Intellectual Stockholm Syndrome: The 220th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Get 1 month free at the DarkHorse Locals channel: https://darkhorse.locals.com/support/promo/DARKHORSE1MONTHIn this 220th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we discuss the modern Dark Age. Topics include informational advantage, entropy, and reason. We discuss whether all static rules are gameable, and whether adjusting your model to increase predictiv...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 220.
It is Saturday, not our usual because we have upcoming travel.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying, and I believe we are ready to rock and roll.
Yep.
We have some good stuff today.
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Now, I'm tempted to say what she said, but I am always troubled by the fact that what she said and that's what she said are so close together that you can't say what she said validating what you have just said without risking that people will mishear it as the other thing.
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Yes.
OK.
Wow.
That was easier than I was expecting.
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I don't know about that.
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Indeed.
Indeed.
Okay.
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No.
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It cuts us off our game.
All right, shall I start off?
Yeah.
All right, so what I wanted to do, I've been deeply in thought trying to sort out features of the model that we've been building up here, and I wanted to explore a little bit down the Cartesian crisis rabbit hole and
Just bring to light some features that I think are significant, and really this is sort of like what we often did in the classroom, where by trying to discuss complex issues we try to find out things about them that we didn't know coming into the discussion.
So anyway, I'm hoping that you will help me figure this out.
I wanted to—we've argued here before that we are in some sort of a cryptic dark age.
Either one is dawning, or if you take Steve Patterson's formulation, maybe it's been continuing for many, many decades.
I would certainly put it back through the 1970s.
A dark age seems to have kicked into high gear, and that goes along with what we have called here Cartesian crisis, which is a place where it becomes incredibly uncertain what is true.
You can't use the normal tools in order to even figure out the state of all the basic parameters.
And the first thing I wanted to point out is how odd that is.
That it tends to be that we get smarter over time.
And this should be true at virtually every scale.
Just the simple discovery that things that you thought were true turn out to cause you to harm yourself, can deviate you to embrace other things.
So over time, even if your method of discovery is haphazard, you ought to happen on things that are more true, and you ought to dispense with things that are less true, and you ought to get smarter over time.
And a dark age is a reversal of that natural process.
So the question is, why do they happen?
And one thing that we have discussed here, we've labeled a certain number of these, but I would say there's a general category of informational advantages that certain people gain at the expense of other people.
So, it is true that if you have insider information that you can make money in a market where you can invest in a way that people who don't have the advantage of insider information can't, which is why insider trading is illegal, right?
It is effectively theft where you are using privileged information to out-invest others.
But it's only possible to prevent that where your insider information is of a known type.
Like you know what your company is about to do because you've been present in the meetings where it was decided and you can't therefore go trade in the market against other people who don't know that same piece of information.
So insider information is one way that informational advantages work.
We've talked about what I've called the time-traveling money printer before, which is the idea that equally valuable and much harder to detect is If you are capable of slowing down the awareness of other people, if something happens, and the example we've used before is the dawning of the COVID crisis, where we all became aware of it as the new year turned, right?
The first information that we in the West got about COVID was as the year 2020 began.
But it appears, the evidence is very strong actually, that the crisis itself had begun in September and October of 2019, and therefore anybody who was in a position to know what was about to happen to the globe could position their money in the market, and that's different than them having been in on some corporate discussion, right?
Much harder to prosecute people for such a thing, but it's every bit as As useful as insider information if you're trying to make a fortune.
So informational advantages are a category, and my basic argument is that nature is like markets.
Informational advantages are always profitable, whether that profit is directly on a balance sheet or indirectly.
And that our tendency to get smarter over time could be disrupted by other people's desire to make us dumber over time because informational advantages are something that they can then trade.
So far this is all review of things we've talked about.
Here's something new.
Question is, our tendency to get smarter over time, I think, is a mirror for nature's tendency to produce creatures that are more capable and more complex over time.
Which, first time you hear that or think about it, it strikes everyone as a violation of the universe's tendency towards entropy, towards a more homogeneous state of matter.
What we know is that in fact it's not a violation of the universe's state tendency towards entropy because there's net entropy, right?
The order is not a measure of the universe getting... It's not a closed system.
Right, it's not a closed system.
The second law of thermodynamics requires that you're talking about a closed system and so organisms become ordered within them by creating chaos on the outside of them.
Yep, exactly.
So there's a net tendency towards entropy is not violated by a local tendency towards complexity.
In order.
Now here's the question.
Superficially, that seems like an analog for what's going on in informational space, where we tend to get smarter over time.
That's an increase in the complexity of our models of the universe.
And that seems to violate a tendency towards disorder.
Presumably there is some escape hatch there as well.
And the question is, is this true in information space?
Or is information sufficiently different from matter that we don't have to account for what it is that is allowing one system to grow smarter over time?
Right?
I'm not sure of this but I think it's a it's a an important question because the reason I raise it is that in an argument where if you imagine that there are people who have a perverse incentive to destroy our ability to get smarter because they're trying to create an informational advantage or they're participating in a system that has hired them to facilitate an informational advantage
We can all know, we all know from having arguments with such people, that they do have an entropic advantage.
It's easier to make sense, to disrupt sense, than it is to make sense.
Making sense is difficult and destruction is easier than creation.
Right, so that suggests that information functions the same way as the organization of matter and that we should be looking for what it is, how does entropy work in information space such that we are capable of being more sensible over time rather than less sensible.
But I wanted to point out that there is a tension, in my experience, there's a tension between two forces in which the The fact that it is easier for people to disrupt sense-making is counteracted by an advantage to people who make sense that I call the luxury of being right.
The luxury of being right means that if, and you don't get to decide that you are right, but if you do your homework so that you increase your tendency to be right, Then it puts you in a luxurious position of not having to have thoroughly explored every facet in advance of a conversation, because it tends to be you can just extrapolate from what you know, and the extrapolations will make sense, and they tend to go in your direction.
If you've done the homework on the front end, then you don't need to worry so much about whether or not, you know, you're going to get back on your heels in a live conversation.
So those two things are intention.
Go ahead.
