Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Liam Bright on Scientific Orthodoxy, Reform Efforts & DTG's Philosophy

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Today we have a little mid-week treat, ahead of our next decoding episode, a discussion with the philosopher and Leverhulme Prize Winning Twitter sensation, Liam Kofi Bright.Liam is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method at a little known degree-mill called the London School of Economics. On this episode we have a wide ranging discussion revolving around the state of the Orthodoxy in modern scientific research, the viability of proposed reforms, and finally Liam decodes whether we are mindless defenders of the status quo or the true heirs of the Logical Positivists tradition. Along the way we also learn the three rules to master Twitter, what Open Science is all about, whether philosophers of science are good or bad, and what exactly 26+6 equals.LinksChris' appearance on The Stoa discussing the GurometerLiam Bright's websiteLiam's (2016) paper 'On Fraud'Liam's (2021) paper 'Why do Scientists Lie'Remco Hessen & Liam's (2021) paper 'Is peer review a good idea'Liam on TwitterThis Week's SponsorCheck out the sponsor of this week's episode, Ground News, and get the app at ground.news/gurus.

Hello and hello and welcome to decoding the gurus the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist take a look at the greatest minds that the online world has to offer and try to work out what the hell they're talking about uh the person doing the intro today is me, Christopher Kavanaugh, cognitive anthropologist, and the elder statesman on the other side of the room is a psychologist, Matthew Brown. G'day, Matthew. How was that? G'day, Chris. Well done. See, it's not that hard. You can do it. That used almost all of my mental power i'm almost out now matt after that

each sentence was a dysphoric ritual in my mind you do it weekend i'm week out and i i just have to do it once and get get flustered about it so you know i've honed it it's a fine art it's my one skill my big contribution to this podcast oh podcast. I do have something to tell you before we shoot off very efficiently into our content for this week. I appeared on this YouTube channel called The Stoa. Quite an unusual channel. The presentations that occurred just before me, for example, included A Planetary Dharma with John Churchill. So that's maybe a bit like Bob, but we had also Ecologies of the Self,

Transformational Practices, Reality, Distortion Fields and Unconscious Mind Dynamics, and so on. Astrological Sensemaking, Blueprint of the Soul. These are just a couple of the titles. So it's quite an eclectic channel. Sounds like your kind of people. Yes, indeed.

Well, it was nice of them, I think, to invite me on, given the other content that is on the channel. Our friend Jordan Hall, for example, has been on before. But I talked about the garometer and went through the 10 dimensions of the garometer. And, and then we had a Q and a session and it was very enjoyable, but I wanted to highlight it because, you know, people can check it out if they want them on YouTube, but also because it means, I think that's the first public presentation about the garometer, right?

Which means I defined all of them. You know all those ones that I get wrong regularly? They're not canon. The historical first presentation. So very sorry about that. I just want to check on the title slide. You have the title and you have the names of the investigators. Is my name there?

Do I get credit? Not only is your name there, I used your, what's that one, your glamour shot, you know, with a pink shirt. And I referenced my handsome co-host, Matthew Brown. So you got suitable credit. Yes. And blame. Anytime there was, you know know something that was a bit off

it was like i am matt named this cassandra complex yeah that's right that's like the single good shot of me in existence and uh it's it's done a lot of traveling a lot of work there's sorry there's a tangent from my tangent which i just also mentioned in passing, Heller Hayne, on her most recent Dark Horse escapade, mentioned that her father considered naming her Cassandra and then decided against it because he didn't want to burden her, you know, with the mythic archetype. But then her and Brett say, but yet you ended up the Cassandra. And I was like, nah, it couldn't be more on the nose you know they call themselves

calabello they call themselves cassandra so they're doing the work for you they're just lining up the balls you know in front of the hole and yeah it's very easy we don't need to make much of a case we can just quote them yeah so matt there's something that seems to be invading my consciousness, a little plinking sound that I can hear in the background. It comes in every episode. I don't know why, but every time I hear it, it makes me feel concerned about misinformation and media literacy. I'm worried about media bias and political polarization, the financial motivations of the media companies. Do you know what I mean? Do these things concern you too? Oh, absolutely. All media sources tend to have

a particular editorial line, perhaps some sort of ideological slant. Yeah, it keeps me up at night. Well, it would be good if there was some way to address that. If there was an app or a website that made it easier to compare sites, compare how the news is being presented across the political spectrum. You know, that would be good. What a world that would be if there was such an app. Well, have I got news for you, Matt. You've forgotten we've talked about this in previous weeks.

There is an app. There is a website. It's called Ground News, and it helps you spot media bias. You can get a visual breakdown of the news sources covering a story and see where they fall on the political spectrum. There's advanced filters, Matt. Sort news by bias and factuality. That's a real word. Or quickly prioritize between local and international coverage.

Many, many things you can do with Ground News. Well, that sounds absolutely fantastic, Chris. If I wanted to, how would I find this app? Do I have to send away for it, like write a letter? No, and it doesn't cost a million pounds. It's free, Matt. You can download it for free. Amazing.

I know, I can see your fear. Look at that. You're astonished. I was expecting it to be like a down payment thing, you know, paying in five easy payments of $19.95. No, no, no. Wrong, Matt. Wrong.

Free. Look at that. So if you wanted to do that you would need to go to ground.news forward slash gurus and that would let them know that we've sent you and you know they'll be happy uh to help you out sounds good to me that's good all right matt so now that music has gone and my brain has returned to its normal setting. This week, we are being especially generous and I'm releasing multiple episodes ahead of our normal release schedule.

But it is partly to just get rid of all the philosophers in the same week, right? We're going to have Aaron Rabinowitz at the end of the week, a moral philosopher. And before that, we have to deal with a different kind of philosopher. One, Liam Coffey Bright, you may have heard of him. He's an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in the London School of Economics. And he's here to help us this week. So what do you think about that?

Is that good? I think it's great. I think it's great. I am a big fan of philosophy. I love philosophy. I'm philosophers. You're not like Scott Adams, where you like science, but you don't like scientists.

You don't trust them at all. No, I think I'm the opposite. I like some philosophers, but I don't like philosophy. I like them, but I don't respect what they do. You've often been referred to as the inverse Scott Adams. So that's good. You're living up to your reputation. But yeah, so we've got a nice interview with Liam this week.

And at the end of the week, we have the combined episode with Aaron Rabinowitz looking at James Lindsay and Michael O'Fallon. So many terrible things for philosophers to do with us and to look forward to. Sounds good. All right, let's take the plunge and see what this Professor Liam Bright has to say for himself. As always, I'm Matt Brown and with me is Chris Kavanagh. And sometimes we have a guest on to help us figure out what is true, beautiful and real

in this crazy mixed up world. And who better to do that than a philosopher? Yes, philosophers can be fun and interesting podcast guests too, Chris. And I think that's true of Liam Kofi Bright, who joins us. Liam is a mystery wrapped in a riddle smuggled into a conundrum because he is an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, yet is also a communist, I think. I'm not sure. He can clarify that later. But Liam writes a lot of interesting papers, many of which I've read, with a focus on the,

I guess, the sociology of science, you would say, which is pretty interesting and epistemology, how we figure out things, but also writes on more general political issues, topics like intersectionality. As well as all of that, Liam also happens to have one of the best accounts on Twitter and you probably all already follow him. So how's that? Welcome Liam. Hi there. So that you're, I take it you guys, cause you always have like a preamble, right?

So you must record that separately when I'm not here. Uh, well, sometimes we're a bit inconsistent because sometimes we add a little bit on before the interview. Sometimes we don't. We're a bit inconsistent because sometimes we add a little bit on before the interview. Sometimes we don't. It's a very idiosyncratic process. Just in case, I just want to thank everyone for sitting through the 45 minutes before they could get to this. Nice to see you. Liam, I noticed from Matt's introduction that you're the better kind of professor.

You're an assistant professor. So I'm a specially appointed associate professor. So I feel like the man here for this conversation, just to be clear, the person, the target is Matt, right? Well, I'm always happy to bully Australians. You know, it turns out that I'm pretty sure things cross stepping words, I'm going to be promoted to associate any minute now. So the working class can kiss my ass. I've got the associate position.

That's what the lever award does to people it's oh i forgot to mention i can't believe i didn't mention that yeah i noticed well i wasn't going to bring the leverhulme prize up it's embarrassing but yes i won a prize well despite our general disdain for philosophers, which primarily comes from dealing with Aaron Rabinowitz on multiple occasions, we have had positive interactions as well with T. Nguyen. Aristotelian forms. It, it, it feels, it feels necessary to have a philosopher here just to keep things on track. I'm glad to. One thing I can reveal to all the, the Guru Boys fans listening in is that having now talked to you behind the scenes and on air, I can say that Matt

has a totally like, Matt, you have like a radio broadcast voice. You switch on when you start and it's very impressive. Whereas Chris always just sounds like a rambling, incoherent mess. So it's totally authentic. We we've talked before Liam, like on zoom. I recall. And it's so you're in a position to judge that. Yeah, that's right.

Yep. No, I speak of authority. So. So you're in a position to judge that. Yeah, that's right. Yep. No, I speak of authority. So, Leo, before we talk about more important and salient things, what about Twitter? I mean, you seem like someone who's mastered the art of Twitter. And I feel sure you must have a theory of Twitter, a theory of social media generally brewing. And there's a paper in this. But, you know, it seems to use it effectively. I feel like there has to be at least three layers of irony involved. What are your thoughts about effective tweeting?

I think stage one is somehow develop major depression. Stage two, check. Yeah. Lose all sense of sincere meaning in your life. You know, stage three, have a job which comes with tenure was really hard to fire you from, so you got nothing to lose or just have nothing to lose in general. And so if you are depressed, nihilistic and have nothing to lose in life, it's just an amazing website. It's a playground. This is why James Lindsay is so successful.

Did you see his recent video about putting the communism in fascism while the fascism is also in the communism? I did see that. He's thinking on a dialectical level I can't quite approach. Oh, yeah. He's a casualty of dialecticism. Chris, I can't believe you haven't seen yeah. He's a casualty of dialecticism. Chris, I can't believe you haven't seen that. He's reached new heights. I'm not as online as you two,

so, you know, I won't know what the latest thing on Twitter. I didn't even know about shape rotators and word cells until the preamble today. Yeah, Matt accused me of being a shape rotator, whereas I think I'm a word cell yeah maybe maybe you bring balance to the force liam i'm not sure okay well let's get to the serious stuff just because it's the top of my mind at the moment which is um you know you've written a fair bit about the sociology of science and how we might be able to improve things to make

science work a little bit better. Like the internet at the moment is full of people who feel that academia and the orthodox science in general is completely failing and should be burnt to the ground and started off from scratch. I think people might get the wrong impression that Chris and I are these sort of mindless defenders of the orthodoxy. We have our own criticisms. The wrong impression. the wrong impression that Chris and I are these sort of mindless defenders of the orthodoxy. We have our own criticisms.

