Mad Scientists: The 273rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 273. That is not a perfect square. I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein. But is it Prime? That's an interesting question. I'm going to say no. Yeah, that's a no. Statistically speaking, that was highly likely to be the correct answer. Three. By 91. Oh. 7 by 39 and 13 by 21.

Those are its factors in addition to, of course, one and 273 itself. So you don't learn something every day, but there are a lot of days on which you do learn something. And this was one of them. I don't think so, because do you still know those factors? I didn't say you remembered it for the entire day on which you learned the mice. It's learning if you hear it and immediately forget it. That's not learning.

Well, let us just say that this is the perfect opportunity for some industrial strength sophistry, in which I could argue that yes, you did in fact learn it, even if you forgot it within... Whatever that first period is that something decides whether it's going to be promoted to slightly longer term memory. Five nanoseconds? Something like that. Yeah. Three. You remember three.

I do remember three. Therefore. Yeah. You have that. I have. As one of the factors of 273. Yeah. You have that. Reminds me of breakfast at Tiffany's. i don't remember the uh the argument in breakfast at tiffany's the song oh i thought you're talking about the movie she says that they have nothing in common no derivative and this is this is not an audrey hepburn thing It's a reference. It is actually a lot of auditory of Audrey Hepburn.

And the idea is that in this song where the guy is being broken up with, the gal says they have nothing in common. And he says, but we both liked breakfast at Tiffany's. So at least we have that. At least we have that. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, I have three as a factor of 273.

At least you have that. At least I have that. All right. You're Brett Weinstein. I'm Brett Weinstein. I'm Heather Hying. You are Heather Hying. This is the Dark Horse Podcast. We have already begun unearthing important things like three. It's a good number. It is. It's useful for a lot of things. I mean, especially like counting to things that are higher than three. All right. Shall we pay the rent and then get on to the amazing state of the world and its miraculous level of cognitive decline?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess we should. So join us on Locals. We've got a watch party going on there. Lots of good stuff. I believe this weekend we also have another Q&A on Locals at 11 a.m. Pacific. Those are a lot of fun and we are Our standards are like our bar is lower in terms of what we're willing to discuss a little bit. and be a little bit more free on some topics. Oh, yeah. We are more adventurous in closer circles. Exactly. So join us there. On Locals. And...

As always, we have three amazing sponsors at the top of the hour. which if you hear us reading ads here, you can be sure that we have ourselves, or in a few cases, asked people who could because it's not a product or service that we have any reason to use. But ourselves in this case, all of them... our own testimonials to how awesome these products are.

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at checkout the link is vanman.shop forward slash darkhorse try their amazing tala products now you will not be sorry I'm going to suggest that we enhance that script for the next time and that it should read the weapon that Van Man is best known for is their tallow and honey ball. this is not a word that i like i don't i don't like that it has become weaponized but i think that use of that word weapon in an ad for van man would be problematic hello and honey bomb

Yes, sir. I get your pun, and I get that you're homophone, man, as always. All right. I'm sorry. I apologize for being nutrient-dense. I was... No, you're not. No. I mean, not profoundly, slightly. Slightly dense not at all Wait, am I right? I guess. Yes. You've known me a long time. I think you read that one accurately. Yeah. Our second sponsor this week is Peaks Linducca, an adaptogenic coffee alternative that is powered by cacao to tea and mushrooms. This is a fantastic product. Nicely done.

excuse me um i'm getting over what turns out i think to have been freaking covid um so last time we were on air i'm just gonna stop the ad read for a moment um i was just getting sick and uh and i've lost my sense of smell so you know what else does that i don't feel most of the symptoms now but except that i still can't smell anything and i still got a bit of a cough so apology

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I apologize in advance. The ad that you're about to read is written in the first person. Oh, God. All right. We'll see if I can cover that in a way that nobody is any the wiser. They won't be. They will not be. Despite the fact that you were not sorry and a little bit. i am at this i'm instantaneously not that sorry and persistently a little bit dense so yes our final sponsor heather

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It was a great chili, as a matter of fact. It started off with one of TJ Robinson's olive oil parietals. It started off, and I believe upon tasting it, I dubbed it... Heather's off the hook chili. Was that not the... I think that's the title you gave it. It was off the hook. Olive oil is succulent and delicious food that, like pretty much all fats, is best when it's fresh.

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In some circles. I think it may well happen. These are just as surprising fresh and vibrant as the olive oils with a wide range of flavors and histories. We add a splash of fresh vinegar to bone broth. and to roasted vegetables, and so much more. As an introduction to TJ Robinson's Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club, he is willing to send you a full-size $39

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I'm thinking in circles, which is not a good sign. But, you know, it's kind of like you orbit before you. Oh, you got to get some speed up. Yeah. Get your bearings. Yeah. All right. Shall we start with... the question of the elites. And I think I'm actually going to lead people here as I arrived at this set of questions, which turns out to be curiouser and curiouser the more you dig.

I will say there are several parts to the exploration here. First, I'm going to show you the inroads. Can you put up Claire Lehman's tweet here? So Claire Lehman tweeted, The great Tyler Cowen in defense of expertise in the free press. And then she, can you enlarge the... I can read it if you want. Yeah, can you read that?

So here she is quoting from a Tyler Cowen article. A lot of people do not want to admit it, but when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, the elites by and large actually got a lot right. Most importantly, the people who got vaccinated fared much better than the people who did not.

We also got a vaccine in record time against most expectations. Operation Warp Speed was a success. Long COVID did turn out to be a real thing. Low personal mobility levels meant that often lockdowns were not the real issue. Most of that economic activity was going away in any case.

Most states should have ended the lockdown sooner, but they mattered less than many critics have suggested. Furthermore, in contrast to what many were predicting, those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary. So holy cow, that's quite a paragraph. It's quite a paragraph. When I saw this. A, I was not at all surprised to find Claire Lehman doubling down on the stance that she has held from before the pandemic, that vaccines are inherently safe and effective. And here she is.

pointing to Tyler Cowen, suggesting that the vaccines, whatever the ups and downs may have been, were in general A good thing. But I was surprised to find Tyler here. Now, you and I have met Tyler Cowen. I respect him. I believe him to be an honorable guy who's interested in figuring out what the truth is. And so you and I, having been down the road that we've been down, looking deeply into all things COVID,

recognize that paragraph is actually rather extraordinary. He's making some claims there that seem shocking. So anyway, I went and dug up the article. which I think we should bring up now. It's a short article in the Free Press.

I think rather than trying to summarize it, what I'm going to do is we're going to go through the entire thing. It's not very long. And we're going to talk about it. Any paragraph that we want to stop at, we'll stop and discuss what's there. And then I'm going to talk about how I think. a thought process like this and an article like this arrive.

So you're going to read this, discuss it a little bit, and you're going to give a little soliloquy, and then we'll discuss more. Yeah, I'm going to present a little model for how this came about, and then you and I are going to talk about that model. All right. So you want me to read this? Yeah, would you? Okay. Again, this is in the free press. Our elites don't deserve this much hatred is the title that the free press gave to this article by economist Tyler Cowen.

Whatever you think of elites, real intellectual elitism is based in science, open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeking behavior, is the subtitle from an article dated April 21st, 2025, so two days ago. How did we get to a place where there is extreme mistrust in the supposed elite? It is no surprise that we are especially skeptical of elites these days. The great financial crisis did not exactly go well, and the COVID pandemic was only slightly more than five years ago.

which right away that's a strange strange construction it was no it was it was i mean up until like now by some measures but also um it it was initiated slightly more than five years ago anyway Plenty of mistakes were made in both, even if parties do not always agree in which direction. Or consider the election of Donald Trump. If you like Trump, his rise is a sign of how far wrong things have gone.

If you don't like Trump, you still have to admit your elites let him win the presidency twice. Surely a major failure. As trust recedes in authorities, and also in legacy outlets, strange beliefs are proliferating, whether it is about life extension, global conspiracies, or even whether Hitler was the chief villain of World War II.

If the elites tell us to reject such opinions, we might ignore them. President Trump often governs without caring what experts think, for instance when virtually all professional economists exoriate his recent tariff policy. his legal strategy is about overwhelming the system with cases and attempts rather than a maximum respect for the law as is commonly understood okay i want to pause here and just say i want to come back to the question of the elite

the elite economists who almost universally rejected trump's tariff play as irresponsible and economically simply wrong or wrong-headed And I want to come back to it at the end of this after we've looked at this article and it's... failings in order to reevaluate that claim. Let me just say that what that reminds me of, you know, economics is not a science despite it being classified as a social science. But I'm reminded of a little thing I used to do in the classroom when there would be some...

popular opinion in the class, and I didn't know we were going to be talking about this, so I don't have a good example, but you may be able to come up with one. Something that people feel like should be true, but turns out not to be true. And so, you know, there'd be discussion. I'd say, okay, like how many people believe this? How many people think this is true? And, you know, majority is like, okay, cool.