Well, it requires not just a willingness, but the expectation that you will get things wrong, and that when you discover, it therefore also requires the obligation that when you do get things wrong, as soon as you recognize it, you acknowledge that to yourself and to anyone, you know, to whom you shared what you now understand to be wrong ideas.
Which actually is, you know, it's precisely what we were doing, what we've been doing all along, you know, on camera and off.
But especially you can see our evolution and thinking through early COVID around things like masks and vaccines and alternative treatments.
And it is not the mark of a brilliant leader whom you should trust to make all the right decisions in the future if what they do is have arrived at what turns out to be exactly the right thing first every time.
Because while that is possible, it is also possible to get back to your information framing that you gave in the beginning.
That that person who never shows you their thinking, and is never wrong, and never acknowledges anything about the pathway by which they used to get to their conclusions, is actually using some kind of backchannel information source that is neither legitimate from a societal perspective, nor is it publicly available to all.
Exactly.
And I would point out that all that has to be true is there has to be a slight tendency to upgrade your model based on information.
So ideally, you very quickly spot that you've been wrong, you update with the full strength of what you've just learned, and then you can very quickly get to a very robust position.
But any tendency towards taking a model that is crude and refining it in the direction that it is predictive is actually good enough for you ultimately to asymptote to the truth, which is exactly why Dark Ages should be all but impossible.
Well, so I don't know where all you're going here, but the one piece that I haven't heard yet, which seems to exist maybe at a different level, maybe a more basic level than what you're talking about, is our tendency, and this is just one of my drum beats always,
Our tendency to want to arrive at a set-and-forget rule that humans, like all organisms, would like to figure out what it is that they need to be doing, develop a rule, have that be static, and then move on to considering the other things that they want to do in their lives.
Static rules are inherently gameable.
And so we have, you know, a few hundred years ago, a move supposedly away from faith and towards reason, towards logic, towards analysis, towards, you know, hypothesis-driven understanding of the universe.
Seemed to be moving us in very much the right direction and was in many, many regards.
But A, you don't need to throw out all of religion when you throw out faith-based decision making.
And the thing that is most revealed by the second half of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st, I think, is that much as John McWhorter has identified DEI as a kind of religion, well, now too are many of the practitioners of science, the would-be practitioners, effectively declaring themselves high priests of science.
And so we have the imprimatur of science, with the lab coats and the fancy degrees and all of that, and standing in as the authority that you cannot question.
And of course, if you say, this is a scientific conclusion, you cannot question it, you have betrayed yourself right there.
That demonstrates that you're not doing science and you're not actually acting as a scientist.
And so we have now this This thing, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Scientific Revolution into the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, all of these things created a fluid, dynamic, analytical way to approach understanding in the world.
And it has become entrenched, it has become static, it has become concretized and canalized, and the very opposite of what it was supposed to be.
So I would argue that this thing that we are now living in, in which we have people with PhDs in science like we have, who are declaring themselves and being declared the arbiters of truth, are actually quite the opposite of that and do not represent science or reason or enlightenment or, yeah, those three things.
Okay.
Fantastic.
I think we've found the first, um, productive element here.
That's novel.
When you first said that static rules are gamable, that's of course true across a wide domain, but my initial reaction was no, that's not quite right, because there might be one static rule that actually is integrative enough that you can follow it, which is correct your model in the direction of predictive power, something like that, right?
An invitation to view things scientifically.
The problem, I think, is That even that rule, if it is.
If you have a slavish devotion to it, results in you following a heuristic to a low peak.
In other words, at what level are you supposed to measure your predictive power?
You might well follow that rule to something that predicts patterns on a short time scale, if you measure on a short time scale, that are violated on a long time scale, because things are very different.
And in fact, a lot of my dissertation research Focused on exactly this, which was we have learned things in an interglacial period and we've failed to intuit what things look like in the oscillation between glacial and interglacial.
So it's a good case where even a proper scientific view of proper scientific factual information leads you to an incorrect scientific conclusion because of an error in what you can see.
Because it is also a human tendency, and presumably an organic life tendency, to presume that what you are experiencing right now is what always has been.
Even when you know that that is not the case, you can only use what you yourself are experiencing as a direct empirical model for what you imagine, and our biases will tend to overfit the past and imagine the future as much more closely aligned with what the current experience is.
Right.
This also... so I see two kinds of heuristic failures that are going to come from even following that thematically correct rule.
One of them is... Being static rules are gameable?
Well, no.
Your rule.
My rule, which turns out not to be... It's the right rule, but if you try to instantiate it, you are running risks that you won't notice until it's too late.
Which is what you say the rule is?
The rule is, adjust your model to increase predictive power.
But the point is, you can only do that on short timescales, right?
As timescales become long, your ability to say where predictive power was is minimal.
So, you are going to run afoul, or you are going to organically run afoul, of the precautionary principle and Chesterton's fence, right, in places where predictive power, you know, if this fence is here for a reason, then we should be able to see, you know, then it predicts there should be objects that don't cross through the fence.
There should be cattle, right?
And if I say, that fence, if it's there for a reason, we should be able to see it, That fence predicts nothing therefore the reason that it was put in is gone.
Well it might be that the cattle are in another pasture and that they're only here during one season of the year.
So the point is on very short timescales your predictive power leads you to the wrong conclusion unless you have a Chesterton's fence override.
For the principle, in which case you know, well, predictive power is the ideal, but there's an infinite number of timescales on which you might attempt to predict and, you know, the fence may be justified by something on a timescale you can't see.
Precautionary principle is the same, but this also opens up the door to skullduggery.
Because a sophist who knows that your static rule is to improve your model so that it's more predictive can micromanage you into an eddy by Causing you to monitor lots of tiny little kinds of prediction and you can't calibrate which ones are More important when they contradict each other that sort of thing.
So sophistry is gonna rear its ugly head according to this rule, but nonetheless Let's say that there's a meta rule that you can't even spell out.
How do you know, in general, you should increase, you should adjust your model so it increases predictive power at any scale that you have access to see whether it's predictive.
But there must be some times in which you suspend your rule because It's not quite right, and whoever's got the best meta rule will actually end up in the right spot.
So this actually goes back to something we've also talked about many times, which is that scientifically speaking, you have two things.
