Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Careful Thinking in Reckless Times: The 318th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Transcript

Careful Thinking in Reckless Times: The 318th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 1:00:00
  (Bell Ringing) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast, live stream number 6,000 three.
• 1:00:10
  What number is it actually?
• 1:00:12
  3,000.
• 1:00:14
  I don't think it's 3,000.
• 1:00:16
  Did I make that up?
• 1:00:19
  I don't know.
• 1:00:19
  Somebody made it up.
• 1:00:20
  It's 3,000.
• 1:00:21
  It's 3,000.
• 1:00:22
  All right, not prime.
• 1:00:23
  Very simple.
• 1:00:25
  It's gonna be that kind of a day, huh?
• 1:00:27
  Despite of your-- Like you're wrong.
• 1:00:28
  Really am I not wrong?
• 1:00:29
  Where did that come from?
• 1:00:32
  Man, it's just, it's crazy out there.
• 1:00:34
  And I'm trying to keep my head above water, which is part of what we are going to be talking about today.
• 1:00:38
  How do you keep your head above water when everything is so confusing?
• 1:00:42
  One thing to do is do what you're doing right now, which is just to remain on solid ground.
• 1:00:46
  Terra firma.
• 1:00:47
  I say it every time I get off the ferry or the airplane, terra firma.
• 1:00:51
  So that's really what we're about.
• 1:00:53
  Terra firma, how do you get to cognitive terra firma-- Fair enough.
• 1:00:58
  An environment that is basically like intellectual quicksand across the board.
• 1:01:06
  Across the board is probably the wrong metaphor for quicksand, but so be it.
• 1:01:14
  Yep, so I'm Dr.
• 1:01:15
  Bret Weinstein.
• 1:01:16
  You're Dr.
• 1:01:16
  Heather Heying.
• 1:01:17
  Yeah, that's right.
• 1:01:19
  We did a fun Q&A last week, which you can find on Locals.
• 1:01:22
  And we're not doing one after the show this week, but we will be having one for two hours this Sunday at Locals at 11 a.m.
• 1:01:29
  Pacific.
• 1:01:30
  Join us.
• 1:01:31
  Join us on Locals now for the watch party.
• 1:01:34
  And what else, Bret?
• 1:01:37
  Yes.
• 1:01:38
  Join us for a big party at our house.
• 1:01:40
  No, all right, that's not it.
• 1:01:43
  Am I missing something?
• 1:01:46
  Maybe it's time to go right into our awesome sponsor.
• 1:01:50
  Hey, the rent.
• 1:01:52
  And while I read the first couple of ads, you can, I don't know, find some dry ground to stand on and...
• 1:02:00
  We will be-- Get an umbrella?
• 1:02:03
  Yeah, no, it's beginning to pour.
• 1:02:06
  All right, good.
• 1:02:07
  That sounds like a good plan.
• 1:02:09
  Okay, okay.
• 1:02:10
  Our first sponsor this week is VanMan.
• 1:02:13
  Here at DarkHorse, we love VanMan's products and are certain that you will too.
• 1:02:16
  Absolutely everything we've had from them has been exceptional, from their pearl eye cream to their Talon's sunscreen, their coconut magnesium deodorant, and their remarkable remineral,(Mumbles) or a remineralizing, a chewing gum.
• 1:02:30
  All of it is superior.
• 1:02:31
  You particularly, I mean, I love all their products.
• 1:02:34
  I'm not a gum person, but you're really enjoying their gum.
• 1:02:36
  I love their gum.
• 1:02:37
  It's great.
• 1:02:40
  And this week, as people suddenly became aware that gum base, which is the base of most gums, is plastic and that it's probably not a good idea to be energizing plastic repeatedly in your mouth, happens, we got a bunch of chicle based gum in our cabinets.
• 1:03:02
  Great stuff and you don't have to worry about your health.
• 1:03:04
  It's actually good for you.
• 1:03:05
  It's good for your teeth.
• 1:03:06
  VanMan's is great, all of it.
• 1:03:07
  It is great, yeah.
• 1:03:08
  Little glass jars, not even plastic in the jar.
• 1:03:12
  It's wonderful.
• 1:03:14
  Today we're gonna focus on their tallow and honey balm.
• 1:03:16
  In particular, tallow is the best moisturizer on earth because the fatty acids in tallow are nearly identical to the oils in your own skin.
• 1:03:23
  One use and you'll feel the difference.
• 1:03:24
  Your skin will be soft and smooth.
• 1:03:26
  Little goes a long way, this stuff lasts and it's fantastic for you.
• 1:03:31
  And tallow balm isn't just a moisturizer.
• 1:03:32
  It can place everything from lotions and wrinkle creams to Neosporin and diaper balm.
• 1:03:36
  You know, I wrote that in part because it was sort of suggested and every time I read it, I think, I don't, do people really have all sorts of different products for all of these things?
• 1:03:45
  I guess all those products exist.
• 1:03:47
  So the idea that this is sort of revolutionary because you can use it for all of the things on your skin.
• 1:03:52
  It's like your skin is your skin.
• 1:03:53
  Use this on your skin.
• 1:03:55
  It's awesome.
• 1:03:56
  That should be the lesson here.
• 1:03:58
  Also, I think it's evidence of major progress that we can talk about diaper balm and people don't immediately think shoe balm, right?
• 1:04:07
  No.
• 1:04:09
  I think we've come a long way.
• 1:04:11
  You are free to differ, but do so while-- Literally no one in the audience, including me, and I dare say, Jen, has ever heard diaper balm and thought shoe balm.
• 1:04:22
  Well, I guarantee you there are people in this audience who thought the same thing I did and are now feeling quite a bit of relief that they are not alone and you are not alone, all three of you.
• 1:04:31
  You are alone.
• 1:04:34
  All right, back to the diaper balm.
• 1:04:36
  No.
• 1:04:39
  Where were we?
• 1:04:39
  It works on rashes and scrapes, acne and sunburn.
• 1:04:43
  Our boys who are young and at college now swear by it too.
• 1:04:46
  The ingredient list of van bans, honey and tallow balm is short and entirely edible.
• 1:04:51
  Actually, the ingredient list isn't edible.
• 1:04:54
  The ingredients, wow, this is gonna be a stupid and pedantic show.
• 1:04:58
  It's gonna be a pedantic man, it's a yes.
• 1:05:01
  Yep, I mean, I'm pedantic king myself.
• 1:05:04
  Yes, there's a lot of fruit on the pedant tree, the pedant tree.
• 1:05:10
  Yeah, okay.
• 1:05:12
  The ingredients in, there aren't that many ingredients in van bans, honey and tallow balm, and all of them are entirely edible.
• 1:05:19
  See, I rewrote it on the fly.
• 1:05:21
  Nice.
• 1:05:22
  Man, it's not easy to write on a fly, it's like painting on a grain of rice.
• 1:05:26
  Oh my God.
• 1:05:28
  (Laughing) It, van bans, honey and tallow balm has got 100% grass-fed and finished suet, beef tallow, organic raw honey and beeswax, and organic cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, and you can get it with or without the essential oils.
• 1:05:43
  Van bans, tallow and honey balm is powerful enough to heal the skin, yet safe enough to spread on your toast.
• 1:05:48
  I wrote that, didn't I?
• 1:05:51
  You were in one of those modes.
• 1:05:53
  That's real ingredients for you.
• 1:05:54
  And unlike many other seemingly small, wholesome companies making healthy, organic products, van ban is the real deal.
• 1:06:01
  Remember when Burt's Bees made great stuff?
• 1:06:02
  Native, Dr.
• 1:06:03
  Squatch, any of those?
• 1:06:04
  All these companies have been bought since they were first formed by mega-corporations and private equity firms, which hijack beloved brands and replace them with the usual corporate slop.
• 1:06:14
  Van bans has never and will never sold out.
• 1:06:18
  I should just stop.
• 1:06:20
  Has never sold out, that makes sense.
• 1:06:22
  Will never sell out.
• 1:06:24
  I don't know how you write that efficiently, but you know.
• 1:06:26
  We know that they won't.
• 1:06:28
  Right.
• 1:06:28
  They're not those kind of people.
• 1:06:29
  They're not those sorts of people.
• 1:06:31
  Ready to ditch the corporate chemicals?
• 1:06:32
  Go to vanman.shop.com slash darkhorse26 and use code darkhorse26 for 15% off your first order.
• 1:06:40
  That's vanman.shop slash darkhorse26 and use code darkhorse26 for 15% off your first order.
• 1:06:47
  VanMan, real ingredients, no exceptions.
• 1:06:52
  This is gonna be quite an episode.
• 1:06:55
  Yes, already is.
• 1:06:57
  Our second sponsor this week is Xlear.
• 1:06:59
  Xlear is a nasal spray that supports respiratory health.
• 1:07:01
  It's widely available online and in stores in both it and the company that makes it are fantastic.
• 1:07:06
  It's Xlear, that's X-L-E-A-R, pronounced Xlear.
• 1:07:10
  Throughout history, improvements in sanitation and hygiene have had huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life, more so than traditional medical advances.
• 1:07:17
  For instance, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, the rate of maternal deaths went way down.
• 1:07:24
  Seems obvious to us now, but it wasn't then.
• 1:07:27
  Breathing polluted air and drinking tainted water have hugely negative effects on human health.
• 1:07:31
  Clean up the air and water, people get healthier.
• 1:07:34
  Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, but considered the majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick enter through our mouth and nose.
• 1:07:40
  It has become a cultural norm to wash our hands in order to help stop the spread of disease from person to person, but it's rare that we get sick through our hands.
• 1:07:47
  Rather, we get sick through our mouth and nose.
• 1:07:49
  So shouldn't we be using something that we know blocks bacterial and viral adhesion in the nose?
• 1:07:53
  Enter Xlear.
• 1:07:55
  Xlear is a nasal spray that contains xylitol, also spelled with an X, a five carbon sugar alcohol.
• 1:08:01
  Our bodies naturally contain five carbon sugars, mostly in the form of ribose and deoxyribose, which are the backbone sugars in RNA and DNA.
• 1:08:09
  Xylitol is known to reduce how sticky bacteria and viruses are to our tissues.
• 1:08:12
  In the presence of Xylitol, bacteria and viruses, including strep, SARS-CoV-2 and RSV, don't adhere to our airways as well, which helps our body's natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away.
• 1:08:23
  Xlear is a simple nasal spray.
• 1:08:24
  Use it morning and evening.
• 1:08:25
  It takes just three seconds.
• 1:08:26
  It's fast and easy and decidedly healthy.
• 1:08:30
  If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listen to Bret's conversation with Nate Jones, founder of Xlear on the Inside Rail in November, 2024, or to Bret's conversation with Nate's father, and to Lon Jones, osteopath and inventor of Xlear, on how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses in May of 2025.
• 1:08:45
  We recommend those conversations and we highly recommend Xlear as a daily habit and prophylactic against respiratory illnesses.
• 1:08:51
  That's Xlear with an X, X-L-E-A-R.
• 1:08:54
  Get Xlear online or at your pharmacy, grocery store, or natural products retailer, and start taking six seconds each day to improve your nasal hygiene and support your respiratory health.
