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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:43
The Death of Science | Scientific Corruption and You
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I am a clinical scientist who works in a government-funded hospital laboratory.
Having worked here for some time, I have concluded that the current model for funding and completing research only breeds fraud and is a waste of resources.
This is not incredibly surprising, considering this is generally the case for government-funded anything.
But what I found depressing is the degree to which my colleagues, whom I consider intelligent individuals, vehemently reject this conclusion, irrespective of the fact that the evidence is incontrovertible.
What bothers me more is the disconnect between public perception of scientists, i.e.
objectivists in search of truth and to promote societal good, And the personalities I am surrounded with, on a daily basis, who are willing to make monumental logical leaps, cut corners, and distort reality, just so long as they can be published.
I enjoy my profession, in the technical sense, but watching dishonest people lauded as saviors and showered with government grants has sapped my motivation.
What is Stefan's view of government research?
Is it actually worth being a part of a system that is laden with so much fraud?
Does it make me immoral for taking money through taxation from the unassuming public to pay for my salary?
Does the current system simply need to be abolished?
That's from Matt.
Hey Matt, how you doing?
Do you mind if I say Matt?
Is that alright?
Yeah, that's fine, thanks.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, yeah.
Now listen, I have a weakness.
Would you like to hear what it is?
Sure.
My weakness, Matthew, is gossip.
Okay.
Now, I don't want any details and certainly no names, but can you give me some gossip about lab life?
I will certainly get to that, but do you mind if I just make a comment real quick regarding... No, no, please go ahead.
First of all, I guess what I wanted to say was I'm probably the inverse of your last caller versus the hyper-masculine American male rushing toward gunfire to fend off terrorists and socialists.
I guess the pussy government scientist from Canada.
But I guess it's a fairly...
All you had to say was Canada.
No, I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
Okay.
No, you know what?
Canadians are an incredible fighting force.
Just so you know, I mean, Canadian history, VMA Ridge and so on is like...
Canadians were like feared around the world as a fighting force.
But anyway, it doesn't need to hear it or there.
But go ahead.
Right.
So I just wanted to mention, I have a minor case of expressive aphasia.
So if I start to ramble or make a lot of sense, just stopped me.
Wait, so your minor case is somehow going to come back with my possibly terminal massive case.
So okay, we'll try and focus ourselves away from the ramble.
It's interesting because you brought up in the previous call the RK selection theory that I've briefly heard about in undergrad and it sort of jogged my memory because I remember my first year of undergrad, I had to take some stupid sociology courses for breadth requirement.
And, I mean, you probably know the context of sociology where everything down to your eye color is apparently a social construct.
For our final essay we had to write... Well, no, hang on.
Except for homosexuality.
Right.
Homosexuality is not a social construct.
It's not chosen.
Race doesn't exist.
But homosexual impulses are entirely genetic.
And it's the only thing that is genetic.
Our choice to not have tails, apparently, is just anti-tailism.
Anyway, so for our final essay, I remember we had to write a paper on race in the context of sociology.
I don't know if you ever came across the work of Philip Rushton.
He wrote the book Race, Evolution, and Behavior.
And it sort of applies the context of the RK selection theory to race, and sort of makes the argument that within human populations, you have R selection more on African black population, whereas K is more Asian population, whereas whites tend to fall somewhere in between.
So I remember my essay was written on society obviously has an influence on What, are you crazy?
What, are you crazy?
You brought up J. Philip Rushton, a professor of psychology, late professor, he died I think recently, a year or two ago, at the age of 67.
I think he was at University of Waterloo or something.
You brought up J. Philip Rushton in a Canadian sociology course?
It was my very first year of undergrad.
How did that work out for you, Matthew?
Just out of curiosity.
I ended up getting, I think, a D- on the paper.
It's funny in retrospect.
I remember my friend who wrote his paper was on the insensitivity of racial jokes.
I think he ended up getting an A+.
Anyway, just bringing up the RK Selection Theory just brought that story up.
Just so you know, I mean, we haven't released this yet because, again, timing is everything.
But I had a close to two-hour conversation with Dr. Linda Gottfriedson, which is probably going to go next.
What do you think next week, Mike?
Do you think we're going to drop that over next week?
It really depends.
I have no idea.
Sometime soon.
Yeah, I mean, we've got to.
In December, I've got to think.
We've got to surf the news cycle or whatever, right?
So it's – but anyway, we talked.
She's very much an expert on Rushton's theories, and we talked quite a bit about it.
So I'm certainly aware of his theories, and I find it a very great shame.
He died of Addison's disease, but he's not alive.
Otherwise, it would have been quite illuminating and instructive and challenging to have him on the show.
But I certainly do know about it, and his work is definitely worth reading.
If he's right, It's genius, like stone genius, in my opinion.
I don't know if he's right or not, because source data, I don't have the time or the competence or the experience or the expertise to grind through it all.
But he makes a strong case.
I don't know whether it's overwhelming or not.
And I don't know if other people, I think Jensen and he died within a day or two of each other after being friends for many years.
I don't know if anyone's picking up the The mantle.
But I certainly know Anonymous Conservative, whose book I continually like to plug.
You can just look in Anonymous Conservative.
His book has gone into it not in exactly the same way, but I'm certainly aware of his stuff and aware enough to know that they can't fail you because he's got lots of data.
It's not like you're quoting a Klansman or something, right?
They can't fail you because a lot of data But they sure as hell aren't going to give you the minimum mark possible, right?
Right.
But I guess he's pretty much been blacklisted from the world of academia since writing the book.
And I remember having a very hard time finding that particular book.
The professor brought it up briefly in class, sort of just to derail it.
But anyway, I guess it's beside the point.
But I guess in respect to my question, I guess I can probably start with what I would consider my central thesis to both of the points that I brought up.