Unfortunately, science is not a democratic process. That's not how science works. That's not how we establish what is true, nor does the majority opinion change what is true. And that's the problem with this. Well, there are several problems with it. One is it does... All great ideas start as a minority of one. So what do you do when everybody's got it wrong because the new idea is still sufficiently heterodox that either nobody's phrased it or somebody's phrased it and they're on the out?

That's one thing. And then there's another question about, you know, is Trump the economist in chief or does he have a different job, which I want to return to? Uh, I am here. I, Tyler Cowen, uh, wait now. I don't know which part I finished on. that is okay i am here to speak up for intellectual elitism this is tyler cowen speaking i'm reading his words

Albeit with some important qualifications. I prefer elitism over the elites. That is to say, credentials themselves do not make for truth. Instead, usually the malady is that the elites do not take their own elitism seriously enough. A truly elite method is based in science, open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeking behavior. Okay, I want to point out his use of the word method here, which I would say is very encouraging. And in fact, before I read this article...

I was planning to say some very positive things about the idea of method as an alternative to elites. So anyway, to find him here championing method, that's a good sign. Fair enough. I often do public events and podcasts, Cowan continues, with individuals who can only be described as belonging to the elites. These are tenured professors at top schools, famous public intellectuals, or former holders of high government office.

To be blunt, I find this cohort evades the truth reasonably often, is sometimes ill-informed about matters of great public import, and is simply too conforming. Hear, hear. This group frequently holds political views to feel good about themselves rather than to benefit the polity. This happens even when I agree with them, and in a typical one-hour session on average it happens at least once.

Okay, so here he has established his credibility for those who have been shaken by the failure of the elites. He sees it too. Academics are among the worst here, he continues. They can be smug and project a feeling of entitlement. Yes, they are more left-leaning than I would like, but I am at least disappointed in how ill-informed they are about current trends. In this particular moment, the rapid progress of AI systems. Most of the ones I speak to are simply asleep about what is going on.

So consider me disappointed by what passes for the elites today. Still, there is something to elitism that runs deeper than these all-too-human shortcomings. I favor elitism as a method. The method consists of trying to find very smart, intellectually honest people, and meta-rational people who will admit when they are wrong, and then work harder to find the truth.

Within the discourse among those people, we should apply the version of the scientific method appropriate to the given issue or question. Usually we will not come away with certain answers, but it is our best chance for tracking the truth or some approximation to it. Okay, hold on. this is the exact location of tyler cowan's massive confusion that will explain his arriving at upside-down

I'm struggling for a synonym for conclusions towards the end of this brief article. This is the place where you can see exactly what he misunderstands. So we're going to come back to this paragraph after we've finished the article. In other words, Cowan continues, we need to value and stress elitist standards to get closer to the truth. Let us not jump into the cauldron of epistemic carelessness.

That's a cool sentence. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I can sign up for that. There's every word of that sentence. Let us not jump into the cauldron of epistemic care. That often involves elevating oral testimony over careful peer review, circulation of rumor, social media pylons, and turning analytic issues into partisan ways.

I've noticed that cutting the corporate income tax became a less popular idea when it moved from being an Obama administration wish list item to a Trump administration reality. Or is it popular today? Or Or it is popular today to point out that Trump's tariffs impose a tax on capital goods imported into the United States and to complain about that. Rightly so, I would say. I feel like I'm either misunderstanding that sentence. No, no, keep going. It resolves itself.

Are those same critics willing to face up to the proposals for higher capital income taxation in other contexts? that they have been advocating for years. Okay. So put aside the linguistic clumsiness here, Tyler. Cowan is now back on solid ground where he is recognizing not only the failures of elites, but their hypocrisy that basically, you know, who's advancing a policy.

dictates what people think of it and it should have no influence whatsoever either the policy is good or bad um and so anyway he's he's back to his his uh his sober self if someone releases a youtube video full of assertions about misfiring vaccines it is safe to assume that they did not follow an elitist method they would need to write up their claims and try to get them peer-reviewed Okay. He's now lost the plot.

Yeah, he's utterly lost the plot because actually critique of peer-reviewed science and put aside all of the critiques that we have already lodged firmly about the peer-review process and all of that, but a lot of what we did early in COVID. was critiquing the science that was coming out both in preprint servers, because it was coming so fast and furious, and also ultimately in peer-reviewed publications. And the critique of that is part of science.

It is absolutely part of science and so they did it well. you're making a youtube a youtube video you couldn't possibly be part of an elitist process like no actually you are wrong yeah Holding the elite's feet to the fire. When they've published something, whether it's in advance of peer review or not, but it's actually, it's actually a requirement of science and the so-called elites within the institutions where so-called science is being practiced are largely not.

doing it. They're engaged in, you know, I've said this before, intellectual circle jerks. Yep. Intellectual circle jerks. And in this case, what he's saying is, well, look. Obviously, the YouTuber who's leveling critiques is not on board with the process that made Western civilization great, because if they were, they'd be putting their stuff out in some way that it was peer-reviewed and responsibly published. What universe is he talking about?

right first of all how long would it you know we've got an active pandemic And you've got vaccines that are being deployed and people are being told to get them. Exactly how long do you think it would take to get it peer reviewed if you were even able to? The chances you could get it peer reviewed are pretty close to zero if you're coming from anywhere other than.

the credentialed elite class inside of those universities. So I'm sorry, but like it is indeed actually one of the really exciting things about that moment early five years ago. was precisely that so many people actually were like, oh my god, we've got to figure this out, and we're going to do some science on it, and we're just going to throw it onto preprints here.

like the preprint servers were suddenly just a wash in all of all of these papers and some of them were total crap and many of them weren't and i don't i'm not going to claim

to begin to estimate what the ratio was. But was that ratio way off what it is in the journals? I wouldn't bet so, but I don't know. And the fact is that now that things have... I mean, I just got asked actually when we were in... savannah last week like are you guys gonna you know keep on assessing you know the science that's coming out about covid

it's like well it's it's a much different job now because the preprint servers aren't where stuff is accumulating and so you've it's already been it's already effectively been not just paywalled um but edited into submission. And I mean that in both senses of the word, like the science that is available. Very good phrase. It has been edited into submission. It has been edited into submission. And so the science that is available.

to everyone, the entire world now, is a much narrower subset of the science that is actually being done, whereas early in COVID you actually had access to a tremendously large percentage of what was being done, which is part of how those of us who were engaging in the scientific method by looking at and critiquing what was out there, were able to do so because we had access to the science. And once again, once again, we don't. And it's not just the paywalls.

It's the having been edited into submission. Yeah. And in fact, the funny thing is two weeks to flatten the curve ended up being a whole heap of bullshit. But what was two weeks to flatten the curve about? It was about the.

idea that there was going to be an onslaught of people so sick that they were going to overwhelm the hospitals. And so even if there was no way to prevent people from getting sick, if they got sick over a longer period of time, that was better because the resources to take care of them would have been present. Well, the funny thing is that never materialized over in medical space for reasons we've covered extensively here.

But in academic space, the papers overwhelmed the peer review process much to the benefit of the public. Yes. Which is amazing. There was just not enough ability to review these things. And so we were dealing with the raw science. which, you know, yeah, a lot of noise. But on the other hand, you could deduce lots of things. There was lots of signal there, and it was in some ways

A demonstration of just how crappy peer review has become that is actually an obstacle to truth seeking rather than an aid to it. But back to Tyler's point. He's arguing that if the YouTuber who's leveling accusations and critiques was actually interested in doing this correctly, they would be peer reviewing their work.

specifically that the only way to engage in the elitism that is science is to be an empirical researcher that like that that is the only role that exists within science and this is like part of the problem that all of the sorry but like all of the All of the would-be elites who don't themselves do science, who aren't themselves scientists, have decided that if they're to be taken seriously, what they have to do is say, okay, well, all that science stuff, it's not what I do. It's not my interest.

I'm just going to nod sagely and be like, yes, I like, oh, I know what the scientific method is. Therefore you took some data and you put it through like some fancy statistics. Cool. Good on you. I'll trust your results. And like that.

you know again it's a kind of you know i'll pat your back and you'll pat mine we'll just agree to take each other seriously while absolutely doing no assessment of each other's work and this is part of how a bunch of non-scientists got the world to believe in truly awful scientific results that had no bearing on reality.

Cowan is creating a hermetically sealed world. Think about this. He's saying, look, the elites have their problems. They screw up all the time. They're arrogant. They aren't paying attention. perverse motivations they're biased by the phraseology that you use to present your idea on the other hand the youtuber who is leveling critique Didn't try to peer review their work. They're telling you they're not serious. So what does that mean if we extrapolate from that formulation?

