The Munk Debates Podcast - Gad Saad Dialogue

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

Gad Saad joins us for an in-depth discussion on how lazy thinking and intellectual tribalism is killing common sense and rational debate. QUOTES: GAD SAAD "When you have a collectivist society, you have cohesive norms, and you have rituals of purity that are easier to implement" The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Executive Producer: Rudyard Griffiths Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Reza DahyaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I distinctly remember hearing someone yell, stop that van. From CBC podcasts, an investigation into how young men are being recruited and radicalized on the internet. And she asked me if I was friends with a guy named Alec Menassian. By a new supercharged form of hate. On Facebook, police say he wrote the incal rebellion has already begun. A dark online subculture that's spilling over into the real world. Boys like me, available now on CBC Listen and everywhere you. you get your podcasts.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Thank you for listening to the Monk Debates. This week, we're stepping away from our usual one-on-one debate to bring you another monk dialogue, the third in our series on rationality. Today, a fascinating, in-depth conversation with globally renowned marketing professor and big thinker Gad Sat on how intellectual tribalism is killing common sense and rational debate. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Thank you for joining us for yet a new. another of our spring 2022 monk dialogues. If you've been part of this series today, you know that we're focusing on the topic of rationality. Why do we think the way we think? Can we learn to think better together?

And why it's times is our popular discourse seemingly so incoherent, confusing, chaotic. We're going to get into all these topics and more today with another fascinating speaker in this series. Professor Gadsad is known to many of us as a veteran marketing professor at Concordia University. He's been a pioneer in using evolutionary psychology to understand human behavior, publishing innumerable scientific and scholarly papers. He's been the associate editor of evolutionary psychology,

and he's the author of some big books that have reached international audiences around the world as bestsellers. The Consuming Instinct in 2011 and his most recent book, Just in 2020, The Parasitic Mind. Professor Gadsad, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Thank you so much for having me. It's so glad to be here. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. We started with your friend Stephen Pinker for a kind of overview of rationality. How do we think, why do we think the way we do?

Lisa Feldman Barrett, who I'm sure you know also, was on a couple weeks ago with a kind of neurologist. lab technician's view of the intellect. I want to turn to you as someone who is a self-described evolutionary psychologist. And maybe you could help our audience just understand what does an evolutionary psychologist do what traditions of learning and insight do you draw on to understand human behavior and then start talking about your views on rationality? Sure. So evolutionary psychology is simply the application.

of evolution to the study of the most important organ that defines our personhood, our brain. So in the same way that I could use evolution to explain why I have opposable thumbs or why my liver operates the way that it does, an evolutionary psychologist argues that to fully understand the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral systems that define who we are as human beings, we need to understand why those systems have evolved to be the way they are. So, for example, if I want to understand why men and women might experience romantic jealousy, why they might experience that aversive response, I might ask, what would be the adaptive

function that such an emotional response would have, you know, how is it adaptive? So all that evolutionary psychology is staking principles from evolutionary biology and applying it to the study of the human mind. You wrote, evolutionary psychologists like myself recognize that human universals exist precisely because they constitute elements of a shared biological heritage. Now, that's a really interesting idea because often we think of universals as these, I don't know, things that exist in culture, they exist in our minds. You're saying no, that we can understand these as having a biological origin.

Maybe you could unpack that for us. Give us some examples. Sure. So evolutionary psychologists actually study both human universals, things that make us all exactly the same, but they also study cross-cultural differences that are themselves due to evolutionary principles. So an example of a human universal might be, do men or women, on average, provide greater parental investment to their children? And not surprisingly, what you'll find in every culture that's ever been studied, while both men and women are invested in their children, we are a bi-parental species, women are going to invest more in their children. One reason being that there is such a thing as paternity uncertainty, but there isn't a thing such as maternity uncertainty. So that would be a human universal. I could go to the Anamomo tribe in the Amazon.

I could go to the Nagev desert with Bedwins. I can go to Nigeria, and I will come up with the exact same phenomena. But here's the interesting part. Cross-cultural differences are oftentimes also due to biological mechanisms. So, for example, if I look at the distribution of use of spices in culinary traditions, why is Mexican food spicy, but Swedish food is not? Now, if I were a cultural anthropologist, I would stop my explanation at simply documenting that difference.

Mexican food is spicy, whereas Swedish food is not. an evolutionist, in this case a behavioral ecologist, would study why are these differences the way that they are cross-culturally. And it turns out that spice use is a cultural adaptation to a very important biological problem, namely in warmer climates, you have a greater density of food pathogens and a quicker proliferation of food pathogens. Therefore, spice use is a means by which you can address what's called the antimicrobial hypothesis. So not only do evolutionary psychologists study the things that unite us under a common biological heritage, they also explain the things that make us different from one another. Fascinating. So my bland IKEA Swedish meatballs tastes that way because colder climate, they don't have to worry about those nasty parasites working their way into their jalapeno poppers,

as maybe they do in Mexico. That's a fascinating idea. Maybe could you extrapolate that to something, let's say outside of food? I mean, does this affect the world of ideas or how different cultures choose to kind of think or the cognitive structures that we apply to the thinking rational reasoning process? Yeah, fantastic question. There's a good friend of mine who is an evolutionist at University of New Mexico. His name is Randy Thornhill. And he developed a framework, a theoretical framework called parasite stress theory, where he precisely addressed things that you're talking about, how cultural differences might arise to different exposure or density of parasites in those ecosystems. So take, for example, the cultural value of collectivism versus individualism, right?

