#204 In Defense of the Indefensible (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 204th 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 science and faith, in the context of the recent court ruling that will keep Trump off the ballot in Colorado. We discuss failure modes, which include, yes, faith, and science, and falsificationism, and rationality, and more. All of these are useful in some contexts, some much more than others, bu...
We are obviously not in our temporary permanent location.
We are in a very temporary location.
In fact, we are on a friend's boat in the Caribbean.
Which means, among other things, that we are using a whole bunch of technology and pushing it to limits that it may or may not be capable of handling.
We will see.
So please bear with us as we attempt to uplink through satellites using a mess of cables and devices that are all, in theory, capable of bringing you the Dark Horse Podcast in full living color.
That's right.
So I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein, this is Dr. Heather Hying, that part you knew, and then you're gonna hear some things that you may or may not know.
Well, we encourage you to come join us on Rumble, and the Watch Party on Locals, and we're also on YouTube, of course, and you can find us everywhere you can find podcasts, as always.
Um, we encourage you to check us out at our store, darkhorsestore.org, and we're going to move really the rest of the stuff that we're going to tell you about where to find us and such to the end, except for our sponsors.
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Alright, what did the sea otter say to the clam that it was about to break open?
I don't know.
Stop being selfish.
I'm sorry.
It just... Something about...
seed and being yes exactly exactly right and the fact that shellfish is called out as an allergen in that oh okay so there it is a dad joke right up right up top spontaneously occurred yep yes that's that's fine that's good um so before we get into the meat of today i just want to point out that tomorrow the 21st of december is the solstice The shortest day of the year is always a little bit of a strange construction, right?
The days are the same length throughout the year.
Slightly changing, but imperceptibly so.
And so the northern winter solstice is the day in which you get the least light.
Even though it is not actually the latest sunrise or the earliest sunset.
Those are a slightly different, slightly offset from when the solstice is.
I'm going to have to puzzle through that with a piece of paper later to convince myself that that's possible.
No, but if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, which almost all of you are, although we got some stats today which suggest there are a lot of viewers in Sydney, hello, fine Southern friends, that if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest, no, sorry, let me make it right, the earliest sunset has already happened for you.
And you are now kind of like hanging out at whatever, if you haven't moved spaces, if you haven't moved geographies.
And it may actually even be a minute or two later, depending on how far north you are, that it was at its earliest time, whereas your sunrise is going to continue to creep later into like early January before it reverses course.
So combine those two, and today is the shortest day of the year.
The period between those things is the shortest.
And is the other thing an artifact of human time zones?
No, you mean the sunrise-sunset times?
Apparently it's about the not-totally-circular orbit of the Earth around the Sun.
All right.
Yeah, okay.
So that's solstice for you.
It's pretty wild.
You know, I think this is one of those things you ought to pay attention to annually.
It's a good way of marking time.
In many ways it's more useful than a birthday, that, you know, it has significance beyond you.
And there's two solstices and therefore two equinoxes every year, so they're really They're beautiful moments of the year to consider, to do some sort of celebration, and many cultures do.
In fact, on the solstices, fewer on the equinoxes, but they're also astronomically meaningful moments.
And, you know, probably, and I think you mentioned this maybe last week on Dark Horse, Hanukkah has sort of been upgraded within the Jewish tradition in part, I think, Um, to help Jewish kids not feel totally left out of the brouhaha that, uh, commercialization of Christmas has become.
Um, but it, you know, it is a festival of lights, so its, its proximity, you know, it moves around a little bit over the years, but, um, its proximity to the solstice is no accident.
And the timing of Christmas itself may, in fact, you know, we don't know.
Actually when the man that would become called Jesus who would become to be called Jesus was born But his the celebration of his birth right around the solstice as well may also be no accident, but instead a replacement of Some of the so-called pagan holidays, which were honoring this, you know much more ancient and astronomically Meaningful reality that is the solstice.
Yeah, and to the extent I think
No biblical scholar, but my understanding is that the evidence suggests that Jesus was not born anywhere near Christmas, and so therefore the idea of creating a celebration that is nominally a birth celebration at this moment, that happens to be right about the solstice, suggests that celebrating the solstice is probably something that populations which did it out-competed those that were similar that didn't, and so there's something to be said for marking the time in a useful way, you know, as things
As things are getting colder, things are also getting brighter.
Yeah, exactly.
So anyway, who knows what the explanation is for so many cultures having found that moment a good time to celebrate, but undoubtedly there is one given the number of times it's been discovered.
So by our current calendar thinking, this is the first day of winter.
By some other ways of thinking this would be midwinter, but it only gets colder from here if you are in the north, the farther north you get, but the days are getting longer.
Albedo and accumulated cold Being what they are, though, means that, you know, through solid mid-February or longer, it's not going to get nicer out, depending on what you view as nice, but your days are going to be getting longer.
And I just want to say before we get into most of what we're talking about today, that I'm going to finish today with a little reading from, and I did this actually the very first Christmas season that we were on air with Dark Horse, a little reading from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
So we'll finish with a little bit of Christmas spirit and cheer, since this will be our last live stream Before Christmas, and then we'll be back, actually on the Thursday after Christmas, and we'll be bringing in the New Year shortly thereafter.
All right.
New Year, should there be one, we will be there to celebrate.
There will be.
Be a New Year.
Yes.
Yeah, almost undoubtedly.
The chances are spectacularly high.
Okay.
So, let us talk about the elephant in the room, and I am not talking about Donald Trump.
He's not the elephant in the room, but this decision in the Colorado Supreme Court declaring him ineligible to be on their ballot based on the 14th Amendment is, here and forever after, going to be some kind of elephant in some kind of room.
You are suggesting that the decision is elephant time.
It is infantile, elephantine.
It is a remarkable moment in American history.
And I will say, this train wreck that follows the candidacy and then presidency of Donald Trump just continues.
So, in some ways, this is yet one more jaw-dropping event that is going to be The result of this one unusual person having taken this unusual path and having demonstrated that the duopoly was not unbeatable, which of course has enraged everything that is using the duopoly in order to maintain and gain further power.
So anyway, yeah, we keep living that storyline and it's terrifying.
It's insane that people would take a system that functions as well as ours does and jeopardize it over their Petty inability to accept this one person and his popularity.
It's like, you know, the nastiest mean girl politics from high school having taken over the governance structure so that it just can't even see straight.
There's a lot to say about this.
The 14th Amendment owes to an era, the Civil War era, in which insurrection actually meant insurrection.
The problem here, there's no point in us rehashing the details of the decision and even pursuing its precise meaning or what will happen if and when the Supreme Court of the United States reviews the decision and what that will mean if the Supreme Court overturns this decision as they should.
There's lots of places you can get that analysis, but the real question is, I think, how this relates to what we have discussed here under the heading of the Cartesian Crisis.
And I'm just going to remind people of two pieces of Cartesian toolkit, Cartesian meaning relative to Rene Descartes, that are relevant and they're connected.
One is that Rene Descartes Had a kind of crisis of...
He had an existential crisis that was based in the fact that he realized that almost everything that he believed to be a fact was not something that he had established himself.
It was something that he had taken on somebody else's authority.
And no rational person thinks that taking other people's word for what's a fact is a good idea.
So, looking at this, the obvious responsible thing to do, from his perspective, was to start establishing things.
And then the deeper he dug, the more he realized that actually there's almost nothing you could establish down to bedrock, because at the bottom level...
What even are you that's doing the establishing?
And how do you even know that you exist?
And so there's nothing.
It all just runs through your fingers like water.
So anyway, he generates what I swear is not an actual proof of anything.
