Based Camp - The Lie That Underwrites Western Civilization：＂Truth＂ Was Invented in 1953

00:00:00.000 hello simone i'm excited to be here with you today today we are going to be discussing something that

00:00:04.720 i have brought up in episodes in the past but it is one of the largest and most systemic

00:00:10.960 fundamental misunderstandings of how our world currently works that is common in society which is

00:00:21.760 how truth is determined and the belief that the system that we have for determining what is true

00:00:30.400 is an old system that it is a vetted system or even that it is a system that hasn't been in

00:00:37.760 constant failure since it came out it's a system that itself says it is not working and here we are

00:00:46.640 going to be talking about the academic system as we understand it right now when somebody's like

00:00:51.680 well trust the science they want you they're trying to get you to believe that what they're saying is

00:00:58.240 like trust the scientific method trust the thing that gave us cars and railroads and industrialization

00:01:04.960 and computers but what they're actually saying is trust is this very specific peer

00:01:14.480 review system and academic bureaucracy for sorting information and i want to point out to them that

00:01:21.040 that very same bureaucracy they're asking us to trust they're the the height or one of the the most

00:01:28.640 respected magazines is nature right nature did a landmark study in 2023 on this very issue and we'll get to

00:01:38.240 it in a bit but basically they show that since this system has been in place scientific research has only

00:01:47.360 declined it has just been getting worse and worse and worse every year by what measure by its ability

00:01:55.280 to be replicated by by its ability disruptiveness is what they were looking at so like genuinely new

00:02:01.920 rather than iterative ideas oh okay okay like germ theory and antibiotics well you also see uh you know

00:02:10.560 research like the the cost of research uh so basically the research you get per dollars has been going

00:02:15.920 down dramatically we'll go over this system basically was put in place in the 1950s and in pharma new drugs

00:02:22.480 per r d dollar halved every nine years since the 1950s so it's it's it's accumulatedly getting worse

00:02:33.520 the further we go from the inception of this system that's horrible and the other funny yeah no

00:02:40.720 halving every nine years i mean i'm sure a lot of that's bureaucratic morass i bet ai is really going

00:02:47.520 to disrupt that but also to a certain extent for example in the united states you almost are prevented

00:02:55.600 from getting a new drug introduced without spending a certain ridiculous amount of money because of the

00:03:01.040 regulatory morass that you're bogged down by with the fda i don't think this is regulatory issues it

00:03:06.560 correlates way more with the implementation of citation the citation system i guess i'll call it

00:03:12.720 really go over how that system works the various variants of that system that have come and people

00:03:18.640 might be surprised how new uh so the system that is used most frequently today to judge professors

00:03:27.280 this is the h index and the g index okay these systems were invented in 2005 and 2006 respectively oh my

00:03:40.080 gosh so around the time you and i were graduating from high school like yeah that's when the system

00:03:46.960 that underlies pretty much all of current academia's hierarchy was invented right because you actually

00:03:53.680 mentioned these these systems to me only this today and i knew that citations mattered to researchers

00:04:01.040 i didn't know that they were tied to their ability to get tenure and i looked it up and you're right

00:04:06.160 and i was shocked that that was one of the most important factors and it wasn't just like

00:04:11.280 organizational fit and the extent to which you contribute to the advancement of your field and to

00:04:15.840 which you are able to get for example grant money to your department for the university i figured that

00:04:21.440 would matter more even though it's not necessarily like the best thing in the world you know at

00:04:26.640 least it's more practical what i find so ironic is you know there's that like redditor who's like

00:04:33.040 more science as you know tomorrow is peace day and nobody is as excited for the big celebration as i am

00:04:41.520 i am not scientifically possible

00:04:44.400 i'm a super scientist my father was a super scientist his father was a super scientist and

00:04:52.400 his father was no wait no i think he was a milliner either way i'm just not impressed with your tricks