The wrong impression. The wrong impression. The wrong impression. Yeah, they might mind it, you know. Yeah, but let's not talk about us. What's your gut feeling about the state of the orthodoxy today? I mean, so the question invites a kind of comparative state of the orthodoxy today as compared to the past, I presume. And the thing to say there is there are more scientists alive working now than any point

previously in history. Science is a bigger enterprise, it's doing more stuff, it's more varied, it's more spread out globally and by a topic matter of what's being investigated than ever before. So direct comparisons are hard. What I think we can say is that what's getting a lot of attention, what's led to a lot of skepticism are sciences which seem to sort of touch immediately on people's lives, things like social psychology, things like medicine or epidemiology, especially after COVID. And these have had troubles for a while. I mean, so a lot of people in those fields are very aware of what's called the replication crisis, which I know you have discussed on your podcast before, where it turns out that results

which seemed well established in those fields are failing to hold up. I think people are too quick to link those failings to the cultural fights of the day. In fact, often the problems are orthogonal or in some sense run deeper. But they are real problems. You know, so the reason I work on this area is precisely because I don't think this is all smoke and fire, like there are real systematic problems in the way we're arranging science, the way we're carrying out science, the way we're incentivizing scientists to behave. And we should think about,

in fairly little downside, people say that kind of thing, I don't know what I mean, but like, we should think about changing things so it's improved. One of the things that I read of yours that I found compelling was that you posed the question of why scientists, not necessarily just lie, but you know but do shoddy practice. And you basically laid most of the blame at this credit system and the incentives at play. And I heartily endorse that. I think it's quite interesting that there usually isn't crass monetary kind of gain. Yes, occasionally you have doctors endorsing cigarettes and things like that. But often it's a little bit more subtle where the system is one that is built on publications

and citations and grants and so on. And in order to do any kind of good work at all, one has to play that game. No one can sort of just be above it. And yet the game can sort of, I can see how it can sort of in an insidious way become like take center stage. Yeah. So I'll say a bit the the background there and the way you said it makes me think that people might be interested in connections to tiny humans work but um so the issue is the way rewards are handed out in science and rewards include things like funding to do more work positions which allow you to do more research and so on the way those kind of offices and opportunities are handed out depends heavily on your reputation.

You have to be seen to be good by your peers. And the way to be seen to be good by your peers is largely to publish original research as say some finding or point of interest before anyone else has published that thing and, you know, be seen to have done so. So get out there in a journal people find reputable in a way they can check themselves and so on. Now that's can become perverse, right? That can become firstly, you can sort of esteem, honor, good regard. We are only human. Those can become their own rewards.

And then now you're playing to the crowd rather than trying to pick questions, which are per se, the best questions to pick. But more than that, those can encourage bad forms of behavior. So for instance, an element I just mentioned was you need to get there first. And if you need to get there first, that can incentivize cutting corners, that can incentivize making up data if you haven't got time to do the actual data collection work, and it can also, if that's sort of at the other end, if you're like on the edge of being knocked out, you know, you're

just not going to get another position unless you get something soon. Then you may as well try and engage in some malpractice because if you don't, then you're simply not going to be able to do science at all. And so you can even sort of justify it to yourself. Like, well, in the long run, I want to generate and spread knowledge, but to do that, I need to have a position, I need funding, and so it's sort of justified. I can tell myself a story where I'm not doing something that bad. And we find that scientists are tempted to cut those corners.

They do sometimes engage in shoddy practice up to and including data fabrication, but usually less extreme than that. Things like finding excuses to throw out inconvenient data points and things like that. And it leads to bad work getting done. The complicating factor, though, is a lot of the good things about science come from the system too. So this system really encourages you to share research. The system really encourages you to pay attention

to what other people are doing so you can build off of what they do. The system in some way channels resources to scientists who've been productive. So the problem is, is I don't think that, and also, I mean, there's also, it taps into a quite a basic element of human psychology.

Wanting to be seen to be good at a thing you value is, you know, not an element of our psychology, which I think is going to be easily modified. And so the problem for it is, is something which is quite basic to us and which is very much tied up with how we organize science and some of its good features also creates some of its bad features. The way that you're addressing things there, and I think it relates to the paper that you wrote, Why Do Scientists Lie, which Matt was probably referencing before as well, that although there is a tendency to look at the figures who engage in fraud as villains of the scientific

world. And they sometimes seem to fit that model, especially when it comes to people playing around with medical transplants or that kind of thing that have very severe consequences. But what you seem to argue in that paper and what you're suggesting here is that a lot of the issues lie in systemic factors and structures of science that even if it produces individuals that are taking advantage of the structure that exists, they can only exist because of the systemic problems. And we can't address it by simply teaching people that fraud is bad or detecting individual cases of fraud. Yeah. Is that accurate?

Like taking them a more structural systemic approach? So I certainly think so. I mean, if there was a reliable means of catching and punishing fraud, that would itself be a systematic thing, right? Cause that would change the incentives of people involved. If you're very like get caught. I mean, one of the issues is it's really hard to get caught. So people talk a lot about replication failure, but replication failure

is not the same as catching someone for fraud. Perfectly good science, I mean, in terms of honestly done, perfectly adequate statistical knowledge etc., can in fact fail to replicate because the world is messy and complicated and hard, and good work can turn out to be wrong in the long run. So it's really hard to actually catch people for fraud, and so we don't have a good way of disincentivizing it. I do want to mention one thing, going back to crude monetary incentives. So it's really hard to actually catch people for fraud. And so we don't have a good way of disincentivizing it. I do want to mention one thing, going back to crude monetary incentives. So what's discussed, that system of credit and esteem, that's internal to academic science. There is a huge world of industry science.

Now, industry science has problems which are much more related to just directly there are people paid to lie. And so a lot of medical research where it goes wrong is basically because companies have every incentive to try and convince someone somewhere that they should buy this pill and they are willing to engage in shoddy practices to ensure that happens. So there is a world in which just the sort of typical incentives of a capitalist economy come to interact with science and cause bad behavior. So that happens as well. I don't want to dismiss that. It's just focusing in on academia. That's it's not, people aren't getting paid piece for piece

work in that kind of way. So it's a bit different. There's a good person. I'm sure you're familiar with Elizabeth Bick to single-handedly detects a lot of fraudulent images or like recopied images. So yeah, I'm giving her a shout out for her. She does heroic work, but is like a single person. Yeah, no, exactly.

It's kind of, I mean, I do have a lot of respect for her. I've got a colleague, someone I know quite like, Felipe Romero at Cronin and University. And he actually suggests we should basically create a sort of cadre of full-time replicators and checker-uppers who would basically be engaged in rooting out both fraud and also just things that they won't replicate for one reason or another. And it's sort of directly paid into advice just to do that, just to focus on that work. She's someone who's sort of like taken it upon herself to be that person. And that's great, but it would be better, as you say, to be at a more systematic

level because otherwise, otherwise we're going to keep seeing it. And as we've recently learned, often public policy wants to lean on the prestige, the trustworthiness of science in order to motivate the public to go along. And I think if science is going to play that kind of social role, it needs to earn it. It needs to be trustworthy. And so we should clean up our house. We should get these systematic problems addressed. One obvious follow-up there that I'm curious about your opinion on.

So this obviously ties in with the open science movement, which I'm strongly in favor of. I know Matt is, and I would imagine you are as well. But there's also criticisms about the open science movement, particularly the perspective of people adopting a data police role and that there can be a male-dominated, harsh tone to a lot of the criticisms. For open science, that kind of critique that has been leveled that a lot of the prominent for open science, that kind of critique that has been leveled that a

lot of the prominent people associated with open science. I'm just curious about basically your opinion on the open science movement and the validity of the criticisms that are made about it. Is it a central part of the reform efforts that you see, or is it a plaster on the keeping wound? I have mixed feelings on the open science movement. I'm on the whole in favor. So I do think that some of it's sort of headline reforms for statistical practice and for things like preregistration, I think are basically good. But I also think the critics have been right on two levels. One on a, I mean, I'm not as involved in this world, so I'm really looking outside, but One, on a, I mean, I'm not as involved in this world, so I'm really looking outside, but there were definitely sort of resentment infused little cops who were just jerks, right?

And like that exists and that is kind of gendered. And so I think people are right to call that out. And the other thing is I, I do think there's been a little bit of a tendency to focus on smaller piecemeal reforms, which won't really be as effective as people say if considered by themselves, and to neglect either larger social reforms or theory? Actually, theory development has been another thing which people often say has been a bit neglected by the open science movement. And I think in terms of, it would be false to say that open science people have totally ignored that. I mean, one of my schticks, along with a call for Renko Heysen, has been we should get rid of pre-publication peer reviews.

I have published on intersectionality. I talk about Marxism. The thing which has got me the most hate mail is the fact that I don't like pre-publication peer review in science. But, you know, I've talked about it and I would say that's a pretty large reform given how science is currently done and I've been invited to open science conferences to do a panel on that stuff. So I don't think they totally neglect it, but I think the critics of open science are right that it's relatively neglected that kind of scale. And I mean, especially like the, you can have fancy empirics all you want.

If you don't have good theory guiding your inquiry, it's never going to be that good. And some work, some more work on theory development is needed. Certainly one of the valid criticisms levied against psychology is the lack of work on basic structuring theory and too much focus on flashy little interesting ted talky clickbaity counterintuitive findings but before we get too satisfied i just want to say i am equally annoyed at the people who write articles saying we need more theory and and everyone everyone agrees. Or they say, we don't need more theory, we need better theory. And okay, yes, agreed.

Agreed. Yeah, right. Like, rather than just saying we should do more good stuff, people should do more good stuff. Exactly. I guess. There are people who do both, so good to them.

But there's a lot of criticisms that people online say, you know, I know people won't want to hear this them but i there's a lot of criticisms that people online say you know i know people won't want to hear this but i'm gonna stand up and say it and then they say something which is completely in line with the predominant view of academics and and left-wing views and you're like i don't i don't know that that is a huge cost that you've incurred to say to say that but But yeah, virtue signaling. That's what I'm complaining about. I could defend my take there

in the sense that, at least for me, that kind of fundamental work is not necessarily very clever or very glamorous. It's often the most boring research that establishes and builds on a solid foundation.

So it's not quite as, I don't mean it in such a highfalutin sense. I wasn't digging you. I was digging them. Oh, yeah, those guys. Yeah, the people not here. Yeah, yeah, I get it. The elites. The elites at the AV universities.

Oh, yeah, those guys. I hate them. The silver spoons in their mouth. Aren't you at Oxford? It depends what you, it depends how you classify. I have a dual position. I'm the black sheep of Oxford.

I'm the only one. I'm the only one here from a non-prestigious institution. So I, I. That's right, you're at LSE. I'm at LSE. It's a degree though. I'm really confident I'm going to get tenure.

