Never Alone: The 223rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 223rd 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 science and religion, materialism and other ways of understanding our world. Can analysis and quantification explain everything? Can narrative, intuition, and creativity? All are or should be part of the scientific process; science is incomplete with only one mode. We also discuss models, how ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 223.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You, I assume, are Dr. Heather Hying, but only you know for sure, and maybe not even that.
And, uh, I have the sense that 223 is probably prime, but I've come to the point that my feeling is it's not, it's not even worth looking into the matter because we'll have plenty of time in the gulag.
223 is prime.
It's the first prime in a while.
We've had some widely spaced primes these last 24 episodes.
We had a prime 12 ago for $211, and another 12 before that for $199.
And none in between, but this is the first of a cousin prime, four apart, and a sexy prime, six apart, making it also the first of a triplet prime.
Whoa!
And then we just got... it's prime season, guys.
That's what it is.
So, let's put it this way.
We have had a drought of primes.
Exactly.
Which is the same thing as having a torrential downpour of factors.
So many factors.
Yeah.
Uh, too many factors.
So many factors.
Yeah, exactly.
There's no, there's no accounting for factors at this level.
It's just too many.
I kind of feel like that's exactly what it's done.
Accounting.
Yeah.
You're right about that.
All right.
I take it back.
But, um, nonetheless, here we are.
Here we are.
223.
It's Saturday.
The first of very many primes special Saturday edition.
We'll be back again on Wednesday and then, then, you know, miss a Saturday, miss a Wednesday and back again following Saturday.
So we're going to do a few Saturdays this month.
So I will just say we are here on Saturday because I was not here in time for our regular time slot.
Because you were taking a bath.
I was taken aback in Bath, which is actually named after bathing, the Roman baths, which are no longer public.
They're not available.
They exist.
Romans only.
I think there's a Malaysian company.
My understanding from Tess is that there's a Malaysian company that administers access to the baths.
But anyway, not worth it at that level.
I was traveling with Zach, our older son.
You probably knew that.
I did.
But I was traveling with Zach.
And I will say, I don't know how much of this is reproducible.
I don't know how much of it is unique to Zach or the fact that we were traveling in a place that I had been before.
So I knew, you know, not just Bath, where I'd been once before, but England, where I've been a number of times.
But there was something pretty remarkable about traveling with one's very thoughtful, and I don't just mean courteous, I mean very deliberate in his thinking, adult child seeing some of the important Fantastic.
of the world that he had never seen before.
Seeing it through his eyes was really an incredible experience and one I will remember forever.
Or let's hope.
There are lots of cognitive diseases that cause you to forget things you shouldn't.
But barring that, I intend to remember it forever.
Fantastic.
Yeah, we took them on the last study abroad trip that I ran, that we ran together, and showed them antiquities older than what you guys were seeing in England.
In the New World, the Inca people, the Kenyari, the Valdivians, but that's archaeological, right?
And we also saw some Spanish churches, But Zach was much younger then, also.
And having raised our children on the leading edge of the European frontier, anyway.
We're here on the West Coast of North America.
We were talking about this the other night.
We're here on the West Coast of North America, where you and I also grew up.
And it's not the last place to be populated on the planet by any means.
In fact, this is one of the first places that the Beringians showed up before they then filled both North America and then later South America.
But this was one of the last places that people of European descent showed up, and there's nothing very old here.
It's either very old or... Right, it's archaeological.
There are fast... there are middens and there are points and there are things to be found, but they are not still being used.
They're not an active material culture.
They are prehistoric material culture.
And as such, and this is his first time across the pond.
Yep.
So we haven't even spent much time on the East Coast, much less in places where people have been living and using the same things for hundreds of years, living in the same spaces.
And that's really a totally remarkable revelation.
Yes.
And in fact, uh, you know, in trying, we didn't have a lot of time.
And so I was trying to get Zach to a lot of the things that he just should have seen, you know, the Tower Bridge, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, you know, big stuff, the Tower of London, all these things.
And, you know, just to be clear, you were in Bath and you were also in London.
Also in London.
Yeah.
And we, you know, we got to take the Tube, which was cool.
You know, he hasn't lived in a city with a real subway system.
But anyway there was for me just realizing and trying to plug and I'm not very good at plotting an itinerary through anything but in this case you know I was able to do it in part because you have all of this like really historical stuff some much of it still being used but all of it kind of close together you know the financial district is right there that you know and
But anyway, I was reminded as we were walking from Big Ben to Westminster Abbey where Darwin is buried, which is an interesting fact of history, but I walked by the spot where I had first seen Douglas Murray and had no idea who he was.
Do you remember this?
No.
Because it was just a weird turn of events.
Douglas Murray was being interviewed outside the Houses of Parliament in a park by presumably the BBC, but certainly some newscast with a significant production.
You know, they had a van and cameras and all this.
And he was standing there being interviewed.
And we walked by and didn't know who we were looking at.
When are you talking about?
Can't remember.
I don't think this could possibly be true, given the various timings of our trips to England.
It's absolutely true.
It's absolutely true.
But the way I know that it was Douglas Murray is that the accident of us having encountered this guy being interviewed and then... I think it was with your other wife.
That's unlikely.
That's unlikely.
She does not like to travel.
We then saw the news broadcast that evening, which had Douglas Murray, and so it put, you know, put a name to the face.
And anyway, um, well, look, it's possible that I've got a brain tumor and I've made this whole thing up.
No, no, no, no, no.
I do not think you have a brain tumor.
I just, uh, I think there's some piece of this that isn't quite right because the timeline No one else.
We're going to figure it out.
We're going to figure it out because I'm certain of the story.
I remember it happening and it's just such an odd, you know, you encounter this person who then goes on to be a friend, uh, watching them be interviewed and then you see the news broadcast and that's how you figure out who they are and then meet them, but by totally other mechanisms, right?
So anyway, it was, it was, it was weird to have all of these things, the historical, the modern, I mean, and that also.
And the personal.
And that relates to memory.
So, you know, you're going back through sort of cultural memory, which has no direct meeting to you and Zach, not having, well, Zach has a tiny bit of English in him through me, who has a tiny bit of English in me, right?
But personal memory often is exactly flagged by, you know, smell or location or, you know, like, wait, last time I was here, this thing happened.
And You know, people report that they have experiences like this and, you know, attribute it to, you know, how in a past life, right?
But, you know, on which perhaps we'll come back to later today.
But in fact, walking through historical important historical places and also finding important personal history in the same place is fascinating yeah totally totally fascinating and uh anyway nifty experience yeah well so today we're going to talk about um god apparently according to your tweet Yes.
And angels and ghosts and natural selection and also climate and pollution.
Right.
You know, a few little topics.
A few little topics for today.
We'll cover some ground.
But before we get on to that, we want to thank all of our supporters on Locals.
As always, you just had a great conversation on your Patreon.
Wow.
You have another one tomorrow.
It was a really good one.
Excellent.
Excellent.
Yeah, I came in near the end and started dropping stuff, so I apologize for that.
It sounded like little explosions in the background.
No, it's all good.
It emphasizes the authenticity of the interaction.
Yeah, it was not my intention.
Not my best work.
No Q&A today, but we've got frequent Q&As for our local supporters only.
Last time we did one, it was with Zach and you, Brett, and we may do another one like that soon.
So we get early access to guest podcasts.
Yeah, the Q&A is organic and it's also gluten-free.
Awesome.
It sounds like a condiment.
The Q&As.
Q&As, yeah.
You prefer mustard or Q&As?
It's an emulsion.
I second it.
Alright.
Alright, this has gone weird.
No, it started weird.
Oh, I guess so.
Or it's been weird long since long before you guys.
For years.
But some of you are still here in spite of that fact, so thanks for it.
That's right.
Okay, so we just have some business to get to.
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You think they're effectively domesticated?
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Right, but the point is, all of those hives that wouldn't exist, that get to exist, and therefore get to put genes into the future, I think they don't mind paying the rent because it's like paying the rent on a place you love, right?