00:04:57.440 you know and then i'll have like a doctor membrane here and the irony is is the ones who say that the

00:05:04.080 ones who worship what they consider quote-unquote science are actually worshiping something of an

00:05:11.040 inversion of what was practiced by the type of historic scientists that would have shouted for

00:05:17.600 science before pulling a lever or something like that right like the the frankenstein scientists

00:05:30.560 yeah actually hate that form of science the you know biohacker lab in your house so you know

00:05:37.840 and it was those people who gave us so many of the medical and otherwise interventions like light

00:05:45.440 bulbs like epidurals that make such a huge difference in our lives i've was epidurals recently explain how

00:05:53.120 those are invented yeah i mean i asked the anesthesiologist giving me my spinal when i was

00:05:58.960 getting my latest c-section like hey how are these invented always attempting to learn simone pathologically

00:06:05.040 here i love it well you'd rather when they're sticking a giant needle like into your spinal cord

00:06:10.320 not think about the fact that they're doing that so yeah i'm asking other questions but they they

00:06:16.880 like checked and they looked it up and they're like oh yeah i remember it was these two guys and they're

00:06:21.040 like um they were experimenting with with different things and they they just decided to experiment on

00:06:26.560 each other using like you know giant huge gauge needles because at the time they didn't have smaller

00:06:31.520 needles but i think what it was was they tried injecting just cocaine directly to their spinal

00:06:36.080 cords because what could go wrong but they were just they did it on themselves it wasn't like i have

00:06:41.920 a theory about this we're going to test this on lab vice for like the next 10 years they're like hey man

00:06:48.320 what would happen if we just put this directly into our spinal you want to try sticking this in our

00:06:53.600 spine with giant needles oh that is that's the type of thing that they're imagining when they say

00:07:01.360 four sons yeah it wasn't yeah it was hold my beer like that's the kind of like attitude and that is

00:07:07.680 it's funny the same type of redditor who will say that unironically on reddit is the same person who

00:07:13.840 freaks out at us for doing like polygenic selection or like germline gene editing on humans they're like

00:07:20.080 how dare you edit human dna that that's that could do something new that would be dangerous have you

00:07:28.720 sought approval from the authority before flipping that switch you know and i i i want to get into

00:07:36.960 when they say for science what they actually are worshiping is a provably failed and when i say

00:07:44.240 provably failed i mean the system itself has said this has failed this is not working on our own

00:07:50.720 metrics yeah a provably failed bureaucracy not actual science or the scientific message so let's

00:07:58.080 get in here so the system that we call the the academic bureaucracy right now that basically and

00:08:04.000 the reason i say like this determines truth within the urban monoculture this really does when they're

00:08:08.720 like what is true and what is not true this is the system they're looking to right it is that their

00:08:15.440 final point of this is the fundamental way reality is structured yeah it came together specifically post

00:08:23.440 1945 fueled by massive government funding specifically the usgi bill and the national science foundation in 1950

00:08:32.880 enrollment exploded for 1.7 million people in 1940 to 7.9 million in 1970 creating quote-unquote big science

00:08:43.680 with more papers necessitating rigorous evaluation peer-reviewed standardized slowly nature in 1967

00:08:54.320 becoming universal by 1970s to handle volume and ensure quality amid funding scrutiny so the

00:09:02.320 concept of you hear like well you know what to peer-reviewed whatever say this concept wasn't

00:09:08.080 even made universal to the 1970s it wasn't fully adopted by nature until 1967 we are dealing with a

00:09:15.840 fundamentally new system here so how was the publication of something deemed like or selected

00:09:22.640 before there was peer review then yeah we'll get into that in a second but basically just the editors of

00:09:28.000 publications like looked at it like looked at it and they were like this looks good okay this looks

00:09:33.200 interesting and then it's not peer review it was it was just editor review which makes sense yes but

00:09:39.600 people were like well that's you know it's it's it's not fair enough it's not basically it's not

