didn't even know existed a few minutes ago, then you can be able to separate for them.
The emotional sense of, like, this, like, I will die if you don't do this for me, as opposed to, maybe that's just not true, and that's okay, so let's move on.
That's great, but it's worse than that.
I'm sorry, I know that's inappropriate here because what you've just described is an excellent way of educating people.
But the problem, many of our colleagues who are comparatively awake to the problem in the university system, see the perverse incentives and they see the meltdown.
And they think, ah, fix the perverse incentives, solve the meltdown.
They don't understand there aren't enough people who are capable of doing what you've just outlined, right?
If you were to solve the, you know, it's tenure, right?
Tenure proves this point.
Okay, but you, you, I was talking about college, and you said, no, we have to talk about K-12, and now you're talking about college again.
So you wanted to talk about the, like, the elementary school kids.
Well.
There's no, there's no tenure there.
It's the same, it's the same point.
The point is, look, look at what tenure proves about fix the incentives.
A professor who has immunity from their colleagues' dirty looks and negative opinions is a professor for whom the incentive structure has been fixed.
And they don't behave courageously because they've been developmentally trained not to.
So what we have is a system that begins miseducating people in grade school.
Those people mature through the ranks.
Then they ultimately become professors.
I think that actually there's plenty of elementary school teachers and people who want to be elementary school teachers who can do what I said.
No, you could do that, but how long would it take you to solve the problem so that it cascaded up and you had a system of people in college who were actually... At least a generation?
Several generations.
It takes several generations.
At least a generation.
Why would it take several?
Why does it inherently take several?
Because it has to spread, because you say there are enough people.
I don't think there are enough people to staff every classroom for every grade school.
There are enough people that you might have a couple of them in every school, and those people might be able to illustrate by example what can be done, and it might catch on slowly, but it's going to take a long time for a good set of incentives to pervade the system enough that we're actually educating people rather than anti-educating people, which is what we're currently doing.
So, Anyway, I think you and I are making different points.
My point is we have a four alarm fire because there's no fix for the one that I'm talking about.
And what can you describe?
I feel like you've made two different points and I don't know what fix you're talking about now.
The fix of civilization in which we are training people to actually think independently enough to spot wrong ideas and See around them.
What we have is a population that has become compliant.
At best, people have become reflexively skeptical of what they're being told is true, but they don't know how to find it.
I would caution.
I would say cynical then.
Reflexively skeptical.
Yeah, yeah.
I agree with you.
Cynical is the right term.
But, you know, you can't live in a society in which you've got a bunch of people who believe the rabid dogma No matter what it says and how obviously wrong it is, and the other half of society just simply won't believe anything, right?
I mean, I think this is, it is a different approach to education, but one that is done.
I mean, maybe not in these terms exactly, but I know that there's elements of this approach.
In the teachings in Rudolf Steiner, right?
And Waldorf in some of the unschooling.
I'm forgetting many of the names of the traditions at the moment, but there are a number of these and they go up as well.
There are some institutions of higher ed that actively take these low-tech
High nature, high exposure to complexity, and high exposure to physical labor, honestly, approaches to educating the whole human being, to not imagining that you're just, you know, doing the analytics, or you're just, I don't even know what else it would be, but, you know, this concept, if, you know, if we're talking about higher ed now, I think most K-12 teachers don't make this error anyway, but it's amazing the number of college faculty who basically say,
The students, to me, are brains in jars.
The whole rest of who they are, what it is that they are, and what informs them, and why they're here, and why they care, and what they're doing next, doesn't pertain to me.
That's for student affairs.
That's a different division of the college that matters.
And that's absurd.
But that does follow from some of the other confusions of modernity or post-modernity, if you will, which imagines that your body is separate from your brain, is separate from your psychology, like all of these things can actually be separated out.
And you can say, oh, well, you know, today I'm going to work out because, you know, my body needs a workout.
It's like, no, that's going to help everything.
Like, you know, everything that you do is affecting everything that you are.
And this reductionist approach to education, to science, to understanding who we are in the universe, everything, it's not just degrading, but it makes no sense.
It's totally incoherent.
And I think the modern educational approach of saying, you know, right now, children, what we're doing is we're learning to write.
Right now, children, what we're learning is how to garden.
And, you know, there will be some of those things, like actually you should know your times tables, right?
But in general, the more holistic the experience and the more you can be called on at any moment to pull something that you know from some domain that you don't think you're working on right now, the more integrated all of your understanding about the universe is going to be and the more likely you are going to be able to be competent to solve problems under normal conditions and also in an emergency.
And that's what we saw, is a failure for people to think in the emergency that was this last three years.
Yeah, it's a obvious demonstration of the absence of the capacity to think, which is what we claim we are inducing in students.
And I have not heard anybody, any professors, say students are effectively brains in jars.
But I certainly have heard them... I have two colleagues who said that to me.
I believe it, I just didn't hear it.
What I heard was the beautified version of that.
It doesn't sound quite so despicable, right?
It's the repackaged version, which is life of the mind, right?
The idea that we are the academics and we have actually discovered that the richness of life is what takes place in your mind and it is disconnected from the world and you have to participate in the world to an extent but it's to be minimized because really what the experience is is the extraction of high-minded ideas from books i'm sorry like this is the ivory tower right this is white collar versus blue collar yeah this is you know hating on the body and anyone who does work with their body and you know
meanwhile these people are presumably thinking of themselves many of them like oh i'm also a foodie i care very much about like you don't know anything these people often don't know anything because they are so disconnected i'm sorry i like no no i hate this so much i detest it equally yes You know, I hate to keep returning us here, but we've got a particular kind of failure that we have now seen again and again, and it looks like this.
