The Lie That Underwrites Western Civilization： ＂Truth＂ Was Invented in 1953
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Summary
In this episode, we discuss one of the most systemic, fundamental misunderstandings of how our world currently works, which is the belief that the system that we have for determining what is true is an old system, that it is a vetted system, and that it s a system that hasn t been in constant failure since it came out in the 19th century. In fact, since then, scientific research has only declined, and has been getting worse and worse every year.
Transcript
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hello simone i'm excited to be here with you today today we are going to be discussing something that
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i have brought up in episodes in the past but it is one of the largest and most systemic
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fundamental misunderstandings of how our world currently works that is common in society which is
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how truth is determined and the belief that the system that we have for determining what is true
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is an old system that it is a vetted system or even that it is a system that hasn't been in
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constant failure since it came out it's a system that itself says it is not working and here we are
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going to be talking about the academic system as we understand it right now when somebody's like
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well trust the science they want you they're trying to get you to believe that what they're saying is
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like trust the scientific method trust the thing that gave us cars and railroads and industrialization
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and computers but what they're actually saying is trust is this very specific peer
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review system and academic bureaucracy for sorting information and i want to point out to them that
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that very same bureaucracy they're asking us to trust they're the the height or one of the the most
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respected magazines is nature right nature did a landmark study in 2023 on this very issue and we'll get to
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it in a bit but basically they show that since this system has been in place scientific research has only
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declined it has just been getting worse and worse and worse every year by what measure by its ability
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to be replicated by by its ability disruptiveness is what they were looking at so like genuinely new
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rather than iterative ideas oh okay okay like germ theory and antibiotics well you also see uh you know
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research like the the cost of research uh so basically the research you get per dollars has been going
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down dramatically we'll go over this system basically was put in place in the 1950s and in pharma new drugs
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per r d dollar halved every nine years since the 1950s so it's it's it's accumulatedly getting worse
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the further we go from the inception of this system that's horrible and the other funny yeah no
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halving every nine years i mean i'm sure a lot of that's bureaucratic morass i bet ai is really going
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to disrupt that but also to a certain extent for example in the united states you almost are prevented
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from getting a new drug introduced without spending a certain ridiculous amount of money because of the
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regulatory morass that you're bogged down by with the fda i don't think this is regulatory issues it
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correlates way more with the implementation of citation the citation system i guess i'll call it
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really go over how that system works the various variants of that system that have come and people
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might be surprised how new uh so the system that is used most frequently today to judge professors
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this is the h index and the g index okay these systems were invented in 2005 and 2006 respectively oh my
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gosh so around the time you and i were graduating from high school like yeah that's when the system
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that underlies pretty much all of current academia's hierarchy was invented right because you actually
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mentioned these these systems to me only this today and i knew that citations mattered to researchers
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i didn't know that they were tied to their ability to get tenure and i looked it up and you're right
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and i was shocked that that was one of the most important factors and it wasn't just like
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organizational fit and the extent to which you contribute to the advancement of your field and to
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which you are able to get for example grant money to your department for the university i figured that
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would matter more even though it's not necessarily like the best thing in the world you know at
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least it's more practical what i find so ironic is you know there's that like redditor who's like
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more science as you know tomorrow is peace day and nobody is as excited for the big celebration as i am
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i'm a super scientist my father was a super scientist his father was a super scientist and
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his father was no wait no i think he was a milliner either way i'm just not impressed with your tricks
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you know and then i'll have like a doctor membrane here and the irony is is the ones who say that the
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ones who worship what they consider quote-unquote science are actually worshiping something of an
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inversion of what was practiced by the type of historic scientists that would have shouted for
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science before pulling a lever or something like that right like the the frankenstein scientists
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yeah actually hate that form of science the you know biohacker lab in your house so you know
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and it was those people who gave us so many of the medical and otherwise interventions like light
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bulbs like epidurals that make such a huge difference in our lives i've was epidurals recently explain how