00:09:45.440 bureaucratic enough they needed to add a bureaucratic layer into how papers were chosen and approved

00:09:52.240 instead of handling it like it was actually so let's talk about why having it be editor approved

00:09:57.360 is much better than having it be peer reviewed when you had it be editor reviewed you were dealing with

00:10:02.640 a few things scientific publications back then made their money based on how many people were paying for

00:10:08.240 them right that is not true anymore right you don't get money based on how many people view your article

00:10:15.040 you don't get money like in the article like the big journals themselves do not really get money

00:10:21.040 based on their quality they get money based on the universities that have them in their pipeline and

00:10:26.320 so much of that is sort of pre-bureaucratic setup that is kind of irrelevant so the people who are

00:10:31.280 making judgments about whether or not a paper got improved actually don't really care outside of

00:10:36.880 being karens they have no real skin in the game to say but if you were an editor back in the day you

00:10:43.520 needed to actually care is this going to destroy the reputation of my journal yeah if it is and i'm

00:10:49.200 not going to publish it is this something that people are going to actually care about and want

00:10:52.640 to buy and want to read is this useful to people like tactically useful such that if they don't have

00:10:58.640 a subscription now will they bother to pay for one because they know they need this yeah yeah and that

00:11:05.360 was a very good way of handling things yes then the bureaucrats come in and are like well we need to

00:11:11.120 systematize this we need more layers we need more standardization now this isn't what caused all of

00:11:18.720 the the breakdown but i'm giving you an example of one layer and you have to remember here is this

00:11:23.600 bureaucratization happened at every single layer at the process that puts out what we today call truth

00:11:32.720 okay yeah from funding to ethics boards to promotion to even just getting your phd

00:11:41.840 and and by the way you want to can you guess when even the concept of the academic citation was formalized

00:11:50.480 was it recent yeah it was eugene garfield's 1955 proposal which led to the science citation index which

00:11:59.680 was put out in 1964 it wasn't even proposed until 1955 enabling enabling impact tracking by the 1960s

00:12:08.960 and 1970s citations became proxies for quality complementing peer review institutional research

00:12:15.280 offices emerge association for institutional research in 1965 to analyze metrics for hiring

00:12:21.120 slash promotions tenure density peaked at around 75 percent in the 1960s but is now only at around 15

00:12:28.400 percent within universities so and this was made so the universities couldn't arbitrarily fire someone

00:12:34.880 based on them publishing something that was politically unpalatable however it basically

00:12:40.000 does not serve that purpose at all anymore tenure doesn't really mean that much important anymore like

00:12:45.440 it used to and the whole system's pretty corrupted but to continue here and i know you're like well ai

00:12:49.760 will remove some of this bureaucracy no ai is just replacing it in the same way that we have seen

00:12:55.600 citizen journalists before i go further we have our piece on like how how i don't even like the term

00:13:01.280 citizen journalists influencers i'm just going to call them influencers have created a system for

00:13:06.320 delivering news to the end reader or listener that is strictly more factual better and less bias than

00:13:15.040 the journalistic system was at its very height by uh creating a very interesting sort of layered approach

00:13:23.120 and i pointed out in that episode the way that that works is basically at the bottom layer

00:13:27.520 you have the autists who nobody really they don't have large follower ships but they just produce 1.00

00:13:33.920 tons and tons and tons of detailed content that's very clearly not about putting out a particular agenda

00:13:40.480 or message it's just like i am obsessed with military drones so i have analyzed every military drone footage

00:13:47.600 from x ukraine or i am obsessed with like military operations so i completely analyzed like s expect of

00:13:55.280 the raid on maduro and like how this satellite equipment could have gone and then at the next

00:14:00.960 layer you have people like us who come through and synthesize that into something that is entertaining

00:14:06.560 and actually have a large viewership and then on the layer atop of us you have your you know your asthma

00:14:10.880 golds and your leaflets and your next well next does a little bit more original research and from there

