Babies Not on the Level: The 221st Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
One month free DarkHorse Locals: https://darkhorse.locals.com/support/promo/DARKHORSE1MONTHIn this 221st 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 men competing against women in women’s sport, and the new research that shows there’s no problem at all. We are in a world of science cosplay, full of science skin suits. Then: cancel culture and its mir...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, livestream number 200 and something.
Is it 218?
Uh, no.
No, it's not.
Is it 219?
Nope.
Is it 204?
How long have you been asleep?
Well, um, what number is it?
It's 221.
221, of course!
Yeah, obviously.
Makes so much sense.
Obviously, it is April 17th, therefore we're here with livestream number 221, not a prime, 13 by 17.
Of course, obviously.
Obviously.
Yep.
Here we are.
It is a beautiful spring day here in San Juan Islands and it's possible that we're going to show you a little bit of that not on this live stream but within the next day or two on Locals.
Please join us there.
We are so close to getting to 2,000 supporters on Dark Horse Locals and we really are hoping to do that if this plane doesn't land in our house as we are speaking to you.
I don't know if they can hear it.
Coming through the new dog door, which the dog does not recognize as a door.
No, no she does, she does not.
But yes, the plane apparently is coming through the dog door.
It's a strange life we're living here.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah, so we are, in order to encourage you, we have just, you know, just a few dozens more supporters to get to 2,000, which we're really trying to get to today.
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Okay.
Okay.
I think you probably do.
No, I'm not.
I'm not that way.
So please, please join us at Locals, where we will be doing a raffle if we hit 2,000, which should happen soon.
It'd be great if it happened during this live stream.
Today we're going to be talking about men competing against women in sport.
A little something that we are calling the stigma engine.
Where cancel culture meets promotion culture and a little thing on cats and their people at the end to finish this off.
You're looking at me like, what?
I didn't know we were talking about cats.
I didn't know.
I need a little personal time to prepare for discussions about cats.
No, you do not.
No, I do not.
Okay, so Brett did an AMA on Locals yesterday.
We are in hopes of getting you something special later on.
We are going to postpone the Q&A after this livestream until next week, but we are doing our long-standing, what we call our private Q&A.
Usually on the last Sunday of the month, this Sunday from 11 a.m.
to 1 p.m.
Pacific, right now on Locals, you can ask questions for that.
That's a beautiful, intimate enough group that we can engage with the chat, and it's really super fantastic.
There are 16 distinct kinds of awesome, and it is 11 of them, which is good.
It's very hard to get more than 8 in one activity.
I think it is testament either to your parenting or your failure to parent, I don't know which, that you have been reporting on the 16 distinct kinds of awesome to me and our children, since our children were very young.
And they have not once demanded of you an enumeration of what those 16 kinds of awesome are, nor have I, in fact.
Right, I think you all know better.
That's what I attribute it to.
We don't want to destroy the magic.
Right, exactly.
Just knowing how many is, you know, that's a good start.
It is 19 27ths of the battle.
I was just going to say in a metric heavy world, as long as you got a number, what else do you need?
You don't need much.
Yeah.
So what has 11 kinds of the 16 kinds of awesome?
Uh, the private Q&A in which we interact with the chat.
It's pretty awesome.
You know, it's awesome, but it can't possibly have 11 of the 16 kinds of awesome.
Count yourself.
I feel that was well played on my part.
Yes, it was.
All right.
And you can join the watch party on Locals.
It's happening right now.
We also release early guest episodes and our Discord community is there, which has great things like karaoke and book clubs and happy hours.
And so much more.
Okay, we're gonna move the rest of the stuff to the end, except for our carefully chosen ads.
As usual, as always, it is true that we only accept sponsors from outfits that actually produce products or offer services that we truly stand behind, and that is true now as it always is.
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Ah, this is I don't either.
There are only 16 kinds of awesome and you think one of them is spelling?
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Mudwater also makes... I hope there will be more animal sounds when we get to your ad read.
I assume there will be.
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I do know, actually, in this case.
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I am hoping in a moment for the sound made by bees.
Bees.
That's a, you know, it's not hard to caricature bees, but it's hard to nail that particular.
You know how you can hear the difference between a bee and a fly?
It's very hard to get that level of precision in an imitation, but I'm going to work on it.
Okay.
Maybe next week I'll have the bee fly distinction down.
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I feel like we got a new code for Mudwater, and I will look while dad is reading his.
Well, Brett, here.
You're someone's dad, and it happens to be his.
Right, now this has gotten confusing.
I knew what you meant.
I think we might have a new code, so I will come back with that if that is the case.
For Mudwater, where you will get 15% off, it's possible I'm confusing the sponsors, but for now I will say to get 15% off, go to mudwatermudwtr.com to support the show.
slash darkhorsepod to support the show.
Use code darkhorsepod for 15% off.
I like a long time.
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That's weird.
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How would you know?
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Yeah, that does sound like you.
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I'm not.
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You do want to start there?
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Otherwise you have no chance of doing anything else.
Right, you don't get to longevity if you don't avoid short-gevity.
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You're giving me that look.
I am, because that's the wrong script.
This is the wrong script.
How is that possible?
I don't know.
It keeps on happening.
Alright.
So, the last one was the right script.
This one, you just, you ad-lib about Moink for a little bit.
Make some of your animal sounds.
I'm gonna cross out.
Make some of your animal sounds.
Alright.
Uh, the giraffe.
It's good.
Alright, are you ready?
I am.
I'm so ready.
Okay.
Dead air giraffe.
Yeah.
Okay, that's all.
All right.
I changed it.
Oh, that was easy.
I thought you were going to have to rewrite the whole thing.
Wait a minute.
Okay.
All right, back to it.
No, it's good.
Have I mentioned that it's important to avoid short-civity?
Sorry, guys.
More Box is fantastic, and we were so busy eating so much of their food, we forgot to update our schedule.
Yeah, it exceeds the quality of this ad read by orders of magnitude.
It really does.
Yeah.
Where was I?
Sorry.
Yeah, we had Moink's meat is grass-fed and grass-finished.
We've talked about that.
Consider treating yourself or someone else, you could buy it as a gift, to some truly fabulous meat.
That's a great idea.
It's grown humanely and with care.
That can't be a bad thing.
And it's fantastic for you.
What?
Talk about increasing longevity and avoiding short-gevity.
Yes.
Moink farmers farm like our grandparents did or at least like Heather's grandparents did on the family farm in Iowa.
As a result, moink meat tastes like it should because the family farm does it better and the moink difference is a difference you can taste.
I changed that because I don't think your grandparents farmed as actively as my grandparents did.
Your family set the bar, but my grandfather... Yeah, they were definitely farmers there in rural northeastern Iowa.
Your family set the bar for our emergent family with respect to the degree of farming.
Ah, yes, yes, yes.
Between the two of us.
Right.
I see.
Got it.
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Wow.
All right.
These edits are tough to read, but I think people got the point.
It's bacon.
It's bacon.
Yeah.
You're going to get free bacon for a year if you sign up for Mikebox now.
Free.
Yeah.
What a deal.
I mean, who... Who doesn't need a bacon year?
Especially super high quality bacon.
Yeah.
All right.
Super high quality bacon does not need a bacon year.
Yeah, that's, now we've gotten philosophical, which is sort of beyond the scope of this ad read.
But, um, in any case, Moink is spelled M-O-I-N-K box, B-O-X dot com slash dark horse spelled dark horse.
That's moinkbox.com slash dark horse for a free year of the best bacon you'll ever taste.
There it is.
All right.
That was a little rough.
It was rough.
But we got there.
We did.
Yes.
I have word.
I don't remember what you read, but the current, uh, the current offer from Mudwater is Mudwater.com slash Dark Horse for a free frother with your order and $20 off.
Oh.
Oh.
All right.
Well, maybe we got to, did you just say that in the microphone?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, okay.
All right.
Well, there you have it.
Okay.
Uh, so what, okay.
Here we are.
Yes.
Yes.
221st episode I'm led to understand.
221st.
We've been doing 17 of the batches of 17, 13 times at this point.
I've been counting up to 17.
Of course.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Who doesn't love base 17?
17.
No, it's not base 17.
But anyway, locals, Dark Horse one month right now.
Join us.
If we hit 2,000 subscribers by the supporters by the end of the day, we'll do a raffle.
We're going to give away a free Zoom call, a free Zoom call with us, and also to someone else a signed copy of our book.
Maybe to choose someone else's signed copy of our book, depending.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Okay.
Science says, we're going to play Science Says.
Whoa.
Yeah.
All right.
I feel prepared.
Now, science says male athletes cosplaying as females have no advantage when competing against actual women.
That's some new research.
Okay.
Published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, an article called Strength, Power and Aerobic Capacity of Transgender Athletes, a Cross-Sectional Study.
All right.
Okay.
It was in part funded by the Olympic Committee, because they really want to know and they want, you know, they want to make things fair.
They're into sports, I hear.
And they would really like to know if all of this hubbub and kerfuffle that, you know, a few, I don't know, outspoken women keep complaining about, especially among the athletes themselves, like this isn't fair.
Well, let's, let's just find out for, for sure.
So, um, the results, let's just start with the results.
That's where, that's where most journalists start, right?
Let's start with the results.
I think most journalists get past the title, but yeah, well, and they look at the results in the abstract, but they skip right by all the other stuff, like the methods, which we'll get to in a moment.
Uh, The results of this just fantastic, science says, research are that trans women, that is, men, athletes, compared to actual women athletes, have equal testosterone, Higher estrogen.
Because they're supplementing with estrogen.
Higher absolute hand grip strength.
Okay, fine.
Fine.
Lower forced expiratory volume.
Lower relative jump height.
Surprising.
And lower relative VO2 max.
That's the maximum rate of oxygen that your body can use during exercise.
VO2 max.
These results seem surprising, do they not?
They do.
They do.
Okay, so the methods.
And I'll ask you to show my screen in a minute, but not just yet.
The methods which are contained in the methods section, which we in the business call the where the bodies are buried section.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Actually, no, before I get to the methods section, before I get to the actual methods section, allow me to show you, hold on, let me find it here.
In, sorry, I'm still looking.
Okay, within the methods section, believe it or not, is this.
Oh, sorry, I'm not plugged in.
Wow, we are just not... We're on it.
Not on it today.
And by we, I mostly mean I. Okay.
And of course, now my screen is going nuts.
Okay.
Can't, uh, yeah.
Okay, so this is, believe it or not, the last section of Methods is called Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Statement.