You'll get lots of good arguments from lots of very smart people that I've got this wrong.
But the idea is, I think therefore I am, is at the very least a one-of-a-kind proof that we accept Under very special rules, because we don't have any choice.
Either that or it's not a proof at all.
It's a bit of circular logic.
And the reason that it's not a real proof, in the normal sense, is that I can show you, if we've got a mathematical proof, or something that follows that form, I can say, here is the proof, right?
And you can look at it and you can say, alright, here are the assumptions, and on the basis of deductive logic, if the assumptions hold, then this series of extrapolations is so ironclad that the conclusion must follow.
The only way for it to be wrong is for the assumptions in it to be incorrect, right?
Because the steps are laid out and there are no gaps.
That's what a real proof is.
The card's proof, if it works at all, it works on the basis that...
In order to have the proof running, you must exist.
Existence is a prerequisite for the proof to be anything.
But that means, I don't know if there was a Rene Descartes.
I don't know that he ever had this thought.
I don't know that he ever said, you know, cogito ergo sum.
I don't know any of those things.
I can't establish that.
I'm taking all of that on authority.
So the only thing I can do is take his proof, and instead of accepting it as a proof on paper that's ironclad, I can say, never mind if Rene Descartes existed or said any of this stuff, I can run that thing, and inside my head I can establish that I exist.
I can't establish that he existed, but I can establish that I exist.
Okay?
That's a weird proof, right?
That it's like, it's only locally true inside the person running it?
That's not how proofs work.
So, whatever this thing is, it's an unusual artifact.
And my claim, as longtime viewers will know, is that it is cruddy as it is, one-off as it is, mislabeled as a proof as it seems to be, it is absolutely essential that you accept it.
Because really you're stuck at a bifurcation, at a fork in the road.
The fork in the road is either you can fail to accept it, you can say, well I still don't know if I exist, and then Maybe it's your obligation to establish that first.
You're not going to do better than Rene Descartes, so you're not going to establish it.
You'll spend your whole life trying.
You'll fail, and you'll accomplish nothing because you were busy with that your whole life.
Or, you can say, I accept the proof.
That frees me to go do something else of value.
And if the proof turns out to be wrong, what have I lost?
Because I guess I didn't exist, right?
So anyway, it's that choice.
And that choice at a return on investment level is a very powerful argument for accepting Rene Descartes' proof as if it was good, which we all do.
You know, it's good enough.
But the problem here is We have now gotten to a place where the amount that is current that we must accept on faith is extreme.
Our ability to check events that they mean, what we're told they mean, is nil.
And we exist in separate echo chambers that have totally different interpretations of extrinsic stuff.
So we're stuck Our ability to check is nil unless we happen to live in the place where the event is happening.
And even then?
I mean, I think this is part of... We have heard that part of why people tuned in to Dark Horse in the summer of 2020 was not just because we were speaking truth about what was going on with regard to the aftermath of George Floyd's death, Uh, and the rise of DEI and so-called anti-racism and such was, but it was also that Portland as one of the epicenters of stupid during that
was where we lived, and we would go downtown and observe, you know, the nightly transitions from peaceful protest into violent riots.
You know, I mean, we could actually see it, and that doesn't mean that you guys were seeing it, but if you had come to otherwise assess that we were trustworthy reporters of what we were seeing, you were now just one step away, as opposed to us saying, well, we read in the New York Times, you know, or, you know, we read in even You know, in any number of places.
Like, no, actually, we went and saw this, and here are some of our pictures, and this is what's actually going on.
But it does, I think that does speak to part of why, sort of, citizen journalism, when it is actually done, is so valuable now.
Because if you have come to trust that that person with the camera is someone that you can trust, well, it's their eyes, then.
I'm gonna look through their eyes.
I don't know about CBS's eyes, or CNN's eyes, or the New York Times' eyes.
I don't trust those people.
But this guy with a YouTube channel or camera or whatever, that guy's trustworthy.
And that is a great demonstration of actually where we're headed here, which is how many links in the chain have to be what you think they are in order for that to work.
And the fact is it does work.
We are trustworthy.
Perfectly trustworthy?
No.
We could easily misperceive something, misanalyze it.
Because we do the analysis in front of you in large measure, you're in some position to detect whether or not we're making sense, or relying to ourselves, or whatever you might detect.
But anyway, the point is, yes, you can depend on somebody who has proven themselves trustworthy in some way that you have to regard as provisional, because what if it later turns out that the thing you thought they were right about, they were wrong about?
How do they handle it?
That sort of thing.
But assuming these people are trustworthy, then I can trust that they at least saw what they said they saw.
Right.
And I can't establish all the things they didn't say.
You know, what if you and I had gone to a protest and And we had seen the targeting of federal law enforcement agents outside a courthouse.
And we had reported this.
And then it had turned out that that had been a training exercise.
And we had misunderstood where we were.
So the exact observation doesn't tell you for sure that the thing is what it says it is.
No, but I mean, this is exactly-- and this is a topic that we come back to over and over and over again, which is basically the philosophy of science.
Like, you know, what-- how is-- and epistemology.
How is it that we make claims of truth?
And how is it that we understand what we believe to be true to be true?
So You know, science just was thrown under the bus by Fauci and company during during COVID, in which he declared that he himself was science and to disagree with him was to disagree with science.
And of course, that is not now nor has it ever been how science works.
That's how authority works.
That's how faith works.
That's you know, that's that's how celestial and would be celestial authorities work.
Observation of something, and especially if you can record it and show what you observed as close as possible through the lens that you observed it to a public, to an audience.
And then saying, and now let me tell you what I think it means.
Like, we do both, but we try to make it clear, even when we aren't explicit, we make it clear, like, this is what I saw, and this is what I think it means.
This is the observation, and this is the interpretation.
And these two things are both absolutely necessary in making sense of the world, and we can't trust either of those things in the modern media landscape, right?
We can't trust the supposed observations, what happened, what are the facts?
Or the interpretation, what does it mean, what does it imply, what does that say about these other things that happened over here?
Right?
We can't trust either of those things, and they're conflated.
They're just wrapped up together as if it's one media block, as if, you know, that's all you have to do is get to a source that can do that thing well.
And by and large, those outfits, those people, those systems that are good at one are not inherently good at the other.
And there are a lot of ways to talk, you know, I've got this We'll get here later, but there are a lot of ways to say, okay, well, is it this or that?
Is it, you know, is it observation or is it interpretation?
Is it intuition or logic?
Like, you know, which of the two things, on which side of the dyad are you right now?
And I've got a list of a lot of these, like, is it A or B?
Both of which, in each of these cases, and just to take the two I just used, like intuition and logic, observation and interpretation, they are all necessary.
They are all important that we all be able to do them.
But one of the mistakes that is made by people assessing media is they say, well, this media system has to get both right or, oh, I can tell that they interpreted it wrong.
Therefore, the reporting on what actually happened must be wrong as well.
When those are usually separable things, separable entities, what is it that happened and what does it mean?
Yeah, actually, I increasingly find that to the extent that we are denied good news sources, that I have to go to news sources that I absolutely do not trust on interpretation, but there are certain events that I could rely on them to tell me happened.
Right.
There are events that I could rely on them to tell me happened, but I could not rely on them to tell me if they hadn't, right?
Right.
So, anyway, there's a weird balancing act to do, but let's go back to the Trump phenomenon.
You've got a 14th Amendment and a provision that prevents somebody who has been involved in actual insurrection from being on the ballot.
Now, why do you need that?
Well, in the mindset of people who had faced the near destruction of the Republic over an insurrection, It is not impossible to imagine a highly popular insurrectionist.
