Why Even Try? The 322nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Dr. Brett Weinstein and Dr. Heather Heying tackle the "Cartesian crisis" of screen-based falsehoods, advocating for curated media diets like The Epoch Times over legacy outlets. They defend the Artemis 2 mission against claims of futility, arguing that engineering wonder and the overview effect are vital for human nature. Critiquing academia's shift toward policing AI cheating rather than teaching critical thinking, they propose restructuring education to leverage AI tools, ensuring inquiry persists even without immediate utility or direct application. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Social Media Ideological Clusters00:13:47
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
It's number 322.
You and I are the resident dark horses.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hyang.
It is Saturday, not our usual spot, but hey, it's kind of traditional around here.
It has been traditional, and then we moved it, and this is the fourth in a cluster of four live streams, and then we're going to be taking most of the rest April to do some other work, but there's going to be some interesting Inside rail drops in our absence.
And as always, we have our locals watch party going on.
We had some great Q&As on locals in the last couple of weeks.
And check us out there.
A cluster of dark horse podcasts.
I'm just thinking some fraction of our audience has been trained such that the word cluster auto completes.
I know, but it makes, then that makes me wonder, and I have known in the past, what are the cluster A personality?
Oh, that's not what I was thinking at all.
Oh, you're thinking bombs?
Yes.
Exactly.
Yes.
Well, not exactly.
Some fraction of our audience thinks cluster B personality.
No, I think our audience.
Yes, some fraction.
Yes.
There's no way no, no fraction of our audience thinks cluster B. For one thing, that's what I thought of.
Yep.
No, I was actually, the bombs.
And you, with your, like, agro-military focus, are thinking about cluster bombs.
But I wasn't.
I really wasn't.
The bombs have been, the cluster in cluster bomb has been reappropriated into common parlance to describe an explosively bad situation.
And that's what I thought the autocomplete was leading to.
I think of that as more of a cluster fuck.
Yes, exactly.
That is what I'm imagining happened in the minds of many of our viewers.
And probably they're recovered by now.
I mean, I think we got in the way of that recovery with this conversation.
Yes, we have promoted it fully to consciousness, and now that's all they're thinking about, which, by the way, you're welcome, and I'm sorry.
No, but I do think that we've talked about before, but the value of not having some things promoted to consciousness so that you are aware of them and can have them promoted if they need to be,
but they aren't taking up valuable sort of interactive day-to-day space in your life is it's it's an ever more difficult tightrope to walk in the modern era if you ever spend time being exposed to things that you weren't explicitly asking for which is to say online actually you know that's quite right You sound surprised.
No, I just, it's a good thought that one of the maladies that we suffer from in modernity is that we are forced to keep many active threads open simultaneously just for because we have things at stake in them.
You can't.
Right.
But I mean, I think my point is now and has been, you know, this is not a new thing that I'm saying that I've said this many times before that for many of us, the active decision to say, actually, that's not.
where I'm going to be aware right now that it's not going to be where I spend my time.
And I'm going to choose to go in sometimes and say, okay, or not.
And that isn't inherently an avoidant or evasive or disinterested position.
It is a both self-preserving position and also one that potentially allows for greater clarity of thought when it comes episodically, when it is important to go back to or to go for the first time to some topic that has been active in many people's minds constantly for, you know. days, weeks, months, years, decades.
Yep.
Each of the threads benefits from being put into a latent phase to be revived later with fresh eyes rather than keeping them all active in the mind because it's like a battlefield with, you know, 20 active threats.
And, you know, we don't, some people think they do, but we basically don't multitask well.
Right.
So, you know, at what cost?
At many costs.
Some of the costs will be quantifiable and noticeable and sort of you know, on the ground in physical space, what didn't you get done because you were thinking about stuff over here?
But I think the much harder to quantify and therefore more likely to be ignored costs have to do with a greater ability to do analysis at various scales when called to do so, as opposed to at a constant level of like, well, I have to know, I need to know what this and that and this and that at the hourly, daily, weekly level is.
Yeah, I also think it interacts with the Cartesian crisis that in effect, because you're trying to make sense of a bunch of things that aren't straightforward, the back burner fills up.
I'm a big fan of the back burner where you can put things and not resolve them prematurely.
And then when you discover something that allows you to make progress, you pull it off the back burner.
But if the back burner has 40 things on it because nothing is straightforward, then you're basically you've got a lot of live models rather than, you know, if you were programming a computer, you would want to get an element right so that when you were working on some other element and breaking things in the process of elaborating it, you weren't worried that this thing over here wasn't stable.
Right.
And that, yeah, it's very counterproductive.
It's very counterproductive.
And there's also, I mean, I was thinking, you know, we're doing this all before the ads, which means some portion of the audience will just skip this, never hear this part of the conversation.
But I think it's maybe the crux of what we should be talking about today, which is that, you know, part of As you have discussed the Cartesian crisis, which you named a few years back, our inability, our ever-greatening inability, greatening?
Our ever-enhanced, our ever-growing, that's the word.
Yes, that's the word.
Inability to discern what is real, discern what the truth is, has to do with us not being actual eyewitnesses to things we think we're eyewitnesses to, the fabrication of apparent reality on screens, the interface,
the delay between what we think that we're sensing, what we are sensing, and when it actually happened, and therefore the ability for contributing forces to get in between the thing that we think we're observing or sensing in some way and how we're sensing it and to change it.
So that's at the empirical level.
The pollen continues.
Spring continues here.
And then, of course, a lot of what we do here with regard to the evolutionary lens is think at the theoretical level, analytically, entirely aside from what is actually true, what would be true if.
Let's work in hypotheticals.
Let's consider things like the game theory and the evolutionary logic of systems.
And then as we actually know things to be true, let's say, oh, I see that.
Let's use what we understand analytically and figure out what must be true if that is true.
and use those sorts of skills to assess if what we think we're seeing is true, is actually true, and also to make inference.
But when the news cycle is so fast, when the information is demonstrably fraudulent, at least in places, the ability to use any model on things that you have totally varying understanding of whether or not they are true and also varying capacity to know to what degree they are true, the whole thing becomes such a muddle that, you know, and your results will vary.
Different people will have different brains, which, yes, different capacities too, but different brains that work well in different styles of tasks that pulling back and saying, actually, that entire thing is so unknown that no amount of analysis over here is going to allow me to discern what's true.
Therefore, I can't make sense of it.
And I'm not saying I don't care.
I'm not saying I'm disinterested.
What I'm saying is, It's simply not possible now.
And there are so many other things that I could be doing with my time in which I could be making sense of the world, developing better models that I'm, you know, maybe I'll come back to it, maybe not.
But being constantly reminded of the thing doesn't often for many people actually help resolve anything and just makes us scattered.
Well, it does remind me a little bit of the conversation we had many months ago about my couple friends who walked away from social media.
Um, first order, that's a very wise thing to do for your sanity and mental health um, but when I checked back in on them years later, I found they, their mental health was fine, but their level of confusion about what was actually going on in the world struck me as quite high.
Because um unfortunately, we're stuck in a kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't world.
It's like, which failure mode do you prefer?
And i'm not arguing that one is better than the other, but I am arguing, I guess, I it's failure modes on both sides.
There are, there is the potential for failure moments on both sides, for sure, and they're going to be different ones mostly.
But i'm thinking about um, you know you, you kept both of your friends anonymously anonymous, as you should.
But i'm thinking about um, people who, for instance, are saying i'm not on social media um, and when my beloved child comes to me and says that they're sex, that they're not um, I believe them because I believe my child.
And oh, by the way, what is my news um feed?
My news feed is the completely captured NEW YORK Times AND PR, And so it's not that there's no media diet.