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Hopefully not right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It starts here.
Right.
Somewhere between an hour and two.
Yeah.
Right.
Precisely.
Not very, but precisely enough.
Let's put it that way.
All right.
Um, you want to start?
Yeah.
Why not?
Why not?
Um, hey, Zach, do you want to put up the tweet that I sent you large enough that I can stumble through reading it?
Something caught my eye, and as is often the case, I'm going to need a little leash to explain where this all leads.
For the moment, I'm just going to read the rather succinct rendering which I ran across that caused me to descend down this particular rabbit hole.
The tweet... Oh, God.
How do you pronounce this person's name?
Brian Romanelli.
I think it's Brian Romanelli.
Romell?
Romell or Romelli?
Romelli, Brian Romelli tweets, Third Man Syndrome.
Third Man Syndrome is a particular psychological phenomenon in which in the event of conditions of extreme resistance on the verge of death, the brain sends electrical signals called switches, such as to allude to the presence of an additional figure next to the exhausted person.
Sir Ernest Shackleton, in his book South, described the phenomenon for the first time in 1919.
He was convinced that a disembodied companion joined him and his men during the last leg of his 1914 to 1917 Antarctic expedition.
The team was stuck in the pack ice for more than two years and endured immense hardships in the attempt to reach safety.
Shackleton wrote, "During that long and torturous march of 36 hours over the nameless mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it often seemed to me that there were four of us, not three.
In recent years, well-known adventurers such as mountaineer Reinhold Mesner and polar explorers Peter Hillary and Anne Bancroft have reported experiencing the phenomena.
Okay, let's just take that at face value.
I've done a little looking both into Shackleton's expedition and the report that this is a actually fairly widespread phenomenon that psychology has taken seriously.
But I wanted to use it for really two purposes.
This is not a hypothesis that I thought to advance.
But it's very much in keeping with some things that I have done some work on.
So here we have the hypothesis that there might be something, from my perspective, it would be an evolutionary something that has endowed human beings with some sort of programming that causes the sensation, the experience of being accompanied by someone in the midst of a life-threatening emergency.
Now it should be, I think, clear to anybody who pays attention to Dark Horse and our way of thinking that the adaptive value of this is almost self-evident.
If you are faced with such a situation then your evolutionary well-being may hinge on whether or not you can keep going in the face of such a thing.
If you try and fail, you've lost nothing.
And if you succeed because you feel that you are not alone, that something is watching out for you, that could be highly beneficial.
So at the very least, we can say that there is an adaptive explanation for why you might experience this that does not require there to be any external force in the universe, that selection could have endowed us with that selection could have endowed us with this very circuit for adaptive reasons.
And if so, that tells us something.
One thing is very interesting.
It tells us something about the power of this Darwinian evolutionary force to shape things like psychology, that enough people would have survived A near-death experience by virtue of the presence of such a thing to have reinforced it so that the mechanism is something like general.
And that is, I would say, I won't speak for you but I'm sure I'm sure you agree, that is the Darwinism that I believe in.
A very powerful shaping force, a sculpting force that is capable of doing mind-blowing things like that.
I did want to say, although I didn't think to hypothesize this, I have hypothesized something next door.
What I've hypothesized is that the hallucinations that dying people sometimes have, hallucinations that often amount to references to people who have died before them, family members, to journeys, boarding a train, a boat, going somewhere, that those things are According to the hypothesis Adaptive and that their purpose seems mysterious.
What does it matter what a dying person sees right to their fitness that is But it could matter very much if this person transitioning from life to death Gives evidence of an afterlife that might have a profound influence on the living and that fits perfectly with the
Literally false metaphorically true model of religion that is in our book and that we have talked about extensively here.
So just to add a little detail there, the fitness value that you're proposing for end-of-life visions is to family members, presumably, that are in attendance.
It's an inclusive fitness.
It's a so-called inclusive fitness value, which is to say that the benefit accrues to those who share copies of the writing of your TNA by common descent.
As opposed to just, you know, members of your species or members of related species.
Right.
It's an inclusive fitness value.
It's an inclusive fitness.
It's very well said.
Now, this of course puts us in a predicament.
That is a decidedly materialist view of a measurable phenomenon.
And the reaction to such arguments is predictable.
People of faith typically do not like such materialist arguments, and they are not wrong.
Let me just point out that let's take the third man phenomenon.
For the third man phenomenon to work, One must not discount the experience of being accompanied as simple programming.
To the extent that one views it as a distortion of reality, its effect is liable to be reduced or eliminated.
Well, what you haven't said is that the third man phenomenon, if it is an adaptive phenomenon, as you were alluding to, works only if you believe that it is real.
Yes.
That is what you were proposing.
That is what I'm suggesting.
Now, I don't exactly believe that.
My guess is it is useful even if you know that you are hallucinating.
But it is surely more useful if you think the universe has noticed your peril and cares about it and has delivered you a shepherd.
Right?
So...
What I'm trying to do here is to point out two things.
This is not a minor fact in the argument between those who would say that religion is a mind virus, it is a distortion, it is parasitizing people by traveling along in our cognitive architecture.
That portrayal is wrong.
It must be wrong because it does not make sense for us to allow ourselves to be infected with a mind virus of such great expense as ancient religious doctrines.
So, the idea that religious belief is literally false, but metaphorically true, has an important impact.
It's not subtle.
And in this case, the reason that I focused on this presentation of the third man phenomenon is that it makes a life and death argument about the value of belief in something that isn't literally present.
But, hearing that it is not literally present will grate on those who have Faith.
But I want you to hear the second part.
Metaphorically true is not simply saying this is a metaphor, right?
By saying metaphorically true, the point is there is an actual reality there.
It is not a literal description of somebody traveling with you, presumably.
It is a An illusion that has the capacity to deliver life from the jaws of death.
And that is not false, right?
That is a very powerful force in the universe.
It's just not exactly as we see it.
And as we've talked about here and elsewhere, many things that we believe in science aren't exactly literal either.
So the idea that it's metaphorical is not pejorative.
Did you have something you wanted to say?
Yeah, you know, it may be an unuseful rabbit warren to go down into.
But I guess the phrase that we have used in the book and that you have invoked here and that you were using as a professor for many years, literally false metaphorically true, is exactly this.
It's a third way.
And of course, there are many, many ways.
People who hear the new atheists say religion's a mind virus may imagine that the only alternative is over here in religion, panpsychism, dualism, idealism land, right, where there is a greater consciousness that explains things, or even a third type of thing that explains both matter and mind, if you will.
And part of what you're saying and what we have said before is that no, there's actually, and it's not a middle ground, this is not a compromise, there is actually a way that natural selection can explain this that is yet materialist without being dismissive of all of the things over in this space around you know, a preeminence of consciousness.
However, the rabbit warren that may not be worth going into is, and I think this is an objection that we've heard come back at us, is the use of the word true, right?
So extraordinarily valuable, thus making, and more valuable if you believe it to be true, is maybe a longer winded way of saying what the two word ending to the phrase is maybe a longer winded way of saying what the two word Literally false, extraordinarily valuable if you believe it to be true, so you're better off if you believe it to be true, let's call that metaphorically true.
But that's too many words.
Well, no, I like where you've taken us, because this is almost exactly the point I'm trying to flesh out.
Which is, I don't believe that it's true with a wink.
And I want to point out that what we have here is a relationship not unlike what you and I describe as the Omega Principle in the book.
The Omega Principle, which is, we're not going to go deeply there at the moment, but Omega Principle is the idea that Cultural evolution is more powerful than genetic evolution because it is capable of producing much more rapid adaptation, which is why the genes have given us the ability to evolve at a cultural level.
But it is inferior, so it is superior in the sense that it is faster evolving, it is inferior in the sense that the genes are upstream and therefore in a position to control whether or not you are a cultural creature or not.
And so it is that relationship where that you've got two different kinds of superiority and they go in opposite directions right in this case what we have is the superiority of the belief if I find myself like Shackleton did needing to survive in circumstances where giving up all hope would be the logical thing to do I
I sure would prefer to believe that the, you know, the companion that walks with me is a real creature who cares and is intervening on my behalf, right?
