The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Stephen Fry on Current Events | Self-Censoring of Scientific Publications

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Fry have a conversation about recent disconcerting news that several scientific publications and associations are self-censoring scientific publications and data for fear of offending people, even if no offense is intended.. something that concerns both of them, and should concern all of us. Show your support and access exclusive bonus content at https://www.patreon.com/originspodcast Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, I'm Lawrence Krause and welcome to the Origins Podcast, in particular to one of our special podcasts on current events. Last week I caught up with my friend Stephen Frye who's filming a movie in L.A., and I wanted to talk to him about some news items that concern me, in particular several scientific associations and publishers, are now apparently so concerned about causing offense that they're not just self-censoring. They're censoring their own articles and data. And of course, that's of some concern to me, and I thought it would be great to talk to Stephen about this because he, more than anyone I know, has eloquently discussed the nature of offense and the fact that people who are offended have no special rights. So we had an interesting conversation about that in some depth. And as you know, if you've listened to Stephen on this podcast or anywhere else, he's an incredibly interesting erudite and eloquent speaker. And it was, as always, incredibly enjoyable to talk to him. Now, for those of you who watch this on YouTube, if you'd consider subscribing to our YouTube

channel, that would help because then you get notice of our upcoming podcasts. Also, I hope you might consider subscribing to our Patreon community, because that will not only give you an opportunity to see podcasts ad-free, but also see special events like the live Q&As that we produce and also interact with other members of the community. So I hope you'll consider one or both of those things. In any case, with no further ado, I hope you enjoy this. Current Events with Stephen Frye. Well, thank you, Stephen, for joining me what I'll call current events with Stephen Fry.

And this current event, I could resist thinking of you. I'll just read this. It came from the Royal Society of Chemistry. And they sent a note to all of their editors, their associate editors and editors. Following the publication of an article by Hoodlicki and the identification of potentially offensive image in a journal, a set of guidelines has been produced by RSC staff to help us minimize the risk of publishing inappropriate or otherwise offensive content. Offense is a subjective matter and sensitivity to it spans a considerable range. However, we bear in mind that it is the perception

of the recipient that we should consider, regardless of the author's intention. Please consider whether or not any contents, words, depictions, or imagery might have the potential to cause offense, referring to the guidelines as needed. And then as if that wasn't bad enough, one could argue, well, that might not be overstepping. They then, in their guidelines, actually explicitly say what is offensive content. Any content that could reasonably offend someone on the basis of their age, gender, race, sexual orientation, religious or political beliefs, meritable or parental status, physical features, national origin, social status, or disability. Though in short, there's nothing that you can't offend someone about and anything that you offend

someone about can be not published in the Royal Society Journal of Chemistry. And when I think of people who've talked about offense, you are one of the most eloquent. And I love to quote you, which I will now, and then we can chat. in a public forum, and I forget what, I've just seen it online several times. Well, you'd say it much better than me, but I'm not going to put on your accent. But it's now very common to hear people say, I'm rather offended by that, as if it gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more than a wine. I find that offensive.

It has no meaning. It has no purpose. It has no reason to be respected as a phrase. I'm offended by that. Well, so fucking what? Okay. So this intrusion, I mean, being offended now in our society is now a capital offense in the sense that people are destroyed for it in general, in the public arena. But seeing it intrude into science is something I was particularly concerned about. So I wanted to talk to you about it. And I think it's a very interesting distinction because it crosses a line into a field which ought one imagines reasonably.

and we'll return to that word, to think is exempt from this kind of social and cultural weighting and freighting and general loading of meaning and offensive potential because science is precisely about that in which the values are expressed in numbers and in testing and experiment of discrete phenomena in various directions. And it's quite hard to see. I mean, one can picture that in generic, genetics and various other forms of bioscience.

I, as a gay man, as a Jew, might discover that someone has borrowed away and found that my genes as an Ashkenazi Jew mean that I am this. So far it hasn't happened. Particularly, there are diseases and illnesses and conditions to which certain people are prey because they belong to a genetic group, as we know, things like sickle cell anemia and so on. are more prevalent amongst certain races. But when it comes to, say, intelligence or even moral, what we call moral qualities,

but might be things like, you know, the helpfulness and, you know, the kindness gene, the cooperation genes, the, you know, those sort of genes that have been observed in everything from vampire bats who feed each other when, you know, if they see a fellow member is starving, all those kinds of qualities, it may be discovered have genetic origins.