• 1:09:02
  Awesome, I love this stuff, and I feel vastly better getting on an airplane after using it.
• 1:09:08
  I just think the likelihood of contracting something drops way down, and you know, one cold a year.
• 1:09:14
  You spare yourself one cold a year.
• 1:09:15
  That's actually a significant upgrade in the quality of life.
• 1:09:18
  It is.
• 1:09:19
  All right, our final sponsor this week is Branch Basics, which makes simple, all-natural, non-toxic, awesome cleaning products.
• 1:09:27
  See, awesome wasn't on there, but I have been using this stuff for ever, ever more use cases, because I think it's really fantastic.
• 1:09:36
  We've been using Branch Basics cleaning products for many, many months now, and we love them more than ever.
• 1:09:41
  They are effective, non-toxic, and easy to use.
• 1:09:44
  What's more, no, reading is fun, that's what I'm told.
• 1:09:49
  What more could-- No, you call it sexy.
• 1:09:53
  People who read are sexy.
• 1:09:55
  Reading is not the least bit sexy.
• 1:09:57
  Well, you've seen the T-shirts, right?
• 1:09:58
  No.
• 1:10:00
  Are there T-shirts?
• 1:10:01
  I didn't read them.
• 1:10:03
  There it is.
• 1:10:04
  That's the problem.
• 1:10:05
  Okay, maybe I'll get around to it later.
• 1:10:07
  I'll put it on my list of things to read.
• 1:10:09
  I am certain you will put it on an existent list.
• 1:10:13
  I will put it on a list that I will promptly lose.
• 1:10:15
  It will be the only thing on that list.
• 1:10:16
  You won't read the list?
• 1:10:17
  No.
• 1:10:18
  What more, I can't read the list, that's the problem half the time.
• 1:10:22
  What did I write there?
• 1:10:23
  All right, what more could you want in cleaning products?
• 1:10:26
  We use Branch Basics in one concentration for countertops and a slightly stronger concentration in the shower.
• 1:10:31
  It works on practically everything you need to clean, from laundry to produce.
• 1:10:36
  And when we say it works, we mean it.
• 1:10:38
  That should have an exclamation mark.
• 1:10:41
  You use cleaning products every day, but do you know what you're cleaning your home with?
• 1:10:45
  How it might be affecting how you feel?
• 1:10:46
  Many products look clean, but contain ingredients like hormone disruption, no, like hormone disruptors, skin irritators, oh, rewiring this on the fly, and things that cause respiratory issues, did it.
• 1:11:00
  And because cleaning brands in the US don't have to list everything they contain, you don't really know what's in your products.
• 1:11:08
  Branch Basics changes this with full transparency, and actually it is pretty fricking transparent, with full transparency about their entirely non-toxic ingredients.
• 1:11:20
  Their premium starter kit comes with one powerful concentrate that makes everything, laundry detergent, bathroom cleaner, glass cleaner, even pet wash and vegetable rinse.
• 1:11:29
  Pet wash?
• 1:11:30
  What?
• 1:11:30
  Sorry.
• 1:11:31
  It says that.
• 1:11:32
  I know, I did, just pet wash.
• 1:11:35
  Pet wash, yeah, no, and they make pet wash, and it's just a different concentration of the stuff.
• 1:11:40
  And vegetable rinse, just one plant and mineral-based formula replaces, that replaces, you're not supposed to breathe whatever that dust was that I just inhaled.
• 1:11:53
  Just one plant and mineral-based formula replaces it all, and it's safe for babies, pets, and anyone wanting to reduce their daily exposure to harmful chemicals in the new year, and who doesn't want to reduce it more than babies.
• 1:12:05
  Branch Basics ships as to, I mean, you'll admit, that sentence could be read.
• 1:12:17
  I think we should get to the ads, but I do intend to alert everyone after the ads that we are actually not high on any drugs, nor are we fasting, so there's really no excuse.
• 1:12:26
  This is all indudgously generated drugs that we are not responsible for, whether or not the universe is deterministic.
• 1:12:32
  Branch Basics ships as two products, a concentrate and an oxygen boost, and the shipment includes empty bottles that you fill to different concentrations for different jobs.
• 1:12:41
  When you run out, all you need to do is restock the two products on their site or on Amazon or Target, and you're again ready to clean everything in your home, from laundry to bathroom to countertops, bounded by three women on their own personal health journeys.
• 1:12:55
  Branch Basics was created out of a desire to heal.
• 1:12:57
  Through years of research, trial and error, the founders discovered the powerful impact that removing toxins from their environment had on their health, and now they're on a mission to help others do the same.
• 1:13:08
  And here's more good news.
• 1:13:10
  Branch Basics is now available everywhere you shop at Target, Target.com, Amazon, and of course, BranchBasics.com.
• 1:13:17
  Tossing the toxins has never been more convenient, and for anyone grabbing the premium starter kit, you can still get 15% off at BranchBasics.com with, com, dot com with code DarkHorse.
• 1:13:29
  Just use the code DarkHorse for 15% off the premium starter kit at BranchBasics.com.
• 1:13:35
  After you purchase, when they ask where you heard about them, please make sure to mention our show.
• 1:13:44
  That's DarkHorse, by the way.
• 1:13:45
  DarkHorse, a lesson in pronouns.
• 1:13:48
  It's a lesson in many things, sometimes inadvertently.
• 1:13:51
  Is that it?
• 1:13:52
  Or did you just put it down?
• 1:13:54
  I'm done, I'm out.
• 1:13:55
  I think we've said it.
• 1:13:56
  I think we have made the case.
• 1:13:59
  It's good stuff.
• 1:14:00
  And oh, yeah, that can go too at this point.
• 1:14:02
  I have something we gotta clean.
• 1:14:07
  So, yeah, so our three sponsors this week, apologies to them if the, you know, the giggling is unprofessional, but really cool that two of the three sponsors this week have actually made it into national stores and online.
• 1:14:23
  Yeah, that's great. So Clear, XLEAR, and BranchBasics are both available widely.
• 1:14:28
  VanMans is completely amazing.
• 1:14:31
  You should go to their site and you should also, in their case, be aware that they are doing such amazing work, Van Mans, that there are not only a lot of pretenders to the throne, but including a site that's actually sending out a lot of stuff that's like VanMans with two A's in the man or something.
• 1:14:48
  And they're actually compelling people to send money and they never have the product.
• 1:14:53
  So make sure that you go into VanMans, V-A-N-M-A-N-S, and check out Clear and BranchBasics all over the place.
• 1:15:00
  God, I hate the fraudsters.
• 1:15:02
  They're everywhere.
• 1:15:03
  They are everywhere.
• 1:15:05
  Which actually is somewhat relevant to our initial topic this morning, or if it's afternoon for you or whatever it might be.
• 1:15:13
  This discussion is about a topic that sounds dry, dull, and boring, but is anything but if you know what we're getting at.
• 1:15:21
  It is about how to think carefully about confusing events.
• 1:15:26
  And I will say, I am proud to have coined the term Cartesian crisis.
• 1:15:32
  It is accelerating before our eyes.
• 1:15:35
  AI has dumped gasoline on that fire.
• 1:15:39
  It is obvious to anyone paying attention that it is becoming increasingly difficult to know what to believe on virtually any topic.
• 1:15:48
  But let's take several steps back.
• 1:15:51
  Okay.
• 1:15:53
  The Cartesian crisis, which you named after Descartes, after his most famous maxim, suggests that it is increasingly difficult, it is difficult within a Cartesian crisis to know what is true, right?
• 1:16:09
  At its most basic.
• 1:16:12
  Discovering what is true is, of course, what science is about, what the scientific method is formalizing with regard to how it is that you think you know something in the world and then determine whether or not it might actually be true.
• 1:16:29
  And so the tools that we're gonna be talking about today, with which to wade through the Cartesian crisis that yes, is accelerating, and there's more things in the way of understanding what is true in the world now than there were two years ago, 20 years ago, 200 years ago.
• 1:16:47
  I don't know, about 2,000 years ago.
• 1:16:50
  But at a fundamental level, figuring out what you think, figuring out the complete space of, yeah, I was gonna say solution space.
• 1:17:02
  That doesn't quite fit.
• 1:17:02
  Solution set.
• 1:17:03
  Solution set, yeah.
• 1:17:04
  Solution set of what might be true.
• 1:17:07
  And then, and this is where we're gonna go in some detail today, trying to put some probabilities on each of those things.
• 1:17:17
  And here's the thing where we're straying from sort of formal scientific thinking is being real clear with yourself about what you have thought in the past and when new stuff comes in, be it formal evidence or insight or someone told you something you think might be true, modifying your thoughts about what you think is true and keeping track of what you have thought.
• 1:17:40
  And that is how we become more and more honest with ourselves and better and better at actually determining what is true in the world.
• 1:17:47
  Right, and if I can revise that slightly or just look at it from a different perspective, if you're doing the job right at all, what you think is likely to be true changes over time.
• 1:18:00
  When something changes substantially over time, when a viewpoint that you once held flips on its head, understanding what it is that you might have seen ahead of time, so that if assuming that we get smarter over time, which hopefully we do, that the indicators that you missed the first time are available to you when you are facing a similar analysis.
• 1:18:25
  So just to take one example from our painful history, we, at the beginning of the COVID vaccine campaign, spotted the vaccines as dangerous from the get-go.
• 1:18:38
  There was never a minute when we didn't think the vaccines that were being offered were dangerous.
• 1:18:42
  We did not immediately spot that the claims about their efficacy were likely fraudulent.
• 1:18:50
  From there, you and I ended up reinvestigating our understanding of the vaccines that we had authorized our own children to get, that we had gotten and realized that there were-- Actual vaccines, not the mRNA coming products.
• 1:19:05
  Not the stuff that's called vaccines, but it's really an mRNA-based gene therapy.
• 1:19:10
  But actual regular old vaccines for which we had been strong champions, turned out not to be nearly as safe as we had imagined, because, and here's the lesson, is what did I miss?
• 1:19:27
  I missed that work that I would have told you I was essentially certain had been done was never done.
• 1:19:35
  The test against the placebo, the test on all-cause mortality and disease in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children was not what the recommendation from doctors was based on, not in the slightest.
• 1:19:52
  And where that evidence did exist, it told a different story.
• 1:19:55
  So what did I miss?
• 1:19:57
  I was too credulous about the implication that work that seems like it should have been done must have been, right?
• 1:20:06
  I needed to investigate whether the work was actually done, which is arduous, which is probably why, it's natural to assume we have an FDA, everything that's coming from a doctor, presumably was safety tested.
• 1:20:19
  I have reason to be concerned about the safety test, but I never had reason to be concerned that they weren't done because of course they were.
• 1:20:25
  And then it turns out that assumption isn't right.
• 1:20:27
  Yeah, I finally went looking explicitly.
• 1:20:32
  I guess it's probably two, two and a half, three years ago at this point and published it on my substack.
• 1:20:38
  And because by then we were hearing from so many people, look into it, the vaccines and the childhood vaccine schedule have not in fact been tested against actual placebo.
• 1:20:49
  And by actual placebo, I mean placebo.