It's that there's been a choice for a media diet that is extraordinarily ideological.
And this will, you know, the same opposite, different, but, you know, similar levels of error will presumably occur on the so-called right side of the spectrum if that's the only media diet you're receiving.
So, you know, ideology is ideology.
So I don't think that that is fixed by social media.
Most people on social media are getting a straight-up ideological diet as well.
And it's just coming at them way faster.
And so it's, you know, it's more toxic because of the speed.
But it's no less or more ideological inherently, and some would argue that the algorithms associated with social media make it more, more canalizing.
I think part of what we've been seeing over the last, I don't know what you want to call it, five or 50 years is a canalizing and a fixing of ideology in the legacy publications and the legacy media such that it's really hard to actually end up informed and educated by reading or watching any individual legacy media.
So social media has the capacity to amalgamate, but it doesn't usually do so.
All right.
I think there are three categories.
You've got I embrace the legacy media, you get the equivalent of false signal.
It's consistent.
It's just not true.
Social media, if you allow the algorithm to govern you, you get a different false signal.
If you attempt to break the false signal on social media, you lose signal in the noise.
What you get is a huge amount of noise, most of it not informative.
And the question is, can you divine a signal out of that noise that is, in fact, leans in the direction of some kind of truth?
In the social media, you're saying.
Right.
Because, you know, because you can follow people who are on different sides of an issue, and then you could try to figure out what's actually going on.
So anyway.
And this, of course, I mean, this is what this is what editors are supposed to do.
This is what curation is.
These concepts that have been grabbed and twisted and either disappeared and then their skin suits are walking around or have been used for totally other things are actually extraordinarily valuable concepts because none of us, especially in the 21st century, can possibly walk into every single system that we might, if we are curious and open human beings, be interested in and become knowledgeable enough to start separating wheat from chaff very quickly.
And so it is valuable.
The reason that there have been beautiful publications that actually you can say, okay, this is what, if I go there once a week or every day even and just do a quick run of the front page or this section and this section, I will get a kind of read on the world as a match for the kind of read that I have historically been interested in.
But all of these things have fallen apart.
So curation and editing is partially the answer to this, but we don't have curators or editors who are trustworthy or non-ideological anymore.
Which I think is the point.
A, that tells you something.
The fact that we would all sign up for even one, even if it was from an ideology that we didn't, you know, from a proceeding from an ideology that we didn't match, just something that tried to tell the truth and held that as its highest value, it'd be a slam dunk business-wise.
Everybody would sign up.
The fact that we don't have one says there's a process that makes sure that this excellent business idea that can't possibly fail will fail every time.
It will turn into an ideological mess.
Top of the Hour Bias00:03:09
It will be targeted.
So I do think actually there is kind of one, and it's the Epic Times, which I find that I am going to more regularly, E-P-O-C-H.
And you've talked with Jan, the, I think, founder, founder and editor?
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
In on the ground floor, to be sure.
I never remember how to pronounce his last name.
Yakalik.
Jan Yakalik, who's extraordinary.
You've had him on Inside Rail.
And the Epic Times does a better job than any other, media outlet I know of at the moment of doing a really wide array of stories regularly and with biases everyone has, but with bias that is worn clearly when it's there.
Well, I think it has a bias that orients its view of the world.
I think the you know, concern about the CCP is not the worst bias you can have.
So anyway, it does have an awful lot of signal and it reports on a lot of stuff where there's no Chinese dimension.
Oh, absolutely.
So anyway, there's a lot of stuff in it.
But I still think I've said it before, but we need a real newspaper with a real newsroom with a budget that can report globally with all of the tools at the disposal of an actual newsroom.
that responds to the journalistic ethics, and the name for it is obvious.
It should be called The Interesting Times.
I think there's no question about that.
Okay.
A good name yeah, but I mean, was this all in service of that?
I just think it's the cherry on top of a very good sunday which we have just constructed here.
Okay, I maybe maybe um okay, let's not not at the top of the hour anymore or, you know, the top of the half hour, the bottom of the hour, is that what the I mean?
I guess?
I guess we start at the bottom of the hour.
Yes, this is the.
Well, if we're starting, we're now closing in on the top of the hour.
We're at the the, the top of the bottom of the hour or the bottom of the middle of the hour.
You're not actually thinking about the way that analog clocks work.
I had a bar graph and it was pretty good.
But I mean, what does the top of the hour mean?
It's thinking about an analog clock.
That never occurred to me.
I think.
I don't know.
I haven't looked it up.
I haven't referred to experts on this, but to me, it seems obvious that that's what top of the hour means, in which case we actually start at the bottom of the hour.
But we say top of the hour because it's top.
We stop at the bottom of the hour, not because hours start at the bottom, which they don't typically.
It's just that we're on the half hour.
So, yeah, it's all making sense to me now.
My whole life is going to need a rethink in light of the fact that I had missed this until now.
Puri Cleaning Product Review00:06:14
Yeah.
All right.
Okay.
Let us at what is now the top of the hour, but the bottom of our starting hour, et cetera.
It's the top of an hour.
Yes, it is.
You have the last one, right?
Did I write final at the top of the hour?
It's the final, but I mean, that could mean anything.
Maybe it's the first one.
things are going to go very wrong after this.
That's too bad.
In which case, I knew I was prescient enough, and yet I still handed it to you, and I'm sitting here next to you.
There's some reason.
I want to go out with you, love.
Yeah, but port.
I knew that years ago, even if it was surprising at the time.
No, I meant I know what you meant.
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We should change that script to say protein forward smoothies.
Mudwater Matcha Coffee Alternative00:05:26
I think it's way cooler.
Do you?
Yes.
You might want to check with your Gen Z children.
Well, they will undoubtedly think it's not cooler, if only because that's not how they are.
That's not how they are at all.
Well, they will think undoubtedly it's uncool because they're Gen Z and speak a foreign language, but that's also not how they are.
I mean, there's foreign jargon for sure.
Oh, there's some jargon.
Yeah.
And they speak a whole different language at the level of emojis and pictures that they send in text.
Crazy stuff.
Fair enough.
The pictures.
Yes.
Yes.
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That's Mudwater spelled without the X.
Yeah.
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Are you having a glass?
I want you to smell it.
It smells great.
It smells so good.
Yeah.
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Trees don't have one.
So anyway, you probably do.
You're ad libbing again, aren't you?
Not well, but, you know, there's a certain amount.
Cinnamon.
Should you have one?
If you don't have one, you should not engage with any products at all.
How about that?
If you don't have an immune system?
No, a tree could engage with ornaments.
There's lots of products for trees, I'm sure.
Trees don't have money with which to buy products.
You buy them as gifts for the trees, as i'm led to understand, that's their.
That's their original coffee alternative.
But Mudwater Mudwater yes, let's just get back to like starting in the middle.
After talking about tree trees and their reefs, we're talking about Mudwater for people with immune systems who might want to augment them with chaga and reefs.
See, i'm paying attention.
That's their original coffee alternative.
They're referring to Mudwater, but Mudwater also makes a matcha coffee alternative, which is like their original, but has matcha instead of cacao and cinnamon too.
Wait, Has matcha instead of cacao and cinnamon too.
All right.
And Mudowater also makes mushroom coffee with their Arabica coffee plus all the mushrooms already mentioned lion's mane and cordyceps, chaga and reishi.
I think it's reishi.
It's what?
I think it's reishi.
Reishi?
Reishi.
Reishi.
I don't know.
Oh, it's reishi.
Sure.
Sounds good to me.
I mean, you know, protein forward and all.
They've got a turmeric.
Wow.
Wow.