We hope they don't because we cling to some belief in personality and character and do you know, authenticity, and that we make ourselves and our own moral makeup. But I'm prepared to believe that the day will come and I'm told I chose to be gay and that my Jewishness makes me a less valuable person than say someone who's Asian. I don't know. I mean, it seems unlikely. But the possibility that science can reach into those areas. is, you know, we can envisage that there are dangers. And we've known this since the days of, you know, Dalton and,

and, sort of, Galton and eugenics. We've known that science can, there can be bad science. And we've known also, very particularly, that Stalin and Hitler to choose the two biggest villains of the 20th century, both felt that science could have ideological implications. So Hitler and Goebbels in particular, called and Gering in fact famously called it black science. The Jewish science, Jews were black.

In fact, the N-word was often to describe Jews. That's right. And slang for the women in the camps was Muslims. And so, you know, race somehow was brought into science in a way that seemed. And one of the great ironies of nuclear. physics is that the very anti-Semitism of the Nazis stopped them going down the fission route and led them towards deuterium oxide and heavy water and probably delayed the ability of the Nazis to have nuclear power. Thank goodness. But anyway, sorry, I'm sort of getting away from

the Soviet, but what I suppose what I really wanted to say is that, yeah, we've always hoped that science would be exempt from the kinds of possibilities of yielding offense in our current culture. But it's clear that it isn't, and that similar to the days of Stalinism and Nazism, science is going to be inspected for its ability to cleave to party lines and certain party lines we're thinking of, of course, are those that involve offense along racial and gender and sexuality. You know, it's more insidious than that. In some sense, one could imagine, yes, there are subjects that may seem offensive. And genetics is certainly, you know, genetics and correlating genetic information

in any aspect of racial information is a subject that's emotional, at the very least, in our society. But there are two aspects. You use the word possibility, which is really, to me, an important question. there is one doesn't know the answer there is a possibility that there are just as there are genetic diseases that are that are have correlation with with with racial things um sickle cell anemia and things like that there's a possibility but not being able to raise the question and ask the question of whether there might be a possibility for fear of of of giving offense is what is one of the more concerning things because that means you can't even do this much less talk about it you can't even do the science for fear of I note I note that the Royal Society of Chemistry have put in an extraordinarily important adverb in the middle of that which is reason might be reasonably offended and it seems to me that a reasonable person and the word reasonable is one in law that has huge meaning in

British and American law goes all the way back time immemorial has a legal meaning in British jurism, as you probably know, is from the time of Richard the second. So we're talking to Corsairia in England around that time. The idea of the guilty mind and the reasonable man, now the reasonable person for obvious totally reasonable reasons. In other words, a jury is supposed to be formed of what would a reasonable person think about this? That is part of in law.

It's not what is the fact. what is that someone was offended is that was someone reasonably offended? And that is what the Royal Society of Chemistry is saying. And maybe that one adverb can at least allow someone whose research is turned down on the grounds that it is offensive. Allow them to plead, no, it's not reasonably offensive. It is not reasonable for someone to be offended by this. And I will stand in the last dock until the last trumpet

to claim that it is unreasonable. I see that they're offended. I see the tears coursing down their cheeks. But it isn't reason that is causing those tears to fall. It is emotional fragility and a sense of upset, a sense of self being assaulted in some way, that has all kinds of histories that are psychologically important and a behaviourologist and a psychologist.

And I'm not being cute here in trying to suggest that the offended person is weak or unable to stand up as a proper human being, because I can cry and be offended by things, but I know when it's reasonable, and I know when it belongs to another magisterium of human behavior, and that is the emotional realm, the realm which determines feelings that can be inspiring and can be useful.

Scientists talk about inspiration and feeling all the time, because they're humans. But we know to separate, and it doesn't mean we're failing to be holistic about what it is to be human, but there must be a division of what is reasonable and what is in a different realm. And our sensitivities and our feelings of personal assault and affront are not the same as our ability to reason. And in between that is even more important, especially to a Britain, is empiricism.