You've got a system that operates on momentum.
Yeah.
You disrupt it in a fundamental way because you're a corrupt son of a bitch and you want the system to, you know, to take your particular idea and propagate it because it will make you wealthier, whatever.
Okay, so you disrupt the ability of the system to spot garbage because you want to distribute your particular kind of garbage through that system.
And then... Hold on, that sounded a little bit too cynical.
I think most people don't start by saying, I'm going to produce garbage and I'm going to make sure the system... No, of course not.
They start by producing something and it's good.
And then they produce another thing and it's not as good.
And I think, well, but it's the thing I just spent a year on and it needs to get accepted.
And so You know, it's not, the goal isn't let's get the system to produce, to accept garbage.
No, no, I'm talking about something different.
I agree with you that what you're talking about is real and that most people start out intending to do good work and they turn into counterproductive automatons through a developmental process.
I'm talking about something like pharma, which discovers that not only does it need for scientists to say untrue things on its behalf, But that it can become expert at refining what it is that the scientists will on cue say in order to get the products of pharma consumed and it becomes a puppeteer.
Yeah.
Right?
So that is diabolical.
Whatever the internal conversations of pharma sound like.
Such an impressive puppeteer.
It's a virtuoso, right?
It plays the university and basically the hospitals, all of these things.
It plays them like an orchestra.
But So you figure, let's say that there's some pharma thing which needs its message broadcast through people wearing the right kind of garb with the right kinds of degrees and the right kinds of venues.
And the right accents.
All of the proper, you know, the props and the settings and everything.
So it disrupts the ability of the university to figure out what's true, because if the university starts looking at what it's supposed to be saying on behalf of pharma, and says, hey, wait a minute, that doesn't even make sense, because here are 17 different reasons that we should be skeptical of it, that will be bad.
So it gets good at playing the university and everything connected to it, like an instrument.
And It does not result in a catastrophe right away, right?
The university stopped thinking.
We don't know exactly when that happened, but it did.
And the point is, it's generations later when you notice, right?
When the thing is so bad that you can now talk about in public, hey, That is an institution that has completely collapsed even though if you stood in the center of any campus it would still look like a functioning university, right?
You still see the professors, you see the students, you see the books, you see that everything that you would expect to see is there except for the style of thinking that results in insight, right?
So what is the name?
It's the hardest thing to quantify though.
Right.
And which is why we were in denial.
And you and I were not in denial.
We were complaining about the failure of those institutions, though maybe we were not complaining at the correct level given the degree of failure.
But we saw it.
But we saw it.
But what's the name for the thing when you wreck, you have a perverse incentive that causes you to wreck the competence of an institution that then continues to do its job because it doesn't require competence for some period of time and then you notice way down the road Hey, the inspectors of this kind of engineering stopped checking anything.
I mean, we saw it in the financial crisis with the ratings agencies.
The ratings agencies were giving ratings that had nothing to do with the quality of the financial instrument, right?
So it's like, oh, the ratings agencies.
It's critically important, and I don't know that that has a name.
I want to hear about it if it does.
There's an institution that is important, if not perhaps even necessary, to the functioning of a society as we understand it.
It gets captured, broken, something.
But it continues on because it's already got momentum, inertia.
Yep.
It is not noticed.
It is a shell of itself.
It is perhaps even in this case, in many cases, doing the opposite of what it's supposed to do, of what it is continuing to claim to do.
And it continues on for some time.
And honestly, because it's still going by the same name, and because the thing that it was supposed to be doing is a little hard to track, Uh, and because there is some other, in this case, there is some other entity out there that wants no one to notice.
Do not look at the man behind the curtain.
It just continues on.
And, I mean, I think, I think we're saying this all over.
We are seeing it all over, and two points.
One, our current president is a very special version of this, right?
It is now totally obvious that the person inhabiting the office is actually an unnecessary prop, right?
This is an unnecessary prop, and you know, the country still hobbles along, right?
Who is that?
Who's really in charge?
What does this mean?
So anyway, A, we got some style of problem where the thing moves along based on momentum.
Ultimately, a crisis emerges that reveals how feeble it has become, at which point people become serious about fixing it.
But What they don't spot is that there is no fix.
At the point you've let the thing go for generations, your fix is going to take generations.
And that is the disaster.
And then there will be the people who trot in and say, but we need X.
And you say, yes, but that isn't X. But we need the institutions, but we need the media, but we need the journalism, but we need the medical fixes for the deadly diseases.
Yes, but those aren't fixes, and those aren't universities, and that's not media.
They're not doing journalism.
They're not seeking truth.
They're not curing the things they're claiming to cure.
None of those things are what they seem to be.
And so when you trot in saying, oh, we need those things, like, no, we need things that were once called that.
But we don't have those things anymore.
And the things that are pretending to be them are doing far more harm than good.
Yeah.
We see it at Wikipedia.
We see it at CDC.
We see it all over the place.
But we need a CDC, Brett.
That very well may be, but the people to staff a CDC are not at the CDC.
I'm not saying none of them are.
There are some people inside the CDC, inside the Congress, there are people everywhere who could be liberated and would start doing the job if given that opportunity, but there aren't enough of it to run these things.
That's the concern, is that actually... Not even, not currently in the institutions, but anywhere.
Yes.
Or, you know, how would you even find them, right?
If they're not credentialed in the way you would expect.
Also, at some level, we've got a hiring problem.
Like, a global level.
