#164 — Cause & Effect
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Summary
After two mass shootings in the past 24 hours, the conversation about mass shootings is generally so confused, and it s so frustrating to see people talking past one another for political or otherwise emotional reasons that, I don t know, I think I'll read the first part of this blog post, just to put my argument in view, in the clearest form, and then maybe say a few things relevant to the current moment. I think we ve all heard of Jared Loughner, James Holmes, and Adam Lanza. But there are at least four types of mass shooters, and they ve all had different motivations. What are they? And how do they differ from one another? And why do they seem to be so hard to identify? And what do they have in common with the other three types of shooters we ve been referring to as psychopaths and psychopaths? Sam Harris argues that psychopaths are not delusional, and are not malignant. They are not selfish, ruthless, and prone to violence. Given half a chance and half a reason, psychopaths will harm others for reasons that have nothing to do with culture, ideology, or other other other than other people. That is what psychopaths do, of course. And it is worth noting that these first-order reasons that trouble us, for a social variable, happens to be the head of a nation that has power and influence, and is so abhorrent about North Korea. of course, it s a mad child. The North Korean leader is simply mad, and we didn t create him. Again, making it too easy for him to get a nuclear arsenal. We didn t make it easy for himself to get nukes. But even here, there is very easy to make it. And we didn't create him, did we make him too easy to get them? making it easy? We didn't make him make it I didn t write a book about it? And it was too easy made it . a few years ago, I m making it ? from a book I wrote a piece on this about how to make a nuclear bomb and in the late 20th century, and I m writing a piece about making it . a book on making it hard for him , and he s building a nuclear bombs it s made possible so he s making it so easy for me to get this?
Transcript
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Well, I'm recording this intro in the immediate aftermath of now two mass shootings, the one
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in El Paso, and it appears there was one in Dayton a few hours ago.
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Needless to say, social media is now a cesspool.
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I guess there are a few things I could say about this.
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Actually, I wrote a piece on my blog when I used to blog rather than podcast about six
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years ago in response to some jihadist violence, and it really is the clearest articulation of
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The conversation about atrocities of this kind, mass shootings, is generally so confused and
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it's so frustrating to see people talking past one another for political or otherwise
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emotional reasons that, I don't know, I think I'll read the first part of this blog post
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just to put my argument in view in the clearest form and then maybe say a few things relevant
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A young man enters a public place, a school, a shopping mall, an airport, carrying a small
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Eventually, the police arrive, and after an excruciating delay as they marshal their forces, the young
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This has happened many times, and it will happen again.
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After each of these crimes, we lose our innocence, but then innocence magically returns.
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In the aftermath of horror, we seem to learn nothing of value.
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Indeed, many of us remain committed to denying the one thing of value that is there to be learned.
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After the Boston Marathon bombing, a journalist asked me,
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Why is it always angry young men who do these terrible things?
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She then sought to connect the behavior of the Tsarnaev brothers with that of Jared Loughner,
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Like many people, she believed that similar actions must have similar causes.
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But there are many sources of human evil, and if we want to protect ourselves and our societies,
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To that end, we should differentiate at least four types of violent actor.
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There may be one new subtype here that I'll add.
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Those who are suffering from some form of mental illness that causes them to think and act irrationally.
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Given access to guns or explosives, these people may harm others for reasons that wouldn't
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make a bit of sense even if they could be articulated.
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We may never hear Jared Loughner and James Holmes give accounts of their crimes.
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And we do not know what drove Adam Lanza to shoot his mother in the face and then slaughter
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But these mass murderers appear to be perfect examples of this first type.
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Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard shooter, is yet another.
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He repeatedly complained that he was being bombarded with, quote,
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Apparently, he thought that killing people at random would offer some relief.
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It seems there's little to understand about the experiences of these men or about their
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beliefs, except as symptoms of underlying mental illness.
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They are malignantly selfish, ruthless, and prone to violence.
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Our maximum security prisons are full of such men.
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Given half a chance and half a reason, psychopaths will harm others.
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It is worth observing that these first two types trouble us for reasons that have nothing
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to do with culture, ideology, or any other social variable.
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Of course, it matters if a psychotic or psychopath happens to be the head of a nation, or otherwise
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That is what is so abhorrent about North Korea.
