Shaun Newman Podcast - #271 - Mark Changizi

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

Mark is an American theoretical cognitive scientist. We discuss his thoughts on music & evolution of writing, humans need for free expression & the dangers we face in the future.  Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500 Support here:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/ShaunNewmanPodcast⁠

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Happy Friday, folks. Hope everybody's enjoying the week. Maybe you've got some plans myself. We're going to go do a little camping this weekend and get the kids out of the house and maybe find some fun at the lake. We'll see. Hopefully the weather holds on for us. Now, before we get to today's episode, let's get to today's episode sponsors. Stephen Barber and the team over at Upstream Data.

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scientist known for his research on evolutionary origins of biological and cognitive design including perceiving the present hypothesis to understand optical illusions nature harnessing theory for the origins of writing speech and music and the skin signaling hypothesis for origins of primate red green vision and the rain tread hypothesis for prune fingers. I'm talking about Mark Changese. So buckle up because here we go. Hey, this is Mark Changizi and welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Mark Changizi. So first off, sir, thanks for hopping on. How great to be here. Now for the

listener, maybe they've stumbled across you, maybe they haven't. Let's start with a bit of your background just so people have an understanding of who they're listening to. Yeah. So I'm a, you know, my undergrad was physics math, PhD was math, but I became kind of a theoretical cognitive scientist. And so I'm known for discoveries on like why we evolved to have eyes that face forward rather than sideways, like your bunnies. Your eyes face forward because it allows you to actually see more in leafy habitats. It's not about being a predator. Why we have color vision, it's actually to see emotions under the bare skin. You're actually your kind of color vision that we primates have is optimized the sea blood under the skin, the oxygenation variations, which lets us see blushes and blanches.

is this kind of an emotion sense. Why we see illusions, all of these illusions that you've seen, I've got a TED talk on this as well as on the color vision one. Illusions are actually, your brain is slow. So if you just perceived what hit your eyes and sometimes built a perception from that, you'd have perceptions of the recent past. Instead, your brain tries to anticipate what the next moment's going to look like out of the world, because by the time your brain creates that perception,

that's what will actually be out there. So these illusions are actually because of this attempt to always perceive the near future. You know, so there's all these different kinds of things that I've worked on in a lot of different fields and also why we came to have language and music. A lot of things that are about cultural selection rather than biological design. And so that's when COVID hit. I come at it from a world of trying to understand human psychology and the design underline that as well as cultural illusion and the design. like i'll give you one case of cultural evolution the reason that we can read at all we didn't evolve to read um writing systems have evolved have culturally evolved over time to look like the contour

conjunctions in the natural world like you end up with when one object goes behind another object um you know you get l junctions you get let's say one contour that gets blocked by another contour that's sorry that's a t junction or l junctions just just the corners of things and you can work out the space of all of these junctions which have three contours and the ones that happen in in nature are the ones that happen in writing systems. The ones that don't happen in nature and three dimensional scenes don't happen in writing systems. So writing systems culturally evolved to harness

our ancient visual object recognition system and transform it into a reading system. Thereby, we didn't have to evolve to read and said cultural evolution evolved writing to be good for us. So there's a lot of these sorts of things and a lot of different kinds of fields that I'm known for. But now I'm known for being a resistance fighter you know, and flushing out and defending free expression in particular and trying to understand mass,

collective hysteria, the kinds of things that we've been experiencing for the last few years. Well, before we get to that, the music thing is, interests me a little bit. And I want to throw something at you because we were having a discussion on the weekend. And I'm like, well, I got the guy coming on that I can talk to music above. And it's a simple question, I think. I was out at the farm and out at the farm, mom and dad have tons of birds. And I was out barbecuing and I turned on some music

and my mother was scolding me that all the birds were going to fly away. And I said, well, if they don't like it, they don't have to come around. And then Adele came on and a bunch of birds came back. And I was explaining this story to one of my brothers and he got talking about dolphins in Mexico on a trip they'd had where one of the tour guides put on a certain type of music and all the dolphins came in. And then if he turned on a deer,

type of music, all the dolphins left. And so I was curious. And animals, do they like music then? And what is the, what is the, what is your background say about that? Because you've done an extensive research into music and the evolution of it. Right. So I mean, the book that we're talking about, by the way, this is called harness. Harnessed. Uh, yeah. Where did language and music come from? And so the story of language is that, of writing, this is the story of writing and like, sorry, of music and language and the origins of it. Now there's a number of species that can entrain to a beat.

And certainly at the base of all kinds of human, culturally evolved music, there's a beat. So I don't believe that music is an instinctual thing that is part of our natural selection. My entire, there's two different kinds of views that you could have. One is that music and the same for language, actually, language or music are the same way.

There's two typical standard views. One is the view that language and music are instincts. We've all over hundreds of thousands or millions of years to slowly have instincts for language or for music and you could have different opinions about each of those. And so it's part of our very nature. Stephen Pinker famously and thinks that language, he has a book called Languic.

he doesn't think that about music now the other view is is that no it's all just just stuff that we learn and we're really plastic animals is that is their kind of viewpoint and so we learn how to ride horse bucking broncos and do and skateboards to do all kinds of things we didn't evolve to do and it's just one of those things and my argument is that neither of these are right what in fact is is a combination it's the only way that we can be good at anything is when it taps into our ancient instincts. We are basically, we're not plastic like people. Stephen Pinker's right.

We're highly instinctual animal. We're piles of instincts. We're not these infinitely plastic creatures that are different from the other animals. No, all animals, including us, are highly entrained piles of instincts, and we're not deeply plastic. No more plastic than the other animal.

What makes us able to seem so plastic and do all these weird stuff is because with cultural evolution up and running, we have a new designer. We no longer have natural selection, which takes epics to give some kind of new switchblade or kind of new thing in our Swiss army knife. Now cultural evolution is up and running. It's also a blind watchmaker. That is, there's no designer, but through time, cultural evolution sort of designs stuff within society and culture and technology to fit our ancient existing unchanging brains.