Like, how do you find the talent for all of the institutions that actually need to be functional that are not functional?
And get those, match those people with those positions and give them the authority to do what needs to be done.
Right, it's a nightmare problem.
Yeah.
And I think, I think I've spotted what I was getting at.
There are every one of these problems where you discover an institution that has been running on momentum at the point a crisis that reveals its incapacity emerges out of nowhere, right?
These are problems for which bad incentives were enough to cause the problem and good incentives are not enough to fix it.
That's the problem.
It's the asymmetry.
It was much easier to cause this disruption than it is to fix it.
It's a basic, it's like institutional entropy.
Right?
You have created institutions that cannot be resurrected by reversing the things that ruined them in the first place.
Yeah, you cannot, as I've said at the universities, just scrape the woke off the top.
Right.
Not sufficient.
Won't happen.
The rot is far deeper than that.
Yep.
Yeah.
Well, that's fun.
Yeah.
Okay.
Change of topic?
Sure!
Did you want to do a thought experiment, or do you want me to talk about cancer research first?
I would like to do a thought experiment, but in light of the darkness of where we have just been, I want to take a brief interlude.
And so yesterday was Independence Day.
As we've mentioned, that was kind of a poignant moment for us.
It ended with the most amazing fireworks show I've ever seen.
Oh my god.
By far.
By far.
It was extraordinary.
I was not expecting that.
We live in a, you know, an island, small town.
I was expecting a little fireworks display, which would be kind of cool.
This was... Blew me away.
Blew us all away.
The four of us were like, whoa!
Stunning.
What happened?
Stunning.
But earlier in the day, um...
Uh, we moved into a place that had a garden that was fully overgrown when we moved in and that garden you have been resurrecting.
A flower garden, not a food garden.
Right, not a food garden, but a flower garden that to me looked like it was going to be, it was going to need to be just totally dug up and new stuff put in there was, it was overgrown.
But the person who had initially put it in was quite a thoughtful person, apparently a very Yeah, the woman whose home it was before she died.
Who's now, she died in her 80s.
Yeah, but she was apparently an amazing woman.
An amazing woman, apparently had been a pilot.
Yeah.
Anyway, a person with an incredible life story who had obviously put... I think she had tremendous gardening insight and sort of, you know, the approach so far has been Get rid of the obvious things that we don't want, the grass that shows up, you know, and just and wait and wait and see what else will come up, and it's been remarkable.
It's been remarkable.
So anyway, there's this little miracle that has emerged this spring for us.
It's our first spring in the place, and You know, we knew we had hummingbirds, which is cool.
There's only a couple of species of hummingbirds up here, but they're both, you know, all hummingbirds are cool.
And these guys are especially behaviorally interesting.
And anyway, the garden has become a little paradise for bumblebees and hummingbirds.
And so anyway, I love photographing hummingbirds and I haven't done very much in the temperate zone because it's just hard to do.
But in our garden it's become possible.
So yesterday I decided to see if I could capture hummingbirds.
But it's tricky in our garden because in most gardens there's like a plant that attracts hummingbirds.
If you can spot it you can set up on a tripod, get ready for the bird to come and if you're lucky you get it.
In our garden, you never know where the bird's going to be because there's so much going on.
There's a lot.
There are a lot of species the hummingbirds go for, but there's also what seems to be their favorite is this toadflax.
And we've got just a lot of spires of toadflax.
So anyway, yesterday I decided to see if I could do it handheld.
I would just figure out where the bird was and see if I could catch it.
And Zach, do you want to show?
I got a bunch of really good pictures, but anyway.
So I believe this is a female rufous hummingbird.
And a rufous hummingbird is an amazing animal.
Their migratory route is from deep in Mexico and they range up to Alaska in the summer.
Do you know, are all the populations migratory, or are some of them resident?
I believe all of them are migratory.
I'm not an expert on this species, but that's what I think is going on here.
So here you have this beautiful female hummingbird drinking nectar from this toadflax in this amazing garden planted by this now-gone, but very insightful woman.
And I think it's pretty clear that she was Fond of hummingbirds herself and planted, uh, to attract them.
So anyway, I thought I would... Wonderful.
Apologies to the people who are just listening, um, but this is a beautiful animal.
It is.
What a privilege to get to see them.
Yeah.
What a beautiful photograph, Brian.
Thank you.
Nice to see it on Independence Day too.
That felt right.
Yeah.
Okay, um, on to the thought experiment.
And it's just a brief thought experiment, but it dawned on me, uh, actually at the parade that we went to, uh, yesterday, the New Year's.
Nope.
How about Independence Day Parade, in which there was a group of, uh, disabled, uh, Athletes, I think.
I'm not sure.
In any case, it spurred a thought, which was, if you take the logic whereby trans women, that is to say people born male who declare themselves female and are now competing in women's sports, and you map it onto the Special Olympics, why is it, would it be permitted
To declare oneself disabled in order to compete in the Special Olympics.
And the reason that I think this is a useful thought experiment is that that would obviously be a despicable behavior, you know, if you decided that what you really wanted was a gold medal in something.
And you declared yourself disabled and then you beat some actually disabled people and you ascended to the podium and then gave your interview and said how proud you were and how hard you had worked, right?
Everybody would presumably, in 2023, look at you like, what the hell are you doing?
Yeah.
Right?
That's not cool.
That's despicable.
That's despicable.
This is an institution that exists for a purpose.
And you know, that purpose is interesting.
It turns out the Special Olympics were founded by So I just pulled it out.
Founded in 1968 by Eunice Kennedy Shriver.