Let's come right after you've got tenure. Sorry, Matt. I interrupted your good question. So there's like a dozen threads to pick up on what Liam just said, but there's one in particular I wanted to ask you about, Liam, which is that because we talked about the peer review thing and ideas for reforming the publication process. And I'm sort of generally on board, you know, I'm essentially

pretty radical. I'd like to get rid of all of the commercial publishing houses like Elsevier and just find a different way, a better way that just cuts them out of it. But I haven't thought deeply about it, but just on a gut level, my opinion is that we need some mechanism for giving some imprimatur of quality standards to make it easier for people. So when one is doing a literature review, one isn't wading through a dross of preprints that haven't been written well and are just incoherent and really low quality standards. So I do feel it needs that

i'm just curious what what do you think do you think it needs i mean what would you replace peer review with or if anything well pre-publication peer review is an important qualification here so i always kind of amuse myself since it's like you know make scientists read again it's like maybe do your fucking job it's like kind of my opinion like okay let's no one's got time for that i can't be reading bloody hell but okay the serious thing is that would be all very well and good if we had any evidence that the journal publication system is in fact a good quality filter so the presupposition of that question is that we currently have a quality filter and maybe it's not a perfect one, but it is something and you're

saying we should get rid of it. You know, people have tried in various ways to see like, does publication in fantasy journal pick out work, which we later agree really was better. Like really was worth this. And that's hard to measure because it's a kind of what's called a Matthew effect where there's the fact of being in top journal just garners you more attention. And so of course you get more, but insofar as the Matthew effect can be disentangled and people could just look at like, do people later agree this was good work? There's really not good evidence. I'm not going to go through

all the arguments now. Maybe we could link to the paper. I think it's quite readable though. Is peer review a good idea paper. And it is really not good evidence that that's true. So we don't currently have good reason to think that we have a quality filter. We just have a thing which lets you allocate your attention somehow. What I think is the case is there are some scientific fields, mathematics, physics, econ is going this way, where it's already the norm really that sort of a work counts as sort of like out there for communal attention when it's uploaded to a preprint server. And it may later come out in a journal, but it's already been the object of communal discussion, been able to be cited, discussed, whatever it is you think of officially

in the record, once it's up on the one of the archives or the preprint servers. More or less those systems with not much modification. We have a suggestion based on Rotten Tomatoes' system in a paper with I'm sorry, Mark Sarfin. Yeah. That's never been gamed. That's never been gamed. No. Well, I mean, even then actually Rotten Tomatoes includes means of like telling

when it's being gamed actually, because you can do things like check out disparities between expert reviewers and randos on the internet or whatever, and see when it's being seen when there's a disparity and that can cause you to investigate why. So with not much modification, we could use these archive systems that already exist to direct attention to work, which the community has agreed is of good quality by much more sustained discussion and evaluation than is just happening when an editor and one or two reviewers have decided it's thing, have science for doing. So we don't currently have a quality filter, but we could do by adapting the much more open, learning more than science, the much more open systems that already

successfully exist in maths, econ and physics. And so to some extent, I think of this as a sort of evolutionary suggestion. I mean, I think the history of peer review is so it was sort of. Careful, Liam, evolution. Just careful. I didn't know this was a creationist podcast, but, um, we keep it on the down low, but you know, so I think of this as a sort of an intelligently designed solution to a problem we're now facing. Right.

So if you look at the history of peer review, it came in partly because paper was expensive, we had to ration what was going to go out there and partly because the Royal society wanted to keep the King off its back and persuade them that we can self-police without you needing to point Royal censors. I'm no longer worried about Queen Elizabeth censoring scientific research on the one hand and on the other with the internet, that sort of rationing issue is no longer an issue. And so I feel it's just like the material basis has moved on. And at this point, the ideology around pre-publication peer review is just throttling development.

It's preventing us from moving on. So it's an ideological superstructure that needs to be swept away. Yeah, I think I basically agree with you. I was speaking to Chris earlier about your paper on this topic, and I was saying to him that over the 20 years or so that I've been writing papers, submitting papers, reviewing papers. Matt's very old. I am very old. Yeah, but you're so good looking. You're such a silver fox. It's amazing. Thank you. Thank you. this is this is the quality of guests we have now i get that vibe like i i think kind of late stage peer review i feel like the

editors aren't really checking the manuscripts properly before sending them out for a review i feel like reviewers including me are getting swamped with heaps and heaps of papers to review often getting sent papers that haven't been edited or checked by co-authors properly. And you know, this is kind of a function of that metric driven system. And so you might think how this interacts with the credit point that we were making earlier. Right now you can think of, you can, this is a, I mean, it's in our paper, but it's

really my friend Renko's division. I like this way of putting it. Is you could think of credit as having a short-term and long-term aspect, where in the short-term, the mere fact that your paper is in nature, whatever it says, the fact that it appears in that journal is a source of prestige. It's a thing to put on your CV and looks impressive. In the long-term, whether or not your paper is good, influential, puts the field in a good direction is a source of credit. That second one matters.

Aligning rewards with that thing is a good thing. That first one only matters insofar as it aligns with the second thing. It has no importance in and of itself. And if it ever makes any difference, it's a bad difference. We never want it to come apart. So one of the things about eliminating these kind of pre-publication peer review, where the mere fact of getting it through the reviewers, which could just be because they're having a bad day in a ball or whatever, is a source of prestige.

It's a perversion of the incentive structure. It can only guide things wrong insofar as it ever makes a difference for what the considered long-term opinion of the field would be. Liam, I've got a counterpoint for you. So far be it for me to defend the establishment institutions. I'm shocked. This is, it's uncharacteristic. Let me preface what I'm about to say by adding that I definitely do agree with both of you about like, I have lots of complaints about the journal system.

I have nothing against alternative peer review, including post-publication peer review systems and the king can go fuck himself. So I sign on to most of the points that you raise, but I do want to say that like take recently the kind of gurus we cover and the anti-vax movement and the whole issue around ivermectin. Now, the ivermectin literature, yes, it was messy. There were studies that made it through publication that were low quality, and there were also fraudulent studies that were published.

So in some ways, you could take it as an indictment of all of the issues that you're raising. On the other hand, I would say that the very basic skills that I learned a long time ago when assessing clinical evidence about in vitro studies should be looked at very skeptically. Small scale studies by advocates should also not be treated as compelling evidence. Large-scale studies better, but you want randomized controlled trials that are pre-registered and ideally replicated. And when you looked at that hierarchy of evidence, the evidence for ivermectin was very weak and subsequently collapsed, right? But those signs were clear from the beginning and the higher quality studies were highlighting that to most people early on. So the stance of most of the scientifically literate, medically literate people was correct to me. They said the evidence is not

strong for ivermectin. There's bigger studies running now. We'll wait and see. But they weren't for ivermectin. There's bigger studies running now, we'll wait and see. But they weren't uncharacteristically optimistic. Whereas the gurus fear and the people who treat publications as if they're all on the same level and you can't really trust randomized control trials, especially ones that the pharmaceutical industry have involvement with. They were advocating something that is not science and is based on intuition and what they want to be true and a whole bunch of other things. I'm not saying that the ivermectin researchers are all pure of heart, but it seems to me that there is an indication there that the peer review and the scientific system was working if you interacted with it properly. So think about what you just said, right? So actually, because of the urgency of the COVID issue, I mean, this has caused, not entirely to the good, but there has been a general rush to get things online with COVID research.

It often involves circumventing pre-provocation peer review, a lot of use of archive systems. What you just said was the fact that once the work was out there, the scientific community could quickly coordinate on like, well, hold on, this really isn't going, I mean, I haven't to do, thank you. I take your word for it. Like, you know, this isn't going anywhere. The higher quality studies quickly showing it's wrong. That didn't rely on pre-publication period. That just relied on a scientifically competent audience quickly looking at the evidence as it was made available and coming to a consensus judgment based on the standards of reasoning. That's good. That's why I want to encourage.

What made that possible was the fact that the work was so quickly put out there, was so quickly made available to lots of people. The higher quality studies, they take longer to do. They weren't then further penalized by having to languish in peer review for ages. They were able to just get that work out there. That to me is good, right? Like I approve of the scientific community coming to a genuine consensus judgment based on evaluating the evidence. And what makes that possible is the evidence being rapidly available

to that community. That's the case against peer review, pre-publication peer review. It's the case for peer review, just not pre-publication peer review. But how about in that context, the way that getting papers through publication or even the preprint, I have a

paper actually on preprints as well. And well before COVID, you could see that, you know, people were publishing preprints and doing science by press release, which was already a problem. But once you have a thing that looks like a paper is, you know, written up in latex and looks like an official publication, a lot of journalists just treat it as a valid finding, which they also shouldn't be doing anyway with individual papers. But nevermind that. The point I want to get our response to is we know that anti-vaxxers or pseudoscientists, various, you know, there's fuzzy boundaries, but there are definitely people that we know that want to publish things and will use the publications for legitimacy. And simply

lowering the boundaries to that, it seems like you're opening yourself, like what you're talking about is the community of scientists reviewing things. But there's plenty of people who are attached to the community of scientists that have a much more nefarious agenda in some occasions. And if we lower the boundaries, don't we risk a discipline full of Weinsteinian theories of everything? I was wondering, someone get a time mark. I was wondering how long it would take. Oh, 39 minutes for you to mention the Weinsteins. That's long.

long it would take 39 minutes for you to mention the Weinsteins. That's wrong. When you factor in the 45 minute intro, people have already listened to it. Yes, they must be. I know you mentioned the Weinstein's first few minutes of that. So I have three things to say to that. First thing is you yourself have already noted the thing that's wrong with that, which is the people with these kind of nefarious purposes, they do tend to treat all publications as on a par. The mere fact of getting something published is easy, right? The only, like there are so many journals and some of them are just rubbish that you can always get something published. Like that's not a filter at all. The filter is meant to be the caliber of journal, but these people aren't paying attention to the

caliber of journal. No, no, you say that, well, really, you could just pay it to have an article published. I know that you're right. There's pay as you play, and there are like an insane amount of terrible journals that publish draws every week. But there's so many people who self-publish papers and books on their website because they can't get over even that minuscule hurdle. So like, they should be able to, but I think you're assigning too much competency. I feel like taking up Liam's argument here because I feel like Liam is not proposing a lower bar.

I think he's proposing that there's kind of this crowdsourced post-publication. Oh, the bar comes up. And I think, Liam, if I'm not wrong, that you're proposing that people pay more attention to those metrics, right, that are crowdsourced and that that actually would do what you want there, Chris. You know what I mean? In that the weight of the expert consensus on ivermectin would come to bear.

I'm stuck in the old... You're stuck in the mud. That's right. So, like, yeah, the mere fact of publication... Actually, maybe people can So like, yeah, like the mere fact of publication, I don't, maybe people can't even do that, but the mere fact of publication, I think is a very, very low bar, whereas I want people to pay attention as Chris is as, um, not Chris, the other one, Australian guy, the racist one. Me, Matt.

Like you thought it was a good point. So you thought I made it. I get it. My name is right there Liam, it's right there above yours in front of you. Um, and the other thing I should say is you have to also consider the world before the invention of what after. Right now we live in a world where still like, you know, I have this opinion and yet I publish in pre-publication journals. Why is that? Partly because right now what I'm proposing is not the norm. It's itself a signal about your work.

If you choose to not try and go through the pre-publication peer review system. While that's still the expected norm, to deviate from that suggests that you're trying to avoid the scrutiny which the scientific community considers normative. And that's telling me, that's information about you as an author. So comparing how people, like if you look at what the things which are just on archive but no one intends to publish them look like now, that's not informative as to what the world would be like if the norm was to rely on those metrics. And so you've got to be a bit careful with that. The third and final thing is, I think, you know, this should be part of a suite of reviews. So one of the times I've engaged with, this is in work which is still under

review so I didn't come out, but again with Remco Heysen, my frequent partner in crime, we've looked at some of the arguments in For and Against Open Science where people have discussed pre-registration, mandatory pre-registration supports. And we actually came to agree with the critics of Open Science that a sufficiently sophisticated scientist shouldn't really gain much from it. They should really be able to look at the pattern of literature they're seeing, plus their knowledge of how the journal system works, and basically work out where things are.

They shouldn't expect to get much more information after the HP review. They should just be a buzzer to it because now they have to do it when they're watching it. But we're still in favour of it. And we're still in favour of it because we think the benefits would accrue actually to people outside science journalists. People who don't have the sort of intimate knowledge of like, well, here's really how the journal system works, here's what the kind of things like peers are doing. Here's where I expect the information to be.

