TRASHFUTURE - The Sweet Science ft Olly Thorn

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

The team sits down with Olly Thorn, AKA Philosophy Tube, to talk about scientism... which is the ideology by which the world's most pareto optimised stupid/confident jackasses blithely claim to understand the entire world by just using a calculator and making some shit up. It's at the root of phrenology, both classic and modern, the tedious gender politics of the anti-trans lobby, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Enjoy! Also... there's an election on! *Register to vote* You can do this here — it’s fast! https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote *Do some canvassing* Momentum (@peoplesmomentum) has a great resource that lets you sign up to canvassing events in marginal seats close to you. Access it here: https://www.mycampaignmap.com We have a Patreon and signing up at the $5 tier will give you an extra episode each week. You’ll also gain access to our incredibly powerful Discord server. Sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We cannot stress enough how much voting and canvassing matters. BERLIN LISTENERS: Milo is bringing his award-winning Fringe show 'Pindos' to Cafe Nr10 in Mitte THIS SATURDAY and has not sold enough tickets - so why not come down, check it out and catch a trashboi in the flesh? Tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/milos-edwards-pindos-tickets-78549332167?aff=ebdssbeac  

Welcome back yet again to another edition of Trash Future, that podcast you're listening to now. I am Riley. You may remember me from every previous episode of this podcast. I am joined by Milo Edwards, who's too busy texting. Hey, it's me. I was texting your mom, Riley, and just saying, what a beautiful young man you've become. Wholesome.

So there you go. You feel silly now, don't you? Well, you know, it's just, you know, there's very Hollywood of you texting my mom. Well, it's Hollywood Edwards over here. Everyone in Hollywood films is always texting Riley's mom. No one knows why. It's a really weird trope that they've come up with. No one gets it.

We also, of course, have Nate, who is ably boardriding. Yeah. And also, Riley, you say that you may remember me from every episode, but there was in fact the episode about Lionel Shriver that you weren't here for, that we ran ourselves, and it was basically Nice Future, but also extremely disorganized because we hadn't spent three hours making the notes. And so we appreciated you in your absence because when you do all the work, we can just misbehave the whole time.

Yes, the children. And the final of the children, of course, is Alice in Glasgow. Yes. Alice, how you doing? I'm doing well. Milo stopped texting Riley's mom. Her phone keeps going off and it's interrupting my mic. We love to see it.

Are we implying that Alice is my mother? No, we're implying that Alice is in the room with your mom. Being nice with your mom, being friends with your mom. Exactly. Wait, Riley's mom is Alice's dick doctor. Welcome to the Trash Future version of a Ryan Reynolds movie. It's all good. Making some cum jokes.

Here we go. And we're also joined. Riley is played by Owen Wilson. Wow. We're also going. You never knew my mom was a dick doctor. That's crazy. Look, everyone's just Joker.

Everyone is just a different kind of Joker. That's true. You know how I got this spare room in a house with some newlyweds? Indeed. Anyway. We are also joined by Ollie Thorne. You may also know as the force behind Philosophy Tube on YouTube. Ollie, how's it going?

It's going very well. I've never been described as a force before, but quite like that. That's very cool. Very masculine. Yes. Oh, that comes up later. Surround, I penetrate, I bind the galaxy together. The space force.

Unfortunately, Ollie's not the cool force from the early movies. He's the midi-chlorians force from the bad prequels. I've come back and I'm significantly more powered up than I used to be. Significantly more powered up, but yet somehow related to like a blood disease. Like a freshly recharged vibrator. Yes. Who doesn't love the smell of a freshly recharged vibrator, except who doesn't love that more than Neil deGrasse Tyson?

That was a beautiful segue, by the way. Beautiful. One of the greatest I've ever done. He would regard that as a misuse of science. Yeah, he'd say, actually, I like to think of beauty in the nebulas and the stars, not in your ham-fisted segues, Riley. So Neil deGrasse Tyson said, We learn about the expanding universe.