And, you know, I found it a little hard to find a precise description of exactly what she was doing, but I think it's pretty clear that we can make the following argument.
So she says, founded in 1968 by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Special Olympics provides people with intellectual disabilities continuing opportunities to realize their potential Develop physical fitness, demonstrate courage, and experience joy and friendship.
And then under the facts, it's a little bit small, who is eligible to participate?
Yeah.
Share it?
Yeah, yeah.
To be eligible to participate in Special Olympics, you must be at least eight years old and identified by an agency or professional as having one of the following conditions.
Intellectual disabilities, cognitive delays as measured by formal assessment, or significant learning or vocational problems due to cognitive delay that require or have required specially designed instruction.
So that identified by an agency or professional as having an intellectual disability for instance.
Now given that professionals are identifying boys as girls and girls as boys.
There you go.
Why not?
And the answer is, in 2023, why not is pretty obvious, because it would be despicable.
However, it's despicable for boys to be called girls in order to compete in women's sports.
Right.
And so I did want to... So there's obviously an important distinction here.
The reason that the mind bridles at the idea of an abled person declaring themselves disabled, getting an institution or professional to sign on and Going and beating actually disabled people in order to get awards.
Yeah.
The reason that that is not something that we can accept in 2023 is that we still reserve in our minds a position of protection for a person who is intellectually disabled in this regard.
Right.
Some kind of, I hope I'm not using an offensive term, but some kind of pity would cause us, I think still in 2023, to defend such people.
And women are not incapacitated men.
This is an entirely different phenomenon.
What women are is optimized for a different subset of roles in biology that means that in almost all sports women and men cannot compete directly with each other.
Fairly.
Fairly, right.
And so there is a slight distinction here, but I believe it is a distinction without a difference, because what has happened is we built women's sports precisely because half of the population was perfectly capable of benefiting from sport and competing vigorously in sport, but not if we, you know, did it all in one mixed grouping.
And so That was progress.
That was progress.
And it created the ability for all of the good things that follow from sport to reach half of the population, right?
By breaching that boundary in some sort of ill-begotten attempt to protect some tiny number of people from some largely imagined hazard, Right, is obviously upside down and backwards, but I just think by, you know, and thought experiments I have to say we have to be careful with because many people do not understand their proper logical status.
They are not experiments as if you have run them in a laboratory.
They are not validations of something.
Or in the field.
Yeah, they are not validations of what will happen if you did run such an experiment, but they are useful, A, to predict what might happen and then find out, or in order to explore territory where you can't run an experiment, right?
So I don't know what will happen here.
I don't know if we will ultimately find terrible people who misunderstand what the I don't see why not.
of pride actually is and seek to be proud of themselves for winning an award they are not entitled to by beating people who are disabled and therefore competing in the Special Olympics.
But I wouldn't rule out the possibility that we're going there.
I mean, we've basically I don't see why not.
destroyed every kind of logic there is.
We now cannot agree that two plus two equals four, that men cannot become women, that pedophilia is bad.
You and I can.
You and I can and presumably most of our audience, maybe all of our audience, save for the few haters, can agree on these things.
Yeah.
But we civilizationally cannot figure out how to shut down the sophists and the cheaters who wish to use our inability to precisely articulate exactly why in this instance you are not allowed to do X, right?
That's what they're doing again and again, and this is a case— And back to your point that it's much easier to destroy than to build.
Yeah, it's another kind of institutional entropy.
And I will say, when I went looking at the Special Olympics site, I was, as now happens so frequently, Confused.
Emotionally confused at some of what I read.
Because things that 10 years ago would... Yeah, go to the front page of their site.
Things that 10 years ago would not have struck me at all, would have struck me as just normal... There it is.
What is it?
The revolution is inclusion.
Oh.
Oh, hello!
Right?
Now, the revolution is inclusion.
This is the Special Olympics.
They're just I can read that both ways.
I can read that as the Special Olympics are heroic people who are looking to include people whose quality of life would otherwise be lower because, of course, why do we care less about the quality of life of a mentally disabled person?
And it is wonderful that there's an organization that wishes to give them the kinds of rewards that come from vigorous participation in sports.
And isn't it amazing that this works?
Right?
Yeah.
On the other hand, I can read that inclusion as a code word.
Yeah.
And the point is, is that word setting them up for, well, why is the Special Olympics excluding certain people who wish to participate?
And, you know, here I have a person who this institution has declared disabled.
And, you know, I could see that happening.
So.
Yeah.
No, I mean.
Inclusion starts out as an idea that makes good sense, intuitive sense, moral sense, but what it actually means is we've had a group with rigid boundaries and we've been excluding some people and so now we want to open it up.
But that doesn't mean that every competition, every meeting, every organization has to have its doors wide open to everyone.
Just as a nation state is allowed to have borders, a Women's basketball team is allowed to say no men allowed.
If you're a group of neighborhood kids, you're allowed to build a treehouse and say no boys or no girls.
Like, we're allowed to create groups for ourselves and organizations with missions, in this case, specifically for those people who had been excluded from competitive sport before.
Right?
And is it possible that someone could come along and say, ah, I don't have an intellectual disability, but I want to participate?
It's hard to imagine at this point anyone would fall for it, but given what has happened to women's sports, why not?
And then given what has happened to the so-called professionals who would diagnose such a thing, of course.
If you're willing to diagnose a girl as a boy, why would you not diagnose totally normal intellectual functioning as a disability of some sort?
We know that's happening.
And then use that as a ticket to entry into the special ethics.
So I have become very careful in my thinking around liberty.