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those are invented yeah i mean i asked the anesthesiologist giving me my spinal when i was
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getting my latest c-section like hey how are these invented always attempting to learn simone pathologically
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here i love it well you'd rather when they're sticking a giant needle like into your spinal cord
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not think about the fact that they're doing that so yeah i'm asking other questions but they they
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like checked and they looked it up and they're like oh yeah i remember it was these two guys and they're
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like um they were experimenting with with different things and they they just decided to experiment on
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each other using like you know giant huge gauge needles because at the time they didn't have smaller
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needles but i think what it was was they tried injecting just cocaine directly to their spinal
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cords because what could go wrong but they were just they did it on themselves it wasn't like i have
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a theory about this we're going to test this on lab vice for like the next 10 years they're like hey man
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what would happen if we just put this directly into our spinal you want to try sticking this in our
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spine with giant needles oh that is that's the type of thing that they're imagining when they say
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four sons yeah it wasn't yeah it was hold my beer like that's the kind of like attitude and that is
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it's funny the same type of redditor who will say that unironically on reddit is the same person who
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freaks out at us for doing like polygenic selection or like germline gene editing on humans they're like
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how dare you edit human dna that that's that could do something new that would be dangerous have you
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sought approval from the authority before flipping that switch you know and i i i want to get into
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when they say for science what they actually are worshiping is a provably failed and when i say
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provably failed i mean the system itself has said this has failed this is not working on our own
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metrics yeah a provably failed bureaucracy not actual science or the scientific message so let's
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get in here so the system that we call the the academic bureaucracy right now that basically and
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the reason i say like this determines truth within the urban monoculture this really does when they're
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like what is true and what is not true this is the system they're looking to right it is that their
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final point of this is the fundamental way reality is structured yeah it came together specifically post
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1945 fueled by massive government funding specifically the usgi bill and the national science foundation in 1950
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enrollment exploded for 1.7 million people in 1940 to 7.9 million in 1970 creating quote-unquote big science
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with more papers necessitating rigorous evaluation peer-reviewed standardized slowly nature in 1967
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becoming universal by 1970s to handle volume and ensure quality amid funding scrutiny so the
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concept of you hear like well you know what to peer-reviewed whatever say this concept wasn't
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even made universal to the 1970s it wasn't fully adopted by nature until 1967 we are dealing with a
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fundamentally new system here so how was the publication of something deemed like or selected
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before there was peer review then yeah we'll get into that in a second but basically just the editors of
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publications like looked at it like looked at it and they were like this looks good okay this looks
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interesting and then it's not peer review it was it was just editor review which makes sense yes but
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people were like well that's you know it's it's it's not fair enough it's not basically it's not
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bureaucratic enough they needed to add a bureaucratic layer into how papers were chosen and approved
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instead of handling it like it was actually so let's talk about why having it be editor approved
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is much better than having it be peer reviewed when you had it be editor reviewed you were dealing with
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a few things scientific publications back then made their money based on how many people were paying for
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them right that is not true anymore right you don't get money based on how many people view your article
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you don't get money like in the article like the big journals themselves do not really get money
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based on their quality they get money based on the universities that have them in their pipeline and
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so much of that is sort of pre-bureaucratic setup that is kind of irrelevant so the people who are
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making judgments about whether or not a paper got improved actually don't really care outside of
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being karens they have no real skin in the game to say but if you were an editor back in the day you
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needed to actually care is this going to destroy the reputation of my journal yeah if it is and i'm
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not going to publish it is this something that people are going to actually care about and want
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to buy and want to read is this useful to people like tactically useful such that if they don't have
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a subscription now will they bother to pay for one because they know they need this yeah yeah and that
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was a very good way of handling things yes then the bureaucrats come in and are like well we need to
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systematize this we need more layers we need more standardization now this isn't what caused all of