And so this provision is placed in the constitution as a protection against a scenario that is not unimaginable.
Mapping this scenario onto Donald Trump is a, it's a terrifying abuse of logic.
But it's an abuse of logic for reasons that one cannot establish in absolute terms.
Donald Trump was president.
The folks who thought that was an asteroid headed for Earth were wrong.
Okay?
You can say a lot of things about Trump.
I wish, and in fact maybe I'm just going to break the habit of always saying, this isn't my guy, I didn't vote for him, I don't want him to be president, I don't think he has the characteristics that make a good president, but he did a lot of good stuff.
And top of the list, I would point out, and I'm going to come back to this, is No New Wars.
Now, No New Wars is something that virtually every American should be biased towards.
There are moments at which you have to go to war, but the bias ought to be, look, war is a last resort.
Starting new ones is bad.
It takes whatever you might be doing economically that would be productive for all of us, that would create a surplus with which we could do the stuff that great civilizations do, gets squandered, stuff that blows up on a battlefield and is never seen again.
It opens up routes for corruption.
It obviously creates tremendous tragedy.
So bias against war ought to be the default.
But there are a whole bunch of people who aren't biased against war because they make money through war.
And so in any case, a president who didn't start any new wars, when every other recent president has, would certainly be a problem for those whose business model depends on the fact that we always have a reason to start a new war, and if we don't have one, we'll make one.
Right?
So one reason this guy might be targeted as an insurrectionist is not an antipathy to America, for which I don't see any evidence.
I think this guy has a different priority.
But hatred for America?
No.
I don't see any evidence of that.
So, there is a desire to make it impossible for this person to ascend to the office.
There is at least one reason that people who are themselves being deeply unpatriotic might want to prevent that using any tool at their disposal, especially in light of the popularity of the man, especially at the moment.
And the idea that you might then invoke this exotic Prohibition against insurrection is showing up on the ballot, right?
It's a shocking departure from normalcy and decency and all of that.
On the other hand, We are in a Cartesian crisis, and there are those who think that what I've just said, as much as what I've said seems to me perfectly obvious and utterly secure, there are those who think that the existential threat represented by this person, even though he was president for four years and we were not destroyed, and not even nearly so,
That is exactly the reason for which the ripcords that have been placed in various places have been placed.
Now, even that I would say is preposterous.
The fact is the Constitution does not have, you know, exceptions for epidemics or, you know, Reality TV stars ascending to the presidency.
It just doesn't happen, for good reason.
Because if it did, then that would be the whole game, right?
And in fact, the sense that people think that the exceptions exist is... It is now the game.
creating the impression that the circumstances are such that we now have to pull these levers that largely don't exist, you know, is now where we are.
And that requires the public to be dragged into irreconcilable narratives.
You know, the reality that I see, I know, is completely incompatible, even with the narrative that my parents see.
Right?
And, you know, we get along.
But there is, you know, as soon as we get over into the territory that the New York Times covers every day, it's not possible to find common ground in which...
Anymore.
Yeah.
So the destruction of a shared analysis...
No, not analysis.
A shared set of facts...
Right.
And that's exactly it.
That's it again, right?
We can't even get to the interpretation part.
We can't even get to the analysis part, the part where we get to use logic, the part where we get to reveal ourselves as descendants of the Enlightenment.
No.
If we can't even agree on facts, we are stuck there at the most fundamental level of, like, it's barely even human level, right?
Like, there are a lot of organisms that should be able to do this that aren't human, and we can't even agree on this.
I can't even agree on this, and how anybody thinks that there is a route forward.
There are those who are, at best, there are those who are narrowly gaming our capacity to make sense of the world for their own purposes, whether that's the ability to start new wars when they need new wars, or The ability to transfer wealth from others to themselves through the tax system, which is, of course, war is one way to do that.
Whatever it is that they are using their unearned power for, the ability to maintain it requires the rest of us to be too confused to align.
Right?
If we can agree that the average person is getting screwed by a system that is increasingly disinterested in promoting their well-being and it has now taken up keeping them confused full-time and there are those of us out here struggling to make sense while something is struggling to confuse sense and you know there's obviously a huge range of how successful people are at doing that but
That battle does not leave a coherent future for anybody, really.
Short-term, yes, it puts certain people way ahead, but it's not obvious that they have a long-term plan at all.
They may be just too zoomed in on not losing their immediate power, and they may be undermining themselves long-term, and the rest of us, yes, are going to pay a terrible price for what they're up to, but maybe we all suffer from it in the end.
The question that we are honing in on here is, what is the method that we can deploy that prevents people from
That gives us the capacity to make sense faster than others can untangle our sense-making, such that we can navigate coherently and not become divided over whether or not Trump is a self-obsessed, needy, but non-hostile to America,
Popular candidate or whether he is the end of America encapsulated in one person, right?
We can't disagree over that, right?
And yet we do.
This leads me to something that's going to seem very disconnected, which is a tweet that was forwarded to me by, uh, the tweet is by Tim Kelly, Dr. Tim Kelly.
He's not somebody I know well, but anyway, I found the tweet very interesting.
It lays out a, an argument for, um, yeah, you want to show the tweet and then, uh, show the first chart from it.
It lays out an argument for why the mind fails to properly incorporate evidence of certain kinds.
And basically the argument, I'm not going to go deeply into it because actually this isn't going to be the focus of our discussion.
But the idea is that there is evidence that the mind functions in a Bayesian way, that is according to Bayes' theorem.
And the simple description of how this works is that you have priors, which is your understanding of how the universe functions walking into a situation, and then you have evidence, and that these two things are effectively like curves that get multiplied by and that these two things are effectively like curves that get multiplied by each other to bring you to
The idea being that the incorporation of new evidence adjusts your understanding of how the world works, and in many limited circumstances that's clearly true, and the fact that there's neurological evidence that says the brain does this is fascinating.
Now, the problem is, so the argument that Tim Kelly lays out, which he in part credits to a friend of his, a mathematician, is that in the math there is a defect is that in the math there is a defect which causes the mind not to be able to update when a prior is held with particular intensity.
Now, I think the description in the tweet, which we will link in the description here, I think that the argument that is presented is actually flawed.
It points to something interesting.
But I think what it's really saying is that when you hold a belief with sufficient strength, then a piece of evidence that is sufficiently contradictory to it is not multiplied by it, but is in fact thrown out as an outlier.
Now throwing out outliers is not an inherently wrong thing to do.
It's a question of whether or not your reason for throwing them out is valid.
And to take an example, if we were trying to figure out whether the globe was warming and we had data from a station at a particular spot, and we had, you know, daily readings at noon for a hundred years, And they were all between, uh, you know, whatever.
They were between, uh, 30 degrees Fahrenheit and 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
I'm not sure what location that would describe, but whatever.
That's the range.
And then you've got a reading that is 204 degrees.
Well, you could throw it out as an outlier.
It never got to 204 degrees.
You know it didn't.
And so the point is that's not really evidence.
What that is is a sensor went bad or something.
So you're justified in throwing out an outlier sometimes.
But if what you do is you walk into a situation and you have a very strongly held belief, and something says, oh, that strong belief isn't right, and you throw it out because it contradicts that belief, not because there's reason to think it's in error, then you're making a logical mistake.
Outliers exist for various reasons, and the remarkable habit of throwing out outliers in much of statistical analysis is egregious, and it fails to distinguish between the fact that, especially when it's remote machines that are just blipping on at particular moments, errors in what was collected, but also with regard to humans, there will be errors in the data.
And sometimes outliers indicate that the system is not what you thought it was.
And so if your rule is throw out outliers, you are damning yourself to continuing to believe in what you already believe.