Next sentence, I swear, says they've got a turmeric forward drink that is caffeine free and has the same mushrooms plus ginger, cinnamon, and wait for it, baobab.
Really?
Yeah.
So we haven't actually tried this turmeric one.
I went on their site, spent some time on their site.
We've had a couple of their stuff, a couple of their flavors, their products, and they're great.
But they've got a bunch more now, including the turmeric one.
And I just had to mention it.
And yes, turmeric forward, because literally has baobab in it.
It must be baobab fruits.
I actually, I can, I can look it up.
I wish it was baobab root because then you could say baobab root, which is at the top.
Well, it's not, but it's not.
But the, the thing about baobabs is that people describe them as being upside down because they look like they have the roots at the top.
Anyway, I mean, extraordinary trees.
We've seen them in Madagascar and they're also in East Africa.
I feel like buying them a gift.
I who the water or the baobabs ornaments something to put on the roots.
Yes.
I don't know what the baobab is doing in there, but I'm intrigued.
Heather wrote.
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NASA Moon Mission Goals00:15:33
We've gotten to the point where you're having to point along as you read.
I'm sorry.
I know it's been a long few days.
The funny part is if I was reading this to myself, I would have to read it out loud like this just to understand what it says.
It's too big of a confession, but it's true.
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That's Dark Horse, also without an X. Yep.
All right.
Back to Earth.
Yes.
Yes.
Now at the bottom of the hour again, we are ready to go.
I don't think so.
I.
Yeah.
I mean, we're cruising towards it.
I mean, I think, you know, we had fun, but it took time.
Yeah.
Well, so back to Earth, actually.
Let's, can we talk a little bit about Artemis 2?
Please.
Yeah.
I don't have a ton to say about the actual expedition, but I'm excited by it.
We were both born early enough in 1969 to have been part of sort of the space age, the American space age, watching from caregiving my, in fact, in my case, my father's lap.
And in your case, one of your grandfather's?
I think it was my grandmother.
So, you know, going back to space is exciting.
It's exciting.
And, you know, NASA is one of those agencies that I'm sure there's corruption.
I'm sure there's incompetence, but it's just one of those federal agencies that I'm mostly very excited about.
And, you know, You know, we didn't share last week that the internet failed midway, and although we were still etherneted into live stream, my computer stopped connecting, and so I had to do a bunch of stuff.
It seems to really not be playing ball with me again, but maybe I already have this queued up.
Oh, here we go.
So hopefully I'm not going to be able to change the size of this.
Can you see my screen?
No, of course you can't.
There we go.
In light of Artemis 2, the Guardian, a few days ago, published this op-ed called Let's Stop Going into Space.
There's nothing to see and no one to talk to.
By.
I mean I hate this, but of course it's by a woman, like I don't think any man would put their name to such.
I mean, the headline is never written by the person uh, whose whose piece it is.
But um, i'm going to read a little bit of this, but just just to preempt the insanity and it's a short piece maybe i'll just read the whole thing like, exploration and curiosity and openness and innovation are what we are about.
That's what humanity is, the idea That.
And frankly, it's like a female coded version of the tech bro.
We got it, man.
We know exactly what we're going to do.
We're going to be data driven confusion over in that space.
It's the same thing.
Like, I already know what I'm interested in.
I already know what there is to know.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Who cares?
I'm going to drill down with numbers or I'm going to only look for the things I already know.
And I only know what I want to see and who I want to talk to.
And it's so.
constricting and enfeebling and sad.
It's those things.
So here's what she has to say.
She says, I have nothing against astronauts or scientific innovation, but what's the point of Artemis 2?
It is, I'm going to try to make this bigger and, oh God, it failed me.
Okay, let's see if I can get in this way.
Yes, good.
Okay.
It is absolutely self-evident to me that space exploration is pointless, and the more urgent the crises besetting this planet we live on, the more pointless it becomes.
I can see why people got excited about it in the 1960s, back when the world was young and we still thought there might be little green people out there.
Who wouldn't want to meet them?
Most serious opinion, however, has now settled on the where is everybody paradox, first framed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950.
If there is intelligent life anywhere, why is it not sought to make contact?
It's because there isn't.
There's nothing out there except planets infinitely less beautiful than this one we live on.
So that first paragraph is just so full of wrongness and insanity.
Maybe it's just worth stopping there.
But then she begins the next one with, all that seems pretty uncontroversial.
I almost never mention it, except for when astronauts yet again pointlessly go into space, as with the latest moon mission.
Here's what I've noticed.
People get really annoyed.
Yep, that's me getting really annoyed.
I have loads of opinions, she writes, way more vexatious than that one, yet none of them attract the same ire.
Everyone's annoyed for a different reason.
Some of them think I'm deliberately setting out to ruin a festivity.
Festivity, chosen there to indicate that this is just frivolous.
Frivolous, yeah.
Others act as though I'm opposing innovation and modernity, which I absolutely am not.
Yes, you are.
They point to all the discoveries that wouldn't have been made without the space-based wanderlust, most of which seem to involve finding better ways to kill each other, and then they mourn the kind of world I want to live in where nobody can see beyond their own horizon.
Some people think I just, so this is going to be the end of it, yeah.
Some people think I dislike the astronauts themselves, which couldn't be more wrong.
Who thinks that?
Right.
Like, who has that thought when you start railing against the space program?
You don't like the individuals who are going to space.
What?
Some people think I dislike the astronauts themselves, which couldn't be more wrong.
I'm sure they're great.
They certainly seem wholesome.
Some people think I'm being a Scrooge.
You are.
Resenting the financial outlay because my soul has no poetry in it.
It's a paradox and not a delicious one that moaning about the waste of energy that is space travel has turned into quite a significant waste of my own energy.
Seriously, NASA, can you not just knock it off?
Hasn't the U.S. of all nations got bigger things to worry about?
And worry, again.
Festivities and worry.
And isn't this just a frivolous little and she doesn't say it.
At least she doesn't gender this thing, but she does implicitly.
This is like men doing their frivolous, manly things when they should be solving the real problems here on Earth, which they too caused.
Yes.
I have a thousand things to say.
I just don't want to interrupt an excellent riff.
I will pick it up after you say something.
Okay.
So first of all, I think we cannot bypass the fact that the menfolk are having a very different conversation about this mission.
And it will cause you to want to roll your eyes.
But the menfolk are having a discussion about whether or not the mission happened.
So this is not the menfolk.
This is some group of menfolk.
No, and this is not as insane as it sounds.
You are now combining two reactions.
Okay.
This is not, I mean, any more than that is the womenfolk, but there is a gendered thing here.
That's the thing.
But it is.
A majority of menfolk are not questioning whether or not this happened.
Probably if you were to survey people on the street, that's true.
But in terms of people who are processing this as something thing, a large fraction of the menfolk are having a discussion.
I'm not saying they're all saying it didn't happen.
That's not what I'm saying.
But I am saying there's a very active discussion about what this actually was.
And, you know, it was a bunch of things, including a religious experience, weirdly enough.
Now, I'm not saying what do you mean by that?
I'm saying that what was presented back to us here on Earth had a decidedly religious flavor.
Can you just repeat it?
I'm talking about actual allusions to a particular version of the deity.
There was prayer and all of this stuff.
And I am not saying you don't get to take that stuff with you to space, but I am saying NASA is deciding what we down here on Earth get to enjoy about this.
And there was a time back when the moon mission either did or didn't happen, there was an illusion to this being an accomplishment of humankind, right?
There was a universality to it.
And this was different from that.
Prayer.
I guess I didn't write.
I don't know what you're talking about.
So it's hard for me to respond because I haven't seen any of this.
There was a lot of.