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the the breakdown but i'm giving you an example of one layer and you have to remember here is this
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bureaucratization happened at every single layer at the process that puts out what we today call truth
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okay yeah from funding to ethics boards to promotion to even just getting your phd
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and and by the way you want to can you guess when even the concept of the academic citation was formalized
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was it recent yeah it was eugene garfield's 1955 proposal which led to the science citation index which
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was put out in 1964 it wasn't even proposed until 1955 enabling enabling impact tracking by the 1960s
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and 1970s citations became proxies for quality complementing peer review institutional research
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offices emerge association for institutional research in 1965 to analyze metrics for hiring
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slash promotions tenure density peaked at around 75 percent in the 1960s but is now only at around 15
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percent within universities so and this was made so the universities couldn't arbitrarily fire someone
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based on them publishing something that was politically unpalatable however it basically
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does not serve that purpose at all anymore tenure doesn't really mean that much important anymore like
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it used to and the whole system's pretty corrupted but to continue here and i know you're like well ai
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will remove some of this bureaucracy no ai is just replacing it in the same way that we have seen
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citizen journalists before i go further we have our piece on like how how i don't even like the term
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citizen journalists influencers i'm just going to call them influencers have created a system for
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delivering news to the end reader or listener that is strictly more factual better and less bias than
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the journalistic system was at its very height by uh creating a very interesting sort of layered approach
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and i pointed out in that episode the way that that works is basically at the bottom layer
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you have the autists who nobody really they don't have large follower ships but they just produce
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tons and tons and tons of detailed content that's very clearly not about putting out a particular agenda
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or message it's just like i am obsessed with military drones so i have analyzed every military drone footage
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from x ukraine or i am obsessed with like military operations so i completely analyzed like s expect of
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the raid on maduro and like how this satellite equipment could have gone and then at the next
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layer you have people like us who come through and synthesize that into something that is entertaining
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and actually have a large viewership and then on the layer atop of us you have your you know your asthma
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golds and your leaflets and your next well next does a little bit more original research and from there
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they they then synthesize lots of people like us who are in turn synthesizing the layer below us
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into like a cohesive full like this is what's happening in the space in the space of research
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we are seeing a similar thing happen before i go further with this in the space of research we are
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seeing because i'm seeing this in the people who are like actually interested in advancing our knowledge
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of what is true and this is why we have ayla on frequently like we might not agree with all of her
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lifestyle choices but she is a phenomenal researcher and people who criticize her research
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i think show their like naivete in terms of how actual research is happening when they're like ayla's
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samples you know i'll point out she'll get like a million respondents to something and they'll be
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like well her sample is biased and i'm like if you look at the way that she normalizes her data
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what you will see is in the average sample used by peer-reviewed sex research like the the fact that
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you would say that about her samples and not look at her normalization work shows that either you
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don't understand how any of this works or you don't understand how corrupted the mainstream publications
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are at this point yeah thinking around this if you look at how sex research is working right now
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right the people who are actually interested in moving it forwards and understanding how
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why does sex research matter it matters a lot in understanding the parts of the human brain and
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some reason why i find it so fascinating and may output deleterious or non-beneficial impulses and the
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better we can categorize these impulses and understand what is actually causing them and how they actually
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function at like a baser level we can not only better understand ourselves and better control
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ourselves and better sublimate those animalistic instincts obviously that's not why she does the
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research but that's why i find it so interesting but we can also understand wider trends in society
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why do trans people keep doing mass shootings like there was just another one i remember when we did
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the episode on that so many people were like this isn't a phenomenon and there have been two
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trans mass shootings since that and it was so interesting to see the news completely disappear
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that doesn't happen the moment like i looked at the day that this happened and it was 10 people died in
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this one so it's a really big one too so i double checked and nine people died due to the one recent
