The Battle Between Gender & Biology - Colin Wright | Modern Wisdom 251

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   I think the things…

   1. CWColin Wright0:00

      I think the things we need to talk about, it's not necessarily things we're not talking about. I just think we're talking about things in the complete opposite way we should be talking about them. Like, I think it's important to talk about things like racism in society. It's important to talk about whether or not there are environmental components to behavioral differences between sexes or- or whatever species you're talking about. But we just need to have a more sober conversation where we don't leave some explanations off the table before the conversation even begins. You can't talk about things like any sort of cultural inertia that any population might have, regardless of where it's coming from in the world. Like, we can't talk about any of those sort of factors, like any cultural factors whatsoever that could be predictive of differential group outcomes. Like, that's just off the table. You can't talk about those at all. (wind blowing)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:47

      Colin flippin' Wright in the building. How are you doing, man?

   3. CWColin Wright0:52

      (laughs) I'm doing well. That's a good intro. (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson0:56

      (laughs) Yeah, when you-

   5. CWColin Wright0:56

      I like that. It's the best intro I've had so far.

   6. CWChris Williamson0:58

      What can you say? When I'm away, I'm on holiday, I'm just in a jovial mood, you know, just ready to discuss some evolutionary biology.

   7. CWColin Wright1:07

      I'm down. Let's do it.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:08

      I love it. So what's the most undiscussed topic in evolutionary biology which you think should be talked about more?

   9. CWColin Wright1:16

      So right out of the gates there. Um.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:18

       Yeah, there's very limited foreplay in this show, Colin. It's kind of straight in.

   11. CWColin Wright1:23

       Yeah. And so there's- there's these bigger overarching questions about just, like, human evolution, um, how we evolve certain complex traits behaviorally and otherwise. But I'd- I'd say, it's- it's really gonna depend who you ask on some of these issues. Some people think that we can explain all the diversity of life and all the behavior with current models of evolutionary thinking, just gradualism, you know, mutation, selection. And then you have some people, like I've- I've heard people like Bret Weinstein, for instance. He's- he thinks there's like a missing component that, you know, we need to have some sort of paradigm shift and we- we need something to explain things like peacocks' tails and, uh, why there's so much diversity in the tropics and things like that. And I'm sort of in the camp that we've- we've figured out, like, the main big trends and, like, how, at least in principle, how these things could have arisen. Uh, I'm- haven't been totally convinced that there's any massive discoveries to be made in terms of, you know, that is gonna, like, completely change the way we think about evolutionary biology. Um, I think if- from this point forward, it's gonna be more, like, tweaking bits. And I'm sure, I mean, there can be some substantial insight we might gain from areas, but, um, yeah, I think- I think it's gonna be largely applying the same principles of, you know, Darwinian natural- neutral selection to- to sort of things that we already kind of know about. Then you can also go the other route and say, well, the important things to learn about are things that we- we kind of already know but we're not really allowed to say, maybe, or, to some degree, because there's sort of a social taboo against things. And I think that's probably more threatening to evolutionary biology in the short term and maybe even long term, depending on, you know, how long sort of these cultural norms last that won't let people, you know, speak freely about certain controversial topics or something, uh, or they only, even worse, they only allow sort of one side, the- the side that is sort of, uh, aligns more with our morality or something, that they only allow that side really to get published because it just- they s- they- they'll go through review a lot faster because they- they kind of are leaning towards all the preconceptions and views that reviewers might already have or something. So then you get like a biased literature that's not really reflective of reality but it's sort of reflective of what we'd kind of like to be true in a sense. So, uh, yeah, that's sort of my overarching take on sort of evolution at the moment.

   12. CWChris Williamson3:56

       Got you. What's the bifurcating that you're talking about between Bret's approach and, uh, your conception of how evolution's worked?

   13. CWColin Wright4:08

       You know, it's not entirely clear because he hasn't fully fleshed out the things he's- he's proposing. Um-

   14. CWChris Williamson4:15

       Is it commonly held?

   15. CWColin Wright4:16

       ... it's- it's one area ... Not in my experience, no. Not- I mean, in- in my time in academia I hadn't heard sort of this types of critiques that he's been proposing. Um, but it's also, um, I'm not exactly sure what the type of critiques he is proposing because, um, and- and I do get a little frustrated from sometimes he'll- he'll post things that are sort of these, uh, he'll say something that, you know, evolution is, I don't wanna misquote him but this is sort of paraphrasing, um, you know, in a crisis we haven't really s- made any big discoveries lately. Um, and he kind of, in a way if you- there's a way to read them where he seems to be, like, tipping his hat towards, like, the intelligent design people or something, even though that's not what he's really doing.

   16. CWChris Williamson5:00

       Mm.

   17. CWColin Wright5:00

       But whenever I've sort of pressed him to go into more detail, he doesn't really go into crazy detail about, uh, what exactly he's proposing. He's- he's proposed certain things like, um, these different behavioral, uh, types that he called, like, explorer modes that explains maybe how- how individuals can find new habitat, uh, even though them exploring new habitat wouldn't be selected at, like, an individual level. Um, th- he might have a similar thing that applies to just morphological traits as sort of a bounded mutations and things like that. And these are all ideas that I'm totally open to, it's just I- I haven't heard them fleshed out in a way that makes me think, like, there's- there's something there that's- that's really missing. And I re- I need a- I need to find out what this is. Uh, I'd like to have a podcast with him at some point and just have him lay it all out. And h- him and Heather are writing a book and maybe he'll go- they'll go in more on this. And he's also suggested, 'cause he got pushback from people like Michael Shermer too, that was saying, like, you know, "What are you saying?" And also Jerry Coyne, who's one of the most, I guess, prominent evolutionary biologists sort of called him out in a big-... blog post that was just like, "What the hell is going on?" Like, "What are you- what are you talking about?" And, uh, i- i- the response wasn't- it wasn't substantive. It was just saying, like, "Maybe I'll write a book on this and then we can move from there." And so I was like, "That's fine." Uh, he doesn't tend to want to go the- the publishing and academic journals route because he thinks there's sort of a gated institutional narrative and they're- they're gonna suppress them, even though you can still submit these things online to open, uh... what, what is it? Like the, um, the- the- the- these open journals that... I- it's you can- you can... it's- it's like a preprint service where you can upload things online so they can't suppress your ideas before they're published. Like you get your ideas published on, uh, on one of these open source areas before they get accepted.

   18. CWChris Williamson6:55

       Mm-hmm.

   19. CWColin Wright6:55

       Um, and it's- I- I just really- I really wi- wish both Bret and his brother would sort of go that route and actual- actually write up the paper, whether or not you're gonna submit it to a journal, but just have something that we can look at where I can actually assess what's being talked about here, because I just... it's just a big black box and maybe they're geniuses who are gonna just turn the paradigm of evolution or- or maybe not. I guess I have nothing to go off of. So, I guess we'll see.