What?
Yeah, so we're going to get to what they actually did to get these crazy results, but literally within their Methods section, they have this little section.
The author group consists of early, n equals three, So the parenthetical n equals makes it sound super science-y because it's a sample size.
And this must have been hard to count because there were six authors and they had to figure out how many were early researchers and how many were senior researchers.
As it turns out, three and three from different disciplines and universities.
N equals three again.
Two authors are members of a marginalized community.
The lead early career author is a transgender woman, because of course he is, and one of the junior authors is a woman from the Global South.
Our study population included male and female transgender athletes from within the UK participating in competitive sports in comparison with cisgender male and female athletes participating in competitive sports.
Thus, findings may not be generalizable to global athlete populations.
That last bit is just we pulled from the UK, but This doesn't belong in the methods section.
Okay?
This doesn't belong anywhere in a scientific paper.
It doesn't belong on Earth.
It doesn't belong in a research paper at all.
So if you would give me back my screen for a minute here.
I will say, I'll just scroll up.
Okay, here we go.
You can show my screen again, Zach.
So again, so this is original research, open access.
So I will, as always, link to this in the show notes.
Strength, power, and aerobic capacity of transgender athletes at cross-sectional study.
Just go down to the methods and find recruitment.
Following ethical approval, 75 19, I'm going to use their terminology although I don't like it, 19 cis men, 12 transgender men, 23 transgender women, and 21 cisgender women.
Participants were recruited through social media advertising on meta platforms Facebook and Instagram and X Twitter.
So they put out an announcement on social media saying, we're interested in, in pulling people in and they just let people come to them.
So that tells us right away, we got a selection bias problem, potentially.
Well, and potentially very severe.
Absolutely.
Depending on, let's just use the, the ex Twitter example.
The nature of followers.
You couldn't broadcast this on a fresh account that you'd put up to have no bias built into it because nobody would see it.
So it has to be on an account that has a following and if it has a following then you can imagine that people can... you are telegraphing what you're studying.
We are looking for people for this and therefore people who want the result to come out useful to their team are likely to self-filter, even beyond the self-filtering of those who saw this advertisement, are likely to have already been on board with this message.
Yes, but Brett, unfair competition is the name of the game.
It is.
This is not about athletics, this is not about sportsmanship, this is not about fairness in any way, so how dare you object?
It's not even about establishing facts.
Right, as we shall get to.
Okay, so continuing with the methods here, Participants and eligibility criteria.
Participants were required to participate in competitive sports or undergo physical training at least three times per week.
I'm sorry, undergoing physical training at least three times a week does not make you an athlete, specifically not a competitive athlete.
Maybe you are, but that's not sufficient.
Following written consent, participants were asked to record their last four training sessions and self-rate their training intensity for each session on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being maximum intensity.
The mean of the four sessions was recorded to represent the athlete's training intensity.
Everything is self-report.
They have been advertised to in some way, which must both bias who even sees the call to recruitment, but then they're also self-selected in terms of who goes forward with it.
And then those people who have gone forward with it get to self-describe what they're doing.
And frankly, we know that some of these people are delusional because they think they're the sex that they're not.
The mean of the four sessions was recorded to represent the athletes' training intensity.
The transgender athletes must have completed at least one or more years of GAHT, which is gender-affirming hormone therapy.
Voluntarily disclosed during consent and verified during blood test analysis.
The full inclusion-exclusion criteria can be found in the study protocol available as a preprint.
Two cisgender women and one transgender man could not provide blood samples and were consequently excluded from all analyses, as their endocrine profiles could not be verified.
Furthermore, two transgender women and one cisgender woman were excluded from all analyses due to testosterone concentrations exceeding recommended female testosterone concentrations.
What?
So, it's only three people, but the total numbers are really low.
So, they're actually telling us that they are excluding people based on testosterone levels when one of their metrics is testosterone levels.
This is beyond insane, if I can have my screen back, please.
This is beyond insane in terms of a method.
So, okay, let's see.
I want to show Table 1 here now.
Can I very quickly say, the fact that they've excluded a biological woman from the woman category because of testosterone levels that they are using to grant transgender women into that category is insane at every level.
Yeah, no, absolutely it is.
And actually, maybe this is the moment before you show my screen to also say, so this is great paper by a friend of mine, Emma Hilton, and her co-author,
Lundberg, published in 2021, we actually cite it in our book, called Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage, which they find specifically that it doesn't matter what your current testosterone levels are, that even if you are taking different hormones than you should be for your sex therapy, gender affirming hormone therapy I guess is the acronym,
And you're a man and your testosterone levels are going down, your estrogen levels are going up.
That barely mitigates in any way the effects of having gone through puberty as a male.
Transitioning, actually, from being a boy into becoming a man.
Those effects of steroid hormones like The androgens, including testosterone, are not just activational, meaning in the moment they have effects on what, for instance, might be your burst speed, but they are operational.
Am I using the right word?
Operational?
No, activational versus organizational.
Organizational, yeah.
Organizational, meaning that they organize what you are, all of your bodily systems, anatomical, physiological, endocrinological, other than androgens and more, and that doesn't change with your current level.
So, they denounced, you know, they refuted the idea that current testosterone levels matter.
This new paper, and I'm going to show you some more of their chicanery here, But this new paper actually cites Helton and Lundberg and claims that their argument and their research was exactly the opposite of what it was.
Of course it does, which is not as uncommon in science as you would expect.
Things cited as the inverse of what they actually say because they're sort of on the topic.
I figured they couldn't possibly have cited them.
I went and looked.
It's like, oh, what did they claim they said?
It's like, oh, no, they did not.
Right.
So they, you know, they get cover like, well, I sure hope that you cited this important paper that would seem to refute what you're finding.
Oh yeah, we cited them.
We just claimed they said something they didn't.
So, two things.
One, it is responsive to a phoning-it-in culture across science.
And, you know, so very often a reviewer who's not really paying much attention will sort of give a curse.
You know, the reviewer is somebody who has expertise in a close enough field that they sort of know the 14 or even if it's a hundred papers that are relevant.
And so the point is, well, you didn't cite Lundberg.
And so the point is getting the stuff into the bibliography so that somebody who's too busy and Not that bright and definitely no longer very interested in figuring out what the truth is looks at it and you know their critique is going to be well these people didn't cite the Lundberg paper and And so the point is you just get it in there.
It doesn't, nobody's checking whether or not what you cited it for is actually what it says.
So you get this sort of, it's cargo called science.
It looks like a science paper that reports results and goes back through the relevant literature, but it doesn't do this in a way that would actually produce anything useful.
Right.
It does.
And specifically, I mean, the results section is written so badly, so confusingly, so like it just it mashes all of these categories together.
And it's really hard to track.
But they do have a few useful tables, for instance.
Here's one, Zach.
Participant characteristics.
So again, they have four categories of people.
Men, women who think they're men, women, and men who think they're women.
Cisgender also known as cisgender men, transgender men, cisgender women, and transgender women.
The age is Interestingly, mostly I'm not paying attention to the cisgender men transgender men comparison because guess what?
There aren't that many objections to women who think they're men competing against men except in high contact sports because they're not going to win!
Right?
So, you know, women, even women who think they're men, mostly know this and are not trying to push their way into sports.
It has been pointed out to me that actually it's still not legitimate.
It's not fair, especially if there's any contact because men are wrestling.
It's not okay for a woman who thinks she's a man to, you know, start wrestling against men because they're going to respond differently to a woman's body, right?
That's not okay.
But it's a different kind of not fair than men Who are cosplaying as women competing against women.
So that's these last two columns here is actual women, cisgender women, and men who are pretending to be women, transgender women.
And the age of the actual women is a little younger, but it's not that big a deal.
So we got 30 plus or minus 9.
Versus 34 plus or minus 10 training intensity.
This is again self-reported and these aren't actually you know professional or highly competitive athletes inherently and we don't know to what degree they are or not but that's neither here nor there.
Obviously amount of gender-affirming hormone therapy doesn't apply to the actual women and the actual men who Identify as the thing that they are or more likely don't spend a lot of time thinking about what they identify as because they've got more important things to do with their lives.
Height.
Okay, so transgender women, men, and transgender men, I mean, sorry, and actual men are the same height.
Hey, look at that.
Whoa.
Amazing.
And women... It's almost as if they're both just men.
Right.
And women here, 1.6 plus or minus 0.1, 0.1 rather, and women who think they're men, transgender men, are basically the same height.
Whoa.
Look at that.
Again.
Again.
Almost as if there's biology.
Almost as if there's biology.
So the height of the men and the women is different, but it's not that different.
It's about 0.2 meters.
But then the mass clothed of the Women and the women who think they're men is a little different.
The women who think they're men is higher and a little bit closer to the actual men, but over at 76.4.
But look here at the mass of the transgender women.
It's A, got the highest variance, highest standard deviation of any of these groups, but it's way higher than any of the other groups.
The mass of the men who are cosplaying as women is, what, seven kilograms higher than the mass of the actual men.
Oops.
Oopsie, right?
And therefore the BMI is also way higher in these transgender women, these men who are cosplaying as women, than they are in even actually just men, and certainly than the women.
So when we recognize this, they've got this group where all of the so-called transgender women athletes are Big and fat, right?
And in part that may be a result of the insane hormone replacement therapy they're on, but who knows?
It doesn't matter why, but you've got a bias in the group.
And then you look back at, if I may, Zach, have my screen, because I don't remember where it was in here.
Then you look back at this conclusion that the trans women have lower forced expiratory volume, they can exhale less well, and they have lower relative jump height.
They're big and fat!
And they have lower relative VO2 max.
Again, they're big and fat and they're on hormone replacement therapy.
They're not as healthy, and they're bigger and fatter than anyone else, and the women are actually female athletes who are presumably training to be athletic, and they're not on crazy cross-sex hormones.
Right.
So, A, that anomaly of the, um, I hate the terminology here because it's frankly ambiguous.
People from the future looking back at this conversation aren't going to know whether a transgender man was born male or female because it could be either.
But the trans women, that is born male, became female, or became, or you're cosplaying female, that category may be full of lots of people who can't compete athletically.
That's not what we're worried about.
We're worried about men who can compete athletically switching categories so that they can win when they shouldn't be winning.
Which is well, I mean, no, I'm concerned about both things.
Sure.
I'm concerned about, um, you know, the second thing when it comes to competitive sports, but in this, in this case, and you can actually, it might just be useful to have this up, this screen, this table one from this, uh, from this, we've known because I, because I showed you guys the, um, the ways that they found the participants and, uh, and, and assist them.
