Unfairness and the West: The 270th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 270. Indeed. I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein. You are Dr. Heather Hying. It is... Well, spring is cooking along, and I have to say, I love it. Cooking along. It is cooking along. Yeah. It's good stuff. It is good stuff. It's wonderful. We have the return of the rufous hummingbirds. The rufous hummingbirds, which have the craziest. vocalization the most

Unlikely given a tiny little bird like that. Well, this is the thing. It just seems way out of scale for given what we know about the energy expenditures of hummingbirds already. They're tiny little birds. that are doing this, like, figure eight thing with their wings to stay along. Uniquely. I think no other bird does that. I think no other bird does that. We had a student wet.

who did a study of hovering, did a literature review of hovering in other species of birds. And there are some other birds that do some hovering, but I think no one else manages to do this figure eight. thing with their wings but anyway it's super expensive they have to be sucking down nectar all day long it's amazing they're up here at all and the rufus is a migrant he comes back he she they um all the pronouns of hummingbirds whatever they prefer the winter elsewhere we don't know where um

Someone does. We don't. We don't know where our birds. Our particular birds go. And they're back just in the last week or so. And they have the, so we have Anna's. right yeah i'm worried that is a year-round resident again like how are they surviving okay good on you um but the roof is having words come back and you and they're they're bright red they so they have a flash of of chest red that if

If you see it, you know, that's what you're looking at. But this year you and but for the fact that you told me would have been me to hear them before you see them. Yeah. And they sound like. Something, I mean. Yeah, but harsher, like that was prettier. I mean, it's not an ugly sound. Yeah, no, but it is. It sounds like a... It sounds like a munition.

yeah yeah it does and that's why i think i think i think of the roof of seven birds as he um because they always seem to be like just like self-respecting female would make such a noise

Yeah. Okay. So, uh, spring is springing along spring is spring is doing beautifully. It's, it's gorgeous up here. And I should say, I feel, uh, northern hemisphere centric speaking this way because of course the southern hemisphere is uh in exactly the inverse position and headed towards winter as you well know most of the landmass and most of the people are in the northern hemisphere so it's okay

Yes, but frankly, we don't know what fraction of our audience is aquatic, so. Yes, we do. All right. We have a supposition. Go on, get on with feeling bad about the Northern Hemisphere bias and then say what you're going to say. Oh, well, I was just simply going to say that... of our audience is in the Northern Hemisphere, so I don't feel terribly bad about it. But anyway, if you are in the Southern Hemisphere, well, hope you enjoyed your summer and enjoy autumn.

survive winter that's kind of the program you know some people say that winter is their favorite season yeah that's that's how i feel too and frankly i feel the same way about autumn it's like it's beautiful but it's so Well, the light is waning. And, you know, as we've talked about before, as you and I've talked about with our... the young men who are our children, because of the way we name our seasons. The astronomical realities of equinox and solstices are real.

But we, unlike in Shakespeare's time, name our seasons to begin at the relevant marker. And so summer begins on the longest day of the year, period-wise, and winter begins.

on the shortest day of the year, photo period wise. And what that means is that if you mirror out um the two halves of the year in terms of like when do you have the most light uh spring and summer you have the most light because those are the three months leading up to and leading away from the longest And autumn and winter are the six months of the year with the least light where you are going towards and away from the shortest.

And so, you know, the, the autumnal equinox, which is in the Northern Hemisphere, September 21st, give or take a day or two, depending on the particular vagaries of the year. you're already at a light level like you experience in late months. And it's just getting worse.

uh so um so for me thinking sort of psychologically about it as much as there's there's beauty and they're often just you know days, weeks sometimes of absolutely gorgeous weather in the fall, the rapidity with which the light is waning. And the, um, the ever, you know, the enclosing boundaries of, of light where it's the dawn is coming later and dusk is coming earlier, um, over autumn is, um,

is a constraining, is a constricting feeling for sure. Yeah, it is. And I'm actually reminded, you know, I make this point about what I call laboratory time. Until you have the invention of a reliable clock. time has a much more organic feel to it right when in the day you are has everything to do with you know when the sun rose and when it's going to set and how high in the sky it is and at the point you invent a real clock

It's not that laboratory time is fictional, but it's not normal human time. And in the very same way, the seasons are unnaturally... to the astronomical events it's like you know the analogy for laboratory time would be like you know telescope seasons and the point is really winter is when it gets cold which can vary based on where you are in the world Well, I don't think winter is when it gets cold. You know, the seasons... As I always taught to my students whenever I'd run a study abroad,

The seasons in the tropics are real, but it's more about precipitation than about photoperiod, because at the equator, the photoperiod doesn't vary, but you still have seasonal variation in precipitation. Right, but what I would argue is... that where you are, you will have some natural terminology to refer to the seasons as they actually are, and the idea of because you can be very precise about the moment that winter begins,

Once you have telescopes and you understand the orbits of the planets, we tend to do that as if that's more correct than an empirical local version of these things.

To make one final point, I've always been a little bit troubled by the fact that we call autumn fall. It feels to me like fall is... a very brief season it's the period of time when things are you know dissing from trees when leaves are falling off trees and autumn may be the whole season but fall is you know a very special period And, you know, for most of autumn, fall isn't happening.

So you have no reason to know this, but you're squarely in the space where I've been writing for the last few days in service of a couple of the chapters of the book that I'm writing, including one chapter called Time. And let me just read, basically, it's two quotes from Lewis Mumford, who wrote Techniques and Civilization in 1934. The first quote is, the clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern age.

And then I write, but I got it from him. In the year 1370, a clock was first built in Paris. Bell towers began to proliferate all over the European countryside, and soon the passing of time would become a constant background throng. Anyone who lived with an earshot of a bell tower now had a more regular life. And here I'm quoting Mumford again. Timekeeping passed into time serving and time accounting and time rational.

So 1370 is the first moment that at least Mumford almost 100 years ago, 90 years ago, points to any place in Europe having a public timepiece that was therefore that had a bell tower and was was sending out into the consciousness of everyone in earshot. It's been an hour. It's been an hour. It's been an hour. And that just has to change the way that humans live and experience the world. 100%. I mean, it has a synchronizing effect.

and it has a regularizing effect. Now, the question that I would have is, I guess I would have imagined that bell towers preceded clock towers i don't i don't know i did not pursue that question and if so it raises a question you know does the sundial in the church yard cause the bells to be rung Well, as Mumford also writes about elsewhere in this massive book, again, Techniques and Civilization, it's about...

It's about, and written again 91 years ago, or published 91 years ago, about the role of technology, both positive and negative, in how humans have transformed our own lives, and yes, the Earth too, but especially our own lives.

So your question was about bell towers. Bell towers to me are conceivable before you have a clock to tell you exactly when to ring them. But sundials, of course, if you've got a bell tower and you've... and you're in a village and you know the church has decided actually at noon every day we're going to ring it because even though we don't have a capacity to ring it every hour

we don't have that kind of timekeeping yet but we have a we have a sundial well there are a lot of days that it's cloudy and so what do you do like well i i and i don't i don't know the answer to that you know do do you on days when it is cloudy

they're ringing all together and everyone knows that if night has fallen it was back there sometime and you don't need to pay attention or um do you put it in the hands of the priests or the you know whoever it is who is ringing the bells to kind of estimate I don't know. I don't know. What do you do with, with, with clouds when you're reliant on a sundown?

