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

Colin Wright is an Evolutionary Biologist and the Managing Editor at Quillette. We're nearly at the end of 2020 and what constitutes a man and a woman are still being discussed. Hopefully Colin can shed some light on this. Sponsor: Get 50% discount on your FitBook Membership at https://fitbook.co.uk/showcase-your-work/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow Colin on Twitter - https://twitter.com/SwipeWright Read Colin's article - https://quillette.com/2018/11/30/the-new-evolution-deniers/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #evolution #gender #sex - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 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 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.

• 0:46Chris Williamson?

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

• 0:51Speaker 00

  I'm doing well. It's a good intro.

• 0:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 0:56Speaker 00

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

• 0:58Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  I'm down. Let's do it.

• 1:08Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:15Speaker 00

  It's right out of the gates there.

• 1:18Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's these bigger overarching questions about just like human evolution, how we evolve certain complex traits behaviorally and otherwise. But I'd say 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 heard people like Brett Weinstein, for instance. He thinks there's like a missing component that, you know, we need to have some sort of paradigm shift and we need something to explain things like peacock's tails and why there's so much diversity in the tropics

• 2:08Speaker 00

  and things like that. And I'm sort of in the camp that we've figured out like the main big trends and like how, at least in principle, how these things could have arisen. I haven't been totally convinced that there's any massive discoveries to be made in terms of, you know, that it's gonna like completely change the way we think about evolutionary biology. I think 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 yeah, I think it's gonna be largely applying the same principles of, you know, Darwinian natural selection to sort of things that we already kind of know about.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Then you can also go the other route and say, well, the important things to learn about are things that 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. Or they only, even worse, they only allow sort of one side, the side that is sort of aligns more with our morality or something, that they only allow that side really to

• 3:30Speaker 00

  get published because it's just they, 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 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.

• 3:56Chris Williamson?

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

• 4:08Speaker 00

  You know, it's not entirely clear because he hasn't fully fleshed out the things he's proposing. Is it commonly held? It's one area.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Not in my experience, no, not, I mean, in my time in academia, I hadn't heard sort of the types of critiques that he's been proposing. But it's also, I'm not exactly sure what the type of critiques he is proposing because, and I do get a little frustrated from sometimes, he'll post things that are sort of these, he'll say something that, you know, evolution is, I don't want to misquote him, but this is sort of paraphrasing, you know, in a crisis, we haven't really made any big discoveries lately. 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.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  But whenever I've sort of pressed him to go into more detail, he doesn't really go into crazy detail about what exactly he's proposing. He's proposed certain things like these different behavioral types that he called like explorer modes that explains maybe how individuals can find new habitat, even though them exploring new habitat wouldn't be selected at like an individual level. He might have a similar thing that applies to dysmorphological traits and sort of bounded mutations and things like that. And these are all ideas that I'm totally open to. It's just I haven't heard them fleshed out in a way that makes me think

• 5:42Speaker 00

  like there's, there's something there that's, that's really missing that I need to, I need to find out what this is. I'd like to have a podcast with him at some point and just have him lay it all out. And him and Heather are writing a book and maybe he'll go, they'll go and more on this. And he's also suggested, because he got pushed back 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. It was just like, what the hell is going on? Like, what are you, what are you talking about? And 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. He doesn't tend to want to go the, the publishing and academic journals route because he

• 6:26Speaker 00

  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 is like the,

• 6:40Speaker 00

  there there are these open journals that it is you can you can it's like a pre-print 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. Um, and and I just really, I really wish both Brett 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 it's 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, like I just have nothing to go off of, so I guess we'll see.

• 7:22Chris Williamson?

  It definitely feels like-

• 7:22Speaker 00

  I'm a big fan of Brett, too. This isn't like, there's not a, I'm not like, kind of butt heads with him, I'm just, I I wanna 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 wanna know more, I'm super interested in what he what he's proposing.

• 7:40Chris Williamson?

  It definitely feels to me like him and Eric have had 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.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's 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 write the paper so I can see where it is and we can assess it on its on its own merits regardless of-

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  Brett, if you're if you're listening, my friend, there's a lot of people out here that want to know what's going on. The next thing, 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 rational and reasonable in your 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?