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trans mass shooter and in columbine it was 13 people died with two mass shooters so on a per shooter level
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this trans individual was way above the columbine numbers and yet the news media immediately blacked
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this out and this happened incredibly recently too this was the one that happened in february 10th
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2026 the fact that columbine was a major civilizational issue for about a decade and this immediately gets
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memory hold shows us how much the media manipulates the conversation on this topic as we have said
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with the statistics we're looking at these days somebody admitting that they're trans it's a bit
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like saying nice to meet you listen if you ever need anybody murdered please give me a call you're
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giving him a card i have no code of ethics i will kill anyone anywhere children animals old people
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doesn't matter i just love killing you and it was not anywhere on the charge report that day
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um it was not on some of the front pages of like major newspapers right and i was like this is wild
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like the extent to which the moment disappears but this is what i mean like this is why people
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don't trust these sources of evidence like an academic could not publish a piece investigating
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why are trans people more likely to commit mass shootings that is a very interesting question to be
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asking right um now the the the the point i'm making here is if you look at the people actually
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interested in like this arousal impulse has evolved everything like this you have a community that is
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actively working on this it is actively pushing things forward and the funny thing is it's a
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community that's doing it is very much like one of those historic science communities right like
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they all know each other they all talk like for example diana fleichman and jeffrey miller and
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simone and malcolm and ayla may seem like we have pretty different ideological backgrounds and
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everything like that and yet you know they've all been on our podcast right like we all chat regularly
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and we all are aware of each other because of our social community as competent researchers so i don't
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even really bother to look at the academic fields that much i know the people who are actually producing
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the new stuff right and i know and this is i'm looking at like genetic science right like i'm
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like oh what's the latest genetic science there's like five or six names i can go to right was like
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the leading one i'm sorry i know you're not allowed to say this is emil kirkagard he produces really good
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all of his sub stack posts on the human genetic science because i know that he's pushing things
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forwards in ways and i i don't mean like germling gene editing here i'm talking about like genetic
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correlations and the evolution of human genes like the great study that he and a few other guys did
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recently and this is interesting because there are some other researchers involved in this that aren't
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as famous as him but they know that everybody knows oh well if this guy's involved in it basically
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almost like he's a researcher running one of those old journals and he's putting his name to something
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right a great study that they did where they looked at the full genome sequence of corpses
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in rome over time oh yeah at the the genetic markers for the probability that this person
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was in a modern context like what what level of academic achievement would they have like how far
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would they go was their schooling basically this is what is used often when people say intelligence
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markers and genetics and what they found was that it did actually collapse at the height of the roman
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empire there does appear to have been a high amount of dysgenic selection that contributed to the fall of
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the roman empire and even today the people in rome born have a lower probability of having these these
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markers associated with high intelligence than people at the height of the roman empire that is how long
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the dysgenic impact lasted now it has rebounded to some extent it just hasn't gotten back up to the
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height of the empire and now they're in a state of dysgenic class again so it's never going to unless
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they get involved in like genetic engineering tech or genetic selection tech but the point being
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is that's a really cool study right and that could have gone to mainstream academic sources but the
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people involved in it actively chose not to because they knew the people pushing ahead meaningful
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genetic variation research in human populations are going to read emil's stuff and no here's me
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endorsing everything emil's ever said i'm just saying that in terms of like where is the cutting edge
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who is verifying the cutting edge research it's him and no it's not just him with that crew it's also
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a cluster of people that all know each other you know and they publish things and they all get
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canceled together it is just something right and we are already seeing this shift to what is very
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transparently and obviously going to replace the diversity system and if you're like this doesn't
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work for potentially more advanced or more nuanced fields that is also just wrong we do investing and
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obviously it's been leaked that we do investing in the human dream really in gene editing space right like