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The child king is mad, or simply evil, and he's building a nuclear arsenal while millions
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But even here, there is very little to be learned about what we, the billions of relatively normal
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human beings struggling to maintain open societies, are doing wrong.
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We didn't create Jared Loeffner, apart from making it too easy for him to get a gun.
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And we didn't create Kim Jong-il, apart from making it too easy for him to get nuclear bombs.
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Given access to powerful weapons, such people will pose a threat no matter how rational,
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And I guess I would add another descriptor here.
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There are people, it seems, who fall into one of these two categories, who are living in
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an online culture of trolling now, where killing people and writing semi-bogus or entirely bogus
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manifestos, merely designed to confuse the media, is becoming a new phenomenon, right?
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These are people who are not moved by a sincere ideology.
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The behavior of trolling on websites like 4chan and 8chan has been exported to the real world
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in the form of mass murder designed as a troll.
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And to some degree, I believe the Christchurch shooting in the mosque had this form, right?
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It's still not entirely clear what happened there.
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So this is a kind of derangement that social media has introduced into our lives, where some
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people are willing to commit murder, and even mass murder, simply to enjoy the spectacle
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But in certain cases, the reasons for their behavior are not as they appear, right?
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And the media seems to get very confused about this.
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Normal men and women who harm others while believing that they're doing the right thing,
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or while neglecting to notice the consequences of their actions.
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These people are not insane, and they're not necessarily bad.
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They're just part of a system in which the negative consequences of ordinary selfishness
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Think of a soldier fighting in a war that may be ill-conceived or even unjust, but who
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has no rational alternative but to defend himself and his friends.
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Think of a boy growing up in the inner city who joins a gang for protection, only to perpetuate
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the very cycle of violence that makes gang membership a necessity.
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Or think of a CEO whose short-term interests motivate him to put innocent lives, the environment,
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However, they can easily create suffering for others that only a monster would bring about
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This is the true banality of evil, whatever Hannah Arendt actually meant by that phrase.
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But it is worth remembering that not all evil is banal.
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Four, normal men and women who are motivated by ideology to waste their lives, and the lives
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Some of these belief systems are merely political, or otherwise secular, in that their aim is to
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But the worst of these doctrines are religious, whether or not they are attached to a mainstream
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religion, in that they are informed by ideas about otherworldly rewards and punishments,
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Which are especially conducive to fanaticism and self-sacrifice.
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Of course, a person can inhabit more than one of the above categories at once, and thus
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There must be someone, somewhere, who is simultaneously psychotic and psychopathic, part of a corrupt
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system, and devoted to a dangerous transcendent cause.
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But many examples of each of these types exist in their pure forms.
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For instance, in recent weeks, a spate of especially appalling jihadist attacks occurred.
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One in a shopping mall in Nairobi, where non-Muslims appear to have been systematically tortured
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And one on a school playground in Baghdad, targeting children.
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Whenever I point out the role that religious ideology plays in atrocities of this kind,
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specifically the Islamic doctrines related to jihad, martyrdom, apostasy, and so forth,
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This is an increasingly dangerous misconception to have about human violence.
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Here is my pick for the most terrifying and depressing phenomenon on earth.
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A smart, capable, compassionate, and honorable person grows infected with ludicrous ideas
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about a holy book and a waiting paradise, and then becomes capable of murdering innocent
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people, even children, while in a state of religious ecstasy.
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Needless to say, this problem is rendered all the more terrifying and depressing because
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Again, I wrote this six years ago in the aftermath of some jihadist attacks, and now I'm reading
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it to you in the aftermath of some mass shootings in the United States, which attest at least
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to the problem of gun violence here, as well as to our failure to make it difficult for
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bad people, crazy people, dangerous people to get access to guns.
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And it might in fact attest to a rise of white supremacist violence.
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At the time I'm recording this, it's not yet clear what's what here.
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But whatever's true of El Paso and Dayton, two things are absolutely clear.
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One is that, again, we need some rational gun control in the U.S.
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My views on guns and gun control are hard enough to parse that they resist easy summary.
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You can listen to the podcast or read the associated essay titled, The Riddle of the Gun.
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Again, I can sound very pro-gun for part of that, but the punchline you should not lose
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sight of is that the regulations I recommend on guns in the U.S. are more stringent than
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So don't lose sight of that if you freak out over the other parts of that essay that sound
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like they were written by the NRA, an organization which I hope will one day be destroyed.