And is going to improve my chances of surviving this ordeal.
Right.
In fact, if I fail to believe that, it is likely to cause my death, right?
So I'm not, there's no comparison here about the superiority of the belief in the metaphorical truth here.
However, there is also the flip side of this, and this is what I want to wrestle forth.
In the responses to this tweet were many people saying that those who walk beside you in these times of emergency, ah, those are your dead relatives, or those are angels, right?
All of these beliefs.
They're ghosts.
They're angels.
Right.
Yeah.
They are part of a supernatural realm rather than part of a neurological realm.
And here's my point.
I am not trying to convince you to abandon that view.
Again, I've just said it's probably, it's almost certainly a superior view if you are in a dire enough position that you're going to experience this phenomenon.
So I would be a real jerk to try to convince you not to accept these things.
But What you mustn't do is take the significance of this phenomenon, which is profoundly important, and use it to constrain the materialist understanding of the world.
Now the materialist understanding of the world is definitely incomplete.
It's gappy.
It's so many gaps.
So I'm not arguing we've got some beautiful picture that is complete and you must keep your religious stuff away from it.
That's not what I'm saying.
What I'm getting at is that, look, you're surviving Based on the fact that the food shows up in the supermarket transported by mechanisms that are downstream of a materialist worldview.
In other words, nobody is in a position to discount that there is a material world and that it functions in a predictable way, which we can study scientifically.
Yes, we've got it's gappy.
It gets less gappy over time when we do the job right.
We may at the moment be in a mode where it's getting more gappy because we're doing the job wrong.
But nonetheless, over long enough periods of time, we get better at understanding the material explanation for things that initially don't have a material explanation as far as we know.
And somehow, we together have to figure out how to deal with the fact that there is a real truth over in Third Man phenomenon, and there might also be a real truth over with my hypothesis about what these hallucinations of the afterlife are about.
We do not have to, you know, constantly be waving materialism at people who speak about these things, right?
We have to protect the right to believe these things as they are experienced.
Maybe that's just simply part of your human inheritance.
You're entitled to it.
But We are all downstream of the scientific materialist world and to the extent that it is not, yes, it is profoundly important that you have access to the third man to help you through a dire circumstance.
Maybe you need access to the idea of an afterlife, which I don't think it's materially accurate, but I do think it's accurate in a way.
All right?
You do continue on after you're gone.
Certainly, it's uncontroversial that you continue on in the minds of those who knew you.
So, it's approximate.
It's not false.
It's also not literally true.
Metaphorically true, I think is just about the right way to say it so that you can give it you can honor it fully without embracing it in a way that it Conflicts with the periodic table and forces you to treat that as a fiction right or Darwinian evolution as a fiction And that's the one I'm worried about at the moment.
Yes, we're seeing this this hemorrhage of rejection of Darwinian evolution.
And believe me, to the extent that you detect evolutionists pretending to know more than they do, that's fair game.
But be aware that the problems of modern evolutionists are not Darwin's problem.
Right?
As we said last week, he was general enough in his description that it's very difficult for him to be wrong in light of a molecule that everyone accepts exists that transmits information from one generation to the next imperfectly.
Right?
Once you have that mechanism, Darwinism happens.
And Darwin was good enough to spot that without knowing anything about that mechanism.
So, we have a problem, we're stuck, maybe we're making reverse progress, but Yeah.
Well, I mean, there's a lot of places we could go here.
is both in dismissing phenomena like the third man as some part of some mind virus, right?
But the error is also in rejecting the part of Darwinism that is so secure that it's just, it's all but beyond question at this point, like the earth going around the sun.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, there's a lot of places we could go here.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure how much or what we should do.
Well, I mean, you know, maybe maybe that's maybe that's the extent of it is just simply to say that's the predicament we're in.
And I guess I have one more thing, which is it becomes necessary in a past era where everybody in your experience was all part of the same tradition.
There might be some way of navigating the conflict between these things, because maybe wise elders would give guidance about how to hold these things simultaneously in the mind, even though there's a conflict between them.
But we are in a very different predicament because of cosmopolitanism.
Because we are now living in societies from which we don't all come from the same tradition.
And there's no guarantee that that works.
So we have to figure out how we, together as a society of people who, you know, derive from different books, are going to deal with the fact that The materialist view, which might be the way that we could all come together, is incomplete.
It's also inaccurate in many places and doesn't replace the value of things like a belief in an afterlife and a creator that frankly solves problems in game theory that do not have an obvious solution outside of them.
So you say that as someone without that second kind of belief, as also I do not.
And I think both you and I have been grappling with what is going on?
What happened that suddenly so many high-profile people are saying, yeah, actually, it's pretty clear that evolution by natural selection doesn't explain what we see?
I didn't see that coming.
There's a lot of stuff I didn't see coming.
I didn't see this coming.
Because when you say something like, the materialist worldview is incomplete, that could be read at least two very, very different ways.
And I know when I hear you say that, that what you mean is, we're not there.
The scientific method is incredibly Time consuming and inefficient, but effective.
But also takes us down lots of false paths and allows us to go back up those paths to the last node where we were certain, or relatively certain, and go down new paths.
And The fact of it being incomplete and us recognizing that our understanding of the world, as derived from careful and repeated application of the scientific method, is likely to always be incomplete.
We may never get there, right?
But that is not a failure of either the model of the world as materialist or of the scientific method.
It is precisely built into what the method is, and it's the best one we've got, the method.
But a different reading of your statement that the materialist worldview is incomplete is, ah, well then we need something else to explain the other stuff that it doesn't explain.
And that is precisely not what you are saying, but that is, I think, a frequent misread when people When people like us and others out there, you know, I started by saying, as you did, some disparaging things about what the new atheists have done to this conversation, right?
By making claims that religion is worse than useless, right?
That is not our position.
It never has been.
But many of them, and us, and many other evolutionary biologists, Yes, of course we don't know everything, but that doesn't mean that the model that we are working with cannot ultimately explain all of the things that we can't yet explain.
It's not that we need a totally different kind of explanation.
But I wonder if some amount of what we're seeing right now is that there has been a misunderstanding on the part of many very smart, very highly educated people who hear statements like that and go, Even the evolutionary biologists think that we need something else, so let's go there.
Yeah, I think you've nailed it.
And what's going on is the We have been a little bit incomplete when you and I have talked about science.
We've been accurate that science is a method and either you're doing it, in which case it will produce its product at least over a long term, and it can't fail to.
It's a self-correcting process and all you have to do is do the science according to the underlying philosophy.
But the problem is, What's missing from that is that there is a feedback between a couple different things, right?
In the scientific method we do not say reductionism and synthesis.
It turns out reduction and synthesis have an interplay and they both have to work, right?
So for those who don't know what the hell I'm talking about, we all know what reductionism is, right?
You study one thing at a time in a laboratory environment so you can see its actual effect on something, right?
It's a very powerful process, but if that's all you do, you miss the big picture.
The big picture comes from synthesis, where you take all of the reductionist stuff and you build it into something that actually explains why it interrelates the way it does.
So something like Dawkins work is a beautiful product of a very elegant synthetic mind that is capable of putting these things together, which is in part why Dawkins didn't get as much credit in our field as he should have, I thought, because he was doing synthesis, which was harder to point to the exact contribution. because he was doing synthesis, which was harder to point Well, it is, as you say, not reductionist, but that also means that it doesn't tend to be as easily quantifiable.
It doesn't tend to employ metrics, statistics, replication, especially over in historical science, because history does not actually repeat itself.
And so it's missing these things by which Many modern scientists and almost every modern so-called educated person who doesn't think of themselves as a scientist, but thinks that they support science and follow science and all of these things, makes this mistake of thinking that science is that reductionist, metrics, quantitative thing.
Indeed, I just told you this.
I've been reading a number of books lately, including, finally, Pinker's Enlightenment Now.