   20. CWChris Williamson7:22

       It definitely feels like-

   21. CWColin Wright7:23

       I'm- I'm a big fan of Bret too. This isn't like... there's not a co- I'm not like kind of butt heads with him. I'm just... I- I want to see more because he's- he's a smart guy. He's the kind of person that I could see maybe coming up with some brilliant idea. Uh, I just... as a biologist myself, I- I just want to know more. I'm super interested in what he- what he's proposing.

   22. CWChris Williamson7:41

       It definitely feels to me like him and Eric have had s- such burnt finger syndrome from the traditional avenues of academia that, um, it kind of doesn't surprise me. I didn't know that about their, uh, aversion to publishing in traditional journals and putting together the papers in the normal way. But it totally doesn't surprise me given what I know about their background.

   23. CWColin Wright8:07

       Yeah. I mean, i- it's not even that they won't publish in journals. Like, I'm fine if they just publish it on a blog or something, you know? Just- just write the paper so I can see where it is and we can assess it on its- on its own merits regardless of-

   24. CWChris Williamson8:20

       If you're- if you're listening my friend, there is a lot of people out here that want to know what's going on. The next thing-

   25. CWColin Wright8:25

       Yeah.

   26. CWChris Williamson8:25

       ... next thing that I was really interested in. We'll get- we'll loop back to this kind of, uh, recent narrative restricting what people can and can't talk about within your field. But what area do you disagree with colleagues that you think are mostly rationable- uh, rational and reasonable in your, uh, evolutionary biology field on? What is it that you guys don't agree on? Is there anything kind of juicy that's not the obvious stuff?

   27. CWColin Wright8:52

       Yeah. Well, it depends how obv- what you mean by "obvious", I guess. Like there's sort of obvious things that-

   28. CWChris Williamson8:57

       Not gender. (laughs)

   29. CWColin Wright8:57

       Yeah. That's sort of the obvious area that people outside realizes that, you know, um, sex differences is of course sort of like this whole controversial thing, both outside and within. Uh, but there's also... I mean, I'm... I studied collective behavior, animal personality, social behavior in, uh, eusocial insects and also in- in spiders. And when you start getting into the social evolution literature, you kind of start butting heads, uh, with these two factions that, uh... a lot of times when you go to your undergrad and in some cases grad school, you learn about these two different modes of- of evolution for social behavior. There's sort of this, um, individual selectionist model that's basically founded on- on kin selection, which is this notion that you might behave, uh, you know, altruistic or seemingly altruistic towards individuals because you share like a higher proportion of your genes with them. And so it's actually not... you know, you're not doing anything actually to benefit them, but you're benefiting yourself or at least copies of your genes sort of indirectly by helping other individuals. This is kind of like a- uh, an altruistic, uh, trait that can evolve, um, and sort of explains, uh, why we're actually nice to other individuals when you might predict that we'd just be selfish all the time. Uh, there's also other models within that, like reciprocal altruism, like I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine, things like that. And then there's a whole other kind of way of thinking that's a lot of times used as sort of like this whipping boy in classes. It's sort of this notion of group selection that like groups themselves can evolve traits at the group level that benefit the individuals within it. Uh, so it's not just driven by individual selection at sort of like this- this lower rate, but you can actually have selection between entire groups of individuals that it's going to select for a sort of like a collective type of behavior. That's way more controversial. There's- There tends to be this... so that the history of it kind of is the reason why it's so controversial is because some of the early days when they discuss these ideas, this guy named Wynne Edwards, he sort of had this idea of, uh, of group selection as you'd have maybe individuals sacrificing their body for the good of the group, for the good of the species. Uh, and it turns out this is sort of like a- just a cartoon version of- of group selection. Like, you're never going to get sort of like this sacrificial, uh, trait that can evolve in a population because any individual that has this trait for, you know, committing suicide for their group, if it's beneficial, well, they die and they take that gene with them. They're out of the gene pool so it's not going to spread through the gene pool. Um, but there's sort of this more, I guess, nuanced version of group selection that sort of looks at selection at multiple levels. They call it multi-level selection. I think it's much less controversial, at least i- it makes more theoretic sense, even though there's still a lot of people who will just think people are crazy within the field. And there's heated debates between multi-level selection and the kin selectionists, uh, people, you know, walking out of conference talks because they're...... you know, having this certain opinion and, you know, getting papers, you know, rejected and things like that. It's, it's super brutal and you would never guess that there's-

   30. CWChris Williamson12:16

       I l- I love the idea of this sort of stuff, man.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   What's your work been…

   1. CWColin Wright15:00

      individual differences b- in behavior that exist in a population. Uh, so certain individuals behave one way in this one context and they behave a similar way in multiple contexts. It's really just sort of like a, um, common sense, I guess, idea of what personality is, you know. If, if you're an aggressive person, you're gonna be aggressive in, you know, from when you're young to when you're old and probably across different contexts. So it's just sort of a scientific version of, of what we sort of normally think about when we talk about personalities. And just as, you know, no two individuals have the same personality, uh, what my research did was sort of apply that same principle but to entire groups and looking at the emergent behavior of an entire colony and how does this one colony differ in its behavior from other colonies and how are they, you know, dividing labor up among individuals, how do they respond to, you know, being attacked or something, or being disturbed. Uh, basically any sort of context that would be relevant for the survival of a group.

   2. CWChris Williamson15:57

      What's your work been focused on for the last few years? I know that you've, uh, taken a little bit of a left turn with regards to your career recently.

   3. CWColin Wright16:04

      (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson16:04

      So what have you been focused on?

   5. CWColin Wright16:05

      Yeah. Um, while I was in academia or not in academia?

   6. CWChris Williamson16:10

      After academia.

   7. CWColin Wright16:11

      My last few years in... So after, it hasn't been so much academic research in sort of the, you know, the type I would be doing if I'm in a lab or something like that since I don't have the same funding I do now that I'm not in academia. So it's, it's more sort of a literature-based, uh, approach to doing research. I've been very interested in sex differences in humans and also, um, in animals generally. Uh, how sex differences arise, um, a lot of more behavioral psychology. I'm sort of trying to get into that literature and also the human personality literature because human personality is actually tested quite differently than animal personality is done. There's different traits that are looked at, and there's some overlap, but, uh, basically you can't ask an animal to fill out a survey and so you can't get at some of the nuances that you can get in, to people, but then at the same time, like, animals aren't gonna try to deceive you the way a human might try to do or try to make themselves appear better on paper. So there's, there's benefits and, and disadvantages to, to each and I think it's be really interesting to see if there... How many bridges can be drawn between sort of the human personality literature, animal personality literature. And then also going into, like, some of Jonathan Haidt's research with, uh, the moral foundations and stuff and how do those relate to human personality differences too. And can we look at how these map onto political parties and individual types of behavior. Can we find, uh, you know, keystone individuals, which are just sort of individuals that have a dispro- disproportionate influence on the behavior of groups than any other individual, which could be important for things like rioting or, you know, there are all kinds of interesting questions. So I've just been kind of exploring all kinds of stuff, which has been super nice because back when I was in academia I, I was studying ants and spiders and wasps a lot and so everything I'm reading is just, like, ants, spiders and wasps.