They lack that tacit knowledge. For them to be able to see what sort of things people are trying and then not being able to get published, that's really informative, that tells them something about what ideas are actually, the fact that they got one flashy paper is not very informative because there's been 30 attempts to do that thing. And this is the only one that actually appeared in the literature. That's information. So I partly think that what you're saying points to, you know, that's just one thing, and this is the only one that actually appeared in the literature. That's information. So I partly think that what you're saying points to, you know, that's just one thing,

but it's an example of how I think there should be a suite of reforms. No one reform, there's no one silver bullet to solve the institutional problems with the reliability of scientific research. There's a suite of reforms that need to go together. And so, yeah. we have reformed the tree to go together. And so, yeah. In some ways, Liam, your character is dichotomous because although you are pessimistic

in many aspects of your life, I feel that you're much more optimistic or hopeful about what science could be or what we can reform. Whereas just like my politics, I tend to view the possibility of fundamental dramatic reforms being hampered by the fact that, you know, everyone in the system will prevent it. And the most that we can hope for is that, because I've, I've seen, for example,

that with the open science movement, there were some journals created with alternative open peer review systems where the peer reviews are published, you know the identities and the responses are public as well. And those journals, yes, they're new and they're still coming to gain reputations or not. And it remains to be seen if they can, but I welcome those experiments, but I'm pessimistic about their ability to defer on nature and science. Well, he, for all the reasons you said, you know, uh, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, like the attitude we take.

It's not irrelevant to what happens. Science isn't a huge number of people. It's bigger than it's ever been before, but still not a huge number of people. It's a community which is, you know, unusually invested in mutual monitoring and improvement of itself. I do think, you know, institutional inertia, there's like companies like Elsevier and Springer. They're actually some of the most profitable companies in the world because of the amount of free labor they get from people with PhDs, basically.

So there's huge, wealthy, invested interest in going against this. As I said, commercial science has a string of terrible problems, which are really tied up to the broader capitalist system. So there's all these reasons to be pessimistic,

but the fact that things could be better, we can envision that ourselves and we know what it would be to work towards it. Yeah. That matters. That means something. And I think that's one of the stressors. You're recruiting me. I'm already, I'm already, I'm already a convert, Chris. So comrades, comrades, and a leaf on the shoulder. That's how they get here. No communism, thank you. But actually, I can imagine like these,

like when I read your paper, I always think about how do we get there, you know, and I don't believe in revolutions. Sorry, Liam. But I think you can, I imagine some steps towards it. For the record, I'm not imagining like the storming of the Winter Palace,

but for Elson. Different tools for different social problems. Having fun with you. But, yeah, I can imagine, let's say, this prestigious kind of Royal Transactions or Royal Society, whatever, they can put their stamp, if they want on the crowd-sourced reviews i mean papers that have been subjected to this crowd-sourced thing and it could still be out there in the open thing but like in other words you could build stuff on it you know like there's there's a million different permutations you can imagine give them badges badges yeah that's right. Yeah. Gamify it in different ways. Yeah.

Gamification's good. Gamification's good. Yeah. So Liam, I do have a self-indulgent question, but it's, it's also negatively intinged. So it's like, it's half acceptable, but you know, you listen to the podcast, you've got fine taste, you're an intellectual powerhouse. This is the kind of thing that you consume for you know a workout when you really need to get your hands around something but because of that matt and i

are philosophically amateur amateur philosophers that's that's the way i would not say that of matt that's right i wasn't the one that confused plato and aristotle i just i just want you didn't correct my mind you were talking about the shadows dancing on our history chris i was momentarily distracted so i did have a question i wasn't just engaging in my my own back padding but it was that given what we do on the podcast, from a philosophical perspective, is there a kind of philosophy or epistemology that we have dandered into in the dark and are foisting on people without recognizing it as a philosophical approach? recognizing it as a philosophical approach. And secondly, in so doing, are there a ton of things that we do that make

philosophers very upset when they listen and not just because of our lack of revolutionary politics? Um, well, so, I mean, I just had to go near the from shows, right? Like, so the other is the obvious. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Very much so. Very much so. Yeah. We know that. We know that. So that aside, I guess there's, in contemporary philosophy, there's a movement, the movement's the word, but there's a collection of people who work in the same spirit, and they refer to themselves as naturalists. And naturalists tend to be people who think the best stance a philosopher can take involves quite a heavy degree of trust for the sciences. It's not blind faith, of course, there's things can't be perfect and you have to see where

consensus lies rather than paper or whatever. But in some sense, you should orient yourself around learning from the sciences and the perspective of those sciences very seriously when working out a mystery about the world. Stated as such, that is pretty vague. And I think one of my problems with this group is I worry when you dig down, it's either going to be very implausible or not much more than a slogan, but that is a movement. And I think it would be the most natural characterization of, of yinz. So I, you know, one thing that you also said before, and which on my Twitter, I'm called the last positivist is I tend to shill for logical positivism or logical empiricism,

or logical positivism or logical empiricism, which is a early 20th century philosophy, which kind of tied a number of strands in logic, in the sciences, which would then happen in empiricism and in socialist politics together, it should be a sort of coherent worldview. So that's what I tend to prefer. And I don't think you guys are that in part because you're new in the brochures, but yeah, naturalism would be what I think you guys are. And it's a insipid status quo philosophy. So it does work for you too. Wait, you say it's your philosophy. No, no, no, no, no. I'm a logical positivist. But this is one thing I noticed in our previous dark conversation, Liam, the X rated version too hot for the internet that we, we had before a huge VM.

That, that, that conversation, I was amazed that you are a philosopher of science and that I had a conversation with you and fundamentally didn't find you annoying or to be saying anything like extremely wrong. Like pretty much you on most of the science wars issues within the anthropology field, at least, sided with the evil cognitive anthropologist side or even the classic anthropologists, problematic as they often were, handmaidens of colonialism. But their approach to science or the kind of stance they had about whether they were doing science or not is now not in vogue in social anthropology.

And so I was kind of surprised that there wasn't that much of a gap in our approaches to the way to address science. And this seems to be, I can't remember if you assured me it's not, or said it is, but my impression was that this is not the mainstream dominant view within the philosophy of science, that you are not the status quo there. So I guess I've been roasting you too a lot. And so having someone say you to me, you sounded just like an anthropologist. I guess I had that coming, but, um,

well, so firstly, I grew down from what? Well, so firstly, I grew down from all this. What? Levi Bruhl. No sex. Not, not, not, not that part. Like just, just that, that whole side of it. No, I mean, so what I think. I mean, I don't know how mainstream I am in philosophy of science.

I always assumed that I'm dumb. There's nothing special about me. But what I think is true is that the, there was this kind of like science wars discourse around the nineties where there was this broad humanistic rebellion against stuff that was being said by, I don't know, over enthusiastic physicists in the eighties and nineties and my impression is that philosophy of science as a discipline largely, like we were traitors to the humanists. We were largely on the pro-science side. I mean, I

think there's a simple sociological explanation of that, which is that philosophy of science and largely people who really would have liked to have been scientists failed a bit too many math classes. And so did the next thing we could. And so this was their chance to finally be accepted by the cool kids. It's very much the sort of lafuse to physics Gaston. That was what was going on there. And so insofar as I sounded in the nineties, in the nineties and today. My image was you portrayed the, like that the philosophers of science is, saw the weakened state of the positivists and leapt off the French cigarettes onto the back of the scientists, plunging the dagger in and saying, yes, it's all a social endeavor based

on prestige and you should see what goes on in labs, which was all true, but these feed into the, you know, deep interpretive turn, the writing culture turn, so to speak, like the, the social anthropologists were very happy with what the philosophers of science were saying. I'm just imagining, you know, sinking the knife into someone's back, then whispering their ho, ho, ho. The continental philosophers, they did it, Liam. This is a terrible, it's just such a bad version of the science wars. I hope no one's taking this seriously. So actually, so take for instance, there's one of the groups of people who are sort of international antecedents to me are people like Kitcher, who's a pragmatist philosopher

and I'm sorry for his name, I'm now forgetting, but they wrote a book called Science as a Process. And there was this movement amongst Rostov science at that period to do something like, look, we can grant the, like the accurate things that, you know, sociologists and anthropologists were saying about science, like human endeavor, people are responsive to these incentives that aren't necessarily known pursuit of the truth. And there was, you know, all sorts of politics goes on between labs, et cetera. But I didn't mean this wrong. I mean, what you have to work out is what does, you know, what does a social system constituted by those incentives and agents pursuing those kind of goals, human as they are,

what would be the output of that social system? And, you know, in some sense, I'm downstream of that because you find sometimes it's reliable and sometimes it's not. But what it doesn't do is mean they're totally wrong all the time. I always think it's very telling that there's, you mentioned the French school. I think a really good book from that period, very controversial, but I think it's really good, is the Tor and Wolver's Laboratory Life, which people always cite as like, oh, this deconstruction of the thing. But it has a

preface wrote by the person who was himself the lab leader and be like, yeah, this is great. This is what we were doing. It's wonderful. It wasn't necessarily hostile. Many people took it that way. Sometimes they meant it was a bit gleeful. There was a bit of humanist resentment towards the sciences, no doubt. But, um, you know, I, I just don't really think there's a conflict between acknowledging that science is a human endeavor and thinking that it could be done better or worse and may sometimes lead us towards stronger bad news. I, I, I think that is a something I can completely agree with. And I will just say that like my, my version of the continental philosophers is because I, at SOAS, I actually was taught that, you know,

the caricature that James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose have of what people are instructed in my social anthropology course it was like fukola can and the derrida and so on were half of the year and and and very much confused me so that's all just to say like that they were slightly right about one course in in psoas and matt yeah you you've been uncharacteristically silent. Well, okay. So Liam, let me steer things back to our favorite topic, which is us and gurus. And, you know, we like to think of what we're doing is steering people away from emotionally and intuitively satisfying cliches and misinformation and trying to focus on, I guess, clear thinking and making sure that the kind of discourse that they're dealing with is actually making

some kind of sense in a, dare I say, logical kind of way. And also that the kind of claims that are being made are being based on some kind of empirical evidence. So, in our naive kind of way, we kind of think of ourselves as maybe really the true descendants of the logical positivists in the 1930s with their galois and their dreams of revolution. How are we wrong? The street philosophers. We're street philosophers! Yeah, that's right. Okay, I'll say a bit about what Logical Positivism is.

Logical Positivism, as I said, was a movement which took off in the early 20th century, largely in central Europe. So Vienna, most famously, there was a Vienna circle, but there was also a Berlin circle and a Warsaw circle as well. And the stereotyped core elements of this philosophy, of course, when you dig down, this one's more complicated, but the stereotypes core elements of this philosophy were a theory about meaning and a theory about what that meant for science more broadly. So the key thing about meaning was that for a claim to be meaningful in the sense

of being true or false, they call that cognitively meaningful, like it'd be an assertion that's describing the world accurately or inaccurately. Then it has to be such that there is some evidence one could gather, which would count for or against the claim. And so contrast, if I say this jumper has writing on it, you can look and see it has writing, or you can feel it and see the thing. And so you can see it's true. And then you can imagine, I say, there is a jumper on Mars with writing on it. Now can't just look, but in principle there is evidence, which is if you were to somehow get to Mars and search all the places where jumpers might be, you either see it or you wouldn't. Yeah. Contrast that with a claim like, being is nothingness made absolute. Now, that has this look of like I'm asserting something of an object, being, and I'm saying it's nothingness

made absolute. But there isn't any. I mean, it's by design not a statement which you could get any evidence for or against, and they thought that much of what was going on in philosophy of their day, and which they associated actually with fascist philosophers in particular, was of that form. It was like pseudo-assertions, things which purport to be true or false, but which in fact are such that no amount of evidence could possibly count for or against them. And so they're simply failing to say anything at all. It's not that they're wrong, they're failing to say anything. And so for the record, they also associated that with religious claims. They thought that God is love would be for them an example, the sort of claim which could be true or false. So with that understanding of how claims can

be meaningful in the sense of being true or false, and I keep emphasizing it because of course they know there's other things you could do with language. You can say, close the door. That's a command. It's not a you can do with language. You can say, close the door. That's a command. It's not a description. So it doesn't have to be meaningful in the same kind of way. And they actually thought ethics was the same. So if they say, if you say murder is wrong, you're doing something along the lines of

saying don't murder rather than saying, yeah, wrong description. So anyway, they thought that they could then go in and sort of clean up various of the sciences by showing how it was that the claims being made related or failed to relate to possible sources of empirical evidence. And so they were often taken to be, although it's not actually quite right, but they were often taken to be allies of behaviorism in psychology because the behaviorists took themselves to be doing something similar. That's actually a little bit not true, but that was how it was played out sociologically.