• 1:20:52
  So not only, for many, many, many years, we've been running into this, you know, bait and switch where they use a word that has a meaning and they take it and they change its meaning, but they leave the word the same.
• 1:21:03
  And you think you're talking about a placebo and you're not.
• 1:21:06
  But I would say also that our understanding of the so-called traditional vaccines, again, we're not no longer talking about the mRNA, you know, gene therapy products that were tried out and called vaccines in response to COVID.
• 1:21:22
  Not only are they not safe as we had been led to believe by virtue of the fact that it seemed like they must have been tested against placebo, but their claims of efficacy are also, I want to say suspect to be sort of nice, but suspect is wrong as well, because when you actually see the, you know, the changes in, well, you know, relative to the ad that we just read for clear, you know, changes in air quality and water quality precede the breakout, the release of vaccines for many diseases.
• 1:22:03
  And it is between those two moments, after air and water quality have been improved and before the vaccines are released, that the declines in the diseases take a sharp decline, which right there is a substantial piece of evidence.
• 1:22:19
  But so you change your mind as you learn new things.
• 1:22:23
  That is what it is to be human, that is what it is to be a functioning individual in a world, and it is more and more difficult to do as what we imagine is eyewitness, especially on screens, is not actually eyewitness.
• 1:22:36
  We are seeing things that are already curated, that may be fabricated, that may not be coming from humans at all, but it is even if we are actually seeing things, we have been so confused by the, you know, the nature of our very existence, the complexity and complicated nature of our very existence that it is harder and harder to trust ourselves to do our own analysis.
• 1:22:56
  And so in part, in service of that, you have sort of formalized a way of thinking about intuition and logic and the relationship between them.
• 1:23:10
  Yep, and I wanna pick one more thing from that conversation before we launch into the demonstration of the method such as it is.
• 1:23:19
  Back when you and I were enthusiasts of the vaccines that came from doctors, we were not naive.
• 1:23:26
  Well, turned out we were naive relative to what was actually going on, but we were not naive about the likelihood that there was a real danger with these things, which actually caused us to accept the idea that there were people, anti-vaxxers, who were actually motivated by an instinct to cheat.
• 1:23:49
  Now, in this case, it would have been an instinct to cheat on behalf of their children, which is understandable.
• 1:23:54
  But the idea is there's a game theory reason that given a vaccine that has to be given to a wide number of people in order to halt the spread of a disease, that an individual who doesn't administer that vaccine gets the advantage of other people having taken a tiny risk without taking that tiny risk themselves.
• 1:24:18
  So there is a freeloader problem in theory when it comes to the idea of vaccines.
• 1:24:23
  If you had good vaccines with very low risks, that game theory problem would be real.
• 1:24:29
  It happens that the risks are much greater than represented and the game theory is not what's motivating most of these people who have been wrongly called anti-vaxxers.
• 1:24:40
  Most of them, I would say from now having met probably thousands, what's, you don't think?
• 1:24:48
  I doubt it, but.
• 1:24:50
  Certainly hundreds.
• 1:24:51
  Sure, absolutely.
• 1:24:53
  Or have been exposed to, it's a lot.
• 1:24:57
  You know, you go to a CHD conference, it's a lot of people.
• 1:25:01
  But anyway, most of them are motivated by having a close encounter with injury, either themselves or their children or somebody's children that they know.
• 1:25:12
  And then they get derided as anti-vaxxers, which is ironic because so many of them got there through being too credulous about the safety of these things and then having bad luck with respect to what happened.
• 1:25:27
  Well, and so this isn't exactly about where we're going here, but if your child began to regress within a week of getting a vaccine and you saw it with your own eyes and your child is no longer accessible to you and may never be again, no amount of being called names is going to change your mind, right?
• 1:25:49
  That's not a position that you can be talked out of through social coercion and shaming techniques.
• 1:25:59
  And so in a way, the group of people in particular, the parents whose children have been vaccine injured, of which there are certainly many, tens of thousands perhaps, I don't know how many, but I'm not claiming to have met most of these people, but many, are staunch and unflinching in the face of scorn because they know what they saw and they know what their lives are and they know what they have experienced.
• 1:26:32
  When the stakes are lower or more nuanced or it's not really clear what you might do, like why you're on this side of the issue and sure that's true, but wouldn't it be easier for you if you were over here?
• 1:26:45
  A lot of people take the easier path. A lot of people take the easier path.
• 1:26:48
  I'm like, you know what?
• 1:26:49
  Yeah, I know it's true.
• 1:26:51
  I know A is true, but if I stand up, I'm gonna get shot.
• 1:26:55
  Like I just, it's not worth it.
• 1:26:57
  So I'm gonna be silent or I'm gonna actually be really cowardly and craven and speak a truth, speak something that I know not to be true and thus keep my job or keep my social standing or keep my bowling group, whatever it is.
• 1:27:12
  And those are the people who we have been speaking to a lot since Evergreen, right?
• 1:27:19
  Where they're like, oh my God, how did you stand up to the crowd?
• 1:27:22
  It's like, well, what else was I gonna do?
• 1:27:24
  And not only what else was I gonna do, but once you're on the other side of it, once you have, to use the phrase that we have been using since then, gone through the looking glass around the other side, you're like, huh.
• 1:27:34
  Well, that was actually kind of easy to survive actually.
• 1:27:38
  And isn't it nice to be able to sleep well at night and to wake up in the morning and say, well, I continue to seek truth and I'm gonna be wrong sometimes and I'm gonna make some mistakes and I'm gonna own them and I'm gonna speak about them too.
• 1:27:51
  And hopefully we are just collecting people on a journey interested in discovering truth and beauty in the world.
• 1:27:58
  And that is what we are trying to do.
• 1:28:01
  And, but most people with a few exceptions, like if you've literally seen your child regress after getting a medical intervention and you're being told it wasn't that, you're like, I'm sorry it was.
• 1:28:14
  So then that most people will not continue to stand up for what they understand to be true.
• 1:28:20
  No, the particular detail that causes you, the curtain gets pulled back at the point that you've witnessed this extraordinary thing that nobody warned you was a possibility.
• 1:28:31
  And then the doctor tells you it didn't happen.
• 1:28:35
  So the point is, oh, what did I just learn about doctors, too late to help my own child, right?
• 1:28:41
  That is an amazing, it's the ultimate red pill.
• 1:28:46
  So to set us in motion, let's just say a big part of the motivation for what we're about to do is that people are very bad at separating the social phenomenon involved in sense-making and collectively deciding what is actually taking place from the analytical.
• 1:29:13
  And I think one strength that we have is we know that those things have no relationship.
• 1:29:20
  You can literally be the only person on earth who believes something is true.
• 1:29:25
  Everyone can be screaming at you that it's not true.
• 1:29:27
  And it says nothing one way or the other about whether or not you're right.
• 1:29:31
  And the pointy-headed folks will come back at you and say, "Well, you're dismissing quite a few experts." And the point is, yeah, but I've also seen what happens to experts.
• 1:29:42
  And the fact is the economic milieu of experts and the social coercion that they face, it doesn't mean that expertise is impossible, but it means that actually the places that you would expect it to exist, it has often been poisoned by a kind of coercion that you're just not able to see because you're not present.
• 1:30:02
  So the coercion that causes doctors to embrace dangerous therapies, the coercion that causes the Congress to immunize vaccine manufacturing companies, all of these things are systems of pressure that have nothing to do with analysis that you can't see or easily even infer unless somebody takes you on a tour.
• 1:30:26
  So the question is how, when very frequently, especially if there's anything at stake, you are being pressured into accepting an analytical conclusion for social reasons or out of fear, right?
• 1:30:41
  How do you deal with the analytic part to separate it from the social phenomenon?
• 1:30:49
  It occurs to me hearing you talk that one of the reasons I keep on insisting in our private conversations and here as well, I'm sort of dragging it back to like, remember, we're talking about science, this is what science is, I think in school, when people are taught science, this is the process that they should be being taught.
• 1:31:11
  Not what the Krebs cycle is, not what PCR is, like whatever the particulars are, that's great.
• 1:31:18
  Those are the products of science.
• 1:31:21
  That's not the science itself.
• 1:31:22
  Everyone has the capacity to, and frankly, the obligation to themselves and to society, but especially to themselves, to be able to think scientifically, and those of us who actually understood that we were training ourselves in formal scientific analysis are more able to take that analysis out into the world that is social and say, well, okay, if you claim this and this person claims this, how would I know?
• 1:31:50
  How would I make the determination?
• 1:31:51
  I'm gonna use the same tools I'm used to using and the tools that I'm used to using I honed over in a totally unsocial apolitical space where it was poison frogs in Madagascar, or it was tent making bats in Panama.
• 1:32:04
  Where there's very little at stake.
• 1:32:06
  And right, the bats care, the frogs care, but they don't care about our answers regardless.
• 1:32:11
  Our answers make sense or are important in terms of whether or not what we know to be true is true, but there is no greater stakes.
• 1:32:25
  And so would we take that analytical stuff into the social world?
• 1:32:30
  It seems to some people like it's unemotional.
• 1:32:34
  This is what scientists have a reputation for being like, well, everyone should be able to move the emotional valence, the social valence out of a space where they're trying to make decisions and say, how would I know?
• 1:32:48
  That is the question.
• 1:32:49
  How would I know?
• 1:32:50
  What do I think?
• 1:32:52
  Why do I think it?
• 1:32:53
  And what would have to be true in order to change my mind?
• 1:32:56
  Yep.
• 1:32:57
  And if you think about your own history as a viewer, you will recognize that there are many topics in which you probably now believe something that you would at one time have thought crazy.
• 1:33:08
  And so what that tells you is that you may be told you're crazy right now for things that one day you will take to be self-evident.
• 1:33:17
  So knowing that that pattern is there, arming yourself with a explicit toolkit for sorting out these various things and not being persuaded by a chorus of people telling you, you're crazy is important.
• 1:33:32
  So in light of this, I decided to run an experiment this week.
• 1:33:41
  I have heard a lot about how excellent AI tools are at coding.
• 1:33:47
  I have a minimal history of coding.
• 1:33:49
  I took a college course in the 90s on C plus.
• 1:33:54
  I've done a little Arduino programming, but the idea of being able to tell an AI that you want something and have it produce that something seemed frankly pretty unlikely to work.
• 1:34:06
  I didn't know what was going to happen.
• 1:34:08
  So I set about trying to create a replacement for a program you and I once had, but not exactly.
• 1:34:13
  It's a program I've reached for many times and been sad that I didn't have it because it would allow you to draw something that I could, for example, show here and it would be useful.
• 1:34:22
  So anyway, I used Claude AI to produce a tool for graphing various things.
• 1:34:31
  Primary on my list of motivations was a tool for doing a Bayesian analysis.
• 1:34:40
  Bayesian analysis deriving from Bayes theorem is a system of thinking in which you monitor your assumptions and the strength of your conclusion changes as your belief in those assumptions, so-called priors is altered.
• 1:35:00
  So Jen, you want to show the tool.
• 1:35:02
  This is a work in progress, but this is a second version of DarkHorse Draw 2.
• 1:35:08
  And what it is, is a tool that allows you to assign probabilities to branches.