Allusions to a particular Christian version of and you know, I ain't against it coming from the astronauts or NASA coded.
Well, you know, choice of who went, choice of what they were going to do, all of this stuff somehow happens, we don't know.
Um, so anyway again, you take your beliefs to space with you.
I don't think you shouldn't, I don't think we should be populating space with atheists.
I've said plenty of stuff about what I you know as a de facto atheist.
I've said lots of stuff about the dangers, I think, that come along with abandoning ancient traditions in favor of nothing.
But the point is, we got a particular thing back.
I think there was a huge opportunity missed here.
assuming the mission is what it appeared to have been, then a lot of effort should have been put into figuring out how this could be used to get us some sort of resolution on what happened in 1969.
Because the problem is that the hypothesis that we did not go, actually, there's stuff in it that you wouldn't expect.
It's not flat Earth.
Right.
It's right.
But how would how would this mission, which did not land on the moon, and I don't know enough about where the landings in the 60s, early 70s were versus what exactly was was what where the orbit was this time.
I don't even know if they were I have no idea.
I haven't looked into it, presumably knowable.
But I you're asking for you're asking for this to have been a different well, a different set of goals.
And you know, I think the goals are a little bit.
The goals are in part geopolitical and competitive and chest bumping.
We're going to get there before China.
But the goals are also engineering.
The goals are let's test a bunch of systems and see if manned spaceflight and potentially living on the surface of other planets, satellites, etc.
How close are we and what systems work and what systems need tweaking was the stated goal.
Right.
And look, first of all, let's address this woman's absurd criticisms here just once and for all.
The value of going to the moon is, it's a little bit like the value of going to college back when that had a value.
You are doing it for the purpose of training yourself.
And so the point is, going to the moon, especially landing on the moon and returning, is an extremely difficult task and it succeeds or fails unambiguously.
So the point is, if we want to upgrade ourselves, setting a very difficult task like that, one from which you will, yes, get some kind of information that you didn't have before, but the purpose is not to figure out what the moon is made of, right?
We can take a pretty good guess at that even before arriving.
So I think your framing is actually – I think that's interesting because put aside your claim that many men question whether or not this happened, I think your framing of what the legitimate purpose of a moon mission is, which is firmly within scientific territory.
And my framing of what the legitimate purpose of a moon mission is, which is, I think, also firmly within scientific territory, are actually quite different based on, as it turns out, sex differences.
That you just talked about a goal, a mission, a, you know, having the idea in advance and like coming back with data, basically.
And my, you know, the way that I framed it and the way that I think about one of the key purposes of such missions, but such really, of a space program more generally, of having a space program,
having grown up in the space age, right, is to encourage wonder and awe and openness and curiosity and exploration and discovery, especially when we live on a planet that is full of beauty and unknown things.
But other than the oceanic depths, most of the land has been seen.
Like we've been there.
And there are so many new things under the sun yet.
Part of part of what is happening to us as a species is we're just getting flat, we're just getting bored with what is possible.
Because anytime you think oh oh, I just heard about a new place or a new thing and you and you google it, you Ai it, you do whatever it is to figure it out and you realize that 18 million people have already had thoughts about it or heard about it and added their own little thing.
And you know most of them are wrong, but some of them aren't.
And how do you figure it out?
And you're just done like I don't know, i'll just go back to tick tock, right.
So I think For sure, the stated explicit on the cover of the brochure purpose, in this case it was engineering, not science mostly, were the purposes.
But the scientific reasons are to have questions in advance that you go with the appropriate tools to run experiments or do observations that can help you resolve your hypotheses.
But the more ethereal necessity for science, for humans, is to keep open our sense of wonder and awe and curiosity and openness.
and remember that exploration and discovery are just inherent to who we are.
I disagree with none of that.
And in fact, I thought that your initial defense of it actually included mine, different emphasis.
I mean, I think it did.
I found your emphasis fast.
No, I wasn't defending the engineering.
I was saying the stated goals appear to have been mostly engineering rather than scientific.
There's like some geopolitical stuff for sure.
And there's a lot of engineering stuff.
And there's not really that much over in the explicitly scientific. territory with regard to justifications out of NASA for Artemis 2.
Right.
And I don't think there was much to learn.
For one thing, when it comes to the moon, we've been there, done that maybe.
No, but A, NASA tells us it's a big place, by the way.
NASA?
Oh, space.
The moon.
There's places there are places we haven't been for sure.
Engineering vs Scientific Inquiry00:06:03
Yeah.
Oh, that's true.
Oh, on the moon.
Yeah, but it's kind of a variation on a theme.
Well, that's what we think, having not been many places.
All right.
But nonetheless, the value of going to the moon itself is mostly an engineering thing.
NASA tells us, with a straight face, that they've lost the technology that got us there the first time.
One of the many things that don't quite add up about the story.
So the point is, okay, if this is true, we need to bootstrap that capacity again.
Would be good to have it.
It was quite an accomplishment if it was one, right?
But what do you say?
Would be good to have it.
What do you say to women like this Guardian op-ed writer?
He's like, what do you mean it would be good to have it?
Don't we need to solve the problems here on Earth first?
I actually remember having this argument in eighth grade with a girl.
I was going to say woman, but in eighth grade, you're not women, you're girls.
A girl I was friends with.
And we were doing some science project together.
And I was finding her impossible to deal with because at every turn, she came up with, you know, sort of the social justifications for why we needed to definitely spend money over there and not over here.
Like, what are you talking about?
We're talking about science.
We're talking about like keeping your mind open and being expansive.
And she specifically went after the space program.
Right.
And this would have been in, you know, whatever, the early 80s.
Right.
But first of all, you and I have covered this topic thoroughly under a different banner.
This is basic and it's not basic science.
It's basic engineering.
But the point is, it's engineering without a specific purpose.
But I would point out, many of us have traveled on an airplane and gone to see important things or accomplished things in remote locations by using one.
When the airplane was invented, nobody knew what it was for.
And in fact, for many years after, nobody knew what it was for.
The army couldn't figure out what to do with it.
I'm going to keep pushing back, though.
Like, yes, absolutely.
The value of basic research is in part that you have no idea what it's going to open up with regard to actual things that are useful to humans.
Yeah.
But the actual value to humans is the inquiry and the openness and the exploration.
I mean, so I'm just like, yes, that's true.
But every time that gets trotted out, that's the thing that gets remembered.
And then people could start dismantling that because it seems finite and you can count it and be like, yes, but all this research hasn't resolved into anything useful.
Therefore, let's cut that branch.
That is creating an opportunity to cut opportunities for inquiry.
on the basis that we haven't yet seen utility.
I couldn't possibly be more on your same page.
I know.
I would point out that I studied tent-making bats, and that was either because I misunderstood the potential opportunities that would be opened by our understanding why these bats make these structures and in what way, or it was because I actually believe that it's worth answering difficult questions.
Do you want to get into a fight as to how unimportant with regard to human success on the planet each of our dissertation, the field-based disputes, because some of your your theoretical work.
Oh, I think the theoretical work has lots of important practical implications.
But if we are competing to see whose dissertation was more basic and had less potential for human utility, I'm going to win this.
Really?
Yeah.
With regard to the field work only.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because your frogs are the custodians of an extremely powerful and still mysterious chemical process that creates a compound that interacts in a profound way with mammalian physiology.
Yes, but I wasn't studying the toxin.
I know.
The lipophilic alkaloids on the surface of their skin that they create through their diet of ants and mites.
I can say those words, but that has nothing to do with the questions I was asking.
Now, I do think that we can both put together stories that I think are actually valid about coming to understand the nature, in the case of my research, of sex and sexual selection and territoriality.