And it's fascinating, and I'm learning things, and yet there are places of disagreement, as I knew there would be.
And one of them is, and I didn't pull it up so I don't have the exact quote, but he basically says, what is Enlightenment thinking and answer How is it that we will resolve the problems of modernity, and how is it that the Enlightenment resolved the problems that it was trying to resolve?
The answer is to count.
So he has, as his answer, as his final answer, to resolve problems of humanity, counting.
And I would not say that there aren't problems that we can solve by counting.
Counting is a tiny little term, and of course we're talking about all of what math can do for us, and all of quantification, and metrics, and all of this.
But that is not everything, and that is not all of science.
This is your point.
If I'm not sure that it neatly falls into these two categories, but if we're going to say, okay, there's reductionism, and let's just, for the time being, for the purpose of categories, say that's where the counting happens, and that's where the metrics are, and that's where the quantification is, and then there's the synthesis, and yes, there is some counting over there and some quantification and such, but more or less, that is more often the place of narrative.
Of creativity, of intuition.
And this is exactly what the book that I'm working on is about.
But there's this need to go back and forth between these modes.
And there are lots of modes.
But you can't just live over here in narrative, qualitative, creative, intuitive space.
Nor can you live entirely over here in analytical, quantitative, metric-heavy, counting space.
Logical, analytical.
And not only that, but both of those, all of those, are the domain of science.
That, I feel like, is the major failure of the moderns who think that they are doing the science thing and are only doing what's over here in reductionist, analytical, logical space and forgetting what, you know, Most of the best scientists of the 20th century observed about intuition being the place of hypothesis generation.
That's not the thing that you could teach because you can teach the stats and you can teach the methods, you could teach the various things, but where'd the inspiration come from?
That's still part of the science.
That's still part of the science, as is the synthesis.
And so on both ends, like the reductionist stuff in the middle, where the counting happens, is necessary.
But it's not the most interesting stuff, actually.
Yeah, and it's not sufficient.
It's not sufficient.
Neither is the other.
Right.
Neither is sufficient, but they are both necessary.
Right.
In fact, I would add, certain people are going to not like this very much, but I would argue that the woo Right?
The untethered imagining of the way the universe works is the mirror image of the metric-obsessed, what-do-the-datists-say, uncreative Experimental approach and the point is synthesis is where the great stuff comes from right now Yeah, Dawkins was brilliant at synthesis.
This is also what Darwin was doing, right?
And I guess the point is if you think science is any paper with a method section you've missed something because the most important stuff doesn't have a method section it proceeds from things that did but But there's a whole lot else now.
I did want to add though.
We've got Reductionism and synthesis that have a natural interplay and modern science has largely dismissed the synthetic part of this.
It has treated it as secondary and not scientific.
But we have also missed the significance of the philosophical part.
So I would argue that you've got these two processes, synthesis and reductionism.
But then there's also an implication for Now, what we have learned about what we are doing incorrectly in that process, in other words, if you take the example of Mondelbrot and math, right?
Mondelbrot discovers that there's something about the math that we've been handed that is insufficient for dealing with problems of interest.
And he, in fact, invents a kind of math or elaborates a kind of math that is useful for fractal processes.
We are often in the situation where our toolkit isn't up to the challenge.
And the place where this is most important is this transition from complicated to complex, right?
We are, we have inferred the rules, the philosophical rules of science and how it is to be done from the stuff that we've succeeded at first, all of which is over on the simple end of the continuum.
As you get into complexity space, the rules change and we do not have a vibrant culture that is learning from our mistakes and saying, actually, here's the problem.
You've got paparian falsification.
But if you try to wield that over in biology space, you'll prove that everything is false, because you'll find an exception to everything, because the sheer complexity of all of these things means that there will be things that deviate.
It's not a physics lab, right?
It's not a chemistry bench.
It behaves in a different way.
So those falsifications aren't falsifications.
They're indications of the number of processes that influence the thing that you're studying.
And so you have to think about it differently.
And if you control all the complexity out of a situation and you end up with some nice, clean, reductionist answer, that's cool for you.
And that may allow you to get another grant and publish another paper and get some promotion in your career.
And you may even have discovered something true.
Or maybe not, because if what you did was control, using the experimental meaning of the word control, controlled everything else out, if you stripped the complexity out of your system in order to make it tractable in a lab, there is a relatively good chance that what you've done is taken out the actual things that were explanatory.
And you're left with something that, like all else being equal, looks to be explanatory, but that may be an artifact of you got rid of the stuff that actually matters.
Yeah, I actually think there's, there's a lot to that, that in fact, what we're doing, because we do know how to do, um, science more or less in a, in a complicated environment, but we don't know how to do it in a complex environment.
And so we are constantly trying to reduce the complexity out of it to make it tractable.
And the point is no, actually you're, you're trying, you've got training wheels on, you're trying to figure out how to study complexity, not how to make it go away so you can study the way you used to, right?
We're in a new realm there.
When it's inherent to it, there is an absolute distinction.
There are lots of binaries in science that you can say, well, these people do things this way, and these people do things that way, and they really don't meet up.
And you have the empiricists and the theoreticians, which is a rough model that matches to reductionist versus synthesis.
But lab versus field, is a big one of these, and the fact is that most of the natural sciences don't have a field exactly.
Just because you're working away from your home lab doesn't mean you're actually out in the field.
A lot of space.
But within biology, lab versus field reveals differences in what questions you want to ask, but also in the kinds of comfort that people have with the messiness, with the noise, with the, wait for it, complexity, which is, after all, if you're a biologist, the thing that you are studying.
And if what you want to do is study it by getting rid of all the complexity except the stuff that you think is most interesting, cool.
But recognize that the much messier, much less precise, much harder to predict when a monsoon is going to kill your field season science that is done out where the complexity is, can reveal things that your lab work cannot.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And there is this difference in temperament, right?
Very much so.
The process of trying to figure out how to understand what's going on in a system that is hopelessly complex, that you can't reduce the complexity out of.
You know, if you're going to work in any forest, but a tropical forest, you know, in the worst case, you have to get used to the idea That, you know, the end all and be all of science is not control, because you can't do it, right?
You can control out the big factors.
And then the question is, can you figure out how to wrestle signal to a level that you can detect it and then establish it so other people can see it and then figure out how it fits into this larger puzzle?
And, you know, in some ways it's just fundamentally different.
Right.
And so, I mean, this also means that when you're talking about replication, you're replicating field studies is actually impossible.
You can do everything right, and you can find similar results again and again and again, but you'll never have a true replication precisely because you didn't control out all the complexity.
You can go to the same place at the same time of year and, you know, and try to set up whatever it was that you were doing the same way, but the fact is it's a different year.
Yeah.
Something else is different because you're actually in nature, as opposed to, yeah, this lab did this, and a lab halfway around the world with totally different people can look at the methods and materials and exactly replicate.
You could argue, well, but the humidity is different, and the yeast in the air is different.
Okay, maybe then if you drill down on it, you can't ever fully replicate, but it gets Basically orders of magnitude harder once you go outside.
Yeah.
Orders of magnitude.
Um, it also raises an interesting question.
It's not, it's not the central one here, but we see lots of people trying to force the complexity out of stuff in order to treat it with scientific tools that they understand.
Yeah.
But we also see another process, which is almost the inverse of this, right?
If you look at the, you know, the TOGETHER trial or, uh, ivermectin.
Yeah.
What you see is a method section that is inadequate to reproduce the experiment, right?
I think I'm correct that it is the TOGETHER trial in which the participants were shown a video whose content we still don't know, right?
And so a video that induced you to think, oh, ivermectin might be promising, and if I get COVID, I'm going to go get some, right?
Creates an environment that affects the outcome of the experiment.
But basically what we have is a black box video so it's like it takes the form of a reductionist experiment but it has the downside of a complex field experiment because you just can't you can't control for a factor that's important but undocumented but it's human created complexity yeah it's It's human-created complexity that cannot be replicated from first principles in any way.
And frankly, this is always the problem with models, right?