• 1:35:20
  So we can make this test branch, and then we can say that the probability of this test branch, according to our current understanding, is 70%, and voila, you get probability 0.7 on this branch.
• 1:35:33
  So you get the basic idea.
• 1:35:39
  Can we not leave the probability at 1.2?
• 1:35:43
  Yes, we sure can.
• 1:35:45
  Now what Heather is pointing to is that the sum total of probabilities at any given level of this should equal one if you have a complete solution set.
• 1:35:55
  And there are reasons you might do this without one, but-- But it can never be over one.
• 1:35:58
  Yeah, so what we do is we just say, 0.3 here, and voila, now they equal one.
• 1:36:09
  And I will just also say, for those of you who are watching this, that there's also a table function in which the values are checked at a particular level of the hierarchy in order to see if they equal one to alert you that you may have done some logic wrong if they don't.
• 1:36:25
  Okay, so what I wanted to do is illustrate how on some controversial issues this tool can be used to help you understand your own thinking.
• 1:36:38
  Why do I believe this?
• 1:36:40
  And in particular, I want you to keep your eye out for the following thing.
• 1:36:45
  There are many circumstances in which something seems unlikely, maybe even to you.
• 1:36:52
  And you will get social pressure to agree that if you're going to be a person who has social pressure to agree that it is not true.
• 1:36:57
  Some part of you should be resisting the urge to close down anything that is possible just because you regard it as highly improbable, right?
• 1:37:09
  So my claim is gonna be you will be socially pressured into surrendering a belief in a possibility.
• 1:37:18
  And then later on down the line, you will not understand why you were confused.
• 1:37:22
  And the answer is because back when the evidence suggested something was very unlikely, you made the mistake of going from very unlikely to I'll just regard that as impossible because it makes my job of thinking simpler.
• 1:37:41
  So can we, so for me, this doesn't remind me of phylogeny at all because it doesn't make any sense for a dichotomous branch to have different probabilities like you either branch or it didn't.
• 1:37:51
  It's a one or a zero, not each is 0.5.
• 1:37:54
  So I actually am having a hard time just looking at it with species.
• 1:37:59
  Boom, they're gone.
• 1:38:00
  Okay, but I think better though than hiding the probabilities because what you're at, so and we've talked about this.
• 1:38:07
  You've actually done, there's like two different things that you could be trying to accomplish here.
• 1:38:11
  And I don't think that making tree diagrams is where it's at yet.
• 1:38:15
  It just doesn't look like phylogenies yet.
• 1:38:18
  This is better as sort of path analysis and thinking about and putting a visual to the probabilities that you have, like this is only a tool and it's not the kind of tool that this is the kind of tool that very much speaks to the way your brain works.
• 1:38:38
  And as we were discussing this morning, my brain says, but I know that if I've got three things, all of which have to be true for something to be true, I just multiply those probabilities.
• 1:38:50
  But having a process show that to you can be useful to reveal to other people.
• 1:38:56
  So I just, the use of the word species and clade and root here makes us feel like it's pertaining to BFI-logeny, but really what it is, is a discussion of possibilities in logic space.
• 1:39:08
  Yes, and in fact, I should say, because the tool that I wanted to reach for would have been me borrowing from a cladistic tool that we used to have, I decided to make this so that it could work for phylogenies and the graphics aren't good enough yet to do it, but put that aside, it was intended to be a multi-use tool.
• 1:39:30
  So let me show you an example and forgive the fact that this ends up small.
• 1:39:40
  I've learned a lot about what programmers actually go through in order to get a program to actually work.
• 1:39:48
  And what I wanna show you is the path analysis part of this program.
• 1:39:53
  So what we have here is, I think that we are having a very insane discussion in public about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
• 1:40:07
  One of the things that is insane about it is that people seem to think if you are discussing the possibility that something larger was at work in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, you are saying you don't believe that Tyler Robinson is guilty and that that is ridiculous because there's so much evidence against Tyler Robinson.
• 1:40:32
  To me, that's a non sequitur.
• 1:40:34
  This is the point here, right?
• 1:40:37
  The nested sets nature of logic, which branching diagrams can reveal in a different way than if you just nested the sets within parentheses or something can show you that it could be Tyler Robinson and still not have him be some lone gun nut, which is exactly what you have established here.
• 1:40:58
  But again, you've used a tool to visualize a logical understanding that you can't, like the logical understanding is the human scientific part of this that is absolutely necessary to making meaning in the world.
• 1:41:17
  So let's just walk through this and then I'll show you how the path analysis part works, which is really where this is helpful.
• 1:41:24
  So the question is who killed Charlie Kirk?
• 1:41:26
  Nobody doubts that somebody killed Charlie Kirk.
• 1:41:28
  Well, I won't say nobody, but let's just say, assuming someone killed Charlie Kirk, which I do, this is a complete solution set right here.
• 1:41:38
  Either it was one gunman or it was a larger conspiracy.
• 1:41:44
  So it happens that I have set the probability that it was a lone gunman at 15%.
• 1:41:54
  And again, you're not pretending that that number is true.
• 1:41:58
  You're saying this is a visualization of your estimation of what the probabilities are as of now, based on what you know now, so that in part, you can go back and check your own thinking later.
• 1:42:13
  Right, and one thing I'm going to add to this program is the ability to record why you set a probability the way you did.
• 1:42:18
  And in this case, I will say, I have ignored most of the analysis around the assassination because I don't feel like I'm in a position to evaluate it.
• 1:42:28
  But what throws me is the ballistics that are claimed versus what we all saw.
• 1:42:36
  This does not add up to me and therefore suggest to me something else was afoot.
• 1:42:41
  That said, weird stuff happens and these probabilities could change.
• 1:42:45
  I could invert my position based on new evidence or based on some epiphany that I might have.
• 1:42:52
  But in any case, complete solution set, 15%.
• 1:42:55
  It was a lone gunman, 85%.
• 1:42:57
  It was some kind of larger conspiracy with no specificity as to what that might be.
• 1:43:03
  From each of those two branches, on the lone gunman branch, there's one possibility that the lone gunman was Tyler Robinson.
• 1:43:14
  I've set that at 98%.
• 1:43:17
  There's a lot of evidence against Tyler Robinson.
• 1:43:20
  If the lone gunman was somebody else, well, I don't think the evidence would look like what it does, so I've set that at 2%.
• 1:43:28
  And again, that adds to 100%.
• 1:43:31
  And again, you're not claiming that those numbers are true.
• 1:43:36
  You are using what you currently expect to be true in a model that you can then check later and is changeable.
• 1:43:43
  Yes, this is a map of my understanding, which can definitely be wrong, but I wanna understand what my understanding is now and I wanna be able to check what it is six months from now.
• 1:43:53
  I wanna see it evolve and I wanna know why it evolved, what changed when.
• 1:43:58
  Okay, so there's another branch, the one I have set at 85%, which is that there was a larger conspiracy involved in the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
• 1:44:08
  No, Charlie Kirk.
• 1:44:10
  On this, again, you have two possibilities.
• 1:44:13
  I would say Tyler Robinson is either a patsy in a scenario where there was a larger conspiracy or he was uninvolved.
• 1:44:22
  Now, if it was a larger conspiracy-- And the patsy itself can look a different, a lot of different ways too.
• 1:44:27
  A lot of different ways.
• 1:44:28
  Knowing patsy and unknowing patsy, like right.
• 1:44:30
  Right, exactly.
• 1:44:32
  So my point would be the whole discussion, you can't have a discussion, was it Tyler Robinson or do you believe in a larger conspiracy because that leaves off the table an obvious likely scenario, which is that a conspiracy would use a patsy to hide its behavior.
• 1:44:55
  So what this means now is that if we put this in path mode, whoops, here, let's fit the screen, okay.
• 1:45:03
  If you put this in path mode, we can highlight the two paths in which Tyler Robinson is part of the crime and we get, that is 98% of the potential on the map of my own understanding of the events, okay.
• 1:45:24
  So here it is, there it is.
• 1:45:27
  You've got the two paths in which Tyler Robinson is involved in one, he's a lone gunman, in the other, he's a patsy and between the two, you have what I think is a 98% potential.
• 1:45:39
  So what this reveals about your thinking about the probabilities, so your assignment of probabilities is based on your understanding.
• 1:45:50
  The possible cases should be recognizable by everyone here.
• 1:45:58
  Everyone will put different probabilities to each of these six moments, but the was it a lone gunman versus was there a larger conspiracy?
• 1:46:09
  I believe that everyone should grant that and maybe someone would say, isn't there a third possibility?
• 1:46:14
  Well, I don't know what it is, but okay, say there's possibility three and give it a 1% chance and drop larger conspiracy to, I can't reread your numbers here, to 84 or whatever.
• 1:46:27
  And can we just zoom out so I can see?
• 1:46:33
  So are there other possibilities between, if it's a lone gunman between Tyler Robinson and someone else, no, you've defined a complete solution set inherently de facto.
• 1:46:46
  Right.
• 1:46:47
  And Tyler Robinson is a patsy versus he was uninvolved.
• 1:46:51
  You know, could you phrase that in a way that maybe you want to add a third thing?
• 1:46:54
  Maybe, maybe, but really the possibilities that you've described describe everything possible.
• 1:47:02
  It's the probabilities that you've assigned to them that people may take issue with, that you yourself in the future might disagree with.
• 1:47:10
  But having this and having the ability to look and say, okay, what if lone gunman, then what?
• 1:47:17
  What if someone else, then what?
• 1:47:19
  Right?
• 1:47:20
  Allows you to track your logic and to keep an eye on your own intuitions and how they change as evidence mounts.
• 1:47:29
  Yep.
• 1:47:30
  And let's just say the discussion is liable to be vastly better if the point is, can we all agree that this is the diagram and can we then discuss why your percentage chance that it's a lone gunman is set too low?
• 1:47:44
  I'd like to make the argument to you, Bret, that you've set the lone gunman possibility too low and it's because you don't really understand something about a 30-06 or something like that, right?
• 1:47:54
  That's a discussion I am absolutely ready to have as long as we're doing it on a diagram that has Patsy properly categorized as a real possibility.
• 1:48:06
  I'm not saying it happened.
• 1:48:07
  It could easily be eliminated, but the fact that you're telling me, his fingerprints were on the gun, it's like, well, wouldn't you want them to be if you wanted a Patsy?
• 1:48:16
  Can we agree that there are people who would benefit from having a Patsy to cover their tracks for an assassination?
• 1:48:23
  Of course.
• 1:48:24
  So is the fact that his prints are on the gun and that he appears to have been on the roof, is that evidence that there was no larger conspiracy?
• 1:48:34
  Not if you understand what a Patsy is.
• 1:48:36
  So there's gonna be many, many words for this kind of logical contingency thinking across many, many domains.
• 1:48:45
  I'm thinking in terms of nested sets and contingencies and presumably economics and game theory and rationality space.
• 1:48:54
  All of the different traditions are gonna have different words for exactly what this is.
• 1:48:59
  What you've done, I think that is useful, that I haven't really seen before, is the visual path.
• 1:49:07
  And as you say, it's path analysis, but the visual path in which you can, by which anyone can look at it and say, you're missing a possibility, okay?
• 1:49:19
  Let's talk.
