Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Where has all the science gone? The 290th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Transcript

Where has all the science gone? The 290th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 1:00:04
  Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast live stream episode number 280.
• 1:00:12
  Not likely to be prime. I mean, what we just talked about this.
• 1:00:17
  Yes, it's 290 290 as I said, also not prime.(...) All right. Yep. We did just talk about this. It's been a long morning for me.
• 1:00:29
  I got up at six. It was so busy doing stuff. I even forgot to shave. So I'm sort of going with the stubble look today.
• 1:00:34
  I got up before six and by close to six was walking on the 20, which is not a great place to walk from Anticortis to the ferry terminal. Walked into the ferry terminal this morning. You met me at the other end. Here I am.
• 1:00:48
  Here you are.
• 1:00:49
  Having had a slight delay in an airline yesterday that caused everything else to fall apart because that is one of the giant disadvantages of living on an island.
• 1:00:57
  Yeah, it is. Many advantages to living on an island. Few disadvantages. Yeah.(...) All right. It is 290. It is 290. Prime as you said.
• 1:01:08
  Prime ish.
• 1:01:10
  Yeah.
• 1:01:12
  We are going to talk about the fashion show that Elon tweeted, the AI generated fashion show that Elon tweeted out, which has implications, as you might imagine.
• 1:01:25
  We're also going to talk about the interesting stance that Michael Tracy has taken relative to the Epstein case and in a related way, relative to the case of the Israeli who was let out on $10,000 bond in Nevada and allowed to keep his passport and predictably fled back to Israel.
• 1:01:51
  In any case, there's some interesting stuff to be said there as well.(...) So we're going to cover those stories and then we're going to cover the state of science as I don't want to say revealed, but as partially revealed by a very new interesting paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is a very prestigious journal in which they allege that a lot of work, even in very prestigious journals, isn't what it appears to be, that it's flat out fraud.
• 1:02:18
  Yeah. They argue strongly against the perception widely held in science that scientific fraud while it exists is rare and primarily the act, the actions of a few bad actors. They push back against that narrative and I think they're right.
• 1:02:37
  Do you know where that belief is not widely held?
• 1:02:40
  You're on the DarkHorse podcast where we have been pointing out just how much probable fraud there was in the literature. And in any case, those two things are going to meet today. You've got scientific evidence of fraud and you've got our model of what's been going on and we will see how they match.
• 1:02:55
  Indeed.
• 1:02:56
  Indeed. So join us on Locals where there's a watch party going on right now.
• 1:03:00
  And before we get into those stories that Bret was just talking about, I almost called you Zach. Apologies, I usually don't do that on camera. I'm not going to call you Maddie.
• 1:03:10
  My parents used to call me by the dog's name.
• 1:03:12
  Yeah. No, I have not done that. Having three of you Y crown with some types in the family does mean that I have occasionally called each of you by the other's name.
• 1:03:21
  These things happen.
• 1:03:22
  It happens.
• 1:03:24
  No disrespect ever meant as you know.
• 1:03:27
  We have a sign of respect in my case.
• 1:03:30
  For all three of you. Yes. So before we get to the stories, we have to pay the rent. We've got three sponsors as always.
• 1:03:36
  We're at the top of the hour. None others throughout the podcast. Three sponsors who as always offer products or services that we really truly vouch for. Actually, in this case, it's all products. So without further ado, Bret, you're up first.
• 1:03:50
  All right. I care. Wait. I care. Wait.
• 1:03:52
  You're supposed to go in the kitchen, the mighty kitchen. You're not. All right.
• 1:03:59
  Maybe I'll just get to the ad. I thought it would have been cool. We could have spontaneously broken into song. Who knows where it might have.
• 1:04:05
  I thought you were going to do both parts.
• 1:04:08
  You know, I have been known to do both parts, but it sort of seems weird that you're kind of like talking to each other, but it's sort of reminiscent actually of this genre of little video that people put out where they play all the characters. Right.
• 1:04:20
  Exactly.
• 1:04:20
  Your shirt.
• 1:04:21
  Totally.
• 1:04:22
  I really dig. I think that's a super cool innovation and it's beautiful stuff as is Caraway.
• 1:04:29
  Our first sponsor this week, Heather, is Caraway, which makes high quality, non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
• 1:04:35
  Repangers to DarkHorse are well familiar with some of the myriad ways that modern life puts our health at risk, including exposures to agricultural chemicals like atrazine and glyphosate, now sprayed on forests, fluoride in our water, food dyes, seed oils, and the hazards of nonstick coatings on cookware and bakeware.(...) Decades. Mmm. Decades is that word.(...) Decades before we started giving seed oils the side eye, we threw out all of our cookware that contained Teflon. Teflon is toxic. A single scratch in a Teflon cookware pan can release over 9,000 microplastic particles, none of which you should be ingesting, many of which you will if you cook with Teflon.
• 1:05:13
  Over 70% of cookware in the United States is made with Teflon and 97% of Americans have toxic chemicals from nonstick cookware in their blood. When you cook with Teflon, it only takes a half minute for a pan to get hot enough to start releasing toxins. Enter Caraway. Caraway kitchenware is crafted with sustainable non-toxic materials like FSC certified Birchwood premium stainless steel enameled cast iron, naturally slick ceramic, and more to help you create a safer, healthier home. And they look fantastic. Those materials really look nice.
• 1:05:45
  They're beautiful.
• 1:05:46
  Caraway makes several lines of nonstick cookware and bakeware. Our favorites are their stainless steel line and their enameled cast iron. All of Caraway's products are free from Forever Chemicals and their new enameled cast iron is offered in six stylish and beautiful colors.(...) These pots are strong and highly scratch resistant. The last generations we use enameled cast iron pots to cook stews and soups and even braise large cuts of meat or roast chickens because one of the great advantages of enameled cast iron is its uniform heat retention.
• 1:06:15
  Yes, which also means you can leave things on the stove and they remain hot.
• 1:06:20
  Easy to use and beautiful too. You can't go wrong. We just sent Zach off to his...
• 1:06:24
  (...) We just sent Zach off to set up his first college apartment period. It's not his first apartment. I was fearing the sentence, but I had no need. It's all right there. His first college apartment with some beautiful functional Caraway cookware knowing that he will be cooking with it for a long time to come. There is no better time to make a healthy swap to Caraway. Our favorite cookware set will save you $150 versus buying the items individually. Plus, if you visit carawayhome.com slash DH10 like Dark Horse 10, you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. The deal is exclusive for our listeners, so visit carawayhome.com slash DH10 or use the code DH10 at checkout. Not sure if it matters, but DH is capitalized.
• 1:07:11
  Caraway non-toxic cookware made modern.
• 1:07:15
  Awesome. Our second sponsor today is Masa Chips, which is a perfect follow on to Caraway.(...) Masa makes delicious, healthy chips that aren't going to make you sick because they're made with real whole ingredients the way that all of our food used to be made. These chips are fried in 100% beef tallow. You know what?
• 1:07:30
  I was going to bring a bag, but we ate them.
• 1:07:32
  Yep.
• 1:07:33
  We do have some more, but I had a bet and they're gone.
• 1:07:37
  They've caught us without our hand in the cookie jar because it's empty. There's no point in putting your hand in.
• 1:07:42
  We do have a QR code on the screen here to get some for you and yours too will go more quickly maybe than you were planning on it, but you'll feel good after eating them. I'm getting there, but unlike most chips, most things that read as snack food, these are actually good for you and you actually feel good after eating them.
• 1:08:02
  Masa chips are made with real whole ingredients the way that all of our food used to be made. They're fried in 100% beef tallow, no seed oils ever. You can taste the difference and your body can feel the difference.(...) Because health is declining fast, chronic illnesses, obesity, autoimmune diseases have exploded. Why? In large part because we've swapped real food for cheap industrial substitutes. All chips and fries used to be cooked in tallow, but in the 1990s, corporations switched to cheaper fats, specifically to seed oils.
• 1:08:28
  Seed oils include soybean, canola, sunflower, and corn, among others, and are often labeled vegetable oils as if that makes them healthy. In fact, seed oils are increasingly linked to metabolic health issues and inflammation, and today's seed oils make up 20% of the average American's daily calories. 20% not 20% of their fat calories, 20% of total calories taken in by the average American is from seed oils.
• 1:08:49
  Industrial lubricants are now making up 20%.
• 1:08:52
  And we wonder why we're sick.(...) In addition to seed oils, big food companies use artificial dyes, stabilizers, and other toxins. In contrast, Masa chips have just three simple ingredients.
• 1:09:02
  Organic, nixtamalized corn, sea salt, and 100% grass-fed beef tallow.(...) Absolutely no seed oils, artificial dyes, or additives ever.(...) Beef tallow is nutrient-rich, nourishing, and makes food taste incredible. Masa chips are crunchy and delicious, and after you eat them, you feel satisfied, satiated, and energetic.(...) Masa also supports American farms and regenerative agriculture, ranches that revitalize soil health, boost biodiversity, and protect ecosystems. Choosing real food heals us and our environment, which in turn makes us even more healthy.(...) Masa is champion and clean, American-grown ingredients, transparency, and authenticity.
• 1:09:40
  Try them with salsa, or goat cheese, or a spicy pepper jam. Smother them in beans and cheese, or just eat them straight out of the bag. They're delicious.(...) Masa chips are delivered by 10,000s of customers and have been endorsed by industry-leading health and nutrition experts. Ready to give Masa a try? Go to masachips.com slash darkhorse and use code "darkhorse" for 25% off your first order. That's M-A-S-A-C-H-I-P-S.
• 1:10:11
  That's M-A-S-A-C-H-I-P-S. Our final sponsor this week is ARMRA Colostrum, an ancient bioactive whole food. The original mammalian colostrum is the first food that every mammal eats. It is produced in the first two or three days of an infant's life and is nutritionally different from the milk that comes in afterwards. Colostrum serves many vital functions, including that of protecting and strengthening the mucosal barriers of infants before their own systems mature. Modern living breaks down many of our mucosal and immune barriers. In contrast, ARMRA Colostrum balances and strengthens, helping to create a seal that guards against inflammation and everyday toxins, pollutants, and threats. ARMRA Colostrum is a bioactive whole food with over 400 functional nutrients, including but not limited to immunoglobulins, antioxidants, minerals, and prebiotics.(...) Bovine colostrum has been used to treat cancer, heart disease, and rheumatoid arthritis among many other ailments. It is a general anti-inflammatory.
• 1:11:45
  Its use in adults has been clinically shown to increase lean muscle mass, improve athletic performance and recovery time, support healthy digestion, and reduce allergy symptoms.(...) ARMRA Colostrum starts with sustainably sourced colostrum from grass-fed cows from their co-op of dairy farms in the U.S. and they source only the surplus colostrum after calves are fully fed. Unlike most colostrums on the market, which use heat pasteurization that depletes nutrient potency, ARMRA Colostrum uses an innovative process that purifies and preserves the integrity of hundreds of bioactive nutrients while removing castean and fat to guarantee the highest potency and bioavailability.(...) The quality control is far above industry standards, including being certified to be glyphosate-free.
• 1:12:23
  People who have used ARMRA's colostrum have reported clearer skin, faster and thicker hair growth, and better mental concentration. In addition, people using ARMRA's colostrum have noticed a decrease in muscle soreness after exercise, better sleep, and fewer sugar cravings. You don't want to put it in hot liquids, but it goes great in anything cool, like in smoothies. Try it with loads of fresh mint, raw milk, fantastic honey, and cacao, and nibs, or just with raw milk, frozen strawberries, and honey.
• 1:12:46
  It's amazing. ARMRA Colostrum is the real deal.(...) ARMRA has a special offer for the DarkHorse audience.
• 1:12:51
  Receive 15% off your first order. Go to tryARMRA.com slash DarkHorse or enter DarkHorse to get 15% off your first order. That's t-r-y-a-r-m-r-a dot com slash DarkHorse.
• 1:13:03
  Excellent.
• 1:13:05
  So, before you embark on your topical stories of the week, I will say that I was just getting back to the island today, having hoped to get back to the island last night,(...) because I was seeing our boys off for their second year of college, their first year here in the United States. And it is bittersweet, of course, but I'm excited, really excited for both of them. I'm not going to say more about where they are and what it's like just now, but I'm really excited for them in this new adventure.
