In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Gad Saad discuss ideas as parasites, postmodernism, social constructivism, applying evolutionary thinking to understand humans' consumptive nature, epistemic humility, and the degrees of assault on truth. Dr. Peterson is a Canadian-Lebanese evolutionary psychologist, professor, and author. He s best known for his work applying evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behavior. His most popular book is The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. He s currently a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep, I love my mattress and an unhealthy amount of love. I m picky about my mattress, and I have been forever from having arthritis as a kid. I have the Helix Midnight, and it s fantastic for quality. Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners at helixsleep.org to start a free trial today. To start a FREE trial today, go to thinker.org and start getting a discount on your first purchase of a new mattress and pillows. To start your free trial, you ll get 20% off the entire purchase when you run your first month with the discount code: JORDANB.P. Peterson. Learn more about The Great Courses Plus, the course that helps you learn and practice critical business skills for a brighter future you deserve. That s a whole month of unlimited access to hundreds of courses, books, courses, and everything else you need to learn to become a better human being. Get a whole lot more than just one thing you ve ever wanted to learn about business, business, finance, business and life, and so much more. Get started with the course, so you can be a student, you re getting a whole bunch of stuff you can t live up to it, you get it all, and you re not just one more chance to learn, you can get it, it s not just anything you want to learn and you can do it, and more, you're gonna learn it, right here, it's a whole whole-time, they're gonna get it! . . . J.B. Peterson, the J. Peterson Podcast is a podcast that s all J. B. P. Peterson's podcast, J. R. Peterson s podcast is all about J.R. Peterson does it.
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00:00:51.040Welcome to Season 4, Episode 6 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.
00:46:28.260I mean, and that's been my whole career.
00:46:29.900Which is, I go into a business school and I look at organizational behavior and consumer behavior and personnel psychology and all of the other panoply of ways that we manifest our human nature in a business context.
00:46:43.500And never do we ever mention the word biology.
00:46:46.220Well, how could you study all of these purposive important behaviors without recognizing that humans might be privy to their hormonal fluctuations?
00:46:55.920To me, it seems like a trivial, trivially obvious statement to most economists.
00:47:02.480What does, what do hormones have to do with the economy?
00:47:04.700So again, you start off with Franz Boas having a noble cause, but then it metamorphosizes into complete lunacy in the service of that original noble goal.
00:47:15.640So I think if I were to look for a consilient explanation as to why all these idea pathogens arise, it's because they start off with a kernel of truth, with a noble cause, but then they metamorphosize into bullshit.
00:47:28.060All right, so here's another way that they might be conceptualized as parasites too.
00:47:36.320Imagine that the academy has built up a reputation, which is like a, a reputation is like a storehouse of value in some sense.
00:47:44.600So you get a good reputation if you trade equitably with people, and then your ability to trade equitably is relatively assured in the future, right?
00:47:54.140You'll be invited to trade, and so reputation is like a storehouse in some sense.
00:47:58.720Now, academia, at least in principle, or the intellectual exercise, has built up a certain reservoir of goodwill, which is indicated by the fact that people will pay to go to universities to be educated.
00:48:11.540And the hypothesis there is that the universities have something to offer that's of practical utility, of sufficient magnitude, so that the cost is justifiable.
00:48:22.180You go to university and you come out more productive.
00:48:25.820And the reason you come out more productive is because the intellectual enterprise that the university has been engaged in has had actual practical relevance.
00:48:34.120And you might justify that claim by pointing to the fact that the technological improvements that have been generated in no small part by raw research have radically improved the standard of living of people everywhere in the world.
00:48:47.680And some of that's a consequence of pure academic research, a fair bit of it, pure scientific research.
00:48:53.580Now, what happens is that other ideas come along that don't have the same functional utility, but have the same appearance.
00:49:01.400And so they don't so much parasitize individuals, let's say, as they parasitize the entire system.
00:49:11.000The system has built up a reputation because it was offering solutions of pragmatic utility.
00:49:17.900Even training students to think clearly and to assess arguments clearly and to communicate properly has tremendous economic value if you do it appropriately, because that means they can operate more efficiently when they're solving problems.
00:49:30.700Now, but once that system is in place with its academic divisions and its modes of proof and all of that, it can be mimicked by systems that perform the same functions putatively, but don't have the same pragmatic, they don't have the same history of demonstrating practical utility.
00:49:51.800Well, let me give you an example, the idea of peer review, a peer review works in the sciences because there's a scientific method and because you can bring scientists together and you can ask them to adjudicate how stringently the scientific method was adhered to in a given research program.
00:50:14.040But then you can take the idea of peer review, but then you can translate it into a field like, let's say, sociology, and you can mimic the academic writing style that's characteristic of the sciences, and you can make claims that look on the surface of them to have been generated using the same technologies that the sciences use.
00:50:39.100But all it is, and so that's where it's at that level where the parasitic metaphor seems to me to be most appropriate.
00:50:50.940And so let me, let me, you raise a great point.
00:50:54.580So a couple of things to mention here.
00:50:56.520Number one, I reside in a business school.
00:50:59.920It's, and if I were residing in an engineering school, I would probably say the exact same thing that I'm about to say, which is the idea pathogens that I discuss in the parasitic mind have simply not proliferated in the business school and the engineering school for exactly the reasons that you began enunciating at the start of your, of your, of the current comment, right?
00:51:22.720Because those disciplines are coupled with reality.
00:51:28.200I cannot build a good economic model using postmodernist economics.
00:51:34.380I cannot build a econometric model of consumer choice that literally, that predicts well, you know, how, you know, that develops an AI model that learns what I should prefer on Amazon using feminist glaciology.