You have the active process by which you do your scientific work, and then you have a fudge factor in which you can allow yourself to be agnostic about something because you don't have enough information in order to do the work.
So another, I think, if I understand what you're saying here, is that black boxes are okay as long as you're explicit about where they are.
So, you know, you can say, okay, I'm trying to, I'm trying to figure out, I don't know how to do this.
In the abstract.
I'm trying to get to point eight.
I don't know if it's a linear path.
I don't know if I have to go backwards.
I don't know how I'm going to get there.
But I've got these three steps in the beginning, and I've got a couple steps in the end, and I'm sure those are right.
But there's this big thing in the middle.
And at the moment, I want to really drill down on the stuff that I'm pretty sure I know to make sure it's right.
And I'm going to put that black box there, and it's going to be the stand-in for, I know that I don't yet know what's there, but I know that there's something there.
Right, and the perfect example of this is Darwin and the information.
So Darwin is perfectly capable of deducing from the creatures that are downstream of genetic information that an evolutionary process accounts for adaptation, but he never gets to the point of understanding how the information might be housed and transmitted and combined And all of that.
So he needed a black box around the information in order to do the excellent work that he did with the phenomenology of creatures.
So yes, good scientists have to have license to black box things, and they have to do it responsibly.
They can't use it as a cheat.
They just use it as a tool, right?
You don't need to answer that question.
All right, so... There's no rule.
that allows you to perfectly pursue predictive power.
There are heuristics, and heuristics run the risk of climbing low peaks, which prevent you from escaping.
They also open the door to sophistry, which will be utilized by people who are trying to create an informational advantage.
And informational advantages, I think, are going to be at the root of at least our Dark Age, maybe all Dark Ages, I don't know.
Okay.
I wanted to try another little module.
I don't know how these things all fit together.
They all occurred to me as I was wrestling with sort of one set of questions, but I want to consider the question of what people in North Korea believe about their own well-being.
Now, I, of course, have no idea.
You mean relative to the rest of the world?
Yes.
How well their system is serving them.
It's a fascinating question.
It is a fascinating question, and I would love to have more information, you know, about what they even say, about how they feel, even knowing that they're not free to say anything.
I would just like to have any actual empirical information on their state of mind.
Right, the only stories we know are of people who have escaped.
If those stories are even true, and I always worry that the status of North Korea is such that there's any number of reasons that you might get... Look, I believe that there's a horror story to be told about what's going on in North Korea, and it may be exactly the one that we've seen the few escapees tell, although there are features of those stories... I can't remember any at the moment, but there are features of those stories that make me worry about them.
But nonetheless, let's just treat the state of mind as a black box.
I will say that I have actually met, so there are some of these famous stories, I don't remember any of the people's names at the moment, right, but I have actually met two people, two different people while traveling, one of whose fathers and one of whose slightly more distant relative had escaped.
and had stories to tell that sounded very much the same.
And this, you know, this was not coming through some, you know, public channel.
This was, you know, this was an individual's family story that resonated very much with what we are otherwise hearing.
Yep.
Okay, so let's just assume something in that neighborhood is true as seen by somebody who has left North Korea and is therefore in a position to compare well-being inside and outside.
Okay, let's just take those at face value.
I thought you were going with anyone who has left.
Like, okay, maybe the stories aren't true, but assume the stories are true.
But anyone who has left is obviously seeing a particular thing about what is there.
You don't necessarily know what people who didn't choose to try to leave, to take their lives into their own hands.
People who took the risk of leaving are people who weren't happy there.
It's a very distinct subset.
Yeah, it's not a representative sample.
Right.
Okay, that is quite right.
Nonetheless, let's just assume for a second that their stories are, let's correct for the fact that they are in the most frustrated 10%, because they almost certainly are, but that it's a reflection of what anybody that you teleported out of North Korea into some random spot in the West would conclude, right?
It's extreme, but it's not, it's in keeping.
Well, okay.
And the question is, well, what did they think when they were there?
How did it feel?
How did they feel about this system?
And here's what I, here's what I came up with.
Stockholm Syndrome is fascinating.
Stockholm Syndrome is the phenomenon of somebody who has been taken hostage and their adoption of their captors perspective on the world.
So Patti Hurst is the famous example of this.
She's taken hostage and then she basically becomes one of the people who She's adopted their perspective.
I think that this makes a tremendous amount of evolutionary sense.
I believe it's in fact obvious why this would happen.
It's just so hard to relate to that we can't see it, which is human beings are detectors for Hallmarks of well-being.
That makes it sound very trivial.
Hallmarks of well-being can be, you know, you're on the Titanic and you're looking for indications of which direction to go to escape the rising water, right?
There's nothing trivial about hallmarks of well-being.
If you are taken captive by people who have you under their complete control, Then you are dependent on their not deciding to kill you.
Your minute-to-minute well-being is dependent on whether they view you sympathetically.
So it actually makes sense to embrace their perspective to the extent that that will persuade them to view you as a human being and act to preserve your life and all of the things that you would want them to do.
So, it's interesting that the mind has a module that would lead it to do that, but it's not surprising in retrospect, once we spot the syndrome and we say, oh, actually, that's a real thing.
People tend to see the world through the eyes of their captors.
Well, of course they do, right?
To the extent that selection is capable of finding such a solution, it's not surprising that it did.
Now let's look at the COVID crisis.
We were manipulated by powerful forces, but what those powerful forces attempted to do was create, uh, an intolerable zone of discomfort, pain, and fear for anybody who stepped out of a narrative that was, it was like a home base.
It was safe.
Not surprising that people bought it en masse, right?
They were effectively captives of something.
And to the extent that they attempted to think an independent thought, you know, they got a very quick indication that all hell was going to break loose in their life.
And they watched other people step out of line and get fried right and left, have accusations delivered at them, Wikipedia pages full of slander, all that stuff.
And so I guess the point is, oh, I think we saw a version of the same psychological process in the COVID crisis as we know takes place and we call it Stockholm Syndrome.
But we didn't.
I don't know if we said Stockholm Syndrome during the COVID crisis, but I think it's the same module which detects, oh, there's actually no future in thinking for yourself in this environment.