And that is, let's not worry about what's right or wrong. Let's worry about what's effective. And what really upsets me as a left. as a liberal, as someone who believes themselves to be more or less on the side of that arc of history that people talk about that bends towards good and improvement and so on, is that just as it happened in 1917 after the Russian Revolution, and just as it happens after, you know, just as it happens with priests in the, after Luther or priests during the inquisition, it's not the enemies that the zealots destroy. It's their allies.

And it's not the enemies of racial equality, gender equality, sexual equality, and general believers in diversity and believers in making the world a fair and better place. They're not the ones who get their arseys king. They're the ones who get their arseys king. The ones who are just plain racist, who just hate it all and just call it wokeism and to hell with it. And they are in no way threatened by this. So it is the ineffectiveness of it that really drives me, man, is that what you're doing is not making a new world that is better and finer and brighter.

You're just creating a frightened world in which those who want to make it better and finer, dance, speak. And I know that some of the most advanced wokeists will say, oh, don't say what? What is it you're trying to say that? Go on then, tell me what it is. You can't say, you public figure with a big, you know, 13 minutes. and Twitter followers. No one's shutting you up. Well, yes. I know that I have a big platform

and I can say what I like, except that I can't because I have to self-censor unless I'm an idiot because, you know, frankly, you know, precedent shows me that if I don't self-center, I will come up with a joke, a little stupid remark of the kind that one can say to one's friends and others in private. And that doesn't make me a bad person. but that if I were to say it in public, I would be destroyed. And so we self-censor. And I'm not moaning about it. I don't think I've got a hard deal compared to other people.

But so, again, those who, if they're not defending this new trend in academia and elsewhere, they will often attack those who do question it and say, what are you moaning about? Are you trying to be racist then? Do you want space in which to say unpleasant things that offend people? Do you want space in which to make people feel subjugated? Do you want to praise past historical mistakes? Or, you know, no. Well, but that attack is, that kind of religious attack is, is worrisome.

And, you know, you're a master of language, and I've learned much from you. But you use the words reasonable. I think it's really important because I see a difference between reason, which I kind of see as time invariant, reasonable, which is societally dependent. I mean, there are things that are reasonable to us now. There are things that are reasonable during medieval times, which are not reasonable now. And the problem is if a significant majority, if not just a vocal majority, but a significant group of people feel something is unreasonable,

then you're subject to the majority. that. And, you know, it's like the, you know, one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite books, Catch 22 is, you know, where Yossarian is basically someone said, well, would, you know, what if everyone in the world is walking off a cliff, would, you know, what would you? And he said, I'd be a fool to do otherwise. And, and, and, and if the bar of reasonableness changes for mere verbiage, then it's a problem. And, and, you know, I, I, there's another example, which, shocked me and it's this that was raised to me. It's a journal of hospital medicine, which another, not quite science, but medicine at least.

And there was a piece entitled tribalism, the good, the bad, and the future. And it discussed the dangers to medicine of tribal in-group and out-group behavior and, you know, trying to work together with people who disagree. The editors of the journal then immediately retracted the article because of social media reaction saying it's reasonable that the terms tribal is term tribal is hurtful. And what they did was they not only retracted it, they rewrote the article removing all, even though the article actually defined the words tribalism and tribe. They removed the words tribes and tribalism. And then they republished a revised version and wrote an editorial apologizing for their act of

microaggression by using a term that could reasonably offend people. Yeah, it's very distressing, isn't it? I mean, de minimis non-curat-lex, I think, is the old phrase that lawyers use. And it's true of de minimis and it's also true of de extremists. In other words, you can't make laws about tiny things. You have to let them flow. So to make a law about a microaggression would be absurd. And yet that seems to be what's happening.

And also, you can't make laws based on extreme cases and cases, which, you know, again, that's part of what reasonableness is supposed to mean. And it's an interesting point you make because I wonder if what you're saying is reasonable really is a word like moral, which is to do with custom and times. And what is reasonable in the 16th century is totally unreasonable in the 20th. Because what's reasonable is also obviously in many ways mitigated and altered and always changed by knowledge. Yeah. And by culture, I mean, you know.