00:51:49.400So I cannot build a bridge using postmodernist physics.
00:51:54.760So because those disciplines are intimately coupled with reality, it becomes a lot more difficult for their epistemology to be parasitized by idea packages.
00:52:07.560So now, this brings up some questions about exactly what constitutes a claim to truth.
00:52:15.360And I think engineering is actually a really good place to start because scientists often claim, and I've had discussions with Sam Harris about this a lot, and we never did get to the bottom of it, partly because it's too damn complicated.
00:52:28.180But, you know, I tend to adopt a pragmatic theory of truth, even in the scientific domain.
00:52:33.120And what that essentially means is that your theory predicts the consequences of a set of actions in the world.
00:52:41.780And if you undertake those set of actions and that consequence emerges, then your theory is true enough.
00:52:49.160So what it's done is it's just demonstrated its validity within that set of predictions.
00:52:54.060Now, whether it can predict outside, that's a different question.
00:52:58.700But at least it's true enough to have predicted that outcome.
00:53:02.180And so in engineering, and I would say also in business, maybe not in business schools, but certainly in business, in engineering, and you build, when you build a bridge, there's a simple question, which is, does the bridge stand up to the load that it needs to, it needs to be resistant to?
00:53:21.580And if the answer to that is yes, then your theory was good enough to build that bridge.
00:53:25.700Now, maybe you could have built it more efficiently, and maybe there's a more, you could have got more strength for less use of materials and time, that's certainly possible.
00:53:34.360But there is that, there's the bottom line there that's very, very close.
00:53:38.320And in business, it's the same thing, which is part of the advantage of a market economy, is that your idea can be killed very rapidly.
00:53:46.080And that's actually an advantage, because it helps you determine what a valid idea is in that domain and what a valid idea isn't.
00:53:53.800And it does seem like the closer that disciplines in the universities have adhered to the scientific methodology, the more resistant they have been to these parasitic ideas in your terminology.
00:54:06.520We should go over again exactly what those ideas are, right?
00:54:10.940Just so that everybody's clear about it.
00:54:12.840Do you want to start with postmodernism, since this is one that you've tackled also many times?
00:54:17.120Yeah, you want to define it, and do you want to, let's let everybody know exactly what we're talking about.
00:54:23.220At its most basic level, postmodernism begins with the tenet that, you know, there is no objective truth, that we are completely shackled by subjectivity, we're shackled by a wide range of biases.
00:54:34.520And so to argue about absolute truths is silly.
00:54:39.780Okay, so, sorry, let me add a bit to that, so we can flesh it out.
00:54:43.380So the postmodernists also seem to claim, and I'm going to be as charitable as I possibly can in this description, because I don't want to build up a straw man.
00:54:52.600They're very, very concerned with the effect that language has on defining reality.
00:55:16.320Deconstructionism, language creates reality, is exactly what you just described, correct?
00:55:20.180Right, and it's weak theory in some sense, because it doesn't abide by its own principles.
00:55:24.800So, for example, and this is one of its fundamental weaknesses, as far as I'm concerned, is that Derrida says that, but then he acts as if, and also explicitly claims, that power exists.
00:55:38.920So, if you're building realities with language, the question arises of why you would do that, and the answer seems to be, for the postmodernists, is that it's power.
00:56:14.840This is why, by the way, in the book, I refer to it as intellectual terrorism.
00:56:19.420And I don't use these terms just to kind of come up with poetic prose.
00:56:23.880I genuinely mean, so I compare postmodernism to the 9-11 hijackers who flew planes onto buildings.
00:56:33.740I argue that postmodernists fly buildings of bullshit into our edifices of reason.
00:56:41.160And maybe if I could share a couple of personal interactions that I've had with postmodernists that capture the extent to which they depart from reality.
00:57:01.020So, in 2002, and I think this story might be particularly relevant to you, Jordan, because, of course, you broke through in the public conscience because of the gender pronoun stuff.
00:57:14.340Well, you'll see that this 2002 story was prophetic in predicting what would eventually happen.
00:57:20.120So, in 2002, one of my doctoral students had just defended his dissertation and we were going out for a celebratory dinner.
00:57:29.220It was myself, it was myself, my wife, him, and his date for the evening.
00:57:35.100And so, he contacts me before we go out for the dinner and he kind of gives me a heads up and he says, well, you know, my date is a graduate student in cultural anthropology, radical feminism, and postmodernism.
00:57:52.100It's kind of the holy trinity of bullshit.
00:57:54.940And so, basically, the reason why he was telling me this is he's basically saying, hopefully, please be on your best behavior.
00:58:36.240I do believe that there are certain human universals that serve as kind of a bedrock of similarities that we share, whether we are Peruvian, Nigerian, or Japanese.
00:58:48.100Do you mind if I maybe propose what I consider to be a human universal and then you can tell me how that you don't think that that's the case?
00:59:12.380So, it's not true that women bear children.
00:59:14.220She said, no, because in some Japanese tribe in their mythical folklore, it is the men who bear children.
00:59:23.140And so, by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm, that's how you keep us barefoot and pregnant.
00:59:30.180So, once I kind of recovered from hearing such a position, I then said, okay, well, let me take a less, maybe less controversial or contentious example.
00:59:40.340Is it not true from any vantage point on Earth?
00:59:43.280Sailors, since time immemorial, have relied on the premise that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
00:59:49.640And here, Jordan, she used the kind of language creates reality, the Derrida position.
00:59:54.140She goes, well, what do you mean by east and west?