These aren't, uh, competitive athletes inherently.
I suspect that they're not really competitive, competitive at all.
They're just, This group, these people, are not going to be winning these incredibly difficult off-road mountain bike races against women.
Right.
These dudes aren't going to do that.
They're too fat, they don't breathe well, and it's just not the case.
That's what I'm saying.
This is a political document.
But we still don't want them in our spaces.
No, no.
The thing you showed where, okay, they've used social media to recruit people for a study on whether, you know, trans women actually have an advantage over people who are born female and stick with it.
Yeah.
I'm going to do that instantly.
But... Sticking with it.
The method is designed...
Don't quit your gender, folks.
You'll regret it.
The method is designed to find people who will underperform.
That metric tells us that that's what they did find.
Yes.
And it opens a question.
And actually, this is the second time in a couple of years that I've seen one of these where it's like, look, the method section actually doesn't give you, there's information that you need that is Seemingly reported in the method section, but it ain't there.
You have to go back and forth between the methods and the results to figure it out.
Right.
But let me give you the other example.
Okay.
There was a, one of the major trials that ostensibly proved ivermectin did not work for COVID.
Yeah.
Used a recruiting video in Spanish.
I believe it was in Colombia.
I think this was the together trial But if I've got my facts mixed up there was a recruiting video to get people into the study and my question when I heard this is what the hell was in the content of that video because Because if the video alerted people that there was interest in the possibility that ivermectin might work for COVID, then you could expect the control group to dose itself because they really care about, hey, am I going to get some free ivermectin that's going to prevent me from getting sick?
And if I'm not, then maybe it's worth going to the pharmacy and buying it anyway, because they're not interested in the science of it.
They're interested in being well.
And so the point is, look, you can report in the method section, we used a video to recruit Participants.
But now you've got to cough up the video.
Yeah.
Now we get to see what's in it.
In this case you've got, well we use social media to recruit participants.
Really?
What account?
And what did you say?
Right?
So I did not.
They say that this is available as a pre-print and while you're talking I could potentially...
I could, while you're talking, I could see if I can find it.
Well anyway, let's put it this way.
We are entitled to know that and it may very well tell us something about how they ended up with a disproportionately physically large group of supposed athletes with which to test this question and of course come up with a perfectly predictable result that happens to be politically useful if your point is actually just being born male doesn't give you an advantage.
But I also wanted to point out that Several times you have nailed a biological fact in this arena that has changed the conversation and I believe in fact it's having a consequence.
I don't detect a lot of The Brigading by the trans activists that is obviously out there I think it's leaving us alone And I think the reason it's leaving us alone is because it ends up being a loser if you tangle with us and I wanted to point out you are the first person I heard make the point about not chromosomes, but gamete size that this is the unviolated rule and Of sex.
That's one thing.
And the other thing, which I don't think I've heard anybody else discuss, but I'm quite convinced you were first on it, was this distinction between organizational and activational effects, which is of course a kill shot against the argument of the trans activists that this is all reversible and that the advantages actually aren't manifest because we give you enough hormones to
Put you in the other category, and I hope people will begin to understand that just because it involves two terms of art that they don't know, that this is equally important as the gamete size consideration.
It's so clarifying once you see it.
It is.
That's, of course, not my distinction.
It's a distinction that I ran into when I was doing endocrinological research, actually for Bob Trivers as an undergraduate, or maybe for my senior thesis in anthropology, but while we were both working with Bob, on The role of androgens in constructing female personalities in non-human primates.
That was what the research was, and it was library research.
But very early on in doing that research, it became clear that this distinction, which some but not all endocrinologists insist on, was absolutely fundamental.
Right?
There's no way to think the same way about, like, you just can't say add T or take T away.
You know, add testosterone, take testosterone away, once you understand that there are at least two, but certainly these two very different modes of action by which it functions.
So actually, so I don't mean to imply that you invented the terminology, but you're invoking it in the context of trans activism is where I see something unique.
And just to make it perfectly clear what we're talking about, so anybody who's listening to this discussion walks away with this tool.
If you take a person who was born male and has reached adulthood, and you lower their testosterone and you give them, you increase their estrogen, okay?
Did I get this right?
The person was born male, goes through puberty, and then you change their hormone profile.
You've changed it exogenously.
Yes.
You may very well change certain characteristics like their tendency to grow hair on their face.
Yep.
Right?
The timbre of their voice.
Right, the timbre of their voice.
And there's actually a very interesting, back when NPR had content on it, there was a This American Life on somebody who had a A lesbian who I think had gone trans and had taken testosterone.
The show was about testosterone, it wasn't about trans.
But she reported that she found herself altered.
That she was more likely to behave badly relative to women she was attracted to.
That she suddenly found math more fascinating.
It was a shocking show.
It was a shocking show.
This was back like mid-late 90s.
Right, so anyway, there's no shortage of stuff that you may affect with this late acting change, but you're not gonna change a person's height.
Right so and I'm not saying that's not the I'm not saying that's the only thing I'm just saying here you can see there are two categories and this is not ambiguous it might turn out that you know interest in math is at least partly activational that's fascinating and not something most of us would predict but there it is right but then there's other stuff that's clearly just not right and it has to do with the thickness of your bones which might be a little bit Activational, but is a lot organizational.
Your height, you know, all sorts of parameters just aren't in that category.
Now, a real discussion on this topic.
The trans activists would understand that actually this argument is not a clean win for one side or the other.
We have to take it at full strength.
Their best argument for early transition is also this.
Right?
But the point is, look... But there I think I have an extraordinarily solid bomb-proof argument in that regard as well, which is that we owe it to the vast majority of people who consider who they are and what they are as they approach puberty to not mess with them.
In knowing that, if there is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of humanity who would actually be better off living as the other sex, and I'm not even sure that that is true at this point, but even if we grant that, it is a much tinier fraction of humanity who will be harmed by having to wait for an incredibly modern, dangerous, and unhealthy intervention that medicine is currently allowing.
Especially in light of the fact that we know that a huge fraction of those with gender dysphoria It clears up with no intervention, right?
So yes, absolutely So that is the point is I think an open argument in which all of the points that go in both directions are on the table and we are allowed to evaluate them with you know enlightenment tools does Build a compelling case and the point is you what you've got is cheaters on the other side Who want the advantages of certain arguments?
They don't want the downside of the same argument And they they would like to play as if they are doing science when in fact what they are doing is just dressing up an argument in high heels and lipstick and Hoping you won't notice that it's a pic Yep, I noticed.
I noticed that you noticed.
Yeah, so I found the materials that are supposedly the entire protocol published as pre-print that you can show here, Zach, which Fascinating, really, it doesn't actually provide the details that they suggested it would.
This is Sporting Performance of Athletes of the Gender Spectrum, a Cross-Sectional Comparison Study Protocol, in which the authors of this paper that we've been talking about, which is so badly and chaotically done, promises all of the details that aren't in that paper with regard to method will be here.
And among other things, it says here, if I search on the word poster, Participants will be recruited through social media advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter with the recruitment poster that is supplied in the supplementary materials.
I don't find any supplementary materials.
You have to follow it a few steps before you end up it's a dead end.
You don't want to reveal in the initial paper that actually you're not revealing it because then too many people will say, Hey, you can't do it that way.
That's not how the scientific process is supposed to work.
But they've just buried it one step deeper.
Now, maybe it is available somewhere, but it's not obvious.
They're not making it easy, which they said they were.
Sort of reminds me of the Evergreen debacle when they claimed to have given us the plan with which they were going to remake the college, and we were going to gather to talk about it, and nobody else bothered to mention to them that in fact they hadn't attached it to anything, and I had to go request it in order to even see it.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay, so thank you, Zach.
Maybe that's mostly it.
So I talked a little bit about the Hilton and Lundberg article, which is excellent.
Let me just say, With regard to what they find, this is the excellent paper from 2021, Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage.
They say, the performance gap is more pronounced in sporting activities relying on muscle mass and explosive strength, particularly in the upper body.
Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area, and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment.
Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed.
This is, again, to the point about activational versus organizational effects.
And, you know, No, this is not how you demonstrate truths in science, but think about it, right?
How many push-ups can an average woman do compared to a man?
How about pull-ups, chin-ups, right?
We have two very fit and muscular young men now for children.
They both had birthdays recently.
20 and 18 they are.
And the number of upper body strength exercises that they can do is just shocking to me.
It's extraordinary.
And I think it's less shocking to you.
And I was, you know, I was...
Do you remember the presidential fitness stuff back in the 70s and 80s when we were kids?
I always did that.
I was always leading in that for a girl, for a woman.
And when you're eight, the difference is I was on par with the boys when I was eight.
And by the time I was 14, I was leading the pack for the girls and I was way behind the boys because that's what puberty does in a system that has sexual reproduction and therefore two sexes.
That's the difference.
And you can absolutely, I think it's absurd, but you know, yes, people who are inclined to, you know, pursue the trophy rather than the accomplishment may very well just see the opportunity in front of them and understand what's being asked of them.
And it may seem like a fun way to win the game.
I did want to add something before we move on.
Yeah.
Oh, actually, I got one thing to add as well.
More.
Okay.
Here's what I want to add.
The process... I make the argument sometimes that incredibly powerful processes may be counterintuitively incredibly fragile.
The requirements, you know...
Nuclear fusion is this way.
Nuclear fusion is capable of releasing incredible amounts of energy from tiny amounts of material, but it is very hard to create the conditions in which it happens, which is why we are not generating electricity this way.
Science is just leaps and bounds ahead of the next nearest competitor.
I don't even know what it would be in terms of figuring out what's true about the universe that is surprising, right?
You don't need it in order to figure out the intuitive stuff of the universe, but you do need it to figure out the counterintuitive stuff, and there just ain't another competing process.
But the problem is that whether you have the materials necessary to make it work, the conditions in which it actually functions, or you've got all the junk but it's just not hooked up right, is a tiny difference.
Yeah.
Right?
It is.
And the problem is we are stuck in We're stuck in a predicament where the degree to which people are missing the mark on what you would have to do in order to have a valid scientific study is gigantic.
But we are forced into nitpicking the minutiae and then having an argument about how far off the method that would be necessary to do actual science you are.
And it's like, imagine that you went into the bazaar and you were buying some good by the kilo.
And you discover that the vendor has their thumb on the scale.
The right instinct is not to go to that vendor.