Well, and Stockholm Syndrome writ somewhat larger than it is usually imagined for, you know, those who've been abducted, but somewhat smaller than North Korea, would be what you see in cults, right?
So, individuals who are taken in, you know, usually willingly at first, Maybe begin to recognize that they have effectively had at least their mental capacities abducted, that they are believing untrue things.
But part of what keeps them in line is being given a little bit of power to wield over those who might step out of line.
And so we definitely saw that.
During COVID with the American populace, the people who wielded the social tools, the psychological tools of destroying relationships between people who said, actually, I'm not going to comply.
The non-compliant were bludgeoned mentally.
Constantly.
And we know this is true during the Cultural Revolution in China.
And I imagine it to be true of how, to some degree, the population is kept in line in North Korea.
But again, of course, we don't really know what's going on there.
Right, so it sounds like you are in agreement that that's not a false connection between Maoist China, COVID crisis,
Stockholm Syndrome writ narrowly and the expected belief of somebody inside North Korea where there is just simply no value in seeing reality for what it is that actually well-being flows from seeing reality as it's portrayed by those with absolute power over you.
Absolutely.
That's a category.
Okay, so then I think we are beginning to get at the theme I was trying to wrestle free from this set of observations, which is the initial expectation is dark ages should be all but impossible because of the tendency to get better, to get smarter over time
And so therefore, anybody who deviates from whatever plan is making you smarter over time ought to have a competitive disadvantage.
And so you basically ought to have a mechanism that, you know, keeps you out of the ditches on both sides of the road, right?
Everybody ought to be sticking to this pretty much all the time because getting smarter creates more well-being.
But we now see that there are reasons why you might expect people to embrace something that didn't make them smarter, because smarter... How can I phrase this?
All else being equal, smarter always beats dumber.
But all else is not always equal, because to the extent that somebody else is in control of the well-being that flows to you, or the harm that flows to you, they can exactly reverse those parameters, and there are reasons that they might want to.
Right?
We have narrow reasons why they might want to.
A regime that is fragile might uh turn up the dial on punishing insight because it's persistence required it and the human mind might embrace the um the reality of the situation which is hey i only get fed when i say the right stuff
And it might actually then, this now goes over into Bob Kriver's home turf, about self-deception.
So the point is, okay, if you lived in an environment where every time you said something actually insightful, you got a little closer to starvation, and every time you said something that sounded like the regime, you know, you got a little extra rations, Then the point is, well the best thing for you to do is actually not only say the right stuff, but activate that model.
Activate that model so it's intuitive to you, so that you believe it every minute of the day.
You don't say something awkward because some part of you knows the truth.
You would actively purge Absolutely.
So I will just say, and we talked about this during the height of the COVID craziness, that Matthias Desmet's book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, it speaks to some degree to these issues of how do you get people Who believe that their highest values are free thinking.
To become compliant and to in fact require compliance of others.
I agree.
I'm trying to think back to exactly whether this exact issue is in there or I don't know.
But one way of thinking about it is that of course for Millions of years of our ancestry.
That's the human past and the pre-human past.
Your insight about the world around you tends to manifest in Hard to describe it exactly.
First order, it manifests as food.
The better you understand your habitat, the more able you are to extract resources from it.
But there's also stuff like the better you understand your habitat, the better able you are to preserve the resources that you've already consumed, right?
You waste less energy trying to stay warm.
You accumulate more energy from Sources that are worth your while, the sources tend to be more worth your while, the better you get at doing that.
So the point is, not starving is a good proxy for insight.
Anybody who's in a position to control your food is in a position to create a gradient of calories that will then lead you into nonsensical thinking.
And they might have reasons to do it, which are narrow, right?
They may be terrorists who've Now, here's the next phase of what I've been wrestling with.
They may be a fragile regime that needs you to believe wrong stuff in order to stay in power.
But anyway, there are reasons that somebody might reverse that gradient on you in order to get you to be compliant.
Now, here's the next phase of what I've been wrestling with.
There are two levels of informational advantage that are clearly distinct in their value.
One.
One is you could know that certain statements are false when other people don't know it, either because they're lying to themselves in order to stay out of danger or for whatever reason.
But you could know that something is false, right, but not be especially insightful.
The other way is to be especially insightful.
Which is to say to know true things that other people don't.
True things that nobody's figured out.
You can recognize falsehoods and you can recognize truths.
And just as it's easier to destroy than it is to create, it is on balance easier to recognize falsehoods that are not broadly recognized than to recognize truths that are either entirely otherwise unrecognized or not broadly recognized.
Right, and in fact you could imagine an economy amongst people who had a superior position informationally, people who were well positioned in the regime, whatever the regime is, and so they had insider information.
Now the point is they're going to know that certain stuff isn't true, right?
These shots are safe and effective.
No, they're not.
Don't take a shot, right?
That's a recognizing a falsehood that you have privileged access to the information about.
Knowing what is true at the level of the biology of the immune system, well, that's complex.
And the only way you're going to get to superior information about complex issues like that is to have some sort of program of study that's capable of finding those counterintuitive, highly obscure facts that actually carry a tremendous amount of value to them.
That's certainly the only way when you're dealing with some of the elements in a system are hyper-novel, like mRNA technology.
Right.
And so what you can't, what's hard to imagine is it's very easy for some sort of rent-seeking elites to disrupt our ability to make sense of the world around us, right?
They can capture the universities, they can cause them to do cruddy science and all of that, and then they can be ahead Because they know more than we do.
What they can't do is be enlightened, right?
They can't, unless they're going to build private establishments, private institutions that do science, don't talk to anybody about it, which, I mean, I'm not saying they never do this.
There are skunk works, there are private labs studying all kinds of things, but the problem is what really made us smarter was a university system that covered civilization, right?
You know, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people participating in a collective effort to figure out what's true about the universe.
That was very functional.
And the point is, well, if you've only got 10,000 people trying to figure out what's true, then your truth seeking is going to be feeble relative to a public effort that involved, you know, huge numbers of institutions and individuals.
So anyway, I'm not quite sure what to do with that, but I think there's a decided difference between which kind of information... Both are profitable.