What it means is there is no critique that could be leveled from YouTube space because you can't take the YouTube space stuff, no matter how you... polish it and make it rigorous. The gatekeepers of peer review won't let you in. The gatekeepers of peer review aren't going to let you in. So the point is, We're going to assume you didn't try to peer review it because we don't see it in the peer reviewed literature. That's a fallacy in and of itself. But even if you've.

surrendered to the idea that I'm not going to be able to peer review, get my stuff peer reviewed in a timely fashion. Probably I won't be able to get it peer reviewed at all. And therefore, I'm going to level my critique from out in the open. The point is, oh, well. We, the elites inside of the institutions, do not need to worry about any critique that comes from out of there because it is by definition low quality.

so what the hell if it wasn't low quality it wouldn't be on the outside right it's it's self-fulfilling it's like the uh the phony consensus that arises when you fire everybody who didn't agree. Like yet the consensus of all the scientists. gee yes except that everybody all the scientists who are disagreeing with you you're now telling me are schizophrenic sam harris right it's that so you're just doctors the same way let's get rid of the doctors who don't enforce mandate

Same thing. So, Tyler, if you're watching this, and I hope you will. recognize that the argument you have deployed here pretends to have a method, but the method, if we deploy it as you've described it, actually is cryptically a pure appeal to gatekeepers. Yep. You've established a gate and you've told us there's no critique from outside.

That's, to my way of thinking, an argument that couldn't possibly be defended. I'd like to hear it if you do have a defense. I'd like to know how you could possibly reconcile those things. you want me to continue reading the article okay so this is again um tyler cowen's article from the free press a couple days ago

He says, in other words, who really can you get to vouch for these results? That is the results of the rando YouTuber, especially when the statistics have to be presented exactly and transparently in print. Now, again, this is an appeal to a version of the scientific method that requires statistics, that requires empirical data, doesn't require hypothesis, apparently.

all it requires is data and statistics and then you got science and like again that's a really shit model of science that you've got going on there it's not that there aren't that some science doesn't work uh with both data and statistics but no science works with only data and statistics that is never science if that's all it has that's all you data driven no it's wrong it comes from hypothesis so it is also interesting that the way he's described this,

i lost it he was read me that that sentence again yeah in other words who really can you get to vouch for these results especially when the statistics have to be presented exactly and transparently in print so that also appeals to cartoonish understanding of the way things work behind the gate that he has established.

Here's the thing that you don't know reading it. Let's say you're even reading a paper that appears to do it right and it has a hypothesis and then it has statistics and they're clear about what statistics they've used. And they didn't break the assumptions of the statistical test by applying them to those data. Like everything is actually appropriately done. Appears to be.

The problem is you don't know whether or not the people that did it were unscrupulous and attempting to advance their own careers by pretending they did the method correctly. Or just clueless. Right. Most of them are clueless. Most of the scientists who use statistics, which is not all scientists by any means, but. Those scientists who work on things that have variation within populations, so everything from ecologists to virologists, use statistics.

And most statistics that are being used now are so freaking complicated. And you have to actually, like most people who are using these don't know what they're doing. They feed them into their statistical program. And it may ask them some questions about whether or not the way that the data were collected and the assumptions therein have been met. But largely, you can just kind of go, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the simpler the statistics in a paper, there are limits.

to the complexity of questions that you can address with very simple statistics but if you can literally do it on the back of an envelope then you know that you have or you have not broken the assumptions of the test and you can therefore begin to trust Yeah, it radically decreases the places to hide things. But even well-done simple statistics. There is no way that you can look at a paper

And know whether or not the ordering of the formulation of the hypothesis and the collection of the data in which the pattern was found was accurate. We are taking that entirely on trust. And the fraction of people who are doing this kind of work. who are trustworthy, is small. Why? Because of the massive perverse incentive.

the degree to which you will rise through the ranks faster if you appear to be prescient by creating hypotheses and then finding it in the in the data it's much easier to figure out what patterns are in the data and pretend you had a hypothesis that predicted it so the number of cheaters is huge i actually i saw this once directly Back when we were professors and I did some peer, I act as a peer review sometimes, which, you know, it's not a paid job.

But I got one paper, I'm not going to specify anything about it, but I got a paper that had no stated hypothesis. And the work was mildly interesting, but it was, as we have said over and over and over again, therefore an observation and an interesting starting point to test a hypothesis, but a complete piece of science had not been done.

And that was the feedback that I gave. I said, you know, either this has to be, this should be published as an observation in need of a hypothesis test, or, you know, recommend do not publish. It got published and it was now worded as a hypothesis test. So I will point out to you, if sitting at home, you think, oh, that sounds odd. It's not odd. It's fraud. It's literal fraud to pretend that the hypothesis predated the collection of the data. because

Scientific method requires the hypothesis to be formulated in the absence of the data set that tested, or at least the absence of awareness of it. You can go into the library and find some data that was collected before you formulated it. But if you knew the pattern was there. then you don't have a hypothesis test. So you can't claim that there's evidence that this is true. You can just claim it is a possible explanation. It's literal fraud.

You're describing an event that did not happen. And because this is taking place in a community in which the honor system is the standard, there is a ton of. And I do think that a big part of the problem here, especially when we're talking, especially when we have the elites defunding the elites, talking about things like COVID, which was a scientific space.

And what we are seeing here from Tyler Cowen, a very smart man, and what we have seen from many other people, many of whom we have named, many of whom you named on... Livestream the you know, there would be elites, intellectuals who aren't themselves claiming to be scientists.

who have this tacit agreement, effectively, and that's your language, but this tacit agreement with the other, you know, to use C.P. Snow's framing of like two cultures, right? Like, you know, the other group, the scientists, like, I know, as an economist or historian or a literary guy or whatever it is, that I have wisdom and am smart and would like to be taken seriously in the world.

And I get that those scientists, I don't really understand what they do, but they have certainly created things that I use in the world, and therefore I'm going to have some respect for them. that they have value in the world. And so without getting dirty and spending time figuring out what the method might be or how it is that scientists might actually make claims of truth,

which, frankly, everyone needs to do. We all need to be able to do the epistemology and say, what is it? How is it that you are making the claims that you're making? And it's not sufficient to say, oh, well, you're a scientist, so I guess you get to do that. That's being like, oh, I guess you're a wizard, so you get to do that. Like, no, scientists aren't wizards any more than economists are wizards or historians are wizards, right? So everyone...

economists historians literature like everyone needs to take some freaking responsibility and actually say you know what Those scientists over there, I'm going to assess some of what their claims are, instead of making these crazy frickin' blanket statements like, oh, well...

You know, on YouTube, you couldn't possibly have put it through peer review or done the appropriate statistics. Therefore, it must not be science. Like, I'm sorry. Peer review and statistics are not the hallmarks of science. That's not what makes it science at all. And by saying that, you've indicated that what you're doing with regard to all the claims by the pseudo-scientists, if you will, out there is said, I'm just going to trust you and I hope you will pay me the same respect.

can you just simply trust me and i will trust you and then we elites can get together at our cocktail parties and do what we like to do which is talk about how awesome we all are and how we are going to save the world or control the world? I don't know. Does it matter? Whichever one it is. Yeah. And I would also point out, you know, we have said many times that peer review is not.

It's anonymous with review by peers. We are not against the idea of review by peers, but peer review is an anonymous system that is tailor-made to foster elitism, credentialism, and frankly, theft.

because it gives your immediate competitors access to your results before they're published and a right to kill them off. So anyway, all of that is true. We will come back to the cocktail party, which plays a big... part in this uh i think people need to understand what this article is doing where it came from and all of that but let's uh continue on yeah okay

Tyler Cowen in the Free Press from two days ago continues, when a prophet of doom writes a lengthy internet screed predicting the extermination of humanity at the hands of super smart AIs, that is an interesting hypothesis. Sorry, I was just making sure I was in the right place. It does deserve consideration. But the next step is to develop some basic models and a peer-reviewed body of literature on the question. You might also ask the person whether they are short the stock market.

Usually the answer is no. Shorting. No. Whether they are short the stock market? Yeah. Okay. Unfortunately, I have found that at that point, the enthusiasm for inquiry diminished. Yeah, now that's an interesting paragraph with some barbed critiques of some people that we're going to just let stew in their own juices here. But the idea of...

You know, when some prophet of doom writes a lengthy internet screed predicting the extermination of humanity at the hands of a super smart AI, that's an interesting hypothesis. That's not even right. That's a prediction of a hypothesis. But the next sentence is amazing. It does deserve concern. No, the next sentence is not amazing. It does deserve consideration. Well, all right. But the next step is to develop some basic models and a peer-reviewed body of literature on the question.