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it depends how, what you mean by obvious, I guess. Not gender.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's sort of the obvious area that people outside realize is that, you know, sex differences is, of course, sort of like this whole controversial thing, both outside and within. But there's also, I mean, I'm, I studied collective behavior, animal personality, social behavior in, you social insects and also in spiders. And when you start getting into the social evolution literature, you kind of start butting heads with these two factions that, 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 individual selectionist model that's basically founded on, on kin

• 9:42Speaker 00

  selection, which is this notion that you might behave, 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, an altruistic trait that can evolve and sort of explains why we're actually nice to other individuals when you might predict that we'd just be selfish all the time. There's also other models within that, like reciprocal altruism, like I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine, things like that.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  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. 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 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 discussed these

• 11:05Speaker 00

  ideas, this guy named Wyn Edwards, he sort of had this idea of, of group selection as you'd have maybe individuals sacrificing their body for the good of the group, for the good of the species. 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 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. But there's sort of this more, I guess nuanced version of group selection

• 11:47Speaker 00

  that sort of looks at selection at multiple levels. They call it multi-level selection. I think it's much less controversial. At least it makes more of a 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, 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.

• 12:16Chris Williamson?

  I love the idea of this sort of stuff.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  Completely academic debate is just like, you know, there's, I've heard stories of people at conferences and they're just like at the urinal next to each other and they see the other person who's a group selectionist and they're just, you know, they can't even, they can't even like pee next to them. And it's, it's, it's the ultimate like pettiness, I think. And I think a lot of it too is people are talking past each other in these, you know, they're just volleying these, these 5,000 word papers back to each other in reviews where I think, you know, something just like this, like a podcast, like I just want to get two of these sides off. I could get them on Joe Rogan or something and just, just let them hash it out where they can just talk because I think they both make really good points and I can't really put myself in any one camp. So, but that's a, might be a controversy people aren't really aware of from the outside.

• 13:02Chris Williamson?

  Did you look at how collective intelligence works for insects, stuff like ants in a, a big colony and, and stuff like that? Cause that's always been something that's fascinated me.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, not intelligence per se. I looked at really their collective behavior and how we can predict the behavior of the entire group based on knowing the behavior of spiders, knowing the behavior of sort of the composition of every individual. And then when I study this in wasps, I would look at how we can predict the behavior of the entire colony. And it's also future survival and fitness based on just knowing the personality traits of the queen in the beginning of the season before, you know, any colony even exists where it's just a solitary founder.

• 13:52Chris Williamson?

  Wasp queens have personalities.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Almost everything has personalities in nature. So.

• 14:00Chris Williamson?

  Okay. What are the different personalities that a wasp queen can have?

• 14:06Speaker 00

  So there's so many different axes of behavior. The main ones people test are things like aggressiveness and boldness. There's sort of these tests of how well they're startled by like novel objects. There's like gregariousness.

• 14:27Chris Williamson?

  All of these words, all these words sound like exactly what wasps do. I'm not a massive fan of wasps.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:33Chris Williamson?

  And this is exactly.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  You can also look at like their foraging behavior, exploration, sort of how well they learn, nest construction, things like this. Those are kind of, some of them might not be seen as like traditionally personality traits, but a personality really is just any consistent behavior that exists that an individual has that's consistent throughout its life. Or more specifically, like consistent individual differences in behavior that exist in a population. 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. The common sense, I guess, idea of what personality is, you know, if you're an aggressive

• 15:17Speaker 00

  person, you're going to 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 what we sort of normally think about when we talk about personalities. And just as, you know, no two individuals have the same personality, 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? Basically, any sort of context that would be relevant for their survival of a group.

• 15:57Chris Williamson?

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

• 16:05Speaker 00

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

• 16:10Chris Williamson?

  After academia.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  My last few years. So after, it hasn't been so much academic research in sort of the, you know, the, the type I'd 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 approach to doing research. I've been very interested in sex differences in humans and also animals generally, how sex differences arise. 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

• 16:53Speaker 00

  personality is done. There's different traits that are looked at. I mean, there's some overlap, but 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 into people. But then at the same time, like animals aren't going to try to deceive you the way a human might try to do or try to make themselves appear better on papers. So there's, there's benefits and disadvantages to. To each, and I think it's be really interesting to see if they 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 the moral foundations and stuff, and how do those relate to human personality differences too? And can we

• 17:35Speaker 00

  look at how these map on to political parties and individual types of behavior? Can we find, you know, keystone individuals, which are just sort of individuals that have a disproportionate influence on the behavior of groups and any other individual, which could be important for things like rioting, or, you know, 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 was studying ants and spiders and wasps a lot. And so everything I'm reading is just like ants, spiders and wasps. 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 really refreshing, actually, as much as I love ants, spiders and wasps.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  It would be, I'd probably have to switch systems at some point just to remain sane because man, you can only read so many of those.

