The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - April 28, 2024


Parasitic Ideas and the Death of Common Sense (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_663)


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 38 minutes

Words per Minute

152.59064

Word Count

15,002

Sentence Count

1,091

Misogynist Sentences

40

Hate Speech Sentences

37


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Learn English with Randy Newman. In this episode, Randy Newman talks about the importance of free speech at Cornell University and the life and career of political incorrect gadfly, Dr. Gad Kwan, and his book, "The Sad Truth About Happiness."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Okay, I'd like to begin with a land acknowledgment. In this very room, Jody Shaw, Matt Taibbi, Greg
00:00:21.360 Lukianov, Ricky Schlott, and Barry Strauss spoke before the Heterodox Academy Campus Communities
00:00:27.560 at Cornell University and SUNY Cortland and their allies, the Cornell Political Union, on
00:00:34.740 the importance of free speech. Now for the politically incorrect part. Dad's sad is my
00:00:43.140 hero. Dad's life has been defined by his love of truth and freedom. And I say love,
00:00:57.540 of truth and freedom, because these are not academic words involving the head, but also
00:01:03.680 deeply held values involving the heart. Dad is unique. Dad is unique among academics in being
00:01:12.920 both brilliant in obtaining evidence and using reason to draw conclusions, but he also has
00:01:18.460 a heart, the courage of his convictions to voice his conclusions based on evidence and reason.
00:01:24.540 In an academic environment of cowardly, heartless, and mindless groupthink. And he does it with
00:01:30.680 humor. And my neighbor on my floor said, I should also add, it's a soulless place. Dad is a professor
00:01:40.680 of, uh, is a professor of the people and considers it a part of this job description to engage with
00:01:46.560 the public. Dad has written several popular books, including The Parasitic Mind, The Sad
00:01:52.700 Truth About Happiness, and is now writing a book called Suicidal Empathy. Dad also has his own
00:01:59.700 YouTube channel and has appeared on Joe Rogan's and Jordan Peterson's podcast and was an early
00:02:04.700 supporter of Jordan Peterson when Jordan found himself in hot water but not conforming to
00:02:09.820 conspelt speech demanded by Bill C-16 to use arbitrary and capricious pronouns. Dad is a modern-day
00:02:17.960 Till Eulenspiegel who fearlessly calls out intellectual dishonesty and incoherent ideological dogma
00:02:24.960 of moral relativism with its internal contradictions and premature claims that the science, the trademark,
00:02:32.960 is either irrelevant or separate. I want to read a few sentences from The Parasitic Mind.
00:02:40.100 Without the necessary freedoms, it would be impossible to instantiate my second life ideal,
00:02:47.740 namely the pursuit and defense of truth. There is a bi-directional relationship between truth and
00:02:53.400 freedom, such that the truth will set you free. Some of you recognize that, don't you? John 8, 32.
00:02:59.900 And only in being free can one aspire to uncover the truth. A university must choose one of two
00:03:07.460 T-loids, the search for truth or social justice, trademark. President Pollack contends that the
00:03:14.160 two are not incompatible, but de facto has chosen the T-loids of social justice through an arbitrary
00:03:21.040 capricious abhorrence of words that have wounds, to quote Kimberly Crenshaw, and the calling out of
00:03:28.600 microaggressions and the promotion of anonymous bias reporting. These lead to self-censorship and puts
00:03:35.080 a damper on the search for truth. I want to thank Gad for being so supportive of free speech and the
00:03:41.940 search for truth at Cornell, a postmodern Ivy League university that Gad dearly loves. Gad received his MS and
00:03:50.960 PhD at Cornell in 1963 and 1964. Not only does Gad... 1993. 1993. I'm a child of the 60s. Let me start again. Gad received his MS and PhD at Cornell in 1993 and 1994. Not only does Gad adore Cornell, but he's also adored. Is Jay Russo here? Gad's major professor is...
00:04:20.940 coming. Hannah Silverstein, a fellow student, had a dinner last night. Tom Gilovich...
00:04:30.940 Must be the traffic. Is coming. And Dennis Regan could not make it. Please do say hello to Gad said for me. But April 9th is my daughter's birthday and they'll be far away.
00:04:50.920 David Dunning...
00:04:52.920 David Dunning could not be here. Thanks for the invite, but I now work at the University of Michigan. And worse, I'm at sabbatic at Arizona State. So I'll not be in town.
00:05:00.920 So I'll not be in town. Do give my regards to Gad, who I do remember and I hope his old soccer injury is a lot of what I remember.
00:05:08.920 Sure.
00:05:10.920 Gad ends his book. Gad ends his book, The Sad Truth About Happiness, with these words.
00:05:20.920 My recipe for the good life includes, one, finding the right spouse. On that note, I'd like to thank my wife, Amy, who brings me so much happiness. It's about Judy.
00:05:36.920 In no small way has really made all these talks possible. So thank you. Thank you. And thank you all for having the courage to be here.
00:05:46.920 Thank you so much.
00:05:47.920 Thank you so much.
00:05:48.920 Thank you so much.
00:05:53.920 So let me... it's not on? Is it on? No. I'm pressing it.
00:06:00.920 Well, thank you for that lovely introduction. I've had several lovely introductions in my career, none of which led to such a beautiful emotional moment. So I think I'm going to put that on my CV.
00:06:25.920 Thank you all for coming. I didn't know Randy told me that it takes great courage to show up to this thing. I didn't think that it required so much courage. So thank you for your courage in showing up to my talk.
00:06:38.920 Some of us went through the Lebanese Civil War. That took courage. Apparently it takes equal courage to just show up to a talk at Cornell.
00:06:46.920 So today what I'd like to do is give an overview of some of the things that, regrettably, I've been worrying about in academia for several decades.
00:06:56.920 That resulted in me writing The Parasitic Mind. But notwithstanding that there is some evidence that things are improving, there's still a lot of work to be done.
00:07:05.920 So hopefully all the people who are here will help and affect some change. Let me just give you... Randy gave a bit of a history of my relationship with Cornell.
00:07:18.920 This first photo here is me while I was a student here. This is when I came back in 2000 as a visiting professor at the Johnson School.
00:07:29.920 This is in 2001 when I spoke at the, I think it was at the Stafford School, and my children were this young at the time.
00:07:36.920 This was taken during that visit, so I'm proudly embedding them within the Cornell brand.
00:07:46.920 This is when I was, it's, you shouldn't use the word obese, you should use words like differently-weighted.
00:07:53.920 This is when I used to be differently-weighted. In 2012 I came here to speak about the consuming instinct,
00:08:00.920 which is an area of, my main area of research, which is applying evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology in the behavioral sciences.
00:08:09.920 This is two years ago when several of Jay Russo's students, he's my, he was my supervisor for my PhD, he's a cognitive psychologist.
00:08:19.920 We came back to Ithaca to honor him on his retirement. So I, I guess he's not here yet, but he's supposed to be here. I hope he doesn't show up.
00:08:27.920 And then the next slide is me trying to fit in at, at Cornell because I hear that it is a truly, supremely woke place.
00:08:38.920 So this is my alter ego, Fierce Sally. I, I love smashing capitalism. Ask me about my pronouns. You got Revolucion with Che Guevara.
00:08:47.920 And this is actually a clip that I posted after I came back from this trip because it truly was that Ithaca was the epicenter of wokeness.
00:09:02.920 I didn't remember it as such when I was at Cornell. And as Randy said, I have infinite love for Cornell, but maybe not some of the parasitic infestations that we see at Cornell.
00:09:14.920 So hopefully I can help in administering some of the mind vaccines that are necessary.
00:09:19.920 Why did I use the parasitic framework in describing some of these issues?
00:09:25.920 Well, as you probably know, and certainly now that we face COVID, human beings have faced a slew of pathogenic realities, whether it be viruses or parasites or bacteria or fungi.
00:09:40.920 But of course I argue that human minds can also suffer from a second class of neural parasites.
00:09:48.920 These are beliefs, ideas, attitudes that are parasitic in nature.
00:09:53.920 And I'll try to explain what I mean by parasitic in a few minutes by also drawing some examples from the animal kingdom.
00:10:00.920 So here's an example from the animal kingdom.
00:10:05.920 Here you've got a spider wasp that stings a much larger spider, rendering it zombified, and then it carries it to its burrow where it lays eggs on it.
00:10:19.920 And then when the offspring hatch, they get to eat the spider in vivo.
00:10:28.920 And so I argue that political correctness is very much akin to the spider wasps thing, right?
00:10:35.920 We haplessly walk into the abyss of infinite lunacy quietly and according to plan.
00:10:42.920 Here's another example.
00:10:44.920 This one some of you may have heard of.
00:10:46.920 It can also infect human minds.
00:10:48.920 Toxoplasma gondii, but the most famous example is when it infects the minds of mice.
00:10:54.920 When a mouse is infected with that particular neural parasite, it loses its innate fear of cats,
00:11:01.920 and it actually becomes sexually attracted to the cat's urine,
00:11:05.920 which is a rather maladaptive preference to have if you're a cat.
00:11:10.920 In this case, these are neural parasites that affect ungulates, moose, deer, elk,
00:11:16.920 and so when they are parasitized by this parasite, they will start engaging in what's called circling behavior.
00:11:22.920 They keep going around kind of bobbing their head in a circle.
00:11:25.920 Even as the predators are coming, they can't extricate themselves from this pattern.
00:11:30.920 They can't instantiate their flight mechanism.
00:11:34.920 And so as you can see, it's a very apt metaphor to describe some of the idea pathogens
00:11:40.920 that regrettably all stem from university campuses.
00:11:44.920 And so that's why I use the parasitic framework rather than, say, a mimetic framework.
00:11:51.920 All right.
00:11:55.920 So this is a figure from the parasitic mind.
00:11:59.920 What are some of these idea pathogens?
00:12:01.920 There's a whole bunch that I describe in the book, but I'll just put a few up here for you to see.
00:12:05.920 So here you've got the granddaddy of all idea pathogens, postmodernism.
00:12:11.920 Postmodernism basically purports that there are no universal truths, no objective truths,
00:12:16.920 other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truths.
00:12:20.920 And so, as you might imagine, postmodernism then provides the mechanism by which all of these other idea pathogens can flourish.
00:12:31.920 Men are women, up is down, left is right, my truth, not the truth, and so on.
00:12:37.920 So in the book, I kind of go through many of these idea pathogens and I demonstrate how many of the public policy issues
00:12:44.920 that today we are debating originally stem from many of these parasitic ideas.
00:12:49.920 And I'll show you many examples of these in a second.
00:12:54.920 So, tsunami of lunacy as a form of intellectual terrorism, there are several elements to this tsunami.
00:13:00.920 Attacks on scientific truths, right? Men too can menstruate, right?
00:13:06.920 So until about 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people that had ever lived on Earth seemed to exactly know how to navigate
00:13:15.920 through the very, very complicated conundrum of what constitutes male or female,
00:13:19.920 as a sexually reproducing species consisting of two phenotypes, male and female.
00:13:24.920 But apparently now that was all wrong.
00:13:26.920 So, attacks on scientific truth, attacks on the epistemology for seeking scientific truth.
00:13:32.920 That's what postmodernism does.
00:13:34.920 And then, of course, attacks on the ethos of meritocracy.
00:13:38.920 And I'll just give a few examples of the last one.
00:13:41.920 So here's one.
00:13:43.920 This is the, so the smaller bar is what the average GPA used to be many years ago.
00:13:51.920 And through the years, it keeps going up.
00:13:54.920 So either students have become shockingly more intelligent over the past 30, 40 years,
00:14:00.920 or there might be a tad bit of grade inflation.