   8. CWChris Williamson18:09

      (laughs)

   9. CWColin Wright18:09

      But now I've just sort of just blown it open. Like, I can research anything I want to now and it's, it's been (laughs) really refreshing actually. As much as I love-... ants, spiders, and wasps. Uh, it would be ... I, I'd probably have to switch systems at some point just to remain sane because, man, you can only read so many of those. (laughs)

   10. CWChris Williamson18:28

       There's an up- there's an upper bound on how much you can research insects, man. Like, being in the trenches talking about gender and sex differences for the last few years must have been f- you must have been like the Vanguard on the Lord of the Rings Two Towers battle.

   11. CWColin Wright18:46

       Yeah, I mean it's ... I never expected that that's kind of where I'd end up, you know, staking my ground, uh, in the culture war, I guess. But I, again, yeah, I didn't, I didn't choose it really. It's just ... I've always been sort of somebody who tries to like debunk things. I used to have a blog back in the day where I would just debunk weird pseudoscience like sort of ancient Chinese medicine or something, you know, just things like that. So I was always very sort of combative, uh, in that sense of trying to like debunk pseudoscience. And I guess I j- had just ... in my opinion, I saw what I, what appeared to be a pseudoscience coming from inside the academy rather than from the outside. Uh, so yeah, there's a lot more, there's a lot more consequences when you decide to speak up from within the institution against other people that are in the institution rather than speaking out against ancient Chinese medicine or against creation science where they don't really have a foothold in academia in the first place. So yeah, it's been an interesting couple years for sure.

   12. CWChris Williamson19:50

       Are you surprised that the argument about d- gender and sex differences and how we define that is still going? I mean, Jordan Peterson has been in and out of rehab in the time that this debate's been going. (laughs)

   13. CWColin Wright20:05

       (laughs) Yeah. Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson20:05

       How is this, how is it still going? Is there still more for us to discuss?

   15. CWColin Wright20:12

       Uh, I mean, I don't think there's a lot to discuss really. I mean, it, it seems pretty cut and dry that we can just distinguish between what biological sex is and what gender identity is and know that these things are completely different things and just move on from there. Like this shouldn't be a difficult division to be making yet somehow this is just, you know, we're getting things sometimes in The New York Times or even in Nature Magazine, the most prestigious journal in the world, that's making claims that, you know, sex is a spectrum or that, uh, you can't determine an individual's sex based on anatomy or genetics. Like that's a claim that they've made in Nature Magazine before in a, in a editorial th- that, that they did. And this is the most in- extreme claims I can imagine coming out of a biologist's mouth. Uh, so yeah, it's, it's truly bizarre, that this is what occupies ...

   16. CWChris Williamson21:11

       What's the ... What's the definition that you use of gender and of sex?

   17. CWColin Wright21:17

       So for, for sex ... So there's sort of like two levels to look at it. And this is where a lot of confusion sort of arises, is that there's sex as sort of a concept if we're talking about, you know, males and females. And when you're looking at a population of organisms if you're asking like, "Does this population, is it, does it sexually reproduce?" okay, if the answer is yes, then you say like, "What kind of system does it have?" Are they isogamic? Which means, do they have, uh, individuals that aren't really males or females but they might have two different mating types, um, where they have the same size gamete basically which is, you know, when, uh, wh- when there's males or females it's sperm or ova. But some species don't have these two dichotomous things. They're just s- sort of the similar sized, uh, gametes that will come together and create offspring. But there are male and female-

   18. CWChris Williamson22:04

       What's an example of that ... What's, what's an example of that animal? What animals would fall into that category?

   19. CWColin Wright22:11

       Uh, there's like mainly there's a lot of plants that have that, like some fungus. Um, and I, I don't, I don't know if ... uh, there, there's some sea organisms that have sort of this type of ... Yeah. I'm, I'm sure there's many I'm missing. I, I-

   20. CWChris Williamson22:24

       Okay.

   21. CWColin Wright22:24

       ... don't focus too much on the isogamic species just 'cause they're not that particularly interesting to me. But when you get to the, the existence of a male and female and what those are as sort of a concept, uh, when you're looking at a population as th- the individuals that are creating, uh, the small gametes, whatever it is, you know, sperm if you're a tree, it's, you know, you're making pollen or something, uh, those are considered the males and the females are the ones that are producing the large gametes that are basically stationary. But then there, there gets to the point where, uh, when you wanna actually assign or record the sex of individual organisms that we come up with this, you know, up, up against something where it says like, "Well, you know, males before they reach puberty they are not actually creating sperm. They don't produce any. So are they sexless because they don't produce small gametes?" And so, when you're actually sexing individual bodies you sort of look at what their, uh, primary sex organs, you know, their gonads, what are they ... what, what's the developmental trajectory that they've taken? Is it ... have they developed to, uh, organized around producing sperm or organized around producing ova? You know, are these basically, are they, are they testes, uh, or is it, uh, ovarian tissue is what kind of at base comes down to. Um, but you get a lot of people that, that try to use things like secondary sex characteristics, like the characteristics that we, we get after puberty. So like, you know, females will get breasts and their, their body fat's distributed differently over their body. Males sort of get s- more upper body strength and our jaws become more chiseled, all that s- type of stuff. They conflate that with biological sex so they're, they're sort of looking at the appearance of, of bodies and how a body looks generally and they're saying that because that's sort of on a spectrum and you can have, you know, masculine-looking females and, uh, feminine-looking males, that that's sort of how they're trying to quantify sex even though that's, that's not what sex is at all.... um, and then you ha- you asked about gender. I- I don't really have a definition of gender. There's- there's like five out there and I just f- I find it almost ... It really depends on what they mean when they say it. So whenever someone asks me about gender, I always say like, "Well, what definition do you have?" Like, I'm a biologist so I'm ... When I talk about males and females, I know exactly what we're talking about in that context because it's a very ... it's a scientific definition, it's very precise. Uh, but there are some people that have definitions of gender that, um, you know, you have like the radical feminist definition which is sort of the societal roles and expectations that are placed on individuals based on their perceived sex. So we might, uh, associate women with being more submissive or, uh, more caring for offspring, that type of thing, and males more aggressive and dominant and that type of stuff. Uh, there's the idea of like gender identity and it's sort of like it's internal feeling of- of masculinity or femininity, you know, however those are defined. It's usually sort of reduced to sort of gendered sex stereotypes. Um, and then there's ... yeah, there's sort of psychological definitions, there's more activist-oriented definitions, there's like the Tumblr definition where it's just like everyone's got this gender identity and here's a list of 100 of them and you can just, you know, pick one off of it. You're, you know, a neutrois or whatever, you know, bigender, pangender, genderfluid, like there's all those too, which is just sort of like the- the Pokémon approach to gender is I usually like kind of describe it and there's just huge list. So yeah, I don't know what gender is. If someone gives me a definition, I can just at least know what we're talking about and see if they're differentiating it from biological sex. That's kind of what I care about. Like, people can talk about gender as much as they want to as long as they don't tread on sort of the scientific definition of biological sex and try to blur that boundary in some sort of way.