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The short form of this point is that we license people to drive cars, we license them even
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more stringently to fly airplanes, and I think getting a license to own a firearm should be
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It shouldn't be easy, and if you're mentally ill or prone to suicidal depression, it should
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But with 300 million guns already in existence in the U.S., this is a hard thing to bring
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about, not to mention the political religion around gun ownership enshrined in the Second
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Anyway, we need a conversation and research and political change around the epidemiology
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It's insane that we suffer this in the U.S. to this degree.
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It's also true that we should keep some perspective.
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In the hours where I think it's now 38 people have died in two mass shootings in the U.S., more
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people have died from ordinary shootings and by suicide and even by medical errors in hospitals,
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And finally, whatever is the case with these specific shooters, whether or not they're both
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people of the fourth type I describe in this essay, people who are motivated, in this case,
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by the lunatic ideology of white nationalism, and that may yet prove to be the case, it is obviously
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a bad thing that we have a president who utterly fails to be clearly and consistently opposed
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Yes, you can find him in the aftermath of Charlottesville saying one measly thing against
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But to say that he has been ambiguous on this issue is an understatement, right?
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To say that he has given comfort to racists is an understatement.
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He completely lacks a decent ethical political response to these trends.
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I don't actually think he's dog whistling in his statements to white supremacists.
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I think he's just an ordinary Archie Bunker style racist who doesn't care about these issues
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and doesn't want to alienate anyone in his base.
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And I think the people who are endlessly talking about dog whistles are doing much more harm
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I'm not saying the phenomenon doesn't exist, but generally racists just tell you what they
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And when they talk to other racists, they're explicit about their racism.
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And it really does matter that the left's allegations against Trump and his supporters are so poorly
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You know, when he tells Ilhan Omar to go back to where she came from.
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Again, I have no doubt that Donald Trump is actually a racist, but that's a bad example
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And to think that it's a dog whistle to neo-Nazis is just an act of leftist clairvoyance that strikes
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To remind you how crazy this has all become, there was a Washington Post opinion editor who
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claimed that Nancy Pelosi was dog whistling to racists when she criticized AOC and Ilhan
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The dog whistle meme is going to prove politically suicidal on the left.
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We have to be precise, even when attacking racists.
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So whatever turns out to be true in this case, whether either one of these mass shootings
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is a clear example of white nationalist terrorism, the problem with Trump is not that
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he is a clear supporter of white nationalist terrorism or even white nationalism.
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The problem is he is an obscenely amoral president who can't be counted upon to say anything
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beyond what he imagines is narrowly self-serving politically and financially.
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To use a great word which is now much overused, this is the U.S. presidency reduced to a grift.
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And it's awful, but it is not always precisely awful in the ways that are alleged on the left.
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We are guaranteed to have Trump for four more years if the Democrats can't get their house in order.
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So my political concern here is that this not get overplayed and overspun.
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It's totally possible that one of these shooters is mentally ill.
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And if this still gets talked about as white nationalist terrorism, rather than a symptom of mental illness,
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There are acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims that are not examples of jihadism, much less jihadist terrorism.
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Sometimes people really are violent for other reasons, as I sought to make clear in this essay.
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Okay, well, in this episode of the podcast, I speak with Judea Pearl.
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Judea is a professor of computer science at UCLA.
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He's the author of three highly influential scholarly books.
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He's also the winner of the Alan Turing Award, often considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for computer science.
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He's a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
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He's one of the first ten inductees into the IEEE Intelligence Systems Hall of Fame.
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He's received numerous awards and honorary doctorates, including the Rummelhart Prize,
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the Benjamin Franklin Medal, and the Lakatos Award at the London School of Economics.
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And he's also the founder and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation.
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And that is because he's the father of Daniel Pearl, who was the, I believe, the first journalist killed by al-Qaeda.
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At least the first that came to the attention of everyone in the aftermath of September 11th.
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Anyway, I mentioned this at the beginning because it would have been awkward to have just ignored it,
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but as you'll hear, I didn't have the heart to make Judea's experience there a topic of conversation.
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So I opened that door only to close it, and then we just go on to have a fairly highbrow conversation
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about how science has generally failed to understand causation.