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and like we know most of the companies in the space and the companies that are in the space
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know most of the other companies in the space they know basically everyone in the space and they all
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are aware of each other's research they're aware of how each other's cutting edge methods work
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and they talk together uh basically how humanity ended up solving the problem of the explosion of
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scientists going into the academic system is it turned out that the vast majority of those quote
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unquote scientists were not scientists like the scientists of the old day they were just
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bureaucrats and were largely irrelevant from the perspective of advancing the field of science
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and then when it came to people were actually interested in advancing particular subdomains of science
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the ways that we handled the explosion of population and smart people because there's more people
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doing that today than there was you know during the you know victorian period or whatever right where you
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had the the science societies and everything is these people still form their cliques they still
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all hang out and talk together but the cliques are based around scientific subjects which has been
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actually very interesting to be part of multiple of those cliques because today you guys look at us
00:23:15.680
and you hear malcolm and simone have done x or y in terms of research i think a lot of our audience
00:23:24.000
would expect that to be on demographics or evolutionary slash cultural anthropology that is that is where
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i think our audience expects right they're like okay or they're like maybe if it's not that it's on like
00:23:39.760
speculative theology right uh when in reality there was a period early in our podcast as well so like
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even after we had started popping off as pronatalists we were still like a lower known as pronatalist and
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certainly our anthropological work wasn't known as well yet in our theological work we hadn't even gotten
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into it yet but when we would be asked to go on a podcast or go speak i always needed to ask them
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before we went up and spoke as i'd say i think we're famous about half the time it would be
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pronatalism but about the other half the time and our audience may be surprised about this because we
00:24:18.240
do not cover it on our show as much they'd be like oh i'm really fascinated by your work on governance
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models and crypto and we'd occasionally i'd say like 10 of the time we get something in sex research
00:24:29.840
or human evolution but about 10 of the time just to add some others we get something in the space of
00:24:36.640
positive psychology or or psychology more broadly because we did a lot of stuff in that space oh i
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would say entrepreneurship as a couple was a really big thing to start yeah yeah and they'd have us on
00:24:47.040
for oh you're you married couple entrepreneurship invented the search people don't know that like
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our audience doesn't know that we invented the married search fund model which is now taught at
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harvard and sanford business schools like we've had periods of our life where we changed the way
00:25:01.120
multiple fields work but the the point i'm making here is that these fields are fairly isolated and
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they're isolated from each other to the extent where you will get some overlap like the evolutionary
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uh arousal research field is aware of like the human variation research field and we we talk and
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socialize occasionally but we are still two very different social circles and these two fields are actually
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completely unaware usually of what's going on in the crypto field and that's why because our our models
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in the crypto space the guy who invented quadratic voting glenn wild who i was thinking of said that we
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had i think it was one of the best or the best books on governance models he'd ever read and this is
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important because quadratic voting is used in a lot of crypto governance it's sort of like one of the
00:25:52.240
foundations of the way crypto governance structures work now and because of that a lot of our ideas
00:25:58.640
because he liked our book and the ideas in our book a lot of the ideas in our book ended up being taken
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our book on governance the fragments guide to governance number one wall street journal bestseller
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by the way at one point ended up being taken and used in various parts of other crypto projects
00:26:13.520
and these these crypto people when they are looking for governance theory and people who are like on the
00:26:19.680
cutting edge of governance theory they do not go out and say what are the academics saying right now
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what they do is they go to their leaders in crypto governance theory and they go what projects do
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these people affirm like what other thinkers do these people like i'm going to go to these other thinkers now
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but to continue before i go further here but basically what i'm saying is what's replacing academia
00:26:45.680
is already underway academia is just a rotting behemoth flailing around at this point and slapping at
00:26:52.640
things right and it's hilarious that people will cite like but what does the behemoth think and i'm like
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you mean that thing that has like its skin falling off and is like barely able to lift its hand anymore
00:27:05.920
but to give you an idea of how bad things are here the paper in nature that i mentioned before
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was called papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time a landmark 2023 nature study
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analyzed 45 a million papers 1945 to 2010 and 3.9 million patents 1976 to 2010 using the cd index
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a metric of how much new work disrupts prior citations it found disruptiveness declined by over
00:27:35.120
90 90 percent for papers and 78 for patents no papers increasingly building incrementally rather
00:27:44.400