• 1:13:39
  Yeah, they are preparing for their future. And this podcast is strangely going to be all about the future and making sure that it is not a hellscape.
• 1:13:48
  This episode.
• 1:13:50
  Yes, this podcast episode is really what I meant. I didn't quite quite nail the clarity. Hopefully it's the last hiccup of this episode.
• 1:14:00
  All right, so should we start with Elon?
• 1:14:02
  (...) Let's start with Elon. OK. OK, so Elon put out a tweet in which he quotes another tweet showing what is claimed to be and certainly appears to be a what Elon called a fashion show that showcases models, women who are the creation of AI wearing women stuff.
• 1:14:31
  I mean, so maybe we should show here's the tweet. And here you can see that's a chat GPT version.
• 1:14:37
  (...) Here we got Gemini.
• 1:14:41
  This is Grox version.
• 1:14:44
  Deep seek.
• 1:14:47
  And Claude. All right.(...) So.
• 1:14:53
  This gives you some sense of the the coming dystopia. And I wanted to just simply.
• 1:15:04
  Point to an interpretation here.
• 1:15:07
  I don't know the details, but I feel fairly confident that what we are beginning to see is effectively.(...) Women are having men replaced by AI and men are having women replaced by AI in a sense that matters deeply.
• 1:15:29
  So let's take the obvious. The LLMs that produce knowledge insight more rapidly with no cajoling or dealmaking or whatever, which are doing a lot of work that was traditionally male. Obviously, that's now joint work of the two sexes.
• 1:15:51
  But there is a way in which the AIs are producing a product that makes the desirability of a mate and all of the complexities that come along with it a male mate less obvious.
• 1:16:07
  Less obvious.
• 1:16:10
  And it's. Troubling also for another reason that I think many people have not connected the dots on.
• 1:16:18
  Elon's a very brilliant guy.(...) He is invested in humanoid robots and the advantage of humanoid robots.(...) He is correct. Is that you know it's a cruddy design for a robot. If you wanted to build a robot to do stuff, you could come up with a lot better design than a gangly bipedal robot with, you know, yeah, a robot doesn't have to have the same constraints that an evolved bipedal human does.
• 1:16:51
  Right. And in fact, you would think first order, you would think the beauty of robots is that you're not constrained by evolutionary history. You're totally free to design whatever, you know, I mean, a quadcopter drone isn't constrained by the history of helicopters. And we see that they can do all sorts of things. So there's there's a beauty to being completely liberated from what's called historical contingency.
• 1:17:19
  But Elon has wisely looked past that wisely from a business perspective and created plausible human like robots. Of course, many others have to.
• 1:17:32
  But the basic point, as I understand it, is that a humanoid robot, once the AI is of a sufficient quality in terms of what the robot can think, can actually sub into any job a human can do.
• 1:17:48
  So all of the stuff that you think that, well, you know, robots aren't going to, you know, get into your crawlspace and fix your plumbing.(...) Yeah, they are.
• 1:17:58
  Of course, they are. Right. In fact, they won't even complain about your crawlspace. So.
• 1:18:03
  So anyway, the point is there is a way in which technology is about to obsolete men across a wide number of things, including the things that men uniquely do. Right.
• 1:18:16
  The warfare stuff, at least the fighting on the ground stuff, they're going to, you know, the going into, you know, giant sewers and blasting away the fat deposits.(...) Yeah, of course, it'll be a robot. So anyway, that's a kind of obsolescence. And there's another kind of obsolescence that is coming for women.
• 1:18:36
  And it has to do with, unfortunately, the.
• 1:18:43
  The default that men have in terms of women and sexuality, where they default into a mode where women who are sexually willing are viewed, are prized. If they do not require commitment because men have a reproductive strategy that works that way. Now, in the case of women using birth control, it doesn't work that in that way. But nonetheless, men are wired to seek this. And so one can easily imagine a future in which everybody is scratching their own itch, whatever that itch is, without having to partner with someone. And that it is, of course, technologically, you know, in a world of surrogates where providing a womb is a service that can be procured on the market, as it were.
• 1:19:47
  The idea of being freed from romantic need or even sexual need by the AI revolution. By the AI revolution is truly frightening.(...) It suggests a kind of bifurcation of the species that we already see hints of in things like the mug towel movement.
• 1:20:10
  So I mean, these are they're obviously related, but these are two different things, the humanoid robots and the AI.
• 1:20:16
  Toby, our younger son, has shared with me a number of the epithets that people are coming up with for the humanoid robots.
• 1:20:23
  And I am sorry that I can't remember almost any of them right now, but the favorite is his go to his clankers.
• 1:20:30
  And I think I actually it's the first time in my life where I have heard people heard of people joyfully, frivolously coming up with epithets for some group and I won't say population because that suggests organic life and felt like, yeah, you know, we need we need actually(...) to to be able to to be explicitly pointing out the otherness of this thing.
• 1:20:56
  And I don't want this to become a semantic discussion or, you know, pin picking apart little pieces of language.
• 1:21:03
  But right at the top, we started talking.
• 1:21:06
  I objected to use the word women like that's not women. We didn't see women there just like trans women aren't women.
• 1:21:12
  And part of how the trans madness took over and was able to be successful and still is in some corners, even though it does seem to be waning in many was that those who weren't paying close attention became confused because trans women.
• 1:21:28
  Well, it has women in it. I like I know that a pineapple isn't an apple, but that's not the same thing. So trans women must be a woman. And of course, a trans woman is a woman exactly as much as a pineapple is an apple. And so you're using the word woman for an A.I.
• 1:21:41
  generated image that is designed to titillate and look like a woman,(...) I think, I think facilitates us going down that same slippery slope. And so, you know, the humanoid robots are clankers or, you know, I can't remember any of the other terms that he's using. You can generate a list, but he had some he had some good ones. But, you know, clankers.
• 1:22:01
  And I don't I don't actually know what we should be calling the, you know, the titillating.
• 1:22:08
  You know, A.I. erotica that we see in that fashion show, but women ain't.
• 1:22:16
  Yeah, women, they ain't is exactly right.
• 1:22:21
  It is a struggle to figure out exactly how to describe them, because in some sense what they are. So first of all, I will admit a piece of ignorance here.
• 1:22:33
  It is not a direct line from my perspective as to how you get from LLM A.I. to image A.I. Yeah, it's something I should look deeply into. Now, it's possible that you can do it by doing the same trick with language that you do. You might do it with pixels.
• 1:22:53
  Or the question is, well, what will the next pixel look like?
• 1:22:56
  It seems to me that, you know, that could you can get a lot of missteps.
• 1:23:01
  But presumably there is some way in which these two things are connected because one of them, the image version and the video version has happened right on the heels of the LLM version.(...) But nonetheless, what you are getting is a.
• 1:23:21
  I don't want to I don't want to caricature it, but you are getting a reflection of what.
• 1:23:31
  The average consumer of this stuff wants, right? This machine is catering to your.
• 1:23:45
  Untutored desires and.
• 1:23:51
  On the one hand, you can see why that would be a total winner from the point of view of the market, but.
• 1:23:58
  The key to the human species is partnership around.
• 1:24:06
  Sex and marriage and the partnering in the raising of offspring that results from the navigation of a space that is, I swear to you, adaptive in the fact that you don't get exactly what you want. That you have to navigate with a real person who has, you know, symmetrically important desires and revulsions and all of this stuff and symmetrically important, but different.
• 1:24:38
  Yes, symmetrically important, but radically different in some ways that are predictable by sex and gender and in many ways that are idiosyncratic to the person. But the whole point is a proper marriage is a environment in which you you are a student of another person and for your life to work out well, you have to understand that other person well and you never understand them perfectly and they have to understand you well and they never understand you perfectly. And the idea that that is going to vanish because something is going it, you know, I got an idea.
• 1:25:15
  How about it's the news, except in telling you instead of telling you what you need to know, it's going to tell you what you want to hear.
• 1:25:21
  Well, what could go wrong?
• 1:25:23
  OK, so you you began by talking about you said, AI is going to make women obsolete for men and men obsolete for women. And this creepy, crazy fashion show that that Elon retweeted is a prime example of how women are can become are at risk of becoming obsolete for men. But you also talked about effectively the trades that that men will be being replaced at doing many parts of by humanoid robots or other kinds of robots.
• 1:26:01
  Which suggests that the slippery slope goes way farther back and that actually, again, the part of the problem is the specialization and the ability to parts out your life and say, you know what, I need I am comfortable enough that I can focus that I want to be able to focus on my art, my writing, my science, whatever it is.(...) I want to be able to have a life of the mind and not have to think about the cooking and the plumbing and the drywall and the garbage and all of the other pieces that, you know, most of us do some of those tasks that I just mentioned, but most households outsource at least one of them and some households outsource all of those. And it seems to me that the, you know, the kinds of work that men have historically done within a partnership have been outsourced earlier than the kinds of work that so we hear a lot about how feminism has failed the American family and is destroying the fabric of society. And I feel like by, you know, by this analysis, it's actually being able to hire men to do the kinds of work that men do within the family unit for you to support a household that actually helps slide us into the expectation that actually the family unit, you know, isn't going to be self sufficient and people say, ah, you know, the nuclear family is a new thing and we can't do it all. Like, well, to some degree, that's true, but we never used to hire strangers before. And so, you know, the idea that we are hiring strangers to do a bunch of the work that we used to say, okay, we have a unit and in part we're growing children so that they can also help do the work. And then we also have a neighborhood or an extended family and we're all doing the work. But the idea of hiring strangers to do the work that is necessary to keep your family going is, gosh, that can't be widespread for more than many, many decades at this point.
• 1:27:58
  I agree with that observation. We've outsourced a lot of stuff to the market.
• 1:28:01
  We've talked here previously about how the fact that a psychologist does a lot of jobs that were done previously by members of a community, whether they were your friends or, you know, your favorite uncle or a clergy member. Or whatever, you know, somebody who is insightful about people.
• 1:28:19
  But yeah, the handyman is, you know, taking some of the load off the husband who frankly may not even have those skills anymore. Many don't. Most don't, I would say. Right. Most don't.
• 1:28:31
  And I guess I'm spooked because as far down this road as we already are, AI plus robots gives you... Clankers.
• 1:28:43
  Plus clankers. Thank you.
• 1:28:47
  That gives you a recipe for a one generation catastrophe.
• 1:28:54
  And let me flesh that out.
• 1:28:56
  Yeah. Let's keep it in flesh, can we? Yeah.
• 1:28:58
  All right.
• 1:28:59
  Completely.
• 1:28:59
  You know, we humans are wicked cool. And we suck a lot of the time, but we're wicked cool and we're wicked cool because of one innovation evolutionarily that is...
• 1:29:19
  We're not the first creature to have it, but it's been taken to an entirely different level. And the adaptation is a secondary evolutionary mode that is passed outside the genome. Right? So this cultural mode, Heather and I talk about the cultural consciousness flip flop in the book. It's really worth thinking about this in detail because it lets you understand what a human being really is.
• 1:29:43
  But the cultural mode passes on information that evolutionarily adapts and it adapts much more rapidly than it can in genes. And it can move horizontally when it needs to. Usually it moves vertically. Often it moves horizontally.
• 1:30:03
  Across the population in real time as opposed to requiring a generation to affect change. Right. But let me just let me just asterisk here. We've said it many times, but it is a mistake that I think many, many very smart people make, which is...
• 1:30:19
  Which could be... People could listen to what you just said and make the same mistake, which is it's not just humans.
• 1:30:26
  Humans have the cultural mode more than any other organisms. But we have the independent evolution of culture in many different organisms with the greatest reliance on it, the greatest ubiquity of it, and the greatest diversity of it in humans. But all of the primates have some amount of culture. Elephants, tooth whales,(...) corvids, crows and ravens, parrots, wolves, elephants. I say elephants. Anyway, there's a bunch of other groups that also have this. And we've talked elsewhere and in the book about what the conditions are that seem to lay the groundwork. But actually it is interesting here that some of the conditions are specifically the fact of being long lived and of being social and of having long childhoods and having generational overlap. Wherein two, three, even four generations live together or at least are alive at the same time and so can exchange information between them.
• 1:31:24
  And so those things, those conditions which create culture in all sorts of organisms and most so in us are exactly about the kinds of relationship that are being outsourced and therefore disappeared by the AI revolution.