00:59:59.820That which you call the sun, I might call dancing hyena, exact words.
01:00:04.920I said, okay, well, the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west.
01:00:08.900And she said, well, I don't play those label games.
01:00:11.180So, the reason why this is a powerful story that I continuously recount and hence included in the book is because she wasn't some, you know, psychiatric patient who escaped from the psychiatric institute.
01:00:22.960She was exactly aping what postmodernists espouse on a daily basis to their thousands of adoring students.
01:00:31.380When we can't agree that only women bear children and that there is such a thing as east and west and that there is such a thing as the sun, then it's intellectual terrorism.
01:00:41.320All right, so back to the parasite idea.
01:00:48.660Let's finish listing the ideas that you describe in your book as having this commonality.
01:00:53.940So, there's postmodernism, and we already defined that as the hypothesis that reality is constituted by language.
01:01:03.020Right, which, by the way, is a close ally to another idea pathogen, social constructivism, or if you want, social constructivism on steroids, which basically, and the reason why I add the on steroids, because social constructivism, the idea that we are prone to socialization, no serious behavioral scientist would disagree with that.
01:01:25.560And no avowed evolutionary behavioral scientist would disagree with the idea that socialization is an important force in shaping who we are.
01:01:34.740And no serious intellectual would deny that language shapes our conceptions of reality.
01:01:44.040The problem, and hence the steroid part, is when you argue that everything that we are is due to social constructivism.
01:01:51.660Right, it's the collapse of a multivariate scenario into a univariate scenario, an inappropriate collapse.
01:01:57.920And that's, by the way, I remember your brilliant chat with the woman from, the British woman, the, you know, I don't remember her name, the lobster stuff.
01:02:09.880Where you made exactly that point about multifactorial, right?
01:02:13.300Where she was arguing everything related to the gender gap must be due to misogyny, when the reality is that, of course, there might be 17 other factors with greater explanatory power that explains why we're there.
01:02:28.220But she can't see the world in a multifactorial way.
01:02:33.160Look, this might have some bearing on the attractiveness of certain sets of ideas.
01:02:39.780We might even see if it's the attractiveness of the so-called parasitic ideas.
01:02:44.400I think it was Einstein who said that, it probably wasn't, I probably got the source wrong, but it doesn't matter, that a scientific explanation should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
01:03:03.020And you want to, a good theory buys you a lot, and you want your theory to buy you as much as possible, because it means you only have to learn a limited number of principles, and you can explain a very large number of phenomena.
01:03:16.520So, but there's the attraction of the inappropriate collapse of the complex landscape into its simplified counterpart, whereby you rid yourself of complexity that's actually necessary and inevitable.
01:03:34.320What that means is that you couldn't make progress employing your theory in a pragmatic way, but if you don't ever test it in a way that it could be killed, you'll never find that out.
01:03:46.900In my new book, which is called Beyond Order, I wrote a chapter called Abandoned Ideology, and I'm making the point in there that it's very tempting to collapse the world into, to collapse the world such that one explanatory mechanism can account for everything, and that it's a game that intellectuals are particularly good at,
01:04:11.940because their intellectual function enables them to generate plausible causal hypotheses.
01:04:17.680And so, you can take something like power or sexuality, or relative economic status, or economics for that matter, or love, or hate, or resentment, and you can generate a theory that accounts for virtually everything, relying on only one of those factors.
01:04:38.960And that's because virtually everything that human beings do is affected by those factors.
01:04:46.280And so, it's the attractiveness of that simplification that accounts for the attractiveness of these parasitic ideas.
01:05:06.320So, I would say the idea of you, or the process of finding a simple explanation for an otherwise more complex phenomenon, maybe could be linked to, I don't know if you're familiar with the work.
01:05:19.500Do you know, are you familiar with Gerd Gigerenzer?
01:05:46.380Exactly, because it basically says, look, economists think that before we choose a given car, we engage in these elaborate, laborious calculations because we're seeking to maximize our utility because otherwise we won't pick the optimal car if we don't engage in utility maximization.
01:06:04.180Of course, while that's a beautiful normative theory, it doesn't describe what consumers actually do because you and I, when we chose our last car,
01:06:12.200we didn't look at all available options on all available attributes before we make a choice.
01:06:22.540And in the parlance of Gigerenzer, it would be a fast and frugal heuristic because we've evolved.
01:06:28.860I mean, if I sit there and calculate all of the distribution functions of what happens if I hear a wrestling behind me, the tiger will eat me before I finish all of the distributions, right?
01:06:40.520The calculations of all the distributions.
01:06:41.800Therefore, in many cases, when I deploy a fast and frugal heuristic, it makes perfect adaptive sense.
01:06:48.540But the downside of that, so to go back to your point, is that oftentimes I will apply a fast and frugal heuristic when I shouldn't have done so, right?
01:06:58.520So for certain complex phenomena, my innate pension to want to seek that one causal mechanism is actually, in this case, suboptimal.
01:07:08.900So knowing when I should deploy the fast and frugal heuristic and when I should rely on more complex multifactorial reasoning is the real challenge here.
01:07:18.780Okay, so let's say that a robust discipline offers a set of simplifications that are pragmatically useful.
01:07:28.840Okay, and then being a developing mastery in the application of those heuristics boosts you up the hierarchy that is built around their utilization.
01:07:44.280Okay, so you have a theory that allows you to get a grip on the world and to do things in the world like build bridges.
01:07:51.980And then if you're good at applying that theory, you become good at building bridges and because people value that, that gives you a certain amount of status and authority and maybe even power.
01:08:03.820But we'll go for status and authority.