00:14:17.280 they they then synthesize lots of people like us who are in turn synthesizing the layer below us

00:14:24.080 into like a cohesive full like this is what's happening in the space in the space of research

00:14:29.120 we are seeing a similar thing happen before i go further with this in the space of research we are

00:14:34.480 seeing because i'm seeing this in the people who are like actually interested in advancing our knowledge

00:14:38.880 of what is true and this is why we have ayla on frequently like we might not agree with all of her

00:14:43.680 lifestyle choices but she is a phenomenal researcher and people who criticize her research

00:14:51.360 i think show their like naivete in terms of how actual research is happening when they're like ayla's

00:14:58.960 samples you know i'll point out she'll get like a million respondents to something and they'll be

00:15:03.360 like well her sample is biased and i'm like if you look at the way that she normalizes her data

00:15:09.600 what you will see is in the average sample used by peer-reviewed sex research like the the fact that

00:15:19.600 you would say that about her samples and not look at her normalization work shows that either you

00:15:24.800 don't understand how any of this works or you don't understand how corrupted the mainstream publications

00:15:30.320 are at this point yeah thinking around this if you look at how sex research is working right now

00:15:36.080 right the people who are actually interested in moving it forwards and understanding how

00:15:41.120 why does sex research matter it matters a lot in understanding the parts of the human brain and

00:15:46.240 some reason why i find it so fascinating and may output deleterious or non-beneficial impulses and the

00:15:55.360 better we can categorize these impulses and understand what is actually causing them and how they actually

00:16:02.000 function at like a baser level we can not only better understand ourselves and better control

00:16:09.760 ourselves and better sublimate those animalistic instincts obviously that's not why she does the 1.00

00:16:14.800 research but that's why i find it so interesting but we can also understand wider trends in society

00:16:19.920 why do trans people keep doing mass shootings like there was just another one i remember when we did 0.99

00:16:23.920 the episode on that so many people were like this isn't a phenomenon and there have been two

00:16:29.040 trans mass shootings since that and it was so interesting to see the news completely disappear

00:16:33.920 that doesn't happen the moment like i looked at the day that this happened and it was 10 people died in

00:16:38.720 this one so it's a really big one too so i double checked and nine people died due to the one recent

00:16:45.040 trans mass shooter and in columbine it was 13 people died with two mass shooters so on a per shooter level

00:16:52.960 this trans individual was way above the columbine numbers and yet the news media immediately blacked

00:16:59.920 this out and this happened incredibly recently too this was the one that happened in february 10th

00:17:07.360 2026 the fact that columbine was a major civilizational issue for about a decade and this immediately gets

00:17:17.120 memory hold shows us how much the media manipulates the conversation on this topic as we have said

00:17:23.200 with the statistics we're looking at these days somebody admitting that they're trans it's a bit 1.00

00:17:27.360 like saying nice to meet you listen if you ever need anybody murdered please give me a call you're 0.99

00:17:32.080 giving him a card i have no code of ethics i will kill anyone anywhere children animals old people 0.99

00:17:38.240 doesn't matter i just love killing you and it was not anywhere on the charge report that day 0.98

00:17:42.800 um it was not on some of the front pages of like major newspapers right and i was like this is wild 0.93

00:17:48.960 like the extent to which the moment disappears but this is what i mean like this is why people

00:17:54.800 don't trust these sources of evidence like an academic could not publish a piece investigating

00:17:59.360 why are trans people more likely to commit mass shootings that is a very interesting question to be

00:18:04.080 asking right um now the the the the point i'm making here is if you look at the people actually

00:18:11.040 interested in like this arousal impulse has evolved everything like this you have a community that is

00:18:15.920 actively working on this it is actively pushing things forward and the funny thing is it's a

00:18:21.120 community that's doing it is very much like one of those historic science communities right like

00:18:26.880 they all know each other they all talk like for example diana fleichman and jeffrey miller and