And the evolution of paternal care and the conditions under which predation and competition between and within species end up superseding one another, and also in the evolution of changes of habit, like going from nocturnal to diurnal, like the.
All of these are are actually relevant to questions of humanity as well.
But oh, in frogs, therefore not relevant.
Oh, do you think evolution didn't happen, in which one then humans or frogs and you know, we could certainly make arguments um that that you know, the modification of habitat to create, to create domicile, is, is, I ran out.
Yeah, you were.
More about my own work.
Yeah.
You did admirably well.
It just kind of petered off at the end.
But okay.
So the wonder part, super important.
And as you know, I have argued that actually our light pollution problem accidentally is creating a profound philosophical problem.
Yes.
We write this into the book.
That the inability, and it, you know, it's, ironic, because when you look into the night sky, where it isn't light polluted, most of what you're seeing are near neighbors.
But the grandeur of even just that set of near neighbor stars is so great that it does cause you probably to be less solipsistic and, you know, obsessed with your own local environment.
By the way, there's a very good um song by Cage the Elephant uh, the premise of which is that he is, you know, sort of puttering around his house, and then he looks up at the sky and he's thinking about an alien on a different planet puttering around his house in an analogous way.
Anyway, it's kind of the way you should be thinking about this.
The Overview Effect Drive00:14:26
But There does not need to be a reason to go to the moon.
The capability to go to the moon, the fact that the capability to go to the moon is just out of range or very out of range is reason enough.
And it's, you know, you don't want to do arbitrary.
I'm looking at it.
Losing capacity for such things is crazy.
Right.
And if we didn't do it the first time, doing it for the first time is paramount.
These things are really important.
And it's a shame that this mission did not focus on bringing us compelling photographic evidence of the landing sites.
Well, again, I'm going to push back on that because you presumably also don't know if their orbit, which was limited by the various astronomical bodies, was anywhere close to where the original landing sites were.
Right.
I know.
I will say I believe the Chinese and Russians have both given us some of this evidence.
But the unimpressive evidence that we were given of this flight that appears, you know, static photos where you could have had video, where you could have had persistent video that would have allowed you to track this mission in a way that would have, you know, assuming the mission is real, which I do, the ability to understand, you know,
as the context of the spaceship changes, what that does to the size of the Earth and watching the Earth, you know, look.
The initial space program that we all grew up thinking was the greatest achievement of humanity thus far, or at least on a small list of such things.
One of the things that did come back from it, which, you know, arguably is evidence for its having happened, is the overview effect, which these astronauts kind of alluded to.
But the overview effect was a psychological transition in astronauts, if not universal, near universal among them, from the odd experience of looking back at your home planet on which all of history has happened and understanding how tiny it is.
So it's a version of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, which is, you know, not a great photograph based on the actual content, but maybe one of the most important photographs of all time based on its implication and Carl Sagan's narration of it, which is gorgeous and timeless.
But anyway, yes, you go because of the upgrade in yourself for demonstrating the capacity and understanding what it is that you need to understand in order to accomplish all of the difficult things that are required.
You go because it causes wonder in children who then are tracked into some kind of meaning because they know that amazing things are possible.
Possibly reawakens wonder in adults.
Sure.
Lost it.
Well, and we've frankly had it poisoned.
We've had so much stuff portrayed as other than it was that it has made people cynical.
And the fact is, if this was just purely the mission that it appeared to be, It's a shame that you have a huge fraction of the population looking at it for signs that it was a fake and unfortunately not finding overwhelming evidence that it was true.
So anyway, I think this is the story of a human tragedy.
You've got a mission.
mired in a controversy about the most basic facts of what's true of our technological history.
And this mission does very little to alter the status of that discussion.
It basically plays to the New York Times reading crowd, some of whom are having absurd reactions like, why are we wasting money on this?
Which is good.
I was the Guardian, but close enough.
Well, I think the thing is you're peering into, this is one of these soliloquies that You can imagine exactly the cocktail party at which that sounds sophisticated, right?
The place that you can go that you can say that.
And the response is, I know.
Why do they do this?
Have you seen what's happening on our streets?
Right.
Don't we have better ways to spend our money?
Yeah.
And you guys aren't doing a good job of it at all.
Right.
And you guys are also not paying attention to the fact that, you know, we have these gigantic leaks of our tax dollars into frauds.
in various parts of the country, you know.
That's what I was referring to, both the frauds and the explicit programs that are batshit crazy.
You got explicit programs that are batshit crazy.
You've got frauds that are crazy.
You've got, you know, wars that, you know, destroy a huge amount of treasure and cost lives.
The number of places at which society is misinvesting is spectacular.
And, you know, the idea that you're going to take something that's meaningful.
To many of us, and challenge it because you can't find out how you know it has a practical benefit uh, to the particular things that you're caring about.
It's just, it's a total failure of imagination, which might be one of the many symptoms of the Cartesian crisis and the era of fraud.
Yeah, a total failure of imagination is right.
And again, the headline of that, of that crazy op-ed piece in the Guardian, is, um no, that's not the Guardian at all.
Um, let's stop going into space.
There's nothing to see and no one to talk to.
And, you know, I think maybe hopefully she did write that headline, because that line doesn't actually show up in the piece.
So that's quite, it's quite an extrapolation by the editors if, if that's not from this author.
But there's nothing to see.
There's nothing to see.
I'm sorry.
There's everything to see, including, as you point out, you know, the greatest existential experience possible for humanity to see all of humanity all at once, at least those who are living now and no one to talk to.
So that's, that's you, the author, betraying, betraying what you think has value.
It's just about chit chat.
And that's a denigration.
That maybe wasn't kind.
But there's all sorts of high level talk.
But talking to people is the only reason to do things, is the only reason to go places.
It makes me wonder why you would ever encourage anyone to go anywhere ever.
Not just to say Vietnam to explore, but how about your local park?
Why go anywhere ever if your position is if there's nothing to see?
What is there to see?
I don't know.
If you don't think there's anything to see in space by looking back at the earth, I have no idea what you're talking about.
There's no one to talk to.
So what?
Like, A, there were people to talk to, but B, there's a lot of things to be done in the world that don't involve conversation and don't involve explicit words and don't involve language.
That is surely a human value, but it's not the only one.
And for many of us, it's not the top one.
There's also a profound misunderstanding of what up there means.
I mean, what's up there?
Yeah.
100% of everything to a thousand decimal places is up there and not down here, right?
The fraction of what there is that is down here is so close to zero.
But I mean, you're now responding to a fiction.
She didn't say there's nothing up there.
She said there's nothing to see.
Well, but I think it's the same thing.
The point is it's not.
The idea is what can you sense?
This is a very limited, like I'm a human being trying to experience things.
And I think it misunderstands the fact is that they were mostly testing engineering systems rather than asking scientific questions.
And the scientific questions would be more about what can humans perceive versus what can our instruments perceive?
And what use can we put our instruments to to answer scientific questions?
But that's not, I don't think, what she's well, but even so, I mean, the reason to do this mission was not because of this mission.
This is a step towards gaining capacity, towards what?
Towards seeing things that haven't been seen, towards potential travel to places we haven't gone.
So you know it's a non-argument, right?
It's like this.
This was a prototype, it's a prototype mission.
What's the purpose of this prototype mission?
Well, it may have had purposes, but the purpose of the prototype is so that you can get good enough that you can do the thing that you haven't done yet, and so that I mean that is sort of come full circle.
That is, you know, over in the sort of more masculine coded part of the legitimate scientific justifications for such a mission, that is exactly the error of imagining the basic science that you can't already in advance of doing it, imagine what the human applicability will be, dismissing it and only going for applied science, which is to say, usually, engineering.