01:08:05.300So you have the simultaneous construction of a system that allows you to act in the world in a manner that is productive, but also organizes a social, organizes society.
01:08:17.680Now, it seems to me the postmodernists get rid of the application to the world side of things.
01:08:23.540So they really have constructed a language game that actually operates according to their principles of reality.
01:08:32.200It isn't hemmed in by the constraints of the actual world, except insofar as that world consists of a struggle for academic power and endless definitions of reality within the confines of a language game.
01:08:47.660So I've actually argued exactly for what you just said in speculatively trying to explain why otherwise intelligent people like Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida would have espoused all the nonsense that they did.
01:09:04.320And I argue, and I think there is some evidence to support my otherwise speculative hypothesis.
01:09:33.900If I create a world of folk profundity where I appear as though I'm saying something deeply profound and meaningful, whereas in reality I'm uttering complete gibberish,
01:09:45.540then maybe my pros can be as impenetrable as those haughty mathematicians, right?
01:10:09.020And that's why they've created now sub-disciplines of economics that are completely mathematical but fully devoid from any real world applications.
01:10:19.920It all stemmed originally from wanting to be accepted at the table of serious scientists, right?
01:10:26.860You're making two arguments now, I think.
01:11:17.300And so in that case, going back to our earlier conversation, in that case, the originator of the parasite is actually getting, I mean, literally reproductive fitness.
01:11:27.360Well, but it's also acting as a parasite on a system that's functional.
01:11:30.740But then you could say on top of that, now he's allowing ideas to enter his consciousness, and some of those will fulfill the function of producing this faux reality in which he can rise.
01:11:46.780And so it's a parasitical set of ideas within a parasitical strategy.
01:11:53.240And by the way, for this particular parasitic sleight of hand to work, it relies actually on a principle that you and I probably teach in sort of the introductory psychology course.
01:12:08.560So fundamental attribution error, the idea that people sometimes attribute dispositional traits to otherwise, for example, situational variables or vice versa.
01:12:36.000If I get up in front of an audience, so now I'm Jacques Derrida or Jacques Lacan, and I espouse a never-ending concatenation of syllables that are completely void of semantic meaning,
01:12:48.760but that sound extraordinarily profound, two things can happen.
01:12:53.200The audience member can either say, I don't understand what Jacques Lacan is saying because I'm too dumb and he's very profound,
01:13:01.320or I don't understand what Jacques Lacan is saying because he's a charlatan who's engaging in full profundity.
01:14:52.080You had enough self-confidence in your cognitive abilities that you didn't succumb to their fundamental attribution sleight of hand, right?
01:15:00.600So you're one of those rare animals that said, wait a minute, he's saying bullshit because I know that I can think, and I'm not getting him.
01:15:09.140The problem is that most people that are sitting passively in the audience didn't come with your confidence.
01:15:15.400Maybe it's that they also didn't have a good alternative.
01:15:17.820I was fortunate, Abe, because by the time I started reading that sort of thing, I'd already established something approximating a career path in psychology, in clinical psychology, with a heavy biological basis.
01:15:32.640But if I was a student who had encountered nothing but that kind of theorizing, and I was interested in having an academic career,
01:15:43.020I might well believe that learning how to play that particular language game was valid and also the only route to success.
01:15:51.480I mean, one of the things that really staggers me about the postmodernist types that I read and encounter is that they have absolutely no exposure to biology as a science whatsoever.
01:16:03.060They don't know anything about evolutionary theory.
01:16:05.920By the way, not just postmodernists, most social scientists, and certainly the ones walking around in the business school, think that biology is some Nazi vulgar...
01:16:47.280It's interesting you say this, because I discussed this briefly in the book.
01:16:51.540I gave once, when my first book was released, this one right here, Evolutionary Basics of Consumption.
01:16:57.700This is a book where I tried to explain how you could apply evolutionary thinking to understand our consumatory nature.
01:17:03.240I had given two talks at the University of Michigan.
01:17:08.520The first day, on I think it was a Thursday, I gave the exact same talk.
01:17:13.700So I was giving the exact same talk in two different buildings, two different audiences.
01:17:18.900On one day, it was in the psychology department.
01:17:21.520And as for your viewers who don't know, University of Michigan has consistently always ranked in the top three to five psychology departments in the United States.
01:17:30.640My former doctoral supervisor got his PhD in psychology in University of Michigan.
01:17:35.980He actually overlapped with Amos Tversky, by the way.
01:17:38.600Just a little bit of a historical, you know, parenthesis.
01:17:43.740So I gave the talk on Thursday in front of the psychology department.
01:17:48.520And because, as you said, many of them are neuroscientists, biological psychologists, and so on, they're listening to it.
01:17:54.400And they're like, oh, yeah, this is gorgeous.
01:17:56.880The exact same talk the next day at the business school, which, again, you would think, based on what we said earlier, they should be very pragmatic in their theoretical orientations.
01:18:07.240If something explains behavior, then I should accept it.
01:18:10.700But because they were so bereft of biological-based thinking, Jordan, I couldn't get through a single sentence.
01:18:17.880It was as if I was metaphorically dodging tomatoes being thrown at me.
01:18:22.000I couldn't get through maybe five or six slides of my talk because they were so aghast and felt such disdain for my arguing that consumers are driven by biological mechanisms.
01:18:36.200Yeah, well, the business schools can drift away from the real world, I think, more effectively than the engineering schools can or the biologists.
01:18:44.700And you'd hope that the necessity of contending with free market realities would protect the business school to some degree.
01:18:51.960But my experience with business schools, well, often positive, has often been that the theorizers couldn't necessarily produce a business.