And they critiqued movements in biology like feikalism, which claimed there's a certain elan vital necessary to be a living organism, which they say sort of, it turns out when you analyze that you couldn't get it down. They took themselves to be very inspired by Einstein's work on relativity because they thought what happened is he'd thought really hard about the notion of simultaneity and realized that there's this like, actually to get evidence for that doesn't really make sense. You have to have this perspective relative thing and so on and so forth. So they went through the sciences and tried to clean them up logically and empirically. How that might be for social purposes is I mentioned at start, they mentioned fascist

philosophers and clerics. They did think there was a social output option to this. They did think that gurus essentially work, they thought, by bamboozling. What they do is they say things which have a certain suggestive rhetorical power, but which fail to actually say anything you could ever check up on them on. So their examples were often tied to the recent war and the growing fascism movement in Austria and Germany. So if I say things like the fatherland is a collective whole, which each of us may have, must play our part for each most most sacrifice for then, you know, it kind of sounds like I'm saying something about you, right? Like you have this familial relationship. It's like a father, you owe something to it and

that you are less important than it. You're just a part of a bigger organism. If I were to say, look, I really like collecting monopoly profits of places we've conquered in East Africa, but the Brits are kind of encroaching on that. And so I want you to put on a tin hat and march towards that machine gun in order for me to keep collecting my monopoly profits. That's probably not going to persuade you. But if I say the fatherland above you demands sacrifice and duty above all, then maybe I can get you to put on that tin hat and move towards the machine gun.

It's, but it's working by like suggesting something, but not in a way where you could ever check up on what I'm actually asking you to do or what, how I'm actually saying it works. Yeah. Call it the Muller land and you can be... All of this nationalism is nonsense. And I'm a strict believer in facts and logic, but if you ask me what 26 plus six equals, then I might be in trouble.

Mad, this is Irish, Irish nationalism. But like the point is like, that would be their analysis. So how does that apply to the gurus? Well, kind of you tell me, I mean, I was really struck by when Eric Weinstein finally put up his general theory. It had a little note saying that it was propriety, you could cite it. So that seems like the kind of protecting from empirical investigation, which the logical politicists would have thought was the mark of Nobson's guru-hood.

But you tell me, how much does that sound like a- I think in many ways, our gurus are poets. And what you were describing is a kind of a nationalistic poetry. They rely heavily on poetry. So, you know, I feel like you're making the case, and I feel like what you're really saying is that we are the true logical positivists. Yeah, that's what he said.

More on that. He said. Okay, more on this in a second, but two things. One, there's a famous essay by Rudolf Karnak, one of my favorite philosophers, called The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language. Not a very catchy title, but it's basically a polemic addressed against Heidegger, who was a leading Nazi philosopher. And at the end of that, he's got this line where he says metaphysicians are musicians without

musical talent and what he means by that is that people who are sort of trying to do an activity which if you do it honestly and if you say look this is just poetry this is meant to evoke a feeling but without necessarily being an argument in favor of something it's fine it could be good but they don't have the talent for that So instead they engage in this like long-winded discourse, which is deceptive, which makes you think you're agreeing to something on the basis of reasons, but nothing like that has taken place. It hasn't even been as the assertions this. So that's why I think a connection to what you're saying, but here's why I don't think you two are pos-vis. One of the things that happens when you adopt this worldview you to a positivist. One of the things that happens when you adopt this worldview

is if you start asking about the basic assumptions of the sciences, you realize that they're not actually the kind of things that we empirically confirm or disconfirm. Famously, mathematical systems, right? You don't empirically confirm or disconfirm number theory. That's not... Two plus two equals five? Yeah, yeah, well, they don't two plus two equals five. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they don't know. So the logical empiricists tended to think, I mean, well, you could push it back to make it a matter of logic, but then you don't confirm or disconfirm the logical system.

So logical empiricists tended to think those are matters of convention. Those are matters for social position that we decide on a way of communicating and that will come with it. A certain framework for describing things, concepts which we can use one way or the other, which will come on mathematical theories. And those, because they're conventional, we can a priori work out the consequences of those conventions and say mathematical things or whatnot, but they're not really saying anything about the world. And also they can be changed if our pragmatic purposes change. There's a certain

degree of social constructions here. If we decide that for whatever social reason we prefer to talk about things this way, that's how I should do it. So for instance, I have a paper on the logical empiricists on racial categories. And by my understanding, it's something like, they thought that you could use race. Like there's nothing wrong in terms of being empirically false about describing things racially. They thought it was a certain biological way of dividing up human race, but they associate the Nazis, they hate the Nazis. And so they just said, don't do it.

And so there's not like an argument that it's wrong. There's more just a social decision that we don't want to do it. My sense is that for you to, you too tend to want the sciences not to be a matter of social decision because your gurus, that's definitely a wedge your gurus could put something in and say, well, they got the bad conventions because they're evil elites who want us all to live in pods and eat crickets. Well, I do. I do.

Yeah. Right. So, you know, my sense is the logical, weirdly because of other things, social constructionism is so much left associated that your gurus who are mostly right are also not going to like that language. But nonetheless, I think if they had any sense, they would try and use this as a wedge and YouTube would get mad at them. The funny thing is, Liam, you haven't heard it yet because no one has, but we get into

the bug eating in a forthcoming episode because it's a bugbear of James Lindsay and Michael O'Fallon. So yeah, building on what Matt says, it really shows how, in a way, we are the next evolved stage of the logical positivist movement because Matt and I talked about this once on a late commute, but I think there's validity to it. One of the reasons that we find, not all the gurus, we like some of the gurus, but the gurus who get our goat, so to speak. It's not purely because of all the rhetorical stuff and all of the right-wing stuff. That's all annoying. It is extremely annoying. But there's something about that. We have invested the concept of science,

of positivism with our secret value. We don't have God, we don't have beauty or love or any of these kind of things. So the only thing that we can put up on a pedestal to some extent, even recognizing all of the flaws is that science can lead to, you know, a closer approximation of truth. And this is an important thing to preserve and promote a kind of empirical approach to the world and a respect for science. And the gurus pretend to do that, but they then proceed to lead people astray. They give them false heuristics about how to do science properly, how to tell what is

true and so on. So in some ways, part of our response and this taste for what they do is not based on logical, rational thing, but because of a commitment to a particular thing that we invest value in and we don't like seeing it besmirched. besmirched. So in that way, I think that we are in tune with our emotional side and the fact that it might not be nationalistic poetry, but we share a distaste. But it is not the case that Matt and I think our position is purely grounded on the foundation of scientific purity and mathematical laws. Like it is an emotional commitment to a process that we have invested value in. Matt, have I misrepresented or do you think that is probably accurate?

I stand by that. I stand by that. Well, you know, if you want to be logical empiricists, uh, I, you know, I'm happy to help you out down that path. It'll probably involve having to stop being neoliberal shields, but I think that would be a good idea too. That's a no, that is no seal. That's the one line.

Another person. I also do some historical work on WV Du Bois, the African American sociologist. Well, he's lived such a long life. And one of the curious things about him, so he's very famously an anti-racist campaigner. He was, he felt very deeply about that, but you know, sometimes he's right. You can appreciate his like first passion is science. And like, what really annoys him about the KKK is they like get in the way of, he's trying to do sociology.

His little fucks get in the way when he's trying to go around the South. Getting some WB Du Boisian vibes. We inherit from that tradition as well. I mean, thank you. Thank you, Liam. Yeah. The Nazis, they just cause so much hassle. They're all with the recent IQ papers, making people like David Wright very

nervous, like, you know, yeah. So like, this is, um, it's funny, you two are such like awkward white people in the Kendi episode. It feels good to give you the kind of the blessing of WB device. point in the Kendi episode, it feels good to give you the kind of the blessing of WB device. Look, that Kendi episode has caused us innumerable hassle, but not in the way that we might've anticipated because we're not constantly accused of BBing. Well, no, it's not people saying like we treated Kendi like, you know, they think that he's a terrible blight on humanity, which we feel to address in our analysis of him. But like, I feel that our take was just, he's not terrible.

We don't agree with his system, but he's not as bad as Scott Adams. That was basically our take. And people are like, those guys completely endorsed everything that Kendi said. he's not as bad as Scott Adams. That's basically our case. And people are like, those guys completely endorsed everything that Kennedy said. And it's all because they're on board with his political regime. And this is one thing, Liam,

that you get credit for because there are a number of people online who are convinced we are the vanguard of the revolution of the revolution of the the world regime so by constantly calling out as us as racists you're doing us a great service you're helping us give them give us a little bit of cred rest assured i'd like to continue you were the sensitivity reader the secret sensitivity reader for the candy episode

that's i checked all the jokes i just want any comrades listening to know i was not well like one thing that i think relates to that liam, and I saw Mark click his finger, so I'll ask this and then return to the shadows. So in your neck of the revolutionary woods, where everybody's just a matter of moments away from their turn against the wall, that kind of political oeuvre. I have no idea. I am a comfy middle class professor at LSE there have been very few executions so far

so far have you not have you not read James Redsey's books step by step it's already here it's already here but the thing is though there is within the progressive by Steph, it's already here. It's already here.

But the thing is though, there is within the progressive left spheres and also the like neoliberal left, it has its fair share of this as well. Maybe more towards the kind of literary inclined in those communities. But there is a huge skepticism of science, of nuclear power, of GMOs, the kind of crunchy wing. But I'm wondering, given your politics and given your philosophical stance, do you ever find frustrations in that neck of the wood with left-wing versions of anti-science sentiment?

Yeah, yeah, quite a lot. Um, so I think a few things. I think that people, and this is both on the left and right, this is, I think, an explanatory factor which goes towards both left and right anti-science, is people for good reason feel alienated a certain lack of control like um of big important social decisions which are turned over they are told to technocratic expertise and that technocratic expertise is never so neutral it's not the kind of thing that really can actually issue policy or normative guidance straightforwardly just in and of itself. So the fact that I know how nuclear reactors would work, I don't, but the fact that one knows how nuclear reactors would work does not per se make you the

person who should just decide our energy policy, right? There's a whole bunch of factors that come into that. Antenna cost piece is the only one. People's resentment of that sometimes I think leads them into positions which are just, they try to tackle the source, which is perceived to be the technical expertise and they end up saying nonsense. I think that's pretty common on the left and on the right. And ultimately what I've argued for, for instance, during COVID and what I'm in favor of like teach classes on this is for much more participatory involvement in those areas where science and social life overlaps. So people can genuinely influence how it's used and they can also, so they get

a chance to genuinely make a difference. I don't just want to explain to people they really are participants. But also by seeing themselves involved in the process or by knowing that it's the kind of thing which every now and again you could do, you know, my uncle's doing it, my friend was doing it, my cousin was doing it, whatever, it will no longer seem so alien. It will be something which would be a trusted part of their own lives. And so I certainly see that on the left and I don't even really distinguish between left and right in this because I think there's a lot of similar stuff on the right. There is a peculiarly left-wing one,

which is the peculiar relationship of Marxism to science. And so for Marx, it was important for him that his work was scientific in a certain sense. That sense is not the same necessarily as contemporary people would use the word science. It's closer to meaning sort of like a systematized, organized body of knowledge or something like that. But this leads to people in the socialist spectrum being very opinionated about counts as a science often with no real idea what you're talking about. So every now and again, if I just want to feel something rather than cut myself, what I do is I go online, make some sarcastic comment about marks and science, and then just watch the hate pour in.