Yeah. All right. Well, I have no idea. And obviously, if you had a bell tower and no clock and you were relying on a sundial, you would have exactly that puzzle. Right. Yeah. all right so this this is where i'd like to spend our talking but um i think i think we're not mostly i mean i'm going to close that file down that file was all the all the book in it and um and say that um

We are here, also live at The Watch Party on Locals. Please consider joining us there. We had a great Q&A this last Sunday, which is up there as well. And I feel like I wanted to speak to a few of the things that came up there. But now at the moment, I'm just blanking because I'm thinking about time and bell towers. and such. But consider joining us on Locals. Lots of great stuff there, including all of our Q&As.

And as always, near the top of the hour, if not always at the top of the hour, since we spent some time talking about time here, we have our three sponsors whom we carefully... uh choose so without further ado here we go armra is our first sponsor this week armra colostrum an ancient bioactive whole food

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i have a couple and i think because um maybe the main thing that you want to talk about has to do with fairness um let me just start by highlighting a few things from nature this week Nature magazine, the one of... I don't even know how to describe it anymore. Used to be agreed among scientists that it was one of the two top science journals in the world, Nature being a British publication, Science being the other, an American publication.

And both, actually, I'm not sure if science is on this, but nature has not only gone into woke absurdities, as science has, but nature has also proliferated such that it is... diluted its brand considerably, weakening it in a number of ways. such that there are all of these uh journals that are called like nature x nature biotechnology nature cancer research i don't i'm not sure that second one is one but nature

I don't know, there's just a ton of these, right? But nature itself, which we subscribe to, and it's not cheap, but it's important to be able to see what it is that nature and science It was a treasure trove of the ridiculous and the sublime this week. And I'm not going to go to the sublime, but just a few things that I found there. Just three things.

Here, you can show my screen. So an editorial from March 26th, 2025. Track gender ratios and research to keep countries, institutions, and publishers accountable.

Nature index data reveal how countries and fields differ in gender equity in research. Before we go on, we just remind everyone what equity means. It's not the same thing as equality. It is a... trojan horse of a word uh designed to make you think that you have to be in in favor of equity or else you're some sort of a bigot or worse um but what it's looking for is is what it's seeking is which is to say, if we can recognize that men and women

exist in equal numbers at a one-to-one ratio in the population, then in order to achieve research equity, In every field out there, we must have representation at every level from, you know, deans and professors down to undergraduate students showing a vague interest in the field at a one-to-one level, which is obviously...

But we've talked at length about the problems with equity. The very first sentence in this, and this is an editorial, so this is from the editors of Nature. The next two things I'm going to show you are actually letters, correspondence to Nature. It is no secret that women's participation in research is not reflected in the literature on a par with men's, and that other gender identities are all but invisible.

So right there we know that this is not written by anyone who has a clear tether to reality. or to any kind of scientific recognition of what the sexes are and the first part of it is bowing down to this fake god that is gender equity in research, as if that's something. But the second part of the sentence, other gender identities are all but invisible.

Yes, because they're a fiction, and we're not supposed to be embracing fictions in science. So that's just, that's one thing in nature this week. Wait, wait, wait. No, no. I want to go back. Okay. First of all, I agree with you 100% that equity is a Trojan horse.

But it's a Trojan horse based on a term that used to have a legitimate meaning that has been hijacked, like so many terms. And it's really important not to... imagine that equity never existed, didn't have a legitimate use, and that has always been broken because I don't know when this abuse of the term began. Let's say it's 2010.

The uses of it prior to that were actually important. There are cases in which an equal distribution is not a fair distribution, which does actually allude to something I'll come back to later. But I think I've used this example before. But if you had a situation in which... You're on a ship, the power goes out, and people are threatened by coal.

an equal distribution of blankets might not be the right way to deal with it you might distribute the blankets according to a vulnerability you know those who were better able to fend off cold might need fewer blankets and those who we're more vulnerable would get more blankets you might also argue That triage is.

a an equitable distribution of medical care when there's not enough medical care to go around and you want to allocate it to people who are actually in a position to benefit from it so i don't you know we're going to need which is which is a complex moving combination of who are the people with what expertise that we have on hand to and and the resources that we have on hand to provide to the eight people who came in with different kinds of wounds different kinds of acute scenarios different

honestly, amounts of life left if nothing had happened to them today. So all of these things assess what kinds of decisions you make during triage. And I think it is that same kind of judgment, but with more nuance and And will there be mistakes? Yes. But I think in general, the modern ways that equity gets invoked, such as in this beginning sentence from this Nature op-ed, is that... Whatever the representation is in the population,

is what we should get in any given field. And this doesn't pay any attention to any number of things, including at one end, actually, even if there were an equal amount of interest. and capacity in field X. But there had been historic barriers to entry for one sex or the other, usually a female sex.

suddenly wave your magic wand or, you know, slap a bunch of money on the problem and say, we're now going to have at every single level in this field, a one to one ratio. It cannot work that way because expertise is real.

And so even if the reason that you have a higher ratio of men to women in some field for which you actually have equal interest and capacity is from historic... historic bias and hurdles that shouldn't have been there, that doesn't mean that you should suddenly let a bunch of women in who didn't actually have the background and the training. in order to get to where they might have been today, but for the lack of background training.

But at the other end, of course, is there are differences, especially in interest, and in some cases, maybe even in capacity, such that we should not expect. there existing a one-to-one ratio in the population of people who exist to also be represented.

We just shouldn't. Yes. Now, you also say that the expectation of those pushing equity is that it should mirror the percentage in the population. But even that is not a standard that they adhere to. Of course not. Any place that you're overrepresented. Don't say a word. Any place that you are arguably underrepresented, you protest as if it is the result of...

active bias taking place. No, and we've talked about this before, where in fact, in many fields in medicine and many basically organismal biology, you know, biology at the level of organisms and larger. are increasingly biased towards women and no one is complaining.

uh but it didn't we move out of equity didn't we like maybe move through equity and out of it right away again and isn't oughtn't that be just as big an issue it ought be and also the issue that you're trying to fix maybe isn't an issue at all yes and then the final punchline to the whole thing is that if You start pushing equity as a goal, equity in this new Trojan horse version. If you start pushing that as a goal, what you do is you tank.

Because what you end up doing is overriding those who basically merit. And there are fields in which that. maybe doesn't matter so much because nothing rests on it except the progress of the field itself and there are other places in which it will cause doors to fall off of airplanes in flight. And in any case, what you should really be looking for is if there is a historic bias that has resulted in a unequal distribution in the applicant pool

you should be correcting that. If there's not enough interest because people of one type or another aren't being exposed to it, that's something you could correct. But if it's a lack, you know, if it's a standard gender difference, if it's a people versus things distinction that results in women being less interested in certain things and more interested in other things, that's not necessarily something to be corrected.

People should be liberated to pursue whatever thing they're interested in pursuing, and then they should be judged on a system of merit from a level playing field. where men are more interested in being there than women, or where women are more interested in being there than men. and therefore the ratios of men to women in those fields are unequal. Will it be more difficult to be the rarer sex in that field? All right. Like, that's just the case.

like if if you have gender non-conforming interests at any level it is going to be less average for you to live your life and there are going to be different hurdles than if you were quote unquote gender conforming and that should not be corrected that should not be something that society is interested in correcting and it certainly should not be something that you are crying about because

follow your gender non-conforming interests and do the best work and maybe deal with some stuff that some of your colleagues don't have to deal with. Or don't. And be less interesting in the world because you followed a drive that you weren't as interested in. But what you've protected yourself from is not being the rarer sex in your future. Final thing I would say on this is that if you follow this instinct to correct every defect with some sort of remedy, then what you end up in is.

something analogous to the Pharma death spiral. Where pharma sees a number on your chart that it can declare as a pathology and it just so happens to have the pill that will correct it. You know, maybe it's cholesterol. And then you start taking this cholesterol-lowering drug as if that's an inherently good thing. And you are now dealing with the side effects. And you know who has a solution for that? Well, pharma just so happens to have a solution to that. It's in the form of some other pill.