01:19:02.240Well, it's interesting because I found that when I give a talk in front of business practitioners, then it's always very well received.
01:19:11.280When I give the same talk in front of business school professors, depending on how vested they are in their a priori paradigms, it either goes well or not.
01:19:21.520So if they are hardcore social constructivists, then I am a Nazi, I am a biological vulgarizer, it's grotesque.
01:19:29.180What are you talking about with all this hormone business?
01:19:31.440So the practitioners are not vested in a paradigm.
01:19:35.060If I can offer them some guidelines for how to design advertising messages that are maximally effective using an evolutionary lens, they go, sure, sign me up.
01:19:49.920So everybody has two practical problems, we might say, broadly speaking.
01:19:54.280One is contending with the actual world, so because you have to get enough to eat, that's the world of biological necessity.
01:20:01.060And then there's the world of sociological necessity, which is produced by the fact that you have to be with others while you solve your biological problems.
01:20:11.380And you can solve your biological problems by adapting extraordinarily well to the sociological world, as long as the sociological world has its tendrils out in the world and is solving problems.
01:20:23.100So you can be a postmodernist and believe that there's nothing in the world except language, as long as the university is nested in a system that's dealing with the world well enough to feed you.
01:20:33.620And that isn't your immediate problem.
01:20:37.880Okay, so let's continue with the list of—
01:20:40.300Let me give you another one that I think you're particularly, I think, sensitive to, and you've probably also opined on.
01:20:47.020So the DAI religion, which stems from identity politics, another idea pathic, DAI is the acronym for diversity, inclusion, and equity.
01:20:55.800That is such a dreadfully bad, parasitic idea because it really removes—so let's, again, speak in the context of academia, but it could apply to other contexts.
01:21:06.940It could apply to HR departments, human resources department.
01:21:19.540Well, maybe it's a good thing because since you were last at the university environment, the DAI religion has only proliferated with much greater alacrity.
01:21:29.420So that now when you apply to grants, for grants, you know, with all of the major grants, the equivalent for our American viewers, the equivalent of, say, an NSF grant, the National Science Foundation, we have similar grants for people in engineering or social sciences or natural sciences in Canada.
01:21:46.300You have to have a DAI statement that basically says, you know, what have you done in the past to advance DAI causes?
01:21:55.920What will you do if you get this grant?
01:21:58.040If this grant were granted to you, how would you uphold DAI principles?
01:22:03.300And there is a colleague of mine, a physical chemist—
01:22:05.900So that's for sure, can NSF and the medical research grant say, oh, my God.
01:22:13.220A physical chemist at one of our mutual alma maters, McGill University—maybe I've given too much information here—was denied a grant because it didn't pass the DAI threshold, right?
01:22:29.080In other words, it didn't matter what was the substantive content of his grant application, the scientific content.
01:22:38.080He just wasn't sufficiently—by the way—
01:22:41.200So that's an indication—that's a situation where the elevation of that particular ideological game, that's been elevated over the game of science.
01:22:55.400Now, that would be fine if they were both games, but science isn't a game, right?
01:23:02.040It's a technique for solving—it's a technique for solving genuine problems.
01:23:07.040Science is what allows you and I, friends that haven't otherwise seen each other physically for many years, to reconnect today and have a fantastic conversation as if we were sitting next to each other.
01:23:36.020If I want to study something about the flora or fauna of an indigenous territory where indigenous people have lived there for thousands of years,
01:23:46.320I can defer to their domain-specific knowledge because they've lived within that ecosystem.
01:23:52.800So specific knowledge about a particular phenomenon could be attributed to group A knowing more than group B.
01:24:04.700But the epistemology of how I study the flora or fauna, how I adjudicate scientific issues within that ecosystem, there isn't a competition between the scientific method and indigenous way of knowing.
01:24:28.780That's why there's only one game, is because there's—
01:24:35.780As soon as we use the word knowing and we apply it in a domain that would pertain to indigenous knowledge and a domain that would pertain to science,
01:24:44.960as soon as we use the uniting word knowledge, we're presupposing that knowledge is one thing.
01:24:51.840And knowledge is—knowledge has to be something like the use of abstractions to predict and control.
01:24:59.360The use of abstractions to predict and control.
01:31:42.040So, for example, there's a classic study in evolutionary psychology by two folks that I know,
01:31:48.780one of whom is a friend of mine, Randy Thornhill, where they asked women to rate the pleasantness of T-shirts that were worn by men.
01:31:59.960And it turns out that the one that they judge as most pleasing or factorally speaking is the one that is also identifying the guy who is the most symmetric.
01:32:13.560So, in other words, there is sensorial convergence so that two independent senses are arriving at the same final product,
01:32:22.920in this case, the product being the optimal male for me to choose,
01:32:26.040and it would make perfect evolutionary sense for there to be that sensorial convergence.
01:32:30.400And in the book, you introduce the nomological network, which isn't discussed very frequently in books that are written popularly, right?
01:32:38.760That's an idea that hasn't been discussed much outside of specialty courses, say, in methodology, in psychology.
01:32:46.960I actually think the psychologists came up with the idea of nomological networks.
01:32:50.480So, I'm going to describe what you just said and tell you how my approach of nomological networks is grander, if you'd like.
01:32:57.000So, the folks who came up with the term nomological networks in psychology were coming up with a nomological network of triangulated evidence when establishing the validity of a psychological construct, right?
01:33:11.760So, when you're establishing convergent validity and discriminant validity, right?