So in the case of writing already hinted, writing culturally evolved to shape letters looking like nature, thereby, harnessing an ancient, unchanging, brilliant object recognition system, but harnessing it for reading. The sounds of speech culturally evolved, even before that, long before that, the culturally evolved to choose, language chose the kinds of sounds

that were already good at processing. The kinds of sounds that we find, the kinds of sounds that happen in nature are hits, right, hits, slides, and rings, like when this rings, it has a particular way it vibrates once you hit it, that you can tell it's a box, bottle of wine and not just a piece of paper, right?

They varies the way that they ring after they've been hit. Hits are just plosives like P, T, K, you know, P, T, K, those are closoph, sound, and they're hit sounds. Slides are just what we have for fricatives, like shh. And then all of the other is the sonorance, the vowels being the major one, are the rings. And the way that we combine them into syllables is always, this is what happens to nature. It's always a hits in a ring. is the hits and both objects ring or it's a slide and they're also ringing. That's just a syllable. This is always a plosive followed by a vowel. Syllables are ba, fa, saw. That's the basic

fundamental structures of natural events, the sounds of natural events are built out of those fundamental structures. Cultural evolution said, well, if we're going to have language, if it could talk, it says if we're going to have spoken auditory language, these stupid primates, you know, that are trying to do this don't have changing brains and they have really good instincts for processing the sounds of solid object events. Solid object events have certain kinds of universal grammars in terms of the kinds of sounds that happen. Let's make language sound like that, because that's the only way we're going to get this stuff into their brains. Same for writing. If writing, if someone had come along and said, hey, let's make these primates read by making them

look like barcodes. None of us would even bother with reading. Barcodes are designed for barcode readers. But would never work on it. maybe you know some kid could be trained so that he could read like one word every seven minutes you know with a bar like you know after amazing you know talent but you would never be able to a reader would never become part of ones it only works because the systems have been sweetly uniquely brilliantly designed for our existing brilliant brains in the case of music which is what you hit it in the case of music back to music music is culturally evolved to sound like something that is deeply evocative already that we already have object record

event recognition systems, instincts for. And that's for the sounds of humans moving around us. Every species has, just like we have good face recognition systems, I can recognize faces, I can recognize facial expressions. I can also, with my eyes close, recognize the sounds of a mover moving around me. I can tell that they're getting closer. I can tell on the basis of their gates, what they're doing. Are they doing a layup?

Are they angry? Are they turning and coming back the other way? Like at a coffee shop, you might just be sitting in there working in, and then there's sound behind you. behind you and then suddenly it stops and you might turn around. And that means like you could tell it sort of stopped right before you, you know, and which means that you kind of were tracking your, your lower auditory system was keeping track of these things.

And often people pass by you don't even notice because there's nothing that says, oh, there's maybe an event that's going to impinge on me. Cars going by, for example, if you've ever noticed, but cars when they go by, they might be going by and passing you at one meter past you, you know, you're walking down the street. There's zero, zero and they get louder and louder and louder and they, and they receive, but they have a characteristic Doppler shift that suggests that they're not going to hit you. The Doppler is always falling, but if instead it would go ee, it was solid pitch, it was rising in intensity,

but the pitch was the same, you would suddenly turn around and jump. Why? Because that's the signal that it's looming directly toward you and not passing. That subtle fall suggests you're safe, you're fine, which is why you're totally unconcerned when these cars are whizzing by. Your brain is great attracting the kinds of sounds, especially human sounds. And so music culturally evolved to to sound like a human evocatively moving in your midst. And when you work out the kinds of grammar of what a human sounds when they're moving in your midst, they have a particular kind of gait, they have a particular pattern in terms of how the melody that the doper shifts change, and they're moving fast and have small doper shifts. And how the loudness changes relative to those

and the interaction between these, then you can write a whole book, thing. Here's all these grammars in terms of how humans move. Do you find those peculiar patterns in the structure of music? So then when you look at tens of thousands of music, you find these same fingerprints of human movement in the sounds of music. And so that's why we like to listen to it all day long. I mean, the only reason there's not music going on right now is because I'm here with you and YouTube or whatever sometimes might hear and say, hey, there's a trademark violation or something like that. So you have to turn it up, not to mention it would be annoying, right? Otherwise, I have it on 24-7 basically. there's always music being piped in many ears unless I'm asleep. And we pay billions of dollars people spend worldwide on buying these weird sounds. Why are they doing it? It's because they're social sounds and we're social creatures. We're hearing different kinds of stories with different kinds of composers have different kinds of intuitions. They're not thinking that, oh, it's a human mover.

I'm writing a story about a human doing. No, but their intuitions, their bones sort of get it. And good composers somehow are figuring out good stories, auditory stories of a human moving. So then in theory, if you tap into like a, I don't know, is it a traditional sound, an ancient sound, in theory, if you could encapsulate that somewhat, that would lend credence then to animals understand it. Right? That's why dolphins would come to it or the birds would come back in theory. Well, so in the case of back to back, yeah, back to birds. Now, let me, before getting specifically to that question, if you really want to design

music. Now that so in this way of thinking about it, like birds already have evolved to be really good at processing the sounds of other birds. They're flapping when they're going by. They're going to be good at doppler shift stuff because they're moving even faster and they probably hear very very subtle like things that flutter by and they'll have dopperships. But the grammar of what birds sound like, especially at whatever scale that particular bird is, right? It's going to be different than like I can say hummingbird. They're going to be super good. And they're going to have different kinds of beat they're not going to have a or dogs will have a different kind of beat they're quadrupeds four legs and they're going to have gallops and trots and all the stuff the dog that horses do

that one more familiar with horse right so they're going to have a different uh different kind of fundamental rhythm types than maybe humans do birds will have a different type as well but if you can figure out what the grammar of that species uh movement sounds are the kinds of things that they should be especially good at processing and mean something behaviorly to them uh then you would could start creating music designed for them so that they specifically really enjoy it or find it scary or something. Hence why when you're out at the farm, I just come back to where I am, you can actually whistle or talk to the birds if you talk in their language because if you can imitate them, they'll talk back. Well, yeah. Now, in the case of just, just to be clear, bird song is a misnomer.