• 1:49:20
  As opposed to that probability is wrong.
• 1:49:23
  Well, that's the probability I assigned to it.
• 1:49:26
  I didn't say it was correct, but that's my instinct here.
• 1:49:29
  Why do you think it's wrong?
• 1:49:30
  Those are two really different kinds of objections, right?
• 1:49:35
  And I think honing in on what is the objection that the person who's yelling at you at the moment about something that they are sure you have wrong is about.
• 1:49:45
  Is it a, you don't understand something about the gun that was used, okay, teach me, educate me.
• 1:49:53
  Or you're an idiot, just fingerprints are on the gun.
• 1:49:56
  Okay, you're an idiot because you're not understanding what the causality of evidence actually looks like.
• 1:50:05
  Yep, and in fact, you can spot, because there are two levels in this analysis, you can spot that somebody who is certain that it was a lone gunman because they believe it was Tyler Robinson based on the evidence is involved in a non sequitur.
• 1:50:22
  Tyler Robinson is on both branches of this tree.
• 1:50:26
  So anyway, I just think it's super clarifying to not have some weirdo argument where you're saying things and you assume that the natural consequence of them is obvious to everybody.
• 1:50:39
  It's like, wouldn't it be better if you had that argument in a room with that on the board, where you can just simply point to which of these four possibilities you're describing at any moment, it would be clarifying, which is, I think in part why this is not happening, that there are those of us who are seeking clarity and there are others who are trying to shut it down.
• 1:51:00
  Well, no, I mean, it's not happening for a lot of reasons.
• 1:51:04
  Some of it is because some people don't want clarity, some systems, some people don't want clarity.
• 1:51:09
  But this is the 20 questions exercise that I used to do at the beginning of just about every class and that we did together sometimes that we were first introduced to the force of Costa Rica.
• 1:51:22
  Is this kind of lesson, right?
• 1:51:24
  So what it is, is based on an exercise at the Organization for Tropical Studies does with its graduate students in courses for people learning how to be tropical biologists, as we were when we were first introduced to it.
• 1:51:39
  You take people out someplace in nature where they are not gonna be in visual distance, even better if not an earshot of anyone else with nothing but a notebook and a pencil or pen and really like nothing else if they can manage it.
• 1:51:56
  And you say, look, put you down here, don't move unless you have to.
• 1:52:00
  And if you're swarmed by bees or bear comes along, you can escape.
• 1:52:06
  And I'll come back in two hours, I swear I will.
• 1:52:09
  I used to say to students, I've never lost anyone.
• 1:52:12
  And just sit and be and observe.
• 1:52:18
  And for a while, what you're gonna observe probably, except for those who are sort of the most Buddhist and meditative already, will be the stuff in their head going like, what is this?
• 1:52:28
  This is stupid.
• 1:52:29
  Why'd she do this to me?
• 1:52:30
  What is going on?
• 1:52:31
  Like, I don't wanna be here, I'm hungry.
• 1:52:32
  What am I doing tonight?
• 1:52:33
  Right, like all of that, all of the internal stuff.
• 1:52:35
  It's like, you can write those things that come into your head down if you want.
• 1:52:40
  Either professor or your peers when you share this with them later on, that's not the stuff I want you to share.
• 1:52:47
  Maybe useful to you, the logging of your internal dialogue, that's not what we're doing here.
• 1:52:53
  This is an exercise in learning how to actually observe the outside world.
• 1:52:57
  And coming to recognize that you cannot observe without your sensory biases because you observe through your senses and they have biases and those are yours and there is nothing to be done about it.
• 1:53:08
  But what you come to recognize, and I'm jumping ahead here a bit, is at the point that you have reported that you saw a thing and then someone else was over there and they're like,"Oh, I saw that thing too." And then someone else was over there at a different moment in time and say, "Oh, but over there, I saw the same thing.
• 1:53:23
  It was just slightly different, but it was the same kind of thing." As you start to accumulate very similar eyewitness, ear witness, whatever accounts of a thing, you go, "Ah, I think we have a pattern." And so that's the beginning of pattern recognition, which is the beginning of truth-making, of truth-seeing and revealing and understanding of the universe.
• 1:53:45
  So as your brain quiets down and you stop worrying about the fact that you're out of candy and you don't have a date for the night and whatever it is, you start seeing a bird fly by and you wonder, "Where's it going?
• 1:53:58
  Maybe that's your question." Or you think, "I wonder if it has a mate." Or, "What does it eat?" Or maybe even something as mundane and actually socially constructed as, "What is it called?" It doesn't know what it's called because what it's called is what we call it.
• 1:54:14
  That doesn't actually tell you anything about it, but once you know what a particular species is called, you can use some of the massive understanding that humans have already accumulated to learn something else.
• 1:54:25
  It's not as rich a kind of understanding as watching yourself and coming to know.
• 1:54:30
  But so you write down, you aim for 20 questions in those two hours, that you have about what you actually are observing in the natural world.
• 1:54:39
  And two hours later, come pick you up, say, ready to go, I'll see you this afternoon or tomorrow morning, depending on when we're doing the thing.
• 1:54:48
  And then the class of depending 25 or 50 people comes in with their questions and break them into groups and say, "Okay, in each group of four, everyone choose one of their own favorite questions and one question from the person sitting to your right that you like of theirs best.
• 1:55:05
  And then work up from those eight, as many as possible in the next hour or whatever, how would you figure out the answer?
• 1:55:14
  What are the hypotheses that could begin to address the observation that you had that prompted the question?
• 1:55:20
  What are the predictions that emerged from those hypotheses?
• 1:55:23
  And then if you can get this far, what are the experimental tests or the observational tests that you could determine to figure out what is true?
• 1:55:33
  And then in the next part of the exercise, you come together and everyone presents what they've done to the whole class and why do people feel fiercely about some of the hypotheses that they have generated, about observations that they had just hours earlier or a day earlier, things about which they didn't even know anything 24 hours earlier, much less have an opinion about it.
• 1:55:58
  But suddenly, not only do they have an opinion, they feel fiercely and they are ready to fight you if you disagree.
• 1:56:05
  And this in part reveals the social dynamic that emerges once you have put some effort into belief.
• 1:56:14
  And it also reveals, okay, but how would we know?
• 1:56:17
  I get that you feel really strongly about this, but how would we know?
• 1:56:20
  This is where we use the science and the whole process has been the science, but this is how we begin to figure it out.
• 1:56:25
  And like that sort of teasing a part of like, okay, what's the logical causal set of things that we would need to do to figure out what is true?
• 1:56:36
  And oh boy, do you see how fiercely you care now about something that actually you didn't even know existed 24 hours ago?
• 1:56:42
  That's what you see on social media every single day.
• 1:56:46
  Yeah, and actually, I think if the formalized exercise involved something like this, as you're debating, what is the complete set of possible explanations for the behavior we saw?
• 1:56:57
  If you had them all here and you could even take a poll of the room in order to figure out what the room's instinct was on these things.
• 1:57:05
  And then you debate out these things, you rule out several hypotheses because you have evidence that makes them almost certain to be false.
• 1:57:14
  Whatever the point is watching the probability collapse to one of the branches without the tree collapsing to anything smaller than it was, that's a very useful exercise.
• 1:57:27
  This, so this is one of the key points that we wanted to get to, right?
• 1:57:30
  In this particular example you've given, you just have two options at each.
• 1:57:36
  But I don't know if you wanna use the example that we were using earlier in talking.
• 1:57:42
  You were talking about the existence of God.
• 1:57:45
  Yep, oh, that's coming up soon.
• 1:57:47
  Okay, well, so the point is, I don't know how you wanna get to it, but the point is that you don't ever say, ah, I am so certain that that's not a possibility, even though I can't ever have concrete proof that I'm gonna reduce the probability to zero or increase the probability to one and thus eradicate all the other branches.
• 1:58:09
  That keeping them all alive as distinctly remote possibilities allows you to resurrect them if new evidence comes to light.
• 1:58:21
  And that keeps the logical brain open to possibility possibility and relishing of uncertainty in a way that modern life and specifically life online does not seem to like.
• 1:58:39
  Life online wants you to be 100% certain all the time, I know this isn't true, I know this is true, how could you believe anything else?
• 1:58:47
  You're an idiot.
• 1:58:49
  And actually, the point here is really, uncertainty is not just your friend, it's absolutely necessary.
• 1:58:56
  You need to retain uncertainty on almost every topic and that does not mean that you need to be wishy washy, that does not mean that you need to think there's a 50-50 chance of everything.
• 1:59:05
  Uncertainty can mean, I really don't think there's a God personally, but that doesn't mean that I have decided that there's absolutely zero chance.
• 1:59:15
  Yep, now there is, as you will see in the next diagram, there's something that I decided not to put on this diagram in part just to make it readable, but what is implied here is this diagram assumes the assassination of Charlie Kirk and there is a hidden possibility which you will see in the next case.
• 1:59:36
  So if I were to make this diagram more complete, I would add here a branch and it would say, I know-- You're at the wrong place.
• 1:59:51
  I am.
• 1:59:52
  (Bell Dings) Oh, yeah, delete that here.
• 2:00:00
  Why did, oh, it added because I'm in add mode.
• 2:00:04
  Wow.
• 2:00:05
  It's a new app.
• 2:00:06
  Yeah, it's a new app.
• 2:00:07
  It's a little, needs some refining.
• 2:00:13
  Okay, so go back to select mode, we say, I know nothing.
• 2:00:28
  Now, I will point out and you'll see in the next diagram that I know nothing comes in a couple of different flavors, but what would you do with the probability?
• 2:00:38
  Well, I would say, oops.
• 2:00:43
  I guess I'm not sure why, what that adds.
• 2:00:47
  I don't know why that's useful here because I feel like, Because-- You feel Charlie Kirk, whatever the question is, you can just opt out.
• 2:00:56
  You could be like, I'm not weighing in on this.
• 2:00:58
  I don't have an opinion.
• 2:00:59
  Oh, no, no, no, this is about something else.
• 2:01:02
  The diagram as I presented it assumes that there was an assassination of Charlie Kirk.
• 2:01:07
  What I'm trying to do is instill a kind of mental discipline the same way when our children were very certain of things that were impossible to be perfectly certain of.
• 2:01:19
  I would say, how sure are you?
• 2:01:21
  And they would say 100% and I would say, try again.
• 2:01:24
  I want to know what your degree of uncertainty is.
• 2:01:27
  And if you say, well, there are certain things that are just certain, the answer is actually even those things aren't.
• 2:01:31
  This is exactly why Dick Hart struggled to even prove to himself that he existed.
• 2:01:37
  Is it nothing is that certain, right?
• 2:01:40
  So-- I thought you said Dick Hart.
• 2:01:42
  Who else Dick Hart?
• 2:01:44
  Who are we talking about now?
• 2:01:45
  Gary Hart's uncle.
• 2:01:47
  But anyway, the point is the idea that there should always be looming in your mind, the possibility that you are in a coma and imagining all of this, or that some malevolent for your brain in a jar and you think you're a person and you're being fed data to see what you are gonna do with it, right?