00:14:04.920 And I'll give you a few other figures that demonstrate that.
00:14:07.920 The average grade used to be in the past a C, as you would exactly expect from a normal distribution.
00:14:13.920 The average grade at many universities now is in A.
00:14:17.920 So let me repeat that.
00:14:19.920 The average grade is in A.
00:14:22.920 So again, we must have an epidemic of super, super bright people.
00:14:28.920 Standards have also reduced drastically.
00:14:33.920 So here I wrote a paper, an article a few years ago where I said,
00:14:37.920 I'll have a large flies, a hamburger, a Diet Coke, and an MBA, hold the pickles.
00:14:41.920 What I meant by that is that if you look at the pattern of what is required to get an MBA,
00:14:48.920 when I got an MBA prior to coming to Cornell, I had to go through 67 credits,
00:14:55.920 which was a very, very intense two full years of really jam-packed courses,
00:15:00.920 five, six, seven graduate courses a semester for two years.
00:15:04.920 Now you can get an MBA in one year.
00:15:07.920 You can get 45 credits.
00:15:09.920 So again, you've taken off a third at times half of the credits that were required only 20, 30 years ago.
00:15:19.920 Medical schools are starting to do that instead of four-year medical programs.
00:15:23.920 They're becoming free because, you know, we have to respond to the market conditions.
00:15:27.920 Students don't have time to sit there and waste time studying.
00:15:30.920 You have to respond to the market conditions.
00:15:32.920 The customers can.
00:15:36.920 Let's continue with the attack on meritocracy.
00:15:39.920 This is from the Canada research chair, called for research chair.
00:15:45.920 So this is the highest chair professorship that you can have endowed in Canada.
00:15:50.920 The endower is the Canadian government.
00:15:52.920 So if you hold the Canada research chair, it's a really prestigious thing.
00:15:55.920 You would think that, of course, it would all be based on merit.
00:15:59.920 It's anything but that.
00:16:01.920 It's, am I transgender?
00:16:03.920 Am I indigenous?
00:16:04.920 What's the skin you that I have?
00:16:08.920 Do I suffer from dermatological original sin?
00:16:12.920 So that will determine whether I get those Canada research chairs.
00:16:16.920 And if you think I'm being satirical or hyperbolic, I will actually show you specific language.
00:16:22.920 And you won't believe that it's possible.
00:16:25.920 This, by the way, is a case that is just unbelievable.
00:16:29.920 I mean, you truly think it's just satirical.
00:16:32.920 This is a law professor at UBC, University of British Columbia, who didn't get tenure because, you know, she didn't publish anything.
00:16:41.920 And so she decided that in her culture, which is an oral tradition culture, you know, this thing of writing that would have resulted in her publishing papers was contrary to the ethos of her culture.
00:16:58.920 Therefore, to ask her to have published things for tenure would have been an attack on her culture.
00:17:04.920 And the human rights tribunal said, yeah, okay, that makes sense.
00:17:08.920 Let's hear that case.
00:17:11.920 I mean, that's not a good thing, right?
00:17:15.920 So this is, University of Waterloo is kind of the MIT of Canada.
00:17:21.920 It's where a lot of the top engineering students, I mean, there are many great engineering schools in Canada, but Waterloo is kind of, as I said, MIT, Caltech.
00:17:30.920 A lot of the computer science stuff has happened at Waterloo.
00:17:33.920 So this is, again, a NSERC, which is the National Science Engineering Research Council.
00:17:40.920 So this is the NSERC Tier 1 Canada Research Chair.
00:17:45.920 So this is the top of the top when it comes to being endowed for a chair professorship in computer science in Canada.
00:17:51.920 Let me read you what you are, what we expect of you for the two positions.
00:17:56.920 This is straight out of, I took a screenshot from University of Waterloo.
00:18:01.920 For position one, we're looking for all areas of artificial intelligence.
00:18:06.920 The call is open only to qualified individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, gender fluid, non-binary, or two-spirit.
00:18:17.920 And then for the second position, all areas of computer science, the call is open only to qualified individuals who self-identify as a member of racialized minority.
00:18:27.920 I mean, it would be problematic if it was just racialized minority, but it's if you self-identify as a racialized minority.
00:18:34.920 So if I think that indigenous is the way to gain the system, I stop being a Lebanese Jew.
00:18:41.920 I become part of the Mi'kmaq tribe, and I better get that chair professorship.
00:18:46.920 That's a really nice way to adjudicate decisions.
00:18:50.920 This is me a few years ago.
00:18:52.920 I hate to say that my satire is prophetic, but my satire is prophetic.
00:18:59.920 When people would write to me and say, oh, you know, you warned about all these things, but these are just things that are in some esoteric silly humanities department.
00:19:08.920 It's never going to happen in neuroscience.
00:19:10.920 It's not going to happen in psychology.
00:19:12.920 It's not going to happen in engineering.
00:19:13.920 It's not going to happen in medicine or in physics or chemistry.
00:19:16.920 I say, oh, it's going to happen in all those.
00:19:18.920 And let me preempt it by showing you how it's going to happen in mathematics, which by definition,
00:19:23.920 if there ever was a field that where your identity could not matter, it would be in mathematics, right?
00:19:30.920 It's an axiomatic closed system, right?
00:19:34.920 There is no Lebanese Jewish way to study distribution of prime numbers, right?
00:19:39.920 There is no algebraic topology that's indigenous.
00:19:43.920 There's just algebraic topology.
00:19:45.920 And so I released the clip wearing my super woke wig, and I argued that there is now going to be a new field called social justice mathematics.
00:19:57.920 And I, because I have a mathematics background, I took, so I said, we need to stop using words like irrational numbers,
00:20:04.920 because that marginalizes mental illness.
00:20:06.920 We need to stop with the inequality operator, because that creates an ableist.
00:20:10.920 I just, I had a whole huge big thing.
00:20:12.920 And I would receive emails from professors in math departments saying,
00:20:16.920 we sit there in the faculty lounge watching this clip and laughing, okay?
00:20:20.920 Well, guess what?
00:20:21.920 A few years later, we find out that U.S. professor says that math is honored privilege of white people.
00:20:29.920 But I pre-, I predicted it several years earlier.
00:20:32.920 Now, why am I able to do that?
00:20:34.920 Because you take a principle that's insane, you extrapolate to its boundary condition,
00:20:40.920 you satirize it, and then you cross your fingers and you wait for the stupidity to catch up.
00:20:45.920 And that's exactly what happens.
00:20:48.920 The Quebec minister got into, the Quebec minister, the Deputy Minister of Science or the Environment,
00:20:58.920 got into a lot of trouble, because when they were talking about some environmental impact studies,
00:21:03.920 he said, well, there is no indigenous way to do science.
00:21:07.920 There's just science.
00:21:08.920 He then had to walk it back and apologize.
00:21:11.920 Well, there is no indigenous way to do science.
00:21:14.920 Just like there is no Lebanese Jewish way to do science.
00:21:16.920 There's just science.
00:21:18.920 Science liberates us from the shackles of our personal identity.
00:21:21.920 That's what makes it beautiful.
00:21:22.920 That's what makes it epistemologically democratic.
00:21:25.920 Right?
00:21:26.920 These guys started a movement at the University of Cape Town,
00:21:30.920 hashtag science must fall.
00:21:32.920 Because science is part of whiteness.
00:21:35.920 Right?
00:21:36.920 Darwin, white.
00:21:37.920 Newton, white.
00:21:39.920 Plato, white.
00:21:41.920 Socrates, white.
00:21:42.920 And so we have to look at that with suspicion.
00:21:45.920 Right?
00:21:46.920 This is at my university.
00:21:50.920 The five-year strategic plan was just released, passed around to the entire university.
00:21:57.920 The number one item in our strategic plan, this, I swear this is not, I'm not being satirical.
00:22:07.920 As a matter of fact, I brought literally the screenshots, is to decolonize and indigenize all of our curriculum.
00:22:16.920 So irrespective of which field you're in, so I teach psychology of decision making, consumer psychology, evolutionary psychology, behavioral decision theory,
00:22:26.920 I need to now, you know, in my best honest effort, find ways to decolonize and indigenize evolutionary psychology.
00:22:35.920 And everyone should be doing it, whether you're teaching Shakespeare, or you're in Judaic studies, or you're in neuroscience, that is the fundamental principle.
00:22:45.920 Because, you know, in the past, indigenous people in Canada were treated badly.
00:22:49.920 And so, who cares about science?
00:22:52.920 Who cares about reason?
00:22:53.920 We're going to indigenize.
00:22:54.920 And here is, by the way, the, I don't even know what these words mean, but we're supposed to abide by them.
00:22:59.920 So let me just read them for you for fun.
00:23:01.920 So this is the ethical principles and strategic priorities that we should implement in our curriculum.
00:23:06.920 This is at a major research university in Canada, in the 21st century.
00:23:12.920 Announced at a launch event at 4th Space, the plan draws upon the principles embodied in the two-row, one-pum belt.
00:23:20.920 I don't know what that means.
00:23:22.920 Or Tekani Teotati Kaswanta, an ethical framework for how colonial settler governments are to conduct themselves and on and on and on.
00:23:32.920 So I need to read that ethical statement and see, you know, do some introspection and see how I can implement all that within all of my teaching and future research.
00:23:41.920 This is my interest, some of the students who are physicists here.
00:23:48.920 We have, I think it's a $500,000 grant from the Canadian government to decolonize light.
00:23:56.920 Light, as a physics phenomenon, needs to be indigenized and decolonized.
00:24:03.920 We have $500,000, if any of you are interested.
00:24:07.920 This is a recent thing.
00:24:10.920 Some of you may have seen this.
00:24:11.920 There's an AI Gemini thing that Google released.
00:24:15.920 And it turns out that the way it was programmed, white people cease to exist.
00:24:22.920 So you enter anything you want.
00:24:24.920 George Washington, he comes out as, you know, I don't know, maybe it's this guy.
00:24:29.920 Okay?
00:24:30.920 And so on and so forth.
00:24:32.920 And actually a whole bunch of people started gaming the system to see if they could ever generate.
00:24:37.920 And so now they've taken it off shelf to try to work on it.
00:24:41.920 But again, these are not just esoteric, idiotic ideas that fester in the ecosystem of universities.
00:24:47.920 They escape from the university ecosystem and they become the prime minister of Canada.
00:24:52.920 This is also with AI.
00:24:57.920 This one, someone sent me this.
00:25:00.920 A fan sent me this.
00:25:02.920 It asked the AI system, who is more evil?
00:25:07.920 Mao Tse Tung, you know, who killed 50 plus million people?
00:25:13.920 Or Gad Saad?
00:25:15.920 So I can understand why the room is not completely full today.
00:25:18.920 Because I am, after all, someone who can stand proudly.
00:25:23.920 So you should read this or I can send it to you.
00:25:26.920 It's very tough to tell whether Gad Saad, the evolutionary psychologist in Canada, or the genocidal killer of 50 plus million people.
00:25:35.920 It's really relative.
00:25:36.920 It's a tough call.
00:25:37.920 We can't tell really.
00:25:38.920 That's what happens when wokeness invades our capacity to think.
00:25:43.920 Now this story, some of you may have heard it before if you follow my work.
00:25:49.920 Many may have not.
00:25:51.920 Even if you've heard it, it's worth hearing it in person.
00:25:53.920 So here it goes.
00:25:54.920 This is demonstrating the insanity of, well, this certainly, but even more so this.
00:26:03.920 And you'll see in a second why I've got these two figures.
00:26:06.920 2002, I was a visiting professor at University of California, Irvine.
00:26:12.920 And then I took a break from that to go to a visiting professorship at Dartmouth.