Bird song is really just, it should just be called bird vocalization because it happens to have, you know, a couple features that humans thought of, they named it song. But, In every study, there's no sense in which it's song-like in any interesting sense. These are just instinctual vocalizations that they just start saying, and they can certainly learn, depending on species, they can learn, but they're not even used commentatorially. They have syllabic parts, like they have syllables and words that they combine them into, or like in a commentator. And when you actually, when you look at the birds that have double the number of syllables,

you might think that they would have more than double the number of songs out of which they build those, you know, with which they build those syllables. don't when you have fine birds that have double the number of syllables they have just double the number of songs that's not how we use words when you have double someone with double number of words like kids you can actually track them when they get double the number of words they have disproportionately more sentences because they're using them common tutorial like to build you know say all birds are not like it these are just entrained stereotyped stuff that they're saying with parts in them that are not being used really in a word like way at all much less having any of the kind of things that we that we have for for music in our sense so I But you should think of the vocalizations that they have to be more like our vocalizations, which are the stuff that we did before we had language, which might have been all these kinds

of emotional evocative, like, oh, or curse words are the closest thing that we have today that are kind of words, but really are more like vocalizations that are just don't really matter what they mean in the dictionary. They have evocative emotional oomph on the basis of something else. It's just why we all know in our bones you should rarely use them or use them in certain moments because they're an emotional expression of a certain kind, not a word at all. Hmm. Everybody certainly knows exactly what you mean when you start talking swear words because you just got to, you drop the F-bomb in the right place. And it can mean a lot of different things.

And it doesn't matter what the dictionary says about it. That's absolutely bang on. But I go back to it. So can birds, I play a song. Are they coming to the beat? I don't think so. I think that there are some birds, of course, that have a bit. I've got a parrot just around the corner here.

And some birds can begin to at least entrain to a beat. But I don't see any reason to think, you know, most of these animals are going to have, to the extent that they have a beat that they would want to entrain to, it's usually going to beat that's appropriate for their body size. You know, larger animals are going to have just slower beats. It just scales up that way, smaller animals will fast beats.

Now, you might coincidentally have a song that they can, you know, the beat to what maybe it's every, the eighth note, let's say, if it's a quarter note for us that we're dancing to, they're cool with the eighth note because they're really small. And so like just dancing double time and it happens to fit and they kind of entrain to. There's not that many animals that entrained to a beat at all. But for those that do, I would guess, and I don't know, I don't know the answer to this, but I would guess that they're able to and train to something that their body can move to. It's not, you know, you're just not going to move faster than, than making. sense for your body size. Well, I tell you what, there is an interesting topic to get you talking about because when I was digging into you, I was like, oh, man, this will be interesting. So mainly what you're, mainly. That's harness for those that are just now that we talked about it afterwards. Harness was from 2011, although it's, you know, the bestseller and origins of music, why we have language, why we have music, why were the humans that we take ourselves to be

today. It was probably just the bird feeder and they were annoyed that I was playing music and they just decided to come. It's basically what we're getting to at the end of it. I was really hoping some bird out there really enjoyed Adele. But hey, that's just me. You know, your new book coming out, expressly human here in July, is kind of where you, that and you know what you said right off the hop, you became, you've become a freedom fighter. All of us that are talking openly have become freedom fighters now. I'm really curious, you know, you get talking about language and expression and freedom of expression and all these different things and the mask and covering that all up. What are your thought, you know, in the last two years, two plus years, almost now, geez, it's funny how time flies by. What is your like research, like you must have been sitting there going, this is getting really odd.

Yeah. I was, you know, back in March of 2020, and I even posted tweets about this, I said, not only is this one of the most dangerous and scary times in my lifetime, I'm 53. And so in my lifetime, I've, of course, aware of the events that have happened like this, often worse than this, but, you know, Cultural Revolution in China, you know, Nazis' treatments of Jews. And my own, I'm happy Ronnie, my wife's from Iran. my dad was from Iran.

And so the Islamic Revolution not only was a gun revolution, but also very quickly just created, suddenly women all had to cover up. And still to this day, 40 years later, there's still this kind of collective treatment of anyone who's unclean if they're not being a proper Muslim and that invaded their culture. And so a lot of people that are here are really escaping that kind of, they're not escaping the economy. The economy is not great there, but it's bustling. right i mean it's not it's it's a highly educated highly smart it's not really second-worldy it's kind of just sort of crappy first-worldy the best way to describe but it's the freedom and it's the kind of religious intolerance and cairns on the street that are attacking you because too much of your curls are coming out of your hijab things like this so but i've never seen it myself i mean

i as a kid as a 10-year-old i saw when the hostages were taken in iran and my family told me my my mom and dad said, okay, we're not an Iranian anymore. I was like, what do you mean? Well, we're Persian. And all the Iranian rug stores, carpet stores, change their names to Persian. Because a lot of people didn't really get what Persian was and that it was the same thing as Iranian. So I had already, no one was really mean to me, but we certainly had this impression. Okay, Iran is now the enemy.

Iranians and Arabs just generally are unclean, bad people. And there was a lot of targeting. And my, you know, my dad is a doctor. And people were, you know, unlikely to take on a doctor who was Iranian. and so just because of either feeling that they didn't like that kind of people or they didn't want to be seen to be the kind of person that would like, you know, a lot of these things can spread amongst people that don't have much of an opinion. Irrational fears.

Yeah, irrational fears or fears of what other people will say about you, even if you don't really care, just sort of a kind of weakness like that. So I've seen some of that in micro detail. I don't want to compare that experience to what it's like to be African American or gay, where they're just, you know, constantly getting beat over the head in terms of kind of prejudice and discrimination. But still, I had experienced some of it. it but I don't think most of us have experienced the spread and speed of these kinds of collective hysterias in our in the west really at all in our generation and even my generation so that's the

way I started that sentence was not only was it the most frightening one of the most frightening sort of sociopolitical event that I'd ever witnessed it was also the most interesting it was one of the most deeply intellectual interesting things that's happened in my lifetime so as someone who studies and spent his life studying sort of mathematical kind of computational psychological, cultural psychological sort of group level emergent phenomena in this kind of bag of stuff, it had all of it, right? You've got these are, what's going on is at the immersion level, emergent, it's a collective hysteria.

It means no individual is crazy. The crazy happens by virtue of the illness of the connections and the dynamics of the entire network. And so how can we make sense of these things? how can we better understand them? How can we cure them or roll them back? What is the mathematics that help us understand these things to maybe deter and inhibit them in the future?