With things like, you know, any models, but, you know, climate models is the one that people are most focused on now.
And even, I believe, that even the climate model experts, the people in the field, cannot Read carefully everything in a paper and know all of the things that were plugged into the model, right?
And certainly anyone, you know, a few steps out like we are or farther steps out with no background in biology at all and reading these papers can't know.
And so, you know, that has always been the critique that I've had of these, like, maybe I can't know.
I cannot assess.
What you're supposed to be able to do with scientific papers is, if you are prepared to spend the time to figure out what the language is, that you could take this thing and replicate it, more or less, again, with the recognition that the noisier the environment in which it took place, that is to say, the closer to wild nature, the harder it is to actually replicate, And you could do it yourself, and the expectation would be that you would get the same result.
But with models, there are too many things, there are too many assumptions that the authors can plug in, and you tend to have these multi-authored papers in which, oh, well, I did this over here, and I did this over here, and I've told this story before, but I was on a higher-end committee to hire what was supposed to be a forest ecologist once, and one of the people that we got was a climate guy, and I'd read a bunch of his papers, and I
Couldn't make heads or tails of why it was that they said in the methods they had used all of these models and they only reported the results of one or two of them.
Yeah.
That seemed illegitimate.
And when I asked him, he changed the topic.
He clearly could not answer the question and he thought it cute that I was interested and we did not give him the job.
That's not how this is supposed to work.
If you use a bunch of models, you report the results of all of the models, you don't then cherry-pick the results that you want.
How often is that happening?
That was something that I could tell as a non-specialist in climate space.
There's a problem with this paper, what's your answer?
Oh, you don't have an answer, there's a problem with the work then.
But very often, there are going to be problems that you can't see.
Yes, I would argue that, um, you know, obviously a paper can't report all of the noisy factors that weren't unmeasured, unknown to the experimenter, right?
You can put out a transect and, you know, measure a small number of things and you can describe the transect perfectly and you can describe where it was, but you know, the weather, the, you know, all the things you didn't measure could potentially have an influence.
The things that were under the control of the experimenter cannot be unreported so that you cannot, in principle, replicate the experiment.
I would argue that any paper in which the experiment cannot be replicated because the experimenters who reported the work in question do not provide all of The necessary mechanisms to replicate it is dead on arrival.
It's not, it's not a valid scientific publication.
Now here, I'm going to take a little risk because I'm going to have to think more about this to know if I'm even sure this is true.
But I wonder if one of the many problems when it comes to models, and I will remind people we have said, and I'm pretty sure of this, that a model Could be used to generate a hypothesis, but it cannot be used to test one.
Right?
You can plug something into a model and it can suggest a pattern and then you can go out and look in nature and see if that pattern exists.
That's a valid, that's a philosophically valid activity.
But claiming... The thing that is kicked out is not a result.
Right.
It's not a result.
It's an observation.
It's an observation.
Which is testable, hopefully.
But it having gone through a model does not mean that anything has been tested.
Right.
Now here's the question.
There's one of the reasons that people don't understand the difference between complicated and complex is that there are many things that are so complicated that they might as well be complex to the casual observer, right?
Your car, your car, well, I assume yours, but all your car, whoever is listening is likely so complicated that you You know, it's a big black box to you.
You know, it could do anything.
And of course, I think we talked about this a few weeks ago, but if you add AI into it, then it actually may become complex.
But a highly complicated car that, you know, has algorithms deciding how much fuel to inject into the cylinders based on, you know, five different parameters, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, it's mysterious to you, but it's complicated, right?
It's a totally understandable system.
It's not a fundamentally unpredictable system.
Now, here's the question.
The modelers are playing with something that may well outstrip their or even possibly anybody's ability to understand what's going on under the hood.
That doesn't make it complex.
Yeah.
Right?
It may just be so complicated that you can't, you don't have the mental horsepower to keep up, but that's different.
If you want to model a complex system, in a complicated system, that obviously has philosophical implications.
And I'd be curious if somebody who was well-versed in that knew what those implications were, because it's possible that they're just in violation of a rule of the universe.
Yeah, I suspect you were right, in part because in less complex space, this was always my concern about the fancy statistics that people are using in non-modeling this was always my concern about the fancy statistics that people are using in non-modeling space to do the analysis on data that they have collected to test hypotheses that are ecological or
That when I When I read papers in our field, in animal behavior and evolution and ecology and such, field-based research, and the statistics are such that I know enough about statistics to know that their data, no matter how carefully collected, went into some computer and out popped a bunch of numbers
That the authors of the paper had to go, I guess so.
And, you know, the best they could do probably was say, okay, if I go to, what, a different software platform, a different, you know, different software program, and do the same test, and, you know, put the sliders to the same place, and I've read up on the statistical tests, and I know that I'm not breaking the assumptions of this test as it was originally imagined, do I get the same result?
Yep.
But the complexity of the statistics in most papers now are such that most people have no idea what is going on.
And this was a particular issue for me when I was teaching.
I never expected to teach statistics.
But, A, because animal behavior, which is what I was teaching, generally you don't have data that is normally distributed, so you can't just say, you know, throw in a NOVA at it or a t-test or something.
Like, okay, I'm going to have to go through principal statistics and teach really basic stuff.
And I ended up rediscovering my love of goodness-of-fit tests, things like chi-square, because you can literally do it on a piece of paper.
You can like you have one one table that says like if your number that if the number that you have calculated by hand from the data that you collected yourself is less than this then you've got some significance and if it's more than it's not and boom you're there and nothing hidden and that is Beautiful.
And yes, it can give you a sense that you've got something real when you don't, if you were uncareful in your collection of data, if your experiment wasn't actually designed such as to reveal the differences you think it was.
There are all sorts of other possible sources of error.
But the place that is black-boxed in a way that I'm not okay with in the vast majority of biology papers that I see now that are in the realm that would be using statistics is exactly in the analytics.
And I know from talking to a wide swath of biologists across our careers that the vast majority of scientists, of biologists doing this work, don't even pretend to know what it is that those statistical programs are doing.
So this actually, I'm tempted to say this is an example of, it's actually worse than that.
Because if you think about the way The way the field pays people and what it rewards them for.
The p-hacking crisis is bad enough in a world of people who report results that are significant and don't report results that aren't.
But if you've got a program in front of you that has a lot of check boxes for, you know, uh, this test or that test, this test or that test, and you can go around and you can play until something comes out that's significant, then you're actually in violation of multiple philosophy of science rules, but it's not going to be obvious.
No, the software will do whatever you ask it to.
So So here's what should be true.
So sometimes there are rules that become obvious.
I think they're obvious in retrospect.
Like you and I have said, every scientific paper ought to report where it is relative to a hypothesis.
Either it's an observation leading to a hypothesis, in which case the hypothesis comes at the end.
Here's what we think this might mean.
Or it is a test of a hypothesis, but it's got to be one of those two and if you misreport it you are making actually a major violation of the philosophy of science that is required to make science work, right?
So this is a rule kind of like that.
When you apply a statistical test, right, the program that you're working in Allows you to move sliders and make check, you know, tick check boxes, and then it applies the test mindlessly.
What it should do is it should spit out a list of the assumptions that you have just invoked or gotten rid of each time you make an alteration.
Right?
Because the real question... Yes, and it can.
I mean, this is at a very simple level.
Like, I wouldn't have the beginning of an idea of how to do this for more complicated analyses, but with my students, I said, okay, you know, To do this test, your data need to be normally distributed.
Here's how you will check.
You can't just eyeball it.
Here's how you will see if they are.
And your data need to be dependent.
They need to be ordinal.
They need to be a particular type of data.
And it's very useful in a classroom of excited, smart, eager, but naive students to have them say things like, but the computer's doing it for me.
What do you mean I can't use that test?
Right.
Saying, because now you're going to go back and look up what that test is and what it assumes about your data.
And if you have broken the assumptions, your result is not valid, but the computer will still let you do it.
Yep.
Just because you can doesn't mean you actually have a result that is trustworthy.