It's not to ask, well, how hard were they pushing?
Can we estimate by which degree they were cheating and pretending like I was buying more stuff than I actually was?
The answer is, oh, that's not an honest vendor.
You know, again, we get stuck back in the philosophical questions that nobody is well trained for, right?
What would have to be true for this to be an actually valid scientific exploration?
They're not even in the same ballpark.
They're not trying.
They're not trying.
All it is is a publication that looks as if it might have come from such an investigation until you look at it, at which point it's like, oh no, there are thumbs all over those scales.
There's thumbs all over those scales, but it's, I mean, it's analogous to the concept of a skin suit.
It's a science suit.
There's people wearing science suits and they're putting forth science suit papers and they've compelled the vast majority of at least Americans who were, you know, frankly traumatized by really bad science and math classes in elementary school that they, you know, and they now almost proudly, especially among the, you know, literati, like, Oh yeah, I can't do math.
I leave the scientists to those, you know, those are the geeky people over there.
And then they think that what it means to be, you know, a modern person who understands that science is important is to trust any guy who shows up wearing a lab coat and wielding a degree.
And that's the opposite of science.
It's not how science has ever, ever actually worked, but it is the way that science is being used as the newest religion by which to clobber people.
I will point out, as I always do at this point in the conversation, Richard Feynman's excellent piece on cargo cult science, which explores this exact problem.
That lots of things, even done by people who think of themselves as real scientists and aspire to do the work properly, it is Relatively easy for them to end up going through the motions without actually meeting the requirements of science.
Producing something that seemed, you know, the replication crisis in the social sciences is exactly the product of this.
It was, you know, decades of work that appeared scientific that actually had a flaw significant enough to make almost the entire body of work unreproducible.
And this, I mean, Sorry, but this doesn't differ from that crap work.
This is not called social science.
This is called natural science because they're measuring, they're doing biometrics.
But who cares?
It's the same crap methods.
They just happen to be measuring something that you might also measure if you were doing real physiological research.
Right?
So the particular thing that you're measuring doesn't make it science.
You need the method.
You need the actual hypothesis and the actual experimental design by which you can actually tell if the numbers that are spit out at the end of your process are meaningful and could possibly mean what you say they mean, which in this case they can't.
Yeah, I mean there is a distinction in intent.
A lot of the people who did the cruddy social scientific work thought that they were doing the job right and then at the point that the focus fell on p-values and reproducibility it became apparent that they had just been play-acting.
Yes.
In this case, Had these people come up with the opposite conclusion, they wouldn't have said, oh, that's surprising.
Check this out.
It actually does matter what gender you were born in.
We'll never know.
But I don't think they would have published it.
Of course they wouldn't publish it.
It's clear in their diversity, equity and inclusion statement what they're about, what they want, what the thing is going to say.
Who knows how many, which iteration was this?
Right.
We don't know.
They might have read it 20 times.
And this was the one that gave them the conclusion that was politically desirable to them.
But the I wanted to go back to the, oh, Cargocult Science.
You point to the skin suit, the science skin suit.
And I think what you're really saying is that this is, it's a kind of cosplay, right?
This is not well-intentioned people who have never really trained well in what would disrupt a scientific experiment.
This is now people who are using the modality of science To accomplish a social end that has nothing to do with figuring out what's true.
Right.
And so science cosplay I think is a relevant term but I would also say it's play science.
Right?
This is like, you know, dressing up like a superhero.
It doesn't give you superpowers.
And publishing a somewhat scientific-seeming work doesn't make you a scientist.
The thing that makes you a scientist, and frankly, you can have a degree and not do what makes you a scientist, and you can not have a degree and you can do the thing that makes you a scientist.
We've seen a lot of both.
Yeah, the question is, do you wield the method correctly enough to figure out what is surprising?
Or are you just validating your own beliefs or trying to get ahead in your career?
You know, that's another reason to just validate whatever the powerful narrative might be.
Speaking of suits.
Yes.
One last thing on this before we transition, as it were.
Show my screen if you will.
President Biden.
I remember him.
His social media team put out this amazing tweet.
Women in sports continue to push new boundaries and inspire us all.
But right now we're seeing that even if you're the best, women are not paid their fair share.
It's time that we give our daughters the same opportunities as our sons and ensure women are paid what they deserve.
So, um, I don't even know how many, so there's 16 kinds of awesome.
How many kinds of crap are there?
Uh, that's a much larger category.
I would, I would have to, uh, I'll put together a spreadsheet and we'll see.
Yeah.
I don't know how many kinds of crap this is, but in his usual awesome way, Clifton Duncan responded perfectly.
Aside from the standard economic illiteracy underpinning this cynical tweet, by now everyone knows Democrats don't give a single shit about women's sports.
Beautiful.
Perfect, right?
So let me just say, we have other places to go in the podcast here, but women are not paid their fair share.
We're talking about sports, right?
We're not talking about you got hired by Google to be a software engineer, and a careful look into your pay shows that, oops, oh, actually, at Google, women engineers are paid a little bit more than men, according to the research that I found a couple of years ago.
I don't know if that's still true, but if there's any inequity in pay between the sexes at Google with regard to software engineers, it favors the women, not the men.
Not the story we're told.
But this is not even that, right?
Like, even if the stories were told about the problems with unequal pay and women earning, you know, 70 cents, 86 cents, whatever it is on the dollar that men earn, which there's lots of people who have already debunked that.
Start with Christina Hoff Summers and go from there.
This is sports.
Sports, professional sports, is paid for by the audience who wants to watch professional sports.
If you, as someone who's interested in investing in sports, is interested in creating a marketing campaign to increase interest in watching women's sports, go for it, I guess.
But it's going to be the audience deciding who they want to watch.
It's not about, well, I can see that the NBA players are being paid this much and the WNBA players are not being paid as much and therefore there's an unfairness in the system.
Sorry, no.
So Clifton Duncan, as I said, is right.
The standard economic illiteracy underpinning this cynical tweet.
That's exactly what's going on.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, Clifton Duncan, of course, slam dunks the question.
And of course, it will make no difference because because of the imposter in chief.
Yeah, because the imposter-in-chief, as of the screenshot I took of this, had, you know, 21,000 likes to his incompetent, buffoonish tweet, which, you know, most of the responses don't even point out the absurdity of claiming that professional female athletes aren't paid enough because they're not paid the same as Professional male athletes who garner much more giant audiences and therefore bring in more money.
Most of the responses are apropos what we've just been talking about, which is that actually you don't, frankly, don't give a flying about women athletes given that you're letting men cosplay as women athletes and compete against them.
Yeah, and I don't even know how to phrase this, but there's something with all of the crap that we watched, the terrible science that we watched during the COVID crisis.
Yeah.
So much of it was a shell game in which people who were sick from one thing were pushed into a category that made them look like they were sick from something else in order to draw the conclusion that this thing worked and that thing didn't.
It's scientific shell game, right?
In order to test these things, you have to build categories.
If you were going to game the system, this is an obvious place to do it, is to shove people into categories they don't belong in, right?
You got hit by a bus, but we're going to say you died of COVID, right?
So the idea that actually this game has gotten so ridiculous that we are going to shove actual people into categories they don't belong into.
Right.
Congratulations.
You're a woman now swim, right?
That, that is an amazing, that's like physical sophistry, right?
A man putting on a woman's bathing suit and competing against women and reaching a draw with Riley Gaines in, in Leah Thomas's case, and then getting the trophy because of her struggle.
Her?
His, Leah's.
Yeah.
Which one?
I was being generous.
Leah.
Leah's struggle, Leah's perceived struggle is going to be treated as a tiebreaker rather than treating her height as a tiebreaker in favor of Riley Gaines.
Right?
It's like, this is physical sophistry.
No, it is.
And you're absolutely right.
We've seen picture after picture, or at least I have, unfortunately, of these podiums, right?
In swimming, in biking, those are the two, in running and in sprinting foot races, where you've got a dude, or sometimes two, on the podium next to a woman.
The woman is never on top, right?
The woman is never in the gold position when a guy has competed against her.
And usually they're still, you know, on the podium, you're usually still in the gear that you competed in.
And so with biking, it's a little bit less clear because they may be wearing chamois and everything, but they got a sort of a loose jersey on.
In swimming and in running often, it's just, you're really, 100% clear to anyone with eyes and a brain, and most of the people weighing in on this debate or sitting on the fence actually do have eyes and a brain, can look at these people and say which one's a man and which one's a woman.
And no amount of testosterone suppression or estrogen Supplementation.
Supplementation is going to change that, right?
The activational effects of testosterone do not change your pelvis shape.
And your pelvis shape affects how you run and how you move and how fast you can do so.
And no man is ever going to bear a child, no matter how much Loretta might wish that was different from Monty Python.
Yeah.
Lots of men can't bear children.
All right.
That was a pun, but not a very good one.
How was it a pun?
Um, because, uh, you know, I can't bear to listen to another minute of this child going on and on about whatever.
Yeah.
Wasn't a great pun, but you know, um, maybe with a little smithing.
All right.
All right, shall we move on to the next topic?
Yeah.
Okay, the next topic is a composite, an amalgam, a mashup, pick your metaphor, but a bunch of things have come together and I think painted a Novel enough picture of something we've all of us have been struggling with for you know Closing in on a decade now, right?
So I don't know exactly where to start with this But I'm just gonna launch in you're gonna help me sort it out and make it into a coherent a coherent model, but I wanted to start by saying that earlier this week I was considering the following tweet, which I elected not to make because I thought people would not understand.
I thought it was hilarious.
But very often when I think something is hilarious, I am surprised by it.
Are the people looking at you blankly?
They look at me as if I've said something serious.
But the tweet was going to say... I thought you had an emoji hack for that.
I do, and it saves a lot of work, and it does allow people who've known me long enough to chime in in the replies and say, you know, that emoji indicates that he wasn't being perfectly straightforward.
But in any case, the tweet was going to be, I've decided to sue the Deep State for torturous interference.
Anybody got an address?
Right?
I don't know which emoji would go with that.
A gavel, maybe?
Could be the envelope, the, you know, letter envelope.
I don't know.
Often there's an emoji that I think adds to it, but that's me and apparently no one else.
I have spent very little time in Emojiland.
Yeah, there are a lot of them available to you, including pregnant Bill Gates, which... You could tell it's Bill Gates?
Pretty much.
It looks just like him.
But anyway, Back to the matter at hand.
Spawn of Satan.
I've decided to sue the Deep State for tortious interference.