So that's, I mean, in the beginning, you know, I was a little flummox as to how it even proceed as an intellectual. I was just sort of fighting it as a resistance fighter. But I was like, I had a YouTube Science Moment series called The Science Moment. And I was up to around 51 episodes when COVID hit. And then I just felt like I couldn't continue. I was always just talked about aspects of my research. Things that weren't really in my books, things related to, like, other kinds of points that were kind of always about my research.

And I thought when COVID hit, it was just, I couldn't just continue talking about just those intellectual things. They're kind of fun, but it would be like an artist in World War II and all of the world's falling apart. And they're still doing the same drawings of what that they used to do beforehand. Like, it just, no, when these weird events happened, it just seemed inappropriate to just do this stuff. same thing. So it took me a while, but by maybe October or November of 2020, I realized, okay, I can still move forward in this series because there's so much interesting stuff going on on the psychosocial side. I'm in the sort of complex mathy emergent thought and from masks to free expression to how collective hysteria works to all of these. That's the kind of angle.

I didn't want to get on there and talk about particular data of lockdowns or vaccines or there's a lot better people that can do this. I want to talk about stuff that no one else is talking about. So I think at the Science Moment series since then, I've now up to 188 episodes, 130 something I've been really within the endless COVID hysteria season. And I'm surprised. So there's just endless stuff to talk about that are all related to these deep issues about what drives society forward. And they're all kind of psycho-sociital phenomena. So that's why I've been focusing on. And that's what led me in 2021 and my colleague Tim Barber to start this free Expression Institute.

So that are, you know, my research actually turned out that this book that he and I are publishing in July is all about emotional expressions, but also about the foundations about how free expression works in a network, in a social network, how it evolved to work, so to speak, and how, you know, it's obvious about face masks, because we're deriving the space of emotional expressions

the social animals have to have in order to negotiate, compromise and, you know, get along together. But deriving it from first principles. So we've got the whole space of emotional expressions we've sort of uncovered in this brand new defining period. So we understand exactly what masks are fucking with, right? Masks are destroying that the language upon which we rely. It's not spoken language, it's the emotional expressions.

But it's also the backbone, the fundamental understanding about how why we express one or another, how free expression works, how free speech works, how these networks slowly move towards the truth. And when you censor or, you know, put in barriers and do stuff to the network, how it thereby inhibits or prevents the truth. Mark, can I want to, can you break down free expression? In my brain, I equate free expression to free speech. I feel like you've just rattled off both of them and I'm like, oh, oh, I better make sure that I am on the same page here. What do you mean by free expression?

Is that a yeah. So I've been very kind of trying to keep those things a little bit of stink. and it's not some general term of art. It's my term of art. And the reason I'm focusing on that is because most of the time when people say free speech, they are thinking that what matters most is the propositional content. It's the sentence and sentences are true or not based upon the proposition that it stands for and the facts in the world. But in fact, much of what we're doing is whenever we very rarely are we making a statement

all by itself. We're usually making a statement and saying, and on the. base of the intonation and the emotional expressions either the way that I phrased it in a text I can put a lot of all of our texts even with words are packed with emotions because we do that and kind of sarcastic or we can use language to do that even but usually with emotional expressions in real life the intonation of voice and prostate and so forth we are also saying here's how confident I am in that statement right if I said this is what we do in science

and science we say elephants are you know African elephants are bigger than Asian elephants would be just a statement, but and the statistical significance is P P less than 0.01. That would be the confidence level. The way that, and that's, that's the only thing you really care about. You don't care about some claim. Someone just says African elephants are bigger than Asian elephants. Well, that's, so what? Like, is it, is it the case that you're not sure that that that's the case? Or is it that you're really sure? Like, I want to know, like, I need to know that confidence claim about. That's what emotional expressions do. Emotional expressions say, I really think guns are good and I'm totally serious and like, you know, I think or I think you're so stupid for believing this is this kind of disdain or showing you're so stupid for not believing that guns are good or that would be a kind of disdain versus one which is self-confidence or showing low confidence in you would be self-disdain confidence or pride to be showing when we do these sorts of things or I can show humility. I think maybe guns are good. Now I'm being humble about it. When we put package, we don't have the ability to put P value.

you know, statistical P values, significance is on our claims. We do this with emotional expressions. I can be really confident or really not confident. That's sort of being pride versus having showing pride versus showing humility. Or I can be very disdainful saying, you don't even know what you're talking about versus, oh, yeah, you might be right. Like, you know, good for you.

That's showing you respect versus disdain. I can be aggressive and say, you know, I try to get more versus conciliatory overall. All of these things are part of our emotional expressions. And they're what, when it, when you're, When you emotionally express pride or aggression or disdain, I push in reputation. So if later I'm found out to be wrong, people say, yeah, Mark not only is wrong, not only they write down a claim and it turned out to be wrong, which is not big of it.

Because if I had been humble, and I said, I was like, maybe African elephants are bigger than Asian elephants. Then if it turns out I'm wrong, because he was basically pushing no chips. But when you're confident and you say that kind of thing, you push in a lot of chips. And I could say, I bet my entire reputation that African elephants are bigger than it. Now I've pushed in like tons and tons of ships. So that it turns out that I'm wrong, I lose a lot of my reputation. These are what's in fact happening all the time. And this is why some people are high in reputation and some people are low.

It's through the interactions of these things and how these little poker games played out. So when I hear, you know, the elephant idea, sitting on this side, I go, just tell me if they're bigger or not, I don't really care about the P value. I'm just thinking very quick, simple. And that is probably not the greatest way to think about it. I just listen to you and I go, when you have a scientific debate, I understand why the P value all of a sudden become of such importance because it makes sense of the argument to you. But to me sitting on this side, and I worry then maybe for society, for a lot of us, we just go, oh man, like, we just want to know which elephant's bigger. We don't really care.

about any of the values. We just want to know that, okay, that's what it is. Now, that right there could expose us to a lot of pain because the way news and misinformation or whatever information, not, I mean, hell, I've been deemed misinformation enough. The way information travels so rapidly on social media, that rate there, you know, like when people break down in the middle of COVID

will break down all the different graphs. We all saw them. The common person, if you don't know how to interpret them or read them, looks at one or two and goes, that kind of makes sense. And then the third one, and then the seventh one, you're like, I don't care anymore. Just tell me right, wrong. Yes, no. And when I see them shut down scientific debate, then, I go, oh, this is for the common person, we need you guys to have scientific debate. We need to have that out in the open so that we can see it happen in front of her eyes. But for you to say, this is why and the P value, the P value means literally nothing to me. Right, but that's just it. That's just the point. P values, we didn't evolve to understand P values. Consciously, we can't think about P values. But our brains somewhat compute

these things. This is why, if you're sitting in front of a person and he's having a discussion with you and he says, it just makes a statement, let's, Those are the bad people and let's go fight them. Right. But the other person comes up and says, and those people are so bad and I'm going to go out and fight them. Come with me. Right.