Some cultures, say the Far East or say the Middle East, where I come from, are typically collectivist, right? You as an individual are less important than the group. I'm first a member of a group or a tribe, then I'm an individual. Whereas in the West, Canada, US, Britain, typically we are individualist society. I'm first Gadsad and then I'm a member of a group. Well, you know, many decades of cultural anthropologists and cultural psychologists have studied those cultural values without ever asking the question, why do these cultural differences exist in the way that they do? In this case, this cultural value. And it turns out, as Randy Thornhill and one of his former graduate students found out,

Cultures that are more collectivists are typically those where there is a greater proliferation of parasites. Now, you might say, well, why would that be? You want to venture a guess why that might be, or I don't want to put you on the spot? Yeah, no, that's an interesting idea. I mean, is it that people are falling ill more often? I don't know. They're dealing with dysentery. They have to have relatives and nieces and aunts and uncles and sons and daughters to take care of you

as you try to fight off these waves of parasitic infection. Well, you're on the right track. And it's actually, the explanation is so hauntingly, prophetically relevant to the global pandemic that we face the last few years. So it turns out that when you have a collectivist society, you have norms of, you know, cohesive norms, right? You have rituals of purity that are easier to implement. There's a clearer demarcation between us and them, right? The co-oitional psychology is even more pronounced when you're talking about collectivist societies. There's us, the Chinese, and there's them, the non-Chinese.

And so because of these greater density of pathogens in those environments, it makes sense that the cultural trait of collectivism would arise because it allows people to conform to certain norms that are needed for survival more easily. Fascinating. Let's go to another quote from your book, again, on this same topic of evolutionary psychology. It seems counterintuitive to many people, so I want you to explain it to us. Emotions such as happiness, fear, lust, disgust, or envy serve as solutions to reoccurring evolutionary challenges that our ancestors have faced. So this is interesting, Professor Saad, because it picks up, you know, it's something we're talking with Lisa Feldman Barrett a couple of weeks ago about how, you know, we at times, especially in Western cultures, think of the mind as this kind of seat of reason of clarity. of purpose, subjugating and suppressing the emotions, which are against our interests, which exist outside of reasons. So you're making an interesting case here, maybe that emotions like fear, lust, anger, greed, these in some ways are more natural, maybe more human than we've led ourselves

to assume to believe. So maybe I could address it in two tracks. So first, let me address the false dichotomy of thinking versus faith. feeling or rise in versus emotions. It's a false dichotomy because we are both. So we are both a thinking animal and a feeling animal. The problem arises when we activate the wrong system at the wrong time. So for example, when I am taking a shortcut to get home and I'm going through a dark alley and I see four young men loitering suspiciously, my heart rate goes up, my blood pressure goes up, I start breathing an F more rapid manner. That was triggered by my emotional system related

to fear. Now, in that context, it makes perfect adaptive sense that that system would be activated. On the other hand, if I'm trying to do well on a calculus exam, triggering my emotional system is not going to ensure that I do better on my calculus exam. Now, I apply that issue when it comes to, for example, the way that people form an opinion of whom they're going to choose as their political candidates. Should I pick Hillary Clinton or should I pick Donald Trump? And it turns out in this case that people wrongly activate their emotional system when they should be engaging their cognitive system. So if I ask someone, why do you not like Donald Trump? He's disgusting. He's grotesque. I revile him, right?

Emotional, emotional, emotional. Why do you love Barack Obama so much? Because he's tall, because he has a malefluous voice, because he has a radiant smile, because he speaks with the cadence of a Southern Baptist preacher. So at no point did you explain to me that it's because of this monetary policy or this fiscal policy or this immigration policy.

In both cases, and if you forgive me, I'm going to use a prop here. Yeah. This is a memory stick, but for a second, assume that It is the cork of a wine bottle. There is an expression in Arabic. Arabic is my mother tongue that says getting drunk simply by smelling the cork of the wine bottle. Now, what does that mean? That means I am so weak of constitution that I don't need to actually drink the wine to get drunk.

I just have to take a whiff and I'm already drunk. So I just have to look at Barack Obama and he's my glorious leader. He's gorgeous. Justin Trudeau is just so goddamn handsome. I'm intoxicating. He's intoxicated. He's young. He's got beautiful hair. I don't know a single thing about his ideological positions or how he's going to govern, but my God, does he look presidential? On the other hand, Donald Trump is disgusting and an ogre. So the issue is not that we are a reasoning animal or a thinking animal is that we activate the wrong system at the wrong time. And what you're saying in a sense is there are good evolutionary reasons, those guys loitering in the alleyway, why you potentially are going to respond to feelings of greed.

fear, lust, envy, that these don't exist simply as inconveniences or irrational things in your life. They could be very much in your self-interest, in your evolutionary prerogative to survive and reproduce. Exactly right. So I'll give you two quick examples if I make. One is from the research of a good friend of mine, David Buss, who actually wrote the forward to the consuming instinct, which you kindly mentioned at the moment. intro. So David Buss and his colleagues did a study a few years ago where they looked at

sex differences in two types of infidelity, either sexual infidelity or emotional infidelity. So it's the emotional system that's being triggered. And now we want to see whether men or women are more likely to be triggered by, you know, imagining their partner engaging in this sexual infidelity act or emotional. Emotional infidelity would be no. No sex was involved, but, you know, your husband is getting close to his colleague at work. She understands his dreams. They laugh at the same jokes. They share similar values.