• 1:31:42
  So if I didn't say it, all mammals and almost all birds have this thing in a primitive form and a few clades have it in an advanced form. Nothing has it like humans and the thing that's really, you know, what makes human just different from all the other animals? It's language. Language, it's language. One word, it's language. Anytime you ask that question, the answer is language, right?
• 1:32:09
  Language lets us transmit things across the open air, abstract things and actually have them land in another brain and form themselves into something like the thing that we meant to transmit. No other creature can do that with abstractions. So anyway, we're special.
• 1:32:24
  The problem though is that that special thing that we do comes with a huge vulnerability,(...) which is unlike stuff that's in your genes that is so slow to change. It is stuff in your genes is also slow to be lost. It may not be as slow as we thought. There are certain things that can blink on and off, but they tend to get stored in a latent form because the same process that makes them slow to spread makes them slow to wane. You can lose important culture in one generation.
• 1:32:57
  (...) You just can't, right? You can be a seafaring people who depends on ancient wisdom about how to make kayaks and you can make landfall and you can go inland far enough that nobody needs a kayak and you can forget in one generation how to do it. And so the problem with the, "Hey, I know a problem about being human. Let's solve it." The problem with that is that if you solve things that you don't understand what role they're playing, you end up creating a problem you now can't solve. You can't even just reboot from the last mode that worked because you don't remember how to do it. So to the extent that we create, you know, I would argue the sexual revolution did this, that it took a system that was, yes, unfair in many different ways and it obsoleted it by making sex and reproduction totally separable by a responsible person.
• 1:33:56
  Well, I'm going to repeat my objection to that though, that, you know, that the partsing out, the reductionism, the specialization, and the movement of historically male jobs into that of people for hire contributed as well to the loss of the family fabric. And that has, that has nothing to do with sexual revolution that has to do with the other innovations following the industrial revolution that do not follow the usual story here.
• 1:34:25
  I agree. It's a powerful contributor. I'm not convinced that they're totally separate because...
• 1:34:30
  Fair enough. But you can't blame hiring carpenters on the sexual revolution. No, I might, it depends. If you showed me that the hiring of carpenters did not skyrocket after it, I would have to accept that I am on the wrong track. But I guess my point is...
• 1:34:50
  I think, I think that's, I think the burden is on you because that's a, that's a weird hypothesis. So I think the default hypothesis is that they're independent. It's not weird for the following reason.
• 1:35:01
  You've got...
• 1:35:03
  If I understand what a human being, I mean, I remember what it was like to be young and things were very different. And then there's a period where you and I weren't around at all, you know, the fifties and sixties.
• 1:35:18
  And so I have to infer what it was like to be a human in those circumstances. And it may be...
• 1:35:22
  From family stories and madmen.
• 1:35:25
  Yeah. From, from, from good stories, wherever they come from. And from other evidence. But the point is if sex is scarce, people find each other and they sign up for partnerships. And I hate to be cynical about it, but sex is the most potent reward the universe has ever come up with. Right? It's the most potent one for a reason. And it is because the game is an evolutionary one and reproduction plays such an important role in evolution. So the point is absent, you know, if women are not sleeping around because they can't afford to because producing a child without a commitment to sex.
• 1:36:09
  And if a commitment is an insane thing to do, then the point is, oh, well, then the only way to get to this most potent reward the universe has ever come up with is by partnering in such a way that that scarcity is alleviated. And so I guess my point is at the point that you don't have the drive to partner that overwhelms any other sensibility you might have, then people put off partnering, for example, which means there are long periods of their life that if they don't have those skills, they have to hire them. And there's a, there's a niche for it.
• 1:36:51
  Yeah, but I mean, I think I'm just talking about stuff that the big changes in our economic system that well predate what you're talking about from the mid 20th century, that you have the specialization in the form of, you know, artisans and guilds and, and such. And, you know, I don't think I'm not arguing for everyone to be a total generalist because we wouldn't have nearly the amount of not just stuff and technology but craftsmanship that we do right like I love a beautifully crafted object. I, you know, I totally admire it and love it but my point here is, I think we can point to that as contributing to the beginning of a system in which, because you are not a unit that inherently has to problem solve within yourself or within your existing community. And you know, so maybe this just goes back to money, right, like maybe then, if anytime that you can exchange something in a commodity like way, then you're going to have the beginnings of the connectivity failing.
• 1:37:56
  Okay, I like this. I think these two things are contributing. I think the thing that I'm pointing to is a contributing factor, it shows up at a particular moment.
• 1:38:05
  The thing that you're pointing to is also a contributing factor, it shows up, I agree with you very likely earlier.
• 1:38:12
  And it's thousands of years ago.
• 1:38:15
  Well, yeah, there's a question about when it shows up enough. I think there's a threshold in here.
• 1:38:20
  But in doesn't revolution ish, but the point is something like this used to be, you know, in the place to see.
• 1:38:34
  Guys had different specialties. But the shaman was maybe unique in having a real specialty and everybody else participated in the hunt and some were better at spotting the animals and some were better at, you know, delivering a killing blow and all of that. But the point is, all the guys had all the guy skills, because the range of skills wasn't that great and because not having one would be ridiculous. You don't over specialize in an environment like that. And you don't over specialize for a long time. Right.
• 1:39:04
  There's a line. I keep quoting it to our kids and they quoted back to me from the little house on the prairie books when Pa is building. I think it's their first house and he does not have any nails because they're not available.(...) And his line is a man does not need nails to build a door. Right.(...) I love this line because for one thing, a modern guy, you know, it might probably be three inch screws and to buy material, but it's not obvious what you substitute for the nails.
• 1:39:43
  He's talking about framing it, not the door itself.
• 1:39:46
  No, he's talking about the door itself.
• 1:39:48
  And so I think what he did was he used tapered pins. We actually have a piece of furniture that's this. Yeah. Or mango bench has tapered pins that cause tension to pull mortise and tenon together.(...) But anyway, a man does not need nails to build a door is such a great concept because the point is, even if most men would not be building doors without nails, because frankly, there were nails. And it's better to build it with nails. If you have them, it's faster and more efficient.(...) The idea that a guy left without nails and be like, I can't build the door.
• 1:40:24
  Yeah. So I'm part of what happens. You keep on going back to the sexual revolution. I just feel like I know what you think and I know what we have written into Pendergather's Guide and such.
• 1:40:34
  But it also is completely abused by at least the online community of woman haters, honestly.
• 1:40:43
  And those who would easily fall into a like, who can we blame? It's going to be the feminists. Part of though, which this is going to have nothing to do with the sexual revolution, per se,(...) but you're talking about the place to see and every guy could do guy stuff. And presumably every woman could do woman stuff. I have talked often about this paper that I love from the early 70s, which looks back from before then at the anthropological literature on across.
• 1:41:19
  Boy, it's going to be like 180 pre-industrial cultures, looking at 50 tasks. How gendered are the tasks? Like how much do people like in cultures that go whale hunting? How often do women participate in the whale hunt? The answer is never. Like that just doesn't happen.
• 1:41:36
  (...) And in cultures that do the preparation of vegetal foods, which is to say almost all of them, the Inuit are close to the only exception probably. And even then, presumably there's occasional harvesting.
• 1:41:50
  And the harvesting of vegetal foods, the harvesting and preparation actually of vegetal foods is not nearly as gendered as whale hunting, but it's more over towards towards female typical behavior.
• 1:42:00
  So there's this question of like, what is it to be a male typical behavior or a female typical behavior? And what we see actually across many, many cultures is that there are a lot of activities that are gendered for that culture, which is to say, actually, if we're talking about weaving, that's only for you, ladies. But in other cultures, if we're talking about weaving, that's only for you guys. So we have a lot of activities that are highly gendered, but which culture does which?
• 1:42:27
  Which sex does which varies by culture.
• 1:42:31
  So that just points to the value of the division of labor. What we see in our culture-- Hold on, I'm going somewhere.
• 1:42:38
  What we see in our culture is in part because we are kind of a melting pot, but not really. We have all of these things coming together, all of these different expectations around who does what. Like, what is it? What is guys work? What is women's work? And we have feminism in part to thank for the idea of like, well, if you're interested and capable, maybe you can do that thing, right? And if you're interested and capable over on the other side, maybe you can do that thing.
• 1:43:08
  But that does then begin to model the expectations around, well, what if it turns out that you're not interested in anything?(...) Or all you did as a kid was sit around looking at your screen and have other people do things because in your family, you hired out all of the skills. So it was always strangers coming into the house to do the actual functional things. So the only model you have in your world of people who do functional things is randos who show up and your parents give them money and then they go away. And so as far as you know, we people don't do functional things at all and you don't even know what you're interested in. So that's, you know, that's, you know, down further downstream of specialization. So I blame specialization, not inherently, but there's a lot of chaos that has resulted.
• 1:43:50
  OK, I want to go back and recover some points. First of all, I just do want to point out I was my dad had some of those skills, but by the time I was cognizant, he was mostly doing other things, which I will get back to the meaning of that.
• 1:44:03
  He, like my father, like many of us grew up with fathers who were professionals and many of our mothers worked as well.
• 1:44:10
  Right. And it makes sense that, you know, you make vastly more money out there doing the thing you trained for. It doesn't really make sense to be spending time that you know, the opportunity cost of not doing your actual job is high. And so you tend to default to that, which does lead to, you know, needing a handyman, even if you have those skills on board.
• 1:44:31
  But I wanted to go back to two points.
• 1:44:33
  One, I ain't blaming the feminists. I know you're not, but a lot of people do.
• 1:44:38
  That's fine. They're wrong. OK. I think guys thought, you know what, we need birth control.(...) And you know why they thought it. It's perfectly clear why you would think it. But it's a classic case of, hey, I'm going to solve that problem.
• 1:44:52
  And I'm going to invite a hell I didn't see coming because I don't even understand really, you know, what sex is.
• 1:45:00
  (...) So anyway, the invention of the birth to the degree that that was guys, it was because they don't like condoms.
• 1:45:07
  Fine. But the point is, it was guys who wanted to have sex, didn't want condoms.
• 1:45:12
  And so they invented something that radically changed humanity.
• 1:45:18
  OK, but then I want to go back to the dichotomy. You've got the sexual revolution, which is downstream of reliable birth control without condoms.
• 1:45:26
  And that has an implication. It changes everything. But then there's this other factor that you're now pointing to, which I think is I'm not downplaying the contribution of the sexual revolution, but the.
• 1:45:43
  Once you have people training for an out of the house job, they're not going out into the back 40 and farming, they are going to an office somewhere to facilitate the production of wealth through some.
• 1:45:58
  Mean some highly complex means.
• 1:46:02
  The point is you get the exact opportunity cost calculation that you and I are describing our fathers as having been downstream from guys who were perfectly capable of doing stuff. My dad was an engineer. Your dad grew up on a farm and became a computer engineer.
• 1:46:16
  These were guys who knew how to solve problems. And the point is the fact that they weren't doing the in the house problem solving jobs for the most part was the result of an economic calculation in which specialization was competitively sensible.
• 1:46:31
  Yes, but you know this story. I don't think I've shared it, but I remember I remember a moment.
• 1:46:40
  So my father, yes, grew up on a farm in Northeast Iowa, became a computer scientist before that was really a thing and was surprised to find in his daughter, the child who was the athletic math science, he won,(...) but embraced it. You know, didn't didn't see it coming but embraced it. And I have a have a younger brother as well and he was just less less those things.(...) And I remember, but but I also had, you know, I was also playing classical piano and had an artsy and ready and like knows on the book side.(...) And at one point, my dad, it was time to build a fence and my dad did not outsource that kind of thing. He was like, we're gonna build it. We need to build a fence or the fence separating our tiny plot of land in LA. Not a plot of land, tiny, you know, quarter acre, whatever it was, eighth of an acre tiny was falling down between us, the neighbors and we needed a new fence. And I didn't think I was needed. And I wasn't needed. But I was needed according to my father because I needed to know how to build a fence.
• 1:47:41
  Yeah. And you needed to know how to cause offense.
• 1:47:47
  Anyway, nor is it true.
• 1:47:49
  Great pun.
• 1:47:51
  I never get the pants again. Yes, I'm sure you will.
• 1:47:55
  So he like, you know, he actually was on the very few times that he got angry with me as I remember it as a child.