00:26:16.920 And my doctoral student in Montreal was defending his doctoral dissertation.
00:26:21.920 He defended it.
00:26:22.920 I drove back to Montreal and he defended it.
00:26:24.920 And we were then going out to dinner to celebrate him having his PhD.
00:26:29.920 He's now actually himself a chair professor in Canada.
00:26:33.920 So we were going out to dinner, myself, my wife, my doctoral student at the time, and he was bringing a date.
00:26:41.920 So he calls me nervously about two, three hours before we were meeting.
00:26:47.920 And he goes, oh, I just want to give you a heads up that the person that I'm bringing is a graduate student
00:26:54.920 in cultural anthropology, women's study, and postmodernism.
00:26:59.920 I said, ah, okay, so the holy trinity of bullshit.
00:27:02.920 And I said, oh, no, I got you.
00:27:05.920 I'm going to be on my best behavior.
00:27:07.920 This is your night.
00:27:08.920 I'm going to be good.
00:27:09.920 Like, don't worry about it.
00:27:10.920 No, nothing's going to happen.
00:27:12.920 Which, of course, was a complete lie.
00:27:15.920 So about halfway through the evening, I turned to the lady in question.
00:27:19.920 And I said, oh, I hear you're a post-Mormon graduate student.
00:27:23.920 She goes, yes.
00:27:24.920 I said, there are no universal truths.
00:27:26.920 Yes?
00:27:27.920 No.
00:27:28.920 I said, well, do you mind?
00:27:29.920 I mean, I work under the premise that there are certain universal truths.
00:27:32.920 For example, evolutionary psychology does purport that there is, there are some human universals
00:27:38.920 that you can find in the Yanomomo tribe in the Amazon, and you can find in Detroit, Michigan in the 1950s, and you can find it in Ithaca today.
00:27:47.920 Those are called human universals.
00:27:49.920 She goes, well, do you mind if I propose what I think are human universals, or universal, and then we can discuss them?
00:27:55.920 She goes, yeah, go for it.
00:27:56.920 This is 2002, way before the transgender stuff.
00:28:00.920 Is it not true that only women bear children?
00:28:07.920 So she looks at me, can't believe that someone could be such a simpleton.
00:28:11.920 I said, no, it's not true.
00:28:12.920 I said, it's not true?
00:28:13.920 How so?
00:28:14.920 So then she says that there is some Japanese tribe off some Japanese island where within the folkloric realm, it is the men who bear children.
00:28:23.920 So by you restricting it to the material biological realm, that's how you keep us, you know, barefoot and pregnant.
00:28:30.920 So after I recovered from the mini stroke I had at listening to this, I said, okay, well, let me, maybe it was too controversial when I, you know, tried to tackle something as corrosive as only women bear children.
00:28:44.920 So let me take a slightly less controversial example.
00:28:47.920 Is it not true that within any vantage point on Earth, sailors have relied on the premise that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west?
00:28:59.920 So here she used a variant of postmodernism called deconstructionism by Jacques Derrida.
00:29:06.920 Deconstructionism argues that language creates reality.
00:29:09.920 There is no reality outside that which you name.
00:29:12.920 So then she says, what do you mean by east and west?
00:29:15.920 And what do you mean by the sun?
00:29:18.920 That which you call the sun, I might call dancing hyena.
00:29:22.920 I said, well, fine, the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west.
00:29:27.920 And she said, no, I don't play those label games.
00:29:29.920 Now why, why did that story become such an infamous story in the lore of postmodernism?
00:29:38.920 Because if I can't find an intersection of meaning with a graduate student at a leading university in Canada, where we can agree that a sexually reproducing species, it is the women who bear children.
00:29:54.920 And there is such a thing as the sun, you know, the one where we had the polar eclipse yesterday, the dancing hyena eclipse.
00:30:01.920 So if I can't agree with you on that, it's a dead end.
00:30:06.920 It's an epistemological dead end.
00:30:08.920 So not only can you not solve anything in science or reason or literature or anything that involves intellectual enrichment,
00:30:16.920 but you're wasting your parents' precious hard-earned money in wasting time doing this kind of garbage.
00:30:25.920 It does nothing for you, right?
00:30:27.920 It's a Darwinian dead end.
00:30:32.920 Another idea pathogen that regrettably I saw very early in my academic career where I was trying to Darwinize the behavioral sciences,
00:30:42.920 applying evolutionary theory in understanding human behavior.
00:30:46.920 Most social scientists are social constructivists.
00:30:50.920 We are born tabula rasa, and it's only socialization that then makes men be the way they are, that makes women the way they are.
00:30:58.920 That's called a social constructivist argument.
00:31:01.920 Now in a small sense, of course socialization does occur, but socialization occurs in its forms because of biology, not contra-biology.
00:31:10.920 And so one of the ways that I like to demonstrate that is via the example of the sex specificity of toy preferences.
00:31:19.920 The reason I use that example is because usually social constructivists argue that that's where the nefarious gender roles begin.
00:31:27.920 Right?
00:31:28.920 Little boys are taught to play, you know, rough and tumble with the trucks and the guns.
00:31:33.920 Little girls are taught to play in a nurturing way with the pink doll.
00:31:37.920 And there goes the cascade of gender role specialization.
00:31:40.920 And so if I want to prove to the most hostile audience of social constructivists that toy preferences are actually biological based, how would I go about doing that?
00:31:51.920 And this is how I do it.
00:31:54.920 This is called, this is something that I talk about in chapter seven of the parasitic mind.
00:31:59.920 So this is called a nomological network of cumulative evidence.
00:32:04.920 For anybody who's here who's a student or a professor, if you don't retain anything else from my talk today, I hope you retain many things, then certainly retain this epistemological powerhouse.
00:32:16.920 What a, what a nomological network of cumulative evidence does is it says, what is all of the evidence that I could amass across time, across cultures, across species, across methodologies, across theoretical frameworks, so that I can triangulate the veracity of my position.
00:32:37.920 It's a lot more than merely a literature review.
00:32:40.920 A literature review is very narrow.
00:32:42.920 This is much broader.
00:32:43.920 So let me, I won't go through the entire, the entire network, but so I want to prove to you that there is a biological basis of court preferences.
00:32:52.920 It's not socially constructed.
00:32:54.920 How would I go do that?
00:32:55.920 Okay.
00:32:56.920 So let me show you a few ways.
00:32:57.920 Well, this is from developmental psychology.
00:32:59.920 This, this square right here.
00:33:00.920 Well, I can show you that children who are too young to be socialized, in other words, by definition, they haven't yet reached the cognitive developmental stage to be socialized, already exhibit those sex-specific court preferences.
00:33:16.920 They're three months old, six months old.
00:33:18.920 They couldn't have been socialized, but they already exhibit.
00:33:21.920 So even if I stopped the network right here, I pretty much already put a death nail in your coffin, but I'm not going to stop there.
00:33:29.920 How about I get you data from clinical endocrinology showing you that little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia, that's a mouthful, which basically means that their behaviors and their morphology, because they have an endocrinological problem, becomes masculinized.
00:33:48.920 So girls who suffer from CAH, guess what happens to their court preferences?
00:33:52.920 They become fully reversed.
00:33:54.920 They become like those of boys.
00:33:56.920 Now it's starting to look bad for the social destructiveness, but I'm not going to stop there.
00:34:00.920 How about I get you data from other species?
00:34:04.920 How about I get you data from vervet monkeys, and rhesus monkeys, and chimpanzees, showing you that they exhibit the exact same sex specificity of court preferences as human infants?
00:34:15.920 Well, you're going to have to now really use a lot of mental gymnastics to argue that the baby rhesus monkey has patriarchal parents who are teaching him gender stereotypes.
00:34:29.920 Right?
00:34:30.920 So bit by bit, I put the epistemological noose figuratively around your neck because I drown you in a tsunami of evidence.
00:34:37.920 Now it's a very effortful process, but if you are committed to the process, then you win any argument.
00:34:44.920 That's why people say, well, how come it's so hard to cancel you?
00:34:48.920 Well, first, who could cancel this phrase?
00:34:51.920 But number two, number two, because if you're going to debate me, and I've built this network, good luck to you.
00:34:58.920 You better come correct and not miss, because otherwise, it's going to be trouble for you.
00:35:03.920 So I'm very calibrated.
00:35:06.920 If you ask me a question about something that I don't know about, I'll say, that's a great question.
00:35:11.920 Unfortunately, I don't have the necessary expertise to speak.
00:35:14.920 So I don't overstep my knowledge.
00:35:16.920 I never get caught with my pants down, so to speak.
00:35:20.920 But if you ask me about topics that I've built the requisite neurological network, well then, let's have at it.
00:35:27.920 And so that's what allows me to then go into very hairy situations and come out unscathed.
00:35:36.920 This is continuing with this.
00:35:39.920 So some people said, oh yeah, but it's the woke stuff, the parasitic stuff is never going to come to medicine.
00:35:44.920 I mean, medicine is too practically important to actually find its way there.
00:35:50.920 No way.
00:35:51.920 This is verbatim.
00:35:53.920 I transcribed the entire thing from this gentleman, who is the dean at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities medical class.
00:36:02.920 I won't read the whole thing, but I'll just read a few things.
00:36:05.920 So we recognize inequities built by past and present traumas rooted in white supremacy, colonialism, the gender binary.
00:36:15.920 These are future positions.
00:36:18.920 Ableism and all sorts of, and it goes on and on and on.
00:36:21.920 Now, it used to be that you had to say the Hippocratic Oath after Hippocrates, the Greek, the ancient Greek physician.
00:36:29.920 Now you say the woke oath.
00:36:31.920 It's insane.
00:36:33.920 Now let's keep going in case that hasn't alarmed you enough.
00:36:36.920 This is from the New England Journal of Medicine, which is arguably the most prestigious academic medical journal.
00:36:44.920 The editors of the journal didn't find it necessary to maybe spend a few extra pages, you know, solving cancer.
00:36:52.920 Instead, they had Deborah Cohen write a very, very long self-orgiastic self-flagellation.
00:37:01.920 And I apologize for being white and a physician.
00:37:05.920 I am so wrong for having been white.
00:37:07.920 I'm sorry for having learned white medicine and on and on.
00:37:11.920 Imagine that's your physician.
00:37:14.920 That's your surgeon.
00:37:15.920 So bad ideas are not just esoteric things that just stay within some humanities department.
00:37:21.920 They become our physicians.
00:37:23.920 They become our surgeons.
00:37:24.920 They become our prime ministers and on and on.
00:37:29.920 It's not good.
00:37:31.920 This is me speaking in 2017 in front of the Canadian Senate about what was then called,
00:37:39.920 I mean, it still is called Bill C-16, but at the time it hadn't passed yet.
00:37:44.920 Bill C-16 was the bill that sought to incorporate gender expression and gender orientation within the hate crime rubric.
00:37:52.920 And I was asked to come and testify.
00:37:55.920 Let me repeat it here, although it shouldn't be that I need to say it.
00:38:00.920 Of course, I support the right of every individual to live in any way that they wish.
00:38:04.920 Live and let live.
00:38:05.920 Of course, I wish for everybody to live free of bigotry.
00:38:09.920 That doesn't mean that you take me on your ride to celebrate your unique personhood.
00:38:16.920 It doesn't mean that we remove from the passport, you know, these markers called male and female,
00:38:23.920 because what happens if you're one of the 50,000, one in 50,000 that believes that they are non-binary.
00:38:30.920 So our most fundamental marker of our personhood is lost because now we need to cater to the tyranny of the minority.
00:38:39.920 And so when I explained all that in front of the Canadian Senate, I said, here is what's going to happen.