They're building an emotional bond. Well, it turns out that men are much more likely to be emotionally triggered by sexual infidelity, whereas women are more likely to be triggered by emotional infidelity. Now, why is that? In the case of men, their greatest genetic threat is that someone, They're cuckolded, right? They raised the child of someone else. And as I said, since we're a bi-parental species,

I don't want to spend 18 years raising the child of the gorgeous Greek gardener that used to come and do our lawn. And therefore, I've evolved the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral system to really react adversely to cacoldry, to threats of paternity uncertainty. On the other hand, for women, there is no maternity uncertainty. The greatest predictor of your long-term partner, your male long-term partner, leaving your union, as if he develops an emotional tie with another woman.

Therefore, this doesn't mean that men don't care about their wives having an emotional tie with another man, and it doesn't mean that women don't care about their husbands having a sexual liaison with another woman, but they do react more adversely to emotional infidelity, they meaning women. So in this case, I've shown you how we could study the emotion of jealousy via an adaptive evolutionary lens. Now, let me just quickly explain how I took this beautiful insight that Buss had for romantic jealousy, and I applied it for sex differences in envy. So if you ask men and women using a domain general scale, you know, how envious are you, you find out that men and women are equally envious in a general sense.

But if you then use a sex-specific questionnaire where you recognize that the things that make men jealous and envious of other men may be different than those things that make women jealous of other women, voila, all the sex differences come out. In other words, by using what's called the domain-specific calculus, I will find the sex differences precisely because I'm coming via an evolutionary lens. So those are two examples I gave you that demonstrate how evolutionary thinking can help us understand why emotions operate the way they do. Just do our audience in favor of just quickly unpacking it. It's basic stuff here for you, but it's important for us to remind ourselves these two twin evolutionary impulses, the impulse to survive to the age of reproduction and then to successfully reproduce. and why these are, in a sense, the big drivers in your view of a lot of human behavior and human psychology.

Yeah, exactly right. So I always tell my students when I, you know, lecture about evolution, I say life is a two-part game. The first part is to ensure that I don't become someone's dinner and I get dinner. So that's related to survival. And the second part, I mean, I could survive all you want till pigs fly. but if I don't find a mechanism by which I can extend my genes onto the next generation, then I'm a Darwinian Kildesak. I'm a dead end, right?

So therefore, life, the game of life is first survive and then mate. Now, the way that Darwin theorize these two things, so natural selection are all the adaptations that confer a survival advantage to an organism, including humans. So, for example, the fact that we've evolved the gustatory preferences, the taste buds to prefer highly rich caloric foods is because that's an evolutionary adaptation to the fact that we've evolved in an environment

of caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty. Sexual selection, on the other hand, explains the evolution of traits and behaviors that could not have evolved because they confer survival advantage. As a matter of fact, they reduce your survivability. So the classic example, although there are many others, but the one that resonates with people,

is the peacock's tail. The peacock's tail reduces its survivability because it makes him more conspicuous to predators. It makes it more difficult for him to take flight and avoid a predator because it's such a burdensome tail. And yet that tail has evolved. Why has it evolved? Because it serves as an honest signal to pee hands

despite the fact that I'm carrying this burdensome tail, I am standing here before you. That's an honest signal of my phenotypic quality. Shouldn't you be baiting with me? Those other fake pretenders can't carry that burdensome tail. That's why you shouldn't trust them. So let's put it in a human context. If all it took in a right of passage,

you know, when men go from being boys to say the warrior class in many tribes, if all it took is for me to do five push-ups and then I get access to all the beautiful women in my tribe, well then that's not going to assort the fakers from the real warriors because everybody can match the signal of doing five push-ups. But if you have to tie my ankles to vine ropes when I stand up on an 80-foot platform and then dive head first down and then the vine rope has to stop me a few inches from my head splattering all over the floor. Now, that's an honest signal of my bravery and courage you. We're quickly going to assort the protect.

from the real tough guys. So in order for a signal to be honest, it must be handicapping. And of course, I take these principles and I apply them in the consumer setting. So for example, I argue that a lot of art consumption is nothing but a form of costly signaling, right? When you're in the billionaire class, you don't need to drive a Maserati because everybody within your social network can meet that signal. Everybody can afford the Maserati. The Maserati is a signal for the Nouveau Rich, not for the upper uppers. On the other hand, if I can buy as a billionaire a painting that could have otherwise been

painted by a newborn pigeon and pay $100 million for it, boy, that's an honest signal of my wealth. Why? Because I'm wasted that $100 million. I'm burning it in a big campfire. That must show that I'm really wealthy. Yeah. This is just fascinating stuff.