Seeing the future more clearly than others because you have a deep understanding of the universe is great.
It's much better than knowing what's just a lie.
But it's much more likely for somebody to be able to generate Access to privileged information about what lives are without figuring out how to replace the world's university system.
So What I'm getting at there is that this particular dark age I keep asking myself and other people keep asking me Do they know what they're doing, right?
Do they you know, are they what kind of intention is here?
Is this a plan?
I Are these people as dumb as they seem?
They certainly know more about what's coming than we do.
Does that mean that they have some plan where this doesn't end in a catastrophe?
Or are they just numbskulls who don't understand that, yes, they are going to be ahead until the catastrophe that they are inviting, at which point they're going to be as gone as the rest of us?
Right.
Shared fate on a planet that is finite.
Yeah.
And my instinct says They know a hell of a lot more than we do.
They've got more capacity to actually do research than we think, but they don't have nearly enough to be disrupting civilization and have any sort of confidence that they're going to persist through it.
Well, I mean, that is also, you know, I've been I've been thinking I'm thinking a lot about this theme of oscillation, having to move back and forth between modes, which seems to be, you know, not being static, being flexible, being nimble.
And too often right now, we're seeing people say, oh, you know, science was wrong, go to faith.
You know, the Enlightenment was wrong.
Let's go back to the old ways.
It's, you know, we can't, analysis isn't working, so I'm only going to do the intuitive.
It's like, you know, you actually have to do both the things and also be willing to move between modes, sometimes when you least expect it.
And, um, boy, I was going somewhere there and I just lost it, so.
Well, we were talking about whether or not they know enough to avoid the crash that they're inviting.
And you're talking about the necessity that you not embrace either A or B, where A is faith and B is science.
Yeah.
Oh, yes.
It's real easy, as we have done.
Not everything we do is easy, but it's really easy to point to the hubris, just the arrogance, especially when the arrogance turns out to have been misplaced.
The positive valence version of arrogance is confidence.
What we actually need, all of us, is to have both Humility and confidence.
Like, we need both of these things, and too often we are told, well, if you're one, you're not the other.
Like, if you're humble, well, then, you know, you're not arrogance.
Like, well, if arrogance is negative valence, confidence, and confidence is positive valence, arrogance, and humility, like, what's the negative valence of humility?
Like, I don't know, like lacking self- Confidently.
I don't even know if there's a word for it, right?
But having no sense that you can do anything for yourself.
Just never imagining that you can make decisions for yourself.
You actually need both of these things.
The positive versions of them.
You need to be humble enough to recognize that you are not omniscient.
And you will never be, and you cannot know everything that you might want to know to address something, but you can know more and more and more by developing a toolkit that is better and better prepared for the world in which we live.
And as you become better informed and more skillful in wielding the tools that are relevant to the particular thing that you are thinking about, be it a small problem with the entire world, have your confidence grow while still retaining a humility about what it is that you don't know.
Like, we actually need both of these things.
And too often we have people going, well, like, I'm humble.
Like, that's actually not admirable on its own, nor is confidence admirable on its own.
And, you know, we have these negative violence words over in confidence, space, arrogance, hubris.
We know that those aren't admirable, but we should be esteeming both confidence and humility in especially when they show up at the same time.
One, I'm reminded of Luca Turin.
I don't love the way he said this.
I think it's not quite right, but he definitely was pointing to the right idea.
Luca Turin, who was the renegade scientist who advocated for Vibration theory as the mechanism by which the olfactory senses are capable of identifying an indefinitely large number of compounds instantaneously, which should be impossible.
Should be impossible by the rules that we think processing of information typically happens.
So anyway, very interesting guy.
But what he said is that a And the Chandler Burr book about him, The Emperor of Scent, is fantastic.
It is truly fantastic.
Anyway, Luca Turin says something, I'm going to paraphrase, I don't remember it exactly, but he said something like, a good scientist has to be Bipolar?
Is that what he said?
Something like this.
But his point was a good scientist has to be, maybe he said manic, has to be able to switch between being thrilled at the identification of a new idea and then has to turn around and throw everything at the process of trying to falsify it.
And so again, I don't think this is anything like a disorder, but I do think it is emblematic of exactly that oscillation.
And you know, only at the point that you fail at step two, you come up with a great idea and you've thrown everything you have at proving it false and it doesn't collapse.
Do you really have something?
So that's, That's one thing.
The other thing I wanted to point out is actually something that came up during the call with the Coalition of the Reasonable this morning, which is that there are a certain number of items that are just misfiled in our mental scheme.
Things like, what came up in the call this morning, was things like socialism.
Socialism is a terrible idea if you think it's a plan for how to build a society, but it's an ingredient that is necessary.
And the question is, does this system have too much of it?
Does it have too little of it?
Both states exist, right?
But the point is, socialism, the fire department would be a great example, or public education, Right?
These are things you can have too little and you can have too much, but the point is only at the point that you're advocating it as the system have you made the error.
Ingredient is what you want.
And I think the same thing applies to your point about I won't say hubris because I think hubris is the failure mode.
Confidence versus self-skepticism or something.
And you have to have both, as you point out, you have to have both of these things.
What you don't want to do is be humble, right?
Be humble is self-sabotage.
Well, my argument is that you need to have both things, humility and confidence.
Ah, right.
And this is my point about ingredient.
Humbleness is an ingredient.
Sometimes you need more of it.
Right.
But I guess this is maybe just a semantic disagreement.
I think you do want to be humble and be confident both.
I think you actually need to be both things.
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's an ingredient issue, but it's like instead of a mixture in a system that governs, you know, where you need a certain amount of socialism, it's a temporal question.
But yes, the point is, humbleness has to be a temporal ingredient of what you're doing in order to I mean, as with so many things, you know, you can apply it at time, temporal or space, you know, because there will be places where the ratio of confidence to humility will be, you know, very high and other places will be very low, depending on, you know, how familiar you are in that domain, how quickly it's changing, how many other factors are coming in that you have no control over and have no previous experience with, etc.
Yep.
All right.
This is very productive.
I'm going to go a couple more steps and then we can move on.