Yeah, absolutely.
And especially in a world that incentivizes the production of something like statistically significant results.
You know, it's a, it's the sirens luring you to the rocks by causing you to violate assumptions in order to get the computer to spit out a number that looks good.
Yeah.
It's so late.
I just want a number.
I've been at it all day.
Hey, that's good.
Okay.
Now I'm going to rationalize that I've done the right test because I know that it comes out well if I do that one.
Right.
Yeah.
I don't even know how we got there.
Yeah, well, I mean, I feel a tremendous amount of peril and I detect a third person in the room.
That's Zach.
Oh, yeah, you're right.
And he's very much alive.
Yes.
For which we are all grateful.
Yes, so grateful.
Yeah, well, so...
There's a lot of more places.
But there's a new climate model.
Oh, hell yeah.
And I don't have a lot to say about this.
And I was going to sort of start by saying, you know, remember, it's a model.
I can't really assess it.
I don't know.
I don't know any more than I know about all the rest of these models.
What we've we've been through all of that.
So this here's the here's just the lay description, which you can show my screen here.
This is in science.
Clear skies may be accelerating global warming.
Study suggests declining pollution is one cause behind decades-long drop in Earth's reflectivity.
This is published on April 5th, so it's a month old.
This science news article was published on April 5th.
The actual study was published just a little bit before that in Communications, Earth, and Environment.
And what they find is exactly what the headline says, which is that basically because of when we started taking data, we already had a very polluted world.
And a lot of the particulates in the atmosphere serve to insulate the planet against incoming energy.
And so it was somewhat reflective as opposed to absorbent.
And as we have been successful in cleaning our skies in the last several decades, more of the sun's energy is getting through.
And that this, and actually give me my screen back for a second.
Let me just pull up the original research, which is, yeah, it's here.
So I'll just show you guys.
This is communications, earth and environment.
Um.
The paper is called Recent Reductions in Aerosol Emissions Have Increased Earth's Energy Imbalance, and I'm not going to go through most of this.
It's very complex, and I do not pretend to have been able to assess it independently.
I wanted to just read this one sentence.
A main finding from our model results is that the forcing due to aerosol emission reductions has led to an approximate doubling of the trend in EEI, that's Earth's Energy Imbalance, over the 2001 to 2019 period.
That is to say, to the degree that what climate change researchers and the media and the world is alarmed about is EEI, it's Earth's energy imbalance.
And what these guys find, again, with all of the usual caveats around it's a model I don't know if they did their work right, is that we cleaned up our act and we basically got a doubling in the Earth's energy imbalance over this 18-year period, 2001 to 2019. - Yeah.
Well, according to what you and I just came up with, This is invalid because it's being reported as if it were an observation.
Yes, this is an observation, not a result.
Right, it's not a result.
I would also say, I kind of smell a rat here, because for one thing, there is nothing new about this observation.
I remember Guy McPherson, who I believe is in error about some of what he concludes, but Guy McPherson has been talking about the contribution that pollution makes to modulating the Earth's climate.
I've known about it for 10 years.
This does refer to some earlier work and they have used some Again, not my field at all.
They have used some new approaches using different data sets than what had been done before and found something with what they are saying is greater clarity.
So they are not saying this is a brand new idea to science.
Nonetheless, okay, they're reporting something.
They're reporting it in a place, or you said this is a news article?
No, this is the original.
This is the original.
Yeah.
Sure.
Communications, Earth, and Environment.
That's Nature's font, so this must be a Nature property.
Yeah.
So anyway, this is a high-profile report of a computer output.
Yeah.
Not exactly like Nature.
Nature, the actual phenomenon, rather than the journal.
But in any case, so that has an implication, and it just so happens that that implication Fits with the fervor for both addressing the so-called climate emergency, which looks ever more suspect, but also for, you know, the question of whether or not these maniacs are going to ...engage in geoengineering, right?
The idea of, oh, well, maybe we need to put the particulates back.
Gee, where have I heard that before?
I thought there was a conspiracy theory about... Well, you know, but another possible read is, okay, then simmer down, folks.
Maybe some of the change is due to the fact that we started measuring in a particularly polluted moment.
Well, that's interesting.
Yeah, I mean, it may be that they've upended themselves, but to me, it seems... I mean, that's my first takeaway when I see this.
But that's not consistent, I guess, with... I don't know McPherson's work, but that's not consistent with his analysis.
Yeah, well, I mean, his analysis is largely about things like if we cleaned up our act, what would happen?
And he posits that we would have an immediate jump in temperatures that would actually be unsustainable, which, again, I don't think is right.
But I do increasingly distrust.
Okay, we're going to report on a model and that model has implications about the magnitude of our emergency and oh my God, we're making the problem worse by cleaning up the environment.
So, you know, we can't very well leave that in place.
We're going to have to put something back in the environment.
I think that's where this goes and Well, I don't get the sense that that's what this is about, although I could see how it could be used to that end.
The same day I found that paper, I found this in Nature, an editorial called, What Happens When Climate Change and the Mental Health Crisis Collide?
A lot of freaking out.
Which is just too good a headline, really, because believe what you want is the wrong phrase, but whatever you believe is true about climate change, our role in it, how rapidly it is or is not happening, and what how rapidly it is or is not happening, and what our fate is,
I think all but the greatest ideologues in this world thinking about this right now can acknowledge that the climate change activists have a high level of mental health problems.
These are not the most stable or unanxious people on the planet by a long way.
This feels like almost a tautology.
That thing collided a long time ago.
That's inseparable at this point.
So, the sub-headline against this editorial in the journal Nature, The Warming Planet is Worsening Mental Illness and Distress.
Well, that's just a statement as if it's a fact, and really?
Researchers need to work out the scale of the problem and how those who need assistance can be helped.
It begins by saying things like, acute heatwaves, droughts, floods, and fires fueled by climate change cause trauma, mental illness, and distress.
A growing body of research suggests that climate change is worsening people's mental health and emotional well-being.
If you click on these, you find that these are broad, crazy claims that are not based in reality.
You see them sneaking in things like acute heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires cause trauma, mental illness and distress.
If we get rid of the fuel by climate change part there, I'm sure that there is evidence for this.
Massive wildfires contribute to trauma?
Yeah.
Of course.
Of course they do.
But the fueled by climate change thing there is the part that is yet to be firmly established, honestly.
And in some cases we've seen people attribute to climate change things which should not be clearly.
Yeah, again, I mean, there are a lot of rats, and I smell one here, too.
Look, this one has a lot.
This one has several, I think.
This one has a lot, especially in light of the World Health Organization madness around pandemic preparedness, because they very cleverly carved out the right To take over the dictating of human behavior in the event of a public health emergency.
And lo and behold, here we have, there in black and white, a public health emergency that is downstream of climate change.
Therefore, you know, the WHO is now in a position to dictate whether or not you're allowed to travel.
Yep.
This is madness, obviously.
The who of all people, right?
Didn't they just screw up everything with respect to COVID and we're going to trust them with even more power over the entire...
Who else are you going to trust?
Yeah, exactly.
But so anyway, yeah.
Who knows why the journals report what they report?
How much of this is, you know, let's give them credit that they may not be due, right?
Maybe they are actually confused about what's going on on planet Earth.
And we are now publishing results that enable, you know, just as these things enable crackdowns on perspectives that they view to be hostile to human well-being, Right, this enables an entire discussion about remedies that is unacceptable.
Well, okay, so show this.
This is one of the places you get to if you click through from that Nature editorial that I was just showing.
The impact of climate change on mental health and emotional well-being.
Current evidence and implications for policy and practice.
That headline, that title, makes it sound like this is going to be an analysis with evidence.
Summary.
This briefing and accompanying animation shows how climate change is negatively affecting the mental health and emotional well-being of people around the world.
It proposes a detailed set of recommendations to stimulate greater knowledge, awareness, and action for all sectors, including policymakers, research institutions, and mental health practitioners.
I didn't get it to Zach in time, so I'm not going to show the animation here, and you haven't seen it yet, but I'll post it in the show notes.