And so the point is you're constantly taking new things to deal with the side effects of the last things you took. Well, that's kind of... You say, well, maybe we can do better than a level playing field because on a level playing field, people are showing up and... numbers that are disproportionate.

And maybe we can fix that. And so you're going to create problem after problem that's going to need remedy after remedy. And really, you should settle on the one thing that might work, which is, hey, let's make the system fair and then allow the.

system to equalize over time. And with the pharma example, with the body that you are messing with and messing with and messing with, this is going to be a literal thing that i'm going to say but with the the equity in and social corrections model it's metaphorical but You prevent yourself from ever getting anywhere close to homeostasis. If you add a thing because there's a chemical imbalance or, you know, whatever it is, a cholesterol imbalance or some kind of imbalance that has been made up.

you know or not or it's a real thing but it shouldn't be dealt with that way uh and then you get pill to correct the side effects from pill one and pill three to correct the side effects from pill two um you you're with every new addition Your body goes further away, farther away from an ability to actually manage itself and reach a kind of equilibrium, which we call homeostasis.

with regard to metabolism. And the same thing with the social system. The more tweaks you do, the more fixes and fixes to correct the earlier fixes and fixes and fixes and fixes and fixes. the less likely the system is to actually hum along in any sort of way that is functional at a sort of societal homeostasis. You won't be able to get there. This is true, and actually at the risk of taking an excellent discussion of one topic.

and wrecking it with the inclusion of another i would point out that this is actually the predicament that creates the need for and the frightening prospect of That in effect, what you've got is a system that is a baroque network of solutions to problems long forgotten. And the question is, well, what can you do about this architecture of things interlaced with other things? And the answer is, well,

you can kind of go cold turkey on the whole regimen of drugs that you're taking and see where you are. Oh, is that safe? No, it's not safe. In fact, the crash back to equilibrium is going to be horrifying, but you don't have a better option because nobody understands the interaction of these things well enough.

to be able to predict the cascading effects there's no surgery conceivable right no and i i mean i actually almost almost went there in my little soliloquy um At risk of turning this into something that it wasn't. Some of us are being accused now of having Elon derangement syndrome. I have long since gotten over any Trump derangement syndrome I had eight years ago, eight and nine years ago. But...

But I know too many stories of people who are being badly affected by some of what is happening in Doge Land. that appear to be the result of rather than, oh my God, this is going to hurt. We're going to have to rip the thing off and we're going to have to just take it all the way to the ground and then build it up more carefully.

It seems to be a picking and a choosing and a blindness over here. So it looks like more bureaucracy just from the vantage point of one guy. So, you know, I'm not as... positive about doge in reality as i was about it before it began in the abstract when also we thought that there would be more than one person at the helm um that said um is the desire to get to, in this case, governmental homeostasis as opposed to societal homeostasis or bodily homeostasis.

A driving force behind? We've got to get rid of the Byzantine overlapping bureaucracies. Yes. And will it hurt? Yes. it will not only will it hurt it'll it's it's dangerous but you know at the the standard that i hold people to is i don't hold people responsible for bad decisions if they didn't have access to a better

Right. You become responsible for the bad decisions that you make at the point that you had a choice. Yeah. And what I would say is our system is so badly broken that it's not obvious to me. Yeah, I would have preferred. Doge as less individual centric. you know, if it was Vivek and Elon. Then at least you get a dialogue about, are you seeing this correctly? No, I see it differently. That kind of thing. That sounds safer to me.

was there a good choice here i can't imagine it as a systems theorist having looked at this grotesque monster and all of the harm that it has been doing No, I don't think there was an elegant solution here. It was going to be carnage no matter what. It doesn't mean that I lack compassion for people who are... finding themselves suddenly adrift because Doge came along with a samurai sword and, you know, removed something. But at some level, the game is homeostasis.

That's it. And you know, and the analogy here actually to. to the Laura Delano story is profound. Right here you have somebody who discovers that they are on a whole slew of drugs and have been since they were a child. She first got prescribed at like 14 and mostly didn't take them until she was in college. That's true. Yeah. But.

nonetheless you've got somebody who's even you know given the nature of development in humans this is somebody who had not fully developed had a bunch of drugs introduced to their system those drugs were constantly being changed which means that the mind behind the eyes can't figure out what to do because it's it's constantly a moving target and so The right answer for her and for many is to remove... the offending drugs which then creates a problem which is you've got

The architecture that you would have had if the drugs hadn't been there isn't there either. And so, you know, it's a damned if you do and damned if you don't. Which way are you? Same issue with puberty blockers and cross sex hormones for adults. You can't block puberty safely. You cannot do it. Because at the point that you unblock it, the stuff is not just ready to go. That's not how time works. That's not how development works. That's not how...

So to the question of mood-altering drugs, the likes of which Laura Delano was on for a decade. um you know she she she woke up and you read her book and listen to brett's conversation with her um the book unshrunk out last week or two weeks ago um having been told since she was an early teenager that she had a chemical imbalance. she uh came to in her mid-20s and said, you know what, Docs? I do have a chemical imbalance and you caused it. It's your intervention.

and my compliance with your interventions that cause that chemical imbalance. And I'm going to start writing that right. and you know how which is part of why her story is so so apropos so relevant for right now because this is what we're you know metaphorically we need to be doing the same thing across You're right. You're right. We do have a problem. And you who've been telling me about that problem caused it. So how do I get out of your sphere and get back to homeopathy?

Actually, you know, it's funny. I was having a conversation. with a mutual friend of ours. I'll leave him out of it for the moment, but he's in a position to see some of the consequences. of doge and he's more or less in favor over all but he's seeing carnage of a kind that is unnecessary because of the suddenness of the And so he was telling me about a case in which a longstanding research program was looking into something that was deemed unimportant.

And what that meant is that there's a race. to collect the information that they had even acquired. They weren't expecting their research program to come to an end. And so do you want to squander what you've learned on a topic that, yeah, maybe didn't need to be studied, but it's not. that it's not a ridiculous thing to study. And so there is information. And so the question is, you know, the lesson of Laura Delano's story is that

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't with respect to getting off the drugs. But the degree to which you are damned has to do with how much... technique you can apply to the withdrawal of those drugs in other words it is your system of tapering which varies between individuals you know the degree to which an individual can can remove these things safely varies a tremendous amount and you have to discover what the rate for you has to be. Is there not an analogy in there for Dote?

which is that, you know, the sudden cutting of things in some cases may be exactly the right thing. On the other cases, it may create totally unnecessary carnage where you've actually invested in something and you might as well get a return on that investment and you're going to lose it if you just.

cut the thing off in a matter of you know like yes you have your desk cleared out by morning that that's right and and you know the losses exist both at the research level at the you know the data and well really so we're also going to make that entire thing that happened for the last year or five years whatever a loss

um level and also at the human level and there will be those who will say you know what we've enough with the soft-hearted like we are done we are not funding these people anymore um I don't think anyone would imagine that there haven't been a number of good, honorable scientific studies that have been cut because they will be collected.

assume, therefore, that the people, I'm thinking of a person in particular, who have been affected by suddenly having their grants when they had been awarded by NIH, by DOD, by NSF, whatever it is, a grant that was to continue to some moment in the future.

suddenly you find yourself unable to pay your mortgage. Because this was your entire, because most academics, actually, I don't know about most, Many academics, especially in the sciences are actually on, if not entirely soft money positions, mostly soft money positions, which means that we imagine that most academics are like we. salaried by the institution that they're at. But that's actually the extremely rare position to be getting.

all of your income from basically W-2 income from the institution that you're at. Almost everyone who is in a position to be doing research is pulling grant money in, mostly from the feds. And yes, this is part of the problem. But if you have come to rely on it and you have a mortgage and you have a family and you have people dependent on you to be told one day, actually, the eight months more funding that you were going to have is gone as of today.