Anybody got an address?
That was going to be the tweet.
Then, lo and behold, I ran into an address.
The Deep State.
No, I did not.
What I ran into was a piece on UnHerd.
UnHerd, which is a favorite publication of both yours and mine.
And I really, as much as UnHerd has ended up in some places that are a little bit at odds with you and me, I just I appreciate the way UnHerd, everything about it really, from the clever spelling, which I am embarrassed to say it took me a couple of months to detect, but the clever spelling of UnHerd, U-N-H-E-R-D, that is very clever.
Their slogan, think again, ah, also so clever.
Freddie is a lovely person.
I appreciate the way he sorts stuff out.
I appreciate the way he holds people's feet to the fire, even me, which he has done.
But anyway, Freddie explores a predicament that they found themselves in.
Do you want to show mom's screen?
Now I've called you mom.
They get it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So here we have the piece in question, and Freddie Sayers is exploring the situation, and I will just simply summarize it as follows.
UnHerd, it's a very successful online publication, quite heterodox, quite high production values, and they wished to add advertising to their mechanisms for earning, to their revenue stream.
And what they found as they attempted to do this was that advertisers were not showing up, which doesn't make any sense because this is a highly trafficked website.
It's respectable.
You would imagine that advertisers would be falling all over themselves.
To embrace it.
And when they did a little digging, what they found that there was actually a reason that the advertisers were not showing up.
And that reason involved an organization that had taken it upon themselves to rate different outlets for their propensity for distributing what they call disinformation.
The organization being GDI, the Global Disinformation Index.
The Global Disinformation Index, which is yet another one of these quasi-private entities that has appointed itself the arbiter of truth, and in this case, provides a helpful service.
It allows advertisers to understand who sucks.
And so what they, what UnHerd discovered was that they had been listed as a, uh, a spreader of disinformation.
They're on the dynamic exclusion list.
On the dynamic exclusion list.
These people, they don't hear themselves somehow.
And when they inquired as to why, they were told the rating would not be changed, it was not an error, and it was the result of them having distributed disinformation on LGBTQI+, Specifically, it was so-called gender-critical beliefs, published by Kathleen Stock, who is awesome, Julia Bindel, who is also awesome, and Debbie Hayton, who I know less well, who is actually a man who lives as a woman.
So this is an actual transgender person whose views are so out of step with what we are required to believe with regard to what you actually do when you transition, that them publishing Debbie Hayton was actually part of the evidence for why they should be on this Why unheard should have been placed by GDI on this dynamic exclusion list?
Right, and the implication here gets even crazier.
UnHerd did the due diligence and discovered that this private organization, GDI, is only quasi-private.
It's being funded by the US State Department, my god, the UK government, and the EU, in addition to the Soros Open Society Foundation.
So here you have a well-resourced, unaccountable, non-governmental organization being fueled by government and it has got a mission and that mission has actually changed according to what UnHerd discovered.
You go ahead.
Let me just read two to three paragraphs from this piece because it's exactly about the mission that UnHerd has discovered before you continue.
Together, GDI, they, have spearheaded a carefully intellectualized definitional creep as to what counts as disinformation.
Back when it was first set up in 2018, they defined the term on their website as "deliberately false content designed to deceive." Within these strict parameters, you can see how it might have appeared useful to have dedicated fact-checkers identifying the most egregious offenders and calling them out.
But they have since broadened the definition to encompass anything that deploys an adversarial narrative.
Stories that may be factually true, but pit people against each other by attacking an individual, an institution, or, quote, the science.
GDI founder Claire Melford explained in an interview at the LSE in 2021 how this expanded definition was more useful, as it allowed them to go beyond fact-checking to targeting anything on the internet that they deem harmful or divisive.
This final quote here is a quote from Melford, one of the founders of GDI.
A lot of disinformation is not just whether something is true or false.
It escapes from the limits of fact-checking.
Something can be factually accurate, but still extremely harmful.
GDI leads you to a more useful definition of disinformation.
It's not saying something is or is not disinformation, but it is saying that content on this side of this particular article is content that is anti-immigrant, content that is anti-women, content that is anti-semitic.
Yeah, now this is Breathtaking.
And I want to parse it carefully so people see what the problem is, because the reaction is an allergy, right?
You hear somebody make an argument like that, and you feel like everything about that is wrong.
Well, not everything about that is wrong.
There is nothing wrong with fact checking.
In fact, you and I do a lot of fact checking here.
It's what we do, but we are not asking you to accept our fact checking on the basis that we are fact checkers, right?
What we are asking you to do is evaluate the reason that we do long form podcasting is so that you can see how we got where we are.
You can watch what we do when we get it wrong.
And that hopefully causes you to trust what we come to believe are facts on the basis that you can check our work.
Well, that's exactly it.
Why that bane of elementary school students everywhere show your work?
It's precisely this.
You can happen on to a correct answer, but if you happened on to it, there's no reliable reason that you are going to happen on to a correct answer next time.
You need to demonstrate that how you got there was a way that might be used again with similar results.
And the failure to show your work, the hiding in the last segment that we did, the hiding of the actual poster that was used to solicit participants for this study that was destined to find that men pretending to be women are at no competitive advantage against women when competing in sports against them.
Well, Of course they're not going to show that, because it's going to reveal some of the skullduggery that they're up to.
Yes, so what you have is an organization that most of us have not heard of, that has got resources in which it is behind the scenes tinkering with who can earn money from producing content that people want to see, right?
Somebody is interfering So we all know about the censorship industrial complex, but here we have something that is interfering with the ability of the market to reward you for producing something it finds valuable, right?
It doesn't even matter whether the advertisers understand What's going on?
They do not have to accept that this has anything to do with facts.
The idea that you end up on a list and the idea is, oh, this is the problematic list.
Here are the websites that if your ad fuels these people's work, then you're problematic, right?
And so the point is, it's a shot across the bow for advertisers.
Yeah, do you want to show this chart here?
This is again from the Freddie Sayers Unheard article on his recent discovery that they've been put on this list by GDI.
This is GDI's list.
This is GDI's GDI, the Global Disinformation Index Country Report.
I don't know what country is doing there.
Oh, U.S.
This is just in the U.S.
News outlets lowest and highest in disinformation according to GDI.
The least dangerous NPR right at the top of the list.
Well, interesting given recent revelations about the new CEO of NPR.
Associated Press, The New York Times, ProPublica, Business Insider, USA Today, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Wall Street Journal, and HuffPo as the least dangerous in terms of disinformation.
And then, of course, under most dangerous, New York Post, Reason Magazine, RealClearPolitics, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, One American News Network, The American Conservative, The Federalist, Newsmax, and The American Spectator.
Hmm.
Do I detect an ideological bet to both of these lists?
Ha!
Shocking!
I did actually, and I don't mean to take Reason to task particularly, but we have watched Reason Magazine falter, I would say, a lot in recent times.
One question, and we will come back to this, but one question is why?
What is it that this organization and the various entities that have decided to fund it, what is it that they are trying to accomplish?
Are they trying to snuff out publications that traffic in narratives that they find inconvenient?
Probably.
But would they be just as happy to steer them?
So, this has powerful impacts on what we understand, right?
The only people you're going to find trafficking in narratives that you might desperately need to know about are people who can withstand a cryptic attack they may not be able to identify on their capacity to earn.
And I will just say, maybe I'm a paranoid freak, but you and I feel the thumb on the scales of our ability to put a roof over our family's heads constantly.
Yeah.
I don't know that we were explicitly aware of it until YouTube demonetized us now, almost closing it on three years ago.
But never to be remonetized, never to experience the growth that we were experiencing until then, in terms of actual numbers, even as when we go out into the world, we are recognized more and more and more.
And even as YouTube undermined their own rationale for this, right, the idea that they were concerned about putting advertiser content on our content because the quality of our content was suspect, now they put ads on it and we just don't see any revenue out of it.
So the point is, it's some kind of theater, right, where activists behind the scenes have organizations involved in very serious stuff, deciding who gets to earn and who doesn't get to earn, and we don't even get to know about it, right?
Awful, but much more tolerable if this was at least transparent.
And so we did not have to assert that we feel that thumb on the scale.
We could just say, oh, here we are on the list.
This is why the number of advertisers that come to us is low.
That's right.
As I've said before, it's on a need to know basis and they need us not to know.
They need us not to know.
But the other thing I want to point out, there's a claim in the quote that you just read.
The quote about... From GDI founder, Melford?
Yeah, you want to read it again?
She says, in 2021, she said, a lot of disinformation is not just whether something is true or false.
It escapes from the limits of fact-checking.
Something can be factually accurate, but still extremely harmful.
GDI leads you to a more useful definition of disinformation.
It's not saying something is or is not disinformation, but it is saying that content on this site or this particular article is content that is anti-immigrant, content that is anti-women, content that is anti-Semitic.
Okay, I want to focus on the claim.
Can you put it back up?
Something can be factually accurate, but still extremely harmful.
Now, even if that were true, and I do not believe it to be true, but even if that were true, the idea that anybody is going to be put in charge of what goes in the category of truths that are too dangerous to discuss.
I'm sorry, that is an attack on the Enlightenment, that is an attack on democracy, that is an attack on informed consent, that is an attack on the very foundation of the West.
And this at the same moment that very many of the very same people are Trying and successfully blurring the border between categories where we are actually supposed to be taking care of the other.
Adults are supposed to be limiting access of certain kinds of content for children.
There should be no advertising for children.
There should certainly be none of this trans insanity at children.
None of it, right?
And we've talked before about some of the very few things that we explicitly kept from our children.
You know, the knowledge that suicide was a thing.
Right?
That is our job as parents.
That is everyone's job as parents to monitor what their children see until they feel that it is developmentally appropriate.
We're talking about adults here.
Adults get to decide.
We're talking about, yeah, adults get to decide what they want to contemplate.
Yes.
In this case, we have people who are formally adults who are actually behaving, as I will point out shortly here, as children who are wishing to control what adults may review on the basis that it has been deemed dangerous.
True, possibly, but dangerous through some mechanism that Has never been agreed upon we've never discussed what the mechanism is by which we are gonna figure out what the dangerous truths are Right.
I think that's an empty set.
I think the point is you need structures that prevent people from From utilizing in some way some fact that is a piece of something dangerous, right?
You don't want people making nuclear weapons, right?
But the idea that the facts themselves may be too dangerous to allow is an apocalyptically dangerous concept.
And the only reason that it would show up is that you have this kind of arrogance.