00:18:34.480 simone and malcolm and ayla may seem like we have pretty different ideological backgrounds and

00:18:41.120 everything like that and yet you know they've all been on our podcast right like we all chat regularly

00:18:46.480 and we all are aware of each other because of our social community as competent researchers so i don't

00:18:54.400 even really bother to look at the academic fields that much i know the people who are actually producing

00:19:00.320 the new stuff right and i know and this is i'm looking at like genetic science right like i'm

00:19:06.320 like oh what's the latest genetic science there's like five or six names i can go to right was like

00:19:13.680 the leading one i'm sorry i know you're not allowed to say this is emil kirkagard he produces really good

00:19:22.480 all of his sub stack posts on the human genetic science because i know that he's pushing things

00:19:28.320 forwards in ways and i i don't mean like germling gene editing here i'm talking about like genetic

00:19:34.480 correlations and the evolution of human genes like the great study that he and a few other guys did

00:19:39.680 recently and this is interesting because there are some other researchers involved in this that aren't

00:19:43.040 as famous as him but they know that everybody knows oh well if this guy's involved in it basically

00:19:48.080 almost like he's a researcher running one of those old journals and he's putting his name to something

00:19:53.760 right a great study that they did where they looked at the full genome sequence of corpses

00:20:00.480 in rome over time oh yeah at the the genetic markers for the probability that this person

00:20:08.320 was in a modern context like what what level of academic achievement would they have like how far

00:20:13.600 would they go was their schooling basically this is what is used often when people say intelligence

00:20:18.000 markers and genetics and what they found was that it did actually collapse at the height of the roman

00:20:25.280 empire there does appear to have been a high amount of dysgenic selection that contributed to the fall of

00:20:30.880 the roman empire and even today the people in rome born have a lower probability of having these these

00:20:37.520 markers associated with high intelligence than people at the height of the roman empire that is how long

00:20:42.320 the dysgenic impact lasted now it has rebounded to some extent it just hasn't gotten back up to the

00:20:47.920 height of the empire and now they're in a state of dysgenic class again so it's never going to unless 1.00

00:20:52.320 they get involved in like genetic engineering tech or genetic selection tech but the point being

00:20:58.080 is that's a really cool study right and that could have gone to mainstream academic sources but the

00:21:04.800 people involved in it actively chose not to because they knew the people pushing ahead meaningful

00:21:10.320 genetic variation research in human populations are going to read emil's stuff and no here's me

00:21:17.760 endorsing everything emil's ever said i'm just saying that in terms of like where is the cutting edge

00:21:24.400 who is verifying the cutting edge research it's him and no it's not just him with that crew it's also

00:21:29.840 a cluster of people that all know each other you know and they publish things and they all get

00:21:35.440 canceled together it is just something right and we are already seeing this shift to what is very

00:21:46.000 transparently and obviously going to replace the diversity system and if you're like this doesn't 0.99

00:21:50.400 work for potentially more advanced or more nuanced fields that is also just wrong we do investing and

00:21:56.800 obviously it's been leaked that we do investing in the human dream really in gene editing space right like

00:22:01.120 and like we know most of the companies in the space and the companies that are in the space

00:22:07.120 know most of the other companies in the space they know basically everyone in the space and they all

00:22:11.760 are aware of each other's research they're aware of how each other's cutting edge methods work

00:22:17.040 and they talk together uh basically how humanity ended up solving the problem of the explosion of

00:22:23.520 scientists going into the academic system is it turned out that the vast majority of those quote

00:22:28.400 unquote scientists were not scientists like the scientists of the old day they were just

00:22:33.440 bureaucrats and were largely irrelevant from the perspective of advancing the field of science

00:22:38.240 and then when it came to people were actually interested in advancing particular subdomains of science

00:22:44.080 the ways that we handled the explosion of population and smart people because there's more people