• 18:27Chris Williamson?

  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 you must have been like the vanguard on the Lord of the Rings, Two Towers battle.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I never expected that that's kind of where I'd end up, you know, staking my ground in the culture war, I guess, but I, 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 in that sense of trying to like debunk pseudoscience and

• 19:18Speaker 00

  I guess I had just, in my opinion, I saw what I would appear to be a pseudoscience coming from inside the academy rather than from the outside. 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 of years, for sure.

• 19:50Chris Williamson?

  Are you surprised that the argument about the 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. How is this, how is it still going? Is there still more for us to discuss?

• 20:12Speaker 00

  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 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 an editorial that

• 20:57Speaker 00

  they did. And it's the most extreme claims I can imagine coming out of a biologist's mouth.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  So, yeah, it's, it's truly bizarre.

• 21:09Chris Williamson?

  What's the

• 21:09Speaker 00

  What occupies?

• 21:11Chris Williamson?

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

• 21:17Speaker 00

  So 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 individuals that aren't really males or females, but they might have two different mating types? Where they have the same size gamete, basically, which is, you know, when there's males or females, it's sperm or ova. But some species don't have these two dichotomous things.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  They're just sort of the similar sized gametes that'll come together and create offspring.

• 22:04Chris Williamson?

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

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Uh, there's like mainly, there's a lot of plants that have that, like some fungus. You know, I don't know, there's some sea organisms that have sort of this type of, yeah, I'm sure there's many I'm missing. I don't focus too much on the isogamic species because 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, when you're looking at a population is the, the individuals that are creating the small gametes, whatever it is, you know, sperm, if you're a tree, it's, you know, you're making pollen or something. Those are considered the males and the females are the ones that are producing the large gametes that are basically stationary.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  But then there gets to the point where, uh, when you want to actually assign or record the sex of individual organisms, that we come up with this, you know, 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 a sexy individual bodies, you sort of look at what their primary sex organs, you know, their gonads, what are they, what's the developmental trajectory they've taken? Is it, have they developed to organize around producing sperm or organize around producing ova? You know, are these basically, are they testes or is it ovarian tissue?

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Is what kind of at base comes down to. 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 more upper body strength and our jaws become more chiseled, all that 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 feminine looking males, that's sort of how they're trying to quantify sex, even though that's that's not what sex is at all. And then

• 24:22Speaker 00

  you you asked about gender. I don't really have a definition of gender. There's there's like five out there. And I just 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. But there's some people that have definitions of gender that, 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 associate women with

• 25:04Speaker 00

  being more submissive or more caring for offspring, that type of thing, and males more aggressive and dominant and that type of stuff. There's the idea of like gender identity and it's sort of like its 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. 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 a hundred of them and you can just, you know, pick one off of it, you're, you know, a neutro or whatever, you know, bigender, pangender, gender fluid, like there's all those two.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Which is just sort of like the Pokemon approach to gender is I usually like kind of describe it. 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.

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

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

• 26:25Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 26:50Chris Williamson?

  What's intersex? That's a, is that another sex?

• 26:54Speaker 00

  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

• 27:07Speaker 00

  your internal sex organs and external appearance. So you can have certain individuals say that have uh, like complete androgen and sensitivity syndrome, where their, their cells don't respond to testosterone at all. Like they don't, they don't receive signals to develop based on the presence of testosterone. And also when 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. 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,

• 27:51Speaker 00

  their body hasn't, 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. But it's not a third sex, because if you look at the definition of sex, it's basically the organization around 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 variations of body types, but there aren't, you know, there isn't like a third gamete that is is out there to be a third sex, even like a hermaphrodite, even like a simultaneous hermaphrodite, if you have an individual that can produce birth both sperm or ova,

• 28:34Speaker 00

  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

• 28:42Chris Williamson?

  Still not a third thing, yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're not like, I tend to use like colors. You can have like, if you have like red golf balls and green golf balls, you know, and you have 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, you can, you can mix them, but that's not what like a hermaphrodite is. They're like both at the same time. So, yeah, there's, there's some nuances there. But a lot of the, some people on both sides do, they just sort of throw the nuance out the window and they don't want to sort of get in the details of what they're actually talking about.