We learn about quantum physics, each of which falls so far out of what you can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers was rendered essentially obsolete. Now, Ollie, I'm very sorry that you've made your way down all the way to Whitechapel, only to learn that your entire field and career is obsolete, which is a bummer. And I'm very sorry. I know I'm good. At least I've got YouTube and acting to fall back on, both notoriously stable careers.

Exactly. You can pivot to being a Nazi. It's always there as an option. Always an option on YouTube. Yeah, exactly. Neil deGrasse Tyson, just watching a play being like, Well, obviously they're actors. Why am I even watching this?

I prefer the idea that he's watching it and the ghost of Hamlet's father comes on and he's scared. Oh, God, it's real. The evidence of my eyes does not deceive me. That does appear to be a ghost on stage. Why is everybody panicking? He's an empiricist to such an extent that anything he sees, he believes is real. By any time he watches anime, he is in like full-bore seizure by the end.

Like, Ollie, just opening this episode right on, because we're talking about scientism, the worship of science is some kind of idea. People who fucking love science, if you will. What do you think Neil deGrasse Tyson means when he says that physics has essentially made philosophy obsolete? I think he means that he doesn't want to read philosophy. Yes. Oi!

I recognise that I have some very neat interests, right? It's also weird to me just on first reading, weird, in the sense that he says, oh, well, there are these things about incredibly complex quantum physics that you couldn't work out by doing philosophy. Therefore philosophy is obsolete. He's not even saying therefore philosophy is obsolete as far as regards quantum physics. He's saying therefore philosophy is obsolete, because we have quantum physics, no one needs to think about like, moral dilemmas, or like, no, quantum physics

is the only thing that matters. No one's ever going to have like, you know, the meaning of live questions anymore. That's not going to happen. Philosophers have been sitting around like trying to do quantum physics for ages. The whole time. He may have just said, oh, this is made painting obsolete, because it's like, what are you talking about, Neil? A single Ariana Grande song has gotten us a step closer.

A single step closer to finding out, you know, what the Higgs boson particle is, and therefore she is obsolete. But also the presumption that like everything would be solved if we could only figure that out. It's like, ah, yeah, we've solved the Higgs boson. Great. That's fixed it. Nice. I'll call ISIS.

I'll tell them to knock it off. There are no, it's, well, I think one of the key elements of the, of the scientist, nice. I say, it's not, they're not scientists. They're scientificians, essentially. Just our scientists. Measure the science. Exactly.

One of the things that the scientificians really love is they love talking about the, the idea that there is some grand community of humanity that can be united on the basis of scientific knowledge, because they all have an agreement on what's true, because what's true is can be, what's knowable as true is something that can be measured. And they are also very dismissive of anything subjective and dismiss philosophy as subjective. But philosophical and scientific knowledge are just distinct ways of knowing things. And this should be something of interest to people on the left, specifically because so often liberals like specifically liberals like to claim that they have some knowledge,

some privileged knowledge of what works versus what they dismiss as the fantasism of moral purity on the left. Oh, the left just likes to think about cool ideas. We liberals know that means testing is what we need to do because we have the evidence based knowledge. Just remember an extremely cursed piece of like Naughty's sloganeering with reality has a liberal bias. Often found in the bios of people on Twitter that are extremely good at making very wise

points that actually apply to the world we live in. So I wanted to sort of go into a little bit like what is philosophical versus scientific knowledge? Is that a useful distinction to draw? I'm hesitant to like to just spend the whole episode dunking on Neil deGrasse last night. Fun as it would be. And you know, the Stephen Hawking's and all your other scientists were like, philosophy's dead.

Philosophy's been pronounced dead many, many, many times. But it's like Goku, you know, you pronounce it dead and then it comes back stronger. So as fun as it would be to just spend the whole episode ragging on him. I do think that the scientists who say like, philosophy's dead and it's not really relevant and philosophical knowledge isn't what it's all about. There is the grain of a point in there, which is that for a long time, very much like science actually, philosophy, especially in the academy has been the province of mainly white dudes and it hasn't served the interests of a global majority.