and I think it intuitively registers in terms of our own behavior and the behavior that we see around us. So this is great. We're unpacking some of the key tenets of your thought. And I want to go to another quote from your recent book, The Parasitic Mind. It says one reason our intelligence evolved as it has is so that we can successfully manipulate others. In service of such manipulative intent, we've evolved a parallel proclivity to self-execliving, deceive, which protects us from betraying our duplicity. The first step in being a good liar is believing the lie. So fascinating. Again, running counter to, I think, a lot of our

assumptions maybe about, I don't know, the inherent goodness maybe of our characters or our intent when we engage with each other. So I want you to again to expand on this, to give us the foundations of thinking that have supported you making this assertion? So the evolution of self-deception, the gentleman who first did the real pioneering work in this area, is an evolutionary biologist who's still alive, and some have argued that he may be the greatest evolutionary biologist since Darwin, which is saying a lot. His name is Robert Trivers. And it's exactly what I quoted it in the book, right? So you and I, imagine an evolutionary arms race, right, between a virus and a host or a parasite and a host. As the parasite evolves better strategies to, you know, do, let's say,

the immune system of the host, well, then there's this evolutionary arms race between the diatic evolutionary arms race. Well, when you and I are engaging in an interaction, Machiavellian intelligence is the ability for me to be able to manipulate you to suit my advantage, whatever that might be. On the other hand, you've evolved the capacity to try to read these microcues in me that point to the fact that I may be, that I might be duplicitous in the way that I'm trying to manipulate you. So that's the evolutionary arms race. Now, if I'm trying to manipulate you, and assuming I'm not a psychopath, the reason why I say this is because psychopaths by definition don't emit these microcues of internal struggle when they're trying to

manipulate you. So let's keep psychopaths out of the picture, right? So when I'm trying to manipulate you, there's an internal conflict that's happening in me because I know that I'm lying to you, but I don't want you to pick up any cues that suggests that I'm experiencing that internal conflict. Well, what better way to make sure that I don't emit that than by first lying to myself. So it's a two-step manipulation or Machiavellian intelligence is a two-step process. I first self-deceive so that I can better deceive you. And so that is the argument for the evolution of self-deception. When I tell this to people, once I explain it, they go, my God, it's fantastic. But when I first post to them, can you tell me why we've evolved this capacity?

No one can get it. So it demonstrates to you the explanatory. power and the parsimony and elegance that comes from understanding how to apply evolutionary thinking to human behavior. That's the beauty of the framework. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member. Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts. You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world. And you get a specially curated Friday weekly Monk members-only podcast that focuses on the big international events and trends shaping our world. All of that, again,

free at www.munkdebates.com. I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. community. Now, back to our program. Gad, am I right to think that that you believe that we're rational beings, that we have the capacity to reason and make choices based on self-interest, based on some objective analysis of a situation and environment, but we have to be conscious of these evolutionary characteristics,

these drivers that have accumulated around our behavior that have existed possibly now for millennia, how do we know which is which? How do we know, I don't know if I'm running around being programmed by my caveman brain on this survival and reproduction kind of imperative versus when I may be thinking in ways that are freer of these deeper evolutionary drivers to my behavior? and character. So there, again, several ways I can go with this. Let me begin by first offering different definitions of rationality, since ultimately the series is related to rationality. So I actually

come from the tradition in my doctoral training from what's called behavioral decision theory. Now, behavioral decision theory is the field that tries to demonstrate how we are not rational in the way that classical economists define rationality. So a classical economist, says, here are these axioms of rational choice by which everyone should abide. And if you don't, you're being irrational according to them. So let me give your audience a quick example. Here's, this is something called the transitivity axiom. If I prefer car A to car B and I prefer car B to car C, then it must be that I prefer car A to car C. It's a mathematical property. If I don't do that, I'm being intransitive in my preferences and therefore I'm being irrational. So in the

context of economic theory, rationality has a very constrained definition. It's an axiomatic definition of what it means to be rational. Now, evolutionary scientists, behavioral scientists have come along and said, well, that's the wrong definition of rationality. The way we should define rationality is what some have called ecological rationality or deep rationality. In other words, we shouldn't contextualize rationality against the benchmark of what a

classical economist says is rational, we should contextualize rationality in the context of why would we have evolved that particular architecture of the human mind, right? So that's another definition of rationality. Now, in the context of our daily lives, how we navigate through all sorts of political and socioeconomic issues, then there is a different colloquial use of the word rationality, right? If I say to you, you know, your positions are simply irrational. I don't mean it in the normative economic sense. I don't mean it in the evolutionary sense. I mean it in the everyday colloquial sense. And so I think we need to differentiate between these three, but I thought that it might be worthwhile for me to have at least laid the ground of these different definitions of

rationality. Absolutely. We'll get into those more. Okay, Gad, let's pivot now. We've got a good sense of, you know, some of your key tenants and ideas where you're coming from this fascinating field of evolutionary psychology. Let's turn to the world as we are receiving it today. And I want your thoughts, and I want you to kind of put that lens of evolutionary psychology across a lot of the phenomena that I think is confusing us, in some cases driving some of us a bit insane. And let's talk about the pandemic first. How do you think, as an evolutionary psychologist, we can take a kind of insight out of this pandemic, which helps us understand human behavior. And maybe, again, our capacity to reason to be rational or not in the face of this very complex evolving threat