The whole crowd, he said the same propositional content, but there's this confidence level. He's certain they're the bad ones that did bad thing or whatever, did some heinous crime. And his certainty and he's pushing, he's proving a certainty by sort of being so confident, pushing in reputation. It turns out he's wrong.

He's really going to lose his face. Those are what humans respond to. Humans instinctually convey and absorb statistics statistics in some sense through emotional expressions. That's how it's done. And it's not just just it's also done through pushing reputation chips and and, you know, engaging in poker games. These are all poker games all the time that are going on. In a poker game, I have hidden knowledge, my cards, you have hidden knowledge, your cards. And ideally, in real life, I mean, in poker, you're good to show each other.

But in real life, my hidden cards are my head. I know shit. you don't know and you know stuff i don't know and i can't show you like and we didn't even have a way to talk right we just said and so the way that we do it is the way that they do it in poker is to pretend that i could never show you this and i would like to come to a conclusion as to we're going to decide whose cards are better and do it without fighting about and this happens all the time poker it's called a fold you pushing chips i push in chips and you suddenly push it on i go okay i fold and what that means is okay i agree sean you're you have

better cards than me i mean and then we never show each other our cards maybe and so maybe you didn't maybe you were lying but because you pushed in so much i kind of believed you that you might be right or maybe you're just blustering but of course sometimes we might call to call is to fight so like if we're in a real life arguing two social animals and i say i screw this i'm not going to argue with it let's go ask mom who gets more of the cake you know we're brothers or something like this then mom just says okay mark you were supposed to get more all along and shone you were bad boy whatever something like this so then that would be a call and then the the judge or or a fight physical fight will determine them. That's in sense that, that free expression is really about that.

It's not just sentences being, speech being thrown on each other. It's about speech that comes along wrapped in packages of emotional expressions, which are also bets of reputation. And if you don't understand those bets of reputation, then you can't as people agree or disagree or refuse to they fight about it. And then the world just figures out who was right. Reputation gets shoved over to some people and pool people lose. people gain reputation. And over time, that's why there are people that are really, really high reputation within your network and some that are really low.

Free speech doesn't get at that. I use the word free expression because it's the superset of that, the much bigger pointing to the overall dynamics that are going on. So then these poker games aren't happening. Or at least they're not, like I feel like big tech is like trying, you know, it'd be really cool to see, well, I don't know, two doctors have a debate where they're not literally going to stab each other, but they're exploring ideas. And for the last two years, it feels like that has been, whether that's both sides don't want to talk to each other because they want to be right,

or whether that society and big tech and things like that are trying to push one person's value up and one person's value down. And they see that as we don't talk to each other. Because like, you're a guy on Twitter who's experienced, I don't know, extreme censorship. Myself, I was pulled from YouTube for the Ottawa convoy. We're just talking to one of the truck drivers talking. And I was like, that is wild to me. That is an artificial way of determining a poker game, essentially. Like, nope, that guy wins.

Well, why? I got two aces. Yeah, we don't care. He's going to win. And you're like, to me, your analogy of the poker game, I think, that's what a lot of us want. We want to see those debates happen in public spheres so we can watch. We can see I totally get your, to me, reading a substack article, let's say, is one thing.

Seeing you talk about it, especially with somebody else who can poke and prod is completely different. And that's me. And that's something that's been pulled out of society for maybe it's been longer than two years, Mark. I don't know. Well, certainly, you know what started before two years ago. What's his name, that famous guy who got kicked off of Twitter, and there was a big group on 2017 or whatever. Forgetting his name right now.

Janus, Janopolis or something like this that he was in. You wouldn't recognize him. Milo. Anyway, yeah, it's certainly been around. But it, the, what? What people fail to understand, the traditional left-right argument has often, one way to summarize the traditional left-right argument is that folks on the left who are more socialist don't appreciate the extent to which to get an economy properly working and to be healthy requires what an economy is is inherently a decentralized network. Prices are inherently decentralized. They're out there. You can't determine prices from a centralized level. location. It has to be in each spot within the network. There's different prices that will

self find their own things. It's inherently, it is a decentralized thing that evolves in the way that all decentralized things have to be. And you try to centralize it, then you're completely undo the very nature of why it works at all. Now, the same thing, and I'm not sure if this is not, well, we are sure that it's the case. As it turns out over the last 15 years, the left has become disproportionately, and it's increasing over time. And younger folks even more are against free expression and believe that free expression is fascism. That is, there's, you know, Justin Trudeau is like, there's these new signs of authoritarianism spreading in the world. Oh, like what, Justin? Oh, that social media in different countries are being

allowed to allowing people to say what they wish. And he'll say allowing misinformation, which is what, you know, which just means anti-mainstream narrative opinion. So this, it's exact, in fact, it's very formally analogous when you work out how free expression networks work and how economic networks work. There's a very nice formal analogy between these, which I won't try to get into. It's a little bit abstract. But once you abstract, what you say? No, it's the same thing.

But just at the intuitive level, the free market of ideas is something we often say. And it's really more than just a crappy analogy. The way that even within science things work is never by consensus. It's not by some kind of central organization, much less the government deciding what's right. It's inherently the messy process of the. these decentralized networks with some scientists rising, sometimes lowering in reputation over time by virtue of the true stuff they say

or the stuff that turns out to be false. The same thing happens in society at large and it's done through not those rarefied using p-values and so forth. This is just done by normal speech and it's inherently distributed and it's inherently requires the expressive speech. So I've been, this is what I was told,

I was asked to publish a piece in a particular magazine which I would name it and I wrote it. It was about free expression and it was during the early 2021. And the editor says, no, you just, can you please tone it down? And so this is one of these things. Yeah, if I tone it down, you can imagine all the propositions would have been the same, all the sentences. But so you could say, well, maybe your speech hasn't been violated. It's like, no, you tone it down, you're violating my free expression.