Again, Tyler, I don't know what you're talking about. We are looking at the moment at which humanity has created machines that are truly over the boundary There are no experts here. I do not fall out with the doomers who are expecting the AI to turn on us. I understand the predictions of their model, and I'm on the lookout to see if evidence of this emerges. But the idea that there is a sober way to address questions like, is the AI going to turn on us?

from what, pray tell, would we extrapolate? Well, I mean, we have the problem that we discussed at length in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. The problem is hypernovel. And in an era in which the rate of change itself is changing so fast that even humans, as the best adapted to niche switching of any species on the planet, cannot keep up with the change that we ourselves have facilitated and created. What is an expert? An expert in what and when?

like who's who's experts an expert from a different era which is to say yesterday may well not be relevant to what is happening right now. And that does not mean that we therefore have to give up or we have to say that no one whose expertise was generated in a time when things were different is relevant. But the consistent and persistent reliance on the expertise of people who learned things in an era when things were different

is actually dangerous. It's actually dangerous. It's actually dangerous. And in this case, we can actually put our finger on exactly why. So he is a little ambiguous in that we don't know if he's talking about building computer models. In which case, what he's actually saying is that he believes that a computer model in a deterministic machine can correctly...

anticipate the behavior of emergence in a truly complex machinery, right? He's taking a complicated deterministic machine and he wants us to model inside of it the behavior of an emergent feedback system inside of a new landscape, when in fact what we're talking about is, hey, Let's agree there are no experts and let us figure out how we're going to bootstrap something that stands in for it so that we can anticipate.

something of what's coming. So maybe he doesn't mean a computer model, maybe better if he didn't. And he's saying we need to generate some cognitive models. On the other hand, then again, this is an appeal.

to some gatekeeping because his point is oh you know who the people who are best positioned to come up with some sort of cognitive model of what's going to happen with the ai it's the people inside the academy and the answer is i don't even know why they outrank the people out here in the world it doesn't make any sense the academy has no claim to special wisdom in this regard right so anyway it's circular once again he is

I'm not going to say it's sophistry because I think, again, I think he's an honest broker. Yes. I think he believes this. What he's saying amounts to an allusion to gatekeeping without naming it. It's pretending to be a method, but it's really the method is, hey, let's talk about it inside of the gate. It is easier, Cowan writes, to keep on talking to one's own in-group.

The climate change researchers have made progress in convincing the public and policymakers precisely because they embraced elitist scientific methods and made their case through a wide variety of disciplines, including meteorology, earth science, hydrology, and oceanography. The consilience of methods pointing toward a broadly common conclusion is one sign the elite methods are working. Two points here. Yeah, go for it.

Elitist scientific methods? No. Scientific method is not inherently elitist, and in fact, and as I have already said... going to continue saying, probably until I die, what we need is for everyone to recognize that the methods of science are every human being's rightful

inheritance and everyone should be deploying them as much as they can instead of being convinced that science is what other people do and what we do is we receive wisdom from them and then enact their desires. That is wrong. That is not what science is. And then... The concilience of methods, pointing toward a broadly common conclusion, is one sign that elite methods are working. Consilience is indeed an excellent kind of evidence.

that something is working what you want is um to to gather data from lots of different places and when they all show up in support of a single conclusion you do have greater evidence you have more evidence than each of those taken together independently and just summing them would suggest. However, in this case, that is not necessarily what we should conclude, in part because there are many people in each of these fields.

who are standing up from within the fields and saying, actually, no. When I got different answers, I wasn't allowed to publish. When I got different answers, I didn't get tenure. So again, what you have is cryptic gatekeeping that is producing the illusion of concilience, and concilience is an important... evidentiary standard, which is in this case being... within the gate which you little people

are just going to have to assume is all very responsible and high-minded. What's actually happening within the gate is circular. We're going to fire the people who don't agree. Why? Because it's very important that all of humanity be on the same page about addressing climate change. So the point is, it is our moral obligation to fire the people who... think that it's not as serious as we're saying, or don't believe that it's happening, or are focused on the fact that, you know, our...

Weather stations that are monitoring the temperature are increasingly embedded in urban landscapes that are getting warmer because of human activity rather than because of. climate warming gases. And we're also going to fire the actual cranks, and then we're going to point to the cranks and say, see? These people are yahoos. Right. So you've got

The Wild West outside of the gate. We all agree that's a problem. It's going to be very noisy. You've got the gate, which Tyler is pointing to as if it were a method when it's really a gate. And then you've got a circularity. inside of the academy which we little people outside the gate aren't supposed to worry about because as bad as the elites are and boy do we all know they fuck it up sometimes Actually, they're much better than the alternative. And the point is the whole thing is circular.

Right. You've decided that the only people we can trust and the way that we should actually measure the success of the people in the Wild West is to ask the Academy about how they did. Really? That doesn't seem very methodological to me. Those people that you already decided suck. How do you feel about that? Yeah, exactly. All right. Keep going? Yep. All right. Where was I?

Well, okay. Very often when people complain about the elites, they are not looking in a sufficiently elitist direction. This is a beauty. A prime example, it is true during the pandemic that the CDC and other parts of the government gave us the impression that the vaccines would stop or significantly halt transmission of the coronavirus.

The vaccines may have limited transmission to some partial degree by decreasing viral load, but mostly this was a misrepresentation, perhaps motivated by a desire to get everyone to take the vaccine. Yet the vaccine scientists, the real elites here, were far more qualified in their research papers and they expressed a more agnostic opinion. The real elites were not far from the truth.

What the hell is he on about? Oh, but cool. He provides references. Excellent. Let's see how the true elites, the vaccine scientists, demonstrated greater qualification in their conclusion. It's an AI query that he's providing as evidence. in this case, perplexity, in which his query to the AI is, it is sometimes suggested that government officials spread the myth after the COVID vaccines came out that the vaccines would stop transmission of the disease.

Yet the original scientific papers were most careful. Would you be able to document the greater level of care and qualification in the latter instances? Are you fucking kidding me? That is incredible. Like that query. That query, like, Oh my god. I don't even know where to begin with this. Like, that query has all of the suppositions of the conclusion built in to it, and he's not even going into the literature himself. He is asking a model, which we know, at least at this point, all of the AI.

is producing completely half-baked answers to lots and lots of questions so what he has done is said I have a conclusion please provide me evidence for my conclusion And furthermore, even with all of that, like he couldn't possibly have primed this thing to give him more perfect evidence for the idea that he already has in his own head, but scientific caution in early vaccine literature.

A 2021 study estimated COVID-19 vaccines reduced transmission risk by 88.5% when both parties were vaccinated, but explicitly noted that this was not complete protection. But that's still making the claim. That is still making the claim. The next reviews in The Lancet and PMC clarified that vaccines primarily reduce viral load and symptomatic spread with phrases like moderate transmission prevention and blunting viral expulsion.

Even with his insanely, insanely biased prompt of a... AI model that we have no idea how good it is. or how biased it is, and we know that many models are biased, even it returns an answer that does not give him what he wants, and yet that is as linked as evidence in this article. Yeah, it is anything but evidence. And I would point out, if you... Think back to what you and I have said about science, right?

Our riff on this is that science is a cumbersome method. It's not the quickest way to get anywhere, but it has one advantage over everything else that justifies all of the difficulty of doing it carefully. The one thing that it does that no other method does is it self-corrects. It tells you what you need to know rather than what you want to hear if you do it correctly. Now think about the madness. of taking an AI that is designed as a research tool for science.

and priming it in a direction, basically begging it to give you only the evidence that is consistent with the thesis of the piece that you are writing. Verificationist. Right. So if you want to cherry pick science. This is the way to do it. You use a model, a black box, and you say, tell me only the things that will support my thesis. And even then, it comes back with...

A little bit of nuance. The AI has more nuance than Cowan in this case. And I would point out that actually is... utterly reminiscent of everything that went down with the supposed randomized controlled trials about ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and other repurposed drugs. What happened in those cases was you had experiment after experiment designed to fail. The conclusions written about these experiments say

They failed to find any evidence. But if you looked into those things, as Alexandros Marinos did very, very carefully, what you found is that even an experiment designed to fail revealed the efficacy of those drugs. It was in there. It's sucking. Right. So anyway, the point is, look, science is a delicate process. It's very powerful, but it's very delicate. You have to do it right. If you do it right, it tells you what you need to know, not what you want to hear.

By having an intermediary layer, an AI, that you can tell, you can telegraph to it. Tell me this. This is the lie I want to hear, right? completely invalidates. You're basically taking something that has a scientific form and using it in an argument of advocacy. You are breaking the core benefit of science itself, and you are doing so so that you can use scientific-looking material to back up your point.

which is otherwise unsupported. And even so, it fails to do that. That is an amazing turn of events. It is. Yeah. Back to the article. You might worry, as I do, writes Cowan, that so many scientists in the United States have affiliations with the Democratic Party. As an independent, this does induce me to take many of their policy prescriptions with a grain of salt.

they might be too influenced by NPR and the New York Times, and more likely to favor government action than more decentralized or market-based solutions. Still, that does not give me reason to dismiss their more scientific conclusions. If I am going to differ from those, I need better science on my side, and I need to be able to show it. A lot of people do not want to admit it, but when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, the elites, by and large, actually got a lot right.

Most importantly, the people who got vaccinated fared much better than the people who did not. We also got a vaccine in record time, against most expectations. Operation Warp Speed was a success. Long COVID did turn out to be a real thing. Low personal mobility levels meant that often lockdowns were not the real issue. Most of that economic activity was going away in any case.