that we've all had to exist with these last two years. Yeah, so there are several evolutionary links that one can draw as related to the COVID crisis. One is how intoxicating fear is, right? You can get a lot of people to do all sorts of things simply by, scaring them. And in many cases, the fear is warranted. In many cases, it isn't. It is unwarranted. So that would be one evolutionary angle that one can explore. A second immediate one that comes to mind is the incredible ability of people to be sheep. I mean, we've evolved to be led by someone. And so I always tell people that it's really an anomaly that in the West we've had the system

that we've had. Human history is littered with endless manifestations of despotic rule. It could be an autocrat, it could be a religious fundamentalist, it could be a sultan, it could be a king, it could be a dictator. But having a democratic system is really an incredible anomalous

outlier. Now, why am I saying all this? Because what's happening, right, with all of these haphazard mandates, is our governments become akin to God. So when God speaks and says, you shall not eat non-cosher food. I'm Jewish, so I'm using that example, but to be in any other religious

tradition. Well, who am I to question? God has said that shellfish is bad. Shut up, Jew and follow the rule. Similarly, when someone comes and says, you shall not get together more than six people, okay, boss, you shall not, as we had recently in Quebec, walk your dog outside after 10 o'clock when it's a curfew, because we all know that the epidemiological reality is that if you're walking alone with your dog who is suffering from diarrhea after 10 o'clock on a deserted street, that's really where COVID hits you hard. That makes perfect scientific sense. And if you don't abide by that, then clearly you're a toothless bigot who deny science.

Now, why do people do that? It's because we simply change from following God to following the all paternity. a paternalistic government, who's our big daddy, who will tell us how to be. I'm astonished how all of my super bien-pinsant, you know, colleagues never questioned anything.

And there's now, again, it's not as though, I mean, I am double-vaxed, I got the booster, I understand the dangers of this virus, but I also have a functioning brain that allows me the capacity to ask questions. Why is it that we can't walk our dog after 10 o'clock?

Eventually, by the way, they rescinded that rule. But at first, someone did actually make that rule. And yet few people went on social media and said, hey, if Hoswal-Dugo, are you insane? What do you mean? I can't walk my dog after 10 o'clock. So I think it really stems from the fact that most human are ultimately sheep, and we just need a strong paternal character to,

or maternal character, to lead us the way. And in this case, it was perfectly instantiated with the haphazard rules of COVID. Yeah. kind of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan comes back in the 21st century. Let me go to another quote of your here, because from your book, Parasitic Mind, because it kind of, again, goes to your thinking about the world today. The greatness of the West stems in part from its protection of fundamental freedoms and its commitment to reason and the scientific method.

So the last part of that, Gad, from your book, really stuck with me. You have a strong and enduring belief that we can approach and together acknowledge truths as rational beings through the kind of disciplines and techniques and processes of rational inquiry. Most, I don't want to mischaracterize your views, but most substantially and coherently expressed in the scientific method. Is that correct? Bingo, beautifully said, look, the scientific method is the great epistemological.

liberator, right? It liberates me of the shackles of my personal identity. There is no Lebanese Jewish way of doing mathematics. There is no Lebanese Jewish way of doing evolutionary psychology. There is mathematics and evolutionary psychology, right? So what I despise about all this diversity, inclusion, equity, and identity politics, it's by definition, anti-scientific. because it basically says that there is a black mind, an indigenous mind, a Lebanese Jewish mind, a Bolivian mind. Now, of course, culture matters, but the substrate, the architecture of the human mind is not determined by my skin, you, or whether I'm indigenous or Lebanese Jew. And certainly the way I adjudicate competing scientific hypotheses does not come from my personal identity. So for example, we're seeing at Canadian universities the indigenization of knowledge.

What does that mean? Now, look, if I want to study flora and fauna in the Great North and indigenous people have lived there for many, many millennia, then it makes perfect sense to go to them because they've got unique content-specific knowledge about the flora and fauna there. So if that's what it means to have indigenous knowledge, then I'm all for it. Sign me up. But indigenous epistemology is not something that is distinct from the scientific method. When we adjudicate issues of science within the flora and fauna of the Great North, we still use the scientific method. There is no preying to the great elders.

There is no putting on my Tphelin as a Jew so that I can better understand the climate change. So that's why I say that a lot of the idea pathogens that have proliferated on university campuses are literally, I mean, they're a form of intellectual terrorism. Let me give you one other quick example, what I call the granddaddy of all idea pathogens, and which is perfectly anti-scientific method. Postmodernism is a movement that has been in vogue in some departments in the humanities and the social sciences for 40, 50 years now. Well, postmodernism purports that there are no universal truths, of course, other than the one universal truth that there are no universal truths. So we can't even agree you and I whether women bear children or not. And as a matter of fact, that's a story that I tell in the book that literally happened to me. In 2002, my doctoral student had just defended his doctoral dissertation, and he said, hey, why don't we go out for dinner for celebratory dinner?

And so it was myself, my student, my wife, and he brought a date along. So he called me before going out to dinner to warn me that his date was a graduate student in cultural anthropology, women's studies, and postmodernism, the holy trinity of BS, if I can put it that way, on your august platform. So I understood that what he meant by that is, you know, let's just have a good night and not get into all kinds of trouble. I said, oh, no problem. I'm going to be on my best behavior.