• 1:48:03
  And, you know, I wasn't I wasn't super young, but he's like, you stop reading and you get out here and help us, you know, dig these post holes and learn how to use the tool that we rented. And, you know, we're going to build this fence.
• 1:48:15
  And frankly, I think, you know, we don't have daughters, but you were the same way. And I feel certain that you would have been the same way with daughters with our sons that, you know, you. Yes, you and I both specialized and, you know, we have we have we know lots of people who don't do don't know how to do work around their own homes.
• 1:48:37
  And neither you nor I were ever interested in being like that. At first, we just couldn't afford not to. But also, you know, we grew up knowing how to do things and we generated new skills as we went along. And the fact that both of our boys know, you know, like, launched ish and and you know travel with tools and know how to do things was absolutely important without us ever having talked about it. I feel like it's one of these things that exists as a core skill set that because maybe we don't talk about it, of course, it's being lost because why why wouldn't you outsource it? What like we have the money and why would you spend your time doing that when you could become better at the thing that you're really going to be great at? Like, well, because in part because the value in being a generalist is that you can actually make more strides within your 123 areas of specialty, the more other systems, you know, we've talked about this, you know, the fact that you can come up with analogy, metaphor,(...) analytical specificity from bike land and I can from ceramic land and you know, and we both know how to tile and do carpentry. And like, it's just fabulously useful because it allows you to make connections that you cannot predict in advance.
• 1:49:49
  It also makes you less of a sucker.
• 1:49:51
  The fact is, we have become consumers of everything who can evaluate nothing and don't necessarily have an alternative, right? You know, the woman who goes to the car mechanic and doesn't know enough about a car to decide whether or not she's being told a story about what's wrong with it and the expensive repair that is necessary, you know, it's a classic position to be in.
• 1:50:17
  It's a classic position to be in and too often society at large has understood the predicament as you'd like, you simply need to know more about cars, therefore, before you go into the mechanic man, it's like, well, but recognize that because women are less likely to be interested in understanding the stuff that went into the cars. This is primarily, if not entirely a difference in interests rather than capacity,(...) that the mechanics are likely to have a stereotype that is almost always accurate on board with regard to, can I put one over on this random dude who just walked in and get more than I deserve? Or can I be more likely to put something over on this random woman who just came in?
• 1:51:08
  So it's a, you know, it's a statistical stereotyping game that doesn't inherently come from anything nasty or evil. It just, you know, it emerges from the fact that differences exist.
• 1:51:21
  And it used to be that a wise woman who knew she did not know about cars would bring a guy. And so this is yet again, a place actually women may be about to get an upgrade in terms of seeing through their mechanic who's lying to them because what are they going to do?
• 1:51:37
  They're going to go to the AI, which is actually pretty darn good at diagnosing shit. So, but it's dead wrong, but except when it's dead wrong, but you know, we were five minutes into the AI era and people are four minutes into the AI era.
• 1:51:50
  People are four minutes into using it so they don't know how to describe things in order to get it to work correctly. And so anyway, very easy to see that there is an upgrade coming where AI is going to do the job that men did better than men,(...) certainly better than men can now do it because you know what an AI can do that a modern guy can't do?
• 1:52:12
  Understand a modern car. Right.
• 1:52:14
  And so that's, you know, welcome to the modern dystopia then because like I'd rather I don't, I can listen to you and Zach, for instance, talk about the inner workings of motorcycles and cars and I can follow some of it. And at this point he can refer to some kinds of engines.
• 1:52:30
  I'm like, right, I remember. And I don't, I'm not that interested. Right. Right. Of course. And but I'd like, I would, when I have a car problem would prefer to have one of you guys take it in. I would, I like, I would prefer not to pretend not to be in position of like now I have to study before I take it to the mechanic, not because I can't do it, but because like I would just like to have someone who already has the knowledge on board and has the interest on board. But, but you have a specialization of the cars, not just the people, but of the cars. It is now impossible for anyone, no matter how awesome you are to know all of the things without you know you're on, you know, without the additional thing that you need to use to figure out what the, what I can't remember what they're called, but like the, the, the computers that tell you what that flashing light means on your. The codes. Yeah.
• 1:53:20
  You're right. But you do have a guy in your life. And from that partnership, you've got two other guys in your life.
• 1:53:25
  And the fact is we are now forced to use AI to diagnose the parts of the car that are beyond our understanding. So anyway, it is kind of a steady march to a dystopia where we understand less and less and you know, even guys are now outsourcing the guy work to the machines. Right.
• 1:53:43
  So because the machines have become so specialized, like first the humans became specialized and they created machines that became specialized out from under their own specialization. Yep.
• 1:53:53
  And at one point, as long as we're having this conversation, the way I learned to do stuff around the house actually drove my parents crazy because I think it looked economically insane, which was I followed the people that they hired around the house and watched them do everything.(...) And I think there was a concern that, oh my God, he, he's not going to, you know, go get a professional job.(...) And, you know, maybe it would have been a mistake financially not to, but, but I never regretted the discovery of how all of the stuff, how, how it works. You can learn that by following people around, fixing everything. And anyway, I regret it. Not at all. Absolutely. But okay. So where are we? We've got a one generation problem.
• 1:54:39
  You can forget how to do some intricate thing that evolved over the course of tens of thousands of years in one generation and not be able to recover.
• 1:54:50
  And you can see this, the very creatures that we talk about birds and mammals, especially the highly social ones that have a lot of culture. What happens when they're going extinct and you raise them in captivity and then you try to reintroduce them to the wild, which is, you may have a perfectly healthy creature. It may be healthier than a wild competitor at that same age because you gave it the exact right amount of food and took care of any illnesses it might've had.
• 1:55:20
  But it doesn't know how to be an eagle, right? It just doesn't. The point is learning to be an eagle, it needed to go to eagle school. And you can't do that from a book or from some human who read a book. You have to have learned from an eagle who knows how to be an eagle. And so eagle apprenticeship better than eagle school.
• 1:55:41
  Yeah. I mean, just I've been, I've been thinking and reading about the origins of school and how disastrous it is. But, you know, apprenticeship one on one.
• 1:55:51
  Learning.
• 1:55:52
  I have known this for a very long time because school did not work for me. But, but anyway, point is we are the kind of creature who more than any other creature is in danger of taking some beautifully architected evolutionary thing and squandering it because we solve some problem. This is our focus at this moment in time. And that is what's coming. And, you know, it was obvious that this modern porn was going to be a disaster. Totally obvious.
• 1:56:21
  People are now, you know, decades in openly talking about the problem. I know that wasn't possible a decade ago without being dismissed as a prude. Now people get it. But the point is, OK, here's another one. Now you're going to have, you know,(...) A.I. simulacrum of women to scratch your own itch better than women. It's not, you know, women have women are fucking apes. That's what they are. Those things are going to have all the features of women that you want and none of the defects and good riddance.
• 1:56:54
  That's going to be the the selling point.
• 1:56:57
  And the point is no, no, no.
• 1:56:59
  No spleens. No one wanted hair.
• 1:57:01
  Yeah. No, no, no, none of that. They're not going to, you know, ask you to do stuff. And it's just. It's a classic case of careful what you wish for.(...) And so anyway, we're getting it. And well, it's like it's careful, careful what you like, because most I think I think most men.
• 1:57:24
  I don't know. I was going to say, I think most men wouldn't have known to wish for this. Maybe maybe people did. But some men, at least, will be presented with that and never have thought to want it.
• 1:57:35
  But have a hard time looking away. And so being like learning to be careful about the things that immediately draw you in and get, you know, and titillate, get your dopamine reactions, get like whatever, whatever quick hormonal reaction happens.
• 1:57:52
  If it's coming from a tech source, be careful.
• 1:57:57
  Yeah. Well, be beyond careful, right? I mean, you will be a happier human if you figure out how to afford it.
• 1:58:06
  And you will be able to avoid this stuff entirely because you can't really self-regulate it. You know, it is built to make it impossible for you not to react. And so I also find it interesting and a little bit tragic that Elon is pushing it.(...) And that's like, hey, isn't this cool, guys?
• 1:58:32
  Well, I mean, I'm not in a mood to defend Elon,(...) but he specifically was like, see, Grok won.
• 1:58:40
  Yeah. No, no, look, Grok won at a competition in the race to hell. Grok has won.
• 1:58:47
  Fantastic. So, yeah. Fantastic is right.
• 1:58:50
  But the point is, look, I'm in conflict with myself.(...) I'm a huge fan of freedom. It is the goose that lays the golden eggs.
• 1:59:02
  On the other hand, most of what gets produced with freedom is not good. And some of it's perfectly horrifying.(...) And Elon is engaged in a script for his own life that I think is catastrophic for the man himself.
• 1:59:23
  Nevermind what anybody thinks about him.
• 1:59:25
  Nevermind what children he will produce.
• 1:59:28
  I think his idea is already kind of downstream of this future that he sees better than the rest of us, right?
• 1:59:37
  Basically, he's figured out, well, so far, no solution to the womb problem.
• 1:59:42
  And he wants to produce a lot of offspring.
• 1:59:45
  And so you're going to need women because they're the ones that they've, they've cornered the market on wombs.
• 1:59:51
  And so.
• 1:59:53
  Sneaky we are.
• 1:59:55
  The sneakiest, believe me. But he, he is living out some fantasy that frankly, to a lot of us, just does not look desirable at all.
• 2:00:08
  Right. Even to many to whom it does look desirable, it looks desirable for like five minutes and then they start realizing what it is.
• 2:00:14
  Yeah. And here's the thing.
• 2:00:19
  The really cool stuff is in the mothering and the fathering and the mothering and the fathering is not a wet biology issue.
• 2:00:32
  It's a cognitive cultural issue, right?
• 2:00:38
  The guy who supplies the sperm is the father in one technical sense. That isn't interesting. Right. The guy who supplies the know how that's a place you can really screw a kid up, but it's also a place where you can really make a kid shine and The know how and the corrections and the inspiration and the punishments when they are called for and the, and the, the gifting of both the wisdom and insight. The be in a man part and the, I hesitate to see not only that the technology has brought us to the place that, you know, we're not even through 2025 and we're already dealing with, um, Hey, are you going to fall into the next porn the way you fell into the last one?
• 2:01:37
  And is this one going to ruin your life if the last one almost did, but did it?
• 2:01:39
  Like it's that, you know, and yeah, some number of, it seems like some number of people were beginning to wake up to the porn problem pulling themselves out.
• 2:01:51
  You know,(...) I remember 10 years ago, trying to talk about the danger of porn.
• 2:01:57
  And it's also hard because I literally don't look at the stuff. I haven't seen porn since I was a kid and porn was a whole different thing back then. But so it's hard to talk about it because, you know, it's hard to talk about it because you're inherently naive, but I can see the product of it. And I have an understanding of what landscape it's become. But anyway, it was hard to talk about it because people were like, Oh yeah, I get it. You're approved. It's like, Nope, perfectly cool with sex. I think erotica is a valid form and it can be good.(...) Um, it's the porn. It's the stuff that the market produces that is a lethal danger.
• 2:02:32
  It's the market stupid.
• 2:02:34
  But okay. It was hard to talk about in the past because it made you into something embarrassing or crude, even if you weren't one.(...) We are now at the point where you and I were at the top of a local mountain at a beautiful Vista point, which brings people from all over the place. And we overheard a conversation in which a guy was talking, I think far louder than he was talking about the, I forgot either was some child in his life or his brother's life who had a porn problem. And there was a question about talking to him about it. And he was describing his own porn problem. I really nearly wrecked his life and you know, he's finally passed it. But anyway, it was interesting just to hear some rando talking about the fact that actually in retrospect, his hobby messed him up.
• 2:03:27
  And I was going to learn how to talk to his nephews and maybe children about it as well.
• 2:03:33
  Right. I almost went over to him and said, couldn't help it over here, but you couldn't possibly be aggressive enough in dissuading, aggressive enough. Yeah. In dissuading, uh, at least your male descendants.
• 2:03:48
  He was talking about a girl too, actually, if I'm correct.
• 2:03:51
  Yeah. Yeah. He was talking about a young woman. That's apparently a problem, but yeah, what I've said to our kids, which certainly made an impression is I don't want you to have a drug problem, but I'd rather you had a drug problem because, you know, the drug problem, we know what to do about the porn problem is going to rewire aspects of your brain in a way we have no experience unwiring them. Yeah. Right. So anyway, I think there's, I think we're there on a new frontier.