I think this is an idea, a concept, that is both fundamentally important, as many people realize, and in which the precision surrounding our understanding of it is where it either does great good or great harm.
And so anyway, I've distinguished in my mind between liberty, something that you're technically free to do, and realized liberty, something that you're in a position to act on, right?
One of the things that I've noticed is that there is a paradox, which we have to get good at thinking about, which is good rules, which restrict liberty, that's what rules do, right?
Increase realized liberty, right?
Good rules, that should be their purpose, right?
In fact, ultimately you can make a strong argument That the success of a society can be judged based on its effect on realized liberty.
Now you have to integrate over future generations too.
We can't rob future generations of the ability to do stuff in order to be more liberated in the present.
So that's a potential loophole that you've got to be careful about.
But a society that actually produces increased levels of realized liberty for its citizens going forward is a successful society.
And the point I want to make is that the rules that exclude people born male from competing in women's sports, people who are able competing in the Special Olympics, these are things that clearly increase realized liberty by excluding.
Right?
As soon as you let men into women's sports, there's no women's sports.
We're back where we were before women's sports.
Right?
Men will destroy women's sports.
Women having sports is how many people are women?
Gee, it seems like a lot of them.
Right?
Do you think any of them would be interested in playing sports?
Yeah, again, a lot.
Yeah.
Right?
Do we need sports for them?
It seems like a huge benefit to society for women to be able to get the benefits of sport.
So the point is we need a rule that keeps people from destroying women's sports.
That's very interesting.
I think I want to chew on that a little bit more, this, you know, liberty versus realized liberty.
Yes, I agree with what you've said.
I'm not sure that the advantages that are accrued by the exclusion, I guess in a ledger that I have in my head, that's not, I don't have it yet.
I, you know, I also have justice and safety as, you know, as categories.
Right.
So my now long-term relationship with this concept of liberty is about... the reason that I see it as special is that it integrates the others, right?
So in other words... Yeah, I thought that was what you were doing, that it's an aggregate term.
It is an integrative value, and therefore, this is the place, so I used to be, I think, too hard on the ideological libertarians, right?
Because their focus on liberty is often, I think, more closely aligned with theoretical liberty, and they can be dismissive of rules that create greater realized liberty.
What I think they have right, and I think they actually have very right, is that if you were gonna pick one, that's the one because it's integrative, right?
You need a rich, realized version of liberty.
But if you just maximize realized liberty, then the point is, oh, you take care of all the other stuff because you're not liberated if you're...
you know, dying of cancer because you breathed pollutants, right?
So the point is rules that free your lungs of the pollutants that will cause them to produce a cancer are liberty enhancing if you instantiate liberty correctly.
So anyway, there's something there.
But, you know, the ultimate version of this, the first one I realized was how much liberty do we get from the ability to get on an airplane in one part of the world and within hours be any other part of the world we want.
That's an amazing level of realized liberty.
Right?
It comes from an absolutely ruthless set of rules surrounding the safety of aircraft.
Right?
And you wouldn't want to be in a wild west of aircraft where they were falling out of the sky all the time because the cheapest tickets were to the carriers that were cutting the most corners and maintenance.
Right?
You want an FAA that works and you want international bodies that work and that, you know, agree on the rules of, you know, altitudes and, you know, air traffic control and all that stuff.
Good regulations and good regulators increase realized liberty.
Bingo.
That's the thing.
Libertarians have a lot to say about rhetoric.
I bet they do.
Yeah, and the devil's in the details.
Yeah.
You know, what good, like, defines, you know, depends on what the definition of good is.
Darn, but yeah, it does.
It's one of these things, this is another useful piece of analytical toolkit, is there are lots of things that you can figure out accurately and you can nail them, but you cannot operationalize them easily.
Oh, that's not good.
Understanding what's true about the thing is easy.
No.
Understanding how you manifest that as a set of rules and structures that implements it is much harder.
- Given that it's gonna be entirely apes doing the implementation.
- Oh, that's not good.
- It's gonna be really messy.
- Have you met apes?
- A few.
- Yeah, it's the apes.
It's the apes that are the problem.
Yeah.
Not that if somehow it had been dolphins, I think it would be any better.
No.
At whatever point they got to our level of technological and postmodern progress.
Certain things would be better.
The forest would probably be safer.
The forest would be safer, and the dolphins would give each other the finger less often.
In fact, never.
Yes, never.
Never.
They might have, yeah.
They'd give each other the flipper, but Yeah.
Okay.
Good.
Let's talk a little bit, and I really don't want to go deep on the science in part because there's too many pieces of science out that the papers aren't available to those of us who have been thrown out of academia.
Sci-Hub doesn't have them up yet.
So we just have the abstracts.
But really the point is I was made aware in Nature News, which is the News arm of nature.
Again, one of the world's two supposed best science journals.
This week they reported that, and I'll come back to this piece, but for right now I'll just tell you the headline.
Excuse me.
How the Y chromosome makes some cancers more deadly for men.
Two studies helped to explain why colorectal and bladder tumors take a bigger toll on men than on women.
Okay.
Yep.
So I went to... Pauline's getting to me a little bit too, I think.
Sorry to hear that.
So the research that Nature News is citing is... here's one of them.
This is the just beautifully named Histone dimethylase KDM5D upregulation drives sex differences in colon cancer.
Again, published in Nature, June 21st.
And all we have is the abstract.
Again, it's not available to those of us not affiliated with fancy institutions at the moment.
They begin by saying sex exerts a profound impact on cancer incidence, spectrum, and outcomes.