   22. CWChris Williamson26:14

       So gender is more the expression of the particular sexual characteristics that ... or- or not, or the counter to the particular sexual char- characteristics that an individual has?

   23. CWColin Wright26:25

       Yeah. I think that's mostly the most common sort of way people think about it, I suppose. Um, there's a political divide too. Like, conservatives will, basically don't distinguish between sex and gender, uh, also like radical feminists too. So they- their definition of, you know, what a man and a woman is, is just like an adult human male or female, so they don't really add that social component. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. It just depends.

   24. CWChris Williamson26:51

       What's intersex? That's a ... Is that another sex?

   25. CWColin Wright26:55

       So it's- it's not another sex. It's just sort of defined as either being sexually ambiguous or there being sort of a mismatch between, uh, your internal sex organs and external appearance. So you can have certain individuals, say, that have, uh, like complete androgen insensitivity syndrome where their- their cells don't respond to testosterone at all. Like they're, they don't, they don't receive signals to develop, uh, based on the presence of testosterone. Um, and also when ... in- in utero too. So they- they might be born and look 100% female, uh, and then they grow up too and they still ... they look 100% female, though they might be on average a little bit taller, uh, but, you know, when puberty comes around, they- they don't, uh, they don't start menstruating and then they usually go to the doctor, like, "Why- why aren't I menstruating?" And it turns out they have internal testes and they just ... their body hasn't r- doesn't respond to the testosterone that they're making, so they just never develop to look like a male even though, you know, inside they're- they're biologically male in a- in a very real sense. Um, but it's- it's not a third sex, because if you look at the definition of sex, it- it's- it's basically the organization around, uh, producing sperm or producing ova. Since there's not a third intermediate gamete between sperm or ova, there's not really a third sex. Like, there's- there's variations of body types, but there aren't ... you know, there isn't like a third gamete that is- is out there to- to be a third sex. Even like a hermaphrodite, uh, even like a simultaneous hermaphrodite if you have an individual that can produce both sperm or ova, which hasn't really been shown in humans, that would be an example of someone being sort of both male and female. There wouldn't be like a new third sex.

   26. CWChris Williamson28:42

       Still not a third thing, yeah.

   27. CWColin Wright28:45

       Yeah. They're not like ... I t- I tend to use like colors. You can have like, uh, if you have like red golf balls and green golf balls, you know, and you have a- another golf ball that's like half of it is red and half of it is green, like, well, like red/green isn't its own unique color. It's just like a combination of red and green. You know, it's- it's ... you can- you can mix them, but that's not what like a hermaphrodite is. They're like both at the same time. So, you know, there's- there's some nuances there, uh, but a lot of the ... Some people on both sides too, they just sort of throw the nuance out the window and they don't want to sort of get into the details of what they're actually talking about.

   28. CWChris Williamson29:22

       Yeah. What do people mean when they say that gender's a social construct, then?

   29. CWColin Wright29:28

       Yeah. So when they say that ... if they say gender is a social construct, it's usually that r- the radical feminist view that sort of, uh, there are th- these societal expectations and norms that we build up socially, uh, that we come to expect of people that look male or female. So, you know, like for example, if you're- if you're like an effeminate male growing up, they probably get really, uh, uh, bullied by their friends, uh, to some degree or other, maybe not their close friends, but might get bullied for being like a sissy or something

3. 30:00 – 45:00

   It feels like they're…

   1. CWColin Wright30:00

      like that. Or if you're a super tomboy, you know, you might get bullied because, you know, you're not particularly feminine. And so that- that's sort of the- the social aspect of making individuals trying to conform to these stereotypes of masculinity or femininity. And so in a way, gender is constructed kind of that way by society that's sort of having people try to conform to these- these- these- these norms of masculinity and femininity. Uh-There's also a biological component where, you know, males are, on average, more likely to behave in a certain way that conforms to masculinity or femininity. But, uh, the social construct is sort of like the, the other societal roles that we ascribe to these, uh, to these different sexes. Um, it's this, the social component that we sort of put into our culture I guess might be the best way to describe it. And there's, there's certain renditions of that that I think are interesting that, that can, need to be talked about. Um, but then you get some people who are saying sex and gender are all social constructs and they sort of mean ... What they mean by that is they don't actually exist. There's no such thing as sex differences at all. Because there's overlap between males and females you can't say that they actually differ and, you know, that's, they're all involved in just trying to blur boundaries between anything, so we can't make any statements about, you know, average group differences and things like that. So there's, there's more nuanced and more messy ways to approach, uh, these questions. And It's a general one. Yeah.

   2. CWChris Williamson31:28

      It feels like they're all messy ways. It feels like every single one of them is a messy way.

   3. CWColin Wright31:33

      Yeah. I think the m- the main difference is some people are being maybe intentionally, uh, trying to obfuscate things and not offer clarity. They're only trying to blur things. And then people like, like me and, and others are, are trying to just, you know, say, like, "Yeah, there is a lot of complexity. Sometimes boundaries are a little blurry, but that doesn't mean we can't make sort of general true statements about average differences, uh, between groups, uh, according to some sort of, uh, uh, you know, their sex or whatever it might be."

   4. CWChris Williamson32:04

      How much of this is a semantic game, do you think?