Well, I don't think so.
I mean, I think as much as I was trying to sum up what we had both been saying.
It seems to me that even if the purpose is to bootstrap the capacity for somebody to walk on Mars, I mean, I've given the idea of a colony on Mars a hard time because, and I've specifically, ironically leveled the accusation that there's nothing to see up there because it's all rocks of the same kind.
And my point is I don't want to go on that mission.
I don't think most people would because, you know, you'd have to have a particular bent for that to be an upgrade.
But it doesn't mean that getting human beings to Mars wouldn't have tremendous benefit.
both in terms of what could scientifically be done, which can, you know, be done by robots and things, and we've done a lot of that, but also, you know, human beings never walked on another planet.
That's an accomplishment to do it.
What happens when you've walked on another planet?
Do you come back and say something that actually causes us to reconceptualize the earth yet again?
Or, you know, or our own systems.
I mean, even just at the level of how are all of the ways that our physiology, that our anatomy, yes, but especially our physiology, are taking in the cues from our earthly environment and enacting clocks at the seasonal and the circadian level?
tidal effects.
We have electromagnetic effects.
There's evidence of some, I think it was plants being able to maintain some of its circadian effects deep underground.
It turns out to have been due to some, gosh, I think it was like radioactive decay of particles that it was picking up on.
I'm confusing this.
I was reading a lot about various ways that we keep track of time in ways that we have no idea of.
consciously, most of us.
And of course, our scientists don't know most of it yet.
So move us off of this planet in which we have only and entirely evolved for some amount of time.
We know that being in space messes with you, right?
What would actually the effect of being on a different planet with a different mass, a different distance from the sun, a different day length, a different year length, you know, presume like you're going to be living in a space with an atmosphere like Earth, but all of the other effects, you know, a different core, like all these different things.
what will we start to see that will change?
I'm fascinated.
I'm so curious to know what the answers to those questions will be.
Yeah, I think those are all good questions.
I also think there's something here we're wrestling to phrase, that there's something about humans that figures out what can't be done and then tries to figure out how to do it.
And that that is so fundamental to who we are and what we are.
And I saw a video the other day.
Course, had the same reaction.
Is it real?
You know, somebody built a little car that can drive up a wall, drive around on the wall.
A car with a person in it?
No okay, just a little vehicle.
Yeah um, and it works with fans.
The fans basically create a force that pushes the car onto the wall, allowing all the regular car stuff to fans that are pushing it down onto its surface.
I think the fans are pushing out, so it pushes the car down that it's possible that they're sucking towards the wall.
It wasn't clear from the video, which it was, but you know, By adjusting the fans, a thing can actually drive and then go up the wall and drive around.
And the point is, oh, why do that?
Well, I can come up with use cases, but the reason to do it is because that's so cool to be able to overcome that thing through logic in your way through it, prototyping your way to being able to even start and then improving the thing.
You know, some of the benefit was that those of us who hadn't had the thought saw this thing, that that's productive of who we are.
Yeah, the technological problems that you will have solved to do it, that creates a knowledge base in the people who did it.
Those people are hyper competent people.
They're exactly who you want and you know so anyway.
Well, this exists across all domains too.
Right, the theme music for Dark Horse is the creation of of a man who made is making music with wood and marbles, elaborate design of wood and marbles.
Winter Gaten, is that?
Yes, Martin Mullen.
Yeah.
And, you know, improv and innovation are probably accepted or embraced by such, you know, space exploration naysayers if it happens in the place of music, if it happens over in comedy space, maybe.
But, you know, if it's entirely linguistic, then everyone's into it.
Discovering Creative Limits00:06:26
Oh, of course.
We like, we innovate all the time.
We're creative.
That's who we are.
But the idea that over in actual functional physical understanding of an engagement with the universe space, that that's where the curiosity and creativity have to stop?
My God, that's exactly where we need it most.
And, you know, it's fantastic that we have it in art that doesn't have a, you know, in art and also craft, but like art that doesn't have an obvious practical use.
But it's frankly amazing there.
And if we have to prioritize, it's more important.
The creativity and the openness is more important in science. than in art.
And it is an amazing misapprehension of what science is to imagine that it doesn't involve creativity and discovery.
I think at one level, if something causes, you know, there are obviously people with low standards or whatever, or people with perverse desires, but if something causes your average person to go, wow, that's really cool.
It's probably worth doing whatever it is, whatever realm it is.
Right.
Yeah.
If it's creating optical illusions, if it's some kind of acrobatic feat that you wouldn't have thought possible, parkour, parkour, engineering, any of these things.
Right.
So, you know, why?
Yeah.
I mean, sport in general.
Yeah.
Right.
And in fact, you know, one of the, it's a horrifying age in many ways, but one of the benefits of this age is that you can look out across disciplines and you can watch human beings do things you would not think possible, right?
Manage their center of gravity in a way that doesn't seem possible.
Play ping pong at a speed with dexterity you wouldn't imagine could happen.
You know, whatever these things are, what you're actually discovering is what the limits of that organism Are.
And the limits of that organism are amazing precisely because we're not specialized on anything.
So, you know, discovering what we can do.
As a species, we're not specialized in anything.
Right.
We've talked about this a lot, but we tend to be a species that is a generalist where each individual has various specializations.
Right.
And, you know, but we can expand them.
We can expand them.
Throughout life.
And knowing once you've seen somebody accomplish something incredible, you actually have a sense of what the possibility space is.
So it's valid in that regard, too.
Right.
Oh, I didn't realize a human being can do that, but now I do.
And so the question is, well, OK, what else hasn't been done?
And, you know.
All right, guys, we are stuck down here on the pale blue dot.
We are.
And it's beautiful.
It's lovely.
It's tragic.
But if there's one thing we probably ought to figure out, it's what the limits of what we're capable are.
I mean, yeah.
Why wouldn't you?
What better investment?
All of the stuff we're investing in, how many things actually rise to that level?
Not that many.
Figuring out what the human animal is capable of, that is a worthy investment.
And that doesn't matter whether we're talking about, you know, a huge, organizational effort to get people to the moon, or whether we're talking about an individual, you know, discovering something with a guitar.
It's worth knowing what the limits are and where.
We haven't found them yet.
And and exposing um, your discovery to the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed inquiry of others and seeing what they think right.
And you know, at the smaller, often not scientific uh, individual scale of uh, creating a new riff on the guitar.
Or, you know, an example with which i'm quite familiar is is work in clay.
And I mean you, you know that we live with a whole bunch of apparently mismatched uh pottery uh, in our cabinets, because when I find a bowl uh, that is that is appealing to me in in heft and in form and in glaze, and I tend to buy it and put it in the cabinet and we and we eat from it, because these things aren't precious.
You know there are certainly, you know, things that we have that we don't eat from, but in general, you know, like we've just got, you know, a certain kind of Objects that have been handmade with different clay bodies, fired at different temperatures, with different glazes, fired in either an oxidation or reduction environment, with different amounts of underglaze or slip or carving or any number of things.
And every time I hold one of these objects, you see me doing it all the time, I'm just appreciating the artistry and trying to figure out what they did.
And sometimes I can't know.
And sometimes I think I know, and if I have opportunity to talk to the artist, which sometimes I do, I'm surprised by what they say.
And all of that is just opportunity for learning and to create new things that may branch off of that.
Or sometimes you'll see something and say, oh, that's nothing that I want to do.
I don't want that in my life.
But I'm super impressed by the capacity to have done that.
And I want to know what all went into that thing.
And sometimes it's mimicry.
And actually, we have we have a mug that I particularly like.