And there's actually some other really good research I found that really clarifies to what degree is this lifestyle across many cancers.
It's like, you know what, you can't attribute all the differences in cancer rates to different decisions that men and women make.
Like the fact that men are more likely to smoke and more likely to tell you to hold their beer while they do something stupid.
um doesn't fully um explain the differences.
The contents of the subreddit why women live longer is not fully explanatory.
Yes.
So so now there's some research trying to figure out okay so what might be the things that are actually going on that are attributable to you know underlying sex differences and uh they you know this is a model yada yada um let's see they say Boy, I can't even figure out where... Okay, take my screen off for a moment here so I can look at my notes.
I believe... Do I have this?
I don't even have this in the notes.
Okay, so that one...
Um, is basically finding, um, that a particular Y chromosome gene, not Y chromosomes generally, but a particular gene that is found in the Y chromosome, uh, raises the risks of some colorectal cancer spreading to other parts of the body.
Now it's a model, it's a mouse model, I would also point out, surprising because the Y-chromosome in mammals is not a well-populated chromosome, the logic that is frequently advanced in evolutionary circles is that the rest of the genome can't trust the Y-chromosome and has therefore shut it down so that it encodes primarily just the gene that turns you male.
So precisely the other piece of research, which is this one, also published same day last week or a week and a half ago, whenever.
In Nature, Why Chromosome Loss in Cancer Drives Growth by Evasion of Adaptive Immunity.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Let me think about that.
Y-chromosome loss in cancer drives growth by evasion of adaptive immunity.
So this abstract actually is a little bit less ridiculously written, so let's work through it a little bit.
Loss of the Y-chromosome, L-O-Y.
Loss of the Y-chromosome is observed in multiple cancer types, including 10-40% of bladder cancers, but its clinical and biological significance is unknown.
Here, using genomic and transcriptomic studies, we report that loss of the Y-chromosome correlates with poor prognoses in patients with bladder cancer.
We performed in-depth studies of naturally occurring loss of Y-chromosome mutant bladder cancer cells as well as those with targeted deletion of Y-chromosome by CRISPR-Cas9.
Y-positive and Y-negative tumors grew similarly in vitro, whereas Y-negative tumors were more aggressive than Y-positive tumors in immune-competent hosts and T-cell-dependent manner.
And this is the first time you're seeing this.
Yeah, I'm wondering.
So I don't know where this goes.
Yeah.
And again, I don't have the full paper.
I just have the abstract.
OK, so here's what I think.
A, there's an interesting question.
I actually mentioned this question to Grider back when before she had pretended she didn't know me.
And then she went on and did some work on it, actually.
The question is, okay, telomeres regulate how many cell divisions you get to make, but you've got a bunch of different chromosomes.
Which telomere is it?
Is it the average?
Is it the shortest?
Whatever.
Yeah.
Possible that the Y chromosome, which has a special telomeric implication because you will recall I got very excited one day when I was doing the telomere library work because I found that there was evidence that
Telomeres of sperm produced by older fathers have longer telomeres, and the reason that that's interesting is that it provides a mechanism For an individual to discover some information about how safe the world they are in is, and to convey a degree of longevity to offspring on the basis of it.
So there's a trade-off between cancer suppression and longevity.
And the point is, in a very dangerous environment, you don't worry so much about longevity because you probably won't live to benefit from it, so you worry more about cancer suppression.
So if you found that you were in a very safe environment, where your offspring could potentially live a very long time, then you might imbue them with longer telomeres so that their tissues could replace themselves better at some extra risk of cancer.
So if the Y chromosome is specially implicated in a mechanism for censusing the world to figure out whether or not it's a moment for longer or shorter telomeres in offspring, then the Y chromosome loss here might be, I guess I would expect it to be earlier then the Y chromosome loss here might be, I guess I would expect I would expect telomere, I would expect the loss of the Y chromosome to liberate cells to produce more copies, which would then predispose to cancer.
But I guess I wouldn't necessarily expect the cancers to be more immune evasive.
So again, again, we don't have the full paper.
Together, these results demonstrate that cancer cells with loss of the Y mutations alter T-cell function, promoting T-cell exhaustion and sensitizing them to PD-1-targeted immunotherapy.
So that implies that T-cell exhaustion, unless I'm mistaken, is the result of the fact that T—and this is actually covered in the paper that Debbie and I ultimately wrote on this topic— T and B cells have a special predicament with respect to how many cell divisions they go through, right?
Because the progenitors of the T and B cells, most of them are like bank guards that go their whole career and never get triggered.
So they don't have to do a lot of cell division.
But if you have a pathology that is causing a particular subset of T cells, to react, they have to proliferate tremendously because the way that they get better at fighting the disease is through clonal selection.
So you have to have a huge amount of proliferative capacity for those small set of cells that gets triggered, which is part of why lymphoma and leukemia are likely cancers because you have a tissue in which you have to turn down the cancer protection in order to get the immunity.
So what they're describing with respect to T-cell exhaustion is that the limits on the reproduction of B and T-cells are very high, but they're Right.
And so you can exhaust the capacity of a particular subset of these cells to react, and if that subset is necessary to fight a particular cancer, then the cancer gets liberated by exhausting those cells.
Yes.
I think that's right.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
Fascinating.
I wish that we could say more.
I mean, I think you've already, I think, intuited a lot from just that one abstract, and I'm not going to go back into the other one.
Research may be exciting.
It does seem to be data-driven rather than hypothesis-driven.
It does seem to be at considerable risk of concluding something.
In the first piece of research, it's a gene on the Y that causes cancer.