00:22:48.880 doing that today than there was you know during the you know victorian period or whatever right where you

00:22:53.440 had the the science societies and everything is these people still form their cliques they still

00:23:01.280 all hang out and talk together but the cliques are based around scientific subjects which has been

00:23:08.080 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

00:23:32.880 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

00:23:47.920 even after we had started popping off as pronatalists we were still like a lower known as pronatalist and

00:23:53.680 certainly our anthropological work wasn't known as well yet in our theological work we hadn't even gotten

00:23:58.560 into it yet but when we would be asked to go on a podcast or go speak i always needed to ask them

00:24:07.120 before we went up and spoke as i'd say i think we're famous about half the time it would be

00:24:13.440 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

00:24:24.240 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

00:24:41.680 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

00:24:52.160 our audience doesn't know that we invented the married search fund model which is now taught at

00:24:55.920 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

00:25:07.360 they're isolated from each other to the extent where you will get some overlap like the evolutionary

00:25:13.760 uh arousal research field is aware of like the human variation research field and we we talk and

00:25:20.880 socialize occasionally but we are still two very different social circles and these two fields are actually

00:25:28.080 completely unaware usually of what's going on in the crypto field and that's why because our our models

00:25:36.480 in the crypto space the guy who invented quadratic voting glenn wild who i was thinking of said that we

00:25:41.760 had i think it was one of the best or the best books on governance models he'd ever read and this is

00:25:46.800 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

00:26:04.400 our book on governance the fragments guide to governance number one wall street journal bestseller

00:26:07.680 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

00:26:26.880 what they do is they go to their leaders in crypto governance theory and they go what projects do

00:26:33.440 these people affirm like what other thinkers do these people like i'm going to go to these other thinkers now

00:26:40.480 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

00:26:59.440 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

00:27:10.960 was called papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time a landmark 2023 nature study

00:27:16.800 analyzed 45 a million papers 1945 to 2010 and 3.9 million patents 1976 to 2010 using the cd index

00:27:27.600 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

00:47:41.200 i'm 90 percent sure whatever

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

00:50:13.200 exploration

00:50:17.760 here

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

00:51:08.240 subscribe

00:51:21.520 oh

00:51:31.520 Oh, okay, okay, okay.

00:52:00.940 Okay, so I just got to look behind me and you won't attack me, you promise?

00:52:02.940 Yeah, I promise.

00:52:14.940 Play with us, Daddy.

00:52:17.940 Daddy, play with us. 1.00

00:52:23.940 Oh, shh!

00:52:24.940 Fight us, Dad! 0.97

00:52:26.940 Fight us! 0.84

00:52:28.940 Fight us!

00:52:30.940 Fight us!

00:52:32.940 Fight us!

00:52:34.940 Fight us!

00:52:36.940 Fight us!

00:52:38.940 Fight us!

00:52:40.940 Fight us!

00:52:42.940 Fight us!

00:52:44.940 They can't find us.

00:52:46.940 Find us!

00:52:48.940 Find us!

00:52:50.940 I'll do it later, okay?

00:52:52.940 Oh, God, stop.

00:52:53.940 I gotta recharge my batteries.

00:52:54.940 No!

00:52:55.940 No!

00:52:56.940 No!

00:52:57.940 Gotta recharge my batteries.

00:52:58.940 Stop it! 0.99

00:53:00.940 Angelou, right over

00:53:02.940 Kid!

00:53:04.940 Wait!

00:53:06.940 Use us!

00:53:08.940 Get lucky!

00:53:10.940 See you next time.

00:53:11.940 Catch us out! 0.96

Based Camp - March 02, 2026

The Lie That Underwrites Western Civilization：＂Truth＂ Was Invented in 1953

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Based Camp - March 02, 2026

The Lie That Underwrites Western Civilization： ＂Truth＂ Was Invented in 1953

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

The Lie That Underwrites Western Civilization：＂Truth＂ Was Invented in 1953