Yes, that's the problem, is that there's an art to throwing out only outliers for which there's a justification.
And if you are not practiced at the art, and I use that term carefully, then you end up with a verificationist understanding.
And a verificationist understanding is of course the cardinal sin of what I will call a Popperian worldview.
So, and Anyway, I know that this seems complex and maybe too philosophical to be important, but it's really the opposite.
We are watching civilization decohere over a failure to agree on simple matters of fact and obvious extrapolations from them.
What I want to argue, so we've got Tim Kelly who points out that Bayesian reasoning has a flaw.
And I'm not, again, I'm not certain that the flaw he's found is actually a flaw in Bayesian reasoning.
It's a flaw in something about the way the mind applies this particular method.
But I wanted to lay out an argument.
And the argument is you've got different ways of doing an analysis.
You've got What I would call an Aristotelian or Baconian scientific approach.
You know, standard observation hypothesis prediction test.
Thesis, synthesis, or thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Yep.
You've got the Popperian version of this in which falsification takes on its special capacity to protect us from From reinforcing pre-existing notions, you've got Bayesian analysis, and then you've got other folks who are doing something entirely different.
You've got folks who ascribe to a worldview in which there is some organizing principle with an intelligence to it.
People who are devoted to a religious worldview, who don't necessarily I will come back to why this sounds wrong, but do not necessarily care what the output of all of these scientific or rigorous analytical processes say.
It's not going to budge them off of some core belief about the most fundamental facts of the universe.
So, the upshot of all of this, I think, is how does the mind work?
Right?
We are told, oh, there's evidence that it works in a Bayesian way.
And if it does, that explains why people are unwilling to depart from core beliefs that they hold very strongly.
It's a mathematical issue, right?
That the math does not cause, you know, if you presented them with a small upgrade to their model, they might move just a little bit.
If you present them a large upgrade, they abandon the upgrade as an outlier and they don't move at all.
Right.
So that's a paradox.
Presumably the larger departure from their world, you should move them farther.
But in fact, it moves them less.
Right.
That sounds like, oh, the math is bad in the brain.
Why would a brain be built that way?
Well, my argument is going to be it ain't.
In fact, what you have is a mind.
First of all, realize from our perspective, the mind is built to solve evolutionary puzzles.
What does it mean to solve an evolutionary puzzle?
Well, it means that you take, you make the most of the opportunity that you have in terms of getting your genes as far into the future as you can.
That's what it means to solve.
Well wait, I didn't hear you say anything about being right.
Oh no, being right isn't involved.
To the extent that the universe cares if you're right, it cares if you're effective at something.
And in our case, it cares at the level of whether we get our genes into the future.
Well, what if believing wrong things gets you genes into the future?
Cool.
Then that's what you're gonna do.
So, that is simultaneously living with a mind that is perfectly capable of doing science, and doing it brilliantly.
Right?
Now, a scientific worldview will have you accept things on the basis, you know, I think in the upgraded form, that a falsification has caused you to abandon some primitive way of thinking in favor of a new way of thinking that may actually be bad for you.
Right?
Science doesn't care whether The conclusion that you come to gets your genes into the future.
But it is true that on average, knowing more will provide you opportunities to get your genes into the future in ways that you might miss if you knew less.
So there's some conflict.
Is selection really just getting you to believe whatever is useful, even if it's wrong?
Is it trying to get you to figure out what's right?
It's doing both.
But it's doing those In a way that presumably does not have you obligated to one or the other.
Right?
So... One or the other... which?
I lost the end there.
Okay, so let's say we've got a science person and a faith person.
Which one is ahead in the evolutionary game of getting into the future?
Well, the science person has an advantage.
That advantage is that they can figure out what's true and that may provide some opportunities.
But the faith person has ways of thinking about what might be true that are proven over very long periods of time.
And so neither of these is a recipe for getting into the future.
They are both tools in the toolkit of getting into the future.
And in fact, having both of those people in the same population means that you can have the advantages of both things living in the same place.
I guess I'm stuck.
There are a lot of these ways in which we switch modes that I've been thinking about a lot lately.
And I'm startled to hear a science versus faith description, because that seems to me like it's one of the ancient, or at least several hundreds of years old, ways that we have, that human beings have supposedly sort of come to blows intellectually.
That is almost precisely one of the least common ones at the moment.
It really doesn't feel like at the moment we're in a science versus faith landscape, at least not as the people who are claiming to be speaking for science understand it.
Because the people who are claiming to be speaking for science are very often engaged in faith-based exercises, in faith-based authoritarian trusting exercises.
And I find instead, I find many people of faith, many people who describe themselves as of a faith, which I do not, which you do not.
In fact, do engage in scientific and critical scientific thinking every day, right?
And they engage in logic and I'm so confused by what's going on right now.
They engage in logic and rationality and also in following their intuition and in observing things just as those who are doing science are supposed to be doing.
And I'm not sure...
Maybe you're going somewhere that I don't, I don't know, but that felt like, you went a lot of places I didn't, you didn't tell me you were going, and I didn't, I thought we were going other places, and I'm not sure how useful at the moment it is, like, especially given that you wanted to open by talking about Colorado and Trump and the Supreme Court, like, that is being framed by, you know, the people supposedly on our side, on, you know, on the left, right?
as the Trump people, the Trump voters are mostly of faith and they're not the science people and that's not the way it is at all.
- But I'm not arguing.
- Of course, that's not the way it is.
And so I don't know what science versus faith is doing.
- I'm building up an argument.
- Okay, then keep going.
- Well, my point is not that those science versus faith people exist very much.
They did.
In fact, we overlapped with a worldview in which there was absolute denial of Darwinian evolution as an explanation for the diversity of species.
And that has largely given way, even as we have been functioning in that space, to people who have faith ultimately in a creator actually taking on a scientific understanding and pursuing Pursuing a hybrid explanation.
Now, I'm not arguing for or against that here.
The argument I'm trying to make is, you correctly point out, as we've argued here many times, that even a scientist has to have faith in order to do their work.
Hold on.
So, the point is, a scientific toolkit does not limit itself.
A functional scientific toolkit may limit itself in its description to only, you know, valid scientific things like the formation of hypotheses and predictions and tests, but a functional scientist of the type that actually makes real progress is borrowing from another mode, a mode that we often do not acknowledge.
Absolutely, and I am understanding that mode as a number of things that you have not mentioned, and I do not see it as particularly the purview of those with faith.
I see it, and I don't want to give away too much because this is like a big project that I'm working on, but I see it as a place where beauty exists, and why do we appreciate beauty?
and a place where narrative and story exist.
And there is truth and validity in story, even maybe especially when it is fiction, because what is it that is so appealing to us about story and why do archetypes exist?
And that is the thing that exists in sort of counterpoint to the logic and the rationality and the interpretation of what is often shorthanded for people into like, oh, the science is just, it's the data.
in sort of counterpoint to the logic and the rationality and the interpretation of what is often shorthanded for people into like, oh, the science is just, it's the data.
And it's once you have the numbers and it's how you interpret.
And it's once you have the numbers and it's how you interpret.
And that's not, of course, that's not true, right?
And that's not, of course, that's not true, right?
And like, you know, you describe, you sort of shorthand what Bacon described as the scientific method.
And it absolutely includes observation.
And also it's a cycle.
It returns to itself and says, okay, now that you know something, you know, go back out and see, you know, as Agassi wrote, you know, take the facts into your own hands and see for yourself, right?
Like that is 100% part of what science is, not, oh, you've got some numbers, you know, plug it into an algorithm and see what it spits out.
I agree with that.