So one, considering the disconnect between public perception of scientists and the massive amount of fraud that you see within the government science community.
And I think what it all boils down to.
Sorry, sorry.
Fraud is a very wide term.
I assume you mean data fraud.
I assume you don't mean financial fraud, although you might, but what kind of fraud are we talking about?
Well, I mean, I guess when you're talking about acquiring government grants, you bring in the realm of finance.
But I'm talking more about data fraud and sort of the difference between the truth and the truth as is published, if that makes any sense. - No.
Not quite.
I mean, usually scientists are lauded as, I guess, these objectivists that are in search of the truth.
But what you find is that they generally throw this concept right out the window if it doesn't conform with their central hypothesis that they're pushing in order to get published in whatever journal they're going for.
So data fraud definitely is the main concern.
Sorry, I don't mean to keep plugging interviews, but we just had a chat today with Dr. Barbara Oakley, who was talking about this cherry-picking of data.
It's horrible.
Yeah.
They basically just keep reproducing things until they get data that they want, and nobody publishes their negative results.
There's very little follow-up, very little rebuttal, very little review.
The peer review is largely a joke.
I can't remember which field exactly it was.
You were talking about the education field, 0.13% of the data has been reproduced.
0.13% of the data is reproducible or has been reproducible.
In another field, it was 30% of the data has been reproducible, which is less than chance.
And so it's terrible.
And people believe that this is science.
They believe that managing your own data, being published, peer review, they believe that this is science.
Right.
It sounds like they stole a lot of my points, but I was planning on bringing those up.
And what I really think it boils down to is the fact that Within the world of government research, very few people or labs are developing any sort of product or service.
It's more about generating information.
And in terms of public perception, the information, for one, is difficult to access.
It's usually behind some sort of paywall at a journal.
There are some open access journals that are accessible, really just with an internet connection.
But even if you're able to get those, they're written in such a way that with a scientific jargon, it's incredibly difficult to even comprehend what they're talking about.
I mean… Well, and sorry to interrupt, but there's not any justifiable reason as to why they should be behind paywalls.
Because the taxpayers have already paid for this.
They're not customers out there buying this shit.
The taxpayers have already paid for all of this data.
The only reason for… It's not like they're selling a lot of it, right?
Because the people in the field usually get stuff relatively cheaply, although the journals themselves, as we talked about in a previous show, are ridiculously expensive.
Tens of thousands of dollars sometimes per year.
But the only reason this stuff is behind a paywall is to keep people out.
It's got nothing to do with, oh, well, there's costs to produce it.
No, those costs are already covered by the taxpayers, already paid for the salaries, already paid for the government grant or taxpayers have already paid for it.
So the idea that you then have to pay for it again, you know, like it's with the climate change or global warming stuff.
You have, you know, these people finally got a whole bunch of the source data and, you know, some really good statisticians ran through a whole bunch of stuff and found some real problems.
Right.
Didn't come out.
Like the peer review process is usually got nothing to do with peer review in the academic sense.
It's interested lay people out there with decent computers and mathematics skills grinding through the data, which is why people have stopped a lot of times releasing their data.
You get these academics with their $50 Kindle books, for God's sakes.
You know, I mean, come on.
Well, we already paid for this.
With respect to the peer review process, it's generally a joke.
And all the reviewers can really do is assess, one, the interest of what you're putting forth and look for either internal or external consistency.
I mean, it's not as though they actually attempt to I mean, nobody really has the time for that, nor the money.
So I think that's, again, it sort of boils back to the point of, in a generation of information, you're really on the honor system.
And what I've found over and over again is that when I read something that's been published, and I have a library subscription, so thankfully I don't necessarily have to pay for every paper I download, If I can't reproduce it, I mean, there's so many degrees of plausible deniability that I don't call it fraud if I can't reproduce it.
I'll contact the authors and ask.
I tried to reproduce your findings.
I couldn't do it.
Can you give me some points?
Most of the time, they won't bother to respond to you.
Most of the time, they don't respond to you at all.
If you contact the corresponding author, which is usually the last author on the paper, Nice to have that with Revenue Canada.
that you as a you know if you're somebody that's not too particularly important that they're just not gonna they won't respond to you with if your inquiry especially if your inquiry is questioning their data it's just not going to happen and i mean um if they do respond to me nice to have that with revenue canada right i'm sorry you're i just don't feel like responding to this inquiry but anyway go um but i mean even if they do
um i mean let's let's just say there there is a case that somebody has committed fraud and they respond to your your your email i'm I mean, generally what they can say is there's so much variability in what we do in terms of cell lines, reagents.
They'll just say, well, you know, you're probably not getting the result that I did because you're not using the same cell line.
You're not using the same cell line.
So, I mean, they generate these immortalized cell lines that are basically used for in vitro research.
So it's basically just cells in a dish that are immortalized.
So there's a lot of variability within.
Immortalized?
Sorry.
I feel like we're dealing with a tiny version of Highlander.
What do you mean like immortalized?
Well, I mean, most cells, I mean, most cells, if you were to extract from the human body or from an animal, they will only divide a certain number of times before they reach what's called the Hayflick limit.
Damn mortality.
Right.
So there's ways to sort of trick the cellular machinery to continue to divide.
So So that's really what they're referring to when they talk about immortalized cell lines.
There's primary cell lines, which are extracted right from an organism, which is secondary cell lines, which are these usually immortalized cell lines that you use for a lot of your research.
And of course, there's a lot of variability between batches of cells.
From my own experience, they're called passages of cells.
You culture them and then you keep them going.
If they die off or you need them for an experiment, you start a new batch.
Just reproducing your own data from a previous batch of cells is so incredibly variable with these cell lines.
Oh yeah, I had a friend once who's like the big job was to carry the tray without spilling anything.
It's like the worst waiter job.
Here is half a million dollars, get it from one table to another and don't spill it.
Right.