And by culture, exactly. And certainly, you know, we know that we had perfectly reasonable ancestors who stirred sugar into coffee, knowing that both had been picked by slaves. And they didn't think of themselves as bad people. They tried to be good. They said their prayers or whatever the moral was at the time. They read books and they fought hard. And some of them then caught up with the.

slave movement, but plenty of decent people, you know, do things that future generations will regard as indecent. The question we have to mull over, and it's not an easy one, is whether we are, as the awful phrases, whether we are on the wrong side of history, because we're not fully embracing this total recalibration of everything we grew up with, this total realignment of ideas and ways of approaching things. And it's letting in all kinds of new issues into what we had thought were purer activities of thought and experiment suddenly become solid and colored by and polluted by this new way of having to consider things. And it does remind us of the way the state became the center and being a friend of the state and not an enemy at the state.

And, you know, it reminds one of, you know, if people have read Darkness at Noon by Kessler, for example, and indeed the final half or quarter of 1984 where O'Brien interrogates Winston Smith. These moments when you get a confrontation between the powerful new culture, whose rules and whose control of thinking is so absolute and whose way of explainer,

claiming itself. And it's what an evangelical Christian would call exegesis, you know, its ability to interpret the hermeneutics of a whole world in such a way as to align every, you know, a bit like a magnet aligning every piece of iron filing in the direction of this new God. And if you question any aspect of it, it's so complete a sealed argument. It's that there is no escape for you. And that's what we feel that we grew up reading Kusler and all well thinking, well, thank God, that's over. Thank God there's no more of that kind of thinking. And of course, for us to say that it is 1984, what the Royal Society of Chemistry is doing is an overstatement. But it tends towards it. It seems to be bending towards something very dark and very, very distressing,

and which goes against the most fundamental thing of all, which is not just, we're not free speech, because I'm not as big a worshipper of free speech as say Americans are constitutionally in every sense bound to be, but I am a believer in free thought. And if you have to self-sensor your free thought in order to get on in the world, in order to think about everything from how you cast a movie to how you describe the colour of someone's face in a book,

or, you know, to use some of the more famously unsettling questions that have arisen, as you probably know, editors and publishers now have to cut out anyone who says someone's skin is the color of coffee, or indeed strawberry, you can't use food to describe a coloration of skin anymore. It's apparently commodifying or something. Now, I know, again, one can sound like the op-ed writer or the leader writer of a British tabloid, moaning about wokeism and using the most extreme examples of it in order to shut down argument perhaps. And what we want, all we want is argument,

is the ability to have a reasoned, if not reasonable, discussion about the way the world is and to be able to call upon all aspects of culture and knowledge to reduce these arguments and some of which might offend. Well, I think you're being even here too kind. I think we want the right to have an unreasonable argument. Well, actually, of course, one does. Yes. Yeah, I mean, you want to be able to have the right to have an unreasonable argument

because that illuminates what's reasonable and unreasonable. In fact, you know, I mean, we must all, I do think manners are incredibly important. And manners is another word for mores, which is another one of morals, which is another word for the way we judge things to be right and wrong. I and you would not go to a room to address, to make a speech to a town's women's guild of senior citizen ladies who baked cakes for one and wanted one to come and talk about one's life in science, in your case of my life.

And I wouldn't come in and say, well, fuck me, I had a strange journey here. Come on, don't be a cunt. Give me some of this cake. You just wouldn't do that. You would dress nicely, and you would talk in the language that wouldn't offend them. I don't want to offend people.

But the fact that I say offence isn't actually an argument, doesn't mean that I believe offending people is a nice thing to do if one is consciously able to avoid it, as in these little old ladies. I would treat them, if it isn't patronising to talk about little old ladies like this, but you know what I mean. The point is you wear a suit and tie when a suit and tie is the right thing to wear because it's respectful of the kind of people you're with. It doesn't mean you're a stuffy milk toast who only wears a suit and tie. It means that you're able to change your dress according to where you are, with your friends that are, music festival you're wearing God knows what and smoking God knows what but when you're with

your mother and her friends you're doing something else it isn't that difficult well except here's this let me give you a hypothetical and this is the problem and this is one of the things that worried me about both the Royal Society chemistry and other things is intent so if you go into this group not intend you to offend but by wearing a tie you're representing a hierarchical male you know, you could imagine a whole bunch of things. And in fact, your intent was to show offending people. And your intent wouldn't be to offend, but in some sense, this is saying it doesn't matter.