00:38:44.920 And I hate to say it, go listen to it.
00:38:46.920 It's exactly what I predicted.
00:38:48.920 And kudos to my partisan free thinker in Canada, Jordan Peterson, who also tried to warn them.
00:38:54.920 But Jordan has now retired from academia, so I stand as the lone wolf in Canada fighting against the tsunami of insanity.
00:39:02.920 It's not pretty, let me tell you.
00:39:05.920 Well, this senator said what you are arguing here.
00:39:12.920 I was basically arguing that there really is such a thing as male and female for sexually reproducing species called homo sapiens.
00:39:18.920 That's what I was arguing.
00:39:20.920 He said, you are promulgating genocide against transgender people.
00:39:26.920 To which I said, you might wanna be careful about using this kind of accusations from someone who escaped execution in the Middle East.
00:39:36.920 And that kind of threw him off.
00:39:38.920 But that's the kind of theater, political theater of the absurd that you see amongst our politicians.
00:39:45.920 Of course, this is just so I don't wanna keep you out because we're in the US.
00:39:51.920 I want you to feel inclusive and welcomed and heard.
00:39:56.920 This is a person who is now sitting on the nine person Supreme Court.
00:40:04.920 When asked by this person, can you define what a woman is?
00:40:11.920 You know all this, but it's worth repeating.
00:40:14.920 She pauses.
00:40:15.920 She stutters and says, well, I'm not a biologist, so how could I answer that?
00:40:21.920 Again, the 117 billion people who had existed until this confirmation hearing seem to be able to navigate through choosing who's male or female in reproducing.
00:40:34.920 But she doesn't know that.
00:40:35.920 She's not a biologist.
00:40:36.920 She's not a biologist.
00:40:37.920 Now, of course she knows what it is.
00:40:39.920 But the fact that she's existing in a lunatic epistemological world where she doesn't have the confidence to say, what kind of insane question is that?
00:40:50.920 Of course I know what a woman is.
00:40:52.920 Tells you how far we've gotten.
00:40:55.920 I get emails from grown adults, dear Professor Saad, I'm just wondering, is it accepted science now that men too can menstruate?
00:41:07.920 And I write back, dear so and so, no.
00:41:12.920 So the fact that that person has been so unstable in the ground that they're standing on, to have to get the imprimatur of a professor to tell them who menstruates, tells you that it's parasitic, it's a problem.
00:41:32.920 This is my interaction.
00:41:33.920 This is the actual lady with whom I was interacting.
00:41:37.920 She's an anesthesiologist who first told me to shut my mouth because she's a physician of color.
00:41:44.920 So, to which I answered, I'm a child war refugee of color.
00:41:51.920 So I outrank you by far.
00:41:53.920 Be careful.
00:41:54.920 Don't play victimology poker with me.
00:41:57.920 You lose.
00:41:58.920 So that already got her unstable because she was trying to use that calculus she lost in it.
00:42:03.920 But she explained to me that you didn't go to medical school.
00:42:07.920 I did.
00:42:08.920 And stop saying things like men don't menstruate.
00:42:12.920 This is an anesthesiologist.
00:42:15.920 She administers the dosage of anesthesiology based on whether you're male or female.
00:42:24.920 She publicly chastised me.
00:42:28.920 By the way, I published a lot of papers in journals that she couldn't even pronounce their names on the menstrual cycle.
00:42:34.920 But I wasn't a physician of color.
00:42:37.920 And I'm a man.
00:42:40.920 Therefore, I didn't go through the experience of menstruating.
00:42:44.920 And therefore, shut your mouth.
00:42:45.920 Sorry?
00:42:46.920 How did we know you didn't?
00:42:47.920 Very true.
00:42:48.920 Very true.
00:42:49.920 By the way, I recently announced...
00:42:51.920 I'll take questions at the end.
00:42:54.920 My biological female wife recently announced to me that she now self-identifies as a male.
00:43:05.920 So I'm proud to say that I stand before you today as a gay man.
00:43:10.920 So whatever part of my victimology poker hadn't yet been met, I now also tick that off.
00:43:18.920 So don't come at me.
00:43:19.920 You will lose in victimology poker.
00:43:24.920 Speaking of menstruation, this is happening.
00:43:29.920 It's a one-day scientific symposium at my university.
00:43:33.920 And by the way, my university is very woke.
00:43:37.920 But this could have been at Cornell.
00:43:38.920 It could have been at Harvard.
00:43:40.920 They're holding a one-day scientific conference, symposium for big thinkers, on menstrual equity.
00:43:50.920 And on the fact that menstruation is a human right.
00:43:55.920 Because until we got a bunch of luminaries to sit together, women had not been allowed that right to menstruate.
00:44:03.920 So we need to hold a symposium at Concordia for menstrual equity.
00:44:09.920 Now, you might say, okay, but who cares?
00:44:11.920 Eventually, they'll grow out of this stupidity.
00:44:13.920 But how about the funds that are being wasted on this?
00:44:16.920 How about the attack, the murder and rape of truth, of reason?
00:44:20.920 Really, in the 21st century, this is what we're coming up with?
00:44:23.920 That's what happens when you get a parasitic infestation that attacks, that creates a madness of crowds.
00:44:32.920 Right?
00:44:33.920 Throw the woman in the swimming pool.
00:44:35.920 Throw her.
00:44:36.920 She's a witch.
00:44:37.920 If she drowns, then we were wrong.
00:44:39.920 If she swims, then we were right that she was a witch.
00:44:42.920 It's the exact same principle.
00:44:44.920 The template of parasitic thinking has always existed within the architecture of the human mind.
00:44:50.920 The only thing that's different today is the specific parasitic pathogens, postmodernism, cultural relativism, and so on.
00:44:58.920 Let's keep going.
00:44:59.920 This is at the recent anthropology meetings, the Canadian and U.S. Anthropological Society.
00:45:08.920 So this is the premier anthropologist meetings.
00:45:12.920 But they ended up canceling a session and deeply apologizing because there were five female anthropologists who wanted to argue that there are many cases in archaeology and anthropology where it makes perfect sense to be studying this thing called biological sex.
00:45:34.920 Let's say when you're doing archaeological excavations where you can tell through forensic anthropology if it's a male or female.
00:45:41.920 Right?
00:45:42.920 So they just wanted to reintroduce the idea that, no, no, biological sex really does matter in anthropology and archaeology.
00:45:50.920 Well, they had to cancel that session and they put out a huge letter of apology.
00:45:57.920 Okay?
00:45:58.920 This is not in Waziristan and the contested territories of the Taliban.
00:46:03.920 This is the premier anthropological society of Canada and the United States.
00:46:09.920 Let's keep going.
00:46:12.920 Look at this beautiful woman, Dylan Mulvaney.
00:46:16.920 These are three physicians.
00:46:17.920 The reason I take the screenshots is because I bring the receipts.
00:46:20.920 Okay?
00:46:21.920 These are three physicians.
00:46:23.920 I think two of whom are gynecologists who publicly chastised anyone who said that this wasn't a full woman.
00:46:36.920 Stop.
00:46:37.920 Or period.
00:46:38.920 Forgive the pun.
00:46:39.920 Is that really possible?
00:46:43.920 Is it truly possible that an OBGYN could feel sufficiently emboldened to go on social media and troll and attack people who say,
00:46:56.920 come on, really?
00:46:59.920 And they say, you're an idiot.
00:47:01.920 Yes, really.
00:47:02.920 That's a woman.
00:47:05.920 So let's talk now.
00:47:06.920 Let's move to some other topics so we condemn freedom of speech that hurts other people's feelings.
00:47:11.920 So here what I'd like to talk about is something that actually when Randy and I first met a couple of years ago,
00:47:18.920 I was giving an invited lecture at an academic freedom conference at Stanford University.
00:47:23.920 And the topic of my lecture that day was on the distinction between deontological and consequentialist ethics.
00:47:32.920 I'll spend a few minutes on it because it's really relevant to what's happening in academia.
00:47:38.920 Deontological ethics are absolute statements of truth or morality, right?
00:47:45.920 So if I say, for example, it is never okay to lie, that would be a deontological statement.
00:47:50.920 If I say, well, it is okay to lie to spare someone's feelings, then that's a consequential statement.
00:47:56.920 So I always tell people that if you want to have a long-lasting and happy marriage, when you hear the following question,
00:48:04.920 do I look fat in those jeans, then very quickly put on your consequentialist hat and say, absolutely not.
00:48:11.920 You'll never look more beautiful.
00:48:13.920 So there are times when it makes perfect sense for any of us to be consequentialist in our ethical bent.
00:48:19.920 But when it comes to truth, when it comes to science, when it comes to freedom of speech, when it comes to freedom of inquiry,
00:48:27.920 those are deontological principles by definition.
00:48:31.920 Once you say, I believe in freedom of speech, but that's not good.
00:48:36.920 So let me give you an example of what happens when you do that.
00:48:40.920 Here is... and some of the people who've committed this, these transgressions, used to be former friends of mine.
00:48:50.920 Not that I stopped being friends with people because they're imbeciles, but in this case,
00:48:55.920 it's so egregious, the sum of the sum that they were saying, that they really truly lifted me off.
00:48:59.920 So here's one.
00:49:00.920 But each of these are a violation of the deontological principle.
00:49:03.920 And now I'm speaking in their voice.
00:49:05.920 By the way, each of these positions is also called 95% of professors.
00:49:10.920 Okay?
00:49:11.920 So, oh, of course I believe in freedom of speech.
00:49:14.920 Oh, I'm all about freedom of speech.
00:49:16.920 But it is perfectly reasonable to have banned Donald Trump from Twitter
00:49:20.920 because he's simply too dangerous to be allowed to spew this garbage.
00:49:23.920 No.
00:49:24.920 That means you're consequentialist.
00:49:26.920 You decide that there are certain special asterisk cases of people that shouldn't be given freedom of speech.
00:49:32.920 Right?
00:49:33.920 I'm Jewish.
00:49:34.920 I left Lebanon.
00:49:35.920 I support the right of the most offensive speech, Holocaust denies.
00:49:40.920 There can't be, by definition, something more insulting.
00:49:43.920 Not only because of the reality, but it's such a falsehood.
00:49:47.920 It's such an offensive falsehood.
00:49:49.920 But in a free society, you support imbeciles.
00:49:52.920 You support the right of falsehood spreaders, of racists, of anti-Semites.
00:49:56.920 You beat them with better ideas.
00:49:57.920 Let's go on.
00:49:59.920 Oh, of course I support presumption of innocence.
00:50:02.920 That's a bedrock of American jurisprudence, Western jurisprudence.
00:50:06.920 But not for Brett Kavanaugh.
00:50:09.920 Because Brett Kavanaugh was a gang rapist going up and down the Eastern Seaway raping everything in sight.
00:50:15.920 We don't have to worry if there is evidence in support of him.
00:50:18.920 It's too important a decision to grant him the courtesy of presumption of innocence.
00:50:23.920 So yes, in the abstract, I support presumption of innocence.
00:50:27.920 Just not for the gang rapist Brett Kavanaugh.
00:50:30.920 Here's the third one.
00:50:32.920 Oh, of course I support the need for an impartial truth-telling press.
00:50:38.920 We need a healthy, honest press for democracy to function properly.
00:50:44.920 But not when it came to the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:50:49.920 Because had that story come out, then there's all evidence showing that then Orange Himmler would have won.
00:50:57.920 And so it was perfectly reasonable to suppress that story.
00:51:01.920 Because it was unique to the asteroid that was coming at us.
00:51:06.920 And then finally, of course I support freedom of inquiry.
00:51:09.920 But as long as it's not antithetical to some social justice populist.