• 2:04:18
  Yeah. I mean, this is going to sound like a total non sequitur, although you will understand it. One of the things I said to both of them, it doesn't have anything to do with sex. Um, while I was getting them situated these last few days, their new college, um, their university, uh, was, I don't want you to smoke cigarettes because I think it's, uh, I think modern cigarettes are, are, are bad for you. Um, but I'd far rather you start smoking than you start vaping.
• 2:04:42
  Yep.
• 2:04:42
  And it's, it's, it's a similar sort of thing. Like if you, if, if you're going to, there are a lot of choices you can make and you certainly won't make all the same choices I would make. Um, but here's, here's a list of some things that I think are just insane. And you know, vaping is also on the list.
• 2:04:58
  Absolutely. Absolutely.
• 2:05:01
  All right. Um, I've said much more on this topic than I was expecting to say, shall we quickly move on to Michael Tracy and then get to the meat of the matter?
• 2:05:08
  Well, I don't know about that. Honestly, we've already been at it for quite a while. So, uh, we may, we may save the, uh, I think, I think we should do it and we'll just do it very quickly.
• 2:05:17
  Okay.
• 2:05:17
  Um, okay. So do you want to play, Michael Tracy has taken up a very interesting and almost unique position on the Jeffrey Epstein story. And then he has returned to what seems to be roughly the same position in response to the arrest and then release of the Israeli guy as part of a sting in Nevada, where the, uh, Israeli government official was, um, was accused of attempting to soliciting sex with a minor using a computer. The sting represented somebody as a minor. He apparently used the computer to try to arrange sex with this person. They arrested him. He among something like 10 different defendants was released, uh, $10,000 bail.
• 2:06:10
  That isn't necessarily so strange though.
• 2:06:13
  I wonder about it, but, um, the really strange thing is they didn't take his passport and he of course fled to Israel.
• 2:06:20
  And then, uh, even more horrifying Israel, Netanyahu's office actually downplayed what had happened, not describing it as an arrest said that he was interviewed, but no, he was arrested and then he, they used the word interviewed rather than arrested, I don't know what word they use, but they basically said that police talked to him, um, they didn't say he was arrested and then released on bail and they didn't arrest him and he's not apparently.
• 2:06:51
  Wait, I thought you just, so they did arrest him.
• 2:06:53
  The Israelis didn't, which frankly they should have. My feeling is somebody who's been accused of, uh, a sex crime with a minor or attempting a sex crime with a minor shows up in your country, you arrest that person and you get to the bottom of it and you extradite him if, uh, if you can, you know, I think we do have an extradition treaty with Israel.
• 2:07:17
  But anyway, all that's beside the point.
• 2:07:18
  Michael Tracy took up a position that he is, uh, consistent about in which he is doubtful about the evidence in the Epstein case, and he is doubtful about the evidence in this case, which admittedly we don't have all that much of. So anyway, here's his perspective.
• 2:07:37
  And then I will give my response.
• 2:07:39
  You're right. People constantly ask me, why do you even care about Epstein? Why do you even care about the pedo panic?
• 2:07:43
  Why do you care about this? This like latest Israeli, uh, allegation fleeing from Nevada or whatever.(...) I'll tell you why. Okay. I have a succinct answer that I've rehearsed for you.
• 2:07:55
  Here's why I care. You know what? I hate moral panics. I hate unchecked moral panics in particular. I hate mass hysteria that is unfettered and unconstrained because the media and politicians and everybody else are too cowed to actually engage on the substance and show why the elements of the moral panic or the mass hysteria are unfounded. I really hate that.
• 2:08:19
  Okay. So I have a simple point here. I think it's important.(...) The point is this Michael Tracy has assumed his conclusion in his framing of this. I hate moral panics too, but he is effectively portraying this as a moral panic. While the question about whether or not it might be a moral panic is still completely open and there's a whole lot of evidence that says it isn't. So I would just ask you this question.
• 2:08:51
  Did we experience a moral panic over trans ideology and the surgical and chemical transing of children?(...) I don't believe that we did. I believe that we had an actual crisis in which a significant number of young people were induced to modify themselves in permanent ways with the complicity of science,(...) of medicine, of their parents, of the schools, and that those people have effectively been maimed by our system.
• 2:09:27
  And even a single such case is an unforgivable tragedy. The idea that there were many of them means that the degree of concern was not overstated. It was not a moral panic. It was a correct moral revulsion for a behavior that should never have happened. And it was necessary to bringing it to an end. So the point in the Michael Tracy case here is we have a question, Michael.
• 2:10:00
  How significant is this pedophilia in circles of power?(...) If many of us are right about what we think we are seeing, then there is a good, a significant amount of this and it is playing a role in the governance of absolutely everything, which is completely intolerable.(...) The fact that governments seem to be covering for it and that there seems to be no mechanism for investigating it and just simply getting a full accounting of how significant a pattern this is, is a problem in and of itself. And of course, the nature of what many of us think was going on with Epstein is that it is a a demonic system with an immune system of its own. That is to say, if Epstein was collecting a large video library of powerful people engaged in unforgivable behavior,(...) then whoever owns that library can now call on the compromise that it has collected to prevent any and all investigations from getting to the bottom of it. So the real question is, do we live in a republic that is based on the idea of consent of the governed or has somebody hijacked it using Compromat?
• 2:11:24
  (...) We need to know the answer to that question. You're entitled to hypothesize that this is a moral panic. And if you do, what you are effectively saying is actually, I think there's a lot less of this stuff than people expect. I don't think the Epstein case is what people think it is. I don't think the case of the Israeli who fled is anything but an aberration. You can hypothesize those things, but then you're going to own it if it turns out that these cases are what they appear to be.
• 2:11:57
  And so anyway, I think just phrasing it as a moral panic is a mistake because there are plenty of cases in which people's moral revulsion actually brings about, you know, an end to slavery, an end to the transing of children and to genocides. It is a very useful piece of the human toolkit that has been named like so many things are after its pathological version. Right. Moral panic is the pathological version.
• 2:12:27
  So social contagion is another thing that people call such things. And that also usually has a negative connotation and certainly the social contagion of girls coming to believe that they're boys, as so well chronicled by Abigail Shrier, among others, has is understood to have been absolutely diabolical by most people who are thinking about it. But just to repeat what you're saying, not all social contagions, moral panics, if you will, not all social contagions are in error, right? That we come to believe things sometimes rather than through first principles or direct observation ourselves, but from hearing the concern in our neighbors voices or our family's voices and feeling something in ourselves that goes, yeah, I'm not sure. Now, there was a moral panic over the unvaccinated.
• 2:13:24
  (...) That was a problem. Right. There was a moral panic over witches. Right. There are moral panics over all sorts of things that are obviously wrongheaded and cause much harm and grief to people. But the fact that people can come to begin to think about things through hearing about those things from other people, that's actually how much of humanity has has come to hear about things. So the I think at some level, it comes down to.
• 2:13:56
  Actually, you can't have a static line in the sand and say, I will I will never acknowledge that something is possible if a bunch of people are suddenly thinking that it is because you're basically saying, you know, there's a couple of types of errors in the world. There's type one, there's type two, and I'm only going to abide one of them. I'm just going to throw all of my weight into one and I'm never going to risk the other.
• 2:14:19
  It's like you're going to you have to be more fluid than that. You have to not have a static position or else you are going to be extremely wrong some of the times. And I objected when at first when you said it, like if you if this is your position, you were talking to Michael Tracy here, then you're going to own the downside of that at the point that it is discovered that it's actually that pedophilia isn't as rare as you think.
• 2:14:40
  Part of me thinks, I don't know. I don't know that people need to own that. But your position basically is if you're going to say if it's if it sounds like a moral panic, it must be wrong, then you do have to own the downside of that argument.
• 2:14:52
  Yeah, well, I agree with you. I agree.
• 2:14:54
  And I would also say that you said it. So I would think so. Well, I agree with your interpretation. And I understand why you had the reaction to you on the downside, because where I've used that before is in the pandemic, when we were accused of, you know, you're killing people with your perspective, my feeling is no, we are having a discussion about what the truth is. And the people on both sides of that discussion get credit for it if they do it honorably, because we discover through this process. But if you're going to tell me I'm the killer, if the shots work and I'm telling people, hey, you should be careful about that, then if they don't work and they're dangerous, then you're the killer. You own the downside.
• 2:15:32
  Yeah. I mean, I think again, what it comes to is, is your position static? If your position is static and you are drawing a hard line in the sand, then the things that turn out to be true that are on the wrong side of the line from the one that you drew, you own that. Whereas if you are in good faith trying to discover what is true and your position changes and you resist efforts to make you feel bad because sometimes you realize that you were wrong and own that fact, then you have been trying to discover what is true and that is what we all should be doing.
• 2:16:05
  Right. So if you were effectively in this dialectic mode rather than a debate mode where you're trying to get to the truth, then the point is you're part of the process that discovers the truth that's honorable, even if you're on the wrong side. My point to Michael Tracy, which is different than the point I made to those who accused us of killing grandma, which we didn't, I want to say. No, no, we didn't and wouldn't. The point is if your hypothesis turns out to be false, if you phrase it as a hypothesis, you own the downside, which is, oh, that hypothesis is falsified. Now I have to change my position. There's nothing dishonorable about that. It's an honorable thing. And it's exactly what you should want. Michael, I would bet that if it turned out that Jeffrey Epstein is what many of us believe he was and that it is having an important influence on the practice of policymaking, that you would want us to investigate that at full strength and that you wouldn't be thinking of this as a moral panic. You would be thinking of it as the rest of us do. So anyway, we should want to get to the truth of that irrespective of what it is, no matter which side of this issue you find yourself on at the moment, we should want to know how big a problem this is, what role it's playing, not only because that would tell us something about the magnitude of the problem from the point of view of the children who are having their lives destroyed. It's going to be some. Is it a huge number? Is it a small number? We need to know that. But we also need to know what effect it's having on our ability to shape the world. Consent of the governed is supposed to be what this Democratic Republic functions based on. And if it's not functioning based on that because somebody is corralled a kind of power that the rest of us can't even audit, that's a problem.(...) So anyway, we should all want to separate but like on different planes, equally important point.
• 2:18:04
  It's arguably maybe even more important because downstream of that would be things like wars that we shouldn't get into but can't avoid. Right. So the number of people who are destroyed as the result of us not even knowing what kind of what form of governance we have is huge.
• 2:18:20
  Yeah.
• 2:18:21
  So all right. All of that.
• 2:18:25
  Yeah.
• 2:18:26
  So you you want to move on today or you want to you want to say this for next time?
• 2:18:35
  How long have you been going?
• 2:18:36
  I don't know. How long have been going, Jen? Hour and 20 minutes like that.
• 2:18:41
  I think we could do it.
• 2:18:43
  Okay.
• 2:18:44
  So Bret sent me this paper this morning after I had a stupidly long day yesterday and woke up in a city I wasn't expecting and walked to the ferry and tried to read this paper on the ferry while a very cute dog tried to eat my beef jerky.(...) So those are the conditions which I read this paper.
• 2:19:01
  So.
• 2:19:04
  The problem, Heather, is that God who.
• 2:19:10
  Well, you know, God.
• 2:19:13
  Not intimately know.
• 2:19:14
  Okay. So God is sending us a message here and I at this point am not on my game enough to know how to interpret it. But your story about the elements of your story suggests that there is something to be said about a fairy dog mother.(...) But you see what I'm saying?
• 2:19:33
  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:19:34
  Yeah. But anyway, maybe it will occur to me later and then I can kick myself for not knowing what it is now.
• 2:19:40
  But let's talk about this paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which is an extremely prestigious journal.
• 2:19:50
  I would say it's right below science, nature and cell in the historical pantheon.
• 2:19:59
  Anyway, the National Academy is very exclusive.(...) So this paper is a little surprising because we want to show the paper.
• 2:20:10
  Yeah, just a minute. I just wanted to actually.
• 2:20:14
  So I've got it on my screen. We'll scroll through that. But boy.
• 2:20:21
  Okay, so the title of the paper is the entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient and growing rapidly. This is from August 4th of this year.
• 2:20:34
  The first author is Richardson.