And let me back up a second.
I have argued that wisdom is almost synonymous with delayed gratification.
I think that's right, but I wonder if there is not a second category that's part of what we call wisdom, which is the counterintuitive.
Right?
Children do not understand delayed gratification.
They have to learn it.
They also don't understand the counterintuitive.
So I think in both of those lives, the concept that I've been going back to is an umbrella concept that that feels maximally explanatory, which is uncertainty.
Being able, willing, and even seeking out a position of uncertainty where you are able and willing to say, I don't know.
I'm interested in knowing.
I'm going to try to figure it out, but right now I don't know.
I may veer this way, I may think this, but I do not know.
And so, delayed gratification, and your second thing was?
Was the counterintuitive.
The counterintuitive.
Both of those, I think both of those could be included within this idea of like, you have to grant that there are things that you cannot know now, and that there are things that we think are true now that will turn out not to be true.
And therefore, all of your most cherished beliefs are up for reanalysis.
And you can't walk around all the time reanalyzing every single thing you think is true.
You can't live that way.
But you have to be willing to investigate almost anything.
Not at any moment.
No one gets to walk up to you and be like, you do this now.
You rethink the idea of the heliocentric solar system.
No, you do not have to respond to sophists and charlatans who approach you that way.
But within your own worldview, you need to be willing to recognize that nearly nothing is actually beyond the reach of reinvestigation.
And the tools that allow you to do this in a way that is not just haphazard, that isn't just, you know, throwing darts at a map, is science, right?
We do not need science for the intuitive.
You just don't.
It's intuitive, right?
What you need science for is the counterintuitive.
That's why science wins, right?
Because it is capable of telling you what you do not know and what you do not expect.
I would also point out our good friend Alexandros Marinos, who has been doing an interesting job of holding people's, I don't know if he thinks of it in these terms, but he holds people's philosophical feet to the fire.
So, he demands a kind of consistency in your arguments, you know, so he will point out that you believe something over here and that if you applied it over there it would change your conclusion.
Anyway, this drives some people nuts, which I get, but I do think it's a noble instinct.
But he talks about epistemic humility, right?
What you were talking about is the willingness to question anything in your toolkit.
And I would point out that there are formal tools for this, which you and I have championed separately.
Chesterton's fence and the precautionary principle are both a recognition that you're Your information set is incomplete and therefore there is a danger in treating the things you think of as factually true as if they are just simply true rather than provisional.
So anyway, epistemic humility is crucial.
It is not being evidenced anywhere in this group of arrogant people who have declared themselves not only fact checkers, which might be a fine thing to declare yourself, but successful at it, right?
Where's the list of the And unerring, infallible.
Right.
Where's the list of the stuff that they got wrong and what they learned from it so that they're becoming better fact-checkers over time?
No, it's like, hey, well, we said that's a fact, so it is.
Really?
Mm-hmm.
Is that how that works?
That is surprising in the extreme.
And bonkers and wrong.
And bonkers and wrong.
Right.
It's also banana pants.
It is banana pants.
It is banana pants.
Okay, so a couple other features that I want in the model we're building up here.
One, cancel culture is now back under discussion.
In part because it's now showing up on the team of people who was anti-woke.
Yeah.
Right?
Who did not like cancel culture one bit when it was driving heterodox voices, conservatives out of universities, stuff like that.
But Seemingly in an era of people with, you know, newly noxious perspectives from somebody's point of view, it seems to be a go-to tool.
Yeah.
So you have cancel culture.
Just file that away for a second.
I'm going to argue that if cancel culture exists because it's sort of a tool for advancing an ideology.
And it's a tool for which the social media environment makes it easy to wield.
Yeah, it's an amplifier for that sort of thing.
Your complaints can garner, you know, tens of thousands of likes.
People who wish to wield this thing aggressively can create bot farms or they can hire sock puppets to create the impression that some point of view produces a particular response that it wouldn't normally.
So anyway, there's lots of stuff in the social media environment that makes cancel culture very much, very potent and maybe more potent than it would ordinarily be.
But if cancel culture exists, it's got a mirror image that has to exist, too And the mirror image is promotion culture where people are being placed into positions You know Because what they will do in those positions is considered desirable by something powerful enough to advance their cause so I think we are seeing this in several places this week that are worth thinking about.
The promotion of zombies to positions of power, where they will do the work of something hidden from view.
Where they... Yes, exactly.
And so, for example, the promotion of, is it, Catherine Marr to the head... CEO of NPR.
CEO of NPR.
Well, Catherine Marr appears to be a cartoon of a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, woke do-gooder who is going to wield NPR as a weapon who full well understands that there are certain facts that are just too dangerous to let anybody talk about them.
Um, who has a completely upside down view of what the First Amendment is, interestingly enough.
And it's no surprise that such a person would find themselves at the head of NPR in an era like this, because of course there is a very powerful movement that would see that as a good thing.
Right?
Why would you want NPR to do what it once did, which is explore issues?
Yes, it had a liberal bent all along, but there was a time when it was an interesting outlet.
Long since not been an interesting outlet, but it's still, it's now a weapon.
This week also the Free Press published a piece by a longtime, I think, producer, content producer, I can't remember what, from NPR in which he basically reveals the changes that happened in the decades that he was there.
Right.
Interesting timing that the new CEO of NPR is announced now as well.
Right, now the question is what to think about this, right?
Should we be trying to cancel this person out of this position?
I don't want to dismiss that idea out of hand, and I would point out that, what was the name of the would-be head of the Ministry of Truth that was briefly revealed?
I've forgotten what her name was, but Oh, and I thought you were talking about Orwell.
No, no, no, I'm not talking about actual Orwell.
I'm talking about the Mary Poppins character who briefly showed up in our collective consciousness as the new head of the would-be Ministry of Truth.
Well, that ministry needed to be cancelled, right?
There's a question, though, about individuals.
I don't think that Catherine Marr should be the focus of anything.
The fact that Catherine Marr has bizarre beliefs, and yet with such bizarre beliefs, is finding herself appointed to such a high position at NPR ought to be very troubling.
And whatever in the system has allowed that to happen should be the focus of scrutiny.
How could somebody with such ridiculous beliefs possibly find themselves there?
But, you know, if it weren't her, it'd be somebody else.
So there's no point in focusing on the individual attempting to cancel them.
It is, in fact, a wrong thing to do.
But focusing on the brokenness of the system is not a wrong thing to do in any way, as far as I can tell.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, but just in part, what you're pointing out is now people on the other side are trying to cancel this newly appointed CEO of NPR.
But how did she get there in the first place?
That's your mirror image of cancel culture right there.
She got there through this cryptic promotion culture that is much harder to notice and harder to fight.
Right, and you can imagine that in a world where there is a promotion culture that looks like that, that lots of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed people will discover that when they say perfectly insane things, right, that suddenly they have more spending money, their apartment is higher quality than it was, they can afford a new car, they get health care, you know, they're invited to all the best cocktail parties, yada yada yada.
So you can imagine that somebody who doesn't Come to believe things on the basis of analysis, but comes to say things and then detects what the effect on their well-being is, that such a person might come to believe that they actually are on to something, right?
And could you show the clip of what Catherine Marr said about the First Amendment?
This is not the TED Talk then?
This is the Chris Ruffo?
Yeah, Chris Ruffo pointed to this.
Yeah, we're ready.
The number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States is a fairly robust protection of rights, and that is a protection of rights both for platforms, which I actually think is very important that platforms have those rights to be able to regulate what kind of content they want on their sites,
But it also means that it is a little bit tricky to really address some of the real challenges of where does bad information come from and sort of the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.
Okay, now I will say that the flaw in that was on the recording, that was not our technical issue.
But anyway, okay, so this is the First Amendment as viewed by a bat hanging from its feet, right?
Her point is, she wants the platforms to be enabled by the First Amendment.
This is a bat enthusiast too.
Yeah, I like bats, but... They don't want to view the world the way they do.
Their strong suit is not epistemic humility.
Are you claiming you know what it's like to be a bat?
Whoa.
We will return to that question another time, but in the meantime...
The idea that the person who is about to ascend to the head of NPR is of the belief that the First Amendment's primary purpose is to enable something like a platform to silence people and that when it comes to silencing people it can be a kind of a problematic issue because it can prevent the silencing, right?
This is the inverse of what the first amendment is supposed to be.
And yet this person sees it through the lens that you would expect.
They are part of something powerful.
They want to, you know, they want to utilize every tool at their disposal.
So, you know, let's try to have, how much do you have to refigure the first amendment in order for it to become a weapon against speech?
Well, she just showed you.
So, yes.
All right.
But again, not an accident that somebody with an upside-down view of the First Amendment is headed to the CEO office at NPR.
She believes the right things, and so the team in power doesn't see a problem with her.
Now, what I would point out, next phase in the analysis.
You've got cancel culture.
and promotion culture as mirror images of each other.
That's one team.
The team that wishes to use cancel culture and promotion culture is one team.
The other team doesn't have a name, but I would call it the level playing field.
Team level playing field.
Team level playing field.
And I would argue that team level playing field is actually synonymous with the West.
That the thing that the West did was it neutralized the instinct to elaborate your power when you are the ones in charge and minimize the power of those in charge when you're not.
Right?
The level playing field culture is counterintuitive and what it says is actually we are going to apply the Rawlsian veil of ignorance.
We want to make rules that you're just as happy are the rules when you're on the downside as when you're on the upside, right?
There are rules that don't favor anybody.
That's not intuitive.
Every child understands that you want the rules rigged in your favor.
The idea that you don't want them rigged in your favor just because you're now in the rulemaking position, because at some point you won't be and you don't want your enemies to have that power over you, That's a tough one, right?
Many people never get there.
But those of us who have gotten there, who understand the advantage of a level playing field, of a neutral system, a system that is formally blind to who you are, are faced with those who would like to apply the tools of cancel culture and promotion culture.
Now, I would point out that this connects to a bunch of other discussions that we've had at various times.
The idea that there's a party that understands that it's halfway to the counterintuitive thing, right?
It understands that these rules are not ones you would want to live on the downside of.
And so what it comes up with is the idea of, well, maybe we need to be the permanent party in power so we're never on the downside of them, right?
We're perfectly happy with the asymmetry, but it's got to be us because we can't live with the possibility that somebody's going to use these things against us.