00:51:15.920 No, no, no, and no.
00:51:19.920 Right?
00:51:20.920 There is no forbidden knowledge.
00:51:22.920 There is no freedom of speech.
00:51:24.920 But you're either pregnant or you're not.
00:51:27.920 There is no but.
00:51:28.920 Now, there is the usual proviso, for example, for freedom of speech.
00:51:31.920 You can't defame.
00:51:32.920 You can't libel.
00:51:33.920 You can't engage in a direct incitement.
00:51:36.920 You can't say, at the corner of Buffalo Street and Cayuga, when they come out from the synagogue,
00:51:41.920 let's all go kill the Jews.
00:51:43.920 That's incitement to violence.
00:51:44.920 But if you want to stand up on a podium and say,
00:51:47.920 Judaism is a bunch of croc.
00:51:49.920 Well, it's too bad to say that.
00:51:51.920 But in a free society, that's what we have to do.
00:51:54.920 This is from an article written by a very liberal professor.
00:52:01.920 I won't read you the whole thing.
00:52:02.920 But he's basically saying, I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political
00:52:08.920 winds have shifted.
00:52:09.920 I basically don't teach a single word or utter a single syllable that might offend a single
00:52:16.920 person.
00:52:17.920 Is this the way you want your professors to walk into your classroom and teach your children?
00:52:22.920 Not very good.
00:52:24.920 Let's go on.
00:52:26.920 This is a...
00:52:29.920 So, in evolutionary medicine, there is this idea of the hygiene hypothesis.
00:52:36.920 The hygiene hypothesis works as follows.
00:52:38.920 Let me first explain it, and then I'll link it to echo chambers in universities.
00:52:42.920 The hygiene hypothesis basically argues that if you look, for example, at children who grew up exposed
00:52:48.920 to allergens versus children who grew up in very sterile environments, no pollutants,
00:52:56.920 the children who grew up with a lot of allergens end up having fewer autoimmune diseases.
00:53:02.920 For example, asthma.
00:53:03.920 Why?
00:53:04.920 Because the immune system expects to be triggered.
00:53:09.920 It expects to face stressors for it to operate optimally.
00:53:13.920 So now apply that principle to the human mind and your ability to critically think.
00:53:20.920 My ability to be the best debater possible rests on the premise of being exposed to opposing
00:53:26.920 ideas.
00:53:27.920 That's how I hone my arguments.
00:53:29.920 That's how I can build those nomological networks of evidence that I mentioned earlier.
00:53:34.920 If I only allowed people in the room who agree with me, then I wouldn't be as good of a
00:53:39.920 debater as I might otherwise be.
00:53:42.920 And so this principle of hygiene hypothesis is exactly applicable to the types of echo chambers
00:53:50.920 we see in universities where you cancel someone because, you know, their words are violence
00:53:55.920 and so on and so forth.
00:53:57.920 Now how does that arise?
00:53:58.920 How do you build echo chambers of conformity?
00:54:01.920 You do so by having all your professors be of one political orientation.
00:54:07.920 So this was a study that was done in 2018 by Langbert with whom I've communicated briefly
00:54:12.920 at some point.
00:54:13.920 This shows you the ratio of Democrats to Republicans across disciplines.
00:54:22.920 Okay?
00:54:23.920 So the best possible ratio is in engineering when it's 1.6 to 1 in favor of Democrats.
00:54:32.920 Now to give you a sense of what 1.6 to 1 is in other scientific contexts, if you usually
00:54:38.920 say you have a 1.2 odds ratio, that means that I gave these two drugs, I give a placebo and
00:54:44.920 I give an actual drug, and the non-placebo is 20% more effective.
00:54:49.920 So 1.2 is a big effect.
00:54:51.920 So 1.6 is a pretty big effect.
00:54:55.920 But that's the least one.
00:54:57.920 Now we're going to go to 5.2, we're going to go to 16.8 to 1.
00:55:02.920 So these are orders of magnitude that you don't see in science.
00:55:07.920 Oh, let's go to communications at 133 to 1.
00:55:12.920 So you're more likely to run into a unicorn than you are likely to run into a Republican
00:55:19.920 who's a sociology professor.
00:55:21.920 So look for a winged horse before you look for a sociology professor who's Republican.
00:55:27.920 Now is that a good thing?
00:55:29.920 Well, in some fields it won't matter what my political orientation is as a professor.
00:55:34.920 Right?
00:55:35.920 Whether I am a Democrat, Republican, Liberal, or Conservative, evolution is evolution.
00:55:40.920 But in fields where there are valuable debates to be had on both sides of the aisle,
00:55:46.920 is death penalty a good thing or a bad thing?
00:55:49.920 Should the policy be an isolationist one or should the United States intervene in any places?
00:55:57.920 There are very valuable arguments to be had on both sides.
00:56:01.920 So imagine that you don't have that in your classrooms
00:56:04.920 because every single professor that you're ever going to meet,
00:56:07.920 certainly in fields in politics and in law and in communications and so on,
00:56:12.920 are astronomically of one ideological men.
00:56:18.920 You're cheating your students.
00:56:23.920 Now here is a...
00:56:26.920 So every single day at my university I receive another email telling me
00:56:31.920 how we need to be better allies to women in the university.
00:56:35.920 Because it turns out that, you know, we still live in Waziristan
00:56:38.920 where the Taliban is stopping women from attending universities.
00:56:41.920 Even though the chair of my department is a woman,
00:56:43.920 the associate dean of research is a woman, the...
00:56:47.920 Not the president, but...
00:56:49.920 I mean, it's almost all women.
00:56:51.920 Okay?
00:56:52.920 Here is a study by the U.S. government.
00:56:55.920 Okay?
00:56:56.920 Are you ready for this?
00:56:58.920 This is the U.S. government looking at the ratio of male to female graduates.
00:57:04.920 And I'm going to build the data matrix for you across four levels of education.
00:57:10.920 Associate's degree, which is a two-year degree, half a bachelor's.
00:57:14.920 A bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and a doctorate.
00:57:17.920 So one...
00:57:19.920 So there are four...
00:57:21.920 In the matrix there's four levels of education across five racial categories.
00:57:26.920 White, black, Hispanic, you know, indigenous, whatever.
00:57:31.920 Native, and so on.
00:57:34.920 So they are...
00:57:35.920 So the matrix is four by five.
00:57:37.920 So there are 20 cells.
00:57:39.920 I guess you read it already.
00:57:41.920 Actually, I've not shown you.
00:57:42.920 When I usually ask the students or a lecturer without...
00:57:45.920 How many of those cells do you think men outnumber women?
00:57:50.920 Because if there's a huge problem in terms of, you know,
00:57:53.920 we need to, you know, we need to solve the Waziristan Taliban problem.
00:57:57.920 We need to get more women involved.
00:57:59.920 Well, 20 of the 20 cells would be more men.
00:58:02.920 Well, 20 out of 20 cells across every racial category
00:58:08.920 and every level of educational attainment, women today outnumber men.
00:58:13.920 In many cases, by a big margin.
00:58:16.920 So it was true that 100 years ago there was institutionalized misogynistic barriers
00:58:22.920 for women to enter many fields.
00:58:25.920 And then we worked hard and we solved it.
00:58:27.920 And then a honest interlocutor says, well, there's now a new reality,
00:58:31.920 so I update my narrative.
00:58:33.920 But here we don't update our narratives.
00:58:35.920 Even though women now...
00:58:37.920 Now we should be doing the opposite.
00:58:38.920 There's not enough men that are going to university.
00:58:41.920 Let's flip the narrative.
00:58:43.920 We can't disassociate ourselves from that victimhood narrative.
00:58:46.920 So even though the data couldn't be more fully antithetical to the physician,
00:58:51.920 I still get every day, how are you going to help your female students?
00:58:55.920 Well, I don't help my students as a function of their menstrual status.
00:58:58.920 I help them as a function of how talented they are.
00:59:01.920 Or actually...
00:59:02.920 It doesn't matter.
00:59:03.920 They need my help, they get help.
00:59:05.920 So how do we save our universities?
00:59:07.920 I've got about a few more slides.
00:59:09.920 So I think I'm right on cue in terms of taking questions.
00:59:14.920 So how do we save our universities?
00:59:16.920 Number one, pursue knowledge unencumbered by ideological activism.
00:59:20.920 No knowledge is forbidden if gathered objectively using the scientific method.
00:59:24.920 Universities are not places where you train activists.
00:59:27.920 Universities are places where you enrich human minds.
00:59:30.920 And I'm not an elitist, a disciplinary elitist that I say,
00:59:34.920 oh, it's only science that matters, but not Shakespeare.
00:59:37.920 You could study art history and be fully intellectually enriched.
00:59:41.920 But it has to be wedded to reason, to logic, where it's relevant to the scientific method.
00:59:47.920 We're not here to create little Che Guevara activists.
00:59:51.920 Number two, no more identity politics.
00:59:54.920 Instead, promote the dignity of the individual rather than supporting oppression Olympics and victimology poker.
00:59:59.920 No more coddling of the culture of offense and the ethos of perpetual victimhood.
01:00:04.920 A just society is rooted in the ethos of another hypocrisy.
01:00:09.920 We are not social ants.
01:00:10.920 Why did I say that?
01:00:11.920 E.O. Wilson, the famous Harvard biologist who is an entomologist by training,
01:00:16.920 he studied social ants.
01:00:18.920 And regrettably, he passed away recently.
01:00:21.920 A giant intellectual... intellectual.
01:00:25.920 When he was famously asked once, what are your views on socialism slash communism,
01:00:33.920 he said, great idea, wrong species.
01:00:37.920 Okay?
01:00:38.920 That's one of my favorite quotes of all time because it's incredibly pithy and incredibly powerful.
01:00:42.920 It shows what happens when you understand animal behavior
01:00:46.920 and you can draw an analogy or a homology, depending on the context, to a human context, right?
01:00:53.920 Social ants, by definition, the way they're structured in their evolutionary history,
01:00:58.920 you've got a reproductive queen and then you've got a bunch of worker ants,
01:01:02.920 a bunch of soldier ants that are completely indistinguishable from each other.
01:01:05.920 So communism, which seeks to create equality across everyone, works perfectly for social ants.
01:01:13.920 Human beings are not social ants.
01:01:15.920 Some of us are taller, shorter, smarter, dumber, harder working, less harder working,
01:01:21.920 more motivated, less motivated.
01:01:23.920 So the ethos of diversity, inclusion, equity, or as I like to order the acronym, DIE,
01:01:30.920 because it's where meritocracy goes to die, is a cancer to human dignity.
01:01:36.920 It cloaks itself in the coat of progressivism.
01:01:40.920 It's a cancer.
01:01:42.920 We're not social ants.
01:01:44.920 Number five, promoted ethos of intellectual and political diversity.
01:01:48.920 Number six, again, none of these should require me to say them, but regrettably, it does.
01:01:54.920 All ideas, beliefs, ideologies are open to criticism, debate, mocking, ridicule, and other forms of scrutiny.
01:02:03.920 Nothing is sacrosanct.
01:02:05.920 Nothing is blasphemous.
01:02:07.920 Nothing.
01:02:09.920 And then finally, science, reason, and logic, and commitment to evidence-based thinking,
01:02:13.920 Trump ideology, hurt-fearing feelings, and all that other full-intellectual gibberish.
01:02:19.920 Now, this one is not meant to simply be a frivolous attempt to promote my current book, which is a book on happiness.
01:02:27.920 I read this because it is so powerful.
01:02:29.920 It's in the epigraph of one of the chapters where I talk about the importance of resilience and anti-fragility of failure.
01:02:41.920 This is a quote by the Stoic philosopher Seneca.