What do you do? The bank is suddenly knocking at your door because you cannot pay your mortgage. So have some totally crap grants been pulled? Of course. Of course. aren't inherently bad people who deserve to lose their homes and lose everything and i know of some very good research that has been pulled and these people are now struggling to figure out how to hold on to their homes and I just don't see how this may- Yeah, well.

I guess the question is, is there a way to do this with less carnage? Something like a tapering model that allows people to figure out how to pivot to something. Maybe there's a plan underlying in which. you know, frankly, the perverse incentives surrounding Grant acquisition are such a profound obstacle to functional universities that I wouldn't be against seeing that whole thing.

scrapped in favor of a model where people are actually salaried for work that's worth doing. Absolutely. And, you know, and, you know, obviously, you know, Doge comes in and you got to be on high alert right away. You know what? okay, maybe I have a grant that's ending in eight months and I'm already writing up the next round of grants, but I know already.

nsf directorates are changing and like everything is changing and there's a really good chance that the ways that i have gotten money in the past are not going to be the case but i still have this eight months because that has been promised to me it has been contracted to me I don't understand a world in which... signed contracts are simply That is one of the pieces that makes me wonder how successful a system that is willing to do that could possibly be because it yields no trust. Yep. Agreed.

All right. So nature this week. Yes. total crap right um we talked about the one thing which was uh this uh track gender ratios and research to keep countries institutions and publishers accountable now what they should actually be doing is uh science like scientists should be doing science and that radical i know and there shouldn't be departments like studying equity of people doing science you know like the science education departments which

There is a lot to be said about how best to educate people in terms of how to think scientifically, but the science education people are doing none of that. They're doing none of that. So Nature published this garbage, and then they also published these two letters this week. Readers respond, correspondence. So let's just start with the second one. Give grants to female scientists in war zones.

Which is exactly what it sounds like. But let me just read a couple of excerpts from it. Even in their own countries and territories, we're talking about women scientists who are practicing science in war zones. Like Ukraine and Gaza are the examples they give. Even in their own countries and territories, their achievements are often overshadowed by the war itself.

But recognition alone isn't enough. The world must do more than award honors. It must provide real support. Grants, fellowships, and institutional partnerships should prioritize women in conflict zones, ensuring that they have the resources to sustain their work. Wow. I don't even know what to think about. It's possible I'm just misunderstanding, but.

Science doesn't stop in wartime. So the next science doesn't stop in wartime. Sure. Okay, good. Like Ukraine and Gaza, I have no idea what it's actually like in the ground in either of those places. glad to hear that there's universities still functioning ish with people still doing science ish and we need to prioritize the women doing the science in these places no again no no and and no I just don't even know what to think about it.

To the extent that applications are coming in from the war zones, are the grants not going to the war zones in the way that they have in the past? Is the argument that we should be... disproportionately funding in war zones and of course women doing yeah which which of those two or is it both that we are being uh that is being suggested it sort of seems like both

We need to fund more science in war zones, and within that more science that we're funding in war zones, we need to especially fund women doing science in war zones because, and I quote, even in their own countries and territories, their achievements are often overshadowed by the war. that is that's the nature of war i mean i'm not defending war you understand that's the nature of war yes nature of war okay well okay so that's a bunch of lunacy of some kind i

Can't quite fathom. Yeah. Okay. And then just one more. I mean, there was so much in nature this week to focus on. So much unnatural in nature. Oh, my goodness. And then the first letter, this is, again, correspondence in the journal Nature this week.

Initiatives such as the 100 Global Inspirational Women in Mining, WIM 100, launched by Women in Mining UK, as well as other industry-led awards, challenge outdated perceptions by celebrating achievements of female professionals across technical and leadership roles.

Updating policies and regulations is another way to enhance women's careers. In China, Article 59 of the labor law prohibits female workers from engaging in underground mining, limiting their opportunities to work underground in mining. With the increasing adoption of automation, remote operations, and artificial intelligence, the industry's reliance on physical labor is diminishing, making gender-based job restrictions obsolete.

Expanding these awards to recognize a wider range of innovations in sustainable mining technologies, waste management, and environmental monitoring would promote evolution of the industry even more effectively while... wait for it... Advancing gender equality. Oh, goodness. So admittedly, I know nothing about women in mining, but I would have thought. That the absence of women from mining was an achievement, an early success of feminism that has protected women from involvement in mining.

Yeah, well, okay, so that correspondence, that letter to Nature that I mentioned, that I read from, mentioned the WIM-100? Yes.

so here we have you can show my screen here for a moment this is from mining journal reporting on the wim 100 the women in mining names 100 most inspiring women in the industry i have to wonder how many more than 100 women there are in mining and you know maybe that's my my naivete but the subheading is women in mining 100 highlights that it's to everyone's benefit to have more women in the workplace so that's another one of these claims that are just made without any evidence rather like um

You know, the WHO was busy on Twitter this week making the claim that vaccines are the best thing that we can do to make people healthy. The best thing to deal with infectious disease. And I responded, yeah, or, you know, clean water and good food. Vitamin D, things like that. Yeah. Right. So. All right. WIM 100 highlights that it's to everyone's benefit to have more of an environment.

You haven't done that. What they've done, apparently, is found 100 women in mining that maybe are doing good work. I hope so. I hope they didn't pick randomly average or bad women in mining to... to promote here but um nothing about having created a ward that says hey these are some cool women in mining says anything, speaks at all to the claim that having more women in the workplace, especially the mining workplace, especially the underground mining workplace,

is good for everyone. It's not inherently a benefit to everyone anymore that having women on the front lines is good inherently for everyone of a war. I feel the need to steel man this. Okay. Because... I don't think they're doing themselves any favor. The fact that they may have a correct argument that they have fused to a obviously absurd equity argument means that it hard to see. But they do say in there, the increase in technologies that have

made mining less dependent on physical brawn or whatever, whatever they exactly said. So that leaves open the possibility. That what we're really talking about is miners sitting in a control room, controlling machines that are doing some work. And it may be true that once upon a time, men were just simply better structured for this and more expendable, frankly.

Right. Sending men underground is not a safe thing for them to do. It never has been. Bad shit happens. They're better built for it. And if you lose them, it. less significant, right? Just to put a little meat on that, on those bones. You say that because in mammals, gestation and lactation. It takes a long time for a woman to produce a baby, and it takes really no time at all for a man to produce a baby, and therefore a population can continue with not very many men in it.

whereas it cannot continue with not very many women in it right so there's some historical bias for super dangerous stuff being male quite apart from the uh obvious risk of doing dangerous things when you're eight months pregnant right But so anyway, it may be that there's a historical, there's a legacy of male culture in mining and that it has been slow to adapt to the fact that the work has changed and now.