• 2:20:37
  So do we want to just summarize what the paper is about?
• 2:20:45
  Why don't we let them do it? Let's read the abstract.
• 2:20:47
  Okay.
• 2:20:48
  Science is characterized by collaboration and cooperation. Can you see my screen at this point? Still not.
• 2:20:54
  No way.
• 2:20:57
  How about now?
• 2:21:02
  No.(...) Well, I can read it off my screen. Science is characterized by collaboration and cooperation, but also by uncertainty, competition and inequality. While there's always been some concern that these pressures may compel some to defect from the scientific research ethos, i.e. fail to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or to the training of an expert workforce, the focus has largely been on the actions of lone individuals.(...) Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased.(...) Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities, paper mills, i.e. sellers of mass produced low quality and fabricated research, brokers, i.e. conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research, predatory journals who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions that facilitate systematic scientific fraud.
• 2:21:52
  Here we demonstrate through case studies that one, individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals. Two, brokers have enabled publication and targeted journals at scale and three, within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud. Our results reveal some of the strategies that enable the entities promoting scientific fraud to evade interventions. Our final analysis suggests this ability to evade interventions is enabling the number of fraudulent publications to grow at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science.
• 2:22:24
  So I actually want to read the first paragraph of the introduction to because it's quite good. Over the last four centuries, the production of scientific knowledge has increasingly become a matter of state and societal importance.
• 2:22:37
  The contract between scientists and states can be summarized thusly. In exchange for creating new knowledge that is useful to the state and training a workforce able to use that knowledge, society support scientists with rewarding careers, good salaries and public recognition. The success of this contract has led to an extraordinary growth in the scale and scope of the scientific enterprise and to its adoption across the world. Indeed, some studies suggest that the wealth of a nation is closely aligned with the amount and quality of the research it produces.
• 2:23:03
  (...) And actually, sorry, one more paragraph here.
• 2:23:07
  The state supported scientific enterprise can be idealized as a public goods game with numerous and diverse stakeholders.
• 2:23:13
  Because of the increasing complexity of the knowledge being created and increased specialization, the system relies on the good faith assumption of genuine contributions by all participants.
• 2:23:19
  Scientists rely on other scientists to disclose knowledge that can be built upon, on other scientists and on publishers for the screening of scientific studies, on publishers for the dissemination of their work and on funding agencies and universities for support. Universities and funding agencies rely on scientists for evaluating the work of their peers and on the state and society for their funding.
• 2:23:40
  Private sector firms rely on universities to educate a knowledgeable workforce. The state and society rely on scientists to produce knowledge that will improve well being and state security. Etskowitz and Leidastorf formalize certain aspects of this web of relationships in their triple helix model of knowledge based economic development.(...) So I wanted to read that because it reveals some of the complicated nature of what we are relying on with regard to information dissemination and reliability. But two paragraphs down we have what I think is one of their major, because so they do some good data analysis here, but one of their major contributions here, which they kind of bury, they bury their lead, I think, is when they start talking about defection. They say scholarly defection occurs when there was a failure to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or to the training of an expert workforce while still benefiting from the contract. So specifically what they're doing here is saying, you know what, most scientists, all scientists acknowledge that fraud happens. You would have any system, there will be some bad actors. But most scientists when asked about the ubiquity and source of fraud will say it's rare and it emerges from a few bad actors. And if we can, you know, we'll never get rid of them entirely, but if we can, if we can get rid of as many as possible, you know, we'll have it under control.
• 2:25:05
  And in part, these authors writing this published this month in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences are saying, you know what, it would be better for us to think about this in terms of in game theoretic terms. Using the language of game theory as defection from a system as a unfortunate but profitable strategy that some people will engage in given things like, and they, you know, they talk about inequalities and access to funds in especially developing world countries and such. But they also find in this paper how much fraud is happening within the first world in, you know, in the United States and in Europe with regard to science publishing. You had something to say here.
• 2:25:47
  Yes, I also think that they not only buried the lead, but I think they they're doing a typical careful. This is honorable academic work. And the problem is that honorable academic work is offering sort of the least bad interpretation of the pattern that they have. Sure. They're being careful about it, but they're being careful in a direction that, you know, is cautious about estimating how much fraud there is. But even so, there's a paragraph that I want to read that gives us a sense for this. Jen, do you have that paragraph?(...) OK, a hard time reading it at that distance,(...) but I'll try. It says, scholarly defection occurs when there is a failure to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or the training of an expert workforce while still benefiting from the contract. A 2002 study of scientists funded by the United States National Institutes of Health reported that 0.2 percent of mid-career researchers and 0.5 percent of early career researchers admitted to falsifying research data in the previous previous three years. A systematic analysis of more than 20,000 articles published between 1995 and 2014 reported that 3.8 percent of these articles contained inappropriately duplicated images with at least half of these cases suggesting deliberate manipulation. We and others have also recently described a class of entities engaging in large scale scientific fraud, typically denoted paper mills, that sell mass produced low quality fabricated research articles as described by Byrne et al.(...) And in a report by the Committee on Publication Ethics and in the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers in a 2022 to 2023 survey of medical residents at tertiary hospitals in southwest China, 46.7 percent of respondents self-reported buying and selling papers, letting other people write papers or writing papers for others. Some publishers report that up to one in seven of their submissions are of probable paper mill provenance. Agents of paper mills have also recently been reported attempting to bribe journal editors and to hijack the entire editorial process at some journals.
• 2:28:30
  So that's the rest of the paragraph that I had just begun reading and it's in the introduction. And so here they're just telling us what we already know.
• 2:28:37
  Yeah.
• 2:28:37
  Ish. Right.
• 2:28:40
  And what they have done is a number of things.
• 2:28:45
  They have gone into a number of journal indexing databases.
• 2:28:51
  The landscape is changing so fast. It's hard to know exactly.
• 2:28:56
  How did define these terms anymore? I went back and found a handout that I created the very last quarter that I was a college professor teaching students how to distinguish between full text databases and indexing databases. Web of Science was my go to that I recommend for students, although Evergreen didn't support it. So we had to do some fancy footwork to actually allow them to do literature review.
• 2:29:21
  Obviously, conditions have changed considerably in the nine years since since I made that handout.
• 2:29:29
  But they are finding in that there are these aggregators,(...) the topics that they have are literature aggregators.
• 2:29:47
  They have retractions and pub peer comments, pub peer being a place where you can say, you know, I actually think that there's a problem with this paper and they've got a ton of these these comments on papers accelerating rapidly in the last several years.(...) They are looking at whether or not their individual editors at journals who are very likely to have papers retracted, very likely to have papers show up as duplicates of other papers which are disproportionate. Certain editors are disproportionately likely to have a pattern.
• 2:30:19
  Right. That's that's what I meant by very likely the conferences, particular types of conferences that are that are that are questionable. And then they've got an actual organization and you still can't show my screen here, but down in.
• 2:30:39
  In this is going to be in the methods.
• 2:30:41
  They've got the Academic Research and Development Association, ARDA, in which this this organization, the Academic Research Development Association, sounds like it's of academic quality.
• 2:30:54
  But they guarantee publication in a number of journals and they just they're trying to keep up with the mostly unpaid legitimate journal editors trying to figure out which and the aggregators of scientific articles are trying to figure out like where they can where they can publish their stuff legitimately.
• 2:31:17
  Meanwhile, you've got organizations that have these fraudulent journals and they can act faster than legitimate scientists. And so you've got just you've got fraud upon fraud upon fraud.(...) The one issue I have with this paper and there's, you know, there's a lot here.
• 2:31:34
  But the one issue that I have with this paper is that they've got a couple of.
• 2:31:42
  A couple of journals that disclose who the editor is who worked with the authors in getting a paper published. Most journals don't do that.
• 2:31:51
  They use that information.
• 2:31:54
  But let me just tell the story. Yeah.
• 2:31:57
  (...) Most journals don't reveal who the editor is, which means that for the most part, we can't we have no possibility of seeing this information. So the two journals, one of which is a major American journal plus one proceedings.
• 2:32:11
  What does the L stand for? I've forgotten Public Library of Public Library of Science. Yes.(...) Which only started in like early knots.
• 2:32:19
  Which started to hold on, which started as a response to the corruption of scientific publishing. Yes. It was deliberately started to correct some of the perverse incentives in publishing and has done a decent job of it.
• 2:32:35
  So anyway, this was a response to bad publishing.
• 2:32:37
  And and we've actually we've had some students published in plus one. It's and it has been understood to be an excellent corrective to some of the corruption in science. And one of the things that they are doing is trying to be transparent.
• 2:32:51
  And so having their editors of their editors of individual papers be named as associated with those papers allows these authors who I again, I think are acting in good faith, trying to reveal how much fraud is endemic in science at this point. But because plus one is one of only a tiny handful of journals that actually has editor information associated with papers, they went and did an analysis on plus one. And sure, they found, for instance, the forty five plus one editors whom we were able to flag due to the anomalous rate at which they accepted retracted or pub peer commented publications or had their submissions handled by other flagged editors comprise only point to five percent of all editors. That's one in four hundred. So that sounds like a low rate. I wish it were zero. But we also can't know if that's a low rate because we don't have the information on any of the other journals. So this this unfortunately, I think this paper may end up being being looked at as evidence that plus one has a problem. And in fact, I suspect the plus one has less of a problem than other journals as evidenced by its interest in being transparent. But we have no data to compare it to.
• 2:34:03
  Yeah, I agree. The choice of the day of the journal that provides the data.
• 2:34:11
  Specifically has the estimate in a place where the rate is likely to be low because your name is on the damn thing.
• 2:34:17
  If your name wasn't on the damn thing, it'd be a lot less likely. And so I do think my one complaint about the paper, which is related to yours, is that I think it wildly underestimates the problem as bad as the problem they point out is. The actual problem is worse.(...) So I wanted to run through just a few points about what is here and what isn't here and what it means. The overarching point is going to be the sky fell and nobody blinked scientifically. The sky fell and we've been shouting about it for a long time. Here you have it now showing up in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, or at least a hint at it.(...) Here's the question. But we don't talk about in this paper is what is the direction of the fraud? There's a sense that you have a competitive environment in which people get ahead by publishing papers. You don't necessarily care about the content of those papers because, you know, a good paper, a paper in a good journal counts on your CV, causes you to get a job, causes you to get tenure and all these things.
• 2:35:22
  However, in an environment where it is possible to game the system in this way, you better believe that people who stand to make a ton of money outside of the system have figured out how to game these paper mills, these journals using paper mills and brokers. In other words, if pharma wants the impression that what is causing people to have an increase in cardiac arrest is climate change, then the answer is we've found a way that they can arrange for that conclusion to proliferate by creating a lot of what seems like work that indicates this connection.
• 2:36:01
  And so you've got what is the direction of the fraud? We really need to understand that this is like an Epstein like thing where we don't know to what extent the things we think are true are downstream of a process that has nothing to do with science, which is highly likely.
• 2:36:21
  I think I think this paper is a much more general approach and so it can't do everything. And I think in terms of sense making and the role of science in society, which is where they start the paper, we that problem is larger than a lot of the kinds of fraud that they seem to be talking about here. But for instance, they've got this organization ARDA, which appears to be entirely about encouraging scientific fraud, as far as I can tell from this paper. They write many articles published in the journals listed by ARDA are well outside the journal stated scope. For instance, an article about roasting hazelnuts in a journal about HIV AIDS care or an article about malware detection in a journal about special education.
• 2:37:13
  For the set of five journals that we inspected comprehensively, we found that between 34 and 98.7% of the articles published in these journals were outside of the journal stated scope.
• 2:37:22
  Now, at one level, I don't care. I don't know why any of us should care, except that a journal exists with a scope because editors have scopes and that presumably the editor of a journal on HIV AIDS care doesn't really know anything about roasting hazelnuts and so should have no particular ability to know who to send it out for peer review or whether or not to make a decision that is appropriate with regard to the quality of that amazing paper on the roasting of hazelnuts. But so that doesn't quite that doesn't fit with the larger societal impact objection that you're making. And yet it is also a kind of fraud. It's a way that absurd papers that are important papers are potentially getting into the literature. And then if you don't like you might cite maybe maybe your deal is roasting hazelnuts and maybe the particular article. It's just such a good example. Maybe the particular article on roasting hazelnuts misses a critical step by which you actually don't end up with good hazelnuts. And the person doing research on hazelnut roasting doesn't notice that it's in a totally inappropriate journal for its topic. And that's and that then that would be a clue normally to like where what what do I know about the journal that I found this article in that has been, you know, if I could show my screen, I was going to show this handout that I gave to students. And I like how do you do research? It's not just a how do I find the thing that looks like it says what I wanted to say and plug it in. Like, how do you assess your sources? How do you find sources and how do you assess them once you have them all before you end up reading the thing?