Because the expressive totality of what my essay was, was those expressions, the emotional expressions that was packaged around it. That's what the entire, that's what expressiveness is. It's all of it, right? And so if I have to pull those expressions, then it's, it's me basically pushing in no chips, showing no confidence about what I'm saying. In which case, the average person is going to absorb and say, yeah, Mark's not particularly enthusiastically confident about this because he's so, you know, he's talking like a computer program or something like that.

So I think I got way laid in terms of, yeah. So back to the analogy between the economy and the free market of ideas. The point is a lot of people who have trouble understanding the design and function of emergent networks, you know, and decentralization are going to misunderstand it both for the economy as they are for free markets and not understand how these things work. So I think that's a lot of what I'm trying to communicate in the communication side, but also on the free market on the free expression side, trying to just work out, be one of the new generation of economists, mathematically minded economists. in the free expression rule, sort of working out the kinds of all of the laws of how these things work and how we can understand a free market of ideas better. If I go back to what you said about Iran earlier, that what happened 40 years ago is still a part of their culture today.

I think that's roughly the words you used. What's happening now, do you have the sense that for the next 40 years, here. We're going to have chunks of it a part of our culture. Or do you think is that, you know, I always search for a little bit of hope, a little bit of optimism. Like this coming fall, lockdowns aren't coming. Mass are gone forever. I don't know. Like, there's just so many things that have happened in the last couple of years that really suck that, you know, like free expression, debate, allowing people to go at each other, but in a healthy dynamic. so that you don't have two sides so polarized that they hate each other that we're all trying maybe to do the best for our collective society is going to move us forward.

Do you have any hope like that, Mark? Are you like, no, that you're you're stuck under a rock and you're not paying attention? Well, let me react just to the two sides that just hate each other. I used to, you know, one of the, I wasn't very political. I still consider myself political in the left-right sense before COVID. but it wasn't very political. But I did occasionally. I was, I was, I'm a hockey guy.

All I want to do is cheer for the Oilers in the Battle of Alberta. I think we all share that same sentiment. Like I didn't, I didn't come in this to be political. I just, I look at what's happening in society here in Canada specifically. And I'm like, listen,

we don't start talking about some things. We are going to be down this rabbit hole and there ain't any coming back from it. My kids inherit that. And I go, we got, we got to start talking. So I completely get what you're talking about there. Yeah.

So one of the things that I would occasionally complain about to the extent that this was politics, it was still apolitical or nonpartisan, was just like complaining about the two different echo chambers and then within each one, the others, the out group and unclean and so. But I wish for those days, because at least those days, both sides were symmetric in the sense that there was at least free expression within each. Each was behaving badly towards the other, but they kind of provided a counterbalance to the other. And over time, that could be a kind of an equilibrium. What you don't want is when one side gets the grips of government and the grips of big tech and then can say, oh, that the other side is misinformation. You need to, you need to slowly, you know, make this one wilt on the vine. Then you've got, you don't longer have that balance. So that, the least of my problems right now is the old bad, double, you know, world. Because that's actually, I think, much healthier than where we are now. And in terms of the future, I, on the negative side, both for free expression and for mask, the younger generations are double or triple more enthusiastic about censorship and more enthusiastic about masks and mandatory masks. And these are polls that show these things.

So that's worrying for me. Yes, they get more power. Before we move on from that, when you talk about the younger generations are more for it, curious, from a guy who comes from a rural background, is there a divide two then between rural, like do you see trends between the rural population and the people? the urban? Like, is there a divide there as well? Or is it just young people in general? Oh, well, I'm sure that there's a divide also for a rural, which is also going to correlate a lot with red, you know, red and blue. And so you're going to see that correlation. But so these are,

you know, I'm sure that's a correlation. But in terms of the future, there's a big correlation about the young relative to the old. And so the worry is that those folks aren't in charge now, But as they get more in charge and they begin, and presumably the generation, as they become a larger and larger percentage of who's alive, then masks become more likely. This idea that we're so irresponsible to allow free speech and allow misinformation is only going to get stronger, that kind of weird intuition. Already, the United States, even before COVID, was one of the few places in the world that even had some notion of respect for free speech and free expression. Much of the world just blinks at you. I don't even know what you're talking about. This is not a thing.

The government should be allowed to stop speech that's wrong. At least in the United States, I feel like 50% of the population has at least some familiarity with respect for it. So that's the pessimistic side. On the optimistic side, at least for the United States, I think federalism has saved us. And federalism, you know, I think I would have always argued that federalism is important just because it the danger was the federal government and you want the federal government's you know clip its wings and by having federalism each state being able to do its own things you have just that's just one way to prevent one centralized government controlling all the states but I think really the way I view a lot of my balance of power issues the advantages of balances of power and federalism and all the kinds of things that people often would talk about as checks and balances and ways of keeping the centralized federal government and check I now see more as ways of slowing down or stopping or or helping us against collective hysterias than so much about the federal government. Most of these horrible things that we can look back

historically were really due to collective hysterias and not due to one dictator that was evil that managed the only case that where you find like a single dictator without like a collective hysteria amongst the people on you know riding on his backs you just have a dictator that just takes over power and has like some guys with guns and some you know reaching is in some tin pot dictators in africa for certain kinds of places like that where there's a coup every three months but it's coming it's not coming in on the back with demonstrations in the streets is there's no you know there's no there's no hysteria there's no like it's just a new person they kill the current gun they come in and everybody looks like they go oh okay they don't give a shit right those are not

as dangerous those those folks because when you're out on the streets it's not like suddenly all the neighbors around you are going to be like, oh, my, you're not a defender of, you know, the new guy and like, and they're pointing and they're reporting you, no one gives a crap. The dangerous cases are when the whole populace is whipped up into something, and then there's this new notion of a morally righteous behavior, morally righteous signals that you have to wear. And if you're not wearing these certain kinds of things, you're in the outgroup, you're unclean, go get those people.