I mean, so there's always that first thing they can go to, right?
Like, again, assuming they had committed fraud, they can just say, well, yeah, it's probably your cell line.
It's just, you know, it's not the same as ours, or your cell line has, you know, faced some sort of detriment.
And that's the reason why you're not able to reproduce our data.
But I'm sorry to interrupt, but Dustin, as an outsider, isn't it not science If there are so many variables that you can't reproduce it consistently, isn't that, like, not science?
Reproducibility is one of the cornerstones of the scientific method, isn't it?
How can you say that you have any conclusions if reproducibility becomes functionally impossible because of variability in X, right?
Well, I mean, again, since you don't really have a vested interest in generating any sort of product or service as opposed to just simply getting published in the highest impact journal, I mean, you'll generally say, and this happened to me before, where your supervisor or whoever, if you don't get the same results, they'll say, well, oh, you know, your previous results were fantastic.
That's when your cells were working properly, but this new data, we'll just forget about it.
There's X, Y, and Z problems that probably happen.
So just throw out the data and try it again.
And I see that quite often occurring, especially with newer graduate students where they'll have an initial finding.
That is just fantastic.
And then they'll spend the majority of their time here just simply trying to reproduce the great findings they had initially.
But, I mean, their supervisors liked the initial findings because they were exciting and interesting and would have been published.
And it's just not really useful.
That's great.
I mean, that is just fantastic.
It's literally like a tone deaf singer who accidentally hits some right notes and then starts on a career and just say, well, you know, I hit some great notes once.
Just discard all this stuff, but I really want you to buy tickets to my singing anyway.
I mean, that's just being able to throw out stuff that doesn't match your thesis.
I mean, what are they, central planners?
I mean, that's fantastic.
I mean, that's so much beats having customers and voluntary interactions.
Right.
I mean, it's like… If you're a restaurateur, it's like, you know, I once cooked a meal that people really liked.
I just throw random shit together in the kitchen now.
You know, some bolts, some oil, some husks of bread, some stuff that the rats left behind.
And people don't want to eat it.
So what?
They got to pay anyway.
It's more difficult to produce a good meal.
If people have to eat at my restaurant and, you know, even if I kill them, it doesn't matter.
I mean, why would you bother getting any quality ingredients or doing any good chefing?
Anyway, it's just that's delightful.
I mean, from a From a black comedy standpoint, that standpoint, as an entrepreneur, I've never ever worked in a field that you could ever get away with that kind of stuff.
Oh my god, no.
There's so much disparity between what they state they're doing and what they actually do.
It's really depressing.
So basically, they're theologians.
You can twist it to make anything, right?
Well, what I find is that there's sort of this distinction between a basic researcher and a clinical researcher.
Thankfully, or maybe the field that sort of began to push toward was called translational research where they're attempting to get the basic researchers, which are basically people who are studying in vitro phenomenons of cells in a dish, to get them to apply it to more of an in situ, which is more of a tissue setting.
So versus cells in a dish, it'll be within a brain.
And then you sort of take that data and the next step is to take it into the organism, the in vivo.
And then from there, you'd go to actually generating some sort of product.
So they're attempting to push for that.
There's a lot of pushback, unfortunately, from a lot of basic researchers saying that we should be able to study Whatever we find.
Whatever we find.
I can't believe that you people might humiliate me by demanding that I produce something of value to humanity.
I'm far too refined for that.
I exist in a platonic world of science with all thought and no empiricism and certainly no voluntarism.
Oh, how common, how petty.
Well, no, but I mean, what they'll say generally is along the lines of, well, you know, there's a lot of studies in the past.
That weren't necessarily looking for anything of clinical value.
So for instance, this guy was studying, you know, swamp bacteria just out of sheer interest.
Or this person was looking at why do zebras have stripes.
And oh my god, they found the basis of sRNA or the Krebs cycle just out of their sheer interest.
So as government scientists, and this was actually a seminar I went to not too long ago, we should be given money to study whatever we find interesting.
I love it.
I mean, that's called having a hobby.
And it's great if your hobby finds a cure for something.
That's called having a hobby.
I mean, have a hobby, but don't expect me to pay for your model train set that might produce some virus that produces some cure for some goddamn thing.
I mean, what about all the cures that weren't developed?
That's totally analysis, right?
It's all the opportunity costs that matter.
Right.
I mean, what I was thinking was, I mean, a parallel analysis would be that, I mean, the government should be in the business of buying lottery tickets, because we can all point to somebody who won the lottery and say, well, yeah, look, just by chance alone, they amassed this massive resources.
But what you miss in the analysis is a number of people that went to study something they found interesting and found absolutely nothing.
Once I sneezed out some seeds and a beautiful flower grew, I am both a farmer and a florist.
So give me money for both.
Right.
And just thinking of how that could possibly work in terms of, I mean, right now in terms of deciding who gets government grants, I mean, generally what granting agencies will require is that you write your research up.
I mean, there's different granting agencies in Canada.
No, don't go through the alphabet soup.
It's too depressing.
It feels like somebody is shitting the alphabet in my wallet.
There's a lot.
Let's just keep going with the story.
Generally, they ask you to write your grant in such a way that you define a problem that you're trying to solve.
From the perspective of basic research, I just don't see how it could possibly Interest is something that's completely subjective.
It's not like granting agencies can say, ìOh my god, this is interesting, but this other grant is just really interesting.î It's generally madness in that sense.
It's like government bureaucrats funding companies.
Right?
I mean, oh, this, you know, these guys are going to be really successful.
I don't think these guys have... it's like, nobody knows.
The only thing is to put as much on the line as humanly possible and hope that people's panic produces something useful.
That's entrepreneurship in a nutshell, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
I'm going to throw you out of a plane.
I'm going to throw a parachute out of a plane.
See if you can angle it so you end up somewhere together before the big splat.