   5. CWColin Wright32:09

      Oh, it's almost entirely a semantic game. Like when I ... If I'm talking to people who are, who are activists, they'll, they'll use the words that are, you know, they'll say gender or something like ... I'll, I'll make a statement like, "Biological sex isn't a spectrum." And then they'll, they'll counter with, you know, like, "No, gender is a spectrum." I'll say, "Well, I didn't say gender. I said biological sex." And a lot of times, the rebuttals to my articles will be, you know, all ... My articles are all about biological sex. And they'll, they'll sort of refer to biological sex, then they'll have a sentence where they sort of pivot to gender identity and then the rest of the article will be about gender identity and they'll just do their whole gender thing after that. And it's like, "That's not responding to anything I'm saying." Uh, and that's just ... Yeah. There's ... They'll use gender in a context or sex in a context depending on, like, what is the, kind of the most expedient way to, to, like, win an argument to some degree it seems. Um, maybe I'm being a little, a little harsh on them, but this is what it seems like (laughs) at least from my perspective.

   6. CWChris Williamson33:10

      Yeah. It, it reminds me a little bit, I was talking to Douglas Murray earlier this year and he brought up Black Lives Matter and the fact that you have semantic overload within that terminology.

   7. CWColin Wright33:21

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson33:21

      And even this year, you saw s- certain people when referring to the group calling it BLM and then, so that you could kind of semantically distance yourself from the term Black Lives Matter.

   9. CWColin Wright33:37

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CWChris Williamson33:37

       And it seems a little bit like there's a common thread perhaps between that and what's going on here.

   11. CWColin Wright33:44

       Yeah. I mean, one, one good example is whenever I talk about intersex individuals, if people ask what that is, some people will say, you know, like a developmental error or something has taken place or, uh, th- they'll use some other word that's just like, you know, there, there's a, it's a, it's a condition or something like that. Which I think you need to use some word because it's not, like, the norm of sexual development. And then so if you were to say that, like, yeah, developmental error has taken place, they'll then switch it around and say like, "Oh, o- are you calling me an error?" Like I'm an error. Like they, they'll take that word and they'll ascribe it to, like, them as a person and, you know, it's just ... No one's calling, like, you as a person an error. Like, they're just saying that at some point of development ... You know, if someone, if someone developed and they were b- born with, you know, with only one arm, like, you can say that there's an error in development has taken place that led to a limb missing. You're not calling them an error. You know, they're still 100% human. Uh, but it's just, like, this semantic game where they're always trying to kind of bait you into saying something that they can then construe as you being a terrible person or something and to, to then go on and, and make you ... You know, try to smear your reputation or something.

   12. CWChris Williamson35:01

       Yeah. And I suppose that gender dysphoria, uh, uh, in its most extreme, uh, manifestations could be described as an error. And quite rightly so. Like, the people who are living within that particular body feel like that body isn't for them. If that's not a glossary definition of what an error is, then I'm not sure. But as you get further and further down the boundary, obviously you have no way to know my level of gender dysphoria is at a 10, yours is only at a five, yours is only at a two, yours is at a minus two, you feel perfectly happy being in a man's body or a woman's body. Um, I suppose that, again, that degree of, the degrees of freedom for interpretation just further muddy the water.

   13. CWColin Wright35:46

       Yeah. It, it, it becomes an error when you move beyond just saying that, like, "I sort of feel like I've been born in the wrong body," to people saying that, like, that's literally the case. Like, "I've, I was assigned the wrong sex at birth and, you know, that's, that's just what it is. I'm actually this other sex." It's like, that's just not literally true. And I just think we have a responsibility to be precise about what is actually true in these situations. 'Cause if you're, if you're just gonna bend over backwards and let them, you know, redefine their own bodies, you know, like alchemy or something then just based on what they feel, then you just, there's just nothing they can't just believe and have be true. I mean, we need to have some sort of grounding principle, uh, that tethers this to reality to some degree. Uh, so yeah, that's kind of what I'm concerned about, you know, if-... if we can reject something as, as, as clear-cut in most cases as biological sex is, if that can be just dismissed, you know, en masse by a whole bunch of people, like there's just nothing else that ... Uh, what, what other things are we going to start just saying aren't real. Like age? Like, uh, what ... I mean, you already get people saying some of that stuff too and it's ... You know, I see it as just a hill (laughs) that I'm willing to die on because there's, there's just, there's no, there's no stopping if we get past this point. Like this is one of the most obvious truths I think that we can, I can at least state as a biologist. So, uh, I'll just keep saying it, I suppose.

   14. CWChris Williamson37:18

       It's that-

   15. CWColin Wright37:19

       Working out okay for me. (laughs)

   16. CWChris Williamson37:20

       It's that classic Ben Shapiro video, right? Why Aren't You 60? Why Aren't You 60?

   17. CWColin Wright37:26

       Yeah, yeah, basically. It's like that.

   18. CWChris Williamson37:27

       Uh, yeah, I mean, I don't know, man. Like I, what has happened over the last 15 years to cause this to rise to prominence? Because I went to school 15 years ago and this wasn't, I, I, I wasn't hearing this sort of rhetoric pushed at all.

   19. CWColin Wright37:46

       Yeah, I mean, it's, it's good to go to people like, you know, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay who can trace sort of like the ideological underpinnings of the, the movement and the ideologies. It comes down to, at least for, you know, the whole sex denialism stuff, that's just, uh, the humanities and, and specifically queer theory that's just basically involved in trying to destroy any sort of binary and make everything as blurry as possible and then problematize things where if you disagree you're a horrible person. It's that, that sort of post-modern way of looking at things where it's all about discourses and power dynamics. And, uh, it was present, you know, it wasn't like it didn't exist back, you know, when I was an undergrad. It was, it was just, just kind of starting there and I went to undergrad when I was, you know, 2008 to 2012, I think. And it was there but it wasn't, it wasn't like a dominant view at the time. I, there were some activists that would talk about that and then I would just be like, "Oh, okay. That sounds crazy." And I just never thought about it again because I didn't have to. And then, you know, of course, when I then went to, you know, I graduated and then I went to grad school and got my doctorate. Then at the time I started looking for jobs and now it's, that's the, the dominant view and there are so many people in just my field right now, other biologists, who are making these same claims. It's just like it's superceding the science in many ways. And, uh, I know a lot of the people that I've even co-authored papers with, they think I'm just like this horrible, horrible person now (laughs) just for writing some essays in Quillette. It's, it's just amazing, yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson39:27

       Didn't you say that, um, someone or a number of people had reached out to you basically forewarning you that they were gonna have to do a ...

   21. CWColin Wright39:36

       Oh, yeah. Public.

   22. CWChris Williamson39:37

       ... announcement about the fact that they are not associated with you, they do not believe what you believe, and they have to kind of do it behind the scenes to you just so that in front of the scenes they can make this show of force?