It's the loss of the Y that is indicative here, and they're going in opposite directions, right?
Like, ish.
Not exactly, because it's a gene on the Y, not the Y.
And, you know, the Nature News article says, taken together, the two studies are a step toward understanding why so many cancers have a bias towards men.
Taken together, what are you talking about, right?
They're not supporting one another, right?
But they're both about the Y chromosome.
They're both about, you know, they're both about sex-based differences in cancer rates.
So I wonder, I think you're on to something when you point out this is data-driven, not hypothesis-driven.
And even if it were hypothesis-driven, it would be narrowly mechanistically hypothesis-driven, not evolutionarily.
Which means that whatever downstream applied medical benefits that happen as a result of this research are going to be narrow, reductionist, and at least as likely to be dangerous as helpful.
Yeah.
Especially given that we have things that seem to, at a gross level, go in opposite directions with regard to you.
It's the why that's doing it to you.
Oh, it's the loss of the why that's doing it to you.
Well, okay.
Different cancers, different situations.
Do not make a decision based on this if you're not also aware of what's going on over here.
Right.
In this case, I'm wondering, one of the Coolest pieces of logic that came out of the telomere work was why early sunburns are more likely to cause cancer, which happens late in life, than late sunburns.
And the idea, you will recall, was that Because you have more cell divisions left before you run out of telomere, a mutation that causes a cell line to run away and reproduce without regulation produces a bigger patch of cells that can then get a second mutation that turns it into a tumor.
So one possibility is that the loss of the Y is actually a Red herring here, because what's happened is a cell that goes on to be a cancer and therefore be noticed by people who study cancer is one that escaped telomere regulation by the Y. If the Y is disproportionately likely to be the chromosome that limits cell divisions, that sets the Hayflick limit for those cells,
Then a cell that had lost its Y would create a bigger proto-tumor, and it would be more likely to become a tumor, which would be more likely to be noticed by people who study tumors.
And therefore it may be downstream of, it was the loss of the Y that triggered the tumor in the first place, or increased the likelihood of it, it wasn't the loss of the Y that was involved in the immune evasion.
Right?
Right.
So, I don't know.
Super interesting.
Super interesting.
There's a lot more to be done there.
I mean, this whole area actually has some intriguing stuff around, for instance, imprinting.
So genomic imprinting, meaning that some genes actually keep track of, you know, scare quotes, keep track of which parent they came from.
And so there's been some research.
I won't be able to pull it up right now.
So let me see if I can remember.
Turner syndrome.
uh which is where uh a a female baby um only has one x uh and so is x oh x naught um at that 23rd position um apparently you can they some research has been done now which can track okay but is your x maternally derived or paternally derived like which x are you missing And so with regard to looking at, you know, so and does the body keep track?
When you have a girl child with Turner syndrome who got her ex from mom and is missing an ex from dad, she is likely to be less intellectually impaired than when she only has the ex from dad.
So the imprinting is there and it's tracking what parent it came from and maternally inherited versus paternally inherited exes in girl children with only one ex are less impaired.
So a lot to think about, right?
Biology is very interesting.
I don't know if you've ever noticed that.
Super interesting and complex.
So that was a paper I was actually able to find.
So that's the one I read as opposed to the abstracts on this.
The stupid punchline of all of this, okay?
The incredibly stupid punchline, as opposed to the science, which we'd like to be talking about is here.
Let me see if I can find it.
Okay, here's the Nature News article.
How the Y-chromosome makes some cancers more deadly for men.
Cool.
Two studies help to explain why colorectal and bladder tumors are worse in men than women.
Not very far into this article, however, is the following parenthetical.
This article uses men to describe people with a Y-chromosome, while recognizing that not all people who identify as men have a Y-chromosome, and not all people who have a Y-chromosome identify as men.
Thank you for that.
Oh, that's very clarifying.
Oh, that's... yeah.
So, I mean, at one level, thank you, Idiot nature for sending us into a path of, there's some stuff to think about with regard to cancer and telomeres, and there's some stuff I'm now thinking about with regard to genomic imprinting.
But that?
That line there in this article that is explicitly about sex differences?
I mean, all is lost!
To the point that we've been making this entire episode, how could we possibly recover?
All right, think about it this way.
When they put that, that sentence into a piece about this research.
All right, so you go to a coral reef.
Now, please.
Can I?
Okay.
You dive under the water and you open your eyes.
Things are blurry as hell.
Yeah.
Right?
For obvious reasons we won't go into.
Somebody hands you a mask, right?
Mask.
They're clarifying, right?
Nature is supposed to be clarifying.
But nature has become like a mask that somebody has loaded with mud, right?
It's like you have a mud mask that you are attempting to look, and it is not as clarifying as perhaps it once was.
Perhaps.
Yeah, perhaps.
Mud is not as clarifying as the mask.
These people should get a grip, and they should go back to sciencing stuff, because that was better.
Just don't, I just don't even know what to do with this.
You know what it is?
That is a science don't hurt me wall.
You remember your don't hurt me wall?
Yeah, for sure.
So, you know, at the point that the Portland broke down explicitly and had protests every day that reliably, for 100 nights straight, turned into riots every night.
There was mass destruction.
People started putting up these signs, these Black Lives Matter signs, all over their storefronts.
I called them Don't Hurt Me walls.
I have pictures of a lot of them.
We talked about them on air.
And, you know, that's largely what they look like.
Some of these people were true believers, but it doesn't really matter if they were or not.