And I wanted to add something.
I was not intending to limit the world to some cartoonish faith versus science thing.
Within the scientific worldview, you now have rationalists.
Rationalists who subscribe to this Bayesian idea.
And the Bayesian idea is a sophistication.
It is one that clearly we now generally can see has a failure mode associated with it.
That the so-called rationalists are actually perfectly capable of going insane in a form that looks like effective altruism.
That in effect you have people who Imagine that they are the folks most focused.
They are the most hard-headed, practical folks with respect to figuring out how to get the Earth to be a better place.
And they have signed up for a fancy version of utilitarianism.
And the thing about utilitarianism... Utilitarianism.
The greatest good for the greatest number.
Sounds pretty good.
Don't you love a planet in which we did whatever created the greatest good for the greatest number?
Awesome, sign me up.
Okay, how about slavery?
What if we take a small number of slaves and the net impact is good for lots of people?
Then the cost of those slaves is a small price to pay for all that goodness, right?
So are we on board with slavery?
Ah, so now I know that utilitarianism is a problem.
The rationalists have a problem, which is that they have signed up for a fancy method that they've become very practiced in, without spotting that their very obligation to that method is itself the guarantee of a dramatic failure.
Right.
So... There are limited places where static rules will work over the long term.
There are limited places, I think that's a very good way of saying it, there are limited places where static rules will work over the long term.
And so, what I'm really arguing is when we say something like, there is neurological evidence that the mind functions in a Bayesian way, we've actually already got it wrong.
What is almost certainly taking place is that the mind has the capacity to function in a Bayesian way.
And the mind also has the capacity to function in a scientific falsificationist, Popperian way.
Should you be a scientific falsificationist, Popperian?
Not all the time.
Right?
And so the question is, in a Cartesian crisis, is there a method that gets you out of it?
No.
There won't be a method, because each of these methods is actually a failure mode, and especially if you have antagonists that are working to disrupt your capacity to make sense of the world, then that's even worse than just a chaotic world in which you have tremendously noisy evidence and are having trouble making sense of it.
I guess the point is, and I think I'm just following up on your argument, that it's the staticness of the rules that is the problem.
And you know, we've said this in the context of things like child rearing.
Static child rearing rules are destined to be gamed, and so the way to properly raise children is not to obligate yourself terribly much to anything so that you're free to depart when you have to.
But the idea is, there's no method for making sense that doesn't have a failure mode.
What there is, is a meta-method.
Yeah, I guess, I don't think that's right.
I think, um... Only if you narrowly define method.
Only if you narrowly define method as, this is the thing that you do, there's one thing that you get to do, and it might be complicated, it might be a script, it might have a lot of steps, but there's the one thing, as opposed to, there's at least two modes that you have to be willing to exist in, and you have to be willing to jump sometimes between modes, when least you want to, when least you expect it, even sometimes when it feels like, but this is working for Not necessarily.
Maybe go back to the last point on which you were sure and just try a different branch.
Even if the one you're currently on feels good.
So, the thread that we started with has some follow-up, and I was a little surprised, it's just a coincidence, that actually one of the people who responded to that thread was Alexandros Marinos, a friend of ours, a very high-quality thinker, and he described something that I thought was interesting along your lines.
Can you show that, and actually Maybe I can dredge it up here, because you have no way to.
Um, so I will recover as best I remember.
What Alexandra says that he does, he says he finds it very important in order to avoid the confusion, um, from the thread that this started off with.
I'm sorry, I'm confused.
I don't know what a thread is.
What thread were we on?
The, uh, Dr. Tim Kelly thread.
You're talking about Twitter.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, Twitter thread.
Right.
The literal, concrete, hold it in your hands Twitter thread.
So what Alexandra says is that he finds it important to maintain competing hypotheses and accumulate evidence for them independently.
Now, A, I don't think that's how I do it.
So, I think he's telling us something about an idiosyncratic method that this very effective thinker has for solving part of this problem, which is that he effectively opens a separate file for multiple hypotheses and he doesn't let them touch.
We're talking about multiple hypotheses for a single observation to explain a single pattern?
Yeah.
Otherwise, this is obvious.
Right, right, right.
So, in so doing, one does not fall into the trap of having found a bunch of pieces of evidence that point in this direction, being unable to see the evidence that points in that direction.
We have multiple competing hypotheses, and the point is, well, alright, the evidence that points to this one goes in that folder.
But in order to avoid the confusion, if I have a separate folder, so everything that should degrade this folder actually just contributes to this folder, and then later on I can put them together and I can say, what does all the evidence on this topic say, right?
That is a formalization, I've never heard it before, that solves a problem.
But the key thing is, interesting, I often I like the way Alex thinks through a difficult puzzle.
He's very good at this.
But it's also not... It's not that he's found the way.
It's that everybody who's successful at thinking carefully has found a way that keeps them off of the rocks that the various sirens call towards.
And that process...
Long-time viewers will have heard me say various things, like I'm concerned about a hazard buried in books.
The hazard being that it's something that is book-length causes you to adopt somebody's perspective for long enough that for many of us it's hard to get it out of our minds when we're done.
And so there's no way to provisionally test things out without it having a profound effect on the system.
I freely admit that that's probably not true for most people.
But for me, that seems to be a piece of the method.
The other thing that I have said is I don't think the method that I understand myself to use can be defended in rigorous terms.
In other words, it is...
It's an art, not a science.
And so the question is, how do you, if it is true that if, what if none of us know our method, right?
Our conscious minds are aware of certain features of our method, but then when we get to a place like, oh, formulate a hypothesis, I don't know how that works.
Well, I mean, this is exactly it.
So I'm going to even object to the it's an art, not a science formulation.
I don't like that comparison at all, because I think that the creativity, the unknown, the ineffable, the intuitive, the liminal in science is absolutely necessary.
And most people who don't do science believe these yahoos who are like, just it's data driven.
Just take the data and throw some stats at it and like you have an answer and then you'll know what shots to take.
Right.
Like that's that's how we get to some of this insane totalitarian nonsense.
And that's not where the science starts.
That's not to just throw some heuristics at and see when you get an answer you like and call that science.
But the careful analysis of quantitative information is of course part of most scientific processes.
But the necessary first part, the generation of hypotheses, How do you do it?
How do you teach it?
You've said you can't teach it.
I've said I used to do something around teaching it, but it was really a, like, I'm going to drop you in the field and see, you know, see what you see.
Tell me, tell your peers what you see, and start generating ideas for why you think you saw what you saw.
Not why you think your brain told you what it meant, but like, why that pattern that you noticed?
And that generation of hypotheses stage is not logical.
It's not rational.
It's not numerical.
It is none of those things.
That is the creative, the liminal, the intuitive, the observant part of this, which is very much a necessary part of the artistic process as well.
Now, art and science are both seeking truth in different ways, right?
And what happens after that Looks different in art and science.
But I would say that that part of it, that part that you are saying, it's art, not science?
No, no, no.
That's both.
That's a piece that is a necessary part of the scientific process as well.
It's not quantifiable.
It's not in the rational, logical, analytical, interpretive space.
It's before that.
Then there's another piece, which you haven't brought up, Which is that if you're gonna try to formalize this, and there are pieces within this, again, creative liminal space that you have to try to formalize, you need to say, I've observed a thing, I want to explain the thing, what could possibly explain that thing?
You can't come up with one hypothesis.
And you can't come up with, you can't say, ah, I need to come up with five, like five's the number, right?
You have to come up with all of the possible hypotheses If a method like, say, was it Alex's, is going to work, or, you know, or anyone's.