than veering in new directions similarly a 2021 technological forecasting and social change analysis showed
00:27:52.240
the quote-unquote flow of ideas new concepts entering scientific canon declined since the 1970s and research
00:27:59.920
productivity output per researcher since the 1950s patent quality and nobel prize worthy breakthroughs have
00:28:07.040
also waned with fields like physics and medicine showing no upward trend at all post the 1950s
00:28:18.240
ouch and then remember i mentioned that doubling every nine years and you're not even mentioning like
00:28:24.400
the number of patents now that are filed just by patent trolls that are actively stifling innovation
00:28:31.920
it makes me so mad patents basically just don't make sense anymore as far as i am concerned
00:28:38.400
yep and so if we go further here we're like are there people fighting against this before i get into the
00:28:44.160
nuances of how this stuff works because i don't know everybody cares about that so i try to keep the more
00:28:48.800
boring stuff towards the end of the video and the more interesting stuff towards the beginning of the video
00:28:52.480
and there is a group that is fighting against this called dora and it has actually gained a significant
00:28:58.160
amount of traction and specifically what they push for is be completely transparent about evaluation
00:29:07.360
criteria in terms of like hiring and stuff like that explicitly state that the scientific content of
00:29:12.560
the work is what matters more than the journal or some metrics value all research output data software
00:29:18.080
etc and use qualitative impact measures e.g influenced by policy clinical practice public
00:29:23.040
understanding this is for funders and institutions and then for publishers they say stop promoting gif
00:29:28.400
we'll get to in a second as the main selling point that's basically how many people cite you
00:29:32.880
provide rich article level metrics and encourage proper authorship and contribution statements
00:29:38.720
make reference lists freely usable and reduce artificial limits on references so primary literature gets proper
00:29:44.480
credit for metrics providers this is calvade scopist etc they say be fully transparent about data and
00:29:51.440
methods allow unstructured reuse of the data and clearly define and punish metric violation for individual
00:29:57.920
researchers when you sit in committees judge the science not the journals cite primary papers and not
00:30:02.880
just reviews use diverse article level metrics in your cv or statements actively challenge bad assessment
00:30:10.400
practices when you see them i don't really think that this is a meaningful thing that they're pushing
00:30:16.000
here i think that the truce is is that you cannot reform academia because academia is full of
00:30:22.720
bureaucrats and bureaucrats are not interested in doing actual science the the renegades who are doing actual
00:30:29.680
science are already basically living off of patrons in the way that they did historically you look at
00:30:37.280
somebody like like say if you're looking at like the human differences genetic differences crowd one of our
00:30:41.440
good friends in that space is razeem khan who's been on the podcast great guy really good researcher
00:30:46.640
he used to work for the new york times right but then he i i find this hilarious razeem khan
00:30:56.720
became accused of being a white a white supremacist i guess because he was going through just genetic data
00:31:04.320
the reason why this is hilarious is if you cannot tell from his name he is not remotely a white person
00:31:10.240
but they decided that he he went into genetics data that you're not supposed to talk about
00:31:15.360
and he got in trouble for that and now he makes his money off of substack right like off of off of
00:31:21.680
actual patrons right and that's the world that we live in now right like we have and what's funny is
00:31:29.360
you know he's not making as much money he's not getting as much money as these big organizations
00:31:33.920
and if i was president i would start cutting off when people are like oh we need this r d funding oh
00:31:41.120
we need this we need systems that are not corrupt like darpa that can basically only go to crony
00:31:46.400
insiders we need systems that are not corrupt like the existing university funding system and that fund
00:31:52.320
you know academics quote-unquote academics bureaucrats really and build systems that can fund the sort of
00:31:59.440
truly independent and meaningful research that everyone who is an actually active player knows
00:32:05.920
is happening right and it's also funny to me how you know people like you and me can go out there and
00:32:13.440
have field changing theories which we've had multiple of on this show like my favorite if you want to go into
00:32:23.920
our most controversial theory it is our one civilization hypothesis knew you were going to
00:32:29.440
say that but we had another one recently that i really liked where i was like i'm disappointed i
00:32:33.200
can't like click a button and be like everybody needs to know this is like an actually pretty big
00:32:38.240
theory in terms of changing how things work this is the episode on coup frequency by religious or
00:32:45.120
ethnic background and how that changes which countries end up winning wars because it changes
00:32:52.080
how competent you can allow your generals to be and how much power you can allow them to have
00:32:56.160
in terms of unilateral thinking and all the way down the military you can allow much more autonomy
00:33:01.920
the more you can trust a group to not coup i don't know you come up with so many different concepts
00:33:08.400
i have no idea about this one oh i didn't post i guess but i remember being like yeah this is
00:33:14.640
another big one where it's just like it changes the way an entire field is structured and it's weird
00:33:21.280
that we're able to have these but it's mostly because people in these other fields just aren't
00:33:25.280
thinking anymore and actually you see this a great example if you're like well where else do you see
00:33:29.280
this do you just see this in the sciences it's like no you see this in the in the history as well
00:33:34.160
so like if you're a history nerd these days like you know who the people who are defining rethinking
00:33:41.680
how we see history are this generation is people like rubyard and sam obergia right and and and
00:33:47.840
that's who you're watching that's who you care about right you don't care about what's being
00:33:52.880
published by ex-bureaucrat guy right like if you're an actual history nerd that's who you can because
00:33:57.680
you're like oh this is this is where we're getting new novel theories we should we should go on one
00:34:02.080
of ruby yard show and push our one civilization hypothesis so you go how much he pushes back on
00:34:07.120
that because that that'd be a fun one well one thing i think in terms of returning to how things
00:34:11.920
used to be what's interesting about how truth used to be determined or where people turned
00:34:19.040
to various sources for truth is the most common on a local level was a tribal elder or following
00:34:28.080
tradition and the only reason why that worked was basically if the truth that someone believed
00:34:36.160
didn't work back then and it mattered you would die so you know a tribal elder was kind of a good bet
1.00
00:34:43.760
because they've lived so far they've survived meaning that you know if if you do the solution that they
00:34:50.560
did when you cut your leg or when you get sick you're more likely to survive and all of the elders who
00:34:57.200
did a dumb thing when they felt sick or got injured probably didn't survive so they wouldn't be elders
00:35:03.520