That's a healthier. Yeah. So that's what I say is like the peculiarly left-wing version. And then I think this is general alienation from science, which you see on the left and right. Oh, one more thing. There's also, of course, on the right, there's also a bunch of plucky gajillionaires who fund anti-science efforts

because they don't like global warming science, stuff like that. That's, of course, some of it as well. I don't like global warming science, stuff like that. That's, of course, sort of it as well. I don't want to take that. Yeah. I completely concur. And also a group that fund a lot of research into recent IQ, for example.

Yeah, exactly. So I'm asking you about this, not to argue that this is the primary problem that we currently face. It's just more in your wheelhouse. And I guess the, just one follow-up I have, Liam, and it might be too specific. So if you don't have an opinion on it, that's fine. But I, I've seen a lot of people now, particularly people that are inclined towards Marxism,

citing the book by Graeber and Wengro, The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity, which I haven't read, but I've read reviews of and had people talk to me about. And I get the impression that it's very much taken as a complete rebuttal of the Pinkerian worldview, right? Or like any model that posits a kind of evolutionary development of like society, cultural evolution frameworks. And so my sense from reading the critiques and reading what people have

said is that it's been, it is being treated in a manner which is quite differential because of the chords with people's politics and it seems to fit with the politics of the people who wrote the book very neatly, which I'm always suspicious of. And for the same reason with people like Pinker in opposite directions. But so I'm just curious if you have any opinion on the scientific merits of that argument, if you're familiar with it. So, okay.

So to, if you want to talk more broadly about how I see science values in politics, really, but thirdly, on that particular book, I haven't read it yet, but I do know it was it. And the main reason I swore and laughed is because, you know, remembering how things look from the outside, you said there's many people in the Marxist world. So I'm in the bit of the world where my dear departed colleague, David Graeber was a famous anarchist theorist. Marxists and anarchists hate each other with a burning, burning passion and suspect each other of being CIA agents. So far, far from me thinking it was like, oh yes, the Marxists, we love Graeber. It's like, Oh yes, the mobs is we love Graeber. It's like, uh, Graeber MI5. Um, but, um,

he wrote the book bullshit. He wrote bullshit jobs. He wrote, um, debt the first 5,000 years. He's a very famous anarchist theorist. Okay. That's what this shows my level of, of, of understanding of that. I mean, so I've only really read reviews of it as well. My impression has been, yeah, I mean, my, I guess probably the same to yours, make some plausible points, but whenever there's room for interpretive sway, they always sway in a direction which paints their political views as basically good.

And so the odds of that always being the right move are pretty low. And so you've got to take a pinch of salt. That's been my impression from the outside, but I haven't actually read the book, so I can't. Yeah. It kind of seemed to me to be framed as like a rebuttal, or at least the way some people have framed it, was a rebuttal of the utility of population genetics and classical anthropological approaches. And I was not entirely convinced of that, that. From my understanding, but I haven't read it.

So, so this is just all impressionable. So that's it, Matt. I'll, I'll retire. Very good. Please, please. Master Matt. Well, one thing we should turn to before we run out of time is to give you the stage and let us know, yeah, what do you think?

You've been listening to our show and we're very grateful for that. And despite all appearances, we respect your opinion quite a bit. And we're very interested to know what criticisms would you have of us? Where are we getting it wrong? What do we need to do better? How can we improve? Put the knife in. Do what philosophers do best.

Well, for one thing, every episode should end with you just saying to the camera, what kind of communist you are. It should be the right kind of communist. So there's a bit of a sneak back of that and I'm disappointed. For another thing, I mean, I do actually think yins are a little bit too defensive of the status quo. No, I mean, what I think you often encounter with your gurus fear is the following extremely stupid heuristic, right, where people be like

mainstream sources aren't trustworthy. So I'm going to listen to what Truthseeker69 and 69 420 says on YouTube. Cause he's not mainstream. And like, that's a stupid heuristic and the views you end up when you do that are not good and there are all sorts of pretty crude tricks people have for covering up the fact that all the predictions they made previously, they threw out 30 of them, they were all pretty vague, 29 of them was still managed to be wrong, but they pick up the one which kind of could be a defended and then say, see, I'm a prophet and these are crude tricks and

it's very annoying and they're sort of like, I'm against the mainstream. Pose is a terrible heuristic error is infinite in its varieties. And the mere fact that the mainstream is wrong and you're opposing them does not mean you're right. Um, so I think for all of that being true, IANs just have a tendency to slip into defending them. So I'm still not persuaded that, for instance, the one which gets all discussion is on masks.

I'm still not persuaded that the behavior we saw from official information sources was responsible or worthy. I mean, or like someone, you know, I suspect someone should be punished if there was an investigation done for it. And you slip into the truth, which is, well, of course, in science, as more information comes in, we change our minds. But I don't think that if you investigated that case, you'd find people honestly reporting information as they had it.

I think you'd find the cynical attempt to sort of preempt what they guessed public reaction to various bits of information would be and release information in order to try and mold public opinion about what being were doing. I think that kind of dishonesty and propagandizing does happen. And you two are too willing to defend the most benign interpretation of the powers that be. You know, I think sometimes some of the conspiracies you hear, sorry, I'm talking back against myself, but some of the experiences here, I mean, there's that chap who said, was it someone, was it someone or another, some organization wanted to prevent people from

being cured of COVID, which was perfectly possible, in order to promote mass death, in order to ensure there'd be shutdowns in vaccines. And everything about that is crazy, right? Like you have to think like, well, what's the interests of the powers that be? Presumably not shutting down the economy and mass death of all the workers and consumers. And even if that was the thing, is that that's the cheapest way they could think to get a vaccine campaign. You vaccinate kids all the time at school, just add it to the list and no one would notice in the paperwork change. It was just, it's like, it is a crazy level of thought and like who would even have the power to do that thing? Who would be involved in that degree of coordination? And I was like, no one thought that, you know, in our

country we'll defect and get the economy going and get a boost on a revolution. It's all crazy, right? So I think that what happens is you guys spend so much of your time arguing with people with like that tier thought that it promotes, it pushes you into being too defensive. That's my critique. Just to say that I think Liam is not factoring into those plans that all that stuff about vaccines and stuff is true, but that's because the primary goal is to make people eat bugs.

So that like when the, when that's the goal, anything is well, I think that this is like, seriously, this in like Q. You know, there's this often the sort of Q and is often sort of demonology where like actually the sort of satanic force that way and in mainstream, there's often very thinly veiled antisemitism where it's Soros and the Rothschilds are conspiring. And I think the role of antisemitism and the role of demonology is very similar. And it's basically to posit agents who are malicious for the sakes of it.

I don't really need to explain why it is that they want to inject poison into our kids because they're demons. That's just what demons would want to do. Or antisemitmitic beliefs about jewish people that's just what they do and so i think that sort of they rely on that thought shutting down stopping point partly because otherwise it just collapses if you if you keep on enough yeah but liam i'll respond to your main point and i think it's a good one and you're not alone i think in having this impression for instance stewart ritchie another guest of the pod probably coming from a bit of a different place but still would agree with you i think am i wrong

chris and in saying that now that stewart stewart still says that often to me. It's funny. Stuart Ritchie and me are politically quite different, but he works on a pretty similar thing and he's at King's. He's just down the road from me. So with perspective wise, not that different. Yeah. And so we've had this feedback a bit in different ways, shapes and forms. And I think it is partly, I mean, there could be some reality to it, I guess. It could be. But at least part of it is just because I think of a misunderstanding because the content of the show is to tackle gurus. Most people have this heuristic that the outsiders, the iconoclasts are the ones that are being suppressed and aren't being given enough airtime and that the official orthodoxy is

dominant. I think it's fair to say that me and Chris's heuristic is that actually it's those people who do take the contrarian narrative, whether it's on a lab leak of COVID or something else, they actually get disproportionate airtime and have disproportionate influence in comparison to the thousand voiceless, sort of more boring, if you like, experts or voices on the other side. So that part is true. But I do think part of it is just we create that perception because we do focus on the crazier end and the people that are saying demonstrable nonsense like James Lindsay.

I can give you a couple of examples. For instance, you've seen me vaping my electronic cigarette in this. I actually wrote a paper on addiction and characteristics of nicotine addiction amongst people that smoke cigarettes and people that smoked electronic cigarettes. And in the process of that, I had to do a lot of reading about just the literature, right, on the relative dangers and the demographic characteristics of people who vape and the number of people that are using it for smoking cessation and so on. And so I then compared that to the official public health advice, which is now very much mainstream in a place like Australia, which is that vaping, if anything, is more dangerous than smoking. Nobody should vape, but we have to make it illegal and et cetera, et cetera. the, I guess, political or health advisory motivations that are underlying that kind of

line in the sense that you don't want to legitimize a new addictive form of nicotine delivery and so on. But at the same time, I can see that what they're saying is not consistent with the evidence that we have about the relative risks involved in vaping and liquid and e-cigarettes as opposed to smoking cigarettes. So, you know, that's a case where I've personally seen, I guess, a situation that's probably analogous to the thing that you described with COVID and masks. So I guess all I'm saying is that I think we're probably slightly giving the wrong impression in that because our focus is on these characters and what's going on our heuristic is trying to sort of counteract a kind of conspiratorial

mindset that we may give the impression that we are more au fait with the status quo than we actually are okay so i mean maybe that is so you know there's a bunch of obviously bad actors deliberately promoting lies for fairly self-interested and nefarious gains in the gurusphere. That's certainly true. And so it's worth combating that, I agree. But I do think that one thing that happened during the pandemic and is no doubt will happen again, is perhaps on a philosophical level, like phrases like trust the science or we're following the science was used by the British government in a very

misleading way to cover up for what were actually political decisions they were making about, you know, what kind of economic losses they were willing to take and what kind of cost of human lives they thought were acceptable. And they covered up by sort of shrouding it in an era of objective inquiry. And it's like, there's these hectic institutions and they've discerned this. And you know, importantly, that's just, I mean, for one thing, there's good work on, you know, how they actually interact with the sciences and it's just not true that they were just doing what they said. But even if they were just doing what they said, it's not really the thing. Science can't straightforwardly give policy advice without

taking into account what risks we consider acceptable or not. And there was a more humanistic value judgment made. I think something about ways and only attacking the barbarians at the gate, but ignoring the fact that it's something... it's not guru-esque, but it's a similar kind of appeal to a mysterious authority backed by apparent technical expertise, but not really actually properly logically supporting the claims made. It happens from within those institutions too, within institutions of state, within the mainstream press. Now the nature of your podcast is, it's finally focused on one thing

rather than another, you're focused on gurus, it's called Decoding the Gurus, it ties up YouTube's academic work, et cetera, but it does, I think it's more than just a misleading impression of your attitude to that. You're functioning as propaganda for one side over another. Right. I know it's better, Matt. Don't defend, right? Just, just, it sounds cooler to accept the criticism and say, yeah, you're right.

But let me, let me say this. I'm so surprised that Matt is going to be the chill one and Chris the kind of angry one. Ready to pop off. I want him to like me, Chris. No, no. I'm saying you didn't do that. You didn't do it right, Matt. You have to be more chill.