I promise, which of course was a complete lie, because halfway through the evening, I turned to her politely and said, oh, I hear you're a postmodernist. There are no universals, correct? She said, no, everything is bound by subjectivity and biases and so on. Everything is relative. I said, okay, well, is it not true that within Homo sapiens, only women bear children? Now, this is in 2002, so it's way before the transgender stories. She looked at me, scoffed at my imbecility, and said, no, it's not true. I said, it's not true that only. women bear children. Could you explain how that's the case? She said, well, there is a Japanese tribe of some Japanese island where within the folkloric and mythological realm, it is the men who bear

children. So by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm, you know, that's how you keep us barefoot and pregnant. So I didn't have a place in the, there was no Venn diagram where her and I could meet so that we can have a common sense-making experience. We couldn't agree that only women bear children. She couldn't conceive that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west because she argued, what do you mean by east and west? What do you mean the sun? That which you call the sun, I may call dancing hyena, her literal words. And I said, well, the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west. So now she wasn't an escapee from a mental institution. She was a graduate student in postmodernism. She was aping exactly what she learned. Well, that's a

Darwinian Kul-Dazak. Can you build bridges by postmodernism? Can you build mathematical models of the economy using post-modernism? No. So it's a form of intellectual terrorism. Not only does it make parents who spent all their time saving money to send their kids to tuition, they waste that money studying post-modernist glaciology, but it also is an attack on reason. Because where can that take you to be so neelistic in your thinking. So yes, the only game in town is the scientific method. The rest are details. And what you're arguing, get, is that, you know, the scientific method is generally alive and well in, you know, physics departments, math departments, chemistry, and elsewhere. But your particular field of social studies, your sense is that

this kind of constellation or group of knowledge creators and universities today is really in some crisis here. So there's an epistemological crisis going on. And you think it has downfield kind of effects, that this isn't just about the university. It's not just about, you know, graduate programs of postmodernism and deconstructionism. It's affecting the broader culture. So I'm I wonder if you connect the university to the broader culture and why you think these ideas are having such a profound effect beyond college campuses right now. Right. Thank you. Great question.

First, I would say that the intuition is for people to think that the natural sciences are less likely to be parasitized by these idea pathogens. And to some extent, that's true. It's taken longer for the parasites to make their way into the hallways of biology and chemistry. and physics. Because biology, physics, and chemistry have certain core knowledge that people have agreed upon. There are no chemists who are for the periodic table and chemists who are against the periodic table. But even the natural sciences have now been parasitized by a lot of these idea pathogens that I discussed in the parasitic pine. Now, your other question is, do these idea pathogens eventually break free from the lab, right? So in the same way that an actual

virus that's in a supposedly secure lab can break free, resulting in a global pandemic, or so we think. By the same token, idea pathogens that start off in an esoteric department in the humanities eventually break free because that student who studied all this nonsense, you know, in postmodernism and, you know, feminist architecture eventually becomes, you're ready? They become the prime minister of Canada. they become a walking manifestation of every single idea pathogen that I cover in my book. So the bad ideas are not restricted to academia.

They start off in academia. They're spawned in academia. To paraphrase Orwell, you know, it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas, right? And I fully support that because it's academics who've come up with the idea pathogens that I discuss in the book. Okay. but they don't stay in the feminist interpretive dance department. They eventually infiltrate into Hollywood, into journalism, into our human resources department, into our politics,

in every nook and cranny of society. So many people, when I first was, you know, standing on top of the mountains screaming as a lone wolf about what was happening in academia, people said, oh, come on, you're being hyperbolic, Professor Sad. This is never going to affect the greater culture. Look where we are today. They don't stay in the lab. They escape.

So, yes, it's a problem. Now, I mean, you'd be familiar as an evolutionary psychologist with this. I presume the idea that these ideas, you're calling them pathogens, I mean, they're competing with other ideas. So for some reason, Gad, these ideas are really successful. They grip people. They have traction. Why? I mean, if they're so counter in a sense to, in your view, our success as a species,

you know, we're not figuring out a postmodern theory of vaccinology. That's probably not going to work against the new next variant. Why are they nonetheless so successful in propagating and promulgating themselves? What a fantastic question. Thank you so much. I'm greatly enjoying our chat. Likewise. for that. In one of the chapters of the book, when I'm first introducing the idea of pathogenes,

I precisely try to answer the question that you asked, right? And so let me first analogize it with a cancer example. Different cancers are very different from one another. And melanoma is different from leukemia, which is different from pancreatic cancer. But what is common to all cancers is that they involve the unchecked division of cells. So at least we can agree that they all have that, if you like, universal commonality. So for each of these idea pathogens, I wanted to come up with a similar commonality across all of them. And so let me just very briefly mention what some of those idea pathogens are. So there's postmodernism, there is militant feminism, there is social constructivism, the idea that we are born with empty minds,

with equal biological potentiality. And it's only socialization that causes one person to become Michael Jordan and another person to become something else, right? So then I wanted to know, well, why are these ideas so intoxicating, so illuring, exactly to your question. And so here is my attempt at offering an answer. Each of those ideas starts off with a very noble cause, which then metamorphosis into utter gibberish in the service of that noble cause. So it's a consequentialist view of the truth. In other words, if I have to murder and rape truth in the service of this noble evolutionarily important goal, then so be it. Whereas I argue that when it comes to the truth, you have to be deontological. I don't sacrifice a millimeter of the truth in the service of a noble