Wow. Most states should have ended the lockdown sooner, but they mattered less than many critics have suggested. Furthermore, in contrast to what many were predicting, those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary, did they? So that's also the paragraph, remarkably, that Claire Lehman had quoted in her piece, in her tweet.

Let me just see what his evidence is for. Most importantly, the people who got vaccinated fared much better than the people who did not. Boy, that runs counter to everything that we know to be true. But let's see what research he did here. Oh, look, it's another AI query. Whoa. This one prompted with, which are the best references for reading about, based on scientific evidence, how the COVID-19 vaccines were efficacious and life-saving?

I just, I mean, look, here's the thing. There is evidence here that he does not know that he is cheating. He's providing the links. Okay. He's providing the links. So, you know, it's one click away. I know. But, my God, that is... What you're doing. And then, you know, in the very first, the top piece of evidence that perplexity provides is a 2022 article.

Called global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination, a mathematical modeling study. Unbelievable. So it's not like, because you can't actually demonstrate the result that he has asked it to demonstrate. with empirical data meaning actual numbers because it's not true. You can only do it with a model in which you feed in bad assumptions and get surprised when it pops your bad assumptions right back out at you. All right. Now I want to point out two things. We are comparing in...

We are comparing because Tyler Cowen and the Free Press have decided to advance this thesis. We are comparing the elite method, as Tyler Cowen has it, with the Wild West of... podcasts, and all of the other noisy. Well, I would just point out that among the things that we have done here on this channel in one form or another is explore the so-called cheap trick that Norman Fenton and Martin Neal are.

Tyler, if you don't know about the cheap trick, you owe it to yourself to look it up. What happened is was generated that shoved all the people who got COVID in the period following their vaccination filed them as unvaccinated, which guarantees above an 80% apparent efficacy, having nothing to do with the contents of the shot. Could have been pure saline and you would get at least an 80% efficacy from this cheap trick. It was done again and again. And guess what?

It was never caught by peer review. It was caught by Martin Neal and Norman Fenton out here. Yeah, it was just to make the point that you've made before. It was caught by the review of peers, but not by the thing that we are, you know, peer review TM. which is that much lauded and adored thing, mostly by people who have never engaged in it. Yes, it was caught by actual peers doing an actual review, which is very different than what you're pointing at. It's the opposite of the gatekeeping.

Also, Brett Swanson has done extensive work unearthing the actual effects of the pandemic. the vaccines. And I will add a link in our description to actually, you have a, you have the tweet by him. His handle is JB say on X. in which he points to his work. We will also link it in the description here. Ken, do you have it? Okay, here it comes. There it is. And he says,

The delusion is gobsmacking. Effectiveness didn't just not diminish, it's super negative. Unfortunately, the MOD RNA, that's the mRNA shots, are anti-effective. true, shocking, and absolutely destroys Tyler Cowen's

thesis here. What's more, I would point out, there's no mention here of the extraordinary fact of IgG4, which suggests that we don't know how many long-term impacts there are from dysregulation of immunity by the triggering, in anyone who got more than two of the mRNA shots, the triggering of this. attenuation signal that these shots guarantee, nor is there any acceptance that somehow, if your point is that the elites got it right. They made some embarrassing errors. It got better.

Can you write me a justification? for injecting these mRNA shots into children because we are still doing that. There's no justification based on protection from COVID. There's no justification based on the efficacy of the shots themselves. And there is no testing of what the long-term impact on these children is going to be across an entire lifetime of having the IgG4 system triggered.

Dr. Cowan, you're way the hell out of your depth. And the fact is, the only place where this was properly dealt with was out here in the Wild West. It was actual review of the material by people who understood it better than the elites behind your goddamn gate, who fucked it up universally. Do you know why Brett Swanson is referring to them as mod RNA shock? I just have never seen that before. Yes, and it has to do, it is a term that is used and it is also, so Moderna.

okay moderna is actually a reference to mrna so anyway i don't know the exact details but so this is not about the pfizer or no this is not about the no it is a general reference to the mrna shots okay It's modified RNAs, but okay. Um, He continues, not reopening the schools was a big mistake and meant a lot of lost learning, but plenty of elites protested at the time.

A lot of the problem was with risk-averse school districts and teachers' unions acting out of self-interest rather than scientific investigation. Believe it or not, I even know some elites who think that teachers' unions should not exist. Other mistakes were hooking COVID patients up to ventilating tubes, corrected pretty quickly, dumping COVID patients back into nursing homes, not corrected quickly enough, and dismissing the lab leak hypothesis, corrected only slowly.

In each case, ask yourself whether elite methods of scientific investigation failed us, and mostly they did not, even when the elites did. I just... I... Okay, I'll just keep going. The dissenters also usually have records that are quite mixed rather than fully positive. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis complained loudly about lockdowns later on, but early in the pandemic, Florida was pretty strict.

whether correct or not, in the light of enormous risk, that was his best call at the time. So if you've ever made a mistake, you don't get to count yourself as thinking carefully about something. That's the message here. Mistakes will not be tolerated unless you made most of them, in which case we're going to wrap you back in with everyone else. As long as you were hyper elite in doing so, you're A-OK.

That's right. Too many who despise the elites do not look closely enough at the dissidents or assess what they get right and wrong and how they got... But at the end of it all, if you are unhappy, the solution is more intellectual elitism, not less. Brought to you by The Free Press. Yeah. So there's so many... things here. One, the idea that, yes, there's a problem with elites, but... counterintuitively, it's not too much elitism. It's not enough elitism, right?

The problem with every attempt at communism wasn't that communism is a problem. It's that it's never really been done. You know, it's that kind of argument. This time we're going to get it right. Yeah, you can't escape from this argument. Further, he wants to take credit for the fact that some of the elite We're anti-lockdown?

Is he perhaps referring to the Great Barrington Declaration and Jay Bhattacharya, who was derided as a fringe epidemiologist? Well, we can all get behind him now, now that he's in a position of authority. Right. Now that he's won, we can take him. Ah, that's... Credit for the elites. No, no one courageous man. I guess I get some credit for being courageous for.

standing by his side standing by his side now that we all understand he was never a fringe epidemiologist but he was right all along right so that's that's not to the credit of the elites they very nearly drove him out they derided him falsely they slandered him completely unacceptable yeah and we and you know we did we did not get

We were not on board with the Great Barrington Declaration when it came out. Did not see it for what it was, but have said that. Yep. And frankly, that's the overarching message is. You get stuff wrong. This is not easy. The question is, are you any good at fixing what you have wrong and moving in the direction of right? Any tendency to get right over time gets you really much farther than...

listening to the elites or fucking querying an AI. I mean, especially again, especially if you query an AI with your presupposition. and then act surprised when it kicks out at you exactly what you expected, except not even quite. Why are we listening to you when you have ideas about how it is that we will get an ever greater model of what is true? You asked a model that is known to be biased with a verificationist query. Verificationism is no way to get closer to the truth.

you demonstrated it yeah there's supposed research that you linked to in this article about why we need better elites and more trusted elites. Yep. You're violating Baconian tenants and Popperian tenants that are well understood, that are the key to making this work properly. They're the key to rigor. I would also point out. He seemingly... takes credit for the fact that the system ultimately woke up to the lab.

The system would not have woken up to the lab leak if not for the fact that the Wild West, drastic, you and me, came at it and said, actually, the evidence contravenes what the elites did. And if you remember the... conspiracy between the now pardoned Anthony Fauci and all of the people on the proximal origins paper. I would point out Christian Anderson was the direct underling of Eric Topol, who slandered me on Sam Harris's podcast.

This is a cabal of elites, and they many of them are explicitly conspiring to prevent things like lab leak from ever getting to the public. And the fact that we out here in the Wild West occasionally score a win and we force the elite. to accept something that they were never going to accept on their own. And then they take credit for that. And then they get credit for that. So sorry, no, that doesn't go in your column. But all right, now I want to come back to...

The overarching model of what's going on here. Again, as frustrated as you and I clearly are at seeing Tyler Cowen in the free press. presenting a preposterous analysis of the elites and how they did over, of course, a part of history that you and I know in detail. I do think Tyler Cowen is trying to get it right. But I also think that there are a couple other things going on here. And I want to talk about just... a crude model for how you end up as upside down and backwards as that.

One has to do with something I've described as the middle ground scramble, which is you do have a battle between the elites. I'm going to argue that the elites are... corrupted at a level that is almost impossible to imagine from the outside. There are processes that make it happen. The entire system of experts has become so corrupted that they're very easy to beat now. But it's hard to imagine that if you've never been inside the academy and watched it happen on a subject you understand.

So in any case, let's just say that the... Corruption of the elites resulted in a near total catastrophe across COVID, whether we're talking about lab leak, talking about repurposed drugs. We're talking about vaccine safety and effectiveness. We're talking about escape mutants. We're talking about IgG for any of these things where.

The reality is horrifying, and it didn't come from inside of the Academy. It was discovered with extensive pressure and work on the outside. Maybe IgG4 is kind of an exception because... the initial papers that show it are academic. But in general, the experts got it wrong. They're still not warning people about IgG4. They're still advocating these shots. They're giving them to babies. So the experts have failed. How could that possibly be the case? and what's happening now.