That's entrepreneurship in a nutshell.
But this idea that people can choose it ahead of time, particularly if they have no Investment?
I mean, just look at the green energy scam.
Green energy is basically, hey, is money green?
Okay, we'll call it green energy, because we'd like to take a lot from the taxpayers, please, and not really show much for it.
I always say that the climate change science that goes on in terms of the molecular biology world is cancer research.
I know this touches on a soft spot for you, so I won't overstate where I'm going here.
I mean, cancer research for me is just an absolute nightmare to try to wade through when reading any of the research.
There's so many inconsistencies.
And there's just been so little that has been accomplished in the last decade in terms of— Oh, come on.
Are you saying that poison and massive radiation You think there could be something better?
I mean, basically, cancer treatments are like, you have a cold virus, we're gonna shoot it!
I hope it's not near any vital organs.
But trust me, we'll wipe out the virus and maybe you'll pull through.
I get it.
I mean, listen, I went through it.
And I'm like, really?
This is what we've got?
You're going to poison me and then irradiate me?
So basically, I'm like an unwanted rat and a burrito in a microwave.
Is this really the pinnacle of treatment that we have for this godforsaken illness?
Right.
And what annoys me is there could be real cures.
Right.
Like every single, oh, you know, it's scattershot.
You know, we'll just throw a bunch of shit over there and maybe we'll get a soup.
It's like, you know, you could just plan to make a fucking soup.
No!
Random ingredients.
And, you know, once three years ago we got a soup that didn't make us throw up.
So my soup randomness should really be funded.
But it's like, how about you try and sell some soup to people and then see what they like?
So what bothers me is the degree to which, well there's two things that bother me and I'll rant very briefly then get back to you.
Number one is that yeah all the cures that could be developed but aren't because these people are sucking up all the money for their own fucking hobbies, number one.
Number two, James Watson from my understanding was for many decades was running a pretty sophisticated cancer research center until he got fired for saying the Basic facts that Africans have a lower IQ than Asians.
And then he had to get fired.
And it's like, oh, that's great.
So political correctness might have killed the cure for what might kill me.
Oh, that's fucking great.
Social justice warriors, you are now in my crosshairs because you assholes took a researcher out of the field who was working on a cure to a disease that might come back to me.
So fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
I think also, within any area of research, it's incredibly difficult to detect fraud.
I don't know if you ever came across it.
Again, this is data fraud.
I don't know if you ever came across a cyber-attraction watch.
It sort of monitors The retraction watch is basically like the New York Stock Exchange ticker feed, right?
Diggy, diggy, diggy.
Here's another one.
Diggy, diggy, diggy.
It's like watching the retraction of the New York Times, which sometimes seems bigger than the entire newspaper, but go on.
Right.
So it's basically just tracking in real time retractions that occur at any of the journals where fraud has been discovered and the paper is what's called retracted.
So the researchers, or the journal, puts a big notice on the title of the paper saying this research has been retracted.
So it's been proven to be either non-reproducible or somebody in their group has blown the whistle on them.
To be fair, on the plus side, at least we lost herd immunity out of fear of autism.
And vaccines.
So at least lots of people are dying because illnesses that were formerly protected by herd immunity are no longer protected because people, because of a Lancet article, are afraid to give their kids vaccines because lies.
Right.
I'm on this site often.
I'm interested in this area and what I find is that there's really three different types of papers that are retracted.
There are three different reasons as to why a paper is usually retracted.
The first two, which are usually in the vast minority, are for one, somebody discovered that they made a mistake in their in their methodology when they publish a paper.
And out of sort of the kindness of their own heart, they notify the journal and have the paper retracted.
That's very, very rare that that ever happens.
I mean, when you attract...
And I assume it's because someone's being blackmailed.
Oh, I don't know.
But I mean, it's really a stain on your resume when you have a retracted paper for whatever reason.
I don't think it necessarily matters.
So the second type of retraction is usually a colleague turns somebody else in or notify the journal saying that it was just a bunch of bullshit.
And the vast majority are papers where there is obvious fraud that's just blatant and stupid.
So for example, they'll have an image of their control and then in their treatment it'll just be the same image but just stretched and inverted or whatever.
But the outright fraud, whereas you, like for example, if I were to run a protein blot and just in one of the lanes I don't load any sample, and then I say, well look, in comparison to my control, my protein is gone in this treatment, and I just didn't load any sample.
It's very difficult for anybody to ever detect that as fraud if I publish it, unless they take the time to reproduce the experiment.
And many times, right?
And many times.
One failed, and you reproduce could be an error.
Right, and even still after that, if they can't reproduce it, like I mentioned before, there's all of these layers of deniability.
There's sort of this mindset of you want to produce this plausible deniability in your research.
There's all these layers you can sort of detract them away from you again.
So you sort of say, oh no, it was a cell line, it was a reagent.
So the detection of actual fraud in what's published, it's incredibly difficult to detect because it's almost like it's on the honor system.
Where you're just hoping that the people who are writing these papers are just, you know, at least in some sense adhering to the scientific method, which from my own experience is very rarely ever the case.
And this stuff can, not to put too fine a point on it, but if people put out research that's fraudulent or just false, other people will build upon that research.
Exactly.
And not pursue things that would actually be productive.
It's not just the individual.
It is the discipline as a whole that may charge off in that direction.
And huge amounts of resources then get squandered on something that's fraudulent, whereas they could have been spent on something that would be productive, and cures aren't realized, and treatments aren't realized, and people die as a result.
This isn't just like, well, accounting fraud where people lose money, which is bad enough.
But this is medicine, right?
This is life and death stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
But unfortunately, I think the way the system operates right now, it's sort of, well, it's not sort of, it is that the cheaters win.
If you want to remain within government science, it's gotten to the point where you just have to lower your standards.