So when you know the soviets or you know the nazis the thousand year reich the idea is oh well we're not going to worry about asymmetry because we're just going to worry about being so muscular nobody can displace us that's what you have to worry about and
This is unfortunately the implication of anybody who hates cancel culture when it's being used against their team and loves it when their team Ascends to the office which what you want is people who when they get there try to level the playing field Which frankly is tougher and it doesn't allow you it doesn't allow you payback Right for all of the people who got canceled who shouldn't have now we're gonna cancel some of yours.
That is not a reasonable response I would also point out, along with the Soviets and the Nazis, we've got the thorny issue of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.
Now it's not the only one of these.
It's one that I think is important, but the National Defense Authorization Act is a big omnibus bill.
Every year there is one.
It's full of a ton of stuff.
It's impossible to read because it's too long.
But in 2012, it had provisions in it, which declared the entire world a battlefield and gave the executive branch of the United States the right to declare people terrorists.
And once having declared them terrorists, they could be pulled off any street on earth, including American streets, and they could be detained until the end of hostilities, which are never defined and couldn't possibly end because there will always be terrorists.
So anyway, it was the end of the Constitution, if you read it correctly.
and I'm far from the only person who thinks that.
But it's an insane thing to construct.
Even if you might dream of having that kind of power, you would live in fear that somebody who didn't like you would also end up with that power, and then what are you gonna do?
Which, I think, in part, explains the totally anomalous freakout over Donald Trump.
Right?
The whole idea was that the people who designed that thing had not stopped to contemplate that they didn't have enough control over narratives or elections or whatever it is that they control to prevent somebody who hated them from having that power at their disposal.
And so at the point that Donald Trump shows up out of nowhere doesn't play by the same rules as other people.
They realized that they had built a super weapon and that they did not control who had the button, right?
So they engaged in what we now can.
Any reasonable person can agree was an outright conspiracy against Trump, right?
It's in the open.
We know many of the names of many of the parts.
I'm sure we don't know other names, but the point is the people who think, oh, well, the solution to the asymmetry problem is to never be displaced from the office are always the problem, right?
Yes.
Level playing field is what we have to be about.
And they're the people speaking the most about the level playing field.
Yes, everybody pretends they're on team level playing field.
Everybody pretends.
But they're not.
And you can tell in their behavior rather than their assertions.
They want to...
Well, when it's in DEI space or Black Lives Matter space, they want to overturn the tables of oppression rather than render the inequality a thing of the past.
Yeah, actually, I had forgotten that phrase.
That was one that we came up with and used as we were being cancelled.
And the idea was... I wrote it to the faculty within days of the madness at your office door.
Yep.
These people want to turn the tables of oppression, not end oppression.
And we are back there, interestingly enough.
Except that the people who are trying to oppress indefinitely here already have the power.
They're trying to hold on to it.
While claiming that they are the ones without it, but they already have the power.
Yes, they already have the power and they are conspiring.
And in fact, they are doubly motivated to do things like declare facts too dangerous to talk about because now they need to cover their tracks.
So the point is, look, if there were people who just sucked really badly and said dangerous things and the world listened to them and all of that, and you put together an organization to name them so advertisers could be made aware of it, How hard is that?
Obviously, guys.
Come on.
But if you were going to do that, if that was you, what's the argument for it not being public?
What's the argument for whispering in the ear of an advertiser, oh, you don't want to, you know, unheard?
You mean out in the open or you mean publicly funded?
Because it is publicly funded.
No, no, I mean transparent.
Yeah.
Okay.
The point is, why am I not allowed to know what my status is with YouTube?
Why is that a private question?
If I'm dangerous and YouTube has identified me as such, why don't I get to know?
If these people have identified UnHerd as a dangerous spreader of disinformation, then why can't I look that up?
Why did UnHerd have to go do actual journalism and unearth this stuff in order to find it out?
You know, it's actually, it's like a step beyond it.
I'm not gonna remember the specifics, but you will.
Majid Nawaz took, was it the Southern Poverty Law Center?
Yes, and he won.
Or the SBLC to court because they created a list that they did make public of basically, you know, people who were getting too much attention because they had unworthy and unacceptable views.
Ah, maybe you've just figured it out.
But that was big, and he won, and oh, well then we'd better start doing this more cryptically.
Ah, well, so here's the question.
He won, I would have to go back and look, but I believe he won because he had been defamed.
Yeah.
So, if you make it private, then have you defamed anybody?
Well, you have.
Just on the list.
Right, but if the idea, so again, back to that tweet that I thought was so hilarious that no one else would have thought was funny.
This is tortious interference, right?
And the entity that's doing it is violating First Amendment rights, so how do they deal with that?
Oh, they spin off a quasi-private institution, so it's not the government interfering, but the government's going to finance the thing that's interfering, so it's a shell game.
B, they make it not transparent.
So you have to, you know, you'd have to get to discovery to even find out what was done, what discussions were had about whether or not you're a tolerable person or not.
And so, you know, and then you've got the enabling of a system in which all those who have participated in something that is anti-liberty, Right, like an attack on the First Amendment, now are doubly motivated to make sure nobody ever figures out what was said to whom, right?
And so, you know, is the content of this list a fact that is too dangerous to discuss?
Is that why it must be kept private?
Okay, so a couple more points just to wrap this up.
One, we've got some interesting examples of modern cancellations that are now going in a direction that is not traditional.
Okay, we have the one we've discussed with Catherine Marr at NPR.
There is another one that has just taken place at USC.
Where somebody who, I don't know in depth what her perspective is, but somebody was going to be valedictorian at USC who... An undergrad who's graduating?
Yes.
who holds pro-Palestinian views.
There was a campaign, she has now been cancelled from that role.
Now, I don't know exactly what her views are, to the extent that she is interested in defending innocent Palestinians, I don't see anything wrong with that.
To the extent that she wants to disguise crimes against innocent Israelis, I'm obviously not up for it.
But, The point is, this is a case where cancel culture is now a shoe is on the other foot thing, right?
We cannot allow this to be a battle for power in which the structures are going to be abused against whoever is on the outs.
Yeah.
So you want to show the LA Times article just so people know what I'm talking about and I can be reminded of the name of this person.
So.
Here we have an LA Times article and her name is Asana... Asana Tabassum?
Asana Tabassum.
So, in any case, this is a fine opportunity for people who are opposed to cancel culture to recognize that that has to be true independent of what the topic is.
You're either on board with cancel culture and you think that's the way society should run, Or you're not on board with cancel culture.
And then the point is, I'm not on board with that.
It's not the appropriate place to have that discussion.
Right?
The content of the person's belief is not the thing that causes you to cause an invitation to be rescinded, etc.
OK, now the last.
Oh, go ahead.
No, I mean, I guess it's just.
Yes, once an invitation has been extended, a rescinding of an invitation that was accepted and formalized should only be done under extraordinary circumstances.
I can see that there will be some circumstances.
Will be some circumstances.
Sure, where you discover.
But in general, so where this has, you know, back when, whenever Green was happening, you know, those like three, four years when they were all, there was so much chaos on college campuses.
There was some confusion by some people who said, well, you know, then you're saying the administration can't choose who to bring.
It's like, no.
Whoever it is, be it the administration or some institute at the institution or, you know, whatever it is, whatever entity within the university that is deciding to run an event and offer a speaking opportunity to someone, they get to make that decision.
But once that has been made, the idea that they will cave To outside influences or to changing political winds is the problem.
It is absolutely the right of anyone running any organization to say, I do want to hear from you, and I don't want to hear from you, and you may well find someplace else to talk, but it's not my problem.
Yeah, and I would, there's a subtlety here, which is the way we end up, the way facts come into existence, and obviously the universe is a factual place, but the way facts come into human social awareness has to do with a back and forth.
In which something that may crudely resemble what ultimately turns out to be a fact is presented and somebody else pushes back and it turns out the fact is smaller or smaller or looks different than it was originally imagined to be or is repelled entirely because it's not a fact.
But you have to have the dialogue and the whole idea of some sort of God-given list of things that just simply aren't facts and therefore can't be discussed is a non-starter.
It is inherently about power.
And I agree, you could discover that somebody, you know, isn't what they claim to be.
Like, let's say, you know, you invited a valedictorian, or you invited a graduation speaker, and then it turned out that the accomplishment that had put them on the list was phony.
Well, sure.
I mean, that's I feel like that's obvious.
You always get to rescind invitations when when the facts are.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But anyway.
But the idea that, you know, that person is so wrong, they can't be allowed to speak.
Sorry, that can't be a thing.
And the curatorial instinct.
Yes, colleges have a right to be curatorial on the front end.
But the idea it's the mob.
Right.
And it's not just the mob.
The mob itself is dangerous.
But the idea that the well-resourced thing can behind the scenes create a mob that then gets something they don't want spoken about disinvited is the thing, you know, you don't want to live on the downside of that, do you?
So the answer is level playing field.
It's not dueling cancel cultures.
Okay.
So the last thing is I want to tie this back to wisdom, right?
The wise position is the level playing field position.
That's a smaller team than we think because when we're on the downside, we think everybody's against cancel culture.
And then it turns out a large fraction were just against being canceled.
They weren't against cancellation itself.
Right.
So I'm going to have us do something we don't normally do.
We're going to play a longer clip than we usually play, and it's from a culturally important touchstone.
We're going to play a clip from the Twilight Zone, which is a program from before our time.
You will note it's black and white, and it is a reference point that I think almost anybody in Gen X would recognize immediately, and probably most boomers would too.
But before, so it's an episode called It's a Good Life?
Yeah.
And I'm not going to read from this, I was thinking about it, but it's actually, "It" is based on this amazing short story from 1953 by a guy named Jerome Bixby called "It's a Good Life," in which good is italicized.
And it's got all the same amazingness.
Anyway, I recommend this as my original Science Fiction Hall of Fame volume one from the early part of the 20th century, I believe.
And it's quite a short story, and this Rod Serling, Twilight Zone interpretation of it is classic and relevant.
Yep.
So we're gonna do a couple minutes, or maybe it's four minutes of it here, and then talk about its relevance.
Ready?
Yep.
Nuts!
I can't even play my own record!
I can't even play Perry Como!
Don't play that, Pat.
That's not what I want you to play.
Play this.
Happy birthday to me!
Happy birthday to me!
Happy birthday dear Danny!
Please stop!
Play it, Pat.
Play it so I can sing right.
You know I can't carry a tune unless somebody plays it.
You.
You and her.
You had him.
You had to go have him.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
You make me happy when I am blue.
Monster, you.
You dirty little monster.
You murderer.
You think about me.
Go ahead, Anthony.