The experts have failed. The people in that class do not want to give up their power. Not only do the narrow experts inside of the academy want to retain their position of authority, but the vast network of... businesses and organizations that have disproportionate power do not want to have their failure revealed, and they do not want to be ushered out of the halls of power and displaced by people who did better than they did. So how the hell are they going to avoid it?

is by minting a new set of heterodox thinkers. These are people who were not out in the Wild West getting beaten up and bruised and slashed as they were trying to pursue the truth. These are people who had a middle position, a tepid position. These are fence-sitters. And what they will do is they will now emerge into this space and they will say, my God, the elites made some terribly embarrassing errors. but it was nothing compared to the horror show that took place on the Joe Rogan Podcast.

Right. So let us agree. There are problems that need to be addressed within the system. But let us also agree that we cannot possibly do this without standards. Right. So they're going to slap both sides. The elites are going to get... And Joe Rogan's going to take one right across the face. And then these people who got nothing right are going to ascend to the position of being the gatekeepers because they are in a position to see the failures on both sides of that divide.

OK, that's the middle ground scramble. So you're now going to see a whole bunch of new people who, you know, are going to. Vinay Prasad their way right into the elite positions. And from there, nothing will get better. Why? Because these people don't have a method. The reason that they were fence-sitters is because They were watching which way the wind was blowing. They are not in a position to tell us what the mistakes were because they didn't spot them in real time.

So that middle ground scramble is the thing that prevents us from learning the lesson of the catastrophe and makes it sure that something exactly like it is going to happen again. That's what the whole thing is about. All right. Now let's talk about how this works, how a good man, I hope I'm right about that, but a good man like Tyler Cowen finds himself writing an article in defense of the middle ground scramble in the free press.

Imagine that These people gather, as you point out, at the cocktail party. We all have our own version of the cocktail party. Some group of people whose opinions we care about. And, you know, places where we may grumble at or mock or laugh at people in other camps who we think are doing poorly. Well, in this camp, what you've got are a lot of the people that Cowan describes in the beginning part of that article. You've got a lot of people who have through

very hard work and ambition, risen to the top of something. Now my claim is going to be that every one of these things trains you in the direction of corruption by the time you get to the elite levels of whatever science it might be or whatever position in journalism or whatever it happens to be.

you have been forced to make compromises in order to advance the ball. So that by the time you get there, you know, there are certain conclusions that you, you know, if you were... free to talk openly you might emphasize but you're gonna maybe ignore them because you know yeah we inside the field know that that's a problem but everybody else doesn't need to know that So anyway, within that- We're still moving in the right direction, are we not? So you make some sound.

At least it's better than the Wild West, right? So, okay. So you've got this cocktail party in which the question is, who are you going to listen to? And Eric Topol is there, let's say. Now, Eric Topol is a guy with excellent credentials. He has risen to a prominent position at Scripps. The pandemic is unfolding. And there's lots of discussion. Who do we listen to? Oh, my God.

Brett and Heather are saying that ivermectin might actually be able to control cases of COVID, you know. And Eric Topol looks down his nose and he says, let me tell you. Rhett and Heather are very smart. In fact, I was very supportive of them during what happened at Evergreen. But let's face it, they're not... They were popular professors at a college nobody's ever heard of.

They've got this completely wrong. Let me tell you how it is. And then he goes on to tell you that the repurposed drugs actually There was, you know, quite a lot of hope that they might be able to control the pandemic. But, you know, it just so happens that that did not pan out. And actually, the belief that they might work. truly dangerous because it's going to keep people from getting the one thing that might get us out of this pandemic the

Right. So anyway, the question is who at the cocktail party is in a position to say, you know, Dr. Topol. I don't think that's right. What are you even going to say? For one thing, Eric Topol probably has a whole... encyclopedia of facts at his disposal, you're not going to be able to check them in real time, so you're going to politely listen to what Eric Topol has to say. And if you're Sam Harris,

You don't know dick about this. Eric Topol seems to. And frankly, you're in danger because Maybe you better put Eric Topol on so that he can tell you what he told you at the cocktail party in front of your audience, and that's going to save you from all of the hazards of your reputation that will otherwise accrue. And the answer is, I wish we could prioritize hazards to reality.

That's exactly it. The fact is you and I took big risks and we were not alone. There are many others. We've mentioned several of them here today who took big risks and. ended up being right in the end. Were we right about everything in the beginning? Absolutely not. But we've been very careful to point out our mistakes, point out how they came to be. No doubt are we completely right about everything.

now of course that is always going to be true yeah it's it's the absolute expectation but the question is does your model get better over time any tendency to get better over time makes you really right over some period so in any case the cocktail party that causes the elites to default to each other's position in a system where all the elite structures are corrupted by the same forces none of these fields

have a mechanism for resisting market forces which is why they have become mentally feeble those who are not subject to the forces within these disciplines are freer As I've said before, I know it doesn't sound reasonable to people, but stuck fields are easy to beat. Corrupt fields are easy to beat. It's not hard to be righter than people who are being paid to be wrong, whether they know that's what's going on or not.

The idea that what we need to do is double down on elitism is, of course, music to the ears of elites who are feeling back on their heels because they have been recently embarrassed across topic after topic. But the lesson of the last, I don't know, I mean, certainly the last five years, but really the last 20, the lesson is you've got. A very powerful signal that whatever mechanism it was that was supposed to make civilization smarter by gathering intelligent people.

giving them the resources to study these questions and then asking them what they've found, whatever that thing was supposed to do, it is off the rails and it keeps putting us in danger. We have to resist. I mean, essentially, Tyler Cowen is playing the role of the siren. He is calling us onto the rock.

We cannot afford to go. We have to learn the lesson of this. And it's not a happy lesson because nobody has a plan for what you do when the entire system is captured. Frankly, I would like to hear the elite. I would like to hear them confront the question, how would you know if that system was ever fully captured?

Do you have a backup plan or is your point it can't ever be captured by market forces and therefore we don't need to worry about that? If you have a plan, what is it? If you don't, how do you know it's not captured right now? Because I would say it shows every sign of it. It is simply telling you wrong thing after wrong thing and the one silver lining of COVID. And boy, is this dark. But because the elite confidence... harmed so many people, it became obvious that these debates about

what the elites think versus what the heterodox people in the Wild West think, those debates, it became clear, have material impacts on your well-being. It's not abstract like economics.

concrete like oh my god i took that shot is that why my heart's not working anymore right that is again it's dark but now that you know that the elites are capable of leading you into that kind of harm maybe you're at the beginning of a plan to figure out how to protect yourself from frankly the misinformation that they were distributing because they were perversely incentivized. So your middle ground scramble is like the anti-

We have said that a reckoning will be necessary. We haven't said it for a while. It felt like it might be coming, might be happening, you know, two years ago, 2023. And it feels ever more distant, ever more unlikely to happen. And this is part of the cover-up. This is part of the way that there will be no reckoning when you have an article claiming, eh. We didn't do so badly after all, did we? Not really. And even your, you know, heterodox heroes made mistakes. So who are you going to try?

And that is about as anti-intellectual position as I can imagine, frankly, coming from one of our supposed intellectual elites. So you have this mixing of standards and arguments. that appear to be high-minded, but are often actually just amounting to, come on, just trust us, what else are you going to do?

Don't you need some more set and forget in your life? Because it's really complicated out there. You already have to go to the grocery store and make decisions and look at labels and pay the bills. There's already so much to do. don't you want this one piece of your life just to be taken care of for you because we got some experts for you just trust them we got them all lined up here and um they're gonna walk out here and i tell you what to do it's easy just do it

I mean, that's what they're promising. If you're concerned about the failure of the experts, we are too. We've got some new experts for you. The point about that is... Coming to you now from the new expert platform. Right. From the middle grounders who, yeah, didn't do as bad as the mainstream experts, but they didn't...

They haven't demonstrated that they know anything. That's the problem with them. If you want the system to get better, you need to promote the people who got it right. Right. And so the middle ground scramble is. it plays exactly the same role as the pardon of Anthony Fauci. Right. This is an academic pardon that Tyler Cowen is distributing here. He is trying to get the elites off the hook so they can go back to being the elite.

And it is the exact wrong instinct. Now, can we go back to that paragraph that I pointed to, the one where Cowan describes his method? It's like third or fourth paragraph. So... What he does in this paragraph is... Is it this one? There's nine uses of method in this. I don't know what paragraph you're talking about. I'm here to speak up for intellectual elitism. Is that it? Yeah, read that one. Instead, usually the malady is that the elites do not take their own elitism seriously enough.

A truly elite method is based in science, open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeking behavior. Okay, so I think that's the right paragraph. But in any case, it's enough to recover what he thinks we should be doing and to see how crazy it is. What he's advocating for is a method that involves a gate. And then he says, once we are inside the gate, we must use the scientific method and basically decide who is right based on He doesn't use the term here, but predictive power.