If you adhere to the scientific method and you're willing to put out that your hypothesis is false, Well, you're just never going to get published, and the people who distort the truth and publish their half-truths in slightly significance, and... And this brings a different kind of personality into the scientific world.
Yeah, totally.
Absolutely.
People whose conscience is not particularly bothered by this, they'll tend to do quite well, whereas people who have a sensitive moral conscience, I assume yourself, are, you know, wrestling with this kind of dilemma in the dark.
Right.
When I first started at this institution, they outlined quite clearly their ethics in terms of what they expect the researchers to adhere to.
So what constitutes authorship, what constitutes plagiarism, what is considered data fraud.
So they send you to all these different seminars and they very clearly go through examples as to what's what, what you can't do.
What you should be doing, but I mean there there's no nobody implements any sort of standard once you actually get to the bench side and I I mean I've seen it happen here where You know three different people have reported the same person for Committing data fraud and just absolutely nothing is done and it gets to the point where they go to the people who are reporting and to say to them well look we can attempt to
You know, do something about this, but you have to consider the ramifications for the institution.
You have to consider the ramifications for the supervisor.
And it's probably in your best interest to say nothing.
And then nothing.
Also, there are that person may have obviously had grad students or other people that supervised and passed their PhDs.
I mean, it has a huge ripple effect.
Plus, their management, since they've committed to these ethics, if somebody has been openly practicing in violation of these ethics for a certain amount of time, could be years, could be decades, then, yeah, there's a huge snowball effect.
And people, of course, would much rather not have that happen.
Exactly.
So, I mean, there's a lot of standards that are stated, but nothing's really ever followed.
Right, whereas of course, fraud is punished in the marketplace quite strongly.
Like, I mean, if somebody says, I'm going to sell you a computer with an i5 chip and it comes and it's got a 286, right, then I'm going to complain, I'm going to try to get my money back, I'm going to go to the Better Business Bureau, I might even go to a small claims court, whatever, right?
And so, in the marketplace, fraud You know, oh, this is gluten-free, right?
And then I feed it to someone with a gluten allergy, they get really sick.
Well, okay, that's a problem.
So, or in an R&D department, if I say, oh, you know, I've designed this chip that runs three times faster, right?
And they're like, wow, that's fantastic.
You know, here's all this money and here's a great team.
And it turns out that I've changed the data.
Well, you're severely punished.
And I mean, that's jail time.
That's that significant fraud that has resulted in losses to people.
And this is a, and even if it's an accident, like I read a book many years ago by Andy Grove, who was then, I don't know if he's still there, he's probably not, the CEO of Intel, talking about some problems they had with multiplications in spreadsheets in one of their chips or whatever.
Somebody put the wrong calculation in a table on the chip.
This was not fraud.
This was error.
And you know, What they had to do was considerable.
I mean, the recalls that go on for cars for seemingly minor things are huge.
And so, even with accidents, there's a significant punishment in the marketplace, but fraud is enormous.
And, of course, any company that... Fraud results in significant misallocation of precious resources.
And if your competitors... Like, if I'm the guy who says, I've got a chip that runs three times faster when it's actually twice as slow, and everybody pours, you know, five million dollars into this, And that is fraudulent.
Well, the competitor who poured five million dollars into it, actually a better chip, is way ahead of me because we've fallen back and they've leapt ahead and we have all these internal problems to deal with and they have a streamlined operation.
Plus, we then lose people to them because people are like, well, turns out this guy cooked all the data.
I've lost my motivation to work at this company, so I'm going to go jump ship, right?
So fraud is really significantly and badly punished.
Strongly punished.
Badly punished sounds like not punished at all.
Strongly punished in a sort of free market environment and doesn't mean that it never happens and so on and so on, but it is very inefficient and requires and it results in significant misallocation of precious resources, which because there's no voluntarism, no market, no competition in the area that you're in, well, it's a Soviet factory, right?
I mean, you know, they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.
Right.
Well, not many people around here are fans of the free market and it's interesting.
But it's interesting, if you look sort of, I sort of do this side-by-side comparison with the biotechnology field, which is usually the companies that provide us with the reagents and tools to assess whatever we're studying.
And just the amount of innovation and new technology that comes from the biotechnology field is just absolutely astounding to me, compared to us and what we're studying.
It's just, it's not even comparable.
And so I was kind of... Why don't you go there?
I'm considering it, actually.
Well, I just finished my PhD not too long ago.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
I guess I wish the work that went into it I could be a little more proud of, but it's something that I completed nonetheless.
But yeah, I'm considering it.
So I'm sort of considering either medicine or just getting out of science completely.
Well, I mean, I think that the biotech companies, it's not like they're not doing science.
They're just not doing government science.
No, sorry, that's not what I meant.
Sorry, yeah, sorry, I didn't hear that properly.
Get out of government science.
Yeah, exactly.
It's not as easy as you would think, unfortunately, to find a job in the biotechnology field.
But, yeah, it's definitely something that, for me, that's worth looking into.
I forget where I was going with this.
Why is it to get a job in the biotech field if you've got the education and the drive?
I'm not sure.
I find that the jobs just aren't really there when I look for them.
It's almost as though I feel as though I'm overqualified for a lot of them, which a lot of people with PhDs tend to have a problem with.
They become a bit of a flight risk for the employer.
It's a bit more difficult than I would have thought to find a job in biotech.
But it's not something I have exhausted, for sure.
But the good thing is that once you get a job, you'll be facing less competition for it.
So, the stuff to get in, you know, it's really tough to be the lead in a movie.
Yes, but once you get that status, not a lot of people competing for the leads in the movie.
Right.
So, what sort of brought about this question in the first place was, I work at this building that's a relatively new research center that was funded by some rich benefactor.
And they often have these, I guess, tours that go on for the public.
They come and see what we're doing here.