but that worked and also the same thing happened with traditions right like if if a village or a tribe
00:35:08.880
or some other a town a culture whatever had a tradition that ultimately was not true doesn't
00:35:16.400
matter they'd die then it wouldn't be a tradition anymore so like traditions existed because they correlated
00:35:21.120
with survival and it's interesting how after a while things became bureaucratized and there were
00:35:28.560
dances done around them i mean obviously people turned to academic or really i mean originally
00:35:35.680
church institutions for higher truths we'll say you know stuff that people got through revelations
00:35:41.200
but it was more about these big picture questions where if you were wrong it didn't really mean that you
00:35:46.640
weren't going to survive and i find it very interesting how the original universities how academia in its
00:35:54.640
og sense was religious it was a place where priests studied that is what oxford and cambridge were for
00:36:02.960
it was for the clergy they were governed literally by different laws that only affected the clergy
00:36:09.120
and it is interesting how over time that bureaucratic body took over this scientific method as it was
00:36:20.160
innovated that at first the scientific method was a very or and just in in general empirical knowledge
00:36:27.440
was very grassroots or renegade thing something that went alongside passed down traditions or that was
00:36:33.840
just done by weird autists in society is like as an enthusiasts thing and if if it worked out for the
00:36:41.040
enthusiast experimenters who tried these things out then they would become traditions they would become
00:36:45.760
things that tribal elders passed down it was kind of like the autists were the like yolo people in a
00:36:52.160
society and then the tribal elders were the ones who solidified whatever worked of the yolo class that was
00:36:58.640
disposable and then i don't know there was this sort of vague period where academia became increasingly
00:37:07.920
secular and this is a really important point if you haven't studied the history of knowledge or education
00:37:13.920
is that academia and the church used to be synonymous it was the same system this was true for most of the
00:37:22.800
the history of what today we call science where you would go if you were a precocious young person
00:37:29.680
was to study at one of the colleges that trained seminaries i mean that's what oxford and cambridge
00:37:35.120
and saint andrews and all of that were for originally and i mean obviously there was almost no scientific
00:37:39.840
progress under the catholics when they controlled these institutions but as soon as protestantism came
00:37:44.160
around this is when we had our greatest leap forwards in terms of scientific progress and i feel like
00:37:50.320
that's a key turning point when our method for generating truth that was the beginning of the
00:37:56.480
end like if we talk about demographic collapse really being downstream of the industrial revolution
00:38:02.400
and the atomization of family family jobs you know like basically taking everything that used to be
00:38:08.240
produced in the household and having it being made piecemeal outside by a larger economy i think the
00:38:13.440
thing that really predated the crisis of generation of truth was when we took that which happened within
00:38:21.600
the village and with you know renegade experimenters and passing down of knowledge through survival and and
00:38:27.600
had it be done by a bureaucratic institution instead yeah well i mean basically we we ran the communist
00:38:35.760
experiment on the entire field of science and you know communism has never worked economically but we're
00:38:42.640
like well we'll make it work in terms of information and it demonstrably didn't work by the way i
00:38:47.920
remember the other new theory that i was kind of shocked when i was going over it that no one had had
00:38:52.480
before which is pointing out first why islamic forces hadn't won a war of conquest in a long time
00:39:02.080
and then i pointed out the secondary point to this theory which is that catholic forces actually hadn't won
00:39:09.440
many wars of conquest in in a very long time and that uh this appears to be due to the frequency of coups
00:39:17.120
which then it's like why do protestants have coups so rarely and why do catholics and muslims have
00:39:22.160
coups so frequently and you know i posited a theory there but what was wild to me wasn't even just like my
00:39:28.400
theory there it was that no mainstream academic researcher had even noticed that this was a phenomenon
00:39:36.400
and yet it's it it's like it's not like a like a p-value of like one thing it was like there were
00:39:43.360
like three protestant coups like successful coups in all of human history and for catholics it was like
0.68
00:39:49.680
one a generation in most countries and it's like how yeah it's kind of a big deal yeah interesting
00:39:58.720
question and and i realized that the reason is because academics just were not interested in
00:40:05.840
asking questions that could shake things up they were interested in iteratively asking something
00:40:11.040
right like oh well x has already been established so like let's find out you know how did they cook
00:40:18.240
bread back then or what were roman supply lines like or you know what does was this formation really like
00:40:25.200
you know all of that stuff matters but you know there's bigger picture things you could be getting
00:40:30.000
wrong that are really important to establish the two final things i wanted to go over here jif i talked
00:40:36.320
about a bit or jif it's basically just how many citations does a publication get and publications like
00:40:43.440
display this to show how good they are then you have the h index which was the thing i mentioned that is
00:40:49.120
the fairly recent 2005 thing um the h index a researcher's papers are ranked in descending order
00:40:55.280
by the number of citations they each have received the h index is the highest number h where the
00:41:00.400
researcher has at least h papers that can each be cited at least h times while the remaining papers have
00:41:06.720
fewer h citations each for example if a scientist has an h index of 20 it means they have 20 papers cited
00:41:13.360
at least 20 times each by the first cited paper has fewer than 21 citations this metrics balances
00:41:20.560
quantity number of publications and quality the impact via citations avoiding extremes like somebody
00:41:28.880
who had a bone paper that was cited just a ton of times or somebody who was putting out just tons and
00:41:36.000
tons of papers and this is actually very easy to exploit through things like citation farming and stuff
00:41:42.320
like that and then somebody created a counter system actually just a year later called the g index but
00:41:48.400
i don't think it's gotten as big as the h index um that attempts to solve this with a bit of math that
00:41:54.960
you don't care about but it still runs into many of the same problems anyway simone final thoughts here
00:42:03.360
i'm glad that we're returning to truth in its more natural format and i find it notable how much
00:42:09.360
this rhymes with journalism but i think they're both related journalism is just the truth about what's
00:42:15.120
happening in the world and this is just the truth about anything from medical science to mathematics
00:42:22.880
physics etc what i find very interesting about the way this has been happening is that the people who
00:42:31.840
are in these sort of knowledge circles where real science and real academics is still happening
00:42:37.520
it's not just that they all like know each other and are friendly and it's actually a really chill