• 29:21Chris Williamson?

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

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, so when they say that, if they say gender is a social construct, it's usually that the radical feminist view that sort of, there are these societal expectations and norms that we build up socially 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 bullied by their friends to some degree or other, maybe not their close friends, but might get bullied for being like a sissy or something 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

• 30:11Speaker 00

  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.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  There's also a biological component where males are on average more likely to behave in a certain way that conforms to masculinity or femininity, but the social construct is sort of like the other societal roles that we ascribe to these to these different sexes. It's 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 can need to be talked about. 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

• 31:11Speaker 00

  differ and they're all involved in just trying to blur boundaries between anything. So we can't make any statements about average group differences and things like that. So there's there's more nuanced and more messy ways to approach these questions.

• 31:27Chris Williamson?

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

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the main difference is some people are being maybe intentionally trying to obfuscate things and not offer clarity. They're only trying to blur things. And then people like like me and others are trying to just, you know, saying 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 between groups according to some sort of, you know, their sex or whatever it might be.

• 32:04Chris Williamson?

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

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Oh, it's almost entirely a semantic game. Like when I if I'm talking to people who are activists, they'll they'll use the words that are, you know, they'll say gender or something like, I'll make a statement like biological sex is in the spectrum and then they'll. They'll counter with, you know, like, no gender is a spectrum. I 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. And that's just, yeah,

• 32:51Speaker 00

  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. Maybe I'm being a little, little harsh on them. But this is what it seems like, at least from my perspective.

• 33:09Chris Williamson?

  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. And even this year, you saw 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. And it seems a little bit like there's a common thread, perhaps, between that and what's going on here.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  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, there's, there's 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, if you were to say that, like, yeah, developmental error has taken place, they'll then switch it around and say like, oh, 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.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  At some point of development, you know, if someone if someone developed and they were 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 a hundred percent human. 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 to to then go on and make you, you know, trying to smear your reputation or something.

• 35:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and I suppose that gender dysphoria in its most extreme 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. I suppose that, again, that degree of the degrees of freedom for interpretation just further muddy the water.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it becomes an error when you move beyond just saying that, like, I sort of feel like I've been born of 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, because if you're if you're just going to 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

• 36:31Speaker 00

  that tethers us to reality to some degree. So, yeah, that's kind of what I'm concerned about, you know, if we can reject something is is as clear cut in most cases as biological sexes, if that can be

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Just dismissed, you know, en masse by a whole bunch of people. There's just nothing else that, what other things are we going to start just saying aren't real? Like age, like 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 that I'm willing to die on because there's, it's just, there's no, there's no stopping if it gets 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 I'll just keep saying it, I suppose.

• 37:18Chris Williamson?

  It's that.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  It's working out okay for me.

• 37:20Chris Williamson?

  It's that classic Ben Shapiro video, right? Why aren't you 60? Why aren't you 60?

• 37:25Speaker 00

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

• 37:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know, man, like 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.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  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. I've sat that sort of postmodern 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,

• 38:29Speaker 00

  you know, when I was an undergrad, it was, it was just, just kind of starting there. And I, 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 I would just be like, 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, then I went to grad school and, uh, got my doctorate then, at the time I was started looking for jobs. 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 superseding the science in many ways.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  And 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 for writing some essays in Quillette. It's just amazing.

• 39:26Chris Williamson?

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

• 39:35Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, public

• 39:37Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  I mean, it was someone who'd co-authored papers with me, and you know, I'm always fine with people who want to disagree with me, even publicly, like I don't, if they're, I don't like take offense to that, it doesn't make, doesn't make me feel like I'm being attacked, because I just think ideas need to be attacked, as long as they're not saying bad things about me directly, I'm fine with it. And this was a, this was a close friend, and he just said, yeah, I'm gonna, I need to write something, because, and the scariest part is that, you know, 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,

• 40:29Speaker 00

  we had co-authored papers, 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 fire that's going on, 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. And so I think that's just such an exemplary of the, the mutual policing going on, that he felt that he had this pressure to condemn my views, that before he was just silent on the issue, he didn't, he didn't even care.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  But it was, yeah, it was the, the social coercion of his colleagues, where he felt he needed to, you know, do a, a public denunciation, which, that's the scariest part, because that's, it's so true, at least in my experience, that is the, the cultural aspect of academia, and the, the way that, you know, you need, you need to be

• 41:31Speaker 00

  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 just by not wanting to speak with you, 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 scariest part.