And when I was working, they had one of these tour groups coming around, and these people, I didn't know who they were, but they just came up to me and started talking to me, and they said, They're like, oh, we're right near a hospital.
We're technically part of a hospital.
But they come up to me and said, oh, my son's just recently underwent some traumatic brain injury.
And it gives us so much hope to see young scientists like yourself actively working for a cure.
And I just think to myself, oh my God, if these people actually knew Well, it's useful to some people.
year.
They would just have no hope whatsoever.
I guess it just really bothered me because I don't think what I've done and what I'm doing is necessarily useful to anybody.
Anyway, that's sort of where the question stemmed from.
Well, it's useful to some people.
It was certainly useful in terms of your sponsor, your supervisor, sorry, actually not just sponsor.
You may sponsor it as an addiction, but your supervisor, you know, it helps him get a paycheck and your work probably help people get grants to me.
It's useful to someone.
I get that point.
but I guess useful in actually generating something that would be considered useful to society as a whole.
Not so much.
So, yeah.
No, and listen, there's a movie called Shadowlands.
is It's not background.
I mean, Anthony Hopkins, such a great actor, it's worth just watching it for him.
But there's the academics, right?
The academics, Oxford or Cambridge or whatever, and they have the big flowing robes and they bark at their pupils and all that, and they spend time in the library wearing out their glasses.
And Anthony Hopkins says to another academic, do you ever just feel this unbearable sense of waste?
Yep.
And the other academic says, of course.
And then they both basically shrug and go back to their books, you know.
It's like the shortest parody of a Russian play, you know, one of these 19th century god-awful Russian plays.
It goes something like this.
I believe it's been 10 years since Uncle Ivanov died.
No?
No, it's been 12.
Yes, you're right.
And still, nothing has changed.
The end!
And so you have to, I think, it's wise to be careful of embedding yourself in a system that you become dependent on where there is that increasing sense of waste.
You have a powerful intellect and your communication skills But you have a considerable and formidable intellect, and I view that as gold in the general gravel of humanity.
And I think that intelligence, as you know, is largely heritable.
You have inherited a gift for intellectual work and hard work.
It's not easy to get a PhD, particularly in the sciences.
And I think as the person who has received an accidental gift through genetics, There is a case to be made that using it to serve humanity the best is not a bad way to spend your life.
It's not like you have to or you've got to do it in a way that makes you miserable.
My case is it's win-win.
I think what I'm doing is using my intellect to best serve humanity and I love it.
Do something you hate for the sake of serving the board collective who can't match your achievements.
I don't mean that.
I think that if you take the safer, more predictable route, your life has a great danger of becoming futile and useless and a waste.
Secondly, you'll be around people who have made that choice and have no problem with you making that choice.
And that, to me, is worse than the prison of the lab, is the prison of the other prisoners of the lab.
Right.
Well, I mean, currently I have an open offer of admission from the medical school.
I'm considering that, but I don't know.
I find that a lot of people who finish their PhD are not necessarily enthralled with what's next.
They just send it.
Well, I guess medical school is the next best thing, so they head in that direction.
I can't wait to prescribe SSRIs for bad parenting.
Exactly.
There's a lot of problems there as well.
I'm sort of at a crossroads right now.
I guess it was reflected in my question is considering the morality of the entire situation.
I mean, I guess, well, let's just deal with that.
That's very brief.
Okay.
Shockingly, but but the reality is just in a moral system, because it relies on coercion.
Right.
Right.
I mean, that the people are not funded voluntarily.
Right.
And it has struck me, you know, when you were talking to The people whose kid was ill.
Now, of course, if you were in a free market environment, working hard for a cure, even if you spent your life and failed, that's a good way to spend your life.
Because you will have at least closed off avenues that other people shouldn't go.
There be dragons!
Okay, let's not say all over there.
I'm sorry that guy got eaten by dragons, but at least we know enough not to go over there, right?
So, you know, it's that great Richard Dawkins thing.
It's like it's so incomprehensible, it's not even wrong.
It doesn't even block.
It's just so bad, right?
So, if you spend your life Trying to do something noble in a voluntary environment and failing, you have spent your life well.
Not as well as if you'd succeeded but well.
That, of course, is the view from the outside.
The taxpayers are like, wow, it's great that these people are working so hard for the cure, right?
And they don't know, right?
And I've had some friends who've gone through this sort of process before, and so when people, you know, when I criticize this stuff, you're anti-science!
I'm not.
I'm anti-violence.
I'm anti-coercion.
And what happens in government science now is the result of taxpayers being forced to fund things and all of the inefficiency and fraud and corruption that often, though not always, results from that kind of situation.
Of course, I think a lot of the great scientific advancements, if you look at them, did not come out of government labs.
Sorry, it's just the way it was.
The two big ones of the 19th and 20th century came out of people who weren't even employed in government science.
Darwin with the theory of evolution and Einstein with the theory of relativity.
One was a private naturalist and the other was working in a goddamn patent office, for God's sakes!
I don't know if you know the father of genetics, Gregor Mendel, who was just some priest with pea plants.
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And those are the people I want doing science, not career bureaucrats who don't get what they want and end up typing new crap into spreadsheets.
I mean, that's not the kind of people I want people doing science.
Like, like, I hope and I think that the world says that they want me doing philosophy because I live, eat and breathe philosophy.
It's what I think about after my family and friends the most in the world and sometimes To the detriment of those things, more than that, right?
I mean, I live, eat, sleep and breathe this stuff.
I was doing it for years before I got paid a penny.
In fact, it cost me a lot to do it in terms of education and books and kind of lost social relationships and so on, right?
So, I'm so ridiculously enthusiastic and dedicated towards philosophy That you don't need taxpayers to force me to have a chair in philosophy for me to bring value to the world.
In fact, if taxpayers were funding me having a chair in philosophy, I'd be trying to argue whether nouns exist in the objective, new or demeanable realm of Plato's Ars Fats.