01:33:15.700The Campbell and Fisk stuff, which, by the way, if there are any graduate students in psychology, never mind graduate students in psychology, any student should read the 1959 paper, the multi-trade, multi-method matrix by Campbell and Fisk.
01:33:52.600So, if each of these validity constructs points to ticking off this construct as being valid, then I've now, in a nomological network sense, established the veracity of that construct, the validity of that construct.
01:34:06.460Right, and that's actually something a bit different than, maybe, than a pragmatic proof of truth.
01:34:12.680Because, from the pragmatic perspective, the theory is evaluated with regards to its utility as a tool.
01:34:19.460This is more like an analogy to sensory reality.
01:34:23.780If something registers across multiple different methods of detecting it, it's probably real.
01:34:31.660Detecting it across cultures, across space, across time, across methodologies, across paradigms.
01:34:40.420So, it's really the granddaddy of nomological networks.
01:34:44.440If Kronbach and Campbell and Fisk were talking in a more limited sense of how do you validate a psychological construct, this is saying, how do you validate the veracity of a phenomenon?
01:34:58.580How do I establish that toy preferences are not singularly socially constructed?
01:36:54.120So, what you want to do is use multiple methodologies, and the more separate they are in their approach, the better.
01:37:01.980And so, when I wrote Maps of Meaning, which was my first book, I wanted, I was looking for patterns, but I was skeptical of it.
01:37:10.580I wanted to ensure that the patterns I was looking at sociologically and in literature were also manifest in psychology and in neuroscience.
01:37:20.560And I thought that that gave me the ability to use four dimensions of triangulation, so to speak.
01:37:31.480And the claim was, well, if the pattern emerges across these disparate modes of approach, it's probably, there's more, there's a higher probability that it's real.
01:37:42.000And so, a psychology that's biologically informed is going to be richer than one that isn't, because your theory has to not only account for behavior, let's say, in the instance, but it also has to be in accord with what's currently known about the function of the brain.
01:38:01.520And by the way, it is truly a liberating way to view the world, because it allows you, in a sense, to, so if you have epistemic humility, you're able to say, you know, if now you, Jordan, you were to ask me, hey, you know, in Canada, Justin Trudeau passed the laws legalizing cannabis.
01:38:27.940I haven't built the requisite nomological network to pronounce a definitive position on this.
01:38:34.040On the other hand, if you ask me a question on a phenomenon for which I have built my nomological network, then I can enter that debate and that conversation with all the epistemic swagger that I'm afforded by the protection of having built that nomological network.
01:38:51.440So it's a really wonderful way to view the world, because it allows me to exactly know when I can engage an issue with well-deserved self-assuredness and when I should say, you know, I really just don't know enough about this topic.
01:39:06.220And by the way, someone like you who has, of course, also been a professor for many years, if you establish that epistemic honesty with your students, it's actually quite powerful.
01:39:17.040Because if an undergraduate student asks me a question and in front of everyone I say, wow, you really stumped me with that question.
01:39:24.260You know what, why don't you send me an email and let me look into it?
01:39:27.200What that does is it builds trust with those students, because it's saying this guy is not standing up in front of us pretending to know everything.
01:39:35.220As a matter of fact, he was willing to admit that he was stumped by the student of a 20-year-old.
01:39:40.300Okay, so let me ask you something about that epistemic humility in Relate, because we want to tie this back.
01:39:47.420In fact, you defined a number of intellectual subfields as included in this parasitic network, let's say, under the parasitic rubric.
01:40:02.900And would it be reasonable to say that one of the, then you're left with a question, which is how do you identify valid theories of knowledge from invalid theories of knowledge?
01:40:18.280It seems to me that postmodernism has to deny biological science, because biological science keeps producing facts, claims, keeps making claims that are incommensurate with the postmodernists.
01:40:34.240Now, it seems to me that a reasonable approach would be to say, well, the claim can't be real unless it meets the tenets of the postmodernist theory, but also manifests itself in the biological sciences.
01:40:48.420It has to do both. It can't just do one or the other.
01:40:51.040Now, maybe that wouldn't work for the biologists, but the fact that the postmodernists tend to throw biology out is one of the facts that sheds disrepute on their intellectual endeavor, as far as I'm concerned.
01:41:05.780Because if they were honest theorists, they'd look for what was solid in biology and ensure that the theories that they're constructing were in accordance with that, rather than having to throw the entire science out the window, either by omission, not knowing anything about it, or by defining it as politically suspect.
01:41:26.140And so I'll introduce here another term. I didn't discuss this much in this book, in The Parasitic Mind, but I certainly have discussed it in some way other words.
01:41:34.220So the notion of consilience, so let me introduce this term for your viewers who don't know it.
01:41:42.460The term was reintroduced into the vernacular by E.O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist, who wrote a book in the late 1990s of that title, Consilience, Unity of Knowledge.
01:41:55.120So consilience is very much related to the idea of nomological networks, because consilience is basically saying that can you put a bunch of things under one explanatory rubric?
01:42:07.820So physics is more consilience than sociology, not necessarily, although notwithstanding what you said earlier about the IQ of physicists, it's not because physicists are smart and sociologists are dumb.
01:42:19.640It's because physicists operate using a consilient tree of knowledge, which, by the way, evolutionary theorists also do.
01:42:29.080You start with a meta theory that then goes into mid-level theories, which then goes into universal phenomena, which then generates hypotheses, so that the field becomes very organized.
01:42:43.340The problem with postmodernists is that they exist in a leaf node of bullshit, right?
01:42:48.860It is perfectly unrelated to any consilient tree of knowledge.