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We talk about the different levels of causal inference, counterfactuals, the foundations of knowledge,
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the nature of possibility, the illusion of free will, artificial intelligence, the nature of consciousness, and other topics.
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Anyway, at one point, I get confused about what we're talking about.
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So it's a bit of a nerd fest, but I really enjoyed it.
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And as you'll hear, Judea is a dear person, and it was a great privilege to meet him.
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So now, without further delay, I bring you Judea Pearl.
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So we've been circling this podcast for quite some time.
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It's just taken a while to actually get together, and we have many areas of overlapping interest.
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So I'm looking forward to talking to you about your work.
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I was prepared, as I said, offline to just talk about your academic work, and we'll get deep into that.
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But given my background as a critic of Islam and as a warrior about the link between specific religious ideas and specific forms of violence,
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it's awkward for me to bring it up, but it's awkward for me to ignore it as well.
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Well, Danny Pearl was your son, who was, I believe, the first, at least first most visible person murdered, journalist murdered.
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So I just, I wanted to kind of just mention that at the outset, we can talk about it or not, if, as you like.
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Perhaps we should talk about this topic separately, so we can separate it to discussions.
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But I think for in terms of listeners' interest, some people have interest in the technical part, and some have in the ideological part.
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Okay, well, let's dive into your work and then see what happens, because your work is fascinating.
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So, how would you describe what your intellectual focus has been in your career?
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Recently, it has been the mathematization of cause and effect.
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Let's put it very, very concisely and precisely.
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But there's a direct connection to artificial intelligence that we'll talk about?
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Because if we want robots to behave like us, to communicate with us in our language, we have to equip them with the ability to communicate in terms of cause and effect that this is our language.
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If they act stupidly without knowing the difference between correlation and causation, they will not be able to supply us answers to questions that are burning for us.
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Even simple questions like, why did the milk spill?
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Because I pushed it or because I was irritated or things of that sort.
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You want a good answer, a good explanation, so we can communicate.
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So, you just mentioned this opposition between correlation and causation.
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And this is a phrase that will be familiar to many people.
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I think many people will be surprised that it has impeded scientific understanding to the degree that it has.
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I mean, you make a very strong case that science has more or less ignored causation.
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And yet, I think in the popular understanding, science is all about finding the causes of phenomenon.
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And so, maybe we can speak for a few minutes about how statistics has rendered us unable to speak about causes.
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It's not only statistics, it's science in general.
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Every high school kid can solve physics homework.
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And if you look at the physics homework, you have boundary condition, you have the equation of motions, and find out what's going to happen.
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Or even what's going to happen if you intervene and you change the spring length to double its previous value.
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But when you're trying to transfer this knowledge to a computer, to a robot, then the robot is facing a clash here.
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The equations of physics are symmetric, which means that x causes y to the same degree as y causes x.
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Which means that the movement of the barometer depends on the pressure.
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The same way that the pressure depends on the movement of the barometer.
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So, when a robot comes in and looks at the equation and says, hmm, let me change the weather tomorrow by moving this barometer a little bit, right?
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Yes, it's the same thing that prevents the high school kids from not giving the same answer.
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But what the high school kids had, the notion of cause effect.
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So, the high school kids filters the equations in his or her mind before giving you the answer.
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And that is a kind of filtering that we need to do here to introduce the asymmetry between cause and effect and do it mathematically.
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Because the robot doesn't understand the hand-waving.
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So, we need an algebra, which is asymmetric, to capture the asymmetry in nature.
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We can show many cases in which the temporal direction, temporal order is different.
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I mean, you don't actually need teleology for that.
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And no one will say that the rooster crow causes the sunrise.
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So, the rooster crow appears to be a cause, if time were your only signature.
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And maybe back up for a second and do a little more history of ideas.
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So, David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, has been very influential here in alleging that,
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at least in one place in his work, that we never, we have no direct knowledge of causes ever.
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All we have is the conjunction or the correlation, the coincidence of two events.
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And when, you know, event B reliably follows event A, we impute causation where, in fact, there's no other knowledge ever gained there.
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And, you know, I've always felt that that's almost a kind of semantic game which ignores some background intuitions we have
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that reach deeper into the way the world is than just mere B following A.
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So, I'm surprised that Hume did not pay attention to Galileo, although Galileo didn't make it explicit
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that with experiments we get additional knowledge that you could not get by passive observation.