Yeah, it's a good point, Liam. You know, it's all right. But the thing is, I actually think part of the issue is that I know Matt's view from like discussions that we have not on the podcast, I know my view. I have a very cynical view about governments and institutions. I think they're full of inefficiencies, of people making politically motivated decisions, of gurus like Dominic Cummings putting their thumbs on the scales for specific things that the government wants.

You watch the British Parliament and the way that they use facts and figures, right? It's just cherry pick data after cherry pick data to support whatever policy, the think tank or the, you know, my model is very much in the loop in the thick of it. I think that's pretty accurate. And, you know, Northern Irish politics does also lends me to believe that. I think, you know, it's a good idea to be cynical about those kind of things. And like a very recent example is that I saw a bunch of conspiracy anti-vax people were harping on about the CDC has released a bad study, right? And it's comparing the efficiency of mask and they're using an odds ratio. And basically the results are not statistically significant and the sample is

really small. So it's a meaningless thing, but they've made a nice infographic that makes it look like, you know, wearing mask is very effective. And that is bad science. And it's misleading the public to support a policy agenda. And I think that kind of thing happens a lot, especially with American institutions like the CDC, I think has been caught doing that quite a fair bit.

But so with all of that taken for granted, then the bit that I often find myself fighting with and people misunderstanding it, and I think it's a point that you would agree with, that like when I looked at the mask literature at the beginning of the pandemic and I looked and saw, okay, our data about cloth masks, it's fucking messy. Like it's not good quality. We don't have very good studies about the efficacy of cloth masks in community settings. And I saw at that time, it was a heterodox view. You know, the people wanted to promote masks as extremely effective and the authorities

were kind of hemming and hawing about it. But when I saw that stance, my view was I agreed with the heterodox people that said it was a low cost thing to do. And, you know, it makes sense. It's a disease spread by droplets or by whatever way it's spread, but it definitely seems to be through the respiratory system, so wearing a mask, even if it doesn't do much, it's likely to do something and it's a low cost intervention. So all that seemed reasonable.

I also got the thing about the N95 masks and the public health authorities have to be considerate about them getting stolen up if they say that everyone should wear a mask. considerate about them getting stolen up if they say that everyone should wear a mask. But what I find is when there's those kinds of messy data, I can understand when a public health authority takes a certain position. And it might be because of part of the science decisions. It might be part of the internal hierarchy. And it might be like the political wind from whatever party's in control, all those things going in. And then I find that people are unwilling to accept that you could put in a bunch of different things and come to a, that basically what you're saying, that there isn't a scientifically correct answer. There's a policy answer, which can be informed by science, but you can justify a whole bunch of policies. And it's not to say that all policies are equal,

but just that you have to be able to tolerate some difference. And I get annoyed that people seem unwilling to factor in incompetence or difference of opinions or trade-offs when they're trying to assess what public health bodies do. No, I mean, so I agree with you on that, but let me say one thing where I saw you get in fights online. Matt, you never get in fights online. You're an agent. Like, but Chris, I saw you get in fights online. Well, I thought you were totally, it's just because of his accent. No, no, you have to understand that. Like I do hate Australians. I want that to

be totally fair, but like, yeah, but, um, me too, me too. But, uh, was when that chap from whatever international health or the ZUN was like, asked some trick question about Taiwan. Oh yeah. And I thought like people went on and I was like, look, what is this mid tier functionary meant to do? That was the case where the number of considerations coming in at him at that moment, there but for the grace of God, go ahead, like people who thought they could have done better at that moment were kidding themselves, like, Yeah, just hang up the Zoom. Yeah, just, I've been like, you're breaking up, you know.

What China, Taiwan, yeah, you're all good. Yeah. You know, sometimes people, you know, they're just not being serious. They're not willing to take into account. But I mentioned I do work on W.E.B. Du Bois. Now, one of the things seriously W.E.B. Du Bois thought about a lot was maintaining public trust in science. And I think part of that, one of the things that came out for me is it's true that, you know, there's a lot of things going to these decisions. More than one thing could be justified.

Some things are better than others, but in the end, choices must be made. But what I think we can critique people on is they weren't being honest about it. Compared to in Britain, when the vaccine was rolled out, it was rationed, right? It was done according to age and vulnerability. It was basically the two things. And the government was like totally honest. They just said like, look, we're prioritizing these people because we think they need it more.

If what happened had been like, look, masks are low costs. We're not sure they work, but they're probably worth doing. However, production hasn't ramped up enough now. So we want to, that would have been fine by me, right? Like that would have been, my suspicion is though, is they had made all those calculations in the background and then decided that we weren't to be trusted with a rationing system. And it turned out later on with the vaccines, we were to be trusted with a rationing system. There weren't riots in the streets, people seizing vaccine cases. People let, you know, just do it because it was a reasonable based decision.

That's what bothers me. These extra democratic forces, they're not as better than the demos than they think they are. They presume a role they haven't heard. I think that's a point we can come together on. I think Chris and I both agree with you there. And a related point is that the challenge of communicating uncertainty in public health messaging. And, you know, that's a difficult thing. We have to recognize that if you're trying to give public health messaging or just public messaging in some kind of emergency, I'm sure during the Blitz there was all kinds of messaging in London, which is to do this,

don't do that or whatever. Half the instructions were probably bad instructions, but it's often helpful to be concrete and direct and not to say duck and cover. Yeah, duck and cover. Yeah, yeah. This is probably a good idea. We're not quite sure, but maybe this is good. The most naive thing I've ever done was at the start of the pandemic. I don't think it took a prophet to foresee that, you know, I realized that the communication uncertainty

was going to be an issue here. So me, I'm in a department of people who are experts in that. So we came together to write a little public access piece, which got a fair number of reads. It got translated and was published in Brazil as well, on the community from uncertainty. And we recommended communicating imprecise probabilities to people. To put the point mildly, what did not happen was the government started using probability sets rather than point estimates in their things. So yeah, that was a point where I have to miss some thought myself.

If I'm going to criticize you for another thing, it's not really the same. You don't need to. You've done that. is it, but you actually kind of addressed it. I just want to come in. My partner usually mentions me this morning. That episode where you had Chris Williamson come on and give his guru right of response. He really roasted you guys.

It was great. He's like, oh, look, it was my first time. What was I meant to do? My heart was bleeding for him. And you guys are like, oh, we were kind of mean. Then he played the clip of me making fun of him for being a bodybuilder. Oh, it was beautiful. So that's not a criticism.

Is that a criticism? No, that's just me endorsing how great, if people want to see a criticism of you, they should go back and watch the episode. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey look, Liam, that's timely. Thank you so much because this gives us something that we need to clarify because our subreddit today were complaining. People noticed that Chris Williamson has not been a good boy since that interview. He's been interviewing Sargon, Alphacad, James O'Keefe, and... My, my, my.

What was the other fellow? Not angry. I'm just disappointed. So they... Yes, well, people said, ah, so man, Chris, they should have stuck by the guns. They were played by someone, you know, a charming exterior. And what a charming exterior Chris has. Oh, so charming.

But that's not the point. That's not the point when you're nodding along to proto-fascists like Sargon. Proto. Well, true, true. He was too extreme for like Nigel Farage. Was it BNP? Yeah, it was too extreme for UKIP. Yeah.

UKIP, UKIP. Sorry, it's like a different party, but slightly, it's a different name. So the one thing I would say about that is, I mean, you're right that Chris, it was actually enjoyable for, for me to squirm for all the mean things he said. And but regardless of where his channel currently is, he raised valid points about, you know, we were pretty mean to him. And also, we weren't thinking at all about the second order consequences of us closing the doors to someone that someone else might want the interview who might make them less

inclined to become further down the right wing rabbit hole. Right. That was not in my theory of mind wheelhouse. But what I want to say about that episode, I'm kind of using you as a jumping board for it, is that aside from that, I liked talking to Chris. I hope that based on what he said, that his content would be more critical. But that episode should be a good lesson for people. But, you know, Chris is a nice guy, talking to him nice, good sentiments.

It doesn't mean that his content is therefore going to fit with what we want, or it's the kind of thing that we endorse. And I think this is a thing that gurus often get wrong, that having a nice conversation with someone, therefore means it's, it's not okay to criticize their content and I understand the social thing, but I also think no, like that's fine. Like if somebody gives a very softball interview to Sargon and talks about misogynistic topics, fine, criticize the content, but it doesn't mean the criticisms they raised of us were not valid and they were all the ones that he made about Matt.

This actually reminds me on the Gurometer, is there anything which tracks affect? Because one thing I think is like so kind of a card is a good example of this is in a part of this you can see very sort of confidently and sneeringly says things, which are just rubbish. Tim Pool is another one who's like a very stupid person, but like the affect to say things like very confident and dismissively like, and to reply by just mode of presentation, like to disagree would be ridiculous. I think that's a guru trick and I don't think it's covered by any of you. Yeah.

Yeah, I see that. But it doesn't capture it, right? It's negatively vealanced. But, uh, yeah. You're talking about affect, you're talking about the, the degree of confidence and the. So, so do you remember you did this one, you did the episode on Douglas Murray, right, where Douglas Murray goes like, well, I just wish people would read Shakespeare, then they'd realize we have to obliterate Baghdad Where Douglas Murray goes like, well, I just wish people would read Shakespeare. Then they'd

realise we have to obliterate Baghdad. You know, like, and it's just like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, that's the way of presenting it. I feel as if you've actually, if you've got an actual, if you've got a real point, you don't need to do that. It's more like the logical positive. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting

you bring that up, Liam, because this is something we've talked about. Like, even putting aside our secular gurus gurus, if you want to be a religious prophet or you want to be a statesman and a demagogue, then you have to be confident. You have to have no uncertainty whatsoever. And that is something that we've talked about a fair bit actually in terms of you know it's it's just derogatory you can't imagine a guru who is like i mean we just covered robert wright who is spoiler he's kind of a good guru right he's he doesn't do the toxic stuff and one of the reasons why he can't be a guru is that he's full of uncertainties and he genuinely caveats what he says and he delineates stuff that is pretty much set out like that he's confident about like basic facts about evolution and then he bookmarks that and says okay now this is my

speculations and so he's very academic in that sense i feel the same about contra points because she contra points is like pretty clear when she's when she's conferencing versus when she thinks i don't know maybe you could go one way this could go the other because you'll have a section of you being like well it gets what i just said here's the yeah yeah that's a good example i think it's a legitimate point in the grometer is a you know scientific instrument that needs fine tuning. So the more philosophical input we get. This is how science progresses. It's just continual. Yeah. I'll just, I'll just tweak it.

But the point about like ruminating on negativity, like my, it kind of fits in with, you know, they're confident they're able to be loquacious, but what they're loquacious about is very rarely the beauty of the world or their admiration for a particular kind of scientific paradigm. It's what the fuckers are getting wrong and like who's been holding them back and how society is failing to achieve the things. And I think this extends across the guru sphere, including into the kind of political demagogue space as well. But Liam, in our case, this is part of what makes Matt and I suspicious of utopian promises

of revolutionaries, but setting them as a separate category on their own. There is that negative, tinged affect to things. tinged affect to things and also that sneering tone that only an idiot would feel to you know appreciate that this is a real problem like douglas murray does it beautifully because of the english accent and all the accoutrements with his background but i think it is a common thing and i wonder if it's a distinguishing feature of a certain type of negative guru or it is something that you just see more broadly it's a good now i'm imagining you know. But are we not just talking about the difference between, was it Plato or Aristotle who made that distinction between rhetoric and dialectic? I can't remember.