As I point it's subjective, but it's the perceptions of the recipient. And in that case, you can't ever, you can't ever be right. They'd fall down in wider law, though, because there we have the good Latin phrase, mens rea, guilty mind. That, you know, in order for it to be a crime, you have to intend to deprecate. someone of their property, you have to intend to deprive them of their life.

That's in the law, unfortunately, however, the law of the society. Right now, the law of the social jungle is not the law. That's true. But if one wanted to bring it to law, which would, of course, be nonsensical and boring and expensive. And you would have already been cancelled by that point, so it doesn't really make a difference. But, but, you know, let me... If your intent was to be, was not to offend, but you offended,

in law, that's negligence. It's not a crime. Well, you know, although there was a reporter, as you probably know, there was a reporter for, and science reporter for the, a distinguished science reporter for the New York Times, who was fired for using the N-word.

Yeah. When talking to a young person on a trip about how, that they shouldn't use the N-word. And, and, and they, and that New York Times specifically said intent was irrelevant. Yeah. And that's, that's, if, if intent, tense irrelevant. If it's always in the mind of the behold, you know, of the receiver,

then you can't do anything. The adjective meaning miserly, niggily, has got people into trouble, even though it has absolutely no, it's not cognate with. Yeah, oh, absolutely. There's a whole bunch of. But neither of us would probably, I'm not even sure, I don't know whether we'd use the word now because of concern that people would have done. care, we probably wouldn't in the same way that in America in the 19th century and flew no Webster, you took the English phrase tit bit and thought, we can't say tit bit, it's got tit in which means breast. So you changed it to tidbit. But actually the word was titbit. You simply, you, you bolderized it. And this is what we're doing, but not for

sexual reasons anymore, but for ethnic racial sexuality reasons. We are being asked to do the equivalent of take titbit and make it tidbit and not to use the word niggardly, even though it doesn't have any meaning or relation as a word in its philological history to that. So there is, well, there is sexual. You're offending people by saying the word he or she. Well, yeah, now we can go that far. And one can become that, you know, leader writer for a for a tabloid newspaper who gets very smoked up about it.

Or we can say, look, I've had the advantage, the privilege of an extraordinary education. and the privilege of an impulse to read and to learn and to know things and to understand things and to make things better. And without virtue signalling, when two vessels at sea are heading for each other, one of them has got to make the decision to turn. If they're both so proud and both so fixated on being raped rather than effective, then they'll crash and they'll be, they'll both sink. Well, let's say, okay, without calling myself St. Joan or a hero, I'm going to be the one to say Harder Stern and say, all right, I won't say this word. I won't say that word. I, with my friends, will talk and say, have you seen what the Royal Society of Chemistry said, it's fucking weird.

And if you happen to know someone who's on the board of the Royal Society, just be careful in your wordings, because you can make an ass of yourself. You can make yourself look an idiot. You're scrabbling to do this. Let's just try. get this right. I understand that is so much work to be done on the equality of the races and on the bringing up of people who've been disadvantaged for hundreds of years plucked when they're you know, and I know that sometimes it will come down to symbols and artifacts and words and phrases and directions of research that that are so far off the main issue that it will seem petty to make a fuss about them. But all right, if that's genuinely going to have,

happen. Maybe, maybe we bite our tongues and hold our noses a bit. And don't do it so publicly is to say, oh, I'm holding my nose and I'm agreeing to be woke because that's not helpful. But yeah. And I know it's not satisfactory. But I don't, where do you draw the line? As a public, I mean, as, you know, for example, there's here's it here. It's, it's words, right? It's not even ideas. So, so I was reading the dove soap has. stopped using the when they advertise for normal hair. Because normal has apparently for some people offensive quality because they're normal. Now in chemistry, there's normality of a solution.

And so the concern is whether that using that will now offend people. At some point, it seems to me to slip. If you don't. I think that's partly because normative is a word of critical theory. Normative is very much the cisgender normative. heteronormative, that sort of thing, bad. So normal becomes, yes, slightly. Well, it seems to me that...