• 41:54Chris Williamson?

  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 at the gate, we'll be debating about what gender they are whilst we all get Kalashnikov'd 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 bioweapons, or engineered pandemics, or natural pandemics. Like, if there was ever going to be a year that should have realigned our values, was 2020 not the one?

• 42:36Chris Williamson?

  And why hasn't it brought us, why hasn't it brought our values back in line?

• 42:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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 whatever species you're talking about. But we just need to have a more sober conversation where we don't leave some explanations that are just off the table before the conversation even begins. You can't talk about, like, things like any sort of cultural inertia that any sort

• 43:25Speaker 00

  of 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. You know, if you're looking at police violence or whatever, like if there were papers that were published in prestigious journals like PNAS that, you know, looked at police shootings and didn't find any correlation between this, you know, I think it was actual people who were like armed who were shot by police. They didn't find like a racial component to that. And Heather McDonald, who comments a lot about race

• 44:10Speaker 00

  issues, she had some articles in the Wall Street Journal about this, highlighting this research, and it was one of the biggest data sets. 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 racist and, you know, but again, the data, there was, there was nothing wrong. You usually only retract papers if there's a flaw, if the interpretation's off. And usually it's just not even a retract, 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.

• 44:53Chris Williamson?

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

• 44:58Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. They just, they just memory hold this paper. It doesn't even exist anymore. You can't cite it. And if you try to cite it, people will be like, oh, you're a crackpot citing this paper that's been, you know, this, it's been retracted. And it's like, well, no, there's nothing wrong with the data. And Heather McDonald even said like, you know, they've retracted it because I accurately portrayed their research in the Wall Street Journal. And that's basically what happens. So we're going to get this situation now where the only research people are willing to publish is that that's 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, the environment is so salted and scorched earth that there's just, it's not a friendly environment to actually.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  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 then it starts to move into press and you see some increasingly bizarre headlines that for,

• 46:29Chris Williamson?

  if you were to give to your mum 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. Like, is it still a growing concern? Because to me, like, it's still not something I've ever encountered I R L personally. And up until that point, it's almost a little bit like people lapping in a different, in a different world to me. But I'm sure that it's going to come and arrive at our door, this denial of facts.

• 47:11Chris Williamson?

  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. Like, what's going on?

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it definitely arrived at my door, 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, as a biologist, was because I wanted to work, you know, at the frontier of biological research and I thought, what better environment to?

• 47:48Speaker 00

  What could be more intellectually stimulating than talking about certain issues and being only driven by facts 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 had said that same mantra that you referred to is sort of, you know, when you get into the real world, you know, you're not going to have these. Like I used to say something like, you know, the real world doesn't have trigger warnings. And it turns out it does now. Like, there are, 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. So now we don't have to brave the elements.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  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. And it's definitely getting way worse. Like it's, yeah, we're nowhere near the peak of this, I don't think. I could, it's just exploded in 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, I can't, it's hard to apply to university now where I don't 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 that I just really don't agree with.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  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 are used in ways that, you know, the non-standard 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 others, 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's the chances that someone has a public Facebook and they have a MAGA hat on or something that could be the best, you know, a microbiologist in the world? They're not going to get hired by Berkeley. Like, they're just not going to get a job there.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  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, once you get this feedback loop where you get more and more skewed towards one political orientation. It's just, it's just going to go to fixation. It's going to be a hundred percent. 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.

• 50:40Chris Williamson?

  It's like some sort of brutal Malthusian trap.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Uh, uh, um, do you think post-modernism is slowing human progress? Oh, yeah. It just has to because 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, and your basis is post-modernism, it's 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.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  There's just nothing, you can't, you can't go anywhere. There's no traction to go direction.

• 51:28Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Oh, I think so. I mean, just on almost every issue that we care most about, the, the main, uh, I guess the ideology de jour is, is rooted in, in post-modernism, like almost entirely. You look at just sort of the critical race theory approach to how they want to 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 going to 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.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 52:32Chris Williamson?