And those things, those dictators then have a lot of power, not because just because they're, their people have guns but because the populace is also enforcing what they want to do and so i think that federalism for me and bounce of powers are often about about always worrying about what the populace will do and so i i'm that's what often i think back to the optimism i think federalism has at least allowed these different experiments to go on cultural experiments in different kinds of states in some states it was sufficient 60 percent were really super carin like in in California and New York. And their dynamics is quite different.

They're a year or two behind, or maybe three or four years behind, places like Ohio, despite our government in Texas and Florida. But so you have these experiments. And each one being on different sides of some threshold, then if it went over, suddenly it might exaggerate. If it's a little bit low, it might exaggerate that differences.

So that hope, I feel like here in Ohio, we're winning, we, the anti-maskers are winning. And it tends to, as soon as it looks like we're winning, then all the masks fall off. You know, and so there's a kind of, there's this kind of thing. So the hope would be that if enough states slowly start winning, it could push the other states to change because they're just massive emigration out of New York and California towards places like Texas and Florida. And that's going to change their behavior eventually. What's your thoughts on Canada? You know, I sit here in Canada.

We sit in our own little bubble. but we are your biggest neighbor, you know, and we've got a longstanding history between the two countries. I married a girl from Minnesota, Minneapolis. What's the viewpoint from down there while you look at what we're doing up here? I mean, there's some days where I can't believe some of the silliness that our government's still trying to hold on to at this point, but it's still there. And I'm curious, from your viewpoint, what do you see? I mean, it's a nightmare from my point of view. And both it's a nightmare and whenever I hear from folks,

it sounds like a majority of the Canadians are for the nightmare. They're on, you know, apparently the majority of Canadians were against the truckers, thought they were fascists, racist, blah, you know, whatever, throwing your words here. And they seem to have, it seems to be that the majority, or a high majority of Canadians, are totally for this. And so it's really... When you say that, I'm curious. That's right. I mean, you've got your pulse. Well, actually, but that's why I'm curious.

When you say that it seems like majority of Canadians, where would you say you got that information from? Is that from your news outlets? Is that from people you follow in Canada? It's some of the places where people that I follow in Canada, so I'd be... I've got some friends, colleagues that are there, they're constantly communicating with me,

and they had showed me polls showing that, yeah, the polls are such and such on the other side that they're against it. And so, and at the time, there was, when the trucker thing was going on, it was having a lot of positive press, at least from our, from our point of view, the anti-lockdown's point of view,

but this person would just something says, yeah, but look at here's the polls that we're getting from CBC and whether we could trust them, I don't know, but showing that that most of the Canadian population was against that and thought that they were highly responsible. I would say right off the hop, the CBC in Canada is losing traction every single day. So I don't know what to equate that to in the United States because you guys have an interesting dynamic there in itself with CNN and Fox and all the different sides. And from a viewer, it's pretty clearly defined.

here in Canada we have the CBC and the longer things go on the more they show that they're aligned with the government no matter what the government does right nor wrong and it might be changing a little bit there might be more and more public pressure on it but from my eyes and what I saw in Canada is I thought majority

and I don't mean majority as in like 99% I just mean majority of people supported what was going on with the truckers That's what my eyes told me. But I mean, at this point, everybody knows my bias and everything else. I don't want to see masks on kids. And I certainly don't want to have lockdowns anymore. I continue to see the harms that that created amongst the community, society as a whole, families, friends, like everything.

And to me, none of that gets talked about. It all gets swept under the rug. But I would argue that from what I saw in Canada was... majority of the population supported what they were standing for and the fact they did it peacefully lent even more to that yeah well yeah i i would hope that was true but it were still i mean to toronto or quebec which one was like on her 440 days or of lockdown they finally out of that at the moment yeah i i think now everybody is out of it although different province you know know, I'm in the West. And in the West, we're not Texas by any stretch of the imagination,

but we're as close to Texas as you're going to be in Canada. So you get further out east and you get into Ontario. They're talking about some weird things. Quebec had the curfews and crazy stuff like that, right? Like where it got a little wild there. And you're right. A lot of the population just, I think what surprised a lot of Canadians and probably a lot of people in the world was more the fact how complicit everybody was, was just like, you know what, if that's what they say is right, then let's just roll along with it. And I'm not sure everybody agreed with it. Actually, I would argue a lot of people didn't agree with it. They just weren't willing to speak out about it because if you spoke out about it, you'd know this. Like, if you rewind the

clock mark and go back to when you first started posting thoughts that were counter against everything that was going on, I assume those were some pretty wild days. case. Yeah, yeah, I was I was labeled a denier, science journalists, which have covered all my books in the past. One of them had, you know, written, oh, I'd like to have an app so that if I'm ever at a library or a bookstore, it will make sure that I don't find Mark's books, you know, and she tweeted us out to all of her science journalist. So that's kind of like I'd like to have a blacklist that blacklists anybody who's arguing against the mainstream narrative. So yeah, it's, um, uh, so is there. has I guess in terms of federalism, has there been much variability within Canada for the individual governors, the province, what do you call? Yeah, premieres. Yeah. To make their own policies substantively different than other ones or is I, I don't get the

feeling that it's nearly as federalistic. Well, this is where I do my listeners a bit of a disservice because, like I said, to start two years ago, I was talking to. hockey greats and talking about their careers and lessons learned and and you know trying to you know have it was a different type of fun because this is fun too sitting and listening to you is is working my brain over and I'm assuming that's what it's doing to listeners and I certainly enjoy it but two years ago I wasn't paying attention to politics other than seeing Trudeau get elected again and be very frustrated now I find myself paying very close attention to him

And so when it comes to Canada versus states, I feel like, from what I've seen, and you know, I'll have a listener text me or leave me a message and correct me on this. In Canada, it feels like there isn't as much autonomy from the individual province to the federal like Canada. Canada is dictating a lot. Now, is there some separation? Absolutely. But watching the states have felt like and feels like each individual state can tell the government to go fly a kite. And they're within their rights to do that.

And so you see the different states have very different. You know, California is an extreme. New York is an extreme. And then you have the Texas and the Florida and others that are their own extremes. And that seems to be okay in the United States. Actually, it's almost praised. In Canada, we all have this idea that we're supposed to just all speak the same language. And that is a while we just saw it.