You don't want people to think they're abnormal or subnormal, I suppose, is the reason. But using the word normal is, it's a word. And it may offend some. And what I want to get back to is not... So we're discussing sort of what words might offend or how you might deal in society. But at some point, the key issue, it seems to me, gets back down to offense.

And the question is, should... if you're not intending, should you be concerned about offense? And in fact, in preparation for talking to you, I was not only listening to you, but also to hitch. And he made an important point, which is that it was freedom of speech, but if you don't have the right to offend, then the people who are offended lose the right too.

By censoring language, they lose the right to hear something that may cause them to rethink something that they accepted, but, but, you know, is wrong. So he said, well, I'd love to, you know, if someone has a right to say the Holocaust never happened, you know, maybe, you know, why do I believe it? You know, I have to ask myself the questions

and it forces you to, so you lose a right as well by causing other people to lose the right. So coming down back to this notion of offense and whether it gives anyone rights and whether and how can one respond to this notion that being offended gives you special rights. It's true. I'm absolutely, absolutely with you on that.

And, you know, everything you say is reasonable and right. I just wondering, what is the way we're going to get out of this with the least damage, the least damage to the intellectual future of the human race, the scientific future of research, and the happiness and comity of our human population? And, you know, how are we going to do? And I think, I think, you know, choosing the hill to die on is a very important thing. And while I, you know, I can laugh and wail and wring my hands as much as anyone at some of the apparent excesses of so-called wokeery,

I, again, this, this, the, the empiricist to me, the epidemiologist to me would say, you know, Go to a large town and choose one at random. Stop a person at random. Ask them what they think of woke. They won't have heard of it. They don't know what it is. It doesn't affect them. This whole culture war affects a tiny population of the world.

It's the noisiest part of the world, us and them. They're the noisy ones. And we're standing on hilltops, yelling at each other, while the mass of humanity below is getting on with getting and spending and toiling and roiling and genuinely trying to be here. human and not and being kind to each other and neighborly and decent and all the rest of it. And yes, there are extreme examples of censorship and puritanism and their extreme examples of racism and viciousness.

But it seems to me the hilt that I want to die on if I don't want to die. Yeah, I know what you do. But is, I guess because I'm a scientist, it seems to me when it comes to, you know, science, which is to discuss empirical evidence to ask questions and see if they're right wrong, there's no compromise. The many you compromise there, then... And of course, what, again,

just because I need the evidence, I'm an evidence-based person, I would like to see what this paper was and to see the phrases that were offensive, actually to know what it was that was regarded as an offensive phrase.

Well, here's one. Here's a bit of science. One last thing, I mean, which I was looking at. And And it had to with archaeology. I don't know if you remember the Kenwick man. I know you and I have been fighting the wars for evolution versus intelligent design for a long time. But when the Kennewick man was discovered, which is this 9,000-year-old skeleton, which at the time apparently had Caucasian features, which I think has since then been proved wrong, but was discovered. it was the the the the in Kenwick washing the umatilla tribe of Native Americans it didn't just

people here wanted to um first of all take it as their own so it couldn't be studied because their cosmology doesn't allow for a 9000 year old earth or anything else and and there was a great and it was held by the army corps of engineers and there were court cases and happily finally was decided hey come on this is 9000 year old it has to be studied and it was studied but then two people of the Society for American Archaeology just this year, that meeting censored a talk by two archaeologists who were concerned about allowing creationism when it had to do with indigenous peoples to cause a repatriation of important artifacts, whereas you wouldn't ever say, you know, some young earth creationists of Christian creationists said, no, you can't study that bone because the world

is 6,000 years old, we'd all laugh at them. And this person said, you know, this is a a problem and the society said you can't give that talk we're removing it from the sites it they said such anti-indigenous language does not align with the society of american archaeology values and and so yeah you and i would say obviously for some reason that that society believes that being patronizing and condescending is is more valuable than being truthful because we think still that they're children who can't take the truth now that it's such an insoling to all you need to do, and I would do if I was running this, is find a group from the American Indian Society,

a powerful movement of Aboriginal indigenous peoples, and say, do you want to have science kept from you because we believe you're too kind of fragile to be able to understand or accommodate what we would call a discovery. You can disagree with it. Say you think it's wrong and the scientists would explain why they think it's right and so on. But we, you know, our culture went through the same thing with, you know, geology and Darwin playing Haver with Bishop Usher and even Lord Kelvin getting upset about the... But they were at least able to have the debate.