What I wanted to point out next was that in a world where sometimes it makes sense for somebody who's trying to get a leg up to disrupt the natural tendency that makes people smarter over time, you get a kind of intellectual obstructionism and
I don't know if we've mentioned this before, that term, but I think the idea that there are many flavors of intellectual obstructionism, and they take many different forms that we've identified and complained about in different contexts, but we haven't yet put them under One heading is important.
And so intellectual obstructionism is like anything that prevents a superior idea from getting heard or having reach or anything like that.
And I just wanted to take a couple of examples of things that show up somewhere.
There's something that I would call standing, and standing has a formal meaning in the legal context, right?
Somebody may be in violation of something else, but the question is, were you harmed by their hiring practices?
If you weren't, you may not have standing in a court to challenge them, right?
So you need to have standing in order to even raise the objection in a formal sense in a court.
And that model has been transposed onto the analytical environment in all kinds of places.
Oh, you don't have standing.
And we get it thrown at us informally frequently.
Absolutely.
And also, it seems to me that it's so easily abused if you recognize that externalities can be hidden.
And so, you know, I can't say what the effects on me or society will be of some thing.
And you're telling me I'm not allowed to To care deeply about it because it's not clear what standing I have, because some entity has created a mess that may have incredible downstream effects, the externalities of which are not yet manifest.
Yeah.
of which, no, the externalities of which are not yet manifest.
Yeah.
The, this, I think, is paired with the double standards, right?
If you have not noticed over the last four years or eight years or whatever it is, the abuse of double standards where everything, you know, they'll build a hundred rules in which in theory, you have to have met all 100 to have any standing on this topic at all.
But they're only going to enforce the ones that you're in violation of when you're saying something that's inconvenient to them, right?
The whole point is, oh, we're going to create a set of rules.
Nobody could pass them all, and what we're gonna do, you know, I used to call this the low posted speed limit.
You post a speed limit so low that everybody violates it, and then you pull over whoever you don't like.
You know, if you don't like gay people, you pull over the gay people, and it's like, well, you were speeding, right?
But you got pulled over for being gay.
Right.
So the double standard allows... selective enforcement allows you to do anything with a sufficiently complex set of standards that just, you know, it's hopeless to meet them.
So, but your issue is standing here.
Actually, you were going to the stay in your lane arguments, weren't you?
Yeah, stay in your lane.
This isn't your discipline.
Leave this to the virologist, right?
That would be one.
The progressive stack, right?
Well, let us hear from the Pacific Islanders before we hear from you, you know, because of the color of your skin or the, you know, whatever.
So, you know, The idea that, well, there's an order in which we have to hear from people now in order to correct for past wrongs means that somebody who's got a correct point can't enter it into the conversation at the right moment.
If you want the conversation, if the conversation is an emergent property that has an intelligence to it, you want the right points to be introduced at the right moment in the conversation because we all benefit from the conversation being smart.
The progressive stack gets in the way of that.
What degree you have?
Well, this is a murky matter.
I mean, it happens that you and I have the most advanced degree you can get in biology and it came from a good place.
But at some level, who cares?
You may be self-trained in biology and you may know vastly more than the average person who got an advanced degree from a fancy school, right?
That's not impossible.
So really the question is... Increasingly quite possible.
Increasingly quite possible.
In fact, their fancy school may have made them dumber rather than smarter, right?
That's the thing you don't intuit, right?
So, of course, we're looking for people who couldn't stand graduate school and still had a passion for the subject and said, fine, if you're going to tell me wrong things about biology, then I'm going to go learn biology on my own.
Now, most people will have done something else.
They will have gotten fed up, left, and then taken a job in some other field, and biology will be somewhere deep in their past.
So there aren't as many of these Outsiders beating the field as you would hope, but nonetheless there's nothing that bars it.
The faster the schools are making people dumb, the more it is easy to beat them by being outside and taking advantage of the resources at your disposal.
Publication record is another one of these things that can be used to just bar true stuff from a conversation.
You know, as the literature gets more and more full of garbage that is, you know,
Useful to the regime whatever the regime might be The more you would expect people not to be interested in publishing there to have 19 people read some paper in a journal That's half full of pharma crud like okay publication record doesn't mean anything, but it can be used to exclude people from a conversation so Yep, the the last piece here following from that is that
All of these arbitrary bars to entering points into a conversation should really be compared to a very simple rubric in which those things, you know, you may get an advanced degree from a fancy place as you increase the quality of your model.
That would be a natural thing to do.
It would have been more normal 30 years ago.
Yep.
But the The point is, track record should be the thing, again, that prevents Dark Ages and Cartesian crises.
In other words, you should be able to have a system in which you build institutions whose purpose is to figure out what's true
There should be freedom for them, you know, within reason, freedom for them to explore different ways of trying to figure out what's true early and well, you know, and track record over time should tell you how effective whatever was invested in them was on a per dollar per hour basis or whatever.
Track record is exactly what tenure review is supposed to be recording, right?
This is within academia.
The most sought after jobs are tenure track, and you are working hard towards the moment when your university assesses your track record.
With regard to your research record and your teaching and your governance and other such, and decides whether or not you shall be allowed to have tenure and have a permanent position, at which point the idea was you will then be even freer to say things that do not fit the currently fashionable model in whatever field that you are in.
So track record was precisely the thing that the tenure review was supposed to be keeping track of, but of course at this point it is not doing a very good job of that.
Well, actually, it points to another place that my model needs refining.
Because if I say track record, I am very specifically thinking of predictive power about phenomena.
Right.
And your publications should be that scientific publications have in them predictive power.
Right.
But I mean, so when we were professors, I didn't do a lot of it, but I did peer review.
I got sent papers to do peer review.
And I've said this on air before, but I think more than half of the papers, and I didn't do a ton of these, but a few dozen, a few, many dozen, Probably more than half the papers I got sent, what I wrote back in response was, this isn't hypothesis driven.
And many of them, they didn't even pretend it was hypothesis driven.
And this, you know, these weren't just little like natural history notes, which like, okay, a natural history note is like a description of something that was seen, but a full research paper without any Without any claim to being hypothesis-driven, where's the science then?
This is increasingly the case.