   23. CWColin Wright39:50

       Yeah. I mean, it was, it was someone who'd co-authored papers with me and, you know, I'm always fine with people who wanna disagree with me, even publicly. Like I don't, if they're ... I, I don't, like, take offense to that. It doesn't make, doesn't make me feel like I'm being attacked because I, I just think ideas need to be attacked. As long as it's not saying bad things about me directly, uh, I'm fine with it. And this was a, this was a close friend and, uh, he just said, "Yeah. I'm gonna, I need to write something." Because, and the, the scariest part is that, you know, I, I think he actually disagreed with me, which is fine, but it wasn't just the fact that he disagreed with me. People saw, like his colleagues saw that we had been, you know, we were friends before, we had co-authored papers. He saw my name on a paper next to his, and it was this mutual policing. Like they went to him and they're, they're making him sort of justify him ever associating with me. And he was worried that just because of sort of the, the, the fire that's going on and, you know, with me and the controversy that, that sort of sprung up, that there was gonna be splash damage on his career and that he needed to distance himself from me. Uh, and, so I think that's just such a exemplary of the, the mutual policing going on, that he felt that he had this pressure to condemn my views. Before he was just silent on the issue. He didn't, he didn't even care. Uh, but it was, yeah, it was the social coercion of his colleagues where he felt he needed to, you know, do a public denunciation, which, that's the scariest part because that's, it's so true, at least in my experience, is the cultural aspect of academia and the, the way that, you know, you need, you need to be, you need to have allies to do good science, especially in my field of evolution and ecology. You need collaborators, you need to have people go in on grants with you. And they can essentially make your career impossible to move forward if, just by not wanting to, to speak with you and not wanting to associate with you. And that's sort of what he saw coming his way if he didn't make a public, you know, denunciation. So that's the, that's the scariest part.

   24. CWChris Williamson41:56

       What do you wish people were spending their time talking about or thinking about rather than debating gender? Because there's this famous Douglas Murray line where he says, "When the barbarians are out the gate, we'll be debating about what gender they are whilst we all get Kalashnikov-ed in the head." And I've been reading a lot of Existential Risk recently. I'm absolutely terrified about the advent of misaligned artificial general intelligence and nanotechnology turning us all into gray goo or, uh, bioweapons or engineered pandemics or natural pandemics (laughs) . Like, if twen- if there was ever going to be a year that should have realigned our values, was 2020 not the one? And, like, why hasn't it brought us ...

   25. CWColin Wright42:38

       Yeah.

   26. CWChris Williamson42:39

       Why hasn't it brought our values back in line?

   27. CWColin Wright42:43

       Yeah, I mean, I think the things we need to talk about, it's not necessarily things we're not talking about. I just think we're talking about things in the complete opposite way we should be talking about them. Like I think it's important to talk about things like, like racism in society. It's important to talk about whether or not there are, uh, environmental components to behavioral differences between sexes or- or whatever species you're talking about, like, it... But we just need to have a- a more sober conversation where we don't leave some explanations that are just off the table before the conversation even begins. Um, you can't talk about, uh, like things like any- any sort of cultural inertia that any sort of population might have, uh, regardless of where it's coming from in the world. Like we can't talk about any of those sort of factors, like any cultural factors whatsoever that could be predictive of- of, uh, differential group outcomes. Like that's just off the table. You can't talk about those at all. (laughs) Uh, you know, if you're looking at police violence or whatever, like if there were papers that were published i- in prestigious journals like PNAS that, you know, looked at, uh, police shootings and didn't find any correlation between this, you know, uh, I think it was actual, uh, people who were like armed who were shot by police, they didn't find like a racial component to that. And Heather MacDonald, who comments a lot about race issues, she had some articles in The Wall Street Journal about this, highlighting this research and it was one of the biggest datasets. In the wake of, you know, George Floyd, the authors of that paper, nothing wrong with the paper, they just said that they wanted to retract it because they were getting hammered by people saying that this research is- is racist and, you know... But again, the data, there was- there was nothing wrong. Like you usually only retract papers if there's a flaw, if the interpretation's off. And usually it's just not even a retraction, unless it was like data fabrication was found. If it's, if it's just a bad interpretation, you can- you can amend them. You can say like, "Oh, we need to issue a, you know, an addendum onto this thing." But no, they just fully retracted it. Uh, so now you can't even cite it.

   28. CWChris Williamson44:54

       That's called pulling, that's called pulling the ejector seat.

   29. CWColin Wright44:58

       Oh yeah, they just, they just memory

4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   (laughs) …

   1. CWColin Wright45:00

      holed this paper.

   2. CWChris Williamson45:00

      (laughs)

   3. CWColin Wright45:00

      Like it doesn't even exist anymore. You can't cite it. And if you try to cite it, people are gonna be like, "Oh, you're a crackpot citing this paper that's been, you know, that's- it's been, uh, retracted." And it's like, "Well, no, there's nothing wrong with the data." And Heather MacDonald even said like, you know, they retracted it because I accurately portrayed their research in The Wall Street Journal. And that's basically what happens. So we're gonna get this situation now where the only research people are willing to publish is that which aligns with any, a certain political narrative. And it's just, you can't, you can't trust the experts anymore. It's just, it's horrible. We c- the environment is so salted and scorched earth that there's just, it's not a friendly environment to actually go into and try to ask a question and be okay with any outcome, even if it's sort of doesn't align with what we'd like to be true.

   4. CWChris Williamson45:49

      Is this still on an upward trajectory in academia? Because it keeps on seeming to me as someone who consumes a lot of content and has been a fly on the wall watching this for the last few years. First off, it was the sort of thing that was students on campus, well, you don't really have to worry because they're just students on campus and when they grow up, they'll hit the real world and the real world will sort them out. And then it started to sort of move into policy of private companies and you saw Netflix and other companies have some kind of like weird policies about eye contact and s- and then it starts to move into press and you see some increasingly, uh, bizarre headlines that for, if you were to give to your mom or dad, kind of salt of the earth people, probably wouldn't make a massive amount of sense. And now we're seeing politicians and we're seeing public policy.

   5. CWColin Wright46:42

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson46:42

      Like i- is it still a- a growing concern? Because to me, like it's still not something I've ever encountered IRL personally. And up until that point, it's almost a little bit like people LARPing, in- in a different-

   7. CWColin Wright47:01

      Yeah. (laughs)

   8. CWChris Williamson47:01

      ... in a different world to me. Uh, but I- I'm sure that it's going to come and arrive at our door, this denial of facts. No matter what your particular beliefs are around the topics that we've gone through today, there is a lot of fact denial. Both sides can't be right. So there is fact denial going on. (laughs) Like-

   9. CWColin Wright47:23

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson47:24

       ... what's going on?