Like, if you haven't actually come up with all of the possible hypotheses to explain the pattern you're trying to explain, at the point that you then go into full rigor falsificationist mode, and you're like, okay, not A, falsified that, not B, falsified that, oh, maybe C, not D, not E, oh, it's C. Well, it's only C if you had the complete solution set to begin with.
And, you know, that piece of it is also, you know, You can say it.
I can say what I just said, but how do you teach the development, the generation of all of the hypotheses, and how would you know?
Like, how would you know when you've got the complete solution set?
You know in part by, well, okay, I'm left with C, but, you know, rinse and repeat.
I've got to do this over and over again, and I have to know from having tested those five, say, to start with hypotheses about the pattern that I've observed, oh, I actually came up with some more ideas while I was doing that that I didn't see at the beginning.
I can't test those now while I'm already in the middle of testing ones that I had in advance, but once I go, oh, C is the one left standing, that doesn't mean C is true, but it means C is more likely to be true than any of the others, and I have more confidence in it being true than I did before, but now let me add G, H, and I, because I've generated those in the meantime.
And hopefully you generate fewer and fewer and at some point you are left with, say, a C. Like, okay, you know what?
It's hypothesis C after all.
That's the one that I think is true.
But all of that is outside of the realm of numbers and logic and rationality at some level.
It's this interplay of modes, if you will, but it includes not just the if, you know, If and then, and thesis antithesis and synthesis, but also the what if, and how on, and I'm curious about.
It's that space that is where the scientific imperative starts, and it's why children act like scientists until they're told they can't possibly until they understand calculus, and that kills off scientific inspiration in children.
And so it's both of these things.
And yes, there are moments when we need to separate it.
Like, I don't think we want the liminal entering statistical analysis exactly.
But for a lot of the process, it's both and.
I have a couple thoughts just based on laboratory of the self.
I have the sense, first of all, when I say it's an art, not a science, I'm not saying it's art.
I'm saying it's an art.
Yeah.
So we just, we have a number of ways of using the various words, right?
Yeah.
So an art means it is a skill that cannot be, um, Fully described.
So, the, you know, I don't know if ballerinas are virtuosos, but the ballerina is particularly gifted, right?
We do not have some method for knowing how all of the neurons fire that get her to do exactly the thing that evokes whatever she's evoking better than others, right?
But it is something that she's undeniably tremendously practiced at doing, and She ain't doing it consciously, right?
The analogy that I've used, that I've been thinking about, that I think is relevant here, is that art is to craft as science is to engineering.
Hold on, let me think about that.
Art is to craft as science is to engineering.
And part of the reason that works is not relevant to what you're talking about right here.
Both craft and engineering are outcome focused.
I'm going to do this with an analytical understanding or a creative understanding, but I'm trying to build a, I'm trying to solve this, right?
And art and science are engaged in discovery and revealing something that is true about the universe that even the person, the artist or the scientist at the very beginning of the process may not know.
that they are trying to reveal.
At the very beginning of the scientific process, you don't know what question you're asking.
You have some idea, you have made some observation, but you haven't even generated the beginning of the hypotheses yet.
And that's still part of the scientific process. - Oh, the scientific process has to include whatever the process is by which a hypothesis is formulated, obviously.
But there is no method for it that we can describe.
Right?
And what you've described is a method for, yes, I grant you teaching people to do it, but as you describe it.
But it's mostly about immersing them.
Right.
It's about saying, look, here's the objective.
And nudging them this way or that.
See if you can't find something that reaches this objective.
I want you to come out with a hypothesis.
What's a hypothesis?
Well, it's a potential explanation for something that you've seen for which you don't know the explanation.
Right?
Well, how am I going to do it?
I don't know, go try.
And at some point you're either going to figure it out or you're going to discover that there's no route in here.
That this is a skill for some reason you can't figure out how to access and then you got to do something else.
But I also wanted to pick up, so my point is, I'm sure there's methodological stuff going on in the unconscious layer.
When I formulate a hypothesis, I'm sure there's a method and I know I've gotten better at it, so something got trained to do something better.
There's some method running.
I just don't have access to it any more than I have access to sending the muscles some particular information about how to lift that object.
I can't tap into it.
But here's the other thing.
You say the right way to do science is to formulate all of the competing hypotheses that might explain an observation.
Now, I agree.
If the method that you described Alex using, if you're putting into bins, if you're accumulating evidence into the bins, You don't know as much as you think you do at the end of that if you didn't have a complete solution set of hypotheses to begin with.
Right, now here's the point.
To do that kind of science, to do empirical science.
So, I know... Because I did not use the phrase that you just used.
Which one?
I don't know, what did you say?
To do science, you need to do X. I don't remember exactly what you said.
I'm not defending that, because I don't think it's true.
And I think it's interesting.
We now have evidence on how Alex thinks he does this.
And we have evidence on how you think you do this.
And I know I can point to two examples where what I'm doing doesn't match either of these things.
Now we're off the rails.
I was not talking about my process at all.
I was not describing anything about what I do.
I was saying that you do not know, at the end of the day, if you had a bunch of hypotheses, if you only have one left standing, if that one that is left standing is true, unless you had all the hypotheses to begin with.
That is what I'm saying.
That is the end.
And that is just true.
That is correct.
Right.
But, I want to point out two things.
It doesn't have anything to do with a particular method.
There is a statement, an Arthur Conan Doyle quote, probably the most famous quote of all, that gets invoked all the time, and I can't figure out why anybody believes it.
You know the one?
I won't get it exactly.
Maybe Zach can look it up for us.
But it's something like, once you have eliminated... Once you have eliminated all of the...
Impossible hypotheses, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth, or something like this.
Only if you had a complete solution set.
Right, only if you had a complete... But that's my point!
Right, but how would you know?
This is also my point.
So that's what I said.
So you have to cycle back.
The scientific method is inherently a cycle.
So you're left with one standing.
You don't stop.
Right.
You don't stop there.
You have to say, OK, well, what else emerged as a possibility?
Then you're never done.
You never know.
OK.
When you've arrived at truth, you get closer and closer to thinking, ah, this is probably it.
OK.
So I want to give you two examples from my own history as a developing scientist in which Something else happened outside of the possibility of having all the solutions, all of the hypotheses in the solution set, or continuing a cycle of generating new ones.
And it doesn't match Alex's version either of competing files for evidence.
And the two examples are, when I was doing my qualifying exam as a graduate student.
So this is an early exam after the first year.
I wrote a paper on monogamy in mammals.
And there was a fact that didn't make any sense to me.
The fact... I'm trying to remember exactly what the setup was, but in Calatricids you had... Which are marmosets and tamarins.
New world primates of a particular clade.
Right.
you had, um...
I can't even remember what the observation was, that, uh...
you had twins.
You had obligate twinning.
And you... I can't remember.
You have polyandry and... It's something around polyandry and obligate twinning.
And you have brothers taking care of each other's kids.
Yeah, you had... You had individuals who were collaborating as if identical twins.
Who, it seemed logical, had to have been... So, cow trichids, in question, produced twins.
You had males collaborating on the raising of offspring as if twins, but the embryological evidence suggested that they were not identical twins, and that did not add up to What I found out many years later was that there was a weird cellular phenomenon where the cells in individuals actually intermixed, and so the animals themselves were composites of two individuals.
So not technically identical twins, but it's something I would never have thought to hypothesize, right?
It's too weird Yes, from the crazy but true phrase chimeric testes.
Right, so chimeric testes are testes where the individual who possesses them doesn't know which genome they are borrowing from to create sperm.
So it results in a statistical, as if identical twins, behavior based on some mechanism that was just outside of what was known or knowable at the time that I was formulating hypotheses.