• 2:02:08
  Those things aren't significant possibilities, but the idea that you leave them open because that means that you are actually completely open to the discovery that something you didn't have on your map should be is a key part of epistemic humility.
• 2:02:25
  Yeah, I think that putting that on this makes this less useful.
• 2:02:30
  Maybe, but my point is when you exclude it, know that you're excluding it, right?
• 2:02:35
  There are reasons to exclude it.
• 2:02:37
  For example, it makes the diagram harder to read.
• 2:02:40
  But in any case, here is another diagram in which we can use path analysis to understand what's going on.
• 2:02:48
  Now, this was motivated.
• 2:02:50
  Just so you know, very hard to read.
• 2:02:52
  Oh, of course, impossible to read and I will zoom in.
• 2:02:55
  I do not wish to drag this into social space.
• 2:02:58
  I don't wish to drag anyone else into it.
• 2:03:00
  But I was challenged by somebody that I know and like over a claim that somebody I've just met believes that the venue in which Charlie Kirk was assassinated is symbolic and it is suggestive of a darker meaning.
• 2:03:20
  So here's the diagrams.
• 2:03:23
  That's the venue in which Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
• 2:03:26
  Wait, wait, wait, but the line.
• 2:03:28
  So there's, I see three colors painted onto a photograph.
• 2:03:31
  Yes, you see three colors painted onto a satellite image of the-- Can we see the satellite image without the colors painted on them?
• 2:03:38
  No, we can't.
• 2:03:39
  Because that pentagon is loose at best.
• 2:03:42
  Yeah.
• 2:03:42
  Okay.
• 2:03:43
  Okay, so this is the image that is used to describe why the inscribing of the pentagon, I mean of the-- Pentagram.
• 2:03:54
  Pentagram is being suggested as something meaningful.
• 2:03:59
  And I was challenged by somebody as to whether or not the fact that somebody that I had spoken to, I had reposted something he said, what he said was not about symbolism or anything, it was about his friend Charlie Kirk.
• 2:04:16
  This was somebody who knew Charlie better than I did by quite a bit apparently.
• 2:04:20
  And so what I posted was you should take his claims about what Charlie Kirk said and thought and what Eric Kirk said and thought seriously because he apparently vacationed with them and went to dinner with them.
• 2:04:32
  And so anyway, it's evidence.
• 2:04:34
  But anyway, somebody challenged me and said, well, do you take this seriously and showed the images of the pentagram and blah, blah, blah.
• 2:04:44
  So you're not using names intentionally?
• 2:04:46
  Yeah.
• 2:04:46
  Right?
• 2:04:46
  Okay, so, but a guy wrote something that you found compelling and you directed people to it.
• 2:04:52
  He also posted something about the symbolism at the venue that you haven't yet said what you think of it.
• 2:04:59
  And someone said, yeah, but that's the same guy who said this thing.
• 2:05:02
  Do you take that seriously?
• 2:05:03
  Right.
• 2:05:03
  You know, if you do, then you're that kind of crazy.
• 2:05:06
  And if you don't, then how could you possibly be vouching for this other thing that he thinks?
• 2:05:12
  Right.
• 2:05:12
  Is that the basic landscape?
• 2:05:14
  Yes, and I mean, I showed his tweets.
• 2:05:17
  So I think there's no reason not to reveal that this is John Mappin who reached out to me after my discussions with Tucker to tell me things I didn't know about Charlie.
• 2:05:29
  Okay, so what do I do?
• 2:05:32
  Why can I not say to my friend who challenged me over, well, do you take this, you know, the venue was symbolic in a demonic way that was in some way intentional?
• 2:05:45
  Well, do you take that seriously?
• 2:05:47
  And my point is the pressure to say, no, I don't take that seriously is immense.
• 2:05:53
  I am not going to say I don't take it seriously because of the analysis that we've been showing you, the style of analysis in which you have various possibilities.
• 2:06:04
  And so I want to show you what I do with a question like that that will cause me not to answer it declaratively, but to answer it.
• 2:06:14
  So not to hit the pressure release valve, which most normal people would do, and say, no, of course I don't take that seriously.
• 2:06:21
  Right.
• 2:06:22
  So instead you create, this is the venue.
• 2:06:27
  What are the three possible possibilities about the venue?
• 2:06:31
  Right, what are the three possibilities about the venue?
• 2:06:35
  And I see I have failed to input a value, which I will try.
• 2:06:43
  Wow.
• 2:06:44
  (Keyboard Clattering) Okay, so I'm in select mode.
• 2:06:54
  I should be able to select that and add the value, but I can't for some reason.
• 2:07:01
  So this is just dead air while people are listening.
• 2:07:06
  So, all right, so then we're just gonna forgive me for my failure of text.
• 2:07:14
  Back here, this is a new program, as Heather points out, okay.
• 2:07:17
  Yeah, I mean, you literally just created it.
• 2:07:18
  Okay, so in the space of possibilities where we are asking the question as to whether or not the Utah Valley University venue is significant, the shape of it is significant in the assassination of Charlie Kirk as John Mappin asserts.
• 2:07:38
  I would argue that we are in a possibility space.
• 2:07:41
  On the bottom branch here, I have the possibility that I can't interpret the universe I live in at all.
• 2:07:49
  I know nothing and the possibilities for why I might know nothing come in two flavors.
• 2:07:54
  My world is somehow false or I'm crazy.
• 2:07:58
  Now, do I think those things have any significant possibility of being true?
• 2:08:04
  Not really, I've set the probability at one in 100,000.
• 2:08:08
  So it's low and I thought about setting it at a million, but okay, so one in 100,000 is not worth worrying about here.
• 2:08:16
  So the point is what's happening in this space is on this other part of the tree.
• 2:08:24
  And in fact, I should be able to just delete this branch so we can not focus on it.
• 2:08:32
  Stuff doesn't work as it should, but okay.
• 2:08:34
  So the other two branches of the tree divide between a branch in which there is a supernatural creator and another branch in which the universe is strictly natural.
• 2:08:49
  But your p-value is way too low.
• 2:08:52
  Yeah, well, I was trying to fix that just a second ago.
• 2:08:54
  That's exactly the problem.
• 2:08:58
  So, yeah.
• 2:09:01
  So anyway, I would say that the chances that the universe is strictly natural are 99%.
• 2:09:07
  The chances that there is a supernatural creator are 1%.
• 2:09:12
  And we can argue about whether or not I've set those things correctly, but you get the balance of it.
• 2:09:16
  Almost all of the action, as far as I'm concerned, is on the strictly natural universe branch.
• 2:09:25
  And obviously other people would reverse those probabilities.
• 2:09:28
  Yes, many other people would reverse those probabilities.
• 2:09:32
  But what do you have downstream of strictly natural universe in terms of, if strictly natural universe-- I think you interpret the so-called evidence about the venue being evidence of demonic ritual or something.
• 2:09:42
  If this is a strictly natural universe, then the question of whether or not the structure of the venue is meaningful and symbolic depends on whether the criminals who were involved-- And criminals, you're just using mafias as a generic, whatever conspiracy might've been involved.
• 2:10:02
  Right, remember when in one of the "Godfather" movies, a bulletproof vest is delivered with a fish in it, and somebody says, "What does this mean?" And somebody responds, "It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes," right?
• 2:10:18
  The point is symbolism, okay?
• 2:10:20
  So in a world where criminals use symbolism, the possibility that the venue is symbolic in an important way exists, but I would regard it as very low probability.
• 2:10:37
  Why?
• 2:10:38
  Because what would've had to be true in order for the venue's shape to be important in the assassination of Charlie Kirk?
• 2:10:46
  Either it would've had to be built with that in mind, knowing that either this assassination was going to happen there or that some other thing was going to happen there, so it would've had to be, the planning involved just doesn't make any sense to me.
• 2:10:58
  So I think even a 2% chance that if this was just a criminal enterprise, that the venue means anything is incredibly-- I think that's generous.
• 2:11:08
  Yeah, it is generous.
• 2:11:09
  It is generous, and I should probably bump it down to less than 1%.
• 2:11:16
  If we live in a purely natural universe, it's also possible that criminal organizations of the sort that might've been involved in this don't care about symbolism, in which case the chances that the venue means nothing are extremely high, and the chances that it means something are extremely low.
• 2:11:37
  If, on the other hand, there is a supernatural creator who has essentially unlimited powers and insight in the construction of things, well then the chances that God employs symbolism are extremely high in my book.
• 2:11:56
  I mean, it's one of the languages of God in virtually any tradition, sure.
• 2:12:02
  And so the chances then, assuming a supernatural creator, which I have set at 1%.
• 2:12:09
  But again, many people would reverse that.
• 2:12:11
  Reverse that.
• 2:12:12
  But if there is a God, the chances that God eschews symbolism are very low.
• 2:12:18
  I have it at 5%, probably way too high.
• 2:12:22
  And that God uses symbolism, I have it 95%, which is probably too low.
• 2:12:27
  But the point is, then the chances that the venue means something go up.
• 2:12:32
  I have them at 95% and I have the chances that the venue means nothing at 5%.
• 2:12:39
  Okay, but I feel like, I think this is useful in terms of tracking what's contingent on what.
• 2:12:48
  But there's a critical piece missing in this analysis, which is that that evidence of symbol was to my first time seeing it, eyes extraordinarily weak.
• 2:13:04
  It didn't really look like a Pentagon.
• 2:13:06
  It looked like it had been drawn onto something and kind of like fit into place.
• 2:13:09
  And so, I like the analysis in so far as, if entirely natural universe, this is very unlikely to mean anything at all.
• 2:13:22
  If a God created universe with a God who uses symbolism, then the chances get higher.
• 2:13:29
  But there still has to be some evidence that there's symbol.
• 2:13:34
  And that you've sort of assumed here.
• 2:13:36
  You've assumed that the sort of painting onto a picture in a, what looks to me sort of like a half-assed way is meaningful.
• 2:13:43
  And so I feel like that's missing.
• 2:13:45
  That's missing and I wouldn't know how to begin to put a probability on, oh, that pentagram definitely looks like that venue.
• 2:13:57
  Right.
• 2:13:57
  Because to me, I was like, I just doesn't, but I don't know, I don't know.
• 2:14:00
  Well, in fact, I think you can say even more strongly that the existence of the Pentagon implies that you could inscribe a pentagram.
• 2:14:11
  Right, right, right.
• 2:14:11
  But as I said, when I first looked at the Pentagon itself, looks, it's just not there.
• 2:14:16
  Like it looks like that picture, but you can't see without, like if we can't see the picture without the paint, it's impossible to know what it would look like without the paint.
• 2:14:23
  Yep, okay.
• 2:14:23
  But it does, it looks like, it just doesn't look like a pentagram.
• 2:14:26
  So the right thing to do then would be.
• 2:14:30
  But yes, if Pentagon, then pentagram, but that's not a coincidence.
• 2:14:35
  That's just de facto geometry.
• 2:14:37
  Right, so the thing to do, that we have now done in real time, exactly the thing that the diagrams are supposed to prompt, which is you have compelled me that I have overrated the chances of this being a symbol, even if my other probabilities were defensible and that would change the whole architecture.
• 2:14:57
  And that in fact, that is where I think this is useful.