You think bad thoughts about me.
And maybe some man in this room, some man with guts, somebody who's so sick to death of living in this kind of place and willing to take a chance, will sneak up behind you and lay something heavy across your skull.
And end this once and for all!
You're a bad man!
You're a very bad man!
You think that?
Go ahead, Anthony.
I'm a very bad man.
Keep thinking that.
Somebody sneak up behind him!
Somebody end this now while he's thinking about me.
Won't somebody take a lamp or a bottle or something and end this?
You're a bad man.
You're a very bad man.
And you keep thinking bad thoughts about me.
Wish it into the cornfield.
Please, son.
We should head to the cornfield.
Please.
He was a bad man.
So I turned him into a jack-in-the-box.
A jack-in-the-box that still had his bad face.
And you mustn't think bad thoughts about me either, or I'll do the same thing to you.
Play some more music.
It's good what you've done today.
It's real good.
It was swell.
It was just swell.
That was really good.
I kind of liked it a little bit better when we had cities outside and-- and we could get real television.
Things like that.
Amy, it's real good for you to say such a thing.
It's real good.
But how can you mean it?
Why, Anthony's television is much better than anything we ever used to get.
Oh, yes, it's fine.
Why Anthony's television is the best television we've ever seen!
All right.
Um, I had forgotten.
I remembered the ending, but not the very ending of that piece.
Watching all of the adults reinforcing the views of this child who is tyrannical reminds me very much of where we are.
Right?
You have an ascendant orthodoxy and that ascendant orthodoxy is availing itself of all kinds of illegitimate tools and it is canceling people and promoting other people and creating a world in which there's a hyper viscosity that prevents certain things from being discussed and other things that aren't high quality are just, you know, uh, uh, amplified beyond any reason, right?
It's, it's an upside down world.
That has self-reinforcing properties.
It has the arrogance of children who do not understand the counterintuitive or delayed gratification or any of the important things.
They can't imagine why you would have a First Amendment, right?
It's so counterintuitive.
Why would you allow people to say terrible things?
Well, Allowing people to say terrible things is the only way that all the stuff that needs to get said can be said.
Why would you police science so that it's all done correctly?
Why would you try to keep garbage out of these journals when there's important stuff that we can dress up like science and publish?
Well...
Because science has to be kept pure enough to tell us what we need to know rather than what we want to hear, right?
Turning it into something that tells you what you want to hear makes it just another version of the broken journalism in which all you can read are the things that you're allowed to know.
So this is like being ruled by children.
And these children, we see them every so often, we learn their names, they ascend to the CEO office of NPR and we find out what the hell has happened to our environment.
But what we can't do is infer what the world would look like if these people weren't up to all the stuff behind the scenes that we don't get to see, right?
Who would we be listening to?
What would they be telling us?
We don't know that.
And it is causing us to again and again engage in self-harm, to be suckered by people who are selling illegitimate products, mandating them, and...
And anyway, you got to extrapolate.
You got to look at how much damage this is doing to our capacity to just simply navigate in an intelligent way, which wouldn't mean that we didn't do ourselves a certain amount of self-harm.
There would be some, but there would be a lot less if we could navigate Openly, transparently with a level playing field where those who, uh, however crazy you thought their claims were when you first heard them, if they end up being predictive, then those come to be the things that everybody believes.
That's the way it's supposed to work.
And it makes for a self upgrading society rather than one that collapses into nonstop sophistry.
Excellent.
Um, I guess, What we can't see is critical because what creates the utter fear and inability to act is in the Twilight Zone episode and in our society now.
The, I think, majority of people, the invisible majority who would do better with freedom, but is quiet or worse, assenting, nodding along, going along with whatever it is that is happening.
they would be better off if they weren't in the thrall to this orthodoxy.
And as you point out, the orthodoxy is effectively being led by people with the minds of children, the minds and morality of children, which sounds pure and sweet.
And no, it is naive and it cannot understand why the counterintuitive and delayed gratification and uncertainty are not just nice, but they're absolutely necessary to having a functioning society.
Yeah, these are, in fact, our birthright.
Our forefathers discovered all of these counterintuitive principles.
It happens that in the West, they were made very explicit and their reasoning was even made explicit.
You know, why?
Why, when the police arrest somebody in the midst of a crime, time do we hobble the state so that the criminal has a tremendous opportunity to not be held to account on the basis that there are all kinds of hurdles that the state has to jump through in order to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, not just a preponderance of the evidence, but beyond a reasonable doubt.
And if the police have erred in the collection of evidence, that evidence doesn't even show up, even though it's real, right?
This is all very counterintuitive.
The problem is the founders understood the state was so ferociously powerful that you had to hobble it because its inherent advantages would otherwise result in the abuse of power.
So the abuse of power was on their minds.
And what we're watching is the nonstop abuse of power.
Now, one last point.
In the unheard analysis, there's a terrifying revelation, which I don't think got enough focus.
This entity that is defining lists of intolerable people so that advertisers can be spooked away from them.
Is using AI.
They have identified narratives that are hostile and those narratives are increasingly being built into automated systems that go around looking for those narratives in order to label them as from unacceptable sources.
Imagine what this does.
It means that even the diabolical people who are deploying the intolerable tools to silence their opposition may one day have no ability to know that anything happened.
Right?
Those narratives are going to be purged by a very effective machine that makes it so that those who traffic in these narratives starve.
And it creates plausible deniability for the perpetrators.
Absolutely.
And so the real point then is, oh, whatever party is in power, it has certain narratives it likes.
Those narratives will be built into the AI.
The other narratives will be unthinkable, unspeakable.
This is really in the realm of pre-crime, thought crime.
This is very deeply troubling because it threatens to take this even out of human hands, which are not tolerably suited to to manage it.
And I think we need At the very least, we need to understand how much of this there is.
The idea that they can do this and be non-transparent about it means we can't even correct.
We have no idea what the quantity of this stuff is and how much impact it's having on what we believe on any topic.
Yeah, that's right.
Speaking of that, not at all.
Yes.
I want to finish with a tiny little bit on some research that was published in 2020, actually, on cats and humans.
Does it adhere to a tolerable narrative?
I think so.
Okay, that's good enough for me.
It's published in the journal Scientific Reports, and the title of the piece is The Role of Cat Eye Narrowing Movements in Cat-Human Communication.
Okay, so for those of you who haven't interacted with cats, you may not know what that means, but actually anyone who's interacted with any kind of domesticated or quasi-domesticated mammal has probably noticed the narrowing of the eyes that often accompanies interaction.
And it feels meaningful, speaking of a dog movement over there when I say this.
Specifically, it's the slow blink sequence that these authors were looking at in this 2020 piece, in which the cat or the human, and in the cat-human interaction we see both players doing it, slowly half closes their eyes a few times, narrowing them and then sometimes closing them completely.
Okay, so that's the observation is that happens.
Cats do that to people, and people do that to cats, and I wonder if it's responsive.
Like, the question is, is that actually communication?
So they did a couple of experiments.
One with cats interacting with their owners in the home that the cat and the owners live in, and one in which strangers are interacting with the cats, but in, again, the space that the cat is familiar with.
So they were controlling for the cat isn't freaked out because it's in some new space, which Anyone who knows cats knows that that will just make everything unnatural.
So when owners do this to their cats, when owners, this research finds, and it's small scale, but it was well done, but the sample size is small.
When owners do this slow blink sequence of their cats, as opposed to offering neutral expressions, their cats are more likely to give them the same expression back.
They are responsive, but only male cats.
Female cats did not respond a tiny bit more, but not significantly more, to this slow blink expression from their owners than they did to just neutral expressions from their owners.
So that's one interesting thing.
Let me just say the other finding before you riff on that.
And the second experiment was with strangers.
When strangers do this slow eye blink thing to domestic cats in the cat's own home, The cat is also more likely to respond in kind, and it doesn't differ by the cat's sex, and the cat is more likely to approach the stranger.
So this seems to be a cat beckoning thing, and they didn't do this with the owners because there's so many other things going on.
Cats often approach owners, who knows?
So this slow blink thing that if you've interacted with cats you've probably done this, you've probably observed them doing it to you, and you've probably done this whether or not you know it, and it turns out that it does appear to be a communication which is actually responded to by cats when humans do it at That's interesting.
When I got my first cat in college, I became fascinated by this.
I believe you pointed this out to me and I started paying attention to this pattern.
Am I imagining?
It's very hard to know what happens when you're not there.
But the sex difference is strange.
The sex difference is strange, and the paper does not specify if these are neutered cats, which I suspect they're neutered.
I suspect the sex difference is going to end up being about the thwarted reproductive aims of female cats.
Anecdotally, it does seem like neutered female cats are much more neurotic than neutered male cats.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a very interesting finding.
I'm gratifying to discover that this is not our imagination, that the cat is responding to this.
We have two male cats at the moment, so...
I'm of course tempted to, without a female cat who knows us well, you wouldn't be able to test it.
Right.
But anyway, that is interesting.
I wonder, it's possible that the sex difference, how you said it was a small?
It's a small sample size, so it might disappear.
It might disappear if you had more animals.
Yeah.
But anyway, yeah, that's very, very interesting.
Yeah, and I'll just hear from the introduction.
They say, interestingly, narrowing of the eyes, the main characteristic of the slow blink sequence, also features in the positive emotional displays of some other species, including the play faces of canids, in horses and cows during stroking, and the human Duchenne smile, and might therefore be a positive emotional indicator in cats.
And that Duchenne smile, which I may be mispronouncing, that's the real smile.
That's the smile that actually portrays true pleasure, as opposed to the sort of the Tight mouth.
I'm going to smile for the camera, but I really wish I weren't here.
Smile.
Yep.
All right.
Cool.
So it's maybe... It's maybe at least a placental mammal characteristic, or possibly, or sort of latent and emerges with domestication.
One of these things that emerges with domestication like, you know, curly tails in canids.
Curly tails, floppy ears, and white blazes.
Emerge with domestication in canids.
So, you know, we have some strange things we never select for.
Like we think, oh yeah, of course we selected for floppy ears, like no floppy ears emerges when you're selecting for, are you willing to put up with people in both wolves, which is what our dogs come from, but also in foxes.
So that's, you know, some, some fascinating things that may or may not be what the humans are actually after, but come along for the ride.
Cool.
Cool.
All right.
Yes.
I'm waiting for the study that tells us what the hiding under the bed thing is about.
Yeah.
Um, I don't, I don't know.
All right.
I think, I think we're there.
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