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

• 52:43Speaker 00

  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 they were to reject it.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  So, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's sort of has a wedge everywhere, but some places it's going to be a lot harder to, to drive it through because at some point with engineering, you're, the bridge needs to stand, you know, like there needs, the, the fields where there's going to 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 going to be hard, if not impossible, to really completely take over. Um, I mean, maybe I say that now, but who knows?

• 54:11Chris Williamson?

  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. Has the last five to 10 years been a stress test for all academic disciplines in that way?

• 54:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, some more than others for sure. Um, the stressed, 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 in my field ecology, for instance, we're dealing with super complex variables. We're looking at the way populations are interacting with their environment and the environment's changed and the populations are changing genetically over time and complex behaviors. You can make some broad, you know, measurements about how these, how, how things are happening between groups or something, but it's not a very precise science. It's, it requires long-term studies to get like anything that's gonna be super

• 55:13Speaker 00

  robust. 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 an engineer who-

• 55:29Chris Williamson?

  The rocket doesn't explode, the-

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Rocket doesn't explode, like an exploding rocket and a collapsing bridge. Those are just immediate ways to know, like, we really messed up here. But some other fields, you're not gonna know you've messed up until, you know, a while or never, depending on how you get, you know, if you have certain narratives that are getting published more and you're not accepting other things to get published that could potentially debunk these things. There might be, you know, there's these cryptic, you know, crumbling bridges that are in there waiting to be discovered, but they just might not be discovered. And so, yeah, so that's, that's the, that's the stress test is like, is the, do you have an objective test of failure that's gonna be so readily apparent to everybody? And a

• 56:15Speaker 00

  lot of fields just don't have that. It's much more nuanced and requires a lot more rigor.

• 56:22Chris Williamson?

  I guess as well, in fields that are based on interpretation, when you think about what a lot of literature is, what a lot of philosophy is, it's abstract thought, it's thinking about thinking, it's interpreting, interpreting past passages and ideas. And by its very nature, that level of abstraction adds slippage into the system where people can slide nefarious ideas.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, any of those fields, we, where they're just thinking about thinking. I mean, once you, once you go down a pathway, like, there's no corrective mechanism to get back on the trail. You're just gonna be walking out in the woods forever and ever. So- Yeah, you you you need to have some tether to reality. There needs to be some sort of external check. You need to have some, uh, what is it? The, uh, the theory of knowledge where it's it's, uh, it's it's based on feedback from from nature, basically. You have to have some way of being falsified, some way of some outcome where you could say, oh, yeah, we're clearly wrong on that because we didn't expect that outcome, or we predicted this outcome and that's not what we got.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, you need to be have some way to test alternative hypotheses and you just don't get that in some fields of philosophy, especially those that are based on, you know, the the postmodern thing where you're just narratives is like the foundation of it all.

• 57:54Chris Williamson?

  As an evolutionary biologist, do you find it hilarious or interesting that this, to me, seems like a massive status game? That everybody is just status signaling left, right and center, status signaling that they're not status signaling, tearing down other people who are. That that must be fascinating to you.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  It really is. Yeah. I mean, there was a paper, I might I might butcher the interpretation of it, but it was like, it was an evolutionary psychology paper that was talking about how it was like an evolutionary psychological explanation for the reason why certain ideas are being suppressed. Like it just, it fitted the entire like suppression of ideas within a framework of evolutionary psychology and how it's just sort of like these tribal

• 58:43Speaker 00

  mentalities that are going going at one another. And it's, you know, basically predicted like this is what we would expect if evolutionary psychology was true. We'd have these certain groups that are trying to suppress these ideas and signal in these certain ways. Uh, you you get to the smallest little things too, like, you know, pronoun usage or something that's in your bio or in your signature of your email. And these are like, you know, you you don't need to be aware. Of what those are doing like at a ultimate level

• 59:14Speaker 00

  for it to be actually influenced by some evolutionary force. So like people who have the pronouns, they might, they might tell themselves that these, I have these pronunciations because it's a nice thing. It's creating an inclusive environment or something like that for certain minorities or something. But what these turn into and what the real function I think of these things are is, is well, it turns into a sort of like this in-group signaling where you see other people, sort of like someone who wears a cross or something on their, on their, on their shirt. Like you, you can identify these individuals who share a wide range of your beliefs and you know, they're in the in-group. But then, once this becomes more expansive and more and more people are using this and almost every email I get from a university professor has them in their bios and

• 59:58Speaker 00

  on their Twitter profile, it's less of like identifying the in-group with given that everyone now knows that pronouns and 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 a way to identify like this out-group. And 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 easy they're just defended super hard, like if they're challenged to any degree. So you have this imbalance of

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  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 were getting in almost every area of, of political discourse nowadays.