I think I got for you, but I like it more that looks like it's made of pipes, right?
And it's not.
It's entirely made of clay, but it looks and it has the heft of it looks like it's made from plumbing fittings, the handle, and just it feels great in the hand.
But I did talk to the artist in that case.
I was out of Portland, Oregon, and just the capacity to have looked at a real functional thing and said, okay, I think that would make an interesting form.
On a mug.
I'm going to make this metal thing into clay.
I'm going to, i'm going to make a clay thing that exactly mimics that metal thing to such a degree that anyone picking it up actually has to question what it is.
That is again, it's.
It's in the realm of optical illusion, it's in the realm of yes creativity, of mimicry of uh of just, you know, expanding your capacity to the edges of, of what is possible and you know, and then going further.
Yeah pushing, pushing the limit is inherently valid, and that's probably why All of us are fascinated by it, right?
Yeah.
Really, who do you know who isn't looking at these things documented and thinking, that one's really cool.
Distracted Students and AI00:13:41
That one doesn't impress me.
Oh, this one does.
We are, in some sense, it's galvanizing that we're all obsessed with seeing things that, oh, I've never seen anybody do that before.
That's pretty amazing.
That obsession is there for a reason.
And we should not overthink it the way this woman at The Guardian was clearly overthinking it.
Indeed.
And I think we can also say that the Artemis II mission, if it was a mission, was successful.
And if it was a PSYAP, it's not quite as successful, but still impressive.
You can say that.
Okay.
I did say that.
Yeah.
It was perhaps clumsy.
I think a human could do better, but I remain to see it done.
Okay.
I think I actually want to hold off on the other things.
I enjoyed talking about, yeah, I mean, I think you might have something you want to talk about, but I had a couple other stories that just are so much more downers and sociopolitical and, you know, about what is happening right here on earth at a very uncreative and unopen level that they'll save, unfortunately, because the corruption will continue.
All right.
Well, I do have one other thing.
I hope you'll give me a little leash for this.
I think you'll see why it's worth talking about once we look at it.
You realize you're not wearing a collar.
Metaphorical entirely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If I was, it'd be spiked, for sure.
But it doesn't preclude a leash, I think.
I don't know.
I've never had a spiked collar.
But, Jen, do you have the tweet and video you want to show that video?
It's just me.
Or is anyone else slightly concerned what professors can see when you upload your paper for them to grade it?
Because I am grading a student's paper, and I'm a TA.
And this professor is having me do something that he's never had me do before when it comes to grading a college student's paper.
And I want to show you guys what this is and what you guys should look out for if you're currently making essays in college.
Okay?
So.
This is a student's paper that I pulled up in Google Docs.
It's a real student's paper.
And when I come over here to this black dot from GPT zero, what it does is it pulls up basically an AI detector, okay?
But the real thing is we can obviously see this is a human paper, okay?
The student didn't use AI or ChatGPT to write the paper.
But the way that we're proving it now, that my professors never had us do until now, is this button right here called the typing analysis.
Guys, what this does is it pulls up a video in real time.
Showing you exactly how a student typed the paper.
So it shows all of the front spaces and like all the back spaces, all the keystrokes the student made when writing out the essay.
Then it shows all the pastes and all the edits the student made.
And if you come over here, you can see the timestamp when the student uploaded the paper into Google Docs, how many words are in the paper, how many edits and pastes there are, how long it took the student to write the paper.
Then it shows the editors of the paper, so the student and the professor who both made edits to this paper, and then this typing analysis where it says if it's natural.
Or unnatural sounding.
And this paper is 100% natural sounding because of the pauses, errors, and changes in speed and rhythm.
Wow.
Yeah.
Wow.
Now, I do have to say a few things before we get to discussing the implications here, of which there are many.
There is something weird about this in the sense that you couldn't do that analysis, I believe, with something that you wrote in Word or I use LibreOffice, the free version.
Why don't you think it could work in Word?
Because I don't think Word records the data about what you did.
This was a Google Doc?
Google Doc.
Exactly.
Now, I'm not saying the information doesn't exist somewhere, but I don't think it exists in a readily readable way in the file that you upload.
There's obviously also a danger here.
Let's suppose that your professor, in order to be able to use this tool sorry, but no wonder file sizes have gotten so huge.
There's so much data in there.
Well, there's a lot of data in there.
But what about the student who does write it in LibreOffice and then cuts and pastes it?
Right.
Right.
So it's possible that the professor required students to write in Google Docs in order to be able to do such an analysis.
Even if that's the case, though, it is obviously also the case that we are 30 seconds from somebody generating a program that will take a pre-existing document and typing it like a human.
Right.
So the point is arms race.
That's where we are.
And this TA's job, this TA's time is now being spent assessing reality of whether or not a human wrote the paper rather than actually assessing the content.
Right.
Now, I did want to make two points as a former professor about the interesting fact of this post-AI moment.
One of them is I think that we just need a rethink on the relationship between three objects.
the work, whatever it is, the professor and the student.
And the point is, at this moment, professor and student have both been rendered novice at something fundamental.
And that's not necessarily bad.
And I would point out, when you and I take students into a tropical forest, we have the benefit, although we know more than they do about it, of knowing that nobody knows all that much.
So the point is everybody's in student mode and that's good.
It's wonderful.
It's ideal really from the point of view of teaching.
It's part of the reason to go.
Right.
So I would argue that college needs a rethink and that part of the rethink is not how are the experts going to keep the students from cheating and pretending to be more expert than they are.
That's not the job anymore.
AI isn't going anywhere.
So in some sense you are it never should have been the main job.
Right.
No.
Policing the cheaters?
That's not the highest and best use of an excellent professor.
No, and I would point out that the, I know people will hear this as hyperbole.
I mean it perfectly literally.
The academy was essentially a fraud before the AI era, right?
You had a huge number of people pretending to be expert in something they themselves often did not know, probably almost all of them didn't know that they were frauds.
But you can tell if you look at their performance on sex and gender, if you look at their performance on COVID, if you look at their performance on string theory, there's no shortage of evidence that the academy is full of people who aren't in a position to tell anybody anything because on the most basic tests, they fail.
My favorite example, which will be immediately obvious to everyone, and it's short, is when I was teaching with a medical anthropologist who declared that malaria had never killed anyone.
And when called out on this obvious, like he must have misspoke and no student raised their hand, it was early in the quarter.
Everyone was scared.
And so I was like, I'm sorry, that's not true.
Oh, yes, it's definitely true.
Malaria is not actually deadly.
Yep.
So now it has never actually murdered anyone.
This is true.
I mean, that, you know, that's a defensible, if pedantic claim.
But okay, so what should college professors be doing?
I think one thing that is perfectly clear is this.
Your students are going to go into a world that we cannot foresee, but in which AI is going to be a dominant feature in the same way that computers are now a dominant feature, in the same way that search is a dominant feature.
So the point is you're training them for that world.
The best thing you can do for them, all the money they're paying to go to hear you, the best thing you can do is figure out how to train them to leverage that thing rather than use it to supplant their own.
Capacity.
You want to use it to make them smarter.
That is your job.
To make them smarter.
That's your job.
You're they're not trying.
They should not be of the mindset of they're producing valuable work.
They don't do that in college typically.
Bring it in as a tool, like you bring in books as tools right now, and not you can't bring it in the same way that you bring in books, but use it as a tool.
You already use tools, you already use technology.
A book is technology, computers are technology.
So here it is, here's the newest.
And because you know, If I had to guess, you and the students don't understand AI and how it might be leveraged.
But if anybody understands it, they probably understand it better than you do, just given the age and exposure.
I don't know that that's necessarily true.