And you know, like some inventions of science and so on have trickled down, but we could talk about like systemic critiques of science capital S as an institution. But when people say that like philosophy isn't relevant, I think there's actually something to that. It's not just like, oh, these liberals don't know like philosophy. If they can only go to universities and read philosophy, they'd realize how like Kant is actually the key. It's like, well, no, you kind of actually have to work to make Kant relevant to the

global majority of people, which is like what my show tries to do and fails in interesting ways to do. So yeah, like, I think there are people like to a degree, there are people who just want science to be like, oh, there's no political questions, no philosophical questions, no questions of like meaning or what we should be doing. But I do want to flag up early in the podcast that like there is the beginnings of a point here and it's a point that I've made on my show before as well. But I think one of the key distinctions also I want to bring out and this is not just about

the practice of philosophy and the practice of science, but what philosophical knowledge and what scientific knowledge is, right? Where scientific knowledge usually is claimed to be the knowledge that comes to you from some kind of experience. I look at a particle accelerator and I see that there is a sensor that detects a Higgs boson, but philosophical knowledge comes from reflection, communication. It's sort of more, it is seen as more socially constructed and therefore to the scientifician can often be dismissed as worth less, right?

Yeah. I mean, I often do run into this assumption that like the tools with which we use to, with which we do science are themselves somehow philosophically neutral, that they don't contain any philosophy within them. Whereas, of course, you know, if you build a machine to do a job, then you have already, for instance, presumed that the job is worth doing. So there's this great philosopher of technology called F. Geni Morozov who says that when you build a tool, whether that's like a literal tool, like a machine, or even just like a

concept to do a job, once you've built it, it becomes very, very hard to question whether or not the job needs doing in the first place. So, like, for instance, if you... The Dick's Sucking Machine. The Dick's Sucking Machine. That's absolutely preparation. They never asked if they should. They only asked if they could.

Exactly. The Dick's Sucking Machine, perfect. Like you have presumed that Dick's need to be sucked. Or, for instance, if you have designed a set of skull callipers and you've got like a whole industry producing skull callipers, it's very difficult to then go, hang on a minute, what are we doing? Why are we building these? These are useless.

Suddenly, you're on the tube just measuring people. Just measuring skulls, yeah. Then you have to design like a whole new set of massive skull callipers to measure my head, because it's enormous. And this has particular relevance to things like algorithms. If you, for instance, an example I've talked about, I did a lecture at the Hague a while ago about the use of AI in warfare, and they're designing algorithms now that can recognize people who are on kill lists from satellite photos and like flag it up on the computer.

So, the drone operator gets like, this guy's on a kill list. Yes or no? Just get some printout of all of your tweets. Yeah, but he just gets some notification on his phone saying, this man's on a kill list. Do you wish to kill him or not? And once you do that, like the algorithm doesn't stop to question, why is this guy on a kill list? Why do we have kill lists?

Is this right? Should we be doing this? Like, shouldn't this guy get a trial? What the hell's going on here? The more you streamline it, the more difficult it becomes to question it. So there's this presumption, I think, that if it can be measured or if there's some kind of machine that does it, then it's just kind of value neutral. So actually, you're basically just like putting a lot of philosophy into the machine and then

not looking at it. I've heard this also with reference to things like facial recognition software where it's designed with a specific race in mind or when it's designed with a certain set of attributes in mind. And if you look at it, it winds up flagging people or being unable to read people's faces or get information because of the fact that they only programmed it with the people who worked at the company who were all probably white or white and East Asian in the United States.

And so, as a result, you know, this winds up saying, here's this perfect set of tools and they can produce this result because they don't make mistakes. It's absolutely analytical. But because of the way that it's the premise that it's programmed from, it winds up just hard coding the things that are the inequities that are already there. And it's like, it seems to me that this winds up being used to dismiss any kind of argument for subjectivity because it's like, well, no, the machine doesn't make a mistake. It's not subjective.

It can't be subjective. It's weird how this idea comes forth that the people who programmed it, they could not have had inherent biases and that their review process could not have had inherent biases because the end result is a machine that apparently has no subjectivity. It just looks for zeros and ones. And yet it keeps reproducing these same problems over and over again. Well, the other thing, right, is that this isn't just something that you can get with technology that you can build and put in your hand or even algorithms.