They were able to have the debate, yeah. And that's, you know, what I've discovered, and a number of these examples I got, it's interesting as scientists, the people who were speaking out the most are scientists from former Soviet Union or Eastern Bloc countries who are now in the States who are saying this kind of ideological, well, I wrote in an article once, ideological corruption in science, this kind of demand that certain things not be said, that certain questions cannot be asked, is reminiscent for them of their experience in the former Soviet Union and place like that. And so, you know, a number of the examples I got from Anne Krilov, who's a chemist, and there's a well-known mathematician at Princeton who's been writing about the Wokos in Princeton.

And they see this, and it reminds them of the situation that they dealt with in those countries where certain things were not able to be discussed. And, you know, and maybe they're ultra-sensitive, I don't know, but they, but it's interesting. ones the major ones i'm seeing speaking out are the ones from former eastern block countries yes and and that it is very worrying and of course it's not new in the history of science and mathematics for for there to be a kind of censorship i mean it's a kind of truism of cambridge mathematics for example which used to lead the world from from newton onwards but by the sort of mid to late 19th century it was stuck in a rut it wouldn't allow new ways of thinking about

mathematics because they went against Newtonian ideas and this allowed Hilbert and and the great Germans suddenly to take over the world of mathematics because they had free thought which the Cambridge ones didn't the Cambridge ones were not restricted in their thought because of an ideology exactly what we think of as an ideology but just of a tradition and and so it's all kinds of things can inhibit free thought and one of the things that inhibits we thought paradoxically almost is this idea that freedom is indivisible which is what libertarians and the right are insist upon they even you know sort of uh the the second amendment gun totas you know they claim it's an indivisible freedom but of course they

don't suggest that they can have arms like for example proton bombs or neutron bombs or Could you have a private one in your? No, but why not? It's arms. It says arms. It doesn't say, so where then, then you get back to the pre-Socratic philosophers and the philosophies of vagueness and the heap where you say, okay, so where's the line we draw? So you can have a gun that big. Where do I stop?

I've got a mortar here, belt-fed mortar. I've got a huge Gatling gun. So that's the line. But the founding fathers didn't write the line there. Why are you saying that's the line? Freedom is clearly divisible. And nuance and ambiguity in freedom are as necessary to, you know, our freedom is completely constrained by other things, other freedoms, mostly, of course. And that's true.

That's even true in science in a strange sort of way, isn't it? Because every scientist has got the pressures of their department, the competition that's going on in the University of Israel and the other one's going on in Buenos Aires. who were both chasing the same holy grail that I'm chasing and if I go that way no I can't do that I can't do that there's a lot of times scientists saying I can't do this I can't do that what's new is saying I can't do it for reasons that seem completely extraneous to the business of science itself and that's an insult to the very principles and if you're like yeah you know and there is another example that goes speaking of historical examples which I got from and I forget if I told you about this but this is great and I want giving it to you so you can use it sometime because it has to do with the Royal Society

but in the time of the first development of the microscopy when Anton von Loonhoek developed microscopy and he was the first person he discovered spermatozoa in semen and he was concerned that communicating a result would cause some problem. So he put it in a letter to the President of the Royal Society when he wanted to publish it.

If your lordship should consider these observations may disgust or scandalize the learned, I love that sense. Scandalized learned, I earnestly beg your lordship to regard them as private and to publish them or destroy them as your lordship sees fit. And fortunately, for the progress of biology, his lordship saw fit to publish it. This concern about offending not just the much, the learned, but the learned goes a long way. And there's a distinguished history in the World Society of defending that. We do well to remember that.

