Editing 19: Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC

'''Eric:''' Hello. This is Eric Weinstein. I'm going to be recording a short introduction to this episode because I think it's probably the most important episode of The Portal to date. That said, under normal circumstances I probably would have either edited this heavily or not released it at all. It starts off quite slow [sic] and it gets quite awkward before finding its pace.

I believe that a lot of us are sitting on intellectual gold.

 

I don't think that the story that somebody’s work didn't see the light of day, or got attributed to somebody else, is as exotic as the institutions would have you believe. In fact, I think it's quite common. I think many of us find that we don't have careers inside of science because something goes wrong quite early when we're quite vulnerable. And my hope is that some of you listening, who I know are struggling as graduate students or as postdocs or as undergraduates, will listen to this and find some courage to stand up for yourself, [sic] because quite frankly, if you choose not to do it in order to make nice with[in] your fields, the chances are you probably won't have a career in the long term. You might as well swing for the fences, and you might as well clear your throat and tell your story as it actually happened, without fear.  

'''Bret:''' Including the pets’ names [which] were also sometimes thrown in, if I recall correctly.

'''Eric:''' That's true. OK. So if you don't mind, I was trying to think about the fact that we have an opportunity to do something that might be slightly different because you and I share a lot, and what I thought is that we should begin to really focus on areas of your expertise with respect to biology, rather than the way in which many people have come to know you. So can I ask you to just quickly dispense with, in thirty seconds, how the world has come to recognize you if they recognize you at all?

'''Bret:''' Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where I taught for 14 years, along with my wife, Heather Heying, who taught there for 15 years. We faced a mob of people who accused me of racism. And these were students; they were students I had never met. And the event was so colorful, and eventually when the world caught on to the fact that the protesters, who became rioters, had uploaded footage to the net, and so the whole event could effectively be seen from their perspective, it raised interest in some other quadrants. So, for example, I ended up on Joe Rogan's program, which is the place I'm probably most recognized from. And you know, my first appearance there we talked about the Evergreen situation. And anyway, that's the bulk of how people know me.

'''Eric:''' All right. So you were a biologist teaching at a relatively obscure college that had previously been known for social activism. And I didn't love your introduction, because when you say well, the students accused me of racism, that leaves sort of a weird question. Like, ‘Why was he accused of racism?’ Let me solve the puzzle just immediately-maybe you can't do this-because that was the closest we'd seen to a Maoist takeover inside of the United States of America, ever. Like, it was a case of mass insanity, and the videos showed it to be mass insanity, and unless you had been indoctrinated to believe that Maoism of some form, Maoist re-education, was normal, the rest of the world said OMG, what the heck is going on at this completely insane—. It wasn't just like one of these college craziness pieces. This is really an episode of broad institutional madness that was localized there. And I want to take it to be self-evident because it is self-evident. The video exists. And if you took the people who were trying to pretend that you were a racist in their own terms, that was sufficient to—it was like the unreliable narrator. They were debunking themselves in the eyes of everyone who hadn't come under the spell of this particular kind of madness.  

'''Bret:''' They were crazy. But my point is, the accusation is in and of itself so powerful in modern circumstances that people-the idea of standing up to it doesn't occur to most people. And the fact is I was not well enough positioned. The thing descended into madness. It descended into literal anarchy with armed students roving the campus; the same mob was looking for me, searching car to car, for example. It was a very dangerous situation-

'''Eric:''' Yeah. I don't, you know, here's the thing. I have two documents that I've studied that have a lot of longevity to them. One begins with, “We hold these truths to be self evident… “ and the other one begins with, “In the beginning… “ And I think we've made a huge mistake taking this as an argument; it’s a non-serious position held by morons and idiots, or people who've been indoctrinated and infected with an idea that there's something left-wing about being a racist. I'm not interested in it, and I also think that it's really important to stop giving these people their due. Like, it's really important to exclude them from the conversation, because if you have to have a three day symposium as to whether or not racism can be redefined in a way that makes it impossible for certain people to be racist but impossible for other people not to be racist, there's just no point. It just needs to be thrown in the garbage because it just-it's a suicide idea that wastes everyone's time and plunges the world into stupidity, madness and hatred.

'''Eric:''' Yeah. But I think you're not getting the message. We've made a huge mistake, and I refuse to spend time because these people have decided that this is a tax that we should pay, that they have a serious point. It's a non-serious point. It's a terrifying moronic non-serious point that you can redefine racism to be anti-racism and anti-racism to be racism.  

'''Bret:''' Yeah, and in fact Sam-I remember even the content of his tweet where he entered this discussion, where he suggested that what was necessary was a deprogramming for these people. And from living inside of this very confusing scenario, to hear a message of reason from the outside-that it was visible how insane this was-meant a lot to me. It really-it changed things. It was like a reality check.