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But Hume puts too much emphasis on regularity, which was criticized by many other people.
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Between his essay and the treatise on human nature.
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And he, after I think seven or nine years, he said, in other words, and then he brought up a counterfactual definition of causation.
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Had the object been different, the results would have, I don't have the exact phrasing, I have it in my book,
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that he changed from regularity to counterfactual.
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Had the object been different, then the outcome would be different.
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And even put the words, in other words, between them, as if they were the same.
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The first one is statistical regularity, which sits on the lowest level of the ladder, and the counterfactual is the top layer, the third layer.
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You described them at one point as seeing, doing, and imagining.
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So seeing is this, well, I'll let you describe it.
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Seeing is you are sitting there like an astronomer, possibly observing phenomena, with your hand tied behind your back,
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and you are talking about how your belief changes with additional observation.
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If you see another piece of evidence, you change your belief.
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Whether you see symptoms and you change your belief about disease, you see a disease and you have expectation about symptoms.
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And so that's the domain of mere correlation and humean juxtaposition.
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And that, by the way, is the domain of machine learning today.
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Maybe, I mean, we're going to head toward AI for a second, but maybe we should elaborate on that just for a stretch of 30 seconds.
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Machine learning takes in an immense amount of data and finds correlations which prove useful as long as we give it information as to what constitutes success.
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Yeah, so it's like take a facial recognition task.
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And there's just, there's that mere correlation combined with sufficient computational power can prove very useful.
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Just obviously not the basis of general intelligence of the sort that we are, we'll later talk about.
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It is debatable whether it is sufficient for general intelligence or not.
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But my opinion is not, because I've seen mathematically that there are barriers that you cannot cross.
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Okay, so we'll get to AI in a second and the robots that may or may not kill us.
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I'm wondering whether cancer, whether smoking causes cancer.
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Okay, in the book of Daniel, you have a first experiment where Daniel and his fellow Israelites who were exiled refused to eat the food.
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And the king, Nebuchadnezzar, commanded them to eat the king's food because it was much healthier.
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And he depended on their talents to run the empire.
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Okay, take a few of us, give them vegetarian food, and take the other groups and give them the king's food and see who is going to be more healthier looking.
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And that was the first experiment that we know of.
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Yeah, I don't know which the control is there, but yeah.
00:32:00.140
So, let's tell you, you split the group into two parts.
00:32:06.700
One of them is control, the other one is treatment, they call them.
00:32:28.260
But we have been dealing with cause and effect much before this, right?
00:32:36.100
Well, the child manages by conducting playful manipulation in the world.
00:32:43.040
The child finds out that moving one ball causes the other one ball to move.
00:32:48.960
Playing with one toy makes a noise, and the other one doesn't.
00:32:52.560
So, it's called playful manipulation, and that, I believe, where we get most of our knowledge
00:33:02.560
Yeah, you push the world and something happens.
00:33:07.640
Like Galileo dropped the two objects from the Tao of Pisa and looked at them with his own eyes.
00:33:31.660
Imagining is looking at your theory of the world and manipulating it in your mind.
00:33:38.800
I start talking about imagining by showing the first sculpture that described impossible
00:33:54.360
That was the first figurine, ivory figurines, discovered from 32,000 years ago in a cave in
00:34:02.520
Germany, the first object, artifact, they described an impossible object.
00:34:12.780
Well, the artist, in his or her mind, probably was his.
00:34:17.660
He imagined taking apart the human body, sever it, and putting on a lion head.
00:34:29.420
Imagining it in your mind first and then put it in the ivory.
00:34:36.060
You can manipulate things in your mind before doing it in the physical world.
00:34:41.640
And that is a terrific idea, because that creates, according to Harari, a market of promises.
00:35:05.240
So, imagining is the domain of counterfactuals.
00:35:09.280
And counterfactuals are a very important part of this story.
00:35:17.100
It's figuring out an outcome that would have prevailed had a certain observation not taken place.
00:35:28.980
Had Cleopatra knows being longer than it was really, okay?
00:35:36.960
Don't laugh, because that's how historians communicate.
00:35:42.360
And they understand each other, and they form a consensus.
00:35:47.600
So, they can communicate, had Oswald not killed Kennedy, how would American politics develop?