Women are just as capable of doing it and it's not dangerous. Many of the jobs aren't dangerous. So I could see that. And it would be rather a lot like what was true in science, which is this was a. very male culture and, um, There was no reason women shouldn't be able to be part of it. And so forcing the doors open made sense. It may be that mining is just behind the times by 100 years or something, and that it is that moment in mining.

But it certainly doesn't lead to the conclusion that it's better for everyone if this is the case. And I can think of at least one way in which it's not better, which is... There is something to be said for a... I will go ahead and say it's complex because I think it is. A complex... Job structure. A complex task like mining. In which everybody understands the roles being done by others. In other words, if I'm underground mining coal or something else.

I want the people in the control room who are involved in some part of this operation. to understand the underground process not as an abstraction in a textbook, but probably because they've had some experience in the underground component. There are some fields in which you should hire from within. not from outside to do the administrative or technical roles. Right. And so I guess what I would say is maybe there's some natural broadening of mining to women that...

it's time for. But the idea that we just simply should force this to happen. is that going to end up with people getting trapped underground? Because if so, it's not an obvious benefit, certainly not a benefit to the people who get trapped if somebody in the control room doesn't have an understanding of what really goes on and, you know, stabilizing a mineshaft. Yeah. And there's just, you know, there's a there's a Chesterton's fence.

style failure here um in you know the the letter here says With the increasing adoption of automation, remote operations and artificial intelligence, the industry's reliance on physical labor is diminishing. Granted, and this is the point to which you were speaking, but the sentence continues making gender-based job restrictions obsolete. That does not follow from the previous part of the sentence. Obsolete is a really strong term. And we simply don't know enough.

There have been barriers to entry. Some of those barriers may now no longer make sense. But some of the barriers that may no longer make sense created other barriers that still exist, and there are other barriers presumably that we do not know yet. that are going to make it difficult to fully succeed in a system if you haven't, as you say, actually been done or even be considered capable of doing all the parts of it. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, interesting. I wonder what's really going on. I'm curious, you know, I'm obviously you, you don't mean to demean and I don't mean to demean women in mining. I'd be very curious. I don't think I've ever met... i'm not sure how many miners i've actually met right um i mean this is part of that i remember like we had a student um We had a student at Evergreen.

whose whole family were stevedores. And she came to me as she was graduating and said, I'm going to be a stevedore. I thought, I didn't know that women were stevedores. That's awesome. Okay, cool. Awesome. And it's a little bit like that. Like presumably her grandmother wasn't a stevedore, but her grandfather was. Yeah. Right.

But so part of what this put me in mind of, because, you know, again, like literally at least the title that the nature editors have given this letter and this letter to the editor is how to get more women into mining as if that is in itself a good.

Right. Like, as if we've already agreed on it. And I'm reminded of what, you know, the nuttery at Evergreen. You know, we're going to do this whether you like it or not, because we've decided that this is a good thing. It's like, yeah, well, you're wrong. And we are going to stand. because as it turns out that your certainty in your rightness doesn't make you any more right it just makes you look like a less

careful thinker, which you are. So how to get more women into mining? Well, these things that they suggest might, in fact, drive more women into mining but that doesn't make it a good thing yeah and so just one more thing before we move on um i'm reminded too of course of one of my favorite papers

And you can show this, and I'll explain it as I talk about it. This is a paper Murdoch and Provost from 1973 called Factors in the Division of Labor by Sex, a Cross-Cultural Analysis, published in the journal Ethnology.

and this is just the table this is basically the you know page 207 of this incredibly long paper in which what the authors did was, so this is published in 1973, and there was over 100 years of... anthropological research ethnographic research of varying quality they tried to only look at the high quality research and they looked at existing ethnographic research from pre-industrial societies from 185 societies that's a lot And they identified 50 what they're calling technological activities.

And basically from the existing ethnographic research, for each of those 50 activities in each of those 185 societies, they said, okay, is this only ever done by men? Is this only ever done by women? Is it almost entirely done by men, but sometimes there's some women? Is it almost entirely done by women, but sometimes there's some men? Or is it really kind of a toss up and it's not a gendered activity?

And so we have here, and you'll see at the bottom, I've got my little key here. M here, this is male only on the left. Male, mostly second to left, equal. Female, mostly second to right, and female only. And it's basically ranked. and their index is something we don't need to pay attention to here. But these 50 activities are ranked in order from, as these researchers found, most male-exclusive activities to most female-exclusive activities.

And there's a lot of interesting things to say about this research I've talked about at length. I used to teach with this when I was teaching sort of basic statistics. And one of the things is that you see at the bottom, there aren't... really female, totally female exclusive activities the way there are totally male exclusive activities. But I think that's because what has been excluded

are the biologically mandated female-exclusive activities of gestation and lactation. And so there's a whole lot of work that isn't on this chart because these are technological activities. In fact, it's a large... piece of the total work done by most women right so it's at least a lot of the time spent right yeah um so you know that that's at least a piece of it um and there are um many activities uh that in those societies where they exist are only known by men my you know the top three

hunting of large aquatic fauna, that's whaling basically, smelting of ores, And metalworking, which in one culture that these authors looked at, occasionally women participate, are just basically exclusively male activities. And none of those activities are found in a majority of the pre-industrial societies they looked at. But in those societies, in those pre-industrial societies where they looked at them,

they are done by men only. And then the next several are also almost entirely male activities, including lumbering. That's, you know, so taking down of giant animals, taking down of giant trees, using high heat.

um hunting large land fauna again again with that work in wood is interesting and that's the first one where we see actually one that's line six here we see one um i can't do it well um but one culture they looked at that is woodworking is mostly done by women fouling interestingly mostly a male activity hanging out with chickens It's not exactly what that is, but manufacturing of musical instruments.

Interesting that that's mostly male, although there's one culture they look at that's exclusively female. And then actually down at 13 is mining and quarry. So it's a small fraction of the cultures that they looked at that actually do any mining and coring. And there's, in fact, one culture that they looked at that has mining and coring as an exclusively female activity. Interesting. I haven't looked into it. My prediction is that these aren't deep underground mines. Yeah. Right.

But that by and large, again, this is mining and quarrying is an almost exclusively male activity. Even into the era of crypto. No, these are pre-industrial cultures. No. So, but, but. One more thing to say about this, which I always need to... say when i'm talking about this particular piece of research because to me it's the most interesting thing um is that there are a lot of activities again these are technological activities on here um that are

I'm going to use the word gendered because sext sounds a little weird, but, um... really i mean sexed there are many activities in these 185 pre-industrial societies that are highly gendered which is to say for instance um let's see i forgot to look look into it i i didn't remind myself matte making how about yeah matte making which has some cultures where it's not a gendered activity at all and some where it's mostly male or mostly female, but most of the cultures that make mats at all

either have it being done entirely by men, 30, or entirely by women, 55. Same thing, if I remember correctly, is the preparation of skin. preparation of skins which we probably would think of as mostly a male activity uh in 39 of the cultures they looked at it was male only There were a handful of cultures where it was mixed and then 31 of the cultures that they looked at. It's a female only activity.

so what this says to me which is far more interesting actually than the fact that um whaling is an entirely male activity because that should have been obvious to everyone before going into this is that there is value in division of labor even when how you divide the labor doesn't have anything to do with what the underlying capacities are.

we can say, oh my God, we're messing with traditional rules and roles in Western culture, and why are women being allowed to do X, Y, and Z? And you can say, well, to some degree, with regard to mining, for instance, underground mining, I would say... Yep, there are going to have been good, solid anatomical and physiological reasons, and evolutionary beyond that, that women weren't involved in mining until recently.