01:42:54.620Therefore, they can never advance anything, because as you said earlier, they exist within an ecosystem where they reward one another, but they can never build coherence, right?
01:43:07.680That's why physics and biology and the neurosciences and chemistry are prestigious.
01:43:12.700It's not because they are necessarily more scientific than sociology.
01:43:17.140It's because they take consilience at heart.
01:43:27.320I mean, I think to some degree, too, that, you know, you also have to note that the phenomena that physicists deal with are in some sense simpler than the phenomena that sociologists deal with, right?
01:43:38.380So the physicists and the chemists and even the biologists, to some degree, have plucked the low-hanging fruit.
01:43:44.080That's Augustine Colt, by the way, who said this, right?
01:43:46.360Auguste Colt created a hierarchy of the sciences, and perhaps because he was a sociologist-inclined, he placed sociology at the apex of the sciences, precisely arguing what you just said, which is it's a lot easier to study the crystallography of a diamond than it is to study the rich complexity of humans within a social system.
01:44:14.780So, you know, it still requires a tremendous amount of intelligence to be a physicist and to manage the mathematics.
01:44:21.800Because although the theories have tremendous explanatory power, they're still very sophisticated.
01:44:26.820So, okay, so I've been trying to think about this from the perspective of a postmodernist to say, well, we're making the claim that biology and chemistry and physics, all these, this multitude of pragmatic disciplines, engineering,
01:44:43.200to some degree, psychology and business, they're valid enterprises, and they need to take each other's findings into account.
01:44:57.740So the postmodernist might say, well, these various disciplines don't take our findings into account.
01:45:05.120And so they're being just as exclusionary as we are.
01:45:30.200No, no, no, no, no, it's not that straightforward because it's not like, so let's, let's make the presumption for a moment that these are essentially left-wing theories.
01:45:42.000It's, it's the case that, it's not the case that the left-wing politically has had nothing to offer the improvement of society.
01:45:51.280You see all sorts of ideas that are generated initially by the left that move into the mainstream that, that have, have made society a more civil place.
01:45:59.480I mean, maybe that's the introduction of the eight-hour workday or the 40-hour workweek or universal pension, or at least in Canada and most other countries apart from the United States, universal health care.
01:46:11.380And I mean, almost everybody now presumes that those things are, that they've improved the quality of life for everyone, rich and poor alike.
01:46:20.700And, and I think, I think that that's a, a reasonable claim.
01:46:27.160Is the, is the, is the, is the, are the claims of the postmodernists justified by the political effects of their actions?
01:46:37.180Can you give me an example of a postmodernist nugget that had it not been espoused specifically by a postmodernist, the world would be a poorer place, whether it be practically, theoretically, epistemologically.
01:46:53.980Can you think of one off the top of your head, George?
01:46:55.900Well, I can only do it generally, like in the manner that I just did to say that, well, it's, it's part of, it's part of the, the, the domain of left-wing thought.
01:47:05.120And it's not reasonable to assume that nothing of any benefit has come out of the domain of left-wing thought.
01:47:10.240It's, I mean, that's a very general, it's a very general analysis.
01:47:14.420I'm not pointing to a particular theorem, for example.
01:47:17.000Right. But see, take, for example, in your field of clinical psychology, we can say, okay, cognitive behavior therapy, by studying that process, and then by testing it using the scientific method in terms of its efficacy in reducing anxiety symptoms in, in patients.
01:47:35.780If I say nothing more, I've just offered a single example of a valuable insight coming from clinical psychology, whether it be theoretical or in the practice of therapy.
01:47:49.680And of course, there are many more than that singular CBD example that I just gave.
01:47:54.080It would not be hyperbolic for me to say, and maybe I don't know enough about postmodernism, but I think I do.
01:48:00.880You can't even come up with one, I don't mean you, I mean, in general.
01:48:04.020No one can come up with a single example as simple as me just enunciating the value of cognitive behavior therapy.
01:48:12.680At that level, you can't come up with one postmodernist insight.
01:48:16.060The only insight that we have is that we are shackled by subjectivity.
01:48:20.320We are shackled by our personal biases, and that is true.
01:48:23.660And any human being with a functioning brain could have told you that.
01:48:29.120Well, that kind of criticism has been leveled within fields by the practitioners in those fields many times.
01:48:36.480Including by the postmodernists to their field?
01:48:38.420I would hesitate to say, I would say, you know, reflexively, I would say no, because if everything's a language game, then why play the postmodernist game?
01:48:50.080You know, why does it obtain privileged status in the hierarchy of truth claims if there's nothing more than the world that's produced by language?
01:48:59.100Well, I think, I mean, because some of your viewers might be saying, well, why are they spending so much time on postmodernism and other ideopathies?
01:49:06.820The reason why actually it's important to talk about postmodernism, because it's a fundamental attack on the epistemology of truth.
01:49:14.280That's right, and that is something we need to point out why that's right.
01:49:19.240So I had a very good friend of mine who actually happens to be a clinical psychologist also, just a lovely guy, who once asked me very politely, he said, you know, Gad, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?
01:49:33.760He said, how come you are such a truth defender and so on, and you're perfectly happy to criticize all these leftist idea pathogens, very much along the lines of how you started our conversation today, Jordan, and yet you're not as critical of Donald Trump's attacks on truth.
01:49:51.960And so let me answer that question here, because in a sense, it will be such a good one, right?
01:49:56.240So Trump attacks specific truth statements.
01:50:24.260While it is reprehensible, I disagree with any form of lying.
01:50:27.400That is a lot less concerning to me than a group of folks that are devoted to attacking the epistemology of truth.