And these biases or preferences can be hard coded into institutions as well. As soon as you build a DWP with a means testing department, it becomes very difficult to think about a world in which you don't means test benefits. Once your hospital has a billing department, closing it down would be unthinkable because well, how do we get money in? Well, that would be jobs. Yeah, exactly. You can apply it to concepts as well.

Biologists know that the concept of race, like biologically, is like, what is that? It still gets cited and referenced in papers and used as a shorthand for all kinds of stuff. And it gets used as a shorthand for people designing studies. They'll sometimes categorize like participants by race and so on. Even though biologically, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And if you want to design even a concept to do that kind of work, it's very, very difficult to get rid of it. Unless you do philosophy, which of course Neil deGrasse Tyson would prefer not to do. Oh, no.

A little alert came up in my computer, everyone. Fuck. We've all been doing grievance studies. Oh, no. It turns out that by highlighting all of these ways in which science itself can be a deeply, deeply biased, imperfect and philosophically loaded form of inquiry, we went and did a dang grievance study. I hate doing a meta-analysis of all the lightsabers I've collected. We should have just stuck to the only thing that science is, adding two very large numbers together.

Look, scientists are... You're trying to do things like free women and people of color from centuries-old systems of injustice. Yet there are scientists who right now are counting to a quadrillion. Yeah, exactly. But they're wearing safety goggles because they take this stuff seriously. What are you even just going back to what Ollie said initially? That the idea actually that science and philosophy are separate disciplines completely rides roughshod over the history of science. No scientistians ever learn any history because the past is bad and it's where people are all dumb.

And no one did, you know, because that was before we invented being smart, right? Before we invented the I fucking love Facebook science page. And so, like, yeah, I mean, obviously, like the concept of science was invented by philosophers who were trying to apply philosophy to, like, the empirical world. It's like that really, really scary bit in Fallout 4 where if you find the, like, the technologically advanced super society of scientists you just like stay in and bunker and do math and science all day. And then they're building some kind of like database and you say, what, do you guys have like a secret police? And the scientist guy goes, I'm not sure if that's some kind of reference to the pre-war times. But like, that doesn't sound so bad.

It's like, oh my God, you've never stood in any history. These people need to die all of a sudden. That was the moment where I was like, I've chosen my path for the rest of this game. So I find it very interesting, Milo, that you brought up the moment we invented being smart because the man himself, Mr. Intelligence 2, Steven Pinker is now entering our story. Oh, I missed it. He's coming in on his cloud ship. So one of the inciting incidents for this episode on scientism was the small furor that erupted among the sort of Clare laymans

and Steven Pinkers of the world. I wrote an essay in the journal Nature by philosopher of science, Nicholas Comfort, who was reflecting on the development of science and how it's changed. Very good name. He also invented the fabric softener. And how the development of science has changed human nature if there can be said to be such a thing. So here's a core paragraph of this essay, and this is a good reading, everyone. So safety goggles on.

Most of these age of reason notions of identity and the dominant sci-fi scenarios of post-human futures have been developed by university educated men who were not disabled and who hailed from the middle and upper classes of the wealthy nations of the global north. Ideas reflect not only the findings, but also the values of those who have for too long commanded the science system, positivist, reductionist and focused on dominating nature. Those who control the means of sequence production get to write the story. And I think those three concepts, positivist, reductionist and dominating nature, are very useful when we want to think of what science means to I fucking love science people.

And you're saying this is what got Clare layman at all furious. Because it dared question if they fucking love science. Again, though, I do want to flag up, but you could make that same critique of a lot of academic philosophy the last 200 years. Oh, of course. I think, but the key thing is they're not dismissing academic philosophy. What they're doing is they're trying to dismiss gender studies, post-colonial theory, anything that wants to question, say, the validity of someone who is designing an app to measure someone's skull. But also it's interesting too, because this is the stuff that gets kind of workshopped through right wing headlines

to the point where it becomes this outrage, like shareable content where the argument you're putting forth right there about it's not a question of dismissing everything that has previously existed or been studied, but rather to try to broaden the search. And that turns into these disgusting people want to ban Plato because he was a white man. And it always turns out that way. And you see it in headlines in the sun. And it's just, it's weird because on its face, it's a pretty benign thing to be asking. It's saying, look at the potential for, I don't know, alternate sources that go beyond a sort of canonical understanding of what's important.