He does not explain why you need a gate at all. this is this is exactly going to be my point like a truly elite method is based in science open into inquiry and truth-seeking behavior i mean this this is the way in which he exactly sounds like the elitist that he is defending here because Science, open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeing behavior, that is, again, what we all should be doing, what we all can be doing, how it is that we generate an understanding of reality for all of ourselves.

And that doesn't mean that every human should know how to run a PCR. That is a different question. But to me, that sentence there, a truly elite method is based in science, open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeking behavior is one of the most damning in the entire piece. right by replacing the word elite with human. A truly human method is based on science, open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeking behavior. Am I claiming that everyone is equally capable? No, I am not.

Am I claiming that everyone is equally interested in or capable of doing the work required to actually make sense of the world? No. But one of the remarkable things that I learned teaching for 15 years, undergraduates who are explicitly not elite by and large, we had elite students, students who had come from elite college prep schools.

But famously, Evergreen accepted over 99% or something of its applicants, right? Even though we were able to be very selective in the populations that we taught. But that's a different story. i was at first surprised and over time became utterly unsurprised and more disgusted with claims like this because surprised at first by the capacity of almost all of our students, the interest in and willingness to engage hard problems that went against their preconceptions.

That is what I saw in everyone from 18-year-olds who'd been in high school, who'd been in school all their lives, to grandmas who were returning to school, to veterans, police, like so many people across so many demographics. who, not everyone, but the vast majority of our students had such amazing capacity to engage in science, open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeking behavior.

that's not an elite method it's a human method and the gatekeeping here is in part an attempt to keep those things out of the hands of It is a part of every human until it is driven out of you by... comforting siren songs like this one, which tells you that there's an alternative to you having to think carefully about whether or not to take the elite seriously. And I would point out that the alternative Think about the paragraph you just read and his supposedly elite method, which says,

explicitly you get behind the gate we listen to only high quality people who've gotten there and then we apply the scientific method to what they say right that's not what happens behind the gate but nonetheless The alternative is what I would call a meritocracy of ideas. We often say marketplace of ideas. That's a phrase I'm fond of. But marketplace is actually not the right analogy because...

A market is about price. And so how much do you like an idea? It may not be the best measure of the quality of the idea. Truth will tend to make an idea rise, but it is not. It is a noisier factor, but a meritocracy of ideas. in which the arbiter of whether you were right is simply whether or not what you said had predictive power, period, the end. That's the only way to know who was right. And the fact that it sometimes...

makes people who were not elite, didn't have the degree, who were saying things that sounded perfectly crazy, that it makes them look good because they were prescient. That's exactly how it's supposed to work. Would I rather listen to somebody who was prescient during COVID and didn't have the appropriate degree? Of course I would. Every time I would prefer that person. So I like this a lot, a meritocracy of ideas as opposed to a marketplace of ideas.

And I think it has often been said that evolutionary biology and economics share a language in part because they share many, many ways of understanding the world. But I think the error... in applying too much of what we learned from economics over in evolutionary biology is that it imagines that there is one static thing there is one static that organisms are trying to get to. And in the case of economics, it's generally like accrual of resource, accrual of the fiat currency.

evolutionary biology just puts the light of that you know there is no best there isn't this is you know this is why the eugenicists are wrong the social darwinists are wrong you know the the neo nazis are wrong There is no static best way to be. It's dependent on the conditions and the when and the where. and the what and the how. It's all going to change. It's the match between Critter and Nip.

Yeah, and niche is constantly changing because change is universal, and therefore you may be best right now, or that may be the best solution right now, but that will not remain so. You can't, you know, there's no resting on your laurels over an evolution. Well, maybe that's all right. So I had one other thing that I wanted to come back to, which was early in that piece. There's an allusion to Trump and his tariffs and the fact that the economists all recognize that this is just not.

Well, I wanted to point something out. I said he wasn't the economist in chief, and he's not. He has a very different job. And I don't know whether he knows what he's doing with respect to tariffs, but I don't think the economists are even in a position to say. because it isn't strictly an economic question.

There is an economic question that is one major component of whether or not he knows what he's doing. That major component involves what is the expected outcome were he to embark on his tariffs. But that is not the same thing as the larger picture, where part of what happens is Trump may be trying to scare the crap out of people in order to get a renegotiation of a deal that he thinks is bad for Americans. It may involve looking like he's a hothead who doesn't understand economics.

That's quite possible. Now, I'm not saying I favor that style of negotiation. Maybe I do. Maybe I don't. But I guess the point is, I don't even know whether he's making sense, even if the economists who I don't trust are right. This does not make sense as an economic policy. It's more than an economic policy. It's a negotiation policy. And so the proof is in the pudding. Yeah. And, you know, he might well be right in spite.

of the fact that the economists seem to universally or almost universally feel that he's wrong. And I think it is, frankly, small-minded to look at it and say, well, you know. Well, it's again with a production. Right. Like, A, I have a job. He's speaking my language. Therefore, he's trying to do the same job I am. That's the mistake that you just pointed out. But also like, oh, the job that I'm doing is assessing policy.

And therefore, anything that Trump says needs to be interpreted literally and in the smallest terms possible in terms of whether or not if he gets what he says he wants, it will work.

It's like, yes, but is it possible that what he is saying he wants and what he's trying to accomplish are two different things? And isn't that actually the job of the president of the United States to do ultimately what is best for the United States and to sometimes not do so in terms that are so transparent that our enemies can see him coming and therefore do an end run. Yes, especially in light of the fact that who knows how many administrations have.

created a landscape in which the normal escape that you might have the normal transition between policies may not even be possible right there's been a lot of uh tying our hands so that we are stuck you know how do you undo the mistakes of the clinton era with respect to offshoring all of the manufacturing work right it's not that you can't just you know

executive order it out of existence you have to get from where we are to where you want to go and that's not a simple job so you know i think we have to give the benefit of the doubt when a policy seems Irrational? It may be irrational. On the other hand, it may be that in light of the constraints which we don't know, that this is rational but you know defaulting to any field would be a mistake it's not the consequence of any field. It's the consequence of a location in space and time.

set of options that are not obvious to us. And, you know, even if the policy fails, it doesn't mean that it wasn't a reasonable gamble. It's hard to say. But if it succeeds, that tells us that there was something that we couldn't see. And we don't know. All right. You also wanted to talk about the sun. Yeah, I did want to. I'm going to save.

we're going on for a while yep uh you definitely want to talk about the sun the sun's not going anywhere yeah or is it not fully not fully um yeah so i wanted to uh respond and recast something that has been widely discussed today as a result of the revelation you want to put up that uh here it is this is the telegraphs version of the article

It says experiments to dim the sun will be approved within weeks. Scientists consider brightening clouds to reflect sunshine among ways to prevent runaway climate change. OK, now brought to you by the experts. Brought to you by the experts who are convinced that there is a problem that can be addressed productively, must be addressed. I'll speak for myself. I have a feeling you agree with me. Ever less convinced that the global warming catastrophe...

There's something going on for sure. There's something going on, but there's always something going on. Climate is a highly dynamic thing. Many of you will have seen discussion that I had with Ben Davidson about things that seem to be changing throughout our solar system as a result of our position in the galaxy. There are many things happening. The scientific elite have become quite convinced, and in fact, Tyler Cowen in his article argues that it is a major testament to how wonderful...

The elites are that we've been so successful at persuading the public that we have to all alter the way we live in order to address anthropogenic climate change. So in any case. The idea that it is tolerable for anybody to decide that it is their right to alter the level of incoming sunlight aerosolized stuff is shocking. Yeah, I'm utterly shocked.

And I'm not saying that they haven't been doing it. My guess is they've been experimenting with these technologies for quite some time. No, I'm not a believer that every contrail that lasts in the sky is a chemtrail. I can't say that I've ever seen a contrail that I'm sure wasn't a contrail. But do I think people have been experimenting with these technologies? Yes, I strongly suspect that they have.

They have absolutely no right to do it. And I will point out at least one reason that I never hear mentioned that I think should be mentioned, which is informed consent. And I will remind our viewers that informed consent. is a principle that was deemed so self-evident and important that the Allies literally hanged seven doctors at the end of World War II for violating the informed consent of their patients.

Now, if you're injecting stuff into the atmosphere for the purpose of dimming out the sun, and in this case, there are two technologies being discussed. There's the dimming of the sun by basically putting particulates into the... atmosphere itself. And then there's cloud brightening, which makes the clouds lighter, which increases the albedo. You don't have any right to do it because the fact is you're effectively...

inflicting those materials on the public. Now, it may be that there's an interesting term in the description of this experiment, that they're brightening marine clouds. There may be the argument that this isn't going to be affecting the terrestrial population. I'm just anticipating what's going to be said.