It is a stunning act of propaganda.
And they are acting like what it is, is the evidence that they are promoting, which then requires an answer, right?
And what they're actually doing is stoking the fear.
They are making people fearful.
They are creating the doom and the fear that they are then claiming needs to be addressed.
So, who wins when you create a population that is so cowed by fear that they will look to any authority to take advice?
Well, the authorities.
Sounds an awful lot like what happened during COVID.
Yes, that is precisely what I'm seeing here.
The same maniacs who went about finding viruses with the potential to be weaponized, bringing them into the lab, engineering them in such a way that they could more easily invade human cells and spread between people, lose, let's give them the benefit of the doubt, lose control of the damn pathogens that they've enhanced.
And then suddenly the same people are called in to protect the world from the pathogen that they've created and set loose.
Right?
So this, how many times are we going to watch that playbook?
Climate change is creating a mental health crisis because it's really, really dangerous and you're all going to die.
You are all going to die and we are here to help.
Yeah.
Why are you so scared?
You're all going to die.
We're here to help.
Trust us.
It just keeps, like, everything that I find when I go down into this hole that they are digging and throwing people into is fear-mongering and insipid, maniacal screaming.
Right, and we are going to be told that we are interfering with their Right.
of a population in need.
We are again going to be the selfish villains who insist on doing this, that, or the other when there's a public health emergency involving people with anxiety over climate change.
Right.
And actually, what do you also get when you assure people that the world is ending and there's nothing they can do?
You assure them that they have no agency, they have no autonomy, all of the power is outside of them, The locus of control is way external.
And oh, by the way, it comes in the form of the people delivering the bad news.
So sorry to have to deliver the bad news.
Don't shoot the messenger, we're here to help.
It turns out in this case, the messenger is actually the thing that is creating the problem.
So yeah, shoot the messenger.
When the messenger is the thing, it's a Trojan horse, that is what you should be skeptical of.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's an army inside of a horse.
It's not a horse.
Yeah, it's not a horse.
So I wanted actually to read just a little section from my Substack this week, which is, it's not going to seem highly relevant, but I think it is.
You can show my screen here.
It was inspired in part by, I went back and was reading some Kant, some Immanuel Kant, went back as if I was alive in 1784 when he was writing.
Well, I mean, it's always good practice to read the Immanuel.
Very good.
So, I was prompted to write this about what Enlightenment values actually are and went back to Kant's essay in which he proposes that he is addressing exactly that question.
By being told yet again that you and I are, you know, irresponsible and immoral for questioning some of the received wisdom that true blue Democrat scientifically minded people cannot question, right?
I've heard that, yes.
Yeah, so I I encourage people to go read this and I'll put a link in, but the particular section I wanted to read was this.
Inquiry is the heart of enlightenment.
Absent inquiry, there is no development of wisdom.
As Kant also says, what enlightenment requires, and therefore what humans require, is freedom to think and to speak.
I have been scolded and slandered, demonized and demonetized for using my freedom to think and to speak.
My husband, that's you.
That is me.
Brett Weinstein draws even more ire and venom than I do.
Rageful hatred is thrown at him remarkably often, and at him or at me, it always sounds very much the same.
How dare you seek to understand what is true?
How dare you speak what you believe to be true?
How dare anyone else listen to what you have to say?
This is not the time.
Now is the time to fall in line, to comply, and to obey.
What goes unspoken is we will tell you when it is your time to speak.
Education and seduction are etymological sisters, both from the Latin.
To educate is to bring out or lift up.
To be educated is to be led forth from narrow faith-based belief into intellectual self-sufficiency.
To seduce is to draw away.
To be seduced is often to be led astray by false praise.
To those who are angered by Brett's and my tendency to think from scratch and for his principles rather than from authority, and on sharing our thoughts with a willing audience, I say this.
You want us all in thrall to the gods that have seduced you.
You may think that they have educated rather than seduced you, and you may call your gods by different names.
You may call them scientists or elected leaders or public health authorities, but they are the new gods.
They act with impunity, they speak from authority rather than from reason, and they discourage skepticism and inquiry.
These are the new gods, same as the old gods.
You have been seduced by them, you have not been educated.
We, Brett and I and all those who seek truth, prefer to educate our audiences rather than to seduce.
It is inevitable, though, that those who would lead by seduction, and those who have been seduced, do not appreciate those who would lead by education.
So that's what we're trying to do.
That's fantastically written, by the way.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I think we came to education by surprise, right?
We understand ourselves to be scientists, first and foremost.
And again, that includes not just the analytical and the logical and the numerate and the quantitative and the metrics, but also the synthesis and the narrative and the intuitive and the creative.
All of that is the stuff of science.
But coming to be educators at Evergreen, which was a fantastic place in which to do it until suddenly it was not, has enabled us to do what we're doing here.
And I think today in this live stream, we covered sufficient ground that we will probably irritate Everyone a little bit, right?
We're doing it right.
Almost, right?
And that's, at some level, and what we hear from people is, I listen because I'm challenged or because I know that.
You change your minds.
That in the presence of new evidence, actual evidence, you change your minds.
And so, you know, the lessons of COVID, the lessons of, you know, the madness on college campuses now, and, you know, several years ago, reveals the risks of certainty.
We are all too certain of things that we need to leave open the possibility.
You know what?
What might show up that could change my mind?
Now, I'm tempted to leave that as stated because I think it's so well done, but... Go for it.
I think it's... Here's the question.
I hear you invoke seduction here in a way that at least conflicts with the way I've used that term.
So this is the original, and actually hat tip to Derek Jensen.
It's in one of his amazing books.
I think it may be Walking on Water, which is one of his books about education.
I think that's the name of it, in which he first points out the etymological sisterhood of the two terms.
And we use that same conceit in the book.
And every time I come to it, I go, but seduction doesn't have to mean leading astray by false praise, but it can.
And so it's not that there's not another meaning for seduction that doesn't have a negative valence, but it can be.
I don't know of any negative valence to associate with actual education.
With, you know, education as it is done, yes, but it's not education.
That's education.
Right, right.
But here's the thing I want to just wrestle forth.
I always thought it was unfortunate that seduction had an inherently sexual connotation.
Yeah.
Because what I thought as an educator was that the biggest obstacle to learning is bad motivational structures, right?
You're trying to force knowledge into the mind of somebody who, Everybody wants it because they want to get a good grade at the end of the term.
That doesn't work.
It's not a test.
Right.
So the thing that you really want to do if you want to get them to learn is you want them to desire to know what it is that you're trying to teach them.
If you accomplish that, the rest actually becomes easy and fun.
Right?
If you, you know, if you've got students who, you know, if you say what we used to say all the time.
Which is that, look, we're really trying to provide you a toolkit.
You will find that almost everything you care about is downstream of an evolutionary toolkit that nobody has taught you.
And that if you want to understand why romance works the way it does, if you want to understand why people succeed, why they fail, how markets work, all of these things, this toolkit will pay back in spades.
Also, more arcane questions like, what are 10 recs?
Right.
Exactly.
Which, you know, that's the kind of thing that can come up at a party and you can be left, you know, I got this one.
Right.
Exactly.
But anyway, so the point was, it is a little bit like seductions.
The point is, look, if I can make you want the toolkit, Then this just becomes fun.
I come into class every day and I volley with you and you, you know, try to stump me.
And the point is by the end of this process, you're going to know a hell of a lot more about how to use that toolkit than you did walking in.
And so anyway, I always thought of it as, um, you know, analytical seduction.
And so I guess I'm troubled by this etymological connection.
Well, I think in its original education is a leading forth, like, you know, come out and, you know, join us in the exploration of what might be the infinite.
Like, you know, it'll never stop.
And seduction in its most, I don't know, I guess, basal form is leading astray as opposed to leading forth.
And education, like the Enlightenment, encourages inquiry, encourages questions that...
We've said this before here, too.