   11. CWColin Wright47:26

       Yeah. It, well, it- it definitely arrived at my door, (laughs) which was shocking to me because the reason I decided to, I wanted to be an academic, you know, 12 years ago when I decided to major in, a, a, a, in a, as a biologist, um, was because I wanted to work, you know, at the frontier of, uh, biological research and I thought, what better environment to, w- what could be more intellectually stimulating than talking about certain issues and being only driven by facts, uh, with a bunch of other experts in the field and things like that. And that just turned out not to be the case. You know, I- I- I had said that same mantra that you- you referred to is, um, sort of, you know, when you get into the real world, you know, you're not gonna have these, like I used to say something like, you know, the real world doesn't have trigger warnings. And now it turns out it does now. Like-

   12. CWChris Williamson48:15

       (laughs)

   13. CWColin Wright48:15

       ... there are (laughs) , they've- they've, they've modified their environment to accommodate them. Like, you know, the same way that humans have sort of, you know, we- we need shelter and so we've now reached a position where we've- we've created houses and now we don't have to brave the elements. They've sort of just created the same equivalent. They've just made safe spaces in places where we said that they- they didn't exist. Um, and it's definitely getting way worse. Like it's, you know, we're- we're nowhere near...... the peak of this, I don't think, uh, 'cause it has just exploded in the, over the last six months. Like, it's just gotten everywhere. I mean, we see the diversity, equity, and inclusion statements that are taking over all the, you know, I can't, uh, it's hold- hard to apply to university now, right? I'll have to fill out this diversity, equity, and inclusion statement which is basically a, a political litmus test that I pledge allegiance to this sort of way of thinking about racial issues, uh, that I just really don't agree with. Um, and it's not because I'm, like, a bigot or anything, it's just I, I think a more liberal approach is, is more warranted and some of the words that are used in ways that, you know, that are nonstandard definitions, and yeah. It's, it's creating this feedback loop, loop in academia too where you get, you know, you have a bunch of people on hiring committees who have these ideologies, and they'll only hire other people that have these ideologies. And social media makes it so you can find out someone's political beliefs and might not think these are influencing your hiring decision, but they almost certainly are. Like, what is the chances that someone has a public Facebook and they have a MAGA hat on or something? They could be the best, you know, uh, microbiologist in the world. They're not gonna get hired by Berkeley. Like, they're just not gonna get a job there, period. Uh, especially if they don't fill out the, uh, diversity statement the way that they want it to be done, and Berkeley has a rubric of how exactly to respond to these and what types of answers are wrong. So they're like, they're leading you to tell you, like, "Here's what you need to say." Like, "Say the words. Say them." And it's, it's just, it's a nightmare, and it's just going to get worse. Once you, once you get this feedback loop where you get more and more skewed towards one political orientation, it's just, it's just gonna go to fixation. It's gonna be 100%, and then where do you go from there? Like, how do you, how do you reverse it? If everyone shares the same blind spot, there's no one there to point it out to them anymore, so.

   14. CWChris Williamson50:41

       It's like some sort of-

   15. CWColin Wright50:42

       Yeah, yeah.

   16. CWChris Williamson50:43

       ... brutal Malthusian trap. Uh, uh-

   17. CWColin Wright50:46

       Oh, yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson50:47

       Um, do you think postmodernism is slowing human progress?

   19. CWColin Wright50:52

       Oh, yeah. It just has to 'cause it's just not tethered to reality. I mean, there might be, like, sort of a nugget of truth that is at the center of their concerns, but when you go about to try to actually try to base a policy or some action, uh, and your basis is postmodernism, that just assumes that power is the thing that permeates everything and that truth is created through narratives, and there's not, like, an objective reality, or at least we can't come to objective knowledge about that reality, there's just nothing. You can't, you can't go anywhere. There's no traction to go direction.

   20. CWChris Williamson51:29

       Are the effects sufficiently widespread now that they're actually making a genuine impact on our ability to move forward as a civilization as well?

   21. CWColin Wright51:38

       Oh, I think so. I mean, uh, just on almost every issue that we care most about (laughs) the, the main, uh, I guess the ideology du jour is, is rooted in, in postmodernism, like, almost entirely. You look at just sort of the critical race theory approach to how they wanna solve racism, and it's just measured by, "Let's look at outcomes. Let's look at any disparity of outcomes," and that's just gonna be if there are these disparities, that is the definition of institutional structural racism, and end of story. And we need to fix the outcomes rather than try to solve something at the beginning of the pipeline because they've convinced themselves it's not a pipeline issue, it's just sort of a systemic issue, uh, and that, you know, the only way we can do it, to fix things is by, you know, just having certain, some sort of racial quotas is what it usually boils down to in the end, um-

   22. CWChris Williamson52:32

       Are there any areas-

   23. CWColin Wright52:33

       ... yeah.

   24. CWChris Williamson52:33

       ... that are still holding fast? Is there any area of academia or research which is yet to be slowed by this?

   25. CWColin Wright52:44

       Yeah, some of the more, I mean, I guess, stereotypically hard sciences like particle physics and, you know, I'm certain, I'm sure that, like, a lot of engineers... I mean, I've seen postmodern papers that are about sort of, uh, trying to deconstruct, like, engineering and, and physics and cosmology and stuff. I, I don't think they have any influence whatsoever right now, but they're, they're definitely trying to get a foothold, and somehow, they've managed to get some of these insane papers published in these, in, in decent journals just because no one wants to reject the paper because they'll be, you know, almost certainly accused of some, some range of bigotry, uh, by, if, if they were to reject it. So yeah, it's, it's con- it's, it sort of has a wedge everywhere, but some places, it's gonna be a lot harder to, to drive it through because at some point, with engineering, your, the bridge needs to stand, you know. Like, there needs... Uh, the, the fields where there's gonna be a real-world, like, bridge collapsing somewhere, something that's just like, "That obviously is not a stable bridge," something that, like, reality will just break down everything and make it really apparent that this is incorrect, those are gonna be hard, if not impossible, to really completely take over. Um, I mean, uh, maybe. I say that now, but who knows? (laughs) But, uh-

   26. CWChris Williamson54:11

       You sound as though, it, it seems like you, you keep on using the word hard science, and that's kind of the one that appears to be the, the last stand at the moment for rationality.

   27. CWColin Wright54:20

       Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson54:21

       Has the last five to ten years been a stress test for all academic disciplines in that way?