'''Bret:''' Well, it's mostly fair. It was not really an appropriate place. I don't regret it. I think for the last year or two, Heather and I were living on borrowed time, that this could have come for us in a worse way, and it could've come for us at any moment. But the thing about the job I had was that it was the upside of a crazy experiment in education. The founders of the college had broken every rule of a normal university, and half of what they did in breaking it was crazy, and half of what they did was brilliant. Nobody ever bothered to separate the two from the prototype, and, you know, fix the broken part. Didn't happen. But, the administrators had no power, and very little knowledge about what was going on in the classroom, which meant that I could create a learning environment that worked both from the point of view of students and worked from the point of view of me, in my objectives to keep advancing a research program that frankly I would have had no way to keep on at a normal college. I would have been so burdened by teaching that I couldn't have combined the two things. So anyway, I do think one has to figure out how to make their [sic] way in the world financially. One has to figure out where to raise their [sic] kids. And from many perspectives, as much of a mismatch as Evergreen was for me in some ways, in some other ways, it was not a bad place to be parked. It gave me—I was anonymous from the point of the world and I could make progress on biology. So I have fewer regrets than I might.  

'''Bret:''' That would feel bad to most people, because they would feel like, ‘What am I doing wrong? Why does nobody else understand this point?’ To you and me, that feels good. It is to know that you have achieved something, you have discovered something, and that nobody else can even recognize it gives you some sort of sense of how far ahead you might be. The question is what to do with those things. I said something intemperate to the New Atheists, and suddenly Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, and Neil Shubin came at me all at once, not on the topic that I had caused offense–on a totally different topic. They had picked something off my YouTube channel. Jerry Coyne had claimed to have debunked it. He was wrong, but nonetheless it provided fodder for them to attack. Their point was that I didn't understand natural selection and that, to the extent I might believe I knew something that other people didn't know, the right thing to do was to submit it to a journal and go through peer review. I pointed out to them that peer review was not Richard Dawkins style, and that he in fact advanced the ball for the field, substantially, but has barely published a paper. That backed them off that course, and their tune changed to well, how about a book then? That's what Dawkins did-and to me, that's a win. The idea—I'm not against peer review. I want peers to review my work, but I don't want it snuffed out in private. And so, to the extent that that little battle was the result of them underestimating me and not knowing that something was going to come back that was cogent and responsive to the world as it actually is, and having them back off their position and say yes, actually, a book would be a fine thing. That was positive movement from my perspective. They underestimated me, and they had to back down. So I can't regret that too much. To me, on a different timescale, I believe I'm making progress toward a goal that you and I agree is the right one, but I'm not sure that coming at it guns blazing is the way to go.

'''Eric:''' OK. I want to talk about something I'm calling the DISC, the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex, and it has nothing to do with Richard Dawkins and peer review and Jerry Coyne and a bunch of other things that almost nobody cares about. It has to do with about a 50 year period in which great ideas got buried no matter where they occurred. Because great ideas were very likely to be highly disruptive to an institutional order. And between you and your wife, and me and my wife, three of our four theses ran into incredible problems, because they were trying to break really new ground. And the amount of delay that you suffered, I mean you're now 50 years old.  This is a very late start in a career. You're coming from a very inauspicious place. You've been fitted with a story, which is ‘He's a sweet guy who stood up to a mob and that's his claim to fame.’ And you're not really understanding that you're not being taken fully seriously as a biologist. In part what Jerry Coyne is saying to you is hey, you're really unknown to us. I'm at Chicago. Richard Dawkins was at Oxford. You know, he was the Simoni professor for the—

'''Bret:''' Yep.

'''Eric:''' OK. Here's what he had to say about you. “Bret Weinstein may well be the brightest graduate student I have ever known. His thesis defense involved only one of his four thesis chapters, and it alone was far more than sufficient as a thesis. I don't know anyone who knows more than Bret about not only a wide variety of topics in biological evolution, but the problems and possibilities of cultural change and the means of bringing people together and solving difficult problems. For 40 years, I held frequent, sometimes almost daily seminars with my doctoral students in evolutionary biology. While he was a student, Bret was a major element in all of those seminars. When he spoke, there was almost always respectful silence, even when he was junior to most of the people involved. Bret's thesis topics are so significant and timely, and so well treated on the lifetime patterns of humans and other species, the function and importance of telomeres and explaining lifetimes as hedges against cancer and several other important topics such as species diversity and sexual selection, that he dramatically converted, on the spot, two reluctant—” And by the way, reluctant is British understatement here—“[and] I will say mildly and skeptically evolutionist members of the committee. I think that, despite his youthfulness, in terms of the characteristics I listed earlier, Bret is the best candidate.”

'''Eric:''' Yeah, because you're going to do this thing where you downplay your gift, and I'm sick of it. I'm tired of it. I've just, I've had it. And part of it, what happened is that you are now distorting the history of science. You have a place in the history of science that you are not taking up, you are not advocating for. There’s something that you don't like about this.

'''Bret:''' No, no, I don't think this is true. I just think I'm pursuing it—maybe I'm pursuing it in a way that it doesn't work out in the end, or maybe I'm pursuing it in a way that it would; maybe there's more than one path.

'''Bret:''' I just don't think that's where we are. I've been very clear and very public about the fact that I think my entire field is spinning its wheels, that they've gotten caught by a few bad assumptions and that they are spending decades in the weeds for no good reason; that there is a way out; that I didn't know what it was for a long time. I did figure out what it was, and getting their attention on the question of what they're doing wrong is a Herculean task. I've made that clear. The question is what is the best use of the opportunity that I've got, the cards that I hold, and we have a difference of opinion about what that might be. And you may be right. I'm not saying you're not right, but I am saying that there's at least a discussion to be had about what the best way to play the—