And instead it gets turned into like disgusting libs. And you see it over and over again, but it seems like it's absolutely a recipe for like right wing outrage and clicks on pages and stuff like that. But that article has a quote from a Mr. Christopher Fraudi-Miglia from Jersey. He was like, I can't believe this. They're trying to ban Plato because he's a white man. He was Italian. It's the Greeks, the original Italians. Exactly.

It's really bizarre as well that they say, well, we don't want to do like post-colonial thing. We don't want to do any of that site. But in a lot of ways, we already do it. Like one of the things that I do on my show is try and show people like, look, you're already doing philosophy. Like I talk about, so for instance, Miranda Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice, right? Sounds very technical. Sounds like, oh God, what the hell is epistemic injustice? If you understand the Me Too movement, you understand Miranda Fricker.

And if you understand Fricker, you can understand Me Too. And if you understand them both, you can like, they reflect off each other and you can get like a richer understanding of it. It's like, you don't need to know all the context of what Shakespeare was writing. But if you do, you'll get like more out of it, right? And so when people say, oh, we don't want to do this. We don't want to listen to that the last 50 years. Like sometimes even further, people like 50, 60 years of philosophy, we don't want to do it. It's like, why not?

Because you are already kind of doing it. And it's like, if you only got a little bit curious, you could probably enjoy yourself a lot more. But any philosophy as a mirror is always going to be uncomfortable to these people because they don't want to confront the idea that putting Joker makeup on here, we live in a society, right? As a counterpoint to this, just over two years ago, Riley suggested to me over coffee that we start a podcast together and, you know, dive more deeply into all of this politics and stuff and technology and all that shit. And I have to say, I hate it. It's nothing has made me feel worse.

It's actually not worth living. No, it isn't. I can see why Socrates drank that shit, you know? I've been doing philosophy on YouTube for six years. And yeah, I totally agree. Look how old I look. I'm 26. I look about 39.

It's a beard. Yeah, I mean, it's it is different. And I think these people, a lot of what they want to do, one of their reasons that they're so resistant to the idea of introducing something like a postcolonial perspective into, not even into their study, just of even hearing someone suggest that the British Empire wasn't entirely benign because of the railroads, is it makes them confront an ugly truth about themselves and their history and one that they've been reassured was not there for so long, which is why I think they're so comfortable with a system of knowledge that is positivist, reductionist and focused on dominating nature because it says, because it says all of these people who are suggesting that the observed evidence is wrong are just trying to derail science because they have some kind of plot. I mean, that's why usually they usually say, oh, they're Marxists who feel guilty about the West.

And so they want to denigrate our future by preventing us from building an observatory on like... On Akiya. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I do want to denigrate the future of the West, but that's not really relevant. No, look, to be clear, we all want to do that. Yes. Of course.

Because we're trash. Well, it's interesting that people who are often very hostile to philosophy sometimes view critique as destruction. So if you say, if you sort of bring up Kant's sexism or Kant's racism, they go, what are you trying to ban Kant? I'm not trying to ban him. I'm not saying we shouldn't teach him. We are. I'm saying that actually, well, yeah, I know.

Well, obviously I am. But I pretend that I'm not. And I said, no, because once you, for instance, look at Kant's history of sexism, it opens up an entirely new way of critiquing his philosophy and understanding it. Once you understand that Kant left out a lot of the experience of people who weren't men. And once you understand the feminist critique that a lot of the supporting work, like the cleaning and the carrying that goes into enabling what Kant saw as a natural autonomy, like a state of autonomy, you open up a whole new way of critiquing his philosophy. Dorothy Roberts is a philosopher of science who talks about the concept of race.