01:02:45.920 And so, I guess I'll read it and I'll just explain it briefly.
01:02:50.920 No tree which the wind does not often blow against is firm and strong, for it is stiffened by the very act of being shaken and plants its roots more securely.
01:02:58.920 Those which grow in a sheltered valley are brittle.
01:03:01.920 What is that basically saying?
01:03:03.920 Trees that face the stressors, just like the kids who face the allergens and therefore don't develop asthma,
01:03:11.920 trees that face stressors have much less brittle trunks and have much deeper roots.
01:03:17.920 Those that don't can easily be uprooted.
01:03:20.920 And so, imagine if you're constantly coddling students.
01:03:24.920 Oh, you're okay.
01:03:25.920 You're okay.
01:03:26.920 Please don't be hurt.
01:03:27.920 If I...
01:03:28.920 In this book, by the way, I talk about some of the training that I had.
01:03:31.920 I'm saddened that some of my former professors are not here today, including my doctoral supervisor.
01:03:37.920 But if you saw how exacting they were, how demanding they were and what they expected of me,
01:03:43.920 there was no coddling and let's hug it out.
01:03:46.920 It was, you're going to go out into the world.
01:03:48.920 We're gonna make sure you're going to be ready for the world.
01:03:51.920 And guess what?
01:03:52.920 They did a great job.
01:03:53.920 That's why I left Cornell.
01:03:54.920 Because we didn't have all that I'm okay, you're okay nonsense.
01:03:59.920 Last slide and then I turn it to you.
01:04:03.920 It's a long quote at the end of the parasitic mind, but it's really powerful and hopefully empowering people to find their voice.
01:04:12.920 People are terrified to be called bigot.
01:04:15.920 Right?
01:04:16.920 So that gun is loaded.
01:04:17.920 Don't say a word or I'll release it.
01:04:19.920 So let me read it for you.
01:04:20.920 To criticize Islam does not make you an Islamophobe, an unsensible term, nor a hater of individual Muslims.
01:04:27.920 To scrutinize radical feminism does not make you a misogynist.
01:04:31.920 To question open borders does not make you a racist.
01:04:34.920 You can have an open heart filled with empathy and compassion and yet reject open borders.
01:04:39.920 To assert that trans women, i.e. biological males, should not be competing in athletic competitions with biological females does not make you a transphobe.
01:04:49.920 Many situations in life involve a capitalist of competing rights.
01:04:53.920 With that in mind, the right of your eight-year-old daughter to feel comfortable and safe in a public bathroom supersedes that of a 230 pound, 6 foot 2 trans woman.
01:05:05.920 To reject the idea that so-called other forms of knowing, whether the indigenous way of knowing or postmodernism, are as valid as the scientific method does not make you a close-minded bigot.
01:05:16.920 To reject the hysterical demonization of white men as exemplars of toxic masculinity and white supremacy does not make you Adolf Hitler.
01:05:25.920 The name-calling accusations are locked and loaded threats, ready to be deployed against people who are too afraid to be accused of being racist or misogynist, and so they cower in silence.
01:05:38.920 Keep your mouth shut and not in agreement, or else be prepared to be feathered and tarred.
01:05:44.920 Don't fall prey to this silencing strategy. Be assured in your principles and stand ready to defend them with the ferocity of Mahani Badja.
01:05:52.920 Thank you very much.
01:05:53.920 And now I will take your questions.
01:06:01.920 Thank you very much for coming out tonight.
01:06:11.920 Pleasure.
01:06:12.920 I have a question about an article I should read in one of my political philosophy classes, written by Professor Kate Mann here at the Cornell Philosophy Department.
01:06:21.920 It was in 2015, and she laid out a case for trigger warnings and why professors should put trigger warnings in their syllabi, should offer them in their slide presentations, and she paints trigger warnings in a pretty benign light.
01:06:35.920 She says that really it's just a warning for students before providing some type of explicit content.
01:06:42.920 And she says she agrees with the concept of open inquiry and debate that you laid out here today, but says in order to reach that point, there need to be trigger warnings so that students can rationally engage with the subject.
01:06:58.920 I'm not sure if you've read the article, but I think that lays it out pretty well.
01:07:02.920 Yeah, I mean I haven't read, I don't think I've read that specific article, but I've read several positions on why trigger warnings are necessary.
01:07:08.920 So at one point I facetiously had a trigger warning for my MBA class.
01:07:13.920 It was called trigger warning, life is your trigger warning.
01:07:17.920 And that was it.
01:07:20.920 Look, I had an MBA student two years ago get very angry, and he actually, I think he filed a complaint,
01:07:28.920 because I hadn't put a trigger warning when talking about the evolutionary roots of anorexia nervosa.
01:07:36.920 Well, first there's a trigger warning because he knew someone who had an eating disorder.
01:07:41.920 And also there was a trigger warning because when I'm talking about anorexia, the evolutionary roots of anorexia nervosa,
01:07:47.920 I talk about something called the reproductive suppression model, which I won't get into the details,
01:07:52.920 but talks about possible miscarriages and so on.
01:07:55.920 And the fact that I used the word miscarriage is that should have had a trigger warning
01:08:01.920 because he knew somebody at work that had recently had a miscarriage.
01:08:04.920 So that professor of yours, is it a she or a he?
01:08:09.920 She?
01:08:10.920 Okay, man, she's not my professor.
01:08:11.920 Okay, whatever.
01:08:12.920 She, I just want to use the right pronoun.
01:08:14.920 Sure.
01:08:15.920 So does she think that, so if I were discussing war, there should be a trigger warning for that.
01:08:21.920 If I discuss miscarriage, trigger warning.
01:08:24.920 If I discuss criminality, trigger warning.
01:08:26.920 If I discuss in my evolution psychology courses, child abuse, how step parents are much more likely to commit child abuse, trigger warning.
01:08:33.920 If I want to discuss marital infidelity, trigger warning.
01:08:37.920 So there is almost nothing of any consequence or value that I could ever lecture on any topic that is of any value that doesn't require trigger warning.
01:08:47.920 So that professor isn't in this one.
01:08:49.920 Yes?
01:08:50.920 Hi.
01:08:51.920 Oh, I think you have to add the mic.
01:08:54.920 But I'll take your question.
01:08:55.920 I'll call.
01:08:56.920 Hi.
01:08:57.920 Hello, can you hear me?
01:08:58.920 I can hear you.
01:08:59.920 Thank you for coming and thank you for being brave.
01:09:00.920 And I don't know how many times you've tried to be cancelled.
01:09:01.920 Probably a few more on the way, but thank you for standing up for-
01:09:02.920 Well, it's been very nice here.
01:09:03.920 I was expecting much worse things, so thank you for being-
01:09:05.920 When do you think the- When and how do you think the parasite will end?
01:09:11.920 Do you think it will have to get so bad or-
01:09:14.920 Right.
01:09:15.920 That it destroys itself?
01:09:16.920 Like-
01:09:17.920 Right.
01:09:18.920 Communism, for example?
01:09:19.920 Or how do you proceed?
01:09:20.920 Yeah, yeah.
01:09:21.920 That's a great question.
01:09:22.920 So there are several ways to answer this, and I kind of hinted at this at lunch today with
01:09:26.920 some of the folks that I went out with for lunch.
01:09:29.920 In terms of the battle of the war, I think it's been very nice here.
01:09:31.920 I was expecting much worse things, so thank you for being-
01:09:33.920 When do you think the-
01:09:34.920 When do you think the-
01:09:35.920 When and how do you think the parasite will end?
01:09:37.920 Do you think it will have to get so bad that it destroys itself, like-
01:09:39.920 Right.
01:09:40.920 Communism, for example?
01:09:41.920 Or how do you proceed?
01:09:42.920 In terms of the battlefield of ideas, it'll take a while for us to administer the mind
01:09:50.920 vaccine to go back to reason.
01:09:52.920 It's just because in the same way that it took- I mean, depending on the parasitic idea,
01:09:57.920 it took between 40 and 90 years for it to proliferate.
01:10:01.920 So for example, cultural relativism is an idea that was started by Franz Boas, a cultural
01:10:07.920 anthropologist, nearly 100 years ago.
01:10:09.920 And then his students were training-
01:10:10.920 So that history goes back to 90 years.
01:10:14.920 Radical feminism and some of its tenets is more like 40 years ago.
01:10:18.920 So it depends on the idea pathogen.
01:10:20.920 So it will take, you know, a while.
01:10:23.920 But if we're able to activate the courage of people, hence activate your inner honey badger,
01:10:31.920 if we can get the silent majority to find their spines, to grow the proverbial pair and speak out,
01:10:38.920 then you can reverse things very quickly.
01:10:40.920 The problem is that most people privately agree with you, but then they don't know that all the other people agree with you.
01:10:48.920 But I just happen to be the repository of all of them writing to me saying, oh, shh, I agree with you.
01:10:54.920 But shh, please don't say that I agree with you.
01:10:56.920 Right?
01:10:57.920 But if everybody stands up and says, come on, enough of this nonsense, then it goes away very quickly.
01:11:02.920 So there is a optimistic perspective where we can resolve this very quickly if everybody in the silent majority finds their voice.
01:11:11.920 But the longer battle will just take longer.
01:11:14.920 That's why I do what I do because, you know, that's how I encourage people to speak up.
01:11:19.920 So it'll take a while.
01:11:21.920 I think there's also this lady that wants to.
01:11:24.920 There's this lady, yeah.
01:11:26.920 Oh, you hit the camera.
01:11:29.920 Hi.
01:11:30.920 Thank you.
01:11:31.920 Oh, this is...
01:11:32.920 Can I just talk?
01:11:33.920 Sure.
01:11:34.920 As you wish.
01:11:35.920 Okay.
01:11:36.920 Oh, okay.
01:11:40.920 So my question has to do with what you were discussing also goes back to when you were talking about UINs and the ideas of...
01:11:49.920 Want me to go back to the slide?
01:11:50.920 It's...
01:11:51.920 I have something also on this slide that I would...
01:11:53.920 So I don't mind.
01:11:55.920 Okay.
01:11:56.920 But in a sentence here, you have a reference which is, to assert that a trans woman, parentheses, biological males should not be competing yad yad yad.
01:12:05.920 So you're doing the distinction here that women when used with the qualifier trans woman, it's something different than what we would consider biological sex, male and female.
01:12:17.920 So how would you...
01:12:18.920 Do you recognize that there is a distinction between the gender signifier of the word woman that can be used without disqualifying biological sex?
01:12:30.920 There is a thing called gender dysphoria and it existed in the DSM, right?
01:12:35.920 That doesn't mean that if you're gender dysphoric, you get to assert the biological marker woman, right?
01:12:43.920 So let me put it another way.
01:12:45.920 Oftentimes, the transgender people say, you're being transphobic and not allowing us to compete.
01:12:52.920 It's a right issue.
01:12:53.920 And by me not being able to play handball or soccer with other women, even though I'm a male who identifies a woman, you're transgressing against my rights.
01:13:06.920 How about the rights of all the biological women against whom you're playing?
01:13:11.920 What are their rights?
01:13:12.920 So if you're a feminist who is into women's rights, how do you navigate through the calculus of that conundrum?
01:13:18.920 Do transgender rights supersede the rights of the woman who would have been on the podium, who was taken off the podium because 6'4 woman Leah Thomas decided that she's a female?
01:13:32.920 Yes, go ahead.
01:13:33.920 So I think that there's a lot more nuance than the way that you framed that, but it's also, I would say, kind of irrelevant to what my question was.
01:13:46.920 What's the nuance?
01:13:48.920 I do think, I think that we can have a positive discourse about whether or not trans individuals should be, what types of sports they can be competing in.