But there are other things that women have been kept from doing, like science, for example, for which the reasons did not exist because of capacity. And so we should be able to break down those barriers. while understanding that there is value in division of labor, but also recognizing that maintaining division of labor for something like access to being a scientist isn't something that the weird world is going to be interested in participating in.

That's very well said. The division of labor has been useful in and of itself, even where it is not about capacity. And anyway, yeah, we should. We should have done this reevaluation in thinking about this rather than just tearing apart structures and imagining that it is inherently good to have more women in mining. Is it? That's an open question. Yes.

All right. Change of gears. Yes. I had a bit of an epiphany this week, and I want to step back to what the topic was so you can see what the epiphany was about. in a classroom to do the job really well. you have to be able to understand what is landing right you have to be able to look into the eyes of the students and have some sense about whether or not what you said

whether the people in question thought they understood and didn't understand or they actually did understand. And you try to get as much stuff into that last category as you can, which is why you can't do really good teaching in a room of 100 or 400 people. That's not what it's about. And so anyway, I try very hard to monitor when I...

put forth an idea how it lands. And it's not the same thing in this kind of environment. You know, the feedback comes when you meet people later and they say, oh, this meant something to me. And then they reflect back what they've heard and you get a sense for what works and what doesn't.

so i've been saying a pair of things one of which lands the other one as far as i know has never landed and it occurred to me how to rescue it so the thing that i say that people reflect back to me sometimes, and I know they've got it, is that the West, the modern West, is an agreement to compete on a level playing field. But then I often say that once you have attained a level playing field, you will not have an absence of unfairness. what you will have is the random distribution of unfair.

And that leaves people kind of blinking and you hear crickets, but you don't get the sense that they immediately are like, oh, of course, if the unfairness is there, but it's randomly distributed, then the system is fair. And what I realized this week is that there is a lot in our experience, our shared experience of the world that actually speaks to this very puzzle. I would point out that many of us have... feelings about the concept of personal responsibility.

And so the older I've gotten, the closer to my personal philosophy is the idea that you must play the cards you are dealt, right? And playing the cards you are dealt is actually specifically a reference. to what you do when you face unfairness, right? You can complain about the unfairness. You can try to destroy the system in which the unfairness exists, or you can play the cards you're dealt and you can...

attempt to compete even though you are starting from a disadvantage. And the point about personal responsibility is that you're almost always better off to invest in. How well can I do in spite of the disadvantage? Then you are trying to destroy things because they contain disadvantage. or complaining about the disadvantage. It doesn't mean those disadvantages aren't real and important, but it means that your capacity to affect whether the system is fair is small.

And your capacity to affect how well you do in spite of its unfairness is large. And so what you find and what we actually almost universally admire when we see it. is somebody who has struggled against adversity and achieved much more than you would expect based on the cards that they were dealt. As advice to individuals, play the cards you are dealt resonates for me.

beyond anything else play the cards you are dealt yes you may have gotten a bad hand but hey let's see what you can do with it right you're almost always better investing that way But it occurred to me that the analogy of cards actually explains what I mean when I say randomly distributed unfairness in a way that ought to be intuitive to just about everybody. So if you think about players sitting around a card table, It is inherently true that the deck is shuffled.

And you may get dealt a crappy hand. I mean, that's implied in play the cards that you're dealt. You may get a crappy hand. You may get a beautiful hand. And then there's a question about what you're going to do with it. So the point is the shuffling of the deck. inherently distributes the unevenness of the quality of the hands at random. If it didn't, nobody would be interested in playing poker, right?

table at which the hands are uneven, but it's always that one seat that gets the bad cards, or it's always that person that gets the bad cards, that's not a game of poker. That's something else. That's a scam, right? Well, um, maybe. Because, I mean, this maybe emerges from what you and I were talking about earlier. You can have a fair dealer and a fair deck and a fair shuttle.

and still have a person sitting in a particular seat always seem to have a disadvantage, even if the cards they are dealt are sometimes better and sometimes worse. Because the particular position of their seat allows them to see a reflection on the window of two of the cards that two of the other players.

say okay so um you know the context the greater context of the game also applies and so you know i think i like your analogy very much and i think i think it absolutely works and i think you know individual responsibility ends up being um being the way that individuals need to live their lives for sure, even if they also want to work to distribute luck more.

in the world uh but that okay the deal the the shuffle was fair that the deal was fair the the hands But the person who happens to be the guy who built the house always gets to sit in that one seat. And in that one seat, he happens to get to see the reflections and therefore benefit from insider knowledge, effectively, even when the people he's sitting across from have better cards. Somehow he still wins. Okay.

So I agree with this analogy and I think it actually, it's the exception that proves the rule. And that's a concept that I love. but you could easily not love it because it's not well understood what it means. But in this case, okay, you've got an exception where it's not in the quality of the hand. you're still dealt a fair hand but there's another disadvantage that's structural to the table yeah right well maybe it's lineage

Well, imagine that you did sit down at that table. Imagine that nobody knows. It's not the owner of the house. You sit down at the table and you realize, hey, that window allows me to see the cards of the person sitting across from me. That could be useful, right? And the point is, if you're interested in a level playing field, if your commitment...

You could pretend to be interested in a level playing field because you're at a disadvantage and you want the playing field leveled because that'll give you some more advantage. But if you're really interested in a level playing field and your point is, you know what? I'm pretty good at poker. And on a level playing field, I'll do just fine. I want that playing field absolutely level. I don't want to be accused of anything. I just want to play poker, right? The point is, can we close the drape?

so that I can see your cards. I don't want to. Let's close the drapes and level the playing field. That's the honorable... And just like people, if they're playing with newbies or kids or something, be like, you got to hold your, you know. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, so I think it makes the point. Well, I also think that. This is so well understood that in many... So if you think about what is a game, A game, I would argue, is a set of rules, a set of rules

for a type of competition in which the disadvantage is neutralized. Okay. So you play soccer. Oh, well, maybe one of the sides of the field is a little mushier than the other. You can't make that not be true. So, well, we're going to do a coin flip, and the winner of the coin flip is going to decide which side they're going to start on, and in halftime, we're going to switch it. Well, have you perfectly neutralized the unfairness?

Pretty close because, you know, did you win the coin flip? The coin is fair and it... To the extent you can detect that one of the sides is better and you will advocate for yourself, your ability to do so is dependent on a fair coin flip. So the point is it neutralizes that disadvantage as much as possible and then play the cards you dealt, right? So I think we once upon a time understood this. And anyway... Where this goes I think is that

The level playing field that I claim is the sine qua non of the West. It is the core element of the West, that we agree we do not want structural advantages to people of some skin color or some quadrant or whatever it might be we want when everybody has access to the market and everybody can compete and nobody has disadvantages that become permanent to them. Right. We neutralize the advantages as much as possible. And then we allow you to acquire.

disproportionate reward that's the motivation that drives us in that competitive environment to actually want to take advantage of the cards that we got and make something of them, which then benefits us all. But the point is each round offers people who got a bad hand last time a better hand or the opportunity at a better hand.