So anyway, my point is, in that case, You were left with a, I can't make sense of this, I know there's something not true, no I don't have the answer, but I know I don't have the answer because something about this does not fit.
It's not even I know that I don't know the answer.
It's that these animals are behaving as if they are twins.
I am told that they are behaving as if they are identical twins.
I'm told they are not identical twins.
I don't know if the people who did the measurement got it wrong, and they are identical twins, and the fact that they're behaving like it is really the real piece of information.
I didn't think to hypothesize this other thing, because if I had hypothesized it, then there are a million other... You might have been thrown out of grad school.
Right, I might have been thrown out of grad school, but they're all... So if you're gonna be that weird about it, right, you know, maybe they're not monkeys, right?
Who knows how many hypotheses that are extremely unlikely to have anything to do with anything you would have to hypothesize.
So, I didn't do that.
But the point is, when I finally saw the piece of information that answered the question, I had reserved judgment.
I'm not going to finalize this file because...
Because they're behaving like identical twins, goddammit.
But this is consistent with what I'm saying.
You're not disagreeing.
I have not proposed a method that you don't do.
I have said, one of the errors that people make in imagining what it is that science is, is You have an idea, you test it, you either prove it wrong or you prove it right.
Almost every piece of that is wrong.
You don't prove it right, you may fail to falsify it, fail to prove it wrong, and then maybe, depending on how many iterations you've done of this and how many hypotheses you've tested, you may really feel like that feels right and all of this other stuff that I can't quite figure out where it fits It also seems to fit with that, and so, you know what?
I'm going to call it good for now, and please, all of you future scientists, go ahead and test this, and, you know, if I turn out to be wrong, I will be glad to know that.
I would rather not be wrong, but if I am wrong, I will be glad to know that.
And what you have done here, and always, and we all should be doing this, is you say, In this case, you didn't even think you'd arrived.
The literature thought it arrived at something, and you're like, doesn't work.
And here are the inconsistencies that apparently no one else in literature is talking about.
And you're going, no, I don't know what it is that the answer is going to be.
But I am almost sure, I think you would have said, I am almost sure that either something about what we think is true is not true, or there is something truly extraordinary that explains these sets of things because otherwise it does not add up.
And it's interesting, you know, I end up at this, like, reductionist quantitative like it does not add up, but this is exactly this part of science where it's not about the quantitative.
It's about, again, something in the creative and the liminal.
I can't quite put all of it together, but I'm sure this is not a coherent picture yet.
Right.
And back to my point about indefensible.
Yes.
There is a belief in the world that we scientists behave by a code, and we should.
And that code involves a method to which we are obligated.
And it doesn't matter, you know, if the method produces an answer that you don't like, tough, that's your problem.
And the real answer is Sometimes the method tells you that you have to change your belief because you had it wrong.
Absolutely.
And sometimes you didn't have it wrong.
And the method, because of all of the various contributing factors, has spit out a temporary answer that's more misleading than informative.
And so, you know, a proper method, a proper meta-method, has to contain what I call the agnostic box.
Which is, when you have something that doesn't resolve, and the evidence that should, by some superficial analysis, force you to a conclusion that you cannot accept because something about it isn't right, you have to have some way of filing it.
So, you don't get special privilege for your belief just because it seems more right than the evidence you've been told to reconcile it with.
But you reserve the right not to do anything with it to wait for further evidence, which may frankly take decades.
And what I want to point to in the present, is there are many different factions on many different topics that are now looking for your membership card in a particular club.
And as soon as you give them your membership card in the club, then you're gonna get thrashed against the wall because you're violating its rules.
And the point is, I'm not signing up for those rules.
I'm not signing up for the atheist rules for the universe.
I'm not signing up for the Popperian falsification rules.
I'm not signing up for rationalism and effective altruism.
I am signing up for the ability to utilize these things as necessary and not, you know, I've forgotten who it owes to, but there's a famous statement Supreme Court Justice, I'm not sure which one, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, right?
And the idea is, yes, these rules are written down, they're quite clear, but to the extent that one discovers that these rules are going to force you to self-destruct, obviously, that's not the intent of the people who wrote them.
Now, it's a very dangerous idea, because once you say, well, it's not a suicide pact, all you have to do is declare something suicide in order to get an exemption.
Right, so it creates that other hazard too, right?
It is both not a suicide pact and it has to function very much like one up until some very late moment, otherwise you get, you know, viable presidential candidates who are distasteful to some large number of powerful people declared insurrectionists.
And, you know, voila!
Suddenly your constitution evaporates.
So I'm not quite sure, I'm not quite sure where that leaves us except what are we going to do about the fact that we both need to have methods by which we do things and need to have exemptions and we now live in a world in which the very fact that there are exemptions has been gamified
To invalidate the methods themselves.
How do we navigate that?
And maybe the point is actually all of these things are predicated on a higher value which is not stated.
Which is that, you know, here's a place where science will not work.
It will not work in an environment where we are not agreed that we want to figure out what the truth is.
Right?
Now, if pharma is in your science apparatus, does pharma want to know what the truth is?
No.
It wants marketable drugs.
Sometimes the truth is very inconvenient for a marketable drug.
The drug is too dangerous, it doesn't work, there are competitors that work better.
Right?
So, you know, pharma is going to get you to free it from truth in those cases.
Pharma, like engineering, is outcome-driven.
And so it claims to be doing science, but it is outcome-driven.
It is seeking a solution to a problem that it has identified, sometimes to a problem that it has itself created, but it is seeking a solution to a problem that it has identified.
Yeah, but let's put it this way.
I'm less afraid of the engineers, and I'm afraid enough, but... I'm in favor of all four of those words that I used.
I'm just saying that they are different work modes.
But the problem with the pharma one in particular is...
That if you take, there are pills you can take in which you can monitor an effect on some symptom that you are tracking, right?
So you know it has positively affected you with respect to the thing that you went to the doctor for.
But you can't tell whether it has also increased your likelihood of getting cancer unacceptably, for example.
For that, you have to go to what looks like science that describes the consequences of taking that thing.
And of course, the people who live and die by the valuation of their corporation have perfected the gaming of the appearance of science when they're doing the opposite of science.
They're in fact disrupting science from discovering truths they don't want to hear.
I think it is true that the engineers are just less prone to this because... I mean, well, let's steelman the case that the engineers are in just as bad a spot.
I did not make that argument.
I know.
I'm just steelmanning it, trying to figure out whether there's really a reason to make a distinction.
A distinction between... Between Pharma and its objective-based universe and engineers and their objective-based universe.
There are so many differences.
There are.
I guess I'm just not sure what that serves.
I don't know anyone making that argument, so I don't know why we need to pretend that engineers and farmer people are the same.
I'm wondering if you got to where you wanted to go.
Yeah, mostly.
I guess I would flesh out one other example of the thing that I think eludes everybody's method but must be defensible because of its significance.
So, in addition to the cow trick, it's the other place where I know I've had the experience of being stuck with information and not being able to formulate the hypothesis that turned out to be true.
is Hutchison Guilford's progeria is the most aggressive of the accelerated aging pathologies.
A progeria is an aging pathology in which people age faster than they should.
And Hutchison Guilford's progeria is the most extreme where you've seen pictures of these little boys.
They often have strange kind of beaked faces.
They are balding.
They appear like little old men.
And they rarely make it to 20, if I recall correctly.
And they have, interestingly, every pathology of advanced age with two exceptions.
Two exceptions which I found very important when I was doing the telomere work.
The two exceptions are cancer and dementia.
Their minds work like little boys' minds, not like old men, and they don't get cancer.