00:42:41.920
scene if you end up working your way into it but the ways that they're employed is so diverse
00:42:49.280
a number of them for example still work in traditional academics i've taken individual
00:42:54.080
like robin hansen who's been on the show great great thinker and you know he is a traditional academic
00:43:02.000
still he still works at a professor at a university yet he is sort of like brought into these fields
00:43:08.880
as like oh obviously you belong in these fields because he is generating the type of work he does
00:43:14.320
as a traditional academic actually does revolutionize multiple domains of knowledge through
00:43:20.480
new ways of looking at things you know like the grabby aliens hypothesis for example that's not his job
00:43:26.640
aliens that has nothing to do but he comes up with this hypothesis that everyone who is interested
00:43:33.680
like super interested in aliens is immediately like oh that's a really good way to look at things like
00:43:40.160
let's dig into that right and and i think that it's really heartening for me to see and i think that
00:43:45.760
people who are like how do we save academics the reason they want to save academics is because
00:43:50.720
academics cares about them and the real people moving forward to our human knowledge and innovation
00:43:57.040
don't care about them yeah anyway love you to decimum i love you too welcome i'm glad things are
00:44:06.720
i think getting better yeah i mean how do you have you noticed this in terms of the way that you look at
00:44:13.360
information update yourself with new information about what's true what's not true yes absolutely but you
00:44:19.200
know we're in the same household so of course well i mean you used to like keep track of all the new
00:44:26.000
studies that came out and i think you just stopped doing that i didn't stop doing that because i don't
00:44:30.720
trust them i still think that peer-reviewed academic research is broadly speaking better than
00:44:41.040
anecdotal information that i have from life experience or from someone else's sample of one or two
00:44:45.840
you know it is more rigorously done than that you don't end up in a peer-reviewed publication because
00:44:52.240
you were super super shoddy in your work and as much as there is a lot of academic fraud there's also
00:45:00.400
a lot of people making stuff up online so you have to choose the lesser of various evils yeah but i i'd point
00:45:08.160
out that the difference in terms of information like the quality of the information between let's talk
00:45:14.720
about the the field of like arousal and sex because that's one of the ones i i'm very familiar with
00:45:20.160
of your average peer-reviewed piece versus anecdotal evidence those two things are closer to each other
00:45:26.880
than the average peer-reviewed pieces to an aila substack post no that is 100 true but also sex
00:45:33.360
research has a long especially in the academic field a long history of just being abysmal so i don't think
00:45:41.520
that's a fair i i'm referring mostly to medical science and i think that despite so many headwinds
00:45:50.000
in that space when it comes to academic complications that generally i i turn to it to try to find fairly
00:45:56.720
reliable information because the information of renegade researchers while very interesting
00:46:05.680
is has its own series of problems not just small sample sizes and not just
00:46:15.680
maybe less rigorous methods and less in in most cases transparency but also a lot of hidden agendas
00:46:23.920
and that is you know yeah i i know the agendas in academia at least you just talked about a lot of
00:46:30.720
them and that it at least is helpful when when you trust something it's not because you know it's
00:46:35.920
going to give you good results it's because you can predict it and better understand its incentive
00:46:40.000
structures you can't something you cannot trust something when you cannot accurately and consistently
00:46:45.120
predict it or understand its incentive structures all right have a bye
00:46:52.720
it occurred to me that it's going to be really fun when i'm sure we can probably figure out how to do
00:47:02.400
it now but our kids are still a little bit too young for it but to have prediction markets just for
00:47:07.440
household things like you know in how many months is you know so and so gonna reach because we have
00:47:13.680
enough kids to get a real prediction market going yeah and then also like you know what are the odds that
00:47:20.560
mom or just from the bathroom after using the toilet unclogging gun covered in excrement it will be
0.89
00:47:27.040
very fun and it will also get our kids thinking more in a like bayesian mindset instead of just
00:47:33.360
yes and no and i think or i don't think and i want that i want our kids to think in probabilities
00:47:51.040
so well an interesting concept i saw recently but i'm a little disappointed we didn't do
00:47:57.360
an episode like i didn't focus more on on the episode about how news is dying
00:48:02.800
and as we was actually going over this is when people are like oh that's that's horrible pr or this
00:48:08.560
is a pr disaster they're often talking about news media and news media is largely irrelevant like
00:48:15.200
they're talking about a karen hate mob and then who cares about their opinion published by sort of
00:48:22.000
that class of people and nobody cares nobody cares and that that uh organization or mindset has not made
00:48:31.040
successful boycotts or anything like that in a long time if anything they're they're boycotts more
00:48:35.920
likely to just blow up like it's it's both not an audience as we've seen was like the game about
00:48:42.560
stealing african artifacts that just came out and had like zero players but it's also this is it's not
00:48:49.760
an audience that you can court in any meaningful context nor is it an audience that will abandon
00:48:55.440
your products in any meaningful context and this is coming out i think it's one of those things that
00:49:02.400
yeah is dead and people have not realized it's dead similar to publishing or a variety of other
00:49:10.240
domains like advertising you know people i think even to a certain degree continue to advertise when
00:49:18.240
95 of advertising doesn't reduce sorry does not produce an roi here's a so people freak out so much
00:49:28.000
when they get tied to us or there's some sort of negative mention in like a mainstream media outlet
00:49:32.560
like the new york times or something and in that episode we went over how few people actually watch
00:49:37.280
those or read that these days when in reality it's a bigger impact to them if one of their friends
00:49:44.560
facebook's about something because more of their friends are going to see that than if it's in the
00:49:49.200
new york times more people in their extended social network are going to see that if somebody writes
00:49:53.680
an angry linkedin post about that that's such a good point yeah especially if it's an influencer in
00:49:59.040
their network even if it's literally the head of your homeowners association but if that's your
00:50:06.000
world that's really all you should care about good point yeah influencer in your network
00:50:39.600
octavian you gotta be careful when you attack them you're getting bigger okay you can't jump on them
0.94
00:50:44.720
okay octavian did you understand me why because you could accidentally really hurt them
00:50:51.440
okay i'll hurt the subscribers you'll hurt the subscribers yeah no only hurt the non-subscribers
00:51:04.480
is this where you're training to battle the non-subscribers the people who don't like and
00:52:00.940
Okay, so I just got to look behind me and you won't attack me, you promise?