And that is about the best you can do, right? You can't tell people how to behave or go around shoehorning women into mining, right? What you can do is you can say, is there a reason?

that the biases in the mining control room are actually hobbling us because they're taking talented people who might be making mining better and preventing them from accessing is if that's the case then yeah that's a bias that should be neutralized we should open it so that if what you want to do is take what you bring to the table and apply it to mining and you happen to be female If that's going to be as good for the process as...

a guy in the same position, then of course you should have the ability to choose that if you want. And we shouldn't worry too much about it. If you're like mining, that doesn't remind me of anything I want to do. Right. So just my reaction. Right. And the point is, we don't need to correct that. We don't need to go around correcting people's desire to do this and not do that. That's really up to them. And if it is true. That there aren't that many female...

I don't know, I've got now whale hunters on my mind. Timbers, lumberjacks, lumberjills. Lumberjills, right. To the extent that there might be, you know, a failure of a certain number of people to prioritize something that might be a great thing to do, then the point is that's actually an opportunity. The evolutionary process, or whatever the economic analog for evolution is,

will ultimately fix the system if what you do is you neutralize the structural advantages and disadvantages and then say, you know, play ball, right? So anyway, that's the point. The playing of cards. Anybody who has played cards understands that the fact that you got a bad hand is not evidence that the game is unfair. That's just the nature of the game. And as long as...

each hand is a fresh opportunity at a set of cards, then it's a fair game. But it's interesting, actually. I mean, this is potentially useful for people as well, because anyone who's played several rounds of anything where there's some luck... It could be poker, it could be cribbage, it could be... Rum? Gin rummy? Gin rummy. Rum ginny, that's not the thing. Rum ginny was a failed airplane. Really? No, there's a Curtis Jenny. Okay. Anyway.

So any game where there's at least some component of luck, where you play a lot of iterations, a lot of hands say, there will be dates. when you just seem to like get one bad hand after another. And in fact, I was on the ferry recently and there is a dad and his daughter playing something near enough to me that I could hear.

And she was clearly getting just like all the best hands. And she was just getting more and more exuberant. And, you know, he was being a good dad, but it's, it's, it gets old, right? Like you get like one bad hand after another.

psych like when when will my luck change um the dad playing with his daughter his like you know pre-teen daughter um could totally understand intellectually okay well this is just some sometimes the way it goes because he knows because he's sitting there shuffling and she's shuffling and they know like neither of them has any reason to cheat and you know all of this right

And yet still, there's some part of you, and everyone's experienced this, if you've played several hands of anything multiple times, there's been some days when it's just like, wow, I'm just doing great. Or, man, this just really sucks. It actually has nothing to do with me. You know when it's a card.

If you trust the people you're playing with and you trust the deck, then it has nothing to do with you. And you can convince yourself, but still that part of your brain is like... Feels like the universe is against you. Yeah. So, therefore, whenever you're actually wandering around the world... trying to get a job or trying to get into school or trying to, you know, make friends, whatever it is.

And it's either really, really working well, or it's not working well at all. And you ascribe your total success or total failure entirely to your own actions. Remember that... In both directions. and that you should neither get so full of yourself when you have a string of successes and imagine this is entirely your doing. imagine that the world is out to get you and you should be looking for the people who are gunning for you when things aren't going right. And it's not to say that

Sometimes people aren't gunning for you and there aren't systemic biases and all of these things can be true. But it's also true that even when we know for sure that what is happening to us is entirely about happenstance and luck, we still look for reasons in the universe. All right. That's great. And it actually leads to the ultimate takeaway from this, I think. Great. What is the worst of unlevel playing? It's the internet and social media in the office.

and one of the sides is muddier than the other and it creates a disadvantage for you. Maybe it's very sunny out and you got the muddy side for the first half and by the time you get to the second half, it's dried out enough that it's not.

a big problem okay well that was unfair to you in that case it's still the result of a coin flip so the universe wasn't being unfair it just yep you got unlucky And by the way, I would say that what I didn't say is that when luck is not randomly distributed, it is not luck. that's the point when we say luck what we mean is sometimes you win some sometimes you lose if your disadvantage has to do with the fact that people who have your nose shape tend not to do as well because of

whatever, because of the zip code they tend to be born into has lead in the water or people don't take them as seriously at school or whatever. Right. When that luck is systematically rather than randomly distributed, it ain't luck. It's something else, right? And it doesn't mean that it is inherently the active bias of people, but it is at least non-random and therefore unfair. And there is something to do about it if it's structured.

The point though about the algorithms is You can tell that one side of the soccer field is mud. You have no idea what the hell is going on with the algorithms. And I know because you and I have suffered a whole hell of a lot of structural bias targeted at us. Why? Because we said things that ran afoul of power, right?

systematic work to lower our reach. But what happens when people systematically attempt to lower your reach based on the fact that you have opinions that are deemed to be dangerous or whatever? is you start seeing it whenever actual bad luck happens, because of course you would, right? It's very hard if you are the victim of a campaign to downregulate your reach.

the normal ebb and flow of discussion happens to miss stuff that should have gone farther in your estimation, then it's impossible not You never know when what you're feeling is simple bad luck, like the day that you get six bad hands in poker in a row.

You don't know when it's that and you don't know when it's actually, oh, no, there's actually a thing that, you know, is gunning for me or. So but you said it's impossible to miss. I feel like it's it's more likely to miss if you're if you're being. If there's a shadowy algorithm that's controlling things. Well, my point is...

Of course, you will project onto the algorithm an unfairness, a bias. You will tend to think, why does the algorithm dislike me? Sometimes the algorithm dislikes you for reasons that are not... specific to you like you know i don't know what goes on now but back in the day with twitter twitter used to punish you for disciplining yourself on how much twitter you were looking

So when you came back to Twitter with some idea that you wanted to put out, it would do less well than if you put the same thing out when you had been active on the site. Right. So is, you know, is that unfair? Well, not really. If everybody suffers from the same algorithm at some level, it's fair. It may be awful.

promoting addiction. Yeah, it's promoting addiction, but it's equally so for all participants. So it's not structurally unfair. Whereas if you... run afoul of, you know, if you say ivermectin, right, at the wrong moment in history, and suddenly there's a flag on your account and everything that you tweet hits molasses. Yeah. Right. Well, that is structurally unfair, but you can't see it. You have to guess as to whether that's happening. And so anyway, my point is at some level.

We need in our digital Bill of Rights, whenever that finally happens, and it is necessary that it happen, we need to have the places in which we try to make sense of the world structurally neutral. Right. I'm not arguing that you won't have to have algorithms, but those algorithms can't be targeted at people or ideas or otherwise what you get is. The loop of you're a bad person because you are spreading misinformation. Well, how do we know it's misinformation?

because it violates the scientific consensus. Well, how do we know what the scientific consensus is? Because All of these scientists are saying the same thing. Yes, but you've just told me that you target people who depart from it. So I have no freaking idea what the scientific consensus would be. Not that scientific consensus is a good concept in the first place, but if you're going to use it as a proxy.

it's a terrible proxy. If what you're doing is punishing people who depart from it, what you're going to get is an echo, right? So, um, So anyway, my basic point is level playing fields are the sine qua non of... the west and there is a reason that's about the best we're ever going to do let competition unfold on a level playing field that works in science it works in politics it works in markets it works across everything it's the best

The thing you're going to do is to let people figure out what's true in a system that isn't biased. The algorithms in their current state are the inverse of this. They're anti-Western. Anyway, I'm not sure where that leaves us, but I do think it's an important insight, and I thought I'd share it, and I'll be fascinated to see what comes back from other people as they play with it or challenge it or whatever they're going to do.