• 1:00:51Chris Williamson?

  Have you read Scott Alexander's blog post, "I can tolerate anything except the out-group"?

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  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, because every time I've read his, his stuff, they're just incredibly thoughtful.

• 1:01:07Chris Williamson?

  He's phenomenal, man. So 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

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:01:14Chris Williamson?

  awesome. And it just identifies how much fear.

• 1:01:19Chris Williamson?

  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 early this year, it's shown me just how easily swayed 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 don't even understand how your genes are manipulating your emotions, 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

• 1:02:03Chris Williamson?

  them and a social media with a couple of billion people on it, consuming the world's news in real time, 24 hours a day. It doesn't surprise me that we're in a mess in 2020. It really doesn't. And my fear, which I wish, 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 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

• 1:02:47Chris Williamson?

  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, 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.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know, I've been surprised that during this recent election cycle, we didn't see more deep fakes, 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 deep fake 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, was it a motorhome or something, or a bus?

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  In the future, they could, we could, they could make those videos just from scratch, you know, just with actors and just deep fake it all the way. I mean, I'm shocked we didn't see them now, because I've seen some deep fakes 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.

• 1:04:22Chris Williamson?

  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 to happen.

• 1:04:49Chris Williamson?

  And in 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 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. But it's like, it's like going backwards.

• 1:05:21Chris Williamson?

  It's like going backwards at twice the speed somehow, like going backwards and up in the air at the same time and just getting dropped out of an aeroplane. Like the, uh, the deep fake 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?

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  So. I don't think so.

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:06:29Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Chris Williamson?

  Fuck man, like I, 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.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:48Chris Williamson?

  Let's get back to what truth is. Let's use 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.

• 1:07:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's just the tool that ultimately needs to have, as you mentioned, like the good inputs to actually have it result in good outcomes. So. Yeah, you can, you can use it for any end that you want to, want to, want to enact, you know, there's a lot of people that are probably wishing to bring the whole thing down. So yeah.

• 1:07:23Chris Williamson?

  How apocalyptic, what an apocalyptic way to finish a podcast. But dude, you know, I really do think that it's important that we understand this. People can only arm themselves with correct knowledge of exactly how these messages are being promulgated. And no matter what particular stance you have, I think that being able to talk, it's a trite to say it now, like, you know, everybody's shouting and no one's listening, but it's trite because it's so obvious. Um, but yeah, man, what's coming up for Quillette? Let's leave the, the listeners on a brighter note. What have you guys got coming up at Quillette soon that's going to be cool?

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  You know, there's certain things I can't talk about too much.

• 1:08:07Chris Williamson?

  Commercial confident, bloody commercial confidentiality, doing this again.

• 1:08:11Speaker 00

  I will say that there is a, a book that's going to be announced very, very soon. Um, that's all I'm going to say.

• 1:08:21Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you cliff.

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  We're going to get angry.

• 1:08:23Chris Williamson?

  Cliffhanging sod, Colin. All right. So if people want to check you out at swipe right on Twitter, where else can they go?

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  Uh, I have an Instagram that's swipe right fitness and that's right is my last name, W R I G H T. Uh, yeah, so I do have a whole fitness thing I do as well. Uh, I'm going to try to do a little bit more too, uh, of that.

• 1:08:46Chris Williamson?

  I didn't know that was you. So I was going to tag you earlier on today and I was like, there's no way, there's no way that Colin's got swipe right fitness when he's got swipe right on his, on his normal Twitter. I was like, that can't be him. I won't bother tagging him. So, but it is.

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I was trying to get swipe right, but someone, someone took it, but they haven't used that account in years and they won't respond to my messages to try to take it from them.

• 1:09:08Chris Williamson?

  The worst kind of human, the worst kind of human. Look, dude, thank you so much. Everything that we've spoken about will be linked below. I'll also put the main Quillette article that you sent me earlier on in case people want to check that out. So go and have a read below. Colin, thank you, man. I appreciate it.

• 1:09:23Speaker 00

  Been awesome. Thank you so much.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

• 1:09:43Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:09:55Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:10:03Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.