• 2:15:02
  So you and I had some arguments about this, right?
• 2:15:04
  Or I'm going like, yeah, okay, it's a tool.
• 2:15:07
  The tool could be useful for some people.
• 2:15:10
  I think it won't, you know, I don't think this kind of thing would be useful for people whose brains work a particular way, even if they are highly analytical.
• 2:15:17
  I think I am perhaps one of those people.
• 2:15:21
  But people will always mistake the tool for the work.
• 2:15:25
  And so you hand people a tool and they assume, well, now I can do the work.
• 2:15:30
  And you know, you can do the work, right?
• 2:15:34
  So you've created a tool to help you do the work, to help you keep track of your own logical and intuitive understandings of system so that you can go back and check on what you have thought in the past and may think in the future.
• 2:15:48
  You can't go back and look at what you may think in the future, but you know what I mean?
• 2:15:54
  You will retain the knowledge that this is a tool that exists at your bequest for your use and cannot do your thinking for you.
• 2:16:06
  But almost everyone using tools at some point forgets that the tools are only as good as the inputs and the people using the tools.
• 2:16:15
  All right, which points to in the world of phylogeny, which was the diagram inspiration for writing things out this way, we have two different kinds of tools.
• 2:16:29
  We have analytical tools where you feed in a data set, and it tells you what the most parsimonious way to arrange the species on the tree is based on the data you have given it.
• 2:16:44
  It's an analytical tool.
• 2:16:45
  And then we have graphical tools in which you can put any two species next to each other, and you can propose that this is actually how I think these things evolved rather than that way.
• 2:16:55
  And so what you're pointing to, which I 100% agree with, is that this tool is a tool for you to make your own thinking more complete and to force you to put explicit probabilities on things.
• 2:17:10
  Nothing says that your intuition is any good.
• 2:17:13
  Right.
• 2:17:13
  Not nothing here.
• 2:17:14
  It is a visualization tool, an important distinction now.
• 2:17:18
  And I think this is part of why, and this is inside baseball here, but I think part of the reason why I object to comparing this to like a phylogeny visualization program like McLean, which we used to use, is that when you are drawing a possible set of relationships between species, a so-called phylogenetic tree, you never presume or claim that you have included everything.
• 2:17:42
  There is no complete tree of life.
• 2:17:44
  It just never has existed.
• 2:17:46
  It's too much, right?
• 2:17:47
  And so you always know that you are excluding some things and you are therefore making no claims about those relationships.
• 2:17:54
  They just aren't on there.
• 2:17:55
  If you say, "Look, on this tree of life,"cats and dogs are more closely related to each other "than either are to mice," you're like, "What?
• 2:18:02
  "What about hyenas?
• 2:18:04
  "Like, what about hyenas?
• 2:18:05
  "If I add hyenas, then cats and hyenas"are more closely related to each other than dogs.
• 2:18:08
  "I didn't make a claim about hyenas.
• 2:18:10
  "Therefore, their absence from the hypothesis "of relationship that is the tree is not information." Yeah.
• 2:18:18
  Whereas on the sort of path analysis tool that you have created, you are attempting, and I think in most cases that you have shared today, have succeeded in describing the complete solution set, the scope of possibilities, and it is actually necessary for the meaning to be made.
• 2:18:38
  Because if you simply exclude something from what is possible, and then you put, you know, then your probability is up to one, there's a lie there somewhere.
• 2:18:48
  There's a falsehood.
• 2:18:49
  Right, there's at least an assumption that's unstated.
• 2:18:53
  And I agree with you.
• 2:18:53
  And I must say, I've lost my diagram because the probability of the program has not preserved the state in the tab.
• 2:19:00
  But anyway, I will fix that down the road here.
• 2:19:03
  I will just say that I cautioned you.
• 2:19:07
  So you just created this two days ago.
• 2:19:09
  It's too early to share this.
• 2:19:11
  It is too early to share it.
• 2:19:12
  Yes.
• 2:19:13
  But anyway, I think the discussion so far has been good.
• 2:19:16
  There's a couple of things I wanted to highlight though, one of which we've already hinted at.
• 2:19:20
  That the danger of being socially pressured into falsely closing off a possibility, the difference between setting a possibility at one in a thousand or one in 10,000 versus closing it off and forgetting it ever existed is profound.
• 2:19:38
  And it is also, you know, as you and I talked about earlier today, the, in normal life, you have to just close off possibilities.
• 2:19:48
  It's part of being functional.
• 2:19:50
  And so we have the circuit in us, which is like, yeah, I already decided, you know, at the point that you've picked the thing you're gonna eat off the menu, keeping alive all of the things that you might have ordered.
• 2:20:01
  The way it shows up, here we got a new special.
• 2:20:03
  Like, I don't care.
• 2:20:04
  I don't care.
• 2:20:04
  I don't care anymore.
• 2:20:05
  I don't care what's more.
• 2:20:06
  I'd rather not remember the thing I decided not to order because I don't want to be disappointed in the thing I got.
• 2:20:11
  So, you know, so anyway, the point is normal.
• 2:20:14
  This is what brand loyalty is about too.
• 2:20:15
  It's not like, that's the best.
• 2:20:17
  It's like the decision is made.
• 2:20:18
  Right.
• 2:20:19
  The decision is made or the decision is made.
• 2:20:20
  I'm going to Costco.
• 2:20:21
  We'll see which two things they have and choose between them.
• 2:20:24
  But I'm not, you know, I'm not going to Amazon, right?
• 2:20:28
  Where everything is available.
• 2:20:29
  So anyway, the tendency for normal people in order to function, to close off possibilities and walk away from them and try not to think about them again is powerful and completely understandable.
• 2:20:40
  In fact, you probably are more functional in normal life if you're good at just pruning things from the tree and walking away.
• 2:20:47
  But in terms of being logical in the midst of the Cartesian crisis, when things are contentious, when there is vast pressure to, well, you know, you admit that the vaccines are safe.
• 2:21:01
  Sorry, I can't admit that because I know too much, right?
• 2:21:05
  The point is you've got a world of possibilities that are ugly, that are frightening, that are sometimes falsely introduced.
• 2:21:15
  You know, can somebody pollute your tree by flooding the zone with garbage possibilities?
• 2:21:20
  Sure.
• 2:21:20
  So trying to figure out how to do this in an elegant enough way that you can remember what you thought, why you thought it, and why you now think something different is a truly important skill.
• 2:21:32
  So falsely closing, falsely setting something that has a low probability to zero in order to simplify your thinking life is a bad habit.
• 2:21:40
  And-- Yeah, and so I would say, if we talked about future iterations of this app you're building, say you have something for which there are, you know, five possible outcomes.
• 2:21:56
  And three of them you've decided really the possibilities are vanishingly small.
• 2:22:01
  You don't reduce them to zero and get rid of them entirely, and thus lose track of them ever having been possibilities because it's rare that you actually know for sure that's a zero.
• 2:22:13
  Zeros and ones are very hard to come by in probability space.
• 2:22:17
  Zero, you know, point, 10 to the negative six as you put in one of those.
• 2:22:22
  Yeah, but that's different from zero.
• 2:22:24
  It's different from zero.
• 2:22:25
  And so, you know, I would love to see a beautiful sort of visually useful version of this in which the probability scales is on a gray scale.
• 2:22:37
  So something that's very unlikely is closer to white on white and the closer to one it is is black on white.
• 2:22:45
  And it's just much more visible.
• 2:22:47
  So that, you know, from any kind of a distance you can see, okay, what at this moment in time, the probabilities I'm assigning to this, what do I think is most true?
• 2:22:55
  Okay, I can see it.
• 2:22:57
  But what is also still possible, even though I don't think it's true right now, you can still see the things, but they're not what draw your eye.
• 2:23:03
  And that is in fact how our brains work when they're working best.
• 2:23:06
  I can still see the whole possibility space, but this is where I think it's gonna be.
• 2:23:11
  This is the line that I think the truth is gonna be on.
• 2:23:14
  So I'm gonna go there even though these are still out there.
• 2:23:17
  I know they are, but I don't need to focus there right now because I know they'll be there if I ever need to come back.
• 2:23:22
  Yep, I would also argue that if you had two groups of people, you had one group of people that was committed to doing that, maintaining an awareness of what they once thought possible.
• 2:23:38
  And one group that prunes the tree down to what they now think is likely, what you're describing actually happened in biology classes as people became committed to their interpretation rather than remaining open to the full solution set, even if they now believe this thing is likely.
• 2:23:57
  Of what topic we're talking about?
• 2:24:00
  Which you're describing with the 20 questions exercise where people become very committed to one interpretation.
• 2:24:06
  It doesn't matter, it's not central.
• 2:24:09
  But the point is, I would like to have discussions only with people who implicitly or explicitly enter with the awareness that they are perfectly certain of nothing, right?
• 2:24:21
  And I think you can just say that.
• 2:24:22
  Am I perfectly certain that I exist?
• 2:24:25
  No, I'd put it at one in 100,000, one in a million, maybe less that I don't exist and I'm not just perceiving the universe in the way I think I am.
• 2:24:34
  But you can't rule out the possibility that some kind of insanity would feel like this.
• 2:24:41
  But that also doesn't mean that maintaining that as an extremely low probability possibility warrants any of your attention.
• 2:24:50
  Well, no, no, I would argue-- Like it can be in, I think a utility of this app that you're building is that you can have it on the visual and be like, yep, great, I just don't need to worry about it.
• 2:25:05
  Okay, but then the point is, I'm a big fan of rules of the door.
• 2:25:09
  Rules of the door for an analytical discussion is perfect certainty is never warranted.
• 2:25:15
  Perfect certainty is never warranted, right?
• 2:25:18
  You can act based on the fact that this is the right way, this is the best bet, but if you have perfect certainty in your mind of anything, including your own identity, you've started off on the wrong foot.
• 2:25:29
  So anyway, yeah, it doesn't belong in every diagram.
• 2:25:32
  In fact, it belongs on no diagrams.
• 2:25:33
  It belongs as an assumption of the fact that you're sitting down to diagram probabilities, okay?
• 2:25:39
  All right, the other thing I wanted to add was in thinking about these sorts of issues, I believe in our discussion this morning that we actually happened onto something useful in another contentious quadrant.
• 2:25:58
  There's a very live debate about what the essence of woke is.
• 2:26:05
  There's obviously a major accusation about the woke right and claims about what it means that they are woke and things like that.
• 2:26:13
  And I think in talking about the pressure to close off possibilities prematurely or close them off without a proper evidentiary basis that they are truly impossible, that the reality of what the essence of woke is became clear, something I had thought loosely had became very concrete.
• 2:26:40
  And the idea is in a social environment, let's say it's medicine or the academy, there is a set of beliefs.
• 2:26:52
  Let's say it's medicine and the beliefs are vaccines are very safe.
• 2:27:00
  And then evidence causes a subset of the people in that milieu to doubt, something happens, enough doctors see a patient regress and they say, yeah, that's not related to the vaccine, but then it happens again, enough people begin to get the sense that something is not right.
• 2:27:21
  The pressure to get those people to either reverse course and reverse what they now know or to be perfectly silent about what they know in order to maintain the consensus is extremely powerful.