01:13:57.920 I think that there is such thing as an unfair biological advantage.
01:14:00.920 Are just, in day-to-day life, what, is there really any harm, I guess, in saying that a trans woman can be a woman?
01:14:09.920 Yes, a trans woman is still biologically male, but woman refers to the social construct of gender, not biological sex.
01:14:16.920 If you call yourself whatever you want, once it infringes on the rights of others, then we have a problem, right?
01:14:22.920 So you want me to call you a woman in the privacy of our dyadic conversation? Great.
01:14:28.920 In other words, I don't go out of my way nor do I espouse that other people be frivolously mean to transgender people, right?
01:14:35.920 So, if a student came up to me and said, you know, I used to be Bob and my name is Linda, then I'm going to say, okay, maybe I just need to respect their thing and I'll try my best to honor that.
01:14:45.920 But once we step on the field where now your self-identity somehow is more important than the rights of every other biological woman, then that's a moral question that we need to navigate.
01:14:58.920 I think that no, transgender rights don't supersede biological women's rights.
01:15:03.920 Professor Saad, thank you so much for the great event.
01:15:13.920 I must apologize if my question was answered in a book.
01:15:17.920 I expected the books to arrive by the weekend, but I got them today, so I didn't get a chance to finish them.
01:15:24.920 Sure.
01:15:25.920 Nevertheless, it's about limitation of science.
01:15:27.920 You mentioned that reason, science, that approach would essentially be the cure for the parasite on the campus.
01:15:37.920 But do you see the limitations of science and how can science answer the question where would we need to start conducting an experiment, right?
01:15:50.920 I mean, there are.
01:15:52.920 Do we do moral, do we do human cloning experiments on humans, like those questions?
01:15:57.920 How can science answer those questions?
01:15:59.920 And do you think that religion is also a very necessary element?
01:16:04.920 I know your speech was mostly focused on the reasons.
01:16:07.920 Sure.
01:16:08.920 Jordan Peterson's takes.
01:16:09.920 Sure.
01:16:10.920 Yeah.
01:16:11.920 Great question.
01:16:12.920 So there are several ways I can answer this.
01:16:14.920 So Stephen Jay Gould, who's now the late Stephen Jay Gould, who was a Harvard paleontologist, espoused what was called the NOMA principle.
01:16:24.920 NOMA stands for non-overlapping magisterium.
01:16:27.920 What he's talking about there is what's called an accommodationist view between science and religion.
01:16:33.920 So he's saying, look, science and religion operate in different spheres.
01:16:37.920 They answer different questions.
01:16:39.920 Example, morality.
01:16:40.920 And therefore, they shouldn't have to be competing with each other.
01:16:44.920 There's a bunch of stuff that science does really well, and there's a bunch of stuff that religion does really well, and they don't have to overlap.
01:16:50.920 Other people who are non-accommodationists would say, no, there is nothing that's outside the purview of the scientific method, right?
01:17:01.920 So morals themselves can be studied.
01:17:04.920 As a matter of fact, there's many, many evolutions that have studied the evolution of moral systems, right?
01:17:09.920 And usually the religious folks say, no, there couldn't be an evolutionary mechanism that led to our moral calculus.
01:17:17.920 But there is no epistemological reason to think that.
01:17:19.920 So I happen to be someone who understands the value of religion as long as it doesn't impede in explaining things that are contrary to science, right?
01:17:31.920 So for example, if a geologist says that this is the age of this rock, and that contradicts a young Earth creationist,
01:17:40.920 now the young Earth creationist is impeding on scientific facts that are clear, and he's violating that.
01:17:47.920 Therefore, I say religion has to bow down.
01:17:50.920 But if there are other things that religion offers you, you know, an understanding of the afterlife, which science can't, well then, good for you.
01:17:59.920 So I'm not sure where I exactly fit.
01:18:02.920 At times when I'm charitable, I want to be accommodating towards religion.
01:18:05.920 Other times when I see religion espousing certain things that are, for example, evolutionary theory,
01:18:11.920 there are some, you know, hardcore, for example, Christian right folks who say that that's blasphemous.
01:18:17.920 Well, it's hard for me to be an evolutionary psychologist and agree with them.
01:18:21.920 So it really depends on each issue.
01:18:23.920 Do you want me to ask Paul?
01:18:25.920 I don't know.
01:18:26.920 I don't know.
01:18:27.920 He's holding the mic.
01:18:28.920 Hi.
01:18:29.920 So I'm curious to hear if you can tell us more about the prescription you offer.
01:18:38.920 It seems like it was all compressed to the last few sentences here about being brave.
01:18:43.920 I'll push back a bit, but I don't think the only problem is bravery alone.
01:18:48.920 I think there's at least several cases I can think of off the top of my head where it's rational not to say something.
01:18:55.920 Personally, I'm a six year grad student.
01:18:58.920 I don't want to lose my collaborators and have to be here much longer.
01:19:02.920 So it's rational not to say something about the tampons in the men's room.
01:19:06.920 Even though every man I've talked to has agreed that maybe that's not a policy priority,
01:19:10.920 who is going to die on that hill?
01:19:12.920 It makes sense for no people.
01:19:14.920 So it's not just about bravery.
01:19:16.920 Right.
01:19:17.920 So do you think when I go into campus with security
01:19:22.920 and I'm worried whether I'm going to be decapitated,
01:19:26.920 that might be just as important as you being a six year...
01:19:29.920 In other words, we all have something to bear on the cross, right?
01:19:33.920 Now, I understand.
01:19:34.920 It's not...
01:19:35.920 I don't exist in a utopian world where I don't recognize risk-reward calculus, right?
01:19:41.920 And I understand that there are real...
01:19:43.920 You know, I'm not tenured, so I'm worried about speaking out.
01:19:46.920 I'm a graduate student.
01:19:47.920 I'm not.
01:19:48.920 But as I explained to Randy earlier at lunch,
01:19:50.920 there is always a capacity to use that argument all the way to retirement.
01:19:56.920 I've experienced it with a million people who write to me.
01:19:59.920 Professor Saad, I really admire your bravery.
01:20:02.920 I'm tenured, but I'm going up for a full professor.
01:20:05.920 I simply can't speak about menstrual equity.
01:20:07.920 Professor Saad, I really love you.
01:20:09.920 I'm a full professor, but I'm going for chair professorship, so I can't speak out.
01:20:12.920 In other words, there's always a valid risk-reward argument
01:20:16.920 for why it shouldn't be me now speaking.
01:20:19.920 You know those guys that came off the amphibian machines on Normandy,
01:20:26.920 where there were these guys called Nazis that were mowing them down with machine guns?
01:20:31.920 They seem to have said, yeah, I'll take the risk.
01:20:34.920 In other words, I'm not minimizing the fact that people have to bear a cost.
01:20:39.920 But war, whether it be physical war or a battle of ideas, has casualties.
01:20:45.920 And if everybody says, it's great, you get sad that you speak, but I simply can't,
01:20:50.920 then you are doing diffusion of responsibility, right?
01:20:54.920 And so, no, that really is the reason for the problem, because everybody agrees with you privately,
01:21:01.920 and everybody says, there is a unique narcissistic, self-serving reason why I shouldn't speak out.
01:21:08.920 But please put your head on the guillotine for the rest of us.
01:21:11.920 I really love your honey badger attitude, Professor Zahra.
01:21:15.920 But then I walk into campus, and my wife, five foot three, walks behind me,
01:21:21.920 looking around to make sure that I don't get knifed,
01:21:24.920 because she's afraid for me to go to campus.
01:21:27.920 What's the cost that I was bearing there?
01:21:30.920 So, no, you have to decide for yourself whether you'd rather live five minutes with dignity and stand tall,
01:21:38.920 or live for 500 years cowering on your knees.
01:21:41.920 Each one of us has to make that decision.
01:21:46.920 I don't know if this Mike is working.
01:21:49.920 To address his concern or consideration about religion and science,
01:21:55.920 religion deals in faith.
01:21:58.920 There are two kinds of faith.
01:22:00.920 There's faith in things which cannot be proven.
01:22:03.920 There's faith in things which have been disproved.
01:22:08.920 Religion deals in the first.
01:22:10.920 Science should be addressed in the second.
01:22:15.920 You want me to comment, or just?
01:22:17.920 Well, please do.
01:22:19.920 I mean, it's a complicated story.
01:22:20.920 Look, so some of you may have heard, for example,
01:22:23.920 of Popper's falsification principle.
01:22:26.920 The idea that for something to be scientific, it needs to be falsified.
01:22:30.920 So let's take, for example, the principle of destiny, okay?
01:22:35.920 Which actually exists as part of an ethos of fatalism in some religion, right?
01:22:41.920 It's my destiny.
01:22:42.920 It's written in the sky.
01:22:43.920 It's meant to be.
01:22:44.920 God willing.
01:22:45.920 Inshallah, right?
01:22:46.920 So how would I test destiny?
01:22:51.920 Well, let's see if I can run an experiment.
01:22:53.920 If I go...
01:22:54.920 I want to run an experiment whether it's my destiny to be hit by a truck when I cross the road.
01:22:59.920 So I cross the road and the truck doesn't hit me.
01:23:03.920 What's the conclusion?
01:23:04.920 It was my destiny.
01:23:06.920 I cross the street and the truck does hit me.
01:23:09.920 What do I conclude?
01:23:11.920 It was my destiny.
01:23:12.920 Therefore, there is no state in the world where there is a way to falsify the principle of destiny.
01:23:19.920 All roads lead to destiny.
01:23:21.920 So I have to look at each of the different religious arguments.
01:23:24.920 But the problem is that many religious statements, to the extent that they fail the most basic tenet of Popperian falsification,
01:23:31.920 they're useless to me.
01:23:33.920 So that's why I was saying that while I am sympathetic to why religion exists.
01:23:39.920 So some people think that I'm hostile to religion.
01:23:42.920 I'm not at all.
01:23:43.920 As a matter of fact, as an evolutionist, I understand that the default value of humans is to be believers.
01:23:49.920 It's a lot easier to be a believer than to be a non-believer.
01:23:52.920 Because, regrettably, we have a prefrontal cortex that allows us to realize that the party is very short and we're on a death sentence.
01:24:01.920 And what better way for me to swallow a pill called, don't worry, the party's going to go on.
01:24:05.920 It's a lot more somber for me to say, the party ends here.
01:24:09.920 So it's a complicated story.
01:24:11.920 I try to be as respectful as possible to the religious, but as a purist academic, I'm not that into it.
01:24:20.920 Thank you very much, Professor, for coming and speaking to us today.
01:24:24.920 I wondered what advice you would give to students who find themselves in academic departments
01:24:29.920 where critical thinking is not only not encouraged but actually penalized.
01:24:34.920 To give a brief anecdote, I go to university in the UK and one of my first university essays in my first year of undergrad
01:24:43.920 was how is my discipline impacted by colonialism and how it's inherently colonial.
01:24:49.920 I wrote an essay, compared it with some of my friends.
01:24:52.920 I promised to everyone in the room that I backed it up with evidence and articles.
01:24:56.920 And I lost 20 marks because I didn't think that my discipline was inherently colonial and inherently racist, etc.
01:25:04.920 I just wondered what you think students should do in that situation where many offend partly.
01:25:09.920 It's like the question that the gentleman, the physics student said.
01:25:12.920 I really do, I don't want to sound as though I'm unsympathetic to the calculus that people have to go through.
01:25:18.920 I get that.
01:25:19.920 But again, if every person has exactly that thought, then here I stand, as Martin Luther did, and I'm the only guy speaking.
01:25:30.920 But if suddenly you've, now, by the way, you don't have to be a martyr.