When we were looking to go to grad school, Bob Trivers, the great evolutionary biologist Bob Trivers, who was our undergraduate advisor, No, this is going to have been Richard Alexander, the great evolutionary biologist, Dick Alexander, who we were then working with in grad school.
One of them, I can't remember which one it was, said, wherever you end up getting jobs, if you want to stay in an academic setting, you want to have regular interaction with undergraduates.
Was that Dick or Bob?
I can't remember which one of them it was.
Bob has written a paper to this effect and I think Dick gave us this advice in person.
So anyway, but two great minds, one of whom said you want to have regular interaction with undergraduates because they don't know what they're not supposed to ask.
Yep.
And, you know, a lot of faculty have the idea, especially in the sciences, like, I'm so busy, I have so much material to get to, I can't, like, save your questions to the end, or maybe, you know, come to office hours, maybe I'll be there, maybe I won't.
But, you know, if you really have a question, ask someone else, look it up, right?
And this is a terrible way to teach.
Not that people don't have a point, like time is limiting and we don't have time for all the questions.
This is one of the reasons that the evergreen model was so good, that we had these three-hour blocks several times a week.
It's like, actually, I have a lot of stuff I want to get through, but we're going to take this where we're going to take it.
And I will stop questions at some point.
And yes, there are bad questions and there are stupid questions, but most of them aren't.
And the fact is that when someone asks you a question that is actually obvious and you have a quick answer, you give the quick answer and you move on.
And there's a decent chance that someone else had the question too.
And if it's just a bad question, you don't disrespect the person, you don't conflate the person with the question.
You say, yep, that doesn't make sense.
Here's why.
And you move on.
But very often the surprising questions actually do cause you to go, wait, oh, okay, now I can get there.
And watch my logic as I show you how I get there.
And now you know something more.
And now you have more of a toolkit or I don't.
I don't know.
Let me think on that, either in real time with you, the class, or let me think, and I'll come back to you, and you must come back to them, and either say, you know, I think that you have revealed a paradox, but it's because of this shorthand way of talking over here, and so it's not actually a paradox, and here's how I think it resolves.
Or, I think there's a real paradox there.
And sometimes that can happen.
Oh, yeah.
And I mean, the idea, you know, most faculty can't imagine they could possibly learn from their naive first year undergraduate students.
But if you can't, you're doing something wrong.
Yeah, no, most faculty actually.
Well, there may be disciplines where this is not true.
Yeah.
But most faculty Live so as to not have their ignorance revealed by students.
Right, right.
Very much so.
And that's a shame because nothing's more educational than trying to explain to somebody something you think you know.
You discover things you don't know about it by trying to explain it to people who genuinely don't know and their questions will point that out faster than anything else.
Very powerful.
Yeah.
One more astronomical slash Celtic festival note before we end the show.
Of course.
Of course.
Beltane.
Beltane is a festival that is historically from Celtic lands at the midpoint between, or it's usually on the full moon closest to the midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice.
And in modern times, with the resurgence in some of these old ways, it is often celebrated on May 1st or the night of April 30th into May 1st, regardless of whether or not that falls on a full moon.
And May 1st isn't quite halfway through, and we already had our full moon that's closest to the middle.
But we're not quite halfway between the equinox and the summer solstice, but we're going to be there real soon.
So Beltane is It has been historically sort of a fertility festival, a time of celebrating growth and basically the beginning of the three months of the year in the Northern Temperate Zone that have the most light.
And because of the way we name our seasons, summer begins on the longest day of the year and the days are getting shorter throughout summer.
Similarly, winter begins on the shortest day of the year.
And all of winter your days are getting longer, even though the temperatures get cooler for a while yet, just as the temperatures get warmer in summer for a while yet, given thermal mass and albedo and things like this.
I haven't attended thermal mass in years.
I know, you should really go back.
I should really, yeah.
You should do that.
But if we're thinking just about photoperiod, which is to say day length, and not 24 hours in a day, but for how long in each 24-hour period is the sun above the horizon?
We are now, if you're in the Northern Temperate Zone, which the vast majority of you are, unless you're on boats because there's just not as much land in the Southern Hemisphere, we are now about to begin the three months of the year with the most time of the sun being above the horizon.
Even though we're only halfway through spring.
And so this was an important festival among the Celts, I believe among the Druids, although I may be mistaking that.
And it is a recognition of an astronomical reality, which I love it when those two things come together.
Yeah, which they do surprisingly often because... Of course they do because people needed to know these things because they were agriculturalists as of 12,000 years ago and they needed to know when to plant things and harvest things and what more or less was coming.
Yep.
Now help me out here.
I'm struggling through the analysis a little bit.
This midpoint Between the equinox and the solstice.
Between the equinox and the solstice is not the point at which the day length is changing fast enough.
That would be effectively the equinox.
Fast enough?
What do you mean?
Fastest.
The day length.
Oh, fastest?
Yeah.
Right, right?
Yeah, the fastest change happens around the equinoxes.
Equini?
Equinei.
The equinei, yes.
So we are in the, we have slowed down and we will continue to slow down in the change of day length to a near standstill at the solstice.
Precisely.
Got it.
Yeah.
But here we are and it just, this time of year, even today it happens to be gray and cloudy here.
It was glorious here yesterday, but when There's some light in the sky at five in the morning and still at nine at night when you're as far north as we are.
And you still got a month and a half to go before the solstice.
It feels glorious.
So I guess, you know, I'll get there with the last words that I say here shortly, but get outside for sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, okay, did we want to give a shout out to the store?
Do you have anything queued up or not yet?
Okay, no, we're good.
Oh, we're gonna, he's gonna, he's gonna grab something and, and Fred is gonna put it on.
No, you're not.
Put it on!
Put it all on!
You would need to do striptease music where I'm not putting anything on.
What would we call it?
What kind of poker would that be?
Unstripped poker?
Get ready for winter poker?
Get ready for winter poker, there it is.
Not that hot poker.
Yes.
Very true.
Okay, so while Zach is finding something from our store, which he may be about to throw at us or something.
Yep, exactly.
Here we have Jake's Micro Pizza.
I'll put on a mask when I'm done eating.
And there are still a lot of people wearing masks out there, at least here on the West Coast, but I don't know how many, if there's any place that's mandating them at this point.
Yeah.
Given time, the election is still how many months out?
Yeah, we're still a ways out.
So this may now be an artifact of history that's no longer necessary, but the idea is you were always allowed to take your mask off when you were eating.
You want to be prepared.
I should also point out that this is an artist's rendering of an actual image of a slice of Jake's micro pizza.
So you're looking through the microscope.
The objective.
The objective, yeah.
Of the microscope.
I know.
Is that microns?
I don't know.
It's not labeled what the numbers are, but you can see this pizza is roughly 140-somethings wide.
Yes.
And those are pepperoni nanoparticles.
Sure.
Now with more pepperoni.
Or less, actually.
Uh, smaller diameter pepperoni.
Sure.
Yeah, from smaller diameter animals.
Anyway, so... They could use the same diameter animals and just get more pepperonis per animal.
I don't think you can.
I mean, I've never been in the pepperoni business, but... No, you have not.
You're making that very clear.
Yes.
There.
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe I'm right.
Maybe you are.
We'll see.
The pepperoni makers in our audience are sure to write to us and tell me whether I've understood the process correctly.
I hope they do.
I very much hope that you do.
All... none of you.
Yes.
Okay, check out Locals.
The Watch Party has been happening there today.
Lots of benefits.
Please support us there.
We had a few giveaways recently and we're having those conversations soon and we're excited to be putting more and more stuff on Locals.
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Check out our wonderful sponsors for this week, which I've already forgotten what they were.
Now I can recreate it by cheating.
Mudwater, Armra, and Helix Mattresses.
I think you probably don't want to mix those three together.
You want to take them separately.
You want to have a flowchart of your progress through the... Yeah.
Yeah.
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Uh, but we've got good clips coming out all the time.
And, um, again, we'll be back this Wednesday, uh, so you'll see us again soon.
Oh, yeah.
And until we do see you next time.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