All right. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I think I want to save the discussion of nature and greenness for next time. Yeah, because we're coming in on Saturday. Yeah, yeah, okay. We're going to be here real soon. It's a pretty good story. It's a good story. Tune in on Saturday.

If you think things suck now, tune in on Saturday. You'll find out how bad they really are. Yeah. I mean, it's more about how ridiculous our science has become and how further ridiculous our... the mainstream media reporting on science has become and it's just it's just one clusterfuck on top of another i must tell you when you when you previewed it to me earlier i was like it's it's hard to shock me anymore but i was pretty shocked yeah

Okay, well, good. So we're going to save that. Good. Did you want to talk about the vaccine schedule? Oh. Save that? No, we can save that too. Okay. So finally then. Finally then. We have one last thing, which I think we have to deal with because it's timely. First of all, let me just confess. If you ever wondered, it's weird being in our shoes. I will speak for myself. It is weird being in my shoes. Sometimes you come up in conversations where you just did not expect to show up at all.

And sometimes it's kind of fun, especially when somebody is properly reporting something that you've said or they've learned from you. Sometimes it's horrifying when they say, you know, you know what I heard from Brett Weinstein? And then they.

say something and it's like i don't even know what you're referring to i wouldn't have said that or sometimes they say something and you're like i definitely never would have said that you're like i have the receipts like oh cool show me yeah cool and they show you and you're like can you not read your own like you've just proven my point right and they continue on

Yeah, I had an interesting one, I guess, yesterday where somebody who I quite like reported back something that they had picked up from me. Couldn't recognize it. And then I realized hours later that they had actually taken two things and combined them into some new thing that I would not have said. So anyway, all sorts of things are possible. Let's just say I came across the invocation of my name in a way that.

kind of shocked me. And I think given that people are talking about it, it demands a response. So Jen, do you want to play that clip of Candace Owens here? The question writes, Candice, would you be willing to sit with Eric Weinstein and talk about Israel and anti-Semitism? Nope, because Eric Weinstein is a liar. I have experience with him and Kanye. Do not trust Eric Weinstein, that whole little orbit.

He is not someone that should be trusted. I could tell you a lot more about him and my experience with him and his brother, but you should not trust those two people. And they are part of trying to neocon control people's minds by pretending that they're legitimate and trying to intellectualize things. It's kind of it's kind of the Jordan Peterson jumping on a report.

and trying to make it like a scientific study to talk about Christ as king. I see right through Eric Weinstein. I have zero interest in wasting my time speaking to him. Okay, so first... Four corrections. Weinstein, Weinstein, Weinstein, and Weinstein. It is not Weinstein. That's one correction, right? Or is that all? No, that's four corrections. She said it four times. I'm going to speak only for myself here again.

The first thing to say is I'm shocked to hear myself invoked here. I'm invoked as Eric's brother, which of course I am. But then I am lumped into a category that. I can't imagine that anybody who pays attention to me could possibly mistake me for a neocon. It makes no sense whatsoever. She then, I mean, to be quite blunt about it, I think the neocons have... talked Americans into fighting disastrous wars, and I have not been shy about saying that. We've also said that they switched parties.

The neocons were firmly within the Republican Party in the 90s and aughts, and they're firmly within the Democratic Party now. Yep, and I've never been favorable to them in either of those camps, and I'm still not.

So, anyway, it's weird to hear myself put in that category. And then to be called untrustworthy. I don't know what Candace is referring to. My guess is she's not referring to anything. But I will tell you, I think it is worth... me telling you well here jen do you want to show that screenshot so candace has me blocked Is that new? No, that is longstanding. And I will tell you what I, as best I can, what I recall of the interaction that caused her to block.

Chloe Valdary, who is a friend of ours, was attempting to set up a conversation with Candace. I no longer remember the exact details. Chloe is a wonderful person. She is anti-woke, but quite well versed in the history of racial disadvantage in the U.S. Somebody you and I have learned a lot from. She, like Candace Owens, is a very attractive, very smart black woman. Yeah.

Quite heterodox, although Chloe's politics are not Candace's. Yes, they are decidedly different. So anyway, I thought the conversation that Chloe wanted to have was... a worthy one and i reached out to candace and i said you know how about it this seems like a good idea i think i offered to host i'm almost sure i did um and She came back and said some... pointed stuff and i said come on candace this seems like it could be you know

It could be a useful opportunity. And she blocked me. So I can't imagine that that interaction... is reason for distrust, but whatever. Candace has her own perspective on things. But I would also say what she says here about the issue of Christ is King, which is a, I know that this came up weeks ago. I didn't pay any attention at all. This is the first time I've seen this, but she's just saying, it's a dig at Jordan, and she's saying that he's using something.

as scientific evidence, and then conflating that with the Christ is King. Well, there was some... I didn't follow it a few weeks back, in which... a bunch of folks i guess on the right were saying christ is king and a bunch of other folks were saying oh this is actually coded language or it's been co-opted by, you know, dangerous forces or I don't exactly know what. I will just say I had nothing to do with it. And I, you know, let me confess.

Personally, when I hear, I'm actually quite a fan of Jesus as a, I would call him an important moral philosopher, I would say. what Jesus actually did. But the story of Jesus results in a bunch of things that I think are upgrades to the Western canon. So I think it's very positive. And when I hear people say Christ is king, I think, thing. That's kind of, to me, that's a jarring concept. That's an earthly concept and not a...

Not a good one. Right. So I feel weird about it, but I don't I'm not concerned about people invoking it. I just it sounds to me like, you know, would you say. you know christ is ceo you know i wouldn't say it right it's like no i you know if you you've got this important figure you should use uh sort of unpolluted analogies. And that one seems weird to me, but I'm not against it.

Anyway, I didn't get involved in that discussion at all. So the question is, why is Candace portraying me as untrustworthy? Well, here you've heard about the interaction that caused her to block me. I think my previous interaction with her, if I remember correctly... Her name was invoked by the Christchurch mass shooter in New Zealand. And I, as that story was unfolding. Somehow I ran across her name in that document and I reached out to warn her.

It wasn't especially favorable to Candace, but I thought, you know, that's a pretty rough thing to have your name invoked in such a place, and you ought to know that that's about to hit you. I reached out to her. That doesn't sound untrustworthy to me. So anyway, I don't know what she's talking about, but at some level... I think she's bluffing. She has to be bluffing. So I just thought it was important to respond and say this is an unfair stigma, and I reject it.

Okay. So you don't want to talk about the stuff that's happening right now. Okay. Not very many days from now, actually. That's very, very soon. And we're going to be coming back on Saturday because shortly thereafter, we're heading to Savannah, Georgia to give the Sophia Lectures, the annual Sophia Lectures at Ralston College. And if you are in the area, please consider coming and joining us. It should be a lot of fun, but we will be back here three days from now.

Same time, same place, different day. Saturday at 11.30 a.m. You can join us on our Locals, see all of our past Q&As, And go to the darkhorsepodcast.org website to see our upcoming schedule of various things like your Patreon calls. Q&As and our Evolutionary Lens episodes. And also, you've got another Inside Rail already recorded that'll be out next week, I think. So all that really good stuff.

Check out our sponsors this week, which are Armra, Manakora, and Helix. And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside. Be well, everyone.