goal. I can walk and chew gum at the same time. So for example, I am a very socially liberal person, about as socially liberal as they come. I am a strong supporter of transgender. rights. That doesn't mean, though, that I support the statement that it is antiquated biology to argue for fixed binaries such as male and female, and that sometimes men menstruate and sometimes men bear children. So in the service of protecting your dignity, I don't murder truth. So the original goal, what makes them intoxicating and alluring, is that they appeal to our evolutionary sense of empathy. I want to support the right of people to live free of bigotry. I want men and women to be equal. I want there to not be any institutionalized misogyny.

But in the service of that goal, I don't then go ahead and support all the nonsense that is taught in women's studies departments, which basically says that there are no innate biological differences, and any difference between men and women must be due to the evil sexist patriarchy. Men and women are distinguishable creatures. We should admit that, not superior or inferior. We're similar on many things, and we're very different on others. I can believe in the science of that while also supporting the noble goal of eradicating misogyny. So, again, to summarize, the alluring element is there is an empathetic intoxication with believing in the idea,

and I'm willing to murder any sense of truth in the pursuit of that goal. Is it, GAD, partly a debate about what you just said, goals, that there are people in society who differ as to what goals they think should be advanced? Some would put fairness, equity, diversity, inclusion as paramount goals. And we know that, for instance, in this debate, you just mentioned, you know, transgendered persons. There's a very active debate right now. We've covered it at the Monk debates on our podcast about transgendered athletes.

elites, biological males competing with cisgendered women. And people are saying, you know, we should do this because of the goal of inclusion, that that goal, in a sense, trumps fairness. So, you know, I guess what I'm trying to get at here, Gat, is, is it fair to say that this is just a contest of goals? You have a goal of truth, which is terrific, you know, salute you for that, but you're putting truth as your paramount goal. Other people are going to put other things as their goals. You're going to have to fight it out. Yeah.

Again, fantastic question. First, I would say that let's say I abided by the inclusion objective, and therefore I am for the trans woman competing. Are you not excluding, if there are 100 people who are competing, 99 are biological women. One is a biological male who self-identifies as woman, and then that person wins. How about are you not excluding the 99 biological females?

Is it fair to them or their fairness doesn't matter because some people, as George Orwell said, some animals are more equal than other. Some people's rights and fairness are more important than others. This is what I call, by the way, the tyranny of the minority. Okay, so that's one issue. The second about your competing goals. In the book, I talk about the field of operations research. The field of operations research is the mathematical field that tries to optimize something.

So for example, there's something called the traveling salesman problem whereby a traveling salesman is going to visit X number of cities once each, in which order should he or she visit those cities so that they minimize gas costs, right? So it's a mathematical problem that you have to solve through an optimization algorithm. So that speaks to your question. What am I trying to optimize? Am I trying to optimize truth? Am I trying to optimize equity?

Am I trying to optimize fairness? And I take your point. The issue is, depending on which ecosystem I'm operating, the answer to what is the optimization problem is there. When I'm in the university ecosystem, I don't care about your emotions. Now, that doesn't mean I am a mean person who goes out of their way to hurt you.

My number one objective, the objective function that I'm trying to maximize to use the language of mathematics is truth. If in the pursuit of truth, it hurts your feelings, sorry, buddy, that's the price we pay for falling truth. Now, in other settings, I completely understand that empathy is the driving goal or inclusion or equity. But the problem arises, just like when I talked earlier in the conversation, when should we trigger our emotional system, when should we trigger our cognitive system, the same issue is

arising here. Don't use the metric of empathy when we are in the way. a university. The number one goal of a university is to create knowledge and disseminate knowledge. In the book, I look at the slogans, the mottoes of universities. None of them mysteriously seem to mention emotions. They usually mention veritas. They usually mention truth. They don't mention emotions. The reason being that the intellectual pursuit should be undertaken void of emotions. There is no forbidden knowledge in science. All bets are off as long as you pursue the scientific method objectively. And Gab, what do you think about society at large? Is it a free-for-all? Is it a kind

of struggle for that kind of hierarchy of goals? Because you know the argument that the postmonerists would say it's precisely that. It is a power struggle. It is a set of competing forces who are trying to subject other groups, predominantly marginal or disenfranchised groups, to their prerogatives, to their needs. So can we talk about a universal goal in society? Is that goal truth? Is that what it should be?