   29. CWColin Wright54:31

       Yeah, some more than others, for sure. Um, the stress... I- it's harder for some to survive the stress test because some of the ideas that they're dealing with, if, if they're actually, if they're wrong about something, like, like in my field, ecology, for instance, uh-... we're dealing with super complex var- variables. We're looking at the way populations are interacting with their environment, and the environments change, and the populations are changing genetically over time, and complex behaviors. You can make some broad, you know, measurements about how these ... how, uh, how things are happening between groups or something, but it's not a very precise science. It's, it requires lo- long-term studies to get, like, anything that's, that's gonna be super robust. Um, and so if you're wrong about something in ecology or in psychology or some of these other sciences that are just so complex to, to measure, you don't get that moment of watching a bridge collapse, you know, that you would get as a engineer who is wrong about-

   30. CWChris Williamson55:30

       The rocket doesn't explode, the-
5. 1:00:00 – 1:09:41

   Have you read Scott…

   1. CWColin Wright1:00:00

      Twitter profile, it's less of, like, identifying the in-group with, given that everyone now knows that pronouns in bios and email signatures is a thing, it says more now when you don't have it in your bio. So it becomes more of like an, a way to identify, like, this out group. And it, there's just so, so many evolutionary dynamics that are going on here with forming tribal identities and how easy it is to form these identities and how, you know, if these identities are ever challenged, how, how easily they are just, uh, defended super hard, like if they're challenged to any degree. So you have this imbalance of, of how easy it is to form identities and then how, how much people double down on those easily formed identities when they're challenged, and it just breeds this tribalism that you are getting in almost every area of, of political discourse nowadays.

   2. CWChris Williamson1:00:52

      Have you read Scott Alexander's blog post, I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Out Group?

   3. CWColin Wright1:00:58

      I don't think I've read that. I've read some of his stuff. I really need to go and do, like, a deep dive on his... 'Cause every time I've read his, his stuff, they're just incredibly thoughtful.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:01:08

      He's phenomenal, man. So-

   5. CWColin Wright1:01:09

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:01:10

      ... I implore everyone that's listening to go and check that out. I'll send it to you once we're done, man. It's, it's-

   7. CWColin Wright1:01:14

      Yeah, definitely.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:01:14

      ... awesome. And it just identifies how much fear everybody has around not being part of that in group. And it's so unbelievably compelling and upon deep diving down the evolutionary psychology red pill rabbit hole earlier this year, it's shown me just how easily swayed we, we can be. As seemingly sovereign beings, we presume that we have our own agency and, "I'm in control and I define my own destiny." And you realize that the vast majority of what you do, you, you don't even understand how your genes are manipulating your emotions.

   9. CWColin Wright1:01:54

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:01:54

       Let alone when you then start to scale that across a 50-person workplace and a 10-person family and the interactions between all of them and the social media with a couple of billion people on it consuming the world's news in real time 24 hours a day. Like, it doesn't surprise me that we're in a mess-

   11. CWColin Wright1:02:14

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson1:02:15

       ... in 2020. It really doesn't. And I, my fear, which I wish... Uh, usually I'm able to kind of assuage things, because I believe I get myself set on a particular idea and then I realize I've talked myself into it rather than needing to be talked out of it. But that was my, my question about, is this on an upward trajectory? And my fears about the control problem for AGI and existential crisis and risk and stuff like that is that, like, this, this could be the great filter, as Robin Hanson puts it. This could be the thing that stops us from actualizing our potential as a civilization. And dear Lord-

   13. CWColin Wright1:02:57

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson1:02:57

       ... if, if the thing that kept us together below Dunbar's number when we were living valley to valley and trying not to get the pathogen from the tribe next to us is the thing that stops us from colonizing the galaxy, we didn't deserve to do it.

   15. CWColin Wright1:03:13

       (laughs) Yeah. You know, I, I've been surprised that during this recent election cycle, we didn't see more deepfakes, which I think are just gonna be... It's gonna just completely erode our ability to tell what's real. You know, like, you can have a perfect deepfake of any political candidate you want to, just, like, clearly sitting down there, talking to someone who's not really there, and you can just make a perfect fake. Like, how much would that just destroy... I mean, like, the Access Hollywood thing that people thought was gonna take Trump down, you know, the whole in the, uh... Was it a, uh, motor home or something, or a bus? Uh, in the future, they could, we could, they could make those videos just from scratch, you know, just with actors and just deepfake it all the way. I mean, I'm, I'm shocked we didn't see them now, because I've seen some deepfakes that are scary good now, and they're a lot better than they were even just a year ago. So, I, I think, yeah, everything is kind of pointing to the trajectory of we're not gonna have the ability to know what's true anymore with any high degree of confidence.

   16. CWChris Williamson1:04:23

       And actually, that kind of relates to the control problem for AGI, right? That what you want to do is you want to have the particular goals aligned before you give the system the power to enact them. You need to ensure that you have the foundational source code of the direction that that's moving in correct before it has the ability to move at a speed that, that occurs it to happen.

   17. CWColin Wright1:04:49

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson1:04:49

       And in a, a weird way, we have gone backward with a lot of the values and the virtues that had taken a couple of thousand years to develop, and had arrived-

   19. CWColin Wright1:05:01

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson1:05:01

       ... at a society that kind of understood how things were supposed to work. And that now being undone, whilst at the same time, the speed at which you can undo it and promulgate these new messages, whether that be through technology, communication, stuff like that. Man, it's like, it's like going backwards... It's like going backwards at twice the speed somehow, like going backwards-

   21. CWColin Wright1:05:25

       Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson1:05:25

       ... and up in the air at the same time and just getting dropped out of an airplane. Like, the, uh, the, the deepfake thing is, is absolutely crazy. And you're totally right. It doesn't surprise me that's the case. Another thing that I learned a while ago was the difference in, uh, suggestiveness that people have from VR. Have you seen this? So-

   23. CWColin Wright1:05:47

       Hmm. I don't think so.

   24. CWChris Williamson1:05:47

       ... um, there's a, basically, an upper bound on the level of change that can occur to your belief system when you're consuming content through a particular type of medium. Let's say it's two-dimensional on your phone with audio and video. But then when you strap a VR headset onto yourself, they were able to show people... I think the study was done on... It was to do with paper, to do with the trees that were cut down for paper, and it had some unbelievable multiplier, larger impact on how people related to their paper usage and their, the way that they felt about the environment.

   25. CWColin Wright1:06:29

       Hmm.

   26. CWChris Williamson1:06:29

       Mostly because it was such a more immersive absorption mechanism, I suppose. And-

   27. CWColin Wright1:06:37

       Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson1:06:38

       ... fuck, man. (laughs) Like, I don't... I, I don't know what we need to do, because it's like technology is usually what we would claim would be the solution to all of our problems in situations like this.

   29. CWColin Wright1:06:48

       Yeah, yeah.

   30. CWChris Williamson1:06:49

       Let's get back to what truth is. Let's use, uh, technology to help enable us. But it actually seems like technology is the delivery mechanism. It's the needle through which the, the virus is coming.

Episode duration: 1:09:41