I mean, it would be completely useless.
I am facing the world because, you know, when I say it's really great to develop cures for stuff, yeah, okay.
I'm trying to develop cures for evil, sort of the job of the moral philosopher.
Hey, got a plague of evil?
Send out the bat signal and the bold one will come out.
I mean, that's what I should be.
This is exactly what I should be doing with my life.
I'm like the drummer for U2 in Rattle & Hum.
This is it, man.
This is what I should be doing with my life.
This is the best service of my considerable intellect.
for humanity and I am humble in my approach to it and grateful that people are interested and work very hard to make it engaging and entertaining and enjoyable.
So philosophy is happening and people say, "Well, you know, but it's not a doctorate in philosophy in an ivory tower teaching a bunch of bored post graduates who only hope is to get the same $150,000 a year work three days a week every five years you get a sabbatical and summer's off job." No!
That would be a terrible way!
People are like, wow, you should be a teacher!
You should go be a doctor of philosophy!
It's like, oh, so I could teach, say, five people instead of five million people.
Yeah, good plan!
Good plan!
You should build one iPhone.
Steve Jobs?
You should run for office.
Oh, so that way I have to have stupid people believe me rather than intelligent people understand me.
I don't think that's going to really enhance.
Ah, for my political speech I give you a rousing rendition of universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
I think I'll vote for him if he stops talking.
It's not anti-science, it's anti-coercion, and you are in an environment that is funded by coercion.
It doesn't mean you have to leave.
It doesn't mean you have to leave, because my argument has always been, if you are honest with yourself, and I'm not saying you're not, right, but if anybody out there is honest with themselves, anything's permitted, as long as you're honest with yourself.
We just had this conversation, Cheryl's not out yet, with a British teacher who was talking about the same sort of conversation.
So you can stay if you want, but there are particular consequences to it, which is that the money that you're going to get paid by is not there by choice.
Right.
You know, the woman you're dating is there at gunpoint.
If you can still enjoy the date, OK, but I don't think you're that kind of person myself.
So, you know, it's like Chairman Mao wrote a poem.
Who'd like to applaud?
It's the best poem ever!
Like the Chinese communist seal pups, you have to clap or die, right?
It's like In Gulag Apicalago, as I've mentioned before, there's this terrifying but real scene where some party functionary was giving a speech and everybody was clapping and their hands were hurting and turning into hamburgers but nobody wanted to be the first to stop clapping because you might end up in a gulag.
And so the money that you would be receiving is not there by choice, it's there by coercion and you're surrounded by people who are really okay with that, in fact really like it.
And if you like the free market and if you like volunteerism and you like Uncoercive human interactions, you're going to have to shut up a lot for the next 50 years if that's your goal.
And I think life is too short to do a lot of shutting up.
Yeah, no, I understand that.
And I guess a lot of researchers here, they don't understand that type of perspective in terms of the free market doing anything.
And it's sort of like, oh, well, what we're doing is too important to leave in the hands of the free market.
Oh, come on.
This is part of the lying.
I'm sorry to bring you up short on this, man.
They know exactly what it's all about, which is why they dislike it so much.
They know exactly.
It's like, oh, well, in the free market, I'd have to be productive.
I'd have to be accountable.
And the free market requires you curb your ego.
And people say to me, oh, Steph, you're so egotistical.
You're so arrogant.
It's like, I don't like the cut of your sophistry, Jib, my friend.
No, I mean, the idea that I'm somehow in charge of an entirely voluntary conversation.
I'm a dictator of, hey, Steph, you want and Don't stay if you don't want to.
I have the ultimate control of, hey, can you click on my head or not?
It's really your choice.
It's like the least empowering dictatorship in the known universe.
Now, who's arrogant are people like, I don't know, political leaders who think that they could just wave their pens and wave their guns and solve all social problems.
Me just saying, hey, come and be entertained and hopefully enlightened by some challenging philosophical conversations and ideas if you want to, and pay if you want to, and if you don't, I guess you won't.
That's not arrogance, that's real humility, which I have to continue to provide after eight Or nine, what sometimes feels like long years.
I have to keep providing new insights, new intelligence, because there are people who donate, who've been listening from the beginning, and there are new people, and there are people who are very experienced, and people who are not experienced, and people who are very knowledgeable in philosophy, and people who aren't knowledgeable in philosophy.
I've got to spread everything out.
I've got to do this dance where I'm like teaching postgraduate and kindergarten at the same time, in the same venue.
There are people who like swearing, there are people who don't like swearing, there are people who like the rants, there are people who hate the rants, and I've got to balance it all out.
Every single time I get in front of a mic or a camera, that is the real challenge.
Knowing who to talk to and who not to talk to, what's going to be a good opportunity, what's not going to be a good opportunity, what we're going to focus on, what we're not going to focus on, who we're willing to alienate and who we can't alienate yet because we're still building a case.
These are all very complicated stuff.
There's a lot of stuff going on.
You know, hey, that duck is just mysteriously gliding along the lake.
It's like, no, there's a lot of paddling going on, you just can't see it.
You are around very arrogant people who are so arrogant that the idea that someone, and insecure, and insecure.
Arrogance and insecurity tend to go hand in hand.
Like vanity and insecurity are two sides of the same coin.
Because if they genuinely believed that they had something of incredible value to offer people, they'd be entrepreneurs.
They know that they're producing useless crap That people don't want.
And the reason that they don't want to go on the free market.
Is that then they'd have to work for a living.
Like work and produce.
I'm not saying they don't work.
Work and produce value.
That is determined by the customer.
That is the humiliation sometimes.
And the humility of dealing with the free market.
Is that.
I can't.
Like I've done some shows.
Which I think are the best.
That get like eight and a half views.
Like someone didn't even up click.
They got so.
Right.