You can just tell.
Many papers then get rewritten so they appear to be hypothesis-driven, but if you look carefully, you can still tell.
Of course, it's more and more dangerous because people are on to the fact that actually some people still want hypotheses.
And so you could write it as if it was hypothesis driven.
And then you just don't know.
You don't know what's real data and what's numbers that were collected.
And then they came up with a hypothesis after the fact and claimed that it was a predictive hypothesis when actually it was post hoc.
All right.
So I think we've just found another important piece of this.
Didn't even occur to me when I wrote my notes here that track record could mean two things.
This is obviously an oversight on my part.
Track record is shorthand to me for predictive power about phenomena.
When your university does your tenure review Your university is looking at things that matter to it.
Predictive power may actually be counterproductive with respect to your ability to get tenure.
Tenure was created to free you to use your superior model with excellent predictive power to tell us what we need to know rather than what we want to hear, but in practice a university That is fueled by grant overhead is very interested in how many grants you have, how much money each one represents, how many publications you've got.
And now here's where we get back to North Korea.
Because imagine for a second that you are a climate scientist.
If you do work that predicts an anomaly in the conventional climate model, the one that has the world panicking over a climate crisis, if you send a publication that says actually we've found an anomaly and, you know, let's say you want to talk about the heat island anomaly that comes from the fact that the detectors that were
That we have data from the 50s, you know, are increasingly embedded in an urban environment in which motors are putting out heat and blacktop is sucking in heat.
Everyone knows cities are hotter.
Once you hear that much of the data, majority of the data is being taken from places that are demonstrably hotter, you begin to wonder why our data sets are skewed in this way.
Right.
Now what happens if you've got your eye on your tenure review and you find the heat anomaly from heat islands and you say, well actually we're panicking too much about climate change because it turns out that a lot of our data is polluted by the increasing urbanization of the places that we have long-term numbers for.
Right?
Well, when you file that one at the journal, you're going to get a ton of pushback from all of your peers who are embedded.
It's going to slow your publication rate right down.
Slow your publication rate.
It's going to threaten your tenure, right?
It's going to maybe put you out of sorts with a little cabal of happy peer reviewers that were saying yes to your paper and he says yes to mine.
Right, the little reciprocity network that evolves in small fields.
Even large fields.
But, okay, so what happens to the mind of a person embedded in a field that is on a mission to save the earth and has a model and that model is, you know, under discussion everywhere, right?
There is a penalty for breaking ranks, even though that's exactly the opposite of what you should want.
even let's say global warming is twice as dangerous as anybody thinks it is right what you want is still to have everybody empowered to point out flaws in the model in either direction so the model gets smarter over time but in fact what you have only if we're doing science what you have is north korea because everybody knows that their uh rations will be cut if they say things out of turn even if it ultimately makes you smarter
and even if it ultimately reveals there's more climate crisis than we know.
Yeah, and rations here is great footage of lab space and NSF funds and tenure.
Yes, and all of the stuff that flows from having those good things.
So it's also, you know, prestige.
Yeah.
Spouse, children, cocktails.
Yeah.
Cocktails.
Right.
Exactly.
The best credibility.
Yeah.
So the point is you would expect and embrace Of the captor's viewpoint.
And the captor in this case is the model that says, oh, we definitely know that we are seven minutes from an absolute catastrophe and that we have to get to, you know, carbon neutral by, you know, noon tomorrow.
And no deviation from it.
So anyway, I think what we've done Because we've wrestled a bunch of the parameters that cause a system that looks superficially like it is dedicated to the values and modes of the Enlightenment that in fact is more akin to what you would find in a dark age and for reasons that are not so paradoxical, that are all visible.
All very human.
Yeah, all very human.
All very human.
Wow.
Yeah.
Um, well, crap.
Yeah.
Darn.
Yeah.
Uh, I guess I see, I think we should probably, I want to mention a couple of the questions that we got to last week.
Um, but I'm going to save Stone Tools from the Anatols and maybe the Gates Foundation for, for later.
Yeah.
Um, but I just see a couple more things on your notes there that I'm wondering if you, if we got to.
Track record disruptors.
Oh yeah.
Well, let's, let's talk about that.
Can we just finish that up?
Sure.
Yeah.
What I was thinking, I'm watching something utterly shocking happen.
So, in my own naive mind, I've been watching three and a half tracks of COVID narrative.
One of them has to do with COVID origins.
One of them has to do with the utility of repurposed drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
And one of them has to do with vaccine safety and effectiveness.
And we've talked, I mean, I've written about that.
We've talked about that.
These, these three tracks are all interesting in their own rights.
Yeah.
Interesting in their own rights.
And then the half track is viral variants.
But in any case, my feeling is we won by surprise.
We won on the lab leak.
People are wide awake and they understand that the most likely origin by far for SARS-CoV-2 was the laboratory, probably the Wuhan Institute, unless something really weird happened.
Vaccine safety and effectiveness.
People are also awake enough not to get their boosters and to quietly talk about the people they know who were injured.
So these two things have blown up.
The narrative has broken around them.
Repurposed drugs.
People still feel clever mocking ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
I hope it breaks.
But anyway, my thought was, look, if all of these things break, Then you will know.
What world you're living in.
Once you know what you were lied to about and what its consequences were, you know, not just the consequences of COVID itself, of unnecessary vaccine risks and harms ongoing, the denial of perfectly viable, safe drugs to manage the condition to whatever extent COVID was a threat to anybody, they denied you the ability to Manage it correctly.
They deny doctors the ability to learn how to use those tools.
Once you know what happened on all three of those counts, the system is laid bare.
You finally understand what a cruddy system you're living in and you'll be motivated to do something about it because you will realize that it can do that to you again and again and again.
So I've been waiting for the third of those three patterns to become understood and it's frustrating that people still don't get the repurposed drug one but I hope they will.
What I did not expect was that the one which has been most decisively I'm hesitant to use the word settled, but let's say settled, that the laboratory is the most likely source of SARS-CoV-2, which frankly, many of us, I think most of us got an education in lab leaks.
We find out lab leaks are not uncommon.
They have caused pandemics before.