00:35:55.640
When would we be pulled out of Vietnam and things of that sort?
00:35:58.940
And they can communicate that way, despite the fact that Oswald did kill Kennedy.
00:36:06.800
How can we form a consensus about things that are conflicting with the real trajectory of history?
00:36:22.560
And it's anything that falls into the bin of, had the world been different, what could we say then?
00:36:31.800
If I hadn't crossed the street at precisely that moment, how would my life be different?
00:36:41.220
So, it can sound like a very dry export from the ivory tower, this notion of counterfactuals,
00:36:49.060
but it underpins so much of what we care about.
00:36:55.220
There's another connection, for me, to the foundation of knowledge.
00:37:03.300
And it's not enough to be right by accident, right?
00:37:08.600
So, you can't, like, if I look at my watch and it's actually broken, but it happens to show the correct time at this moment,
00:37:16.740
it's wrong to say that I am in knowledge of what time it is.
00:37:21.260
I, you know, because a minute later, you know, I will reveal that my methodology is such that it's not delivering me actual knowledge about the world.
00:37:28.920
So, you need to be able to ask, and this is a problem I always get into with religious people,
00:37:36.060
when I, you know, when I criticize religion, I criticize it for this.
00:37:39.280
When you ask yourself, I would invite any believer to ask this question of themselves now,
00:37:50.380
Do you stand in such relation to the truth of his existence such that you would not form a false belief that he exists?
00:37:59.480
Is your belief in God the result of being in some contact with reality such that if God didn't exist, you wouldn't believe he exists?
00:38:10.160
And I think, you know, any look at the history and psychology of religion demonstrates that,
00:38:17.320
in almost every case, apart from the mystics who have some vision of God that, you know, may in fact be a vision of God,
00:38:23.780
you know, who are we to judge, believers routinely violate this principle,
00:38:27.840
because the truth is they inherit these doctrines from previous generations that have merely asserted
00:38:34.860
that certain books were dictated by the creator of the universe,
00:38:37.260
and there's no more burden of evidence than that,
00:38:40.680
and there's no more reality testing or updating of beliefs generation after generation.
00:38:46.200
There's still the mere assertion that these ancient books are the perfect record of God's existence.
00:38:51.020
Well, you are facing now a specimen of a person who answered your description.
00:39:11.720
Okay, well, so, all right, so I'm reluctant to take a full detour here, but it's too interesting.
00:39:32.560
I'm using them to communicate with you, with my children, and I say,
00:39:37.200
yeah, God will punish you if you talk like that.
00:39:43.820
Which means, look, to be more scientific about it,
00:39:48.140
most of our reasoning works around metaphors, similarities.
00:39:55.520
And the deepest metaphors that we have are the metaphors of family relations.
00:40:07.820
Our perception system is so attuned to whether our mother frowns or smiles.
00:40:17.440
You grow up, and you find out that the world is not only mother and father.
00:40:25.520
So you create a metaphor, because I understand mother and father.
00:40:32.800
So I would immediately come out with a conclusion that there is some force there,
00:40:41.400
and like my father, teaches me things and punishes me things.
00:40:58.780
Well, then you're in a parish with very few members at the moment.
00:41:04.040
But, you know, I mean, that's a legitimate use of poetry and literature, certainly.
00:41:10.160
But it's not what most people most of the time mean by God, as you know.
00:41:15.900
This is just to say that thinking about what might have been different at the level of belief.
00:41:25.660
And if I believe I'm in touch with the world, I believe that, for instance, I'm staring at a microphone that I put here.
00:41:33.080
I believe there's a microphone in front of me on the desk.
00:41:36.760
But implicit in that belief, to say that that really is my propositional attitude, that there's a microphone on the desk,
00:41:44.880
is the assertion that if there weren't a microphone on the desk, I wouldn't think there was one.
00:41:52.700
So there is a counterfactual built into just the assertion that this is a microphone, whether anyone ever thinks about it.
00:42:02.260
But as you point out, an understanding of counterfactuals or an ability to model them is the necessary ingredient to understanding what in fact is a cause,
00:42:15.200
as opposed to merely an event that happens to precede some other event in time or be associated with it.
00:42:34.860
Smoking is, on the average, smoking is harmful to your health, on the average.
00:42:45.740
When you talk about individual, then you talk about counterfactual.
