Council of the Canceled with Eric Weinstein, Jay Bhattacharya and Mike Benz (X Content): Difference between revisions

Welcome to the Council of the canceled, a idea that has been born, from several of these conversations and realizing that there's very much a trend at hand and that there's enough of us that maybe it's time for us to have these conversations in larger groups than one on one where we just are being interviewed, telling our story from our own personal standpoint. I think we now realize there's a wider issue, not just nationally, but globally. And many, many expert voices have been silenced. Many parents have been silenced. There's a whole mechanism that we're realizing is at play, to silence opinions that are dissenting against the status quo. but and these are very serious things, but I want us to set a vibe for this, and I think the vibe should be light and joyous and productive, because we've been in the middle of it in our own lives for quite a while. And there's some joy now in sitting together in a group and actually talking about what we're going to do next.

So here I am in our first, council with Jay Bhattacharya. Eric Weiner seen my friends. Many of you know them, follow them. They have been incredibly inspirational. They have been up against the odds. They have been deplatformed, and thankfully replatformed thanks to X. And so today we're going to share live a conversation where we are going to unify some of the common threads that we've been talking about. This is being described right now as a decentralized, multi nodal reseating of representative experts. So here we go guys. I mean how are you feeling right now? How many times have you been told you're anti-science today.

I mean what I want, Nicole, is that, there should never have to ever be another Council of the Canceled. We can have society run in a way so that our institutions welcome the kinds of dissident voices that have been shunned aside during the pandemic and.

Also, it is also kind of funny that, I don't remember people using the words "grifter" and "charlatan" outside of, like, I don't know, an 1880s vibe that, you know, those were fighting words or you'd fight a duel. And somehow whenever I hear that somebody, a grifter or a charlatan, I now have a positive sense of, oh, what did they say? What's their perspective? Have they written anything I can read? And I don't think that that was the, initial intent of these campaigns against such people, but it is backfiring in kind of a humorous way.

Right. It's the same thing with science. I mean, when someone's called anti-science, I think, oh, they they must know their stuff. What can I learn from this anti-science person? Because if the science establishment is against them, then they clearly have ideas or research that are not being allowed in for a for a reason. And this gets to something I think we were talking about before, which is about the, really the self-destruction of trust in institutions that do the gatekeeping of ideas that provide, you know, sort of the consensus-building architecture that ends up being implemented in policy or being implemented in public health or censorship decisions or government decisions. And the fact that we're all talking about these labels as being badges of honor, that they must be right because the institutions are opposed to them, I think gets to this question about what is the role of these institutions in our country, how they developed, how they lost that trust, what can be done now? And we hear this term democracy a lot. And I always they always say these terms together, "democratic institutions". And we were talking but before that there's—I see there being two parallel tracks with the role of institutions in censorship and cancellation, which is you have the social media side, which is people being gated out of Instagram or Facebook or YouTube. And then there is the institutional side, which is people not being allowed to publish in, you know, the National Academy of Sciences or in magazines or, you know, in journals or in government agencies. And so those two things, I think, intersect with each other and they're each their own sort of problem for reseating institutions to represent the people rather than a cloistered set of interests.

So the way that I think we can start with this conversation and you said, let's just have one council and then hopefully we don't have to have it again. In our brainstorm for this live session, we already started talking about how deep and how powerful these mechanisms are. And I just want to propose that I think we must continue these councils. It'll be different people, different voices, different backgrounds, different opinions that we will be convening until there is a proper reseating of experts. And so, I want to lay that groundwork that we're trying something right now in this format. That is my hope being is something that last, and many different iterations were open sourcing this format if others want to, to engage in it. But the ideal is, is that we either invite the institutions to reform themselves, in the way that they ought to be reformed or we will be starting our own institutions, and our institutions will be based on principles, on how we reach expert consensus and infrastructure for reaching expert consensus. So, Eric, I want to turn this one over to you. We talked about what this infrastructure should look like, it how it has looked in previous formats, and the risk of what happens if we don't.

Right. So that's the in essence, what I see. And this is your suggestion. Maybe you're too modest to sort of make it is. Let's try to use the campaign to push the experts back into the institutions from which they were ejected. We know who these people are, and they're quite good. They were trained in our institutions. And if that fails, then we have a plan B, which is that you grow the camp. So either kill it or grow it, and you kill it by receiving the, experts inside of the institutions. And if you can't kill it, you grow it and you make sure that you have an alternate plan B.

You. The thing that I'm realizing is that it's actually already quite big, but it's fragmented and not united, and that there's still we're still in the storytelling, information collection phase. And what I was really inspired by, Jay, you said 30,000 qualified doctors and epidemiologists and public policy experts signed your Great Barrington Declaration. I did not realize it was that many people.