And therefore not to get, not to huff and puff too loudly about these things, much as they, do grind our gears, as Peter Griffin would say. And, you know, they do grind our gears. We do get annoyed about it. We do, because we find ourselves suddenly in that position that is what makes social media so poisonous, that the slightest, the slight quiver in that direction seems to be an assault on ourself. It turns us all into narcissists. But this is my belief about the way science should be, and anybody who says anything against it is, it's more than just a, oh, I'd rather disagree with you. It's, they're a fundamental blight. They destroy everything I'm, and I think that's an overstatement. I think, as I say, one just has to try and marshal one's

thoughts and marshal one's ammunition and use it in the right way on the right occasion and keep oneself in post and be reasoning and reasonable and reasoned as per's where possible, and be smart enough to guess what, you know, in the same way that every scientist, I mean, you know, every scientist has had to guess what the heads of department and the money people are after and whether there'll be, will there be funds available for this scholarship, for this research next semester, next semester, whatever, you know, you just have to be smart. And as our great hero, Richard Feynman once advised to someone at Caltech, he said, for your first meeting when you're on a committee, arrive with a cup of coffee,

spill a cup of coffee on the dean, drop all your papers, light a pipe with noxious tobacco. You won't be invited back. Because you've got to learn how to fight the system in other words. That's right. Professional responsibility. The maverick and a renegade and an outsider. And if you want to do that in this particular world without just turning into a right winger who is deliberately trying to offend

in order to show how free you are, but who actually just wants to get on with the work and not be blocked by stupid bureaucratic interference, which is what all scientists want and fight all the time. It's another level of that. But as I say, and so the key is, I think, And I know I am probably too obliging and too keen to be liked and keen not to make a fuss and so on.

Yeah, I mean, I can use language to describe things that enrage me. But the most important thing is to work out how to be effective in this particular shit show. Yeah, well, I think the point is that you are nice way, so you won't be. It's hard to imagine you're pending anyone, even by saying so fucking what. your in your description of it. I thought, Feynman, by the way, probably would have been, wouldn't have made it in the modern world. But I certainly, you know, because you've thought about this, I just, I think they should have a someone like you as president of the Royal Society.

I think it's a lovely thing. And I'm going to, I'm going to make that recommendation, if I ever can. I'm not sure something you'd want. Well, this I do think, Lawrence, and it's a whole other discussion for a whole other time. but for a long while I believed, and it is becoming, it's starting to happen, that large, companies large enough to achieve a certain kind of critical mass need, in the same way that firms need HR,

they need an ethicist. They need someone trained in thinking, a philosopher, we would call them. Ethics being one of the branches and, you know, obviously logic and metaphysics and aesthetics and there are other branches. But, and this is now happening. I read a very good article

a long ago saying philosophy is no longer a stylish route to poverty. That there are figures getting, there are four figure opening salaries available for people with a graduate qualification and above

in bioethics for example, because of the importance of the converging currents of genomics and gene editing and bio-augmentation and brain machine interfacing and of course AI and robotics. All these things mean that there's enormous space for really serious thought. And yes, we know that there'll be rogue companies around the world who won't be paying any attention to ethics. But nonetheless, if you can get the attention of the, of most of the developed world in terms of of ethics.

It's very important. And this side of things is part of ethics. The problem is trust, of course. Within a company, you can trust someone maybe whose knowledge of biothics is very strong when it comes to your investment in CRISPR and related technologies say, you know, but in the wider world, in politics,

you put someone into the cabinet. We don't believe in economists. We don't believe in any experts. The idea we'll believe in a fluffy and philosophy. I've seen some bioethicists too and I still have this, maybe I have a suspicion. I still prefer the thoughtful amateur to the credential provincial. I suspect there will be a period where the so-called training and the methodologies that are currently being used in universities will do have to do a lot of catching up to the real world because that's it's been the problem in terms i i prefer you as a thoughtful i guess i think of you as a

thoughtful amateur i shouldn't really because you're not an immature of anything as far as i can tell but i i thank you and i hope you will in spite of being so polite and so nice i hope you will continue to offend when thank you i'll do my fucking best thank you thanks a lot for that it's always a pleasure stephen and i appreciate you taking the time to have this this chat you enjoyed today's conversation. You can continue the discussion with us on social media and gain access to exclusive bonus content by supporting us through Patreon. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people

who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Originsproject Foundation.org.