• 2:38:58
  So I don't know exactly what's going on with hazelnuts in an HIV journal, but they do talk about the proxies that make the system run. And one of the things that I think is very clear here is academic publishing is an ecosystem.
• 2:39:15
  There is a niche in it for people who utilize paper mills and brokers.(...) There is a niche that will work for people who want to advance to put a particular set of ideas into the literature because it's useful to their their business interests.
• 2:39:33
  And so one of the proxies is something like an impact factor for a journal. Oh, I've got three papers in an impact in a journal with a high impact factor that looks good on my CV. So if the HIV journal is a high impact factor journal and it's got hazelnut stuff in it and I'm trying to get a job somewhere in the neighborhood of medicine. And, you know, I say, well, I've, you know, I published in HIV quarterly or whatever it is that can do it. So I have the sense that it's some sort of a gaming that we don't anticipate because the subject is so weird.(...) But but anyway, the the the bigger question, I think, is peer review is a catastrophe, as you and I have said here many times. Peer review is not review by peers. Review by peers is desirable. If you have peers and there aren't always peers, sometimes you're in a place that nobody knows what you're doing because you're on a frontier. But if you have peers, it's good for them to review your work.(...) There's no reason that shouldn't be happening in public where they have something to lose by getting stuff wrong and they have an incentive, therefore, to review your work well.(...) But we are always told about peer review and how it's the guide to, you know, quality science.
• 2:40:50
  Why didn't peer review catch all of this fraudulent work? And I'm not saying it never catches anything. But the point is, if you had a system, if peer review was what we are told peer review is, then the point is this fraud should be impossible because you're trying to put stuff over on experts who ought to know better.
• 2:41:06
  Yeah, I know. It's implicit in here that.
• 2:41:11
  That what has failed is insufficient peer review as opposed to peer review itself was insufficient, which is an important, an important distinction. I think this is irrelevant here, they say. So they're talking about, you know, how the system has recognized the fraud are things like comments on this thing called PubP.(...) Where peers are pointing out that, you know, I think either I see duplicated images in this paper, in this paper, and I think this is therefore fraud or, you know, the methods are wrong. So pub peer commented articles and retracted articles are there sort of measures of public recognition of fraud. So they say to provide perspective, we note that the number of retracted articles and pub peer commented articles has been doubling every three point three years and every three point six years, respectively.
• 2:42:01
  While the total number of publications has been doubling every 15 years.
• 2:42:05
  So those differences in rates mean that, you know, we're in trouble now. The problem is getting far, far worse, very fast.
• 2:42:13
  Yep. And I would point out that those public comments are effectively the peer review that you and I are advocating for, where people actually say, hey, this is wrong with that thing out here in public, where you can see it rather than killing off good work behind the scenes and stealing it and publishing yourself or whatever happens. And in peer review and believe me, it's a mess.
• 2:42:34
  But OK.
• 2:42:36
  Why is it happening? Well, it's happening because you've got a system that is built on a foundation in which the honor system was sufficient. So the system of gentlemen, science that used to exist was one in which there was no point in publishing fraudulent work because you weren't really doing it as a job. You were doing it as a calling and your whole you're doing it as a calling. You wanted to contribute things that would maybe carry your name into the future after your death because they were actually useful. Publishing fraudulent work doesn't do that. So you've got the honor system and the fact that everybody's trained in the same game. And they are very right to apply game theory to this puzzle. You've got effectively a collective action problem, which they describe as a public goods problem. It won't go into the details of it. But think about it this way. You're a bright eyed, bushy tailed, science minded college graduate who wants to go do your thing.
• 2:43:37
  You go to graduate school, you get there.
• 2:43:40
  Your literature is full of fraudulent material and you don't know which stuff is fraudulent.
• 2:43:48
  OK, that means it's very hard.
• 2:43:51
  Think about this. It's very hard to come up with something that makes sense because you're held responsible for a large body of literature, much of which is wrong. Right. This is I will get back to cherry picking in a moment.
• 2:44:04
  And it's proliferating at a rate that no human could possibly keep up.
• 2:44:06
  Nobody knows. And so the point is everybody in your field is parroting stuff of dubious quality. And so, OK, if you're really smart.
• 2:44:16
  You get out, right? Something's not right here. It's not possible to do the thing that I was passionate about. I don't want to do the academic rat race thing in which I'm now looking for a paper mill because I'm trying to, you know, buttress my CV. So you're really smart and you understand what's going on. You get the hell out and you go do something else.
• 2:44:36
  You stay in. And the point is, OK, well, now you're trapped in a game where all of the people who you're going to be competing with for jobs are the ones who are maximally leveraging the available tools, including paper mills and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. Fraudulent stuff.(...) How are you going to compete with them? Well, there's only one way you're going to do it, too. So how do you get a system in which you've got tens of thousands of people engaged in various different levels of fraud in every single discipline? You get it by creating a system of incentives where you get a positive feedback, where the people who are succeeding are the ones who are doing these things. And I'll make one more point and I'll let you go. The. You don't leave? No, no. You're outside. You cannot leave. No, soon.(...) But when Peter Begozian, Jim Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose revealed their hoax to us in which they exposed the social science journals for being willing to publish absolutely crappy research that they themselves had generated.
• 2:45:46
  I said to them.
• 2:45:48
  This is awesome.
• 2:45:51
  The fly in the ointment is that you didn't try it on the science journals.
• 2:45:55
  You would be shocked at how effective this would be on the science journals because they are a fraud, too. Yep.
• 2:46:01
  Right. So anyway, this is now effectively the proof that that is right, is that the science journals are exerting no kind of quality control. And there is a massive architecture that has grown up in that environment. It's like leaving yogurt on the counter. Right. The yogurt's been sitting on the counter and oh, my God, there's, you know, fungus and bacteria and all kinds of stuff growing out of it.
• 2:46:23
  Why are you shocked? You left yogurt on the counter. So they left the system undefended and they've got all of these parasites who are now taking advantage of it. And frankly, there's the honorable people aren't going to be able to compete. So if you want to find them, they're not going to be there.
• 2:46:38
  Yeah. I mean, it's just in in the discussion at the end of their paper, they say.
• 2:46:45
  In their words, very much what you said a few minutes back. This complexity is why we propose the use of the game theoretical concept of defection. We believe this to be a useful perspective because it frames some behavior, not in ethical terms, but in terms of rationality.
• 2:47:00
  However, the term defection implies realignment from normative behavior to non-normative behavior. For many junior doctors and budding scientists, engaging in defecting behavior may be the new norm.
• 2:47:12
  Yeah, new norm is exactly what you would expect. Right. It's, you know, because it's what the ecosystem rewards.
• 2:47:20
  Right. As you say, you know, if you've got if you you said smartest, I would say the most.
• 2:47:28
  Those who care most deeply about science will have left.
• 2:47:33
  So if the new norm is likely to become defecting behavior, that is unscientific behavior. You are you are no longer interested in discovering what is true.
• 2:47:44
  You are interested only in staying afloat yourself. And we all need to stay afloat.
• 2:47:49
  We all will struggle to stay afloat. But if you are in a field which is explicitly about discovering what is true and you have defected from the goal of discovering what is true in favor of gilding your CV, then you don't deserve to be in that field.
• 2:48:10
  Yeah, you're you're not you're not doing the science, you're doing you're doing scientism.
• 2:48:17
  So I've got three more points and then we can put this put this to be. Yeah, not even scientism. Yeah. One is the cumulative effect problem.
• 2:48:28
  And longtime listeners will remember me talking about this.
• 2:48:34
  It's a pet peeve of mine.(...) When you have a wrong idea in the literature.
• 2:48:40
  In the peer reviewed literature, you are held responsible for accounting for it, which assumes that it's true.(...) If it's not true, there is not a good language for this result is one that I am going to sidestep because I don't believe the people who did it did what they said they did. Right. Even though it's frequently true, even if the extent of the fraud is only that people reported something as a hypothesis that was actually an observation in the data, which is a fatal flaw for any scientific study.
• 2:49:14
  And not one that is detected by a method like this, it's invisible to a method like that.
• 2:49:19
  No, and they and they they say they specifically say in a section of limitations, we cannot see that which we cannot see.
• 2:49:26
  Right. But but the point is almost everybody is doing this. They see some juicy pattern in a data set and they report it as if they had the hypothesis before they collected the data, which means they didn't do science and they reported it as science, which is fraud.
• 2:49:39
  But everybody is guilty of it because they're not interested in science anymore. Why? Because it doesn't pay to be interested in science. But the cumulative effect, you introduce a few bad papers, those bad papers mean that anything that is forced to report them will be compromised. Many things will be fatally compromised. You can't come up with a true hypothesis that accounts for the data if some of the data isn't data.
• 2:50:06
  Right. So the point is a few bad papers results in a whole bunch of bad papers, which results in every paper being bad.
• 2:50:13
  This literally happens like at lightning pace as the things that get cited in the field are less and less reliable. The rate at which things become unreliable skyrockets. And so unless your question is small enough that you can actually answer it empirically within your own lab or your own your own scientific ecosystem. If you are relying if you are relying on on outside data sets, on reviewing literature and reviewing data that other people have taken and testing a hypothesis by looking at data that already exists, but that you haven't seen yet, which is a test, a legitimate test of hypothesis.(...) It is becoming nearly impossible, which means that the testable hypotheses will inherently become smaller and more narrow because they require. And, you know, this is this has been a bias of mine in particular. And I'm just I just did more empirical science than you did. I'm more of an empiricist. It's like I want to keep this like I want the questions to be absolutely intriguing to me, but I want to rely not at all on anyone else's data or on anyone else's analytics, either the stats to like I want to keep it in house so that I know for sure. If there is a mistake in that, that mistake is mine.
• 2:51:25
  And actually, it's very interesting.(...) That is exactly the response to a dark age. Right. In a dark age, you're not interacting with the community of scientists who are feeding you interesting things and you're responding in kind. The point is you're in isolation because at least I know what happened here. I can do a scientific experiment here and I can tell you what proceeded on my desk without reaching into the literature to a bunch of stuff that may not have happened at all. Right.
• 2:51:57
  OK, so the next point is one.
• 2:52:01
  I hate to be right about this.
• 2:52:04
  I really do. I'm not surprised to be right about it. But people have heard me talk about cherry picking, which is a indefensible behavior as the scientific establishment would have it. And I periodically make a defense of it, which is cherry picking is the only mechanism which would allow you to tap into the literature.(...) And there's only one way to do it. Well, first of all, there are two versions of cherry picking cherry picking. Cherry picking is named after the pathological. Again, right. It's named after the version where you go into the literature and find the papers that agree with you and you report those.
• 2:52:45
  That's not forgivable.(...) But cherry picking for only those papers that you believe have a high likelihood of actually reflecting work that took place is the only way to get around rampant fraud that you can't personally detect.
• 2:53:00
  And I would argue the only way to do that well, the honorable version of cherry picking, whatever its name should be, is to process very little. And which is it's like one step out from what you're saying. Yeah, I didn't do it all myself.
• 2:53:15
  But here are a few papers I believe.
• 2:53:17
  Here's why I believe that they were actually done. And here's what happens when you compile that much smaller set of insights and try to make sense of them, which is kind of what I've done is.
• 2:53:28
  And actually, I think this is maybe of interest to no one but the two of us. But I think you and I did the same thing in very different domains, me empirically and you theoretically, where I was thinking about working on this group of organisms like, oh, do I go into Latin America where these frogs are well studied? A lot of people know. Or do I go someplace where no one has looked at them at all? No matter what I find, it's going to be new. And it's going to be harder.
• 2:53:53
  It's going to like I'm not going to be new. It's going to be a meaningful contribution, which you were dead right about that. You contributed a bunch of interesting things that contribute to our knowledge.