And so I knew that There was bound to be that this was not an illusion.
That the fact that they had all of the other pathologies meant that this really was, in some sense, an accelerated aging.
And so I thought, they must have short telomeres.
and they don't.
And I couldn't figure out why that was, but I knew that it had to be approximately there.
It was rather a lot like the monkeys are behaving like twins, like identical twins, even though they aren't.
And in this case, it was another hypothesis I never would have thought to formulate, which was that kids with this disorder, their cells are somehow very impermanent so that it takes five cell divisions to get one that sticks. their cells are somehow very impermanent so that it takes So they basically burn through their lifetime of aging at a fast rate.
But it doesn't, they don't start out with initially short telomeres, it's just that they burn through them, really.
The rate, not the initial length, is what's different.
Right, right.
So anyway, I guess my point is, look, if I was trying to teach somebody how to do this kind of work, My point would be, I don't know what the name for that thing is, where there's something that feels certain to be an X. And the evidence says it's not an X. And so the answer is, it's something in that neighborhood I can't think of yet.
Right?
I'll know it when I see it.
And I reserve the... What is the hypothesis that says, there's something in this neighborhood that will have the following description, and I'll know it when I see it.
But I'm not smart enough to figure it out.
Right?
So anyway, that doesn't sound like a defensible method, right?
I'll know it when I see it, right?
That sounds like cheating.
But, so I'm reminded, and it's not clear if this was actually Isaac Asimov, but my little bit of looking over the last few weeks, I think it probably was, his suggestion, mid-20th century, that what we imagined, what our sort of fairytale version of scientists, the greatest moment for them is Eureka!
I found it!
I knew what I was looking for and I found it.
And he says no that's not the thing that the scientists that the scientist says when he or she is at their most Powerful and also uncertain.
That's odd.
No, that's funny.
That's odd is what I find as the actual quote, if it's actually true from Asimov.
Also, that's curious is attributed to him sometimes, but that's odd.
I wasn't expecting this.
I wonder what it means, right?
And that's the moment of actual beginning of insight and our world of, actually, you need to know exactly what it is.
Right now, you need to know.
It forces us into certainty, and we are all way too comfortable being way too certain of all sorts of things about which we have no reason to be certain.
And this is also the scourge that is happening to science, but it's happening to everyone.
So I'm strangely reminded of a joke, which I think sort of Suggests where I think we're ending up here.
I hope I don't get the joke wrong, but you've got some kind of a situation.
A hurricane has created tremendous flooding and a guy is on his roof as the water is rising and a dog swims up with a life preserver and he pushes the dog away and he thinks, I'm a devout person.
My God has my back.
I don't need that.
And the water is rising and rising, and he's moving up his roof.
And next thing, a guy in a boat comes by and says, hop on.
He says, no, no, no.
My God will protect me.
Now the boat goes and gets somebody else.
And then a helicopter drops a ladder and shouts that he should climb the ladder.
He says, no, my God will protect me.
And the helicopter moves on and the guy drowns and he gets to heaven and says, God, where were you?
God says, I sent you a dog, a boat and a helicopter.
Um, so, you know, I guess the point is religious people have never been, there is always the duality of, you know, lots of scientists have had deep faith that was technically in conflict with lots of scientists have had deep faith that was technically in conflict with something about what So what?
That's the way it is.
Likewise, there's a, it turns out to be from a song, I didn't realize this, but Praise God and Pass the Ammunition, right?
The idea that these two things are not in conflict, right?
God is not that kind of creature, right?
The point is you're still in battle and You're still praying to God or whatever, but I don't want, I don't mean to overly focus on the religious modality.
Maybe it's just useful because it's the most remote for analytical types.
You know, it's the one that is most easily jettisoned.
Initially jettisoning it probably has major benefits, but I think it seems the most easily jettisoned.
I don't think it is actually jettisonable entirely.
And it is exactly the hubris of the would-be analytics and scientists who think that they do not have faith, who have dragged us all into a land of, um, you will have faith in the name of science.
And it's diabolical and extraordinarily dangerous.
Right.
And as we've seen, and as we've talked about on other episodes, a lot of the folks who managed to see through the madness of COVID actually had faith prominently in their toolkit, which tells you something.
But anyway, I don't think we know how the mind works, but I think somehow carving out a mechanism where one cannot but I think somehow carving out a mechanism where one cannot be held to the details of a particular modality or cannot be convicted of hypocrisy,
Sometimes you and I get challenged by the no virus people or the no COVID people or I don't know, I saw one in the piece we covered with Denny Rancourt on the last live stream with the The all-cause mortality numbers for global death as a result of the vaccines.
He says something in there about pathogens do not abide by political boundaries and each time I hear somebody say that I think that can't be right you know you've got a virus in this case it doesn't doesn't transmit outside, right?
It's not very frequent that you would cross a political border inside, and, you know, nobody crossing a border can have those effects.
In any case, it's something about the requirement that we leave room to defend the indefensible, because indefensible doesn't mean that there isn't some higher order of defense that could be made.
It's just that we don't necessarily have access to the substance of that defense. - Indeed.
We need to leave ourselves open to defending what seems to be indefensible.
Because what seems indefensible today may prove to be the only thing worth defending tomorrow.
Let us end with a brief excerpt, if we may.
All right.
From Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
I think it's, because I promised it, I want to do it, even though it's not exactly, it's not anything about what we've been doing so far.
This was first published in 1843.
The door of Scrooge's counting house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond a sort of tank was copying letters.
Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal.
But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal box in his own room, and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part.
Wherefore, the clerk put on his white comforter and tried to warm himself at the candle, in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.
A Merry Christmas, Uncle!
God save you!
cried a cheerful voice.
It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.
Bah!
said Scrooge.
Humbug.
He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow.
His face was ruddy and handsome, his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.
Christmas a humbug, Uncle!
said Scrooge's nephew.
You don't mean that, I'm sure.
I do, said Scrooge.
Merry Christmas.
What right have you to be merry?
What reason have you to be merry?
You're poor enough.
Come then, returned the nephew gaily.
What right have you to be dismal?
What reason have you to be morose?
You're rich enough.
Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said bah again and followed it up with humbug.
Don't be cross, Uncle, said the nephew.
What else can I be, returned the uncle, when I live in such a world of fools as this?
Merry Christmas?
Out upon Merry Christmas!
What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money, a time for finding yourself a year older but not an hour richer, a time for balancing your books and having every item in them through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?
If I could work my will, said Scrooge indignantly, every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stick of holly through his heart.
He should.
Uncle pleaded the nephew.
Nephew returned the uncle sternly.
Keep Christmas in your own way and let me keep it in mine.
Keep it, repeated Scrooge's nephew, but you don't keep it.
Let me leave it alone then, said Scrooge.
Much good may it do to you.
Much good has ever done you.
There are many things from which I might have derived good by which I have not profited, I dare say, returned the nephew.
Christmas among the rest.
But I am sure I have always thought of Christmastime when it has come around, apart from the veneration due its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that as a good time, a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time.
The only time I know of in the long calendar year When men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.
And therefore, Uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and it will do me good, and I say, God bless it.
I have felt that way about this season, about Christmas.
It meant that in my family, which was mostly without religion growing up.
And I love it for that.
And we are lucky to be here with our family and among friends in this Christmas season.
And we hope that you are too.
Excellent.
All right, we will be back a day later than usual next week on the 28th on Thursday.
And you can, of course, join us on Rumble, on Locals, join me at Natural Selections.
We have darkhorsestore.org where you can get Jake's Micro Pizza merch, among other things.
And maybe I'll just leave it at that.
Until we see you next time, go to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