00:42:49.680
Had I not smoked, I would have lived X number of years.
00:42:54.140
Well, let's talk about the smoking case, because that was a fascinating bit of history in your book, which I thought I was aware of,
00:43:01.940
but it was actually a far bit more grim and delusional than I realized.
00:43:07.960
There was a period of such active and protracted debate about whether or not smoking caused cancer that it went on far too long.
00:43:19.000
And you had people, you had scientists who were smoking two and three and four packs a day, denying the linkage.
00:43:27.560
And there's a nicotine-empowered level of confirmation bias that was ruling the conversation there.
00:43:33.000
What lessons do you draw from that period in our history?
00:43:36.880
To me, it means something perhaps different than to other people.
00:43:42.740
For me, it was an example of how scientists can argue about things for which they don't have a language.
00:43:52.560
They didn't have a language of causation at that time.
00:43:56.780
They had a language of randomized experiment, which they couldn't conduct on smoking.
00:44:01.560
And that gave a fisher, who was the top statistician at the time.
00:44:15.500
And it gave him ammunition to claim, hmm, maybe what we see here is just coincidental correlation
00:44:23.160
between some genetic factor that makes you crave for nicotine on one hand,
00:44:33.240
So what we are seeing is just the effect of a confounder, a third variable that causes both.
00:44:43.080
I am not sure that he did it because he was a smoker himself,
00:44:48.740
or because he wanted to be an iphamistabra, which means just a smart, a smart alec.
00:44:58.620
And to show off his knowledge about statistics and about the possibility
00:45:05.100
that you might get the same results with a different hypothesis.
00:45:10.320
I'm not sure which was the case, but the fact that he resisted the conclusion of other people
00:45:23.240
I think millions of people died as a result of that.
00:45:27.900
But eventually it was resolved by the commissioner,
00:45:31.560
and the surgery general came out with a statement that it does cause cancer.
00:45:38.120
And the way that came about it was interesting.
00:45:41.200
They looked into the plausibility argument in order, calculated the degree to which the hidden
00:45:51.180
genetic factors will have to change your craving for incotin, and that made it impossible,
00:45:59.160
or implausible, that if you have these genetic factors, you'll crave eight times more than
00:46:05.360
They don't have any mechanism between a genetic factor to make this craving plausible, you
00:46:13.180
That was a key for the conclusion that they came up with, in the consensus they came up
00:46:18.760
with, and things have been different since then.
00:46:22.760
But still, what one confronts there is the sense that, based on a purely statistical argument,
00:46:32.460
it's always an overreach to establish causation, no matter how much data you have of correlation.
00:46:39.780
And that has not been appreciated to the degree it should be.
00:46:48.000
That was Nancy Cartwright's slogan, which people, it makes sense.
00:47:01.040
But the idea is that if you want to get causal conclusion, you must have some causal assumption
00:47:11.420
This is so important, because so many people have forgotten.
00:47:18.160
Let's linger on this notion of counterfactuals for another moment, because, so it does suggest
00:47:31.500
And I've occasionally wondered, in fact, last time I wondered this in public, it was John
00:47:37.320
Brockman's final edge question, and the one I suggested was, I don't know if you were in
00:47:42.760
that particular round, but my last edge question, the question that year was, what should the
00:47:50.780
And I believe my question was, is the actual all that is possible?
00:47:56.560
Which is to say that, is possibility an illusion?
00:48:01.400
Is the notion that something else could have happened always just an idea, and does it actually
00:48:07.720
not reach into anything that we can profitably think about?
00:48:13.100
Is there simply just the fact of the matter in every case?
00:48:16.520
And counterfactual thinking is explicitly thinking about what is possible, what might have been,
00:48:30.040
How do we know that possibility is even a thing?
00:48:35.580
It's useful to speak as though it were a thing.
00:48:37.880
And this actually connects to the topic of free will, which you write about in the book,
00:48:41.100
because, you know, you and I are convinced, you know, happily, not many people agree with
00:48:45.300
us, but you and I are both convinced that free will is an illusion, but in one way or
00:48:53.080
But we still don't understand what makes it useful.
00:48:56.900
And you and I might disagree a little bit about how useful it is, but is it possible, and here
00:49:03.400
there's the useful invocation of the concept, is it possible that possibility is an illusion
00:49:17.980
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