In this case, we've got grant applications that propose exactly the modifications that we've seen of SARS-CoV-2 relative to the likely precursors from the cave in Wuhan, yada, yada, yada.
What I'm watching is all of a sudden something is unmaking that victory.
Something has decided to go back and pretend to do a new analysis in which, lo and behold, it wasn't the lab, it was nature all along.
Well, I think you and I disagree about how settled that ever was.
I didn't see it as being agreed to across the board, but it became I'm not saying.
Certainly there was a moment when we were the most lambasted for talking about LabLink.
And that was the thing that it seemed would probably take us out.
Right.
And then it became something, you know, with the help and we talked about this and I've written about this as well, you know, with the help of Jon Stewart and with the help of some public figures joking about it.
This became a number of high profile pieces in mainstream media.
This became something that everyone, like the Washington Post reading, Coastal Elite, part of the audience, part of the populace, all had to allow that there were reasonable people who did not think that SARS-CoV-2 had a zoonotic origin.
So we were at least there.
No, we were beyond that.
But there were always still, you still had the core The core people, the, you know, the, what is it?
It's going to be Barak and Warby and Rasmussen and, you know, various people.
Anderson.
Anderson, who, who were, you know, doing their thing behind the scenes and were occasionally putting out these sort of, you know, these, these trial balloons.
Missives.
Yeah.
Missives.
That largely were ignored and then occasionally were picked up and written about with adoration.
Yeah, but you're paying too much attention to the official back and forth.
Yes, there was nothing official.
But on what basis do you think that it was subtle?
Oh, well, this is why I didn't like the word settled.
Okay.
Struggling for a better one.
Okay.
Because nobody in a discussion that held any standard whatsoever was arguing in favor of a natural origin.
It had been settled from the point of view of the public had accepted that yes, of course, a laboratory origin is understood to be the most likely.
That was true in really any sophisticated circle and the official stuff was still happening but nobody was buying it and now what I've seen is a surge in which many properties have been brought back in to alter this to reverse that progress so we have among others we have Scott Alexander
We have some debate that has taken place and Scott Alexander brought in to create the impression that it's a surprise ending.
Yes, we all thought it was laboratory origin, but on reinvestigation it turns out it was natural origins based on nothing.
There is no information that has come to light that changes the analysis at all.
And so anyway, the idea that what you need are institutions that both monitor the track records of people that they hire, and track record has to mean predictive power, not success at getting grants or publications, And then the institutions have to be tracked for their ability to do the same.
So it has to be sort of a fractal track record system.
That should make a Cartesian crisis impossible, but that what we are seeing is that there are numerous processes that are used to interrupt that.
Even where a track record is established, there is no point at which the system will not come back and attempt to either Revise the conclusion in order to rescue the regime's viewpoint, or it can retcon its own position.
We've seen this dozens of times where the system pretends that it gave advice that it didn't.
Oh, nobody told you to get a vaccine.
Right?
That kind of thing.
So that retconning of its position so that it doesn't it's not revealed to be an error is a very powerful force and I guess my point is if track record is the only thing that allows us to guarantee that we move in general over long periods in the right direction with respect to our comprehension of the universe
then the idea that something is going to cover its ass by going back and unmaking progress and Pretending it held the wrong position so it gets credit in a track record race when it doesn't deserve it right these things are They are a weapon pointed at the public well-being and We should be considering it
Yep, and people who were wrong or strategically quiet, cards close to the chest, are busy recreating history as well right now.
And we have talked about this throughout, watching it happen, watching as the mainstream media appeared to be ready to like, okay, we're going to claim victory even though we were wrong the entire time.
Yeah, and actually it creates a sort of moving version of the North Korea thing, right?
As the embarrassed regime, which incidentally has no shame.
As the embarrassed regime attempts to fix things so it can continue on without having to account for its errors or fix its flaws or any of that, right?
It basically, this actually, it fits with what we described A couple years ago now is the middle ground scramble.
Yep.
Where people who had been embarrassed and wrong are now looking to slap both sides on the wrist.
They will slap the regime on the wrist and the regime will grant them power and they will slap the renegades who got it right on the wrist, thereby freeing us from a reckoning in which the people who actually did see things ahead of time are in a position to comment.
So anyway, the point is, We think of something like North Korea as static right North Korea has a perspective And it is in a position to force people to adopt that perspective the regime our regime is a moving target That's in a position to say all right the cocktail party is now going to and actually this is this is not This is quite in keeping with
With the Jon Stewart signaling that it was that moment that we could all talk about LabLeak.
But the basic point is, look, okay, the regime has identified the news story and it's going to have some pheromones around it so you'll be able to identify what the safe news story is and then we're all going to go over there.
And we're going to avoid any self-criticism by doing so.
And everybody happily maintains the power they have and they don't have to face the people who called them out.
Yep.
All right.
So I think we're going to stop there, but I did want to just make mention of the great Q&A that we had last Sunday and just speak a little bit about some of the topics we covered.
Because we do two Q&As a month at Locals, which you can join right now using the code DarkHorse1Month to get a free month.
One is the number one.
We've been doing a private Q&A for many years now at my Patreon, which we've now moved over to Locals.
We have your conversations with Chris Martinson from Panama, we have our conversation about Huberman, we have all these Q&As up at Locals.
This last Sunday we talked about, for instance, environmental endocrine disruptors perhaps paving the way for the trans crisis, carnivores turning into herbivores.
The wisdom of regular bathing, the light spectrum and the color wheel, male leadership and why it's the norm, and under what circumstances it maybe doesn't need to be, Panama.
What's the alternative?
I don't remember.
Clueless.
So, just a ton of diverse and interesting topics that come from you guys, our audience, specifically the people in Locals, which is where we're doing these Q&As.
And also, those are intimate enough conversations that are happening live, we then leave them up for anyone who's supporting us on Locals to see.
We are able to follow the chat as it happens, too, and engage with the chat as it happens.
So please, please consider joining us at Locals using that code DarkHorse one month.
We are not going to be back again until, publicly, until April 17th.
Not this next Wednesday, but the Wednesday after that.
But there will be some Local stuff in the interim.
So just once again, I'm just going to keep on Pushing that?
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