Oh I clicked.
I thought that was porn.
Worst porn ever.
I thought it was.
And then there are shows that I thought.
You know like.
Like the European migrants crisis one, I just got fired up and did 15 minutes and it's like, I don't know, 600, 700,000 views on YouTube.
Other stuff we work on for two weeks and we're lucky to break 30.
And it's like, come on people!
Don't you know quality?
Well, no.
You have to humble yourself before the free choices of free people.
And that requires, you know, you've got to subjugate yourself to what people want.
Give the people what they want.
You know, it's like, Can you play your one hit from the 80s?
It's like, you know, I've written 200 songs since then.
No!
Story of your enslavement again and again.
And so that, I think, is a challenge.
And I think that people instinctively know that out there in the free market, they're going to have to humble their egos and they're going to have to serve the customer.
And it doesn't matter what they think is great.
They can make the case to the customer.
The customer can say no.
And you have to interest people who are busy with other things.
And they have to provide value to the customer.
And that means to serve someone else's needs, often at the expense of your own ego and what you would necessarily prefer in the moment.
That's natural, and it's healthy.
That's healthy.
I mean, it's kind of narcissistic otherwise.
So that's, I would say, well, they don't really, if they don't really know much about the free market, the test is do they react with irritation when you bring it up?
If they do, Then they know.
Like, if they were bored, like you said, oh, I don't know, I studied this really interesting hilltop language singing style from Huanan in China or whatever, right?
They'd be like, oh, okay, well, I guess I'll hear, why don't you rip off a ditty for me, right?
And so if it's something they genuinely don't know, I would assume as scientists they have more than a tiny bone of Curiosity in their body, so they'd be curious.
But you know what happens when you bring up this kind of stuff.
They're immediately annoyed and irritated and superior and aristocratic about it.
That's because they know deep down and that's what I don't want you to lie to yourself about.
I'm not saying you were lying.
I'm just saying that that is the reality.
When people react with irritation and hostility to a particular argument, they can't then also claim that they're ignorant of all its implications.
Okay, well, I guess I'll leave you with two pieces of gossip, as you requested.
Oh, man, you old bottom cat!
I thought I wasn't going to get any gossip out of you at all.
I thought I was going to have to get you drunk!
They're not that great, but I mean, they're sort of... When they happen, I sort of question, like, what am I even doing here?
I mean, like one of my colleagues, who sort of shares a lot of my frustrations, she was doing measurements with her cells or whatever, in their contraption, And when you're done with them, you throw them in the garbage.
And once they're out of the tissue culture hood, they're no longer sterile.
And that's, of course, a big concern.
So she threw them in the garbage.
Her supervisor comes around and says, no, the measurements weren't completed.
And she told her to take the cells out of the garbage and just continue along as though nothing ever happened.
And I guarantee you, if they got the result that they wanted, they would include it in whatever publication they're working for.
And I've seen, well I've heard, I know these, what has occurred where a group that I work alongside with, they were studying a particular protein.
So when you express proteins within cells, it's from an expression in plasmid and so they published this paper saying it was a particular protein and then, you know, two or three years later they had a new graduate student and her first job was sequence.
the plasma that she was working with.
And lo and behold, it wasn't even the protein that they thought it was.
And of course, this was a big concern for them at the time.
But their publication, of course, isn't retracted.
They just said it's taken care of.
And that's the last I ever heard of it.
So, I mean.
They said it's taken care of?
Right.
I mean, that's.
Did the graduate student ever show up again?
Or did he find himself in a Clinton-style self-suitcase packing trip to nowhere?
No, I haven't.
That just sounds like.
Don't worry.
it's been clear off we found it We found a way to liquefy him and drink him through a slurpy straw.
I mean, that just sounds so Mafia style, you know.
It's taken care of.
Anyway, go ahead.
Well, that's pretty much it.
I mean, I guess if anyone... No, you said two pieces of gossip.
That was two.
I mean, the first one was the garbage cells and the second one... Oh, okay, okay.
Well, I mean, I guess if anybody who works here ever comes across this, I really appreciate it.
You're welcome back anytime.
Do keep us posted on what you're up to and of course if there's anything we can do to help, we certainly will.
But I think that it's going to require a fair amount of ignoring what's morally obvious to be genuinely happy in that environment and I think that comes at the cost of happiness.
Keep yourself out there as far as opportunities go.
I don't think you're exactly jumping to the free market in Canada if you go into medicine.
That was my concern.
Well, no, actually, that was my concern was when I was an undergrad, I always wanted to do – I always wanted to be a doctor.
But, I mean, I've dealt with the Canadian medical system and it's horrors.
And, I mean, not too long ago, I had to go to the U.S. for – for treatment, and just the comparison, it was just mind-blowing.
It was just absolutely mind-blowing.
Doctor came to my hotel room.
Oh, it's just insane.
I was just shocked that, I mean, the specialist I was seeing was actually on time.
You know, I got an MRI done within a day, whereas up here, it's just you hope for the best, you cross your fingers, and whatever specialist you... Well, no, actually, if you cross your paws, you're okay.
Like, if you're a dog, you can get an MRI the same day.
If you're an actual human taxpayer, you've got to wait months.
No, I mean, I won't go into details, but yeah, the guy, the doctor sat down with me for like half an hour, diagrammed everything that was going on, everything was on time.
Everything was great.
I didn't have to go back into the hospital.
The doctor came to my house call in a hotel I was staying at to take out the shunt and asked me how I was doing.
There was follow-up.
The paperwork was perfect.
If I have a cold, I'm like, can I fly to Oklahoma?
You know, it's going to be cheaper and easier than me driving to my doctor here.
But anyway, I actually have a pretty good doctor GP here.
But yeah, the moment you start going to specialist land, it's like, yeah, good luck.
But thanks, Matt.
It was a really, really great chat.
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