She has a book called Fatal Invention. She's not trying to say, let's never do biology. Let's never do pharmacology again. She's saying that if we bear this in mind, we can do it better. Instead, people are like, why are you trying to destroy it? I'm not. I'm just trying to prevent it from ossifying. I also appreciate that the voice of the person opposing this has a question time audience member voice in the way that you're phrasing it.

Because it does seem to be like that's the kind of voice that seems to be speaking up against it. It's like someone who's got a kind of face value understanding of the debate taking place and just gets furious at it. And invariably, it winds up being, I don't know, like kind of getting shouted down when, in fact, this is just all this is asking. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong here. It's like an exploration of perhaps more nuance or the idea that like an alternate lens exists with which to look at it. That doesn't obviate all the other views that have existed previously. Well, I just don't understand why it is that we have to ban science. Because without science, we wouldn't have things like the toaster, an uncomplicatedly excellent invention that improves our daily lives.

And I think that if Mr Corbin was serious about improving the lives of working people in this country, he would admit that he owns a toaster. And I just think that it's important that we hear from Mr Corbin's office whether or not he does own a toaster, the message loud and clear about what his position on the toaster is. And then there would be like a smattering of applause from like extremely overweight people. It's busy town, right? It's like Modry Turf Bangs from Kent. You have this busy town idea, right? Where you have a bunch of scientists all wearing lab coats who work in a big building doing science, adding big numbers together. With a big worm and glasses.

And if they have to think about things like racism, then they're not going to have as much time and they're going to get distracted and they're not going to invent the toaster. And then just looking at a gollywag and scratching there. And then the big blackboard drawing. And then they won't be able to put together the volcano with baking soda and vinegar in time. We smash cut to the laboratoire Garnier where French scientists have been working on racism for years. It's like drawing cartoons of Muhammad. So this way of seeing the world, I said this earlier, a positivist, reductionist and dominating nature. What we mean by that is positivist, it just, it looks at something and then says, well, that's the evidence what I see in front of me.

There's no more, nothing more complicated than that, really. Reductionist means you're aiming to understand something by breaking it apart, breaking it apart, breaking it apart and then making reference to its smallest bit. And dominating nature means that what you're doing is you're identifying things and breaking them up in order to dominate and control them. I'm putting the planet in a dick cage, obviously. And frequently by nature, historically, we've meant other people. So if we want to think about eugenics, eugenics aims to transform lesser humans into greater and is a project of greater humans that is then being done to lesser humans. And we know they're lesser because they live in a lower standard of living than us. And we know that standard of living is lower because we've looked at how electrified their towns are or whatever and counted fewer electric wires in them.

People who eat pot noodles, stuff like that. That's a positivist, reductionist and dominating of nature way to look at something like a problem of underdevelopment where you can say, well, clearly it's to do with race because look, they're different, et cetera, et cetera. And when you sort of, and if this is the kind of way that they're, that the I fucking love science people see the world, then it's very easy to dismiss as, well, nonsense. Well, it's interesting that Milo brought up putting the planet in a dick cage because it's a very salient point. It's a field that's expanded a lot in philosophy in the last few years, like climate philosophy and the issue of climate justice. There's a philosopher called Timothy Morton, who I was reminded of when you talked about the domination of nature really being the domination of other people, not in the fun way. And who talks about that, like, where we're much more a part of nature than a lot of scientific discourse with leaders to believe. And something that I pointed out in my video on Timothy Morton and his ideas is that actually this is something that indigenous communities around the world have been pointing out for centuries.

A lot of the key philosophical points he made have actually been being made for the last 200 years for people to ignore it. So, yeah, it's, yeah, the domination of nature really reminds me of that because, again, you can critique philosophy for this. This isn't just a critique of science. It's a critique of philosophy as well and the way that people tend not to listen all that. People that listen to Timothy Morton, like he's a big superstar of climate science and philosophy right now. But he's saying interesting things that have been said before. Something I'm keen to point out, though, is like, we've talked a lot about the imaginary question time person. We've said, oh, they and these people think this and isn't it very funny? Just to play fair, who are we talking about here?