• 2:54:02
  That's true. But I don't think I ever had that thought. I don't think I was thinking in that way. I was thinking, do I want to be well, I mean, maybe this is the same thing that I want to be doing. Do I want to contribute a brick to the wall of the knowledge?
• 2:54:14
  Right.
• 2:54:15
  Or do you or do I want to begin to build the foundation? But also over here, I can refer to all the literature that's happening over in the, you know, it's the Dart poison frogs in in in the new world where a lot of excellent work has been done and presumably some not so good work, but a lot of excellent work has been done. And I know some of many of the people who've been doing it. I trust them. I've been with some of them in the field. But still contributing to that work requires knowing intricately and being sure that everything that you're citing was definitely done perfectly.
• 2:54:48
  Like actually over here.
• 2:54:50
  All I have to know is that I saw what I saw and I did it honestly.
• 2:54:54
  Yeah, actually, that's really.
• 2:54:55
  And it's and it's very much the same way that you ended up the many, you know, much more important places that you ended up theoretically. It just like empirically versus theoretically.
• 2:55:05
  Well, it ends up being a geographic kind of cherry picking because what you did.
• 2:55:10
  So for those who are trying to understand what we're talking about, Heather studied a group of frogs that was known to exist, but almost nothing was known about their behavior.
• 2:55:22
  Even though they looked tantalizingly similar to a different group that was now known to be unrelated that lived in the new world that was really well studied.
• 2:55:30
  They were they looked so similar and were so similar in so many physiological and toxicology ways that they had actually been proposed to be sister taxa. And we now knew that wasn't true, but that was about all we knew about them.
• 2:55:41
  Right. But the point is, if I understand you correctly, you could look at the vast literature that was done on the new world, boys and frogs.(...) And.
• 2:55:52
  You could say, here's what that literature can review that literature.
• 2:55:55
  Right. And if it's wrong,(...) doesn't change a damn thing about what I did, I can update that part of my what I know and say, actually, this group of conclusions didn't turn out to be right.
• 2:56:04
  We thought it was, but it doesn't hurt what I did because what I did is it's on an island in the Indian Ocean, unconnected to the boys and art frogs of the new world. So anyway, that's that's a beautiful insight. I had one more point.
• 2:56:19
  So you were talking about the cumulative effect problem, scientific cherry picking, scientific cherry picking, which actually.
• 2:56:25
  Funny thing happened on the way to scientific cherry picking.
• 2:56:29
  The term cherry picking.
• 2:56:33
  Is named after the pathological version, but it's the name that should be given to the honorable version. Right. You don't know what the name of the pathological version is, the rotten cherry picking, I guess. But, okay,(...) last point.
• 2:56:49
  How does this paper connect to Covid?
• 2:56:55
  Well, I think this paper actually gives you a pretty strong indication of how it is that the Covid catastrophe could have occurred. And I want to remind people in the very early days of DarkHorse, Heather had suggested that we have the conversations about Covid. That we were privately having over the dinner table because she thought that many out there in the world needed to hear what scientists who were not expert in any of the relevant fields except evolution made of what they were being told about viral origins, about treating the disease, about epidemiology. So we would sort it out in front of you and you would benefit. Heather turned out to be right about this.(...) But in that early period, we experienced a weird kind of scientific heyday,(...) which was great because what we were doing was we were reviewing the non peer reviewed literature because frankly, the pandemic was changing so quickly. What the public's knowledge of the pandemic was was changing so quickly that the peer reviewed literature couldn't keep up. And the fact that the peer review is a slow process put us in contact with the preprint literature.
• 2:58:08
  Let me say, actually, I learned today when I was looking at PLOS One again, that PLOS One actually partnered with BioRxIV. I don't know how to pronounce it, but that preprint server that was so fruitful, like the Wild West during Covid, they actually partnered with them.
• 2:58:23
  In 2016.(...) So that like another piece of evidence that PLOS One is actually one of the good guys.
• 2:58:29
  Yeah. Rosenzweig started it specifically because he was fed up.
• 2:58:34
  Yeah.
• 2:58:35
  Anyway, an interesting chapter we should go back to at some point. But here's the point I want to make about the preprint literature. Yeah. The preprint literature is not awesome.(...) The preprint literature is high variance is what it is. But here's the beauty of the preprint literature.
• 2:58:51
  You're expected to cherry pick it. You'd be a fool to do anything else. Nobody's so foolish that they're going to go through the entire preprint literature because there's no standard exerted at all. So you have to exert a standard and you have to decide which of these things is worth your time, which is exactly what we scientists should be doing.
• 2:59:09
  And actually, that's that's great. That's fantastic. And frankly, given the numbers that I shared from this Richardson et al paper in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences this week or month of the rate at which the fraudulent papers are are are propagating more rapidly than what we assume are legitimate papers and presumably there are far more legitimate papers.
• 2:59:36
  That far more fraudulent papers masquerading as legitimate papers than there are legitimate papers masquerading as fraudulent papers. So the problem is probably way worse than what they have found our finding.
• 2:59:46
  But given that, perhaps this should be taken as a call to actually you are now free to cherry pick all of the literature because treat it all like the preprint service.
• 2:59:58
  100 percent. That is exactly the lesson here. And, you know, I will pat myself on the back for telling you you needed to cherry pick the literature and you needed to edit down.
• 3:00:07
  You didn't need to try to account for everything you thought might be true.
• 3:00:11
  You're much better off editing down to things you're very confident of, even if you exclude many things that are probably worthy of your time. A smaller data set of the quality of the research. Confident of. Yeah, I knew that was true.
• 3:00:24
  Therefore, this satisfies my confidence that work represented is what it appears to be. Yes. Right. That is vital. And if all you if you could magically just press a button and have every paper that wasn't what it appeared to be disappear, you'd be left with a tiny literature and you would get smarter so fast. So that really is the job. Can you detect what high quality work actually sounds like when it is reported and process only that you'll see what's coming when nobody else does.
• 3:00:54
  Why? Because they've fed a bunch of garbage into their model and then they've been held responsible for accounting for all of it. And if you've got garbage and you have to explain it, you're done.
• 3:01:03
  You're not going to be able to do science. You just you just can't. So.
• 3:01:08
  Free to ignore every print is great. Now you should consider yourself free to ignore any paper that doesn't smell right. Right.
• 3:01:17
  All right. The last point I wanted to make is that effectively what we are what this paper reports is the result of an inadvertent gain of function experiment run inside the literature in which those things that are easy to spot don't occur.
• 3:01:35
  And those things that don't get detected by the immune system of science proliferate and you are left now with a cryptic anti scientific system feeding stuff into science and getting science to do its bidding.(...) Right. You've got escape variants for reading through the literature in every different conceivable form and you should be on high alert. You should especially expect this stuff where there's money to be made any place that there's money to be made like health. You should expect garbage to be pumped into the literature, which then think about what your life on the Internet looks like. Right. Somebody says, you know, Ivermectin works for Covid and, you know, guess what? It also works for cancer. And the answer is, but here are 14 studies that says it doesn't. Well, why do you suppose that is right? I mean, I'm not telling you, you know what to think about it. You need to find the literature that's actually did the the actual job in order to figure out what the actual effect of the molecule is on the disease.
• 3:02:38
  But the idea that there would be a wall of literature telling you, oh, not only does it not work, but it's dangerous. Of course, there would be. It's not profitable. Right. That's what you're going to find.(...) OK, bonus point.
• 3:02:53
  Bonus point.(...) And it's a good one.
• 3:02:59
  What do you suppose is going to happen when I reads the literature?
• 3:03:04
  God, it's going to be as dumb as your average PhD, which is not a good look.(...) That's what's going to happen. So the real question is, can you figure out how to teach an AI to cherry pick? And that's not going to be an easy one, because it's your Spidey sense that allows you to actually honorably figure out which sub process. And I don't know how you teach these things, a Spidey sense. Maybe you train them on people who have one or something.
• 3:03:33
  But I mean, they're just at this point, they're still really bad. And I know, you know, we have friends. This is why, in part. But yeah, I can't. Yeah. So you guys can see my screen, but I found it. I guess ironic is the right word that at the very top of this, you know, so I always download articles so that I have them and so that I know they're stable.
• 3:03:52
  And the thing that I read, I definitely read at some point. I've got it highlighted. And I know for sure, even though, you know, I really should print it, but I'm not printing articles. I have hard copies of books for this reason. But at the top of the PDF, which is presumably not something that you would see if you just read the thing online, I am offered by Adobe short on time. Save it with a quick document summary, view summary. And then it offers to give me the summary of this article.
• 3:04:16
  Right.
• 3:04:16
  You know, this article, which is effectively trying to about about the problem of of. People having defected from honorable science into labor saving and time saving fraud.
• 3:04:33
  Yeah.
• 3:04:34
  No, I do not actually want the quick document summary from the A.I. of this article.
• 3:04:40
  My God.
• 3:04:42
  Yeah. All right. Well, that is the state of.
• 3:04:48
  Scientific progress at this moment in history and I is liberating to hear it.
• 3:04:54
  It's frightening to see us begin to peer into that particular abyss, but I'm glad it's finally happening because that means we're finally going to be able to talk about it in public.
• 3:05:08
  But it's not going to be enough.
• 3:05:10
  Well, I mean, that's the other thing is.
• 3:05:14
  When you hear I do it more than you do, because I think you're being more politic, but when you hear me say. You can't fix those institutions. There's no baby in that bathwater.
• 3:05:29
  I'm not exaggerating. You've got a system which competitively drives everybody into some version of fraud. I don't think most of them know that they're involved in that, but most of them look to the left, look to the right. They're not doing anything worse than the people next to them. And so they figure this is the way it works. And only if you stand outside that system. Or you're so in love with your science that you can watch people engage in madness in front of you and say, I don't know what y'all are talking about.
• 3:06:00
  You're wrong,(...) right? You're not seeing what's in front of you. You're you're making stuff up only if you're in outside or.
• 3:06:09
  Inside, presumably temporarily watching the thing unfold.(...) Can you get a sense for how broken this system has become? And we have to, you know, I will tell you what we got to do.
• 3:06:26
  You got to find the keepers of the flame.
• 3:06:29
  Many of them will not be academics. Some of them will never have been academics.
• 3:06:32
  Some of them have been exiled from academia and they rekindle the fire of science. That's the only right thing to do. I can't get you out of it. If it's going to have to read the literature, right? You need the keepers of the flame. Well, an AI can't get you out of it.
• 3:06:44
  Keepers of the flame.
• 3:06:45
  Well, an AI can't I can't do science.
• 3:06:49
  Yeah, you can do a lot of pieces of it.
• 3:06:51
  We've talked about this before, but it doesn't have the spark of hypothesis generation.
• 3:06:57
  Well, look, I hate it. I don't want science done by AI. I don't think there's any bar to it ultimately doing science.
• 3:07:06
  I'm not looking forward to living in that world, but I think I think that's coming.
• 3:07:09
  But at the moment, it is completely hobbled by the fact that the way it works is to be a really good reader. And that's a really good way to learn a lot of stuff that just ain't true.
• 3:07:20
  It's entirely past based. Yeah, it's it can only build. It can't create. Yeah, I'm sorry. It can only build on information from before it cannot generate entirely new things.
• 3:07:33
  Yeah, it's a hill climber and not a valley crosser. Not convinced it can't be a valley crosser, but the current system is going to make it a hill climber. And the point is we've got an entire academy of people who are climbing that same hill. And, you know, it's a it's a hill of bullshit is what it is. So.
• 3:07:53
  Oh, perfect. Yeah. All right.
• 3:07:57
  Well, then.(...) So thank you for being here for this. You know, we talked about fashion shows and pedophilia and the state of fraud and science. It was a really uplifting uplifting show here at the end of summer in the northern hemisphere. We're not that close to the end, but it feels like it's really too.
• 3:08:16
  It's actually today.
• 3:08:18
  Yeah, I think it is today.
• 3:08:20
  But, you know, the days are are noticeably shortening. Now we are we are into the part of the year closing in on the equinox when things.
• 3:08:30
  Things are getting faster and faster in terms of the change, the changes that are happening. So we'll be back next week, next Wednesday. In fact, six short days.
• 3:08:42
  In the meantime, check out our sponsors Caraway, Masa Chips and ARMRA this week. And until we see you next time, because you're the ones you love. Eat good food and get outside.
• 3:08:52
  Be well, everyone.