• 2:27:40
  And so what I'm gonna claim, what I've said to James Lindsay and my intervention with him was that the essence of woke is cancellation.
• 2:27:53
  And that I don't think that term applies to anybody who's not trying to shut down the voice of others, but I think it's two pieces.
• 2:28:00
  There's banish, we're not gonna platform you because you've lost your mind and there's coercion.
• 2:28:08
  We're gonna get you back on board with the consensus.
• 2:28:11
  And those two things are basically a choice.
• 2:28:13
  Either you get back on board with the consensus or you're out.
• 2:28:16
  I would argue that those two things are the essential core of wokeness and that it is the artificial closing off of live possibilities that is the uniting feature.
• 2:28:33
  We're either gonna frighten you into saying, say the words vaccines are safe, right?
• 2:28:40
  Or if you don't say that, I'm sorry, he used to be a pretty good doctor until he became an anti-vaxxer, right?
• 2:28:50
  Something like that.
• 2:28:51
  So it is that thing, close down that possibility or else and the or else involves ejecting you.
• 2:29:00
  We're not gonna platform you, you're not gonna talk to you.
• 2:29:02
  I will come after you in the courts, look, use your fraud, whatever we're gonna do.
• 2:29:06
  So it is that social phenomenon which is totally non-analytic.
• 2:29:11
  We saw it over and over and over again, explicitly at Evergreen in the meltdown almost nine years ago.
• 2:29:19
  You saw a couple of very explicit personal examples in which young people whom you did not know tried to speak to you.
• 2:29:32
  You were interested in talking to anyone who would talk as opposed to yell and scream and just shout epithets and accusations.
• 2:29:40
  And several, as I remember, of the young people who wanted to speak to you came away from those conversations thinking, well, wait a minute, that's not what I was told that was gonna be.
• 2:29:54
  He treated me with respect and doesn't seem to be a racist, there's no bigotry and, it's odd.
• 2:30:01
  And then you saw them re-educated when they refused to continue to shout the maxims of the revolution as it was happening in front of us.
• 2:30:19
  So I think your encapsulation of what woke is is born of a very particular set of extreme circumstances that really did encapsulate what it is that they do.
• 2:30:36
  What it is the main weaponry of the woke.
• 2:30:43
  It's, you know, recollect or exercise.
• 2:30:52
  Yeah, we're gonna intimidate you into rejoining the fold and saying the things, or we're gonna exile you.
• 2:31:00
  Now, what I'm saying here is that woke is two things.
• 2:31:04
  One, woke is an ideology, which is only applicable in the one case of the woke revolution and its various beliefs about race and about trans and about those things.
• 2:31:17
  And then there's woke, the toolkit.
• 2:31:19
  And the toolkit is wielded by others.
• 2:31:22
  We certainly saw it work during COVID.
• 2:31:25
  And in fact, at the time I called some people medically woke because their idea was those beliefs of yours are intolerable and nobody should be talking to you.
• 2:31:36
  That's woke, that's the toolkit woke.
• 2:31:39
  And-- Well, and there's a reason that it's Maoist China.
• 2:31:44
  It's communism wherever it has shown up when we are aware of what the strategies are.
• 2:31:51
  And it looks like this more or less over and over and over again.
• 2:31:54
  Yep, because the toolkit is a product of game theory.
• 2:31:57
  This is a way to, it's a way to wield power that is not derived from the fact that you are correct.
• 2:32:05
  It is derived from the fact that you are in a position to coerce and to exile.
• 2:32:11
  Yeah.
• 2:32:12
  Yep.
• 2:32:15
  I guess then there may just be a disagreement.
• 2:32:19
  I don't really care.
• 2:32:21
  So not between you and me, but about what people mean when they say woke.
• 2:32:25
  So that may be the heart of some of the disagreements that you are having with people.
• 2:32:29
  Because woke, the strategy exists outside of the new moment of woke, the ideology and has existed wherever communism has existed.
• 2:32:40
  The set of strategies is going to be called communist or Maoist or something.
• 2:32:44
  And then it's the ideology that gets the name that that may be the heart of some of the disagreement that you have with some people.
• 2:32:52
  Well, the disagreement I think stems from the following thing.
• 2:32:55
  The alternative claim, you've got my claim about the woke toolkit involving coercion and cancellation, threats, coercion and cancellation in order to keep you within a set of belief parameters.
• 2:33:08
  The alternative perspective, which James Lindsay has articulated as well as anyone has, is that the key aspect of woke is effectively the belief that there is an epiphany and that those who have had it can see.
• 2:33:24
  Now, I don't disagree that that does tend to show up, but if you think about what the idea is, like the problem is there are a lot of garbage epiphanies, but everything good starts as one.
• 2:33:36
  So the idea that there might be some epiphany that you have about whether vaccines are safe enough to be used on children, right?
• 2:33:50
  The point is, ah, you're woke.
• 2:33:52
  You claim to have woken up to something.
• 2:33:54
  And it's like, you wanna demonize the idea of waking up to something because we wake up to lots of stuff and there's lots of stuff that I've woken up to that I would not go back to sleep over and it's because it's right and I am safer and healthier and happier to know about it.
• 2:34:08
  So the point is, which is the more essential feature of the woke toolkit?
• 2:34:14
  Is it epiphany and does that distinguish it from anything else, right?
• 2:34:18
  Or is it the toolkit used to prevent people from straying from an enforced consensus?
• 2:34:26
  And I would claim it's obviously the latter thing.
• 2:34:30
  Yep.
• 2:34:31
  Struggle sessions.
• 2:34:32
  Yeah, struggle sessions.
• 2:34:34
  Not to put too fine a point on it.
• 2:34:39
  Gosh, I feel like there was more places here, but maybe that's it.
• 2:34:45
  Maybe that's it.
• 2:34:46
  Yeah, for now.
• 2:34:49
  And maybe, what time is it?
• 2:34:51
  What time does it think it is?
• 2:34:53
  Depends what it is.
• 2:34:55
  Depends what the definition of it is.
• 2:34:56
  Yeah, I think we're gonna hold off on sharks, honestly, because I kinda just don't wanna introduce actual phylogenies on a day when there were sort of tree diagrams being shown.
• 2:35:08
  This will also give sharks a little more time to evolve.
• 2:35:12
  Oh man, they've been so slow about it.
• 2:35:15
  So slow.
• 2:35:16
  No, actually one of the, so I mentioned the shark thing last week.
• 2:35:19
  I'll just keep on like dragging it on and probably we'll never get to it.
• 2:35:22
  But apparently they had very rapid evolution and diversification, but it was so long ago that it feels like they've just been changing a little bit for a very long time.
• 2:35:33
  And they kinda just did all their changing all at once.
• 2:35:36
  And then they're just like, we did it, got there.
• 2:35:39
  They've been resting on their cartilaginous laurels for a good many hundred million years.
• 2:35:45
  Long before laurels ever existed.
• 2:35:47
  Because angiosperms, man, they are late comers, late bloomers.
• 2:35:50
  Wow.
• 2:35:51
  I know.
• 2:35:52
  Yeah.
• 2:35:52
  That was a really good pun that the few people are gonna get.
• 2:35:55
  Yeah.
• 2:35:56
  Okay, but we did, you insisted actually.
• 2:35:58
  Yep.
• 2:35:59
  I do that sometimes.
• 2:36:01
  Usually I ignore you.
• 2:36:03
  Doesn't mean I didn't insist.
• 2:36:04
  That's not true.
• 2:36:05
  That's true.
• 2:36:07
  There are two, so we live in this county in the state of Washington, San Juan County, which has four fairies of islands and another several few handfuls of inhabited islands.
• 2:36:19
  And it's kind of even looking up.
• 2:36:20
  I don't know how many people live in the county.
• 2:36:23
  I don't know, several tens of thousands-ish something.
• 2:36:28
  And there are two weekly newspapers, one that comes out of San Juan, one that comes out of Orcus every week.
• 2:36:36
  And every week they both report basically the sheriff's log.
• 2:36:41
  Police blotter.
• 2:36:42
  Yeah, the police blotter, they call it the sheriff's log here.
• 2:36:45
  And I usually, I read it every week because it's...
• 2:36:48
  Yeah, quaint.
• 2:36:50
  Yeah, it's quaint.
• 2:36:51
  And it just reminds me that literally there's no street light on the island that we live on.
• 2:36:56
  And we're in the county seat, right?
• 2:36:59
  I don't think there's a street light in the county.
• 2:37:00
  Yeah, I think there must not be.
• 2:37:02
  Because if there's none here, there's, yeah, none anywhere.
• 2:37:07
  But still, there's some real things.
• 2:37:09
  And so this is from March 18th.
• 2:37:11
  This is last week's.
• 2:37:13
  This is the most recent one.
• 2:37:14
  There'll be a new one coming out today.
• 2:37:17
  But we have things like, "A Lopez Island deputy stopped a vehicle near the intersection of Mud Bay Road and Vista Road.
• 2:37:24
  The driver was subsequently issued an infraction for speeding 50 miles per hour and opposed to 35 mile per hour zone.
• 2:37:30
  Additional warnings were issued." And I'll say, this is the entire log for the week, for the entire county.
• 2:37:36
  There's not much going on here.
• 2:37:39
  And a Lopez resident reported fraud that resulted in significant loss of funds, both in cash and gift cards purchased at a local business.
• 2:37:48
  More traffic stops.
• 2:37:50
  There's occasional drunk driving, occasional domestic incidents.
• 2:37:56
  But it's pretty rare that there's anything all that serious.
• 2:38:00
  However, I feel like the sheriff's log in our county outdid itself this week with the following, again, from the sheriff's log from March 18th, 2025, the following entry.
• 2:38:13
  "A deputy received a report of found property.
• 2:38:16
  A $1 bill was located in the sheriff's office and the owner was unknown.
• 2:38:21
  The money was booked into evidence as found property." Not many counties where somebody would book a dollar into evidence.
• 2:38:29
  Booked into evidence.
• 2:38:32
  It was a slow day, even here.
• 2:38:35
  Yep.
• 2:38:36
  All right, it's an amazing story.
• 2:38:37
  Yeah, yeah.
• 2:38:38
  So you insisted.
• 2:38:39
  I know, I know, it's good.
• 2:38:40
  I read that to you and you're like, you have to-- You gotta share that.
• 2:38:43
  Yeah.
• 2:38:45
  So from the county where occasionally dollar bills are booked into evidence, it's a beautiful place to live.
• 2:38:52
  It's a little insane for those of you who have been paying attention to Washington state.
• 2:38:57
  It's even further losing its grip on reality in some ways, at least the lawmakers are, but it is a beautiful, beautiful state and the county is quaint enough to occasionally book $1 bills into evidence of lost property.
• 2:39:09
  And I got a piece, so let's-- Wow, I didn't think we were done.
• 2:39:14
  Okay, no, we can do that.
• 2:39:18
  So we'll be back on Sunday with a Q&A on locals at 11 a.m.
• 2:39:23
  Pacific and next week with our next live stream.
• 2:39:28
  And until you see us next, be good to the ones you love, eat good food and get outside.
• 2:39:34
  Be well, everyone.
• 2:39:37
  (Upbeat Music)