You don't have a right to do it. Let's put it that way. Now, to their credit, and I'm not going to give them very much credit here because I think they are diabolical maniacs, but to their credit, They have agreed that it is their obligation to minimize the toxicity of what they use. So I see no evidence that they are using heavy metals in this case, though I won't be surprised if they're... They also claim reversibility. Right.

really you're sure about like well you don't get to do it in the first place and your claims of reversibility which is exactly the right claim that you need to be making but why should we trust you like on what on what basis are you certain that this is reversible it's never been done before oh well you can't ever do anything until you've done it once like you're and it's i would like I would now like Musk to accelerate his work on Mars and get all these people who want to mess with

A planet. And everything that it can do. Go on. Mess with that one. We're using this one. Mess with that one. And then get back to us. Was it reversible or not? Oh, not as fully reversible as you thought. Oh, that sucks. Too bad for Mars. Instead of too bad for Earth. Yeah, I agree with you. It is intolerable to run these experiments on Earth. We're using this one. Their claim of reversibility is.

It's at least a misinterpretation of what that means. I mean, they're talking, I don't quite know exactly what they're alluding to, but they're talking about using... fibers like wood fibers, uh, in their sun dimming technology, which granted I probably like better than them using, uh, you know, heavy metals, like aluminum or plastics metals. or anything. I probably prefer them using some sort of

organic natural material that can be broken down biotically. But is it reversible? I don't think it's reversible. You're dumping a bunch of these things. You're not going to be able to go collect them. And they are going to be breathed by people. And what is the consequence? Do we know what the consequence is?

Are you injecting these wood fibers into the atmosphere and then having people breathe them? Do you know what the effect is on ecosystems? You don't know, and you don't have a right to experiment this way. And I will point out, nobody liked my idea. Which one? I'm sorry. This has sounded very dark. It's very dark. But some time ago, I deployed an idea. That my point is, I don't think we need to be addressing.

anthropogenic climate change i don't think it's the problem that it has been portrayed and i think the academy has talked itself into a frenzy by basically um

seeking confirming evidence and ignoring contradictory evidence. And they have decided that we have a catastrophe that is not the one to be focused on. However, of the mind that this was something that needed to be addressed there is a way to do this that does not involve a violation of informed consent is reversible in every meaningful sense of the term is likely to be highly effective, and may have collateral benefits.

panels that allow you to either reflect sunlight or not reflect sunlight based on whether or not empirically it needs to be altered. In other words, you could leverage albedo without injecting stuff into the atmosphere that people are going to breathe by deciding to build panels that you could modulate that reflected light back into space. Again, I'm not advocating that we do this, but I would put it way. Yeah. So there are a number of steps here.

Observation, climate is changing. Okay, is it? Hypothesis, climate is changing because of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Is that right? secondary hypothesis. Those greenhouse gases are anthropogenic in origin. Is that right? Fourth point. because anthropogenic because you've already accepted points one two three because anthropogenic we can reverse it because if we did it then we can reverse it uh and and therefore we must

is that right? Even if you accept points one, two, and three, is the thing that is happening so sufficiently bad that it needs to be reversed and also even if you accept points one two and three is there something else going on

like what's happening in the solar system and the weakening geomatic field that might be more explanatory but okay so you know points one two three four and also have you forgotten about you know this this bigger issue all of the things all of the other things and you know still Still, even if you've accepted all those things, we've got a solution for you. So now, now, only now are we at the level of like, okay, only if.

you have decided that this bigger thing actually is not explanatory, and you accepted points 1, 2, 3, 4, and we definitely have an anthropogenic problem, and it's about carbon-based molecules in the atmosphere, and we caused it, and therefore we can solve it, and...

here's our solution right only under those conditions do i start looking at that going like yes far better than seeding the clouds or whatever well here's the thing if you make panels and then you decide you didn't need them or it isn't a good idea you can unmake

Yes. Second thing is you're not going to cause health effects because people are ingesting this stuff and have no choice about it. Well, you will cause local weather and then to some degree climatic effects. Which was going to bring me to my next point about. These changes, these cloud alteration and sun dimming technology, which is we have not worked out. Is it any nation's right? to modify the flow of energy. In other words, if I modify the atmosphere around my country,

and it causes a drought in a country downstream of that effect, and people die. Am I responsible for that? We have not worked out, and this has been our refrain, this is one of the things that personal responsibility conservatives don't see, which is that we're now... Living in a world in which the technologies exist so that I can't just be left to do my thing because it has impacts on you. If a nuclear reactor blows up in Japan, it rains down on Seattle.

Right. So do you have the right to build that reactor? Maybe. But we have to work out what our obligations to each other are, because the atmosphere, the oceans, all of these things are. community property effectively right and so you know our externalities have much greater scope than they used to Absolutely. And am I allowed to steal rain?

Can I seed clouds because I want water to fall on my crops? And then what happens if your crops fail? It seems to me that that's a fundamental question, and we're not even talking about this. So in any case, the... The default position has to be nobody's allowed to mess like this, right? In this case, informed consent would seem to suggest you're not allowed to do this because the people who are going to be breathing your wood fibers didn't consent to it.

And, you know, and wouldn't, you're not going to get universal informed consent on this experiment that you were running. This is literally an experiment, right? This literally violates the Nuremberg Code. And it's you know, it's very much this is going to keep coming up in different places. We've also seen. That despite the COVID debacle and all of the preposterous damage that didn't need to be done by the mRNA vaccines, we're now looking at so-called replicons, these self-replicating vaccines.

Replicons? Yeah. That's a new word to me. It's a nifty one. Replicons. Yes. Now, I will say that they... Not to be confused with replicants in Blade Runner. Well, it's a little like this. The replicons supposedly are not going to be able to jump from one person to another.

Of course, we've seen failures of this sort in vaccines before. We've seen pathogens escape and spread. So people who didn't consent to them can still get them. But in the case of the replicons, this is... this is an even more critical danger because you're talking about a technology that is self-propagating and... I'm even concerned that given the intensity of the desire to make sure that everybody got vaccinated,

One obvious interpretation is that they did not want some group of unvaccinated people against whom the vaccinated could compare their level of health. So vaccinating everybody was a priority, not necessarily because they gave a damn about. the everybody but it was because they didn't want a population that could be compared to well the replicons provide another mechanism whereby you could get rid of people who have been unexposed to these things

So is that happening? I have no idea. Could it be happening? It's certainly plausible. And given the cynicism of many of the things that we have seen, I don't put it past. So informed consent, again, is it needs to be understood as an effectively sacred principle that does not get violated by anybody ever. We have to agree to that. That means you don't get to change the atmosphere by injecting wood fibers or sulfur dioxide or...

sea salt. But the point is you're modifying a complex system. What are the chances that you understand that complex system well enough to do that safely? I'd say there's zero. So you don't get to. And anyway, I guess that is where I will leave it. We will talk about polysorbate 80, which was the rabbit hole I fell into after considering the announcement yesterday, I think, that the FDA is going to be banning food dyes.

And I began thinking about what else is in our food. And polysorbate 80 is one of the answers. And it will not be any more positive an analysis of the state of the world than today's analysis. At some point, I would like to see an analysis about how much food there actually is in our food. Yeah. Because it's a lower number than it should be. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, maybe I'll tease it with this. I learned a word. Okay. And I have to now go back and make sure I get it right. The word is excipient.

Do you know the word? I've heard the word. You've heard the word. Okay. So, um, Excipient, I'm not, so I will return to this next week, but an excipient is all the stuff that's not the active ingredient in a pharmaceutical. The sum total of all the stuff. So an adjuvant is a subcategory of an excipient. It's part of the excipient. Well, there are a bunch of excipients. I don't know if excipient is a collective noun or not. It's anything that is not the active ingredient. And so there is no...

Equivalent term for food. I actually, I went looking, I was like, okay, there isn't a... If excipient is all the stuff that's not the active ingredient in a pharmaceutical, what's the equivalent term for food? Food additives, non-food ingredients, inactive ingredients. uh but excipient within the pharmaceutical world which you know i didn't i didn't know the word adjuvant until five years ago recognize now that i should have for a long time before that um and

And we've all heard of things like emulsifiers and food dyes and adjuvants now. And many of those things in pharmaceutical land are included under exhibit. This conversation is not making me hungry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll talk about milk too. All right. the excipients and it's not excipients because it's but uh the you know the the food equivalent excipients in even what you think should just be milk yeah yeah all right we'll do that next time

Sounds like that's going to be fun. No, no less fun than, than this little tour. You just took us on the middle ground scramble middle ground. Yes. Yeah. Wow. Can you imagine? If there's a diner out there run by Dark Horse, Fans, I'm thinking that you could have a breakfast dish at the middle ground scramble. That does make me a little hungry. Yeah. All right. Yeah, totally. Maybe ground bison, eggs, hot peppers. Yeah. Browned onions. Yeah. Browned and tallow or lard lard.

yeah yeah yeah all right butter yeah um all right all right okay uh thank you for being here thank you for uh subscribing liking sharing what you see and the clips that our awesome producer Jen is putting out on all sorts of platforms all over the place. And we will see you in a week, next Wednesday, same time, same place. And until then, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside. Be well, everyone.