I've said this before, but for an accident of timing, we were teaching exactly millennials.
I mean, a lot of older students too, but just the years in which we were professors were the years in which age-typical millennials were in college.
And that was supposedly the first generation of digital natives.
And almost always I found that I had far greater technological capacity and understanding of what was actually going on.
Now, you know, my dad was a computer scientist, but I don't think that's what it was.
I think it was that they had been handed so many systems that were prefab that they just, when they needed to solve a problem, they were like, well, what, I just, where's the app or, you know, where's, where's, where's the button?
Yep.
As opposed to, no, you're actually going to have to solve some of your own problems here.
Yeah.
So I, I, I think that.
part of that is going to happen with AI too.
The people who are coming of age into AI are adopting it in a way that they aren't pushing it.
On the other hand, it's changing super fast.
Well, I don't disagree with what happened with computers, right?
The slicker computers got, the easier it was to become an expert user without knowing anything about how to actually do anything yourself because there was a solution packaged for you.
That's not where we are with AI yet.
It's changing so quickly.
And I do think that Figuring out how to get this beast to do your bidding is a skill.
And I think if I had to guess, the folks in the academy, the faculty are liable to be late to the party in this regard.
Yeah.
Anyway, either way, I do think of course they will be.
Because in general, it's a slow-moving population.
They're slow to react to change.
Yes.
And if you just model this in your mind for a second, imagine the faculty party in which faculty are discussing AI and imagine the eye rolling that will be done and the effective applause that will follow from it over, well, here's how I'm excluding it from my classroom, right?
The idea being, look, we know how academic work is done and it doesn't involve AI.
Now, that's true at one level.
You don't want students.
faking their success in your field.
On the other hand I think, in fact, although you haven't said it, you're arguing for two modes that are opposite of one another.
And almost all of what's being done is in this intermediate muddled mode.
We used to wish for, when we were on campus teaching as opposed to in the field, the ability to turn off the Wi-Fi and cellular in the classrooms that we were in.
Just to keep people so they weren't distracted.
I've said this before, but I always when it came time to ask for rooms for the quarter, I always asked for rooms with a big window out onto something nice so that when people become distracted in the middle of class, which will happen, they had something of nature to consider instead of being drawn to their phones or whatever else it might be.
The argument here isn't we need to get rid of distraction.
People are too distracted.
People are too distracted, but people will always be distracted.
People will always have a tendency to no matter how much they're excited about the topic at hand, if you're asking them to sit with their butts in seats for an hour and a half straight, my God, it's too much, right?
And yet we do it.
So having space to learn, which is utterly free of influence except from the nature and the people with whom you are with.
And then on the other end of the spectrum, engaging and facilitating use of all the tools that are at our disposal and figuring out how we can become better with them as opposed to be fighting their encroachment.
Yep.
I would also point out you and I did something pretty unique in the classroom.
Predicting Evolutionary Math00:05:54
We did it differently, but you and I did it differently.
Yeah.
The you and I used to create exams that were sufficiently, I don't want to say difficult, but sufficiently novel.
They were difficult, but sufficiently novel that you and I could also take those exams.
Yeah.
That it wasn't like, I know the answer to this question and it's a really hard one.
Let's see if you do too.
Well, they were, they were elaborate.
evolutionary hypotheticals with narratives that we had either said, okay, the year is now 2100 and here's what else has happened and here's a population of X organisms.
I'm going to tell you three things about them.
Now I want you to predict their social system, their mating system, any number of things.
Here's a number of planets.
Yeah, one of mine was, imagine a ring of planets.
Equally distant from a sun, in which migration between them is possible.
So basically, I set a species in motion on a planet and predict changes as it migrates around this circle, the Equator, I think it was um, or you had it.
There were different ones.
There's also one in which predict the pattern of species uh diversity, based on a cube like planet that you know.
So I would specify the parameters.
Let me just say one more.
So I was very vague about the.
The one that I mentioned of mine, but another one that I was very proud of, had a quantitative part, for which the math was the math, and then a social evolution part for which there were multiple possible answers, some far better than others.
And what I could see as a professor reading and talking with the students about what they wrote was how good is their evolutionary thinking, not did they arrive at the same answer I did.
And this was what I called the fraternidae, the imaginary, the fictitious family of beetles.
that unlike the Hymenoptera, which is the real clade of insects that includes the ants, bees, and wasps, which have this very unusual genetic system in which females are diploid just like we are.
All of their somatic cells have two copies of each of their chromosomes and males are haploid, which creates really interesting relationships where full sisters of bees and ants and wasps are three-quarters related to one another and male bees don't have dads.
That's reality.
That's science fact and it's amazing.
And so in my fraternity day, I had the who was haploid and who was diploid reversed, said, now do the math.
And it's not just you get to swap out what is going on in the Hymenoptera.
You have to actually follow the math through and do the genetics on it.
But then now that you've got the relationships, tell me about the social system.
Tell me who's going to be more aligned with whom based on relatedness and who's going to end up in more competition than you would expect if you were dealing with a fully diploid species.
And at least at that time, we were typically giving these as take-home exams, right?
You're going to have a few days and then you and then you upload your document.
There was really no cheating unless you happened to be working with someone who had taken a program from us before, in which case, go for it.
Like talk to them.
This is about learning how to think evolutionarily.
Right.
So the question is, could you adapt such things such that professor and student, both of whom are students of the AI tool and how to leverage it, could you arrange things in such a way that there's no cheating?
Because in effect, what you're doing, you know, if you fed these questions to AI, I think different ones would work differently well.
But my guess is the AI would reliably fail.
And so an assignment in which the point is, give me your answer, run it through AI.
See if the AI differs, critique its answer, right?
Wow, is that educational?
Not only at the level, you know, typically our classes worked at multiple levels in the sense that, you know, we're going to teach you how to do a kind of analysis and then we're going to teach you how to think about a particular system.
And then the point is you're going to walk away with a tool and some insight.
And you're going to learn how to think actively about things that are said to you, things that you read.
whether or not they're coming out of a peer-reviewed paper or Wikipedia or your professor or your peer, all of which can be wrong, all of which could be correct, but don't mistake tone for accuracy.
Right.
So to sum this up, we're somewhere in an arms race.
This is a moment that's not going to last, but the overall picture is pretty clear for the foreseeable future.
You've got a phony academy now in charge of a job that none of the people in it train to do, and the smart ones, you know, the ones who aren't a fraud, who are functioning in this environment are going to have to do something innovative in order to manage the problem that the rest of the academy is about to fail at, which is you can't possibly prevent people from cheating because the how do you cheat tools are as powerful as the how do you detect cheating tools.
And so, you know, it's become theater, right?
The students are producing phony stuff so they don't have to work and the professors are using the same stuff to detect whether they cheated.
And it's like, okay, you know, what are you teaching them to do exactly?
What job is that?
And maybe there is one, but it's not like we can employ the entire population to spot cheaters amongst the entire population spotting cheaters.
I mean, it's jobs 2.0.
It's, yeah, it's like exponential jobs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Birthday Palindrome Thoughts00:00:51
All right.
Well, that was good.
All right.
We are going to be back in two and a half weeks on, I think it's the 29th of April in the interim.
Older son is going to have a birthday and i'm also going to have a birthday, but it's less exciting for me at my age.
But uh, he's going to become a palindrome once again and uh, that's thought.
But yes, that's good news for him, that's right yeah yeah, it doesn't have to change anything, coming or going.
He's yeah exactly exactly uh, and um yeah, until until you and they're going to be a couple inside rails coming out in the interim.
But check us out locals.
You'll find all the all the previous q a's where we get into all sorts of conversations that you don't normally hear us talk about here.
And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.