01:50:38.340Okay, define that and define the epistemology of truth so that we can get right down to the bottom.
01:50:44.440The scientific method is a way of tackling truth.
01:50:48.600The nomological networks that we spoke about earlier is a way of adjudicating between competing statements as to what is true or not.
01:50:56.860Those are – so the scientific method and all of its offshoots are ways by which we've agreed that that's the epistemology by which we create core knowledge and then build that front.
01:51:08.780Right, okay, so let's outline that a little bit.
01:52:54.160It's – and that's why now I hope you might agree that it's not too harsh for me to say they are intellectual terrorists.
01:53:00.440Because they put these little bombs of BS that blow up the nomological network, that blows up the epistemology of truth, right?
01:53:09.540And so you're making a claim even beyond that, though, in the book, which is – and this is the claim that I want to get right to, which is that –
01:53:19.440They put forward that theory in order to benefit from being theorists.
01:53:26.020That benefit accrues to them personally as they ratchet themselves up their respective intellectual hierarchies and gain the status and power that goes along with that.
01:53:36.960And the fact that it does damage to the entire system of knowledge itself is irrelevant.
01:53:43.340That's – that's – that's – that's – what do you call that?
01:53:46.580Damage that you don't mean when you bomb something?
01:53:52.420So they're willing to sacrifice the entire game of truth-seeking to the promotion of their own individual careers within this – within the language hierarchy that they've built.
01:54:08.260And by the way, you hit on a wonderful segue to another, I think, important point in the book.
01:54:14.220And that is the distinction between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics, right?
01:54:20.340Deontological ethics, for the viewers who don't know, if I say it is always wrong to lie, that's an absolute statement, right?
01:54:28.760If I say it is okay to lie if I'm trying to spare my spouse's feelings, that's a consequentialist statement.
01:54:36.620Well, it turns out, in many cases, the ones who espouse those parasitic idea pathogens are engaging their consequentialist ethical system, right?
01:54:49.240Because what they're saying is, if I murder truth in the service of this more important noble social justice goal, so be it, right?
01:54:59.460Whereas if you are an absolutist, a deontological –
01:55:04.260You're positing an objective reality, even in the domain of ethics.
01:55:08.280Well, that's another place where the postmodern effort fails, is that it can't help but refer to things that are outside of the language game.
01:55:19.780So, by relying on consequentialist ethics, and I'd have to – I haven't been able to think it through to figure out whether I agree with your claim that the postmodernists tend to be consequentialists.
01:56:03.320And this is why – and so, I know you're not mathematically, you know, minded, but if I can just divert into my background in mathematics.
01:56:11.940In the book, I talk about the field of operations research, which is the field where you try to axiomatize, if you'd like, to put in axiomatic form an objective function that you're trying to maximize or minimize, right?
01:56:27.240So, for example, when I was a research assistant, when I was an undergrad and a graduate student, I worked on a problem called the two-dimensional cutting stock problem.
01:56:35.320So, if you have, for example, rectangles of metal and you get an order to produce 20 X by Y subsheets within that broader metal, how should I do the cut as to minimize the waste of metal?
01:56:52.760So, operations research is a field that is commonly applied, for example, in business problems where you're trying to minimize the queue time that consumers wait or maximize profits, right?
01:57:03.960So, it's a very, very complicated mathematical field, applied mathematics field to solve real-world problems.
01:57:10.140So, now let's apply it to this consequentialist story.
01:57:13.560In the old days, the objective function of a university was maximize intellectual growth, maximize human knowledge.
01:59:04.660And I'm starting to lose my train of concentration.
01:59:07.260And so, I don't want to do anything but a top-rate job on this.
01:59:10.520Let me summarize for a second what we've discussed.
01:59:13.100And then, if you have other things to add that we haven't talked about, then we can go there.
01:59:17.180So, we talked about ideas as parasites.
01:59:21.300And then we spent some time unraveling what parasite might mean.
01:59:26.440And the conversation moved so that we kind of built a two-dimensional or two-strata model of parasitical idea.
01:59:35.380There'd be the parasitical behavior of the theorist who puts forth a theory that mimics a practically useful theory in the attempt to accrue to himself or herself goods that have been produced by theories that actually have broad practical utility.
02:00:01.680So, and then we talked about postmodern ideas in particular as examples of that.
02:00:08.900And I guess one of the things we haven't tied together there is exactly how the—why is it necessary or why has it happened that the ontological and epistemological claims of the postmodernists aid and abet the parasitical function?
02:00:48.660And I said that they kind of start off with a kernel of truth and they start off with some noble original goal.
02:00:54.720The other thing that I would say, which I think answers the question that you just posed, is that each of those idea pathogens frees us from the pesky shackles of reality, right?
02:01:07.380So, in a sense, they are liberating, right?
02:01:09.800So, postmodernism liberates me from capital T truth.
02:01:41.440Look, social constructivism, another one of those idea pathogens, frees me from the shackles of realizing that I will never be, nor will my son be, the next Michael Jordan.
02:01:53.640Because social constructivism, as espoused originally by behaviorism, right, the famous quote, which I cite in the book, give me 12 children and I can make anyone a beggar or a surgeon or whatever.
02:02:05.100That is basically saying that it's only the unique socialization forces that constrain you in life that don't turn you into the next Michael Jordan.
02:02:15.820There is nothing a priori that didn't start us all with equal potentiality.
02:02:47.980And therefore, it is hopeful because it frees me from the shackles of the constraints of reality, right?
02:02:53.880I want to believe that any child that I could have produced could have genuinely had an equal probability of being the next Albert Einstein or Michael Jordan.