They were putting these up as a form of contrition, and basically, in some cases, they were literally begging, like, I'm a female-owned business, I'm a BIPOC-owned business, don't hurt me, I'm on the side of justice, and, you know, whatever.
They were, don't hurt me walls.
I don't, I'm afraid not here.
I think that nature is captured.
Oh, I believe it is.
It's captured, but from the point of view of... Okay, you've got a piece of research.
Maybe, yeah.
Make some cancers more deadly for men.
I mean, first of all, people realize something.
If you rob us of the ability to talk about males and females in simple terms and we start taking seriously the idea that if you say you're a man then you are, then the point is we are actually going to lose the ability to analyze data to find patterns that are important to, for example, our health.
Yes.
Right?
And who is most likely to be harmed by this?
It's going to be women.
Historically, the people most likely to be harmed by like, oh, let's just treat them all like they're the same, it doesn't matter, meant that the research was done on one class of people and it mostly was men.
It's gonna hurt everybody.
I mean, I agree with you that there's a special risk for women, but we are... it is literally... I mean, it's like the mouse telomere problem, right?
The mouse telomere problem is a wicked problem because it actually means that whatever you study in these creatures has a big old asterisk on it that nobody's aware of.
And so the point is you are now becoming blinder.
The more things you stack on top of broken mice, The more you don't know what you're talking about.
And so this is another, hey, you keep playing that game here, you're not gonna know what you're talking about ten years from now.
You're not gonna be able to know what the data means.
And you are, frankly, handing a super weapon to the sophists who are gonna claim that this sex stuff is all made up in the first place because the data is going to reflect chaos.
Total chaos.
You can have women who only get to, say, their chest feeding, and men who get to breast feed, and, you know, just complete insanity across the board.
We used to think that the Y chromosome turned you into a male, but now you can see in the data that lots of people with Y chromosomes are females.
That's what it's going to say.
Right?
It's going to be impossible to make normal sense if you let this stuff into science, nature, cell, these other places.
So for fuck's sake, people, stop it.
That's right.
Right?
Our ability to make sense to each other is at stake and you guys are playing games with it and you have no right.
Yeah.
You have something to say, but put the screen back up just so people can see it again, the counterpoint between the headline of this Nature News article and the highlighted sentence.
Yeah, I think this is them admitting that they destroyed the ability to report anything scientifically, and so they're going to redefine the terms as what they actually mean using the woke terminology.
But I think there were a number of these articles that actually used completely incorrect definitions of everything.
And you couldn't get any information across.
That's right.
And so they've actually made it so the rest of the article can kind of work here.
Yeah, it's just, and it's a parenthetical.
It's literally a parenthetical.
They've literally said, and what that is supposed to mean, a parenthetical, is the word could exist with the same meaning without this thing.
Yeah.
Right?
And so at one level, maybe this is like the necessary nod.
This is the don't hurt me wall, as you as you suggested.
I think I'm coming around to that perspective.
This is like the little tiny don't hurt me bit.
Yep.
And, and by literally putting that in parentheses, they have said, and you could just ditch this.
And the same meaning obtains throughout the rest of the article, and it does.
And in fact, you need to ditch it else you can't take this seriously.
And you know, the rest of the discriminate, you know, I don't think this was, I I do have concerns about the research it's reporting on, as we talked about, but it doesn't seem to be suffused with wokeries other than that parenthetical.
Because they discovered that that doesn't work for this at all.
You can't do it.
You can't talk about this research if you don't know what a man is.
The funny thing is, okay, the first part of what we talked about here is completely fascinating and the pattern is bound, if you can figure out why the pattern is what it is, It is bound to make us much smarter about these very important topics like cancer, right?
Cancers that are difficult to treat.
So the idea that we instead of focusing on this very difficult puzzle, what is the meaning of cancers that are lacking a Y-chromosome?
Why would that be?
Is that because they're, them becoming cancers was the result of them losing a Y and evading a Hayflick limit or not?
That's an interesting question that has, it's consequential for our understanding of cancer, right?
Instead, we're going to talk about this stuff that isn't consequential for anything other than how confused we're going to be in the future, right?
Yeah.
And that's insane.
So, I mean, look, there are very good people who are studying in a parallel area.
I would point out, uh, Bernie Crespi and Kyle Summers have done some very interesting work on the evolutionary dynamics inside of cancers, which is a very fascinating topic because a cancer, uh, basically dies with you.
And so the evolutionary dynamics are bounded within the short period of time that the cancer is present. - Unless it's contagious, which there are a few. - Like Tasmedian devil cancer. - Right, and I will bet you that a lot more cancers turn out to be this as well, but whether they do it, they don't.
The idea that there's a whole branch of evolutionary science that is about the short period of time between the instantiation of a cancer and the death of the patient, This is a perfect place to have that conversation and it has real implications for how you treat these things.
So, you know, let's elevate the Bernie Crespis and the Kyle Summers of the world and get those questions addressed rather than this lunacy over, you know, when we say the word men, what we mean.
Yes.
Let's.
Shall we?
Yes.
Let's.
Let's.
All right.
I think that brings us to the end for today.
We will be back in a few short days, though.
We will be back in three days on Saturday, July 8th at 12.30 p.m. Pacific.
And come back on Wednesday, July 9th.
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And we will have more to say about that on Saturday.
Okay.
Let's see, other things to mention.
Natural Selections this week.
I just did a slight review of some of the freedoms and rights that we Americans are granted in some of our founding documents, and with high hopes that yesterday marking 240,000 We can make it many, many more, but 250 seems like a really good short-term goal.
Yeah, let's make it to 250 and then we'll talk.
Yeah, yeah.
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