01:25:34.920 You could, for example, maybe you're going to the pub privately with four of your friends, maybe raise it there.
01:25:40.920 So we can each decide how to modulate the risk.
01:25:44.920 But what I implore everybody to do is simply not say, I'm not going to do it because my selfish career interests are too important to put myself on the line.
01:25:55.920 If each of us do that, we lose. But if someone says, you know what, I've had enough of this.
01:25:59.920 And then he gets up and then I give courage to her and him and him.
01:26:03.920 Suddenly there's strength in number and we will reverse it.
01:26:06.920 So I appreciate your calculus.
01:26:08.920 And by the way, I get tons of those questions.
01:26:10.920 I have to write a political science paper on Palestine versus Israel.
01:26:15.920 And my professor is a free, free Palestine.
01:26:18.920 But I am, what should I do?
01:26:20.920 Well, the purist in me says, you can't modulate what you think.
01:26:24.920 What kind of academic would I be?
01:26:26.920 What kind of professor worth his salt would I be to say, you know what?
01:26:30.920 Just completely lie on the paper so that at least you can get an A.
01:26:34.920 So again, from a purist perspective, you have to have integrity.
01:26:37.920 But I understand your concern.
01:26:44.920 Sorry about it.
01:26:45.920 It's not me who chooses it.
01:26:46.920 Yeah, you got it.
01:26:47.920 Thank you, Professor.
01:26:49.920 Sure.
01:26:50.920 I wanted to ask if there's a point of no return if you can be so infested with the parasite
01:26:56.920 so that you receive any other differentiated opinion as something that requires an immunological response.
01:27:02.920 And then if not, what are some strategies based on the developmental stages that can be more effective?
01:27:09.920 Say someone whose roots are so deeply ingrained in the sheltered valley.
01:27:14.920 You know, that might take more effort rather than an early adolescent whose roots are more shallow.
01:27:20.920 So I'll answer the last part first.
01:27:22.920 And we talked about this today at lunch.
01:27:24.920 One of the reasons that it's really worrisome to see some of these parasitic ideas being introduced earlier and earlier is precisely because the ideologues understand that young children don't have the cognitive inoculation against a lot of this nonsense.
01:27:42.920 Right?
01:27:43.920 And so, yes, that is a problem.
01:27:45.920 I was recently asked.
01:27:47.920 I appeared on a show, a British show actually, hosted by a psychiatrist.
01:27:51.920 And at the end of the show, he asked me a question which surprisingly in all the years that I've been doing this, no one, I don't think anyone had ever asked me.
01:27:59.920 He said, in your 30 years as a professor, what is the singular thing that has most surprised you about human behavior?
01:28:07.920 And so he took me off guard.
01:28:08.920 And so he took me off guard.
01:28:09.920 I had to think about it.
01:28:10.920 And I said, so to your question, I said, the inability of people to change their opinions once it is solidly anchored.
01:28:21.920 Which, by the way, speaks to, in a sense, contradicts my nomological networks.
01:28:26.920 Right?
01:28:27.920 Because my nomological networks is saying, if you at least grant me the courtesy to show you the nomological network, I could flip you.
01:28:35.920 But if you go, la, la, la, I don't want the vaccine, I could never get to you.
01:28:40.920 And so one of the things that I struggle with is when to walk away from a person knowing that no amount of nomological network is ever born.
01:28:51.920 So I've become, I think, pretty good at quickly gauging if there is an opportunity for us to dialogue or else I just walk away.
01:29:00.920 You're not worth it.
01:29:02.920 Right here.
01:29:03.920 Sure.
01:29:04.920 Hi.
01:29:05.920 Hello?
01:29:06.920 Hi.
01:29:07.920 You mentioned that there has to be a balance of rights.
01:29:09.920 But I think that's where the most interesting questions lie.
01:29:10.920 I can't hear you too well.
01:29:11.920 Hi.
01:29:12.920 You mentioned that there has to be a balance of rights.
01:29:13.920 And I think that's where all of the most interesting questions lie.
01:29:14.920 But I see that often you focus on arguments of people that you consider having like a parasitic mind.
01:29:19.920 And I know those people are very ubiquitous and have very simplistic and hypocritical beliefs.
01:29:29.920 But I find that those are often like the most low-hanging fruit.
01:29:30.920 And that there are often very interesting balance of rights questions that you can describe and talk about.
01:29:36.920 And many of the quotes of like the people that you showed are clearly ridiculous like positions that are very easily defeated.
01:29:43.920 But many of those positions are actually very interesting and do follow some sort of balance of rights question that you can go into and research or discuss.
01:29:56.920 Do you, I haven't read your book.
01:29:57.920 Maybe you talk about it more.
01:29:58.920 But do you often, do you take the time to actually seek out those more difficult discussions on those each individual topics that are often, people have very simplistic positions on?
01:30:13.920 So give me an example of a more what you call balance versus the low-hanging fruit.
01:30:32.920 Sure.
01:30:33.920 For example, the one about Twitter censoring the Hunter Biden laptop, sorry.
01:30:38.920 The position you put is something like it was good because it prevented Trump from getting power.
01:30:48.920 But there's a much more interesting case of like, you can see in like the Twitter files where they're discussing the different topics of whether this counts as some sort of like hack materials policy.
01:31:01.920 There's much, and is this something that should be posted or propagated?
01:31:06.920 Like if somebody found news of your loved one, would you want that to be shareable in the platform to the public?
01:31:14.920 That could be an interesting question where it's a balance of rights versus the simplistic, hey, they just want to divide into it.
01:31:23.920 So you're saying there might be multiple causes or factors that we have to look at doing?
01:31:27.920 Of course that's true, but to that question of the Hunter Biden, most people weren't saying, well, there's really a nuanced reason why.
01:31:35.920 Most people who were openly stating why it was perfectly reasonable to suppress it did not go into all the nuanced arguments you're talking about.
01:31:43.920 Maybe the Twitter files did.
01:31:45.920 But do you take the time to like seek out the more difficult challenges to that particular topic?
01:31:50.920 Like I feel like it's very easy to like point out like a very common problem of people having very simplistic, very like having positions just to benefit their side or political team.
01:32:04.920 But a lot of these topics are very interesting.
01:32:06.920 So as one of my former professors at Cornell said when I asked him a question, he said to me, you know, Gad, I am capable of complex thought.
01:32:14.920 And so I'll answer that to you.
01:32:16.920 Yes, I'm able to be nuanced and look at balanced things.
01:32:19.920 But when it comes to the issue of deontological versus consequentialist, it's really not that nuanced.
01:32:25.920 There are some principles that are inviolable, right?
01:32:30.920 Freedom of speech is inviolable, short of defamation, child pornography, libel, direct incitement of violence, screaming fire in a cinema.
01:32:41.920 That's it.
01:32:42.920 Those are the asterisks.
01:32:43.920 Anything else you want to say.
01:32:45.920 Judaism is a piece of crock.
01:32:48.920 It's ugly you say that.
01:32:49.920 There is no nuance.
01:32:50.920 In a free society, you're allowed to say that.
01:32:53.920 That's it.
01:32:54.920 Anything?
01:32:55.920 Yes, go ahead.
01:32:56.920 I can't hear you.
01:32:57.920 Sir, good to hear you in person.
01:32:58.920 Thank you.
01:32:59.920 I like your approach to serious things.
01:33:00.920 The sense of humor that you bring to, you know, the depth of knowledge and explaining things is something that I cherish a lot.
01:33:19.920 Oh, thank you.
01:33:20.920 Yeah.
01:33:21.920 And that makes people like me want to listen to you, even if maybe we may disagree on some issues.
01:33:30.920 Yes.
01:33:31.920 I believe you, you know, permit that.
01:33:34.920 Looking at the history of the university here in America, maybe starting from Harvard and how Harvard started and, you know, where Harvard is today, which I believe you include in your own critique as having been infected with a parasitic mindset as well.
01:34:01.920 It took a lot of time for the universities to be where they are today.
01:34:10.920 And you seem to be very optimistic of the fact that there is a solution based on the profile solution that you gave.
01:34:23.920 Since it took this long to get to this place.
01:34:27.920 Yes.
01:34:28.920 How long do you think it's going to take to get to the place where you think the university should be?
01:34:33.920 Yes.
01:34:34.920 And how optimistic are you about that?
01:34:36.920 I'm optimistic only to the extent that the totality of people don't go la la la, right?
01:34:45.920 In other words, as long as I'm given the opportunity to administer the mind vaccine, then I can inoculate you.
01:34:52.920 The challenge comes.
01:34:54.920 So I think several of you have already pointed to this.
01:34:56.920 The challenge comes from people who say, I don't want your mind vaccine.
01:35:00.920 Your mind vaccine is polluted.
01:35:02.920 You're you're a Nazi.
01:35:04.920 I don't trust your mind vaccine.
01:35:05.920 Well, then there is no way for me to find a meaningful place for us to even have a debate.
01:35:10.920 So as long as there is an honest effort for people to hear the message, I am optimistic that I can flip them.
01:35:18.920 And when I say I, I mean not just me.
01:35:20.920 I mean reason, science, logic, common sense, reality.
01:35:25.920 These parasitic ideas are only alluring because they free us.
01:35:31.920 So I talk about this in the person like mine.
01:35:33.920 They free us from the shackles of reality, right?
01:35:36.920 Postmodernism frees me from the shackles of there being even a truth, right?
01:35:42.920 Transgender activism frees me from the reality of my genitalia.
01:35:47.920 Radical feminism frees me from the innate sex differences that men and women exhibit.
01:35:53.920 So each of these parasitic ideas cater to a need for me to escape from the pesky shackles of reality.
01:36:01.920 As long as you're willing to come to the stock, hear me out, read the book, I think there is optimism.
01:36:08.920 So I truly believe that we can flip it around.
01:36:10.920 It won't be overnight, but it won't take as long as how long it took us to get here.
01:36:15.920 So it'll be shorter, but it requires work.
01:36:19.920 It requires for all of you to speak out, get engaged, and hopefully we can turn the ship.
01:36:24.920 And thank you for the comment about the humor.
01:36:26.920 It's, you know, it's funny because oftentimes when I'm, I'll just end with this, Randy.
01:36:31.920 Oftentimes when I'm approached by someone in the street, 7 out of 10 times it'll be about my humor more than about something professorial.
01:36:42.920 Which exactly speaks to your point because humor is a very, very powerful way to disarm people, to make them stop and listen to you, to connect with you.
01:36:53.920 That's why, as I mentioned earlier to Randy, dictators will usually first eliminate the satirists, the humorists.
01:37:04.920 Because they're the ones who've got the real power.
01:37:07.920 It's the power of their stinging tongue.
01:37:09.920 It's the power of their pen that will flip the dictator.
01:37:13.920 They don't care about the tall guys with the big muscles.
01:37:15.920 I can get rid of those easy.
01:37:16.920 It's the guy who can make everybody laugh at my stupidity that I need to worry about.
01:37:21.920 So yes, humor is very effective.
01:37:23.920 That's why I use it.
01:37:25.920 I want you to know that you've all been vaccinated.
01:37:34.920 And not only that, but it's like the Sabin vaccine.
01:37:39.920 It's a live virus.
01:37:41.920 So if you talk to other people, they'll also become vaccinated.
01:37:46.920 So please pass this.
01:37:48.920 Great information.
01:37:50.920 Great.
01:37:51.920 Oh, oh, oh.
01:37:54.920 What's happening?
01:37:56.920 Bombs going off.
01:37:57.920 I'd like to thank Sab again for a great time.
01:38:01.920 Thank you so much.
01:38:16.920 Thank you.
01:38:17.920 Thank you.