Help us out, Liam. It was always Aristotle. I'm just snuffing this. But like, I don't, I don't even really think confidence in the position is like per se, one can pick up on. I think it's a mode of presenting your ideas, which suggests that to even countenance disagreement is just, is like evidence that you're a bad person. Foolish, selfish. foolish selfish and so it's a sort of exaggerated effect of shock that anyone disagrees there's some kind of sneering these are things like add up to be it is it's a rhetorical trick but it's a rhetorical trick which is totally argument neutral like you can combine this with

zero support for your claim and so it strikes me as a rhetorical trick, which you only really need to lean on if there's no there there. Yeah. I don't think we have a specific axis in the barometer that captures this, but it kind of relates a little bit to cultishness in the broader sense, right? Yep. It does. Yeah. You know, cults are often about defining the good people and the bad people. The good people are the elect, the people on the inside who agree with everything 100%.

It's worth considering. Maybe we need to expand the grometer. Yeah, into the grometer, there's a high bar. So we'll put it out to crowdsource peer review. Yeah, there you go. Well, Liam, there is a question I want to ask before we use up all of your afternoon time. So, you know, we have a tendency to lean towards the IDW space because it's full of maniacs who are amusing.

Apart from the harm they do in the world, that's the unamusing side effect. But we're always on the lookout for, you know, other suggestions of people that will take us out of culture war stuff or that we haven't thought of. And I wonder, is there anyone that you would nominate contemporary or historical who may have recorded a long form podcast that would be a good candidate to look at. A philosophical guru of sorts, your rival that you want to take it down a peg or two. Any suggestions or out of the philosophical space? Well, I always ask why you guys won't do me as a guru. And so I guess me. That's the problem is where's your long form content? I've been on loads of these bloody podcast things all around the internet.

But yeah, you need to go on with the sense makers. If you go on and have a conversation with the sense maker, Here's your bias towards the IDW sphere. It's like, it turns out to count. I have to, but, um, fine. Uh, no, the problem is, is that everyone on the left is just correct. That is a problem. And so there's not really any, no, it's an, I can't really.

Don't leave. Don't feed in. There are actually people on the internet who don't understand sarcasm and they're like, they just admitted it. They said it at the end of the interview with Liam, you'll have incepted them that we've been at Naya. Stochastic?

Yeah. Don't do it, Liam. It's not fair. You know, how about all this, this sort of worthless centrist? Has Conor Friedersdorf done a broadcast? Oh. Because like, I feel like there's a whole realm of people who are smug, worthless, offenders of the status quo.

Barry Weiss? Ah, she's, just that's quote Barry Weiss. Ah, she's too easy when it's Barry Weiss. Like do one of the ones who's like, okay. Like has a good, but totally unarmed. I would say Yasham Monk is a really good example. Someone who's just has no merit at all, but very confidently people think that he's very clever and reasonable. The problem is you'll do him and you'll like him, but I think Yashimil, Connor Friedersdorf would be good examples. Yeah. I'm blocked by Connor Friedersdorf.

Oh, so am I. Liam. So am I, but then I am relentlessly insulting Friedersdorf. So I don't actually play him in the film. I only insulted him twice. I was going to say once, but it was twice. The second insult was pretty cutting. So, you know, I live by the sword.

I frequently, I frequently refer to Connor Friedersdorf as the stupidest man on the internet and he is, so I don't mind that he's blocked me. Well, that's, that's it. That's it. There we go. But jokes aside, like what I think those people have in common is they lean on a reputation for being rational, see-through the bullshit, down the line, sensible people but promote a very particular worldview in light of that.

It lacks the culty qualities. I mean, you know, no one's saying it's a little shrine to Yashamun, but it has some of the features of being sense makers who interpret the world for an excited audience and do so in a way that subtly, but really promotes certain political rights. So that's what I would say. I feel like I'm doing something mean by asking you to justify it, but do you think they do something different than what Douglas Murray does or just a different flavor?

Well, Douglas Murray's more hard right. You know, Douglas Murray has recently taken a turn to pretending he's a centrist, but until recently he was writing pieces about how only foolish hippies wouldn't want to, you know, carpet bomb various Middle Eastern cities, right? So like Douglas Murray is hard right. Who's recently discovered that he's been the reason centrist all along. Whereas I think Connor Friedestorf, you know, more sincerely thinks that the Kochs just give him money because they like his reasonable point of view.

Well, he's just not as clever as Douglas Murray. You've done the suitable pitch from Will Adam to our list of people that take down a... Good, good, good. That to hear. Yeah. It's an interesting brand. I can see the connection because just like everyone would like to think that

they are being rational and everybody loves science, everyone likes to believe that their beliefs are evidence-based. That fond self-perception is the thing that fuels the secular gurus that we tend to focus on because they provide the feeling of that while actually pandering to the most reflexive, emotional, intuitive bullshit. Now, you name these guys as given the same thing. Everyone would like to think of themselves, well, not everyone, present company excluded, but most people would like to think of themselves as reasonable centrists.

You know what I mean? Not politically ideological on one side or the other. Yeah, so that's an interesting swerve to take it to look at those guys in some extent like looking at centrist seems boring but it's probably because we are more closely aligned to them which is a good reason to look at some centrists yeah yeah well more as well that's funny fine. Yeah. Um, before we close up, I want to make sure I want to, I want to correct something I said, cause you you're right. Cause millions that don't understand sarcasm.

So I just want to say, I do not hate Australians. Um, that was, that was a joke. Like, no, no, look, I hate, I hate racist. That might happen to coincide with Australians. Ah, there's a correlation. There's just a coincidence, right? Correlational, but not- Australians, qua Australians.

Get this. Yeah. Understood. Understood. Look, everyone knew you were joking when you said, I hate Australians. Everyone knows that statement is so ridiculous that anyone could have that feeling about Australians. Who could hate their muscle master?

That's what I want to know. Yeah. Wait, wait, wait. No, I've got newsflash. You know the beginning, Matt? I was dropping my Australian knowledge bombs on you. Too easy. No.

Yeah, too easy. Thank you, Liam. And you were astonished. Chris, when did you visit Australia? That's because my friend is recently relocated from Northern Ireland to Australia. People love it when I talk about Northern Ireland and the cultural differences. So I'll just mention that. This is someone else talking about it.

He just before this podcast described you Australians as basically Americans. He said, you're all too happy. You're asking him about his salads. He has to be nice. And it's doing his head in. He likes the Weller, but he's not happy. He feels he's been sold a false bill of goods. So just saying, he's in Sydney,

if that helps put things in context. Well, Sydney, people in Sydney suck. I understand why he's gotten the wrong impression about Australia. And look, my favourite thing about Australia is the weather. That's pretty much it, as far as I'm concerned. But that's enough. That's enough, Chris.

That's all. That's all. I'm just saying. I'm not saying Northern Ireland is better. I didn't say anything about Northern Ireland's sarcasm, okay? So don't mention it on the subreddit. Well, I'm happy we got the 26 plus 60. Yeah, yeah. That's for the reference for those who know.

If anyone listening knows what 26 plus 6 equals, let us know. Let us know. No, most possibly. Answers on a postcard. All right. Yeah. So, Liam, it's been a pleasure and we're glad that you let us

torture you into coming on you've re-slightly my impression of philosophers above where it was but mainly because you're coming after Aaron I was about to say you've had Ty who should clearly raise your

sorry I did have one genuinely sincere nice thing I about to say, like you've had Ty, who should clearly raise your, Yeah, sorry. I did have one genuinely sincere, nice thing I wanted to say. Oh, not about me. It's an honest thing. It's only tangentially about you. So, so you were caught in the side fire of the Prius. The thing about T is that his papers are amazing, right? If, if people that listen to this podcast don't like academics they would still

enjoy tease papers because they're well written and and liam i'm afraid to say when i read your papers they are the least bad philosophy papers i actually enjoy because you you write in a way that like people can read and enjoy you know you, you say, oh, you're actually right. Like, so you think that's good? Oh, thank you. Yeah. I like that. So I encourage anyone who doesn't believe me to, to check out the people we referenced, why do scientists lie?

It's very good. So sorry. Well, it's good. I liked it. So fun thing you lied. That wasn't tangential at all. That was just, you praised one person and then you praise me. It was sequential.

It was not tangential. And for another thing, I guess, could we just link the wider scientist's life? Yeah. Yeah. We'll be there. So thank you.

Thank you very much, Liam. We appreciate you coming on. Keep doing what you're doing. We'll keep reading your papers and please keep tweeting for God's sake. I know it's only an expression of your neuroses and various mental problems, but it does the worst of us, the world of good. So thank you for that.

I'm so sorry. So if anybody wanted to follow Liam on the Twitters, he is at last on the Twitters. He is at LastPositivist and you can follow us at GurusPod and r4cdent and c underscore cabna and we're on podcast things that you're listening to now. So Liam, we will continue to uphold

the philosophy of the logical positivists in this new era. We will keep carrying the torch for logical positivists. We'll carry the flame. Yep in this new era. We will keep carrying the torch for logical positivists. We'll carry the flame. Don't worry. We are, in many sense, the Aristotelian form, pure as it is,

existing there, against which others can't measure. There is actually an Aristotelian theory of forms. What? I know, Liam. I know, I know, I know know all right so both of you please go grovel at the feet of your muscle masters wait wait wait hold it who's the muscle master oh that's um uh joe rogan oh he's the muscle master oh you and i will be groveling at joe rogan's feet

you managed to get all this two hours and 12 minutes in without saying the N word, but you just kind of slip it in. Very good. That's where we have to cut before Mark gets into his racist rants. It'll get demonetized.

But there, thank you very much, Liam. You've lent us credibility and we'll now use it for evil. Well, wasn't that an interesting interview with Liam? The strange thing is I'm here alone. There's no lyrical Aussie fairy floating in the wind. And I'm here on my own because we gotta get through the Patreon

shoutouts we're way behind we're like a year behind and we're going to be putting out the Liam episode now but I don't want to wake Matt up at this late hour but I do want to give some thanks to people that have supported us. So sorry, you will get Matt saying something funny. You'll have to put up with me just saying your name. So sorry about that, but we do appreciate the support. So for Galaxy Brain Gurus, so first of all, we have Adam Session. Good old Adam. Thank you, Adam.

We have Fraser McMillan, another good guy. Thanks, Fraser. Theo O'Donnell. Now I feel like I have to say everybody's good. Theo, you're good as well. And an influential hog dealer who's a philosopher but you know you can't have everything and i may have thanked him before but anyway i'm thanking him again uh and last last of all seb haig or seb haig i'm i'm sorry seb but thank you anyway so that is our Galaxy Brain Gurus for this week.

You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard. And you're so polite. And hey, wait a minute. Am I an expert? I kind of am. Yeah. I don't trust people at all. So for revolutionary geniuses, we have Andy Hunt, whose name sounds familiar. So thanks, Andy, possibly for the first time, maybe the second time.

We have Carrie Gautason. Sorry about that, Carrie, but thank you very much for the support. We have Alex. Alex, cheers. And we have Susan Lamont. So thank you very much, Susan. Oh, and last, Stephen Keenan. Stephen Keenan. Oh, wait, no. Stephen, take that back. You're a galaxy brain guru.

Thank you anyway. Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking. What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know. So that's our revolutionary geniuses. For conspiracy hypothesizers, we have Duncan, and we have Cameron O'Mara, a considerably Irish-sounding name. Oh, and to finish off, Catherine Walsh. So, all of you, thank you very much for the support.

Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Again, I feel like you're getting a raw deal by not having Matt present. But, you know, just sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. We've got too many names. So thank you all and have a wonderful week, weekend, whatever the hell. God, it's terrible doing this on your own. Anyway, cheers to you all and bye. Thank you.