Like you talked about the danger wasn't the pandemic of COVID. It was more the social contagion of watching people collectively go a little bonkers. And that enforced government rules, mandates, laws were no longer, didn't matter. You know, like we got the charter rights and freedoms. We talk about all the time. And they all just went out the door. Like just nobody cares. It's all for the betterment of the group.

None of the other stuff matters. and that was wild to live through. Right. Yeah. And that's, I mean, the stereotype we have of Canadians is that they're, and I'm sure there's one percent of truth to this compared to, is rather than the rugged individualism of the stereotype of America, which is, of course, still barely true. But there's more of just like, you know, we all like to work together and we want to get

along and there's more of that kind of attitude. But I think that's one of the most dangerous attitudes you can have. It sounds like, yeah, we want to be really nice. But all that happens, the people that are most likely to say, oh, there's that more really terrible thing going on, I'd like to join your group and participate. That's the one of the most dangerous kinds of behaviors and personality types that you can have because it's those exact groups that are trying to stop some morally heinous things that do the most morally heinous things that humans have ever done. So you need to have the, you know, it's the cultural

revolution in China. They were trying to stop horrible capitalism and the horrible upper middle of that. All of these groups always have really good arguments from their own narratives point of view about why doing good. And you need to have the opposite viewpoint. One should always have a disdain and a distrust for what some growing group is saying is the new righteous thing and who the outgroup dangerous people are. I think that's that's that's that's why rugged individualism as a if those are our two choices is much much preferable. Yeah, that's uh Canada we're no you know I I love traveling as a Canadian around the world prior to this, right? Like you put a Canadian flag on your shoulder, on your backpack, or wherever else, and you get praised everywhere you go. I mean,

in saying that, I always like to point out in World War II, World War I, Canadian military were celebrated for different parts they played in different battles. Like, as nice as we are, I mean, our national pastime is hockey. I don't know if you get it. There's very few sports that are as violent as hockey. I mean that in a very positive way. So we have a bone in us that is very similar to Americans. We just go about it in a different way.

Americans are very vocal about it. I got lots of American friends. And now I say this a lot is like, I wish we could have channeled a little more American, but that wasn't, that isn't what Canadians were. And now we've, you know, maybe we're changing our, our stripes a little bit because of how the last two years played out. Right. So can the unvaccinated, what are the travel restrictions now still for them?

Can't leave the country, can't fly, can't train, can't bus, anything federal, not a choice. Can you, can you, can you, sorry? Can you go to a restaurant? Yep. So after the truckers went to Ottawa, all the men. mandates out west almost fell immediately. So the QR code gone. Um, masking pretty much went within a couple weeks. Um, all those little restrictions out the door. Um, some businesses are still, you know, like, uh, they have their own policies

where workers still have to, uh, wear masks. But for the most part, all that out of the way. But, you know, I got friends and family who, um, had loved ones, you know, let's say play a sport out east, you know, Canada isn't Finland where it takes four hours to drive across it. It's like 40 hours to drive across it. You're not allowed to get on a plane right now if you're unvaccinated. And they're still holding on to that. We're not allowed to come down to the United States of America. And I mean, that is an American mandate, not a Canadian, but you can imagine Trudeau and Biden are, you know, have their own ideas of what's going on. But yeah, you can't, You can't hop on a plane and fly across Canada right now, which is, I don't know.

I don't even have the word anymore. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Let's end here. This is the final question I always ask. And I should, I've got to learn to preface this. I should send it in the email.

I'm going to try and be better of that. It's the final five brought to by Crudemaster Transport. Shout out to Heath and Tracy McDonald. They've been supporters of the podcast since the very beginning. it's a time frame, but it's one question right now. In his words, if you're going to stand behind a cause that you think is right, then stand behind it, absolutely. What's a cause that Mark stands behind?

Let people say what they want. It's as simple as that. And I could say a lot of words about free expression and the complicated networks and all the kinds of things I talk about in my series and my substack, But it really comes down to just, you know, let people say what they want. And other than certain kinds of words that are like yelling fire in a theater, you know, very small number of things, aggressive kind of threats, things like this, other than a few cases on the outside, there's just no reason for why there should be censorship in the public square.

I think any public accommodation, any public square, any of these big tech companies in anywhere, should be, even as a libertarian, I think there's strong libertarian arguments for why public accommodations shouldn't be allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, age, race, ethnicity, and political orientation and political speech. And because they're a public accommodation, you shouldn't have to check when you're on your way someplace. Oh, is this the place except people who believe this kind of thing? speech is important both at the small scales with folks that are local to you in restaurants and they're important at the larger scales as well they're important at all of these different kinds of hierarchical levels and and people need to have tolerance without that the free market of ideas does not function and does not lead toward the truth one follow up on that if you know Elon Musk buying Twitter gave a lot of people hope

right, like that he was going to open it back up and it was going to become a thing of five, 10 years ago, whatever the number is. Moving into the future, what's something that would give you a lot of hope if you saw it happen come to fruition? Is there anything that you can pick out that you're like, man, if that happened, I'd be like, maybe we're going to be on the right track. Maybe we're moving the Titanic, so to speak, a little away from the icebergs and onto a different course. Well, I mean, having a political viewpoint and medical status being a protected class, just like those other ones would be great. So that no one has the right to ask you, your political viewpoint or censor you on the basis.

No one has the right to censor you on the basis of your vaccination status or any other kind of medical treatment that you have or have not had. and no one has the right to force you to wear a covering over a human face should all be things that I believe are put into law as as things that public accommodations cannot do. I think that that would be a very small legal set of steps that would enrich the freedoms of everybody and the ability for those freedoms to allow the kind of conversations and behaviors that lead to a healthier society. Well, I appreciate you coming on, Mark. This has been a lot of fun. Where can people pre-order your book and find you on social media? Yeah. So my book, expressly human, it can be found at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, just expressly human. And you can find me at YouTube. So last name is Chang, but then I-ZI, Chang-E-Z. I've got my Science Moment channel at YouTube. Give that a follow. And I've got a substack, mark chang-easy.com. cool well thank you sir for for giving me some of uh your time appreciate it that was great great being here