Is that the organizing concept that leads to fairness, to justice, to these other truths that we've generally associated with our democratic society and culture. Well, I think we're a multifactorial, you know, animal, so we don't have a singular goal, although to your point in chapter one of the parasitic mind, I argued that my two driving life ideals are truth and freedom, meaning that everything else flows from these. Now, that doesn't mean that all of these other calls are sublimated as secondary. They're superseded. They're not important. Again, depending on the context, when I'm tucking my child

to bed at night, I'm not driven by the truth ideal. I'm driven by the love my child and make him feel secure ideal. So we're driven, we're a multi-attribute agent. We are driven, we are shaped, we are motivated by many different drivers, many different goals. But again, my argument stems from a critique of the university ecosystem, which then leads to downstream problems. In the university ecosystem, I'm not.

not there to be empathetic with you. I'm not there to coddle you. I'm not there to make sure that marginalized people receive a higher grade because historically they were marginalized. Therefore, let's add a plus epsilon. It's about truth. It's about objective standards. So again, we can have a conversation about correcting historical grievances. I'm not a cold, you know, monster. But different context call for the activation of different goals. Universities are about knowledge, period. So therefore, for example, if I am showing you that a particular group has a greater proclivity to commit violence than another group, many people would say, don't ever do that research, don't ever publish that research,

because that's going to be a career ender. Well, that's a very sinister metric to use, the old slippery slope argument applies, right? For example, we should have never done physics because physics led to the creation of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. So any knowledge could have bad downstream effects, but that's not the metric that we judge the knowledge. Are you pursuing the scientific method?

Are you adding to the pantheon of human knowledge? If yes, go with it. brother, if no, then you shouldn't publish it. In our remaining moments, let's turn a little bit to solutions. And you just have a phrase here. And there's a lot of thinking behind it. So I want you to explain that for us. And as a solution, nomological networks of cumulative evidence.

So this to me was a really interesting idea about how we could potentially try to find our way together a little bit out of this kind of thicket of contested knowledge and truths and ideals. So that's the nomological networks of cumulative evidence is the epistemological tool that I use in Chapter 7 to address the question of how to seek truth. So forgive me, it's going to be a tiny bit technical. No, no, that's why we're here. Wonderful, thank you.

So let's suppose I wanted to prove to you that the sex different, The sex-specific differences in toy preferences have a biological element to them. So contrary to the social constructivist argument, which basically argues that the reason why little boys prefer blue trucks and little girls prefer pink dolls is because of their evil sexist patriarchal parents, and that starts a cascade of gender role socialization. If I want to prove to you that, no, there are certain indelible universals when it comes to these sexist. specific toy preferences. How would I go doing that? Well, I would build a nomological network of cumulative evidence. Now, what does that mean before I actually demonstrate how you build it? It means I would get you data from across cultures, across time periods, across species, across disciplines, across methodologies, across dependent measures, all of which triangulate

to proving my point. So it's not a literature review. It's not a meta-analysis. It's much more than that. It's basically me putting Han the architect, the hat of the architect who's going to build this network. So now let me apply it for the toy preferences. So I can get your data from children who are too young to be socialized. In other words, by definition, they're not yet at the cognitive age where they have the developmental ability to be socialized. And I can show you that those children already exhibit the sex-specific toy preferences. So by definition, that negates, that falsifies the socialization argument. Now, that would be one box of my nomological network, but I'm not going to stop there.

Next, I'm going to get you data from vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and chimpanzees showing you that their infants exhibit the same sex-specific toy preferences as human infants do. Now, that's already starting to look pretty bad for the social constructivist, but I'm not going to stop there. Now I'm going to get you data from completely different cultures in sub-Saharan Africa. So it can't be to the Western patriarchy that little boys prefer trucks and little girls prefer dolls. And I can show you that they have the same toy preferences. I can get you data from 2,500 years ago where a content analysis of funerary monuments was done, where children who are depicted on the funerary monuments are depicted playing with the exact same toys as those who are playing today in the 21st century. I can get you data from pediatric endocrinology whereby little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia,

which is an endocrinological disorder that masculinizes the behaviors and morphology of little girls. Little girls who suffer from this disorder, guess what? They now have toy preferences that are akin to those of little boys. So bit by bit, I put the epistemological noose around your neck. And in doing the homework of building this nomological network, It allows me to go into a room with unbelievably hostile crowds in the audience, and they're all as quiet as little lambs. Why?

Because I came with the nuclear weaponry of having built the requisite nomological network. Now, there's only one downside to what I just said. It takes effort to build that nomological network. In other words, it presumes that you are intellectually honest enough, and you're not a cognitive miser that you're willing to do the heavy lifting of building that nomological network. So for example, if you were to ask me,

what do you think Professor Sadd has been the net effect of the legalization of marijuana under Trudeau? My answer would be with complete epistemic humility. Guess what? I haven't built the nomological network that is necessary for me to answer you, so I reserve judgment. I just don't know enough.

Right. So the beauty of the nomological network is it allows me to be perfectly modulated about what I know and what I don't know. When I have the nomological network behind me, good luck to you debating me. When I don't, I then bow to your greater knowledge. Well, you've certainly given us a lot of wisdom and insight and provocation this past hour gas of everything that I was hoping for in this monk dialogue conversation with you today. Thank you so much for coming on the program. Thank you. What a delight to talk to you. Thank you for having it.

Thank you for listening to My Monk Dialogue with Gadsad. We'll be featuring more Monk Dialogs on our podcast feed over the next few months. Conversations with big thinkers like Ian Hershey-L-Lee, Daniel Dennett, and Julia Greff. For a complete list of our winter dialogue speakers, go to our website, triple-w monk debates.com forward slash dialogues. We always appreciate your feedback on this podcast. Please let us know what you thought of Gads' conversation, his thoughts and ideas. give us a ding at podcast at monk debates.com.

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