Because I'm reluctant to tilt at windmills. Sure. Well, actually, I have some readings from people who do say all of this stuff. I know I was setting you up for just that. I was looking over your shoulder and it's been like, here we go. Well, random audience member, funny you should ask if it cuts dices and juices. As soon as you said you weren't going to tell a windmills, Julian Maugham looked off. I will be tilted at. This idea is responded to.

It's defended. This scientism is defended by Jerry Coyne, a bosom chum and frequent defender of Stephen Pinker. And specifically, who wrote entire blog posts about how actually Stephen Pinker's association with Epstein was good. That's just science. He was just trying to educate Jeffrey Epstein. He was just trying to see how many Jeffrey Epsteins there are and how worried we should be as a society. Well, his philosophers are all worrying about how many Epsteins can dance on the head of a pin. He's trying to use an atomic clock to work out what the age of consent should be.

He's like got two sets of identical twins, one of them on a light speed ship. If you put one identical twin on a light speed ship, they're all bits of earth. Can you fuck them when they get back? Exactly. These are the difficult questions that Jeffrey Epstein was trying to answer. Anyway, so Jerry Coyne writes, So if scientism is bad for society and the lubrications of able-bodied white men, lol. Don't want to hear that from an Epstein friend.

Telling. Telling. And the lubrications of able-bodied white men who went to college or determining our future. What can we do? What is Nicholas Comfort's alternative? He offers none. All he does is give us an example of how liberation from science leads to some kind of enlightenment for disabled people. Is this better for disabled people than the many scientists and technologists working in curing disabilities

or making it easier for disabled people? And yes, many of these benefactors are white men who went to college. Yes, it is. Like, shut up and do as you're told. Yeah, essentially. Why don't those uppity, non-college educated scientists just stop making a problem for us? Again, he's doing philosophy without even realizing it. It's very, very telling.

Are you saying that actually it's all grievance studies, even STEM? Yes, when everything's grievance studies, nothing is. No, it's very telling that he talks about scientists making things better for disabled people. And like, that's the way it is, like from top down, rather than, Hey, what about all the scientists who have disabilities? Or what about all the disabled people who aren't scientists, who are getting together and organizing and advancing their own rights by like protest and struggle? It's very telling that he sees it as like scientists are in the lab

and they are doing the good stuff and then it trickles down to us and they bestow upon us the wonders of the age. Who tells the scientists to invent like a Professor X floating wheelchair for disabled people? I love my maglev wheelchair. Someone should do that. Number one, get on that. Number two, like, does he think that science just sort of occurs naturally and that we have to sort of just get out of the way?

Yeah, exactly, because science is a fact, whereas everything else is a feeling. It's like a really boring version of the page where it's just a bunch of scientists doing illegal research. The two genders, scientist and disabled person. Yeah, that's a porno I've not seen. Watching a version of The Simpsons edited by Neil deGrasse Tyson where Kirk Van Houten sings, can I borrow a science? But also, I think it goes back again to what Ollie was saying earlier about the fact that, like, this misunderstanding critique for destruction.

Like, them saying, well, maybe science could be more inclusive of the following things. Oh, oh, you don't like science now? Oh, well, get rid of the polio vaccine, shall we? See how you like it? Then you're like, no, actually, we were going to keep the polio vaccine. No, it's gone. I've forgotten it already. I've destroyed every record of the polio vaccine.

Good luck reinventing that. I'm just going to turn off the gravity if you're not going to want that. There's going to be no more sun. We're switching off the sun now because you can't fucking handle it. You can turn gravity off. I hope you didn't enjoy counting over 100 because every number over 100 is science, buddy. Numbers under 100 are just like... No, that's just like commerce.

That's economics. Yeah, exactly. So one of the key mistakes of scientism is that it mistakes the apparent for the actual. So this is what Cohen goes on to say. Just because the scientists who held the tripartite value of reason, science and humanism held slaves doesn't mean that those values do not call for the killing of aristocrats or the enslavement of others. So it's a bad sentence, I'll give you. But what he's trying to say is just because that people have been enslaved under the tripartite values of reason, science and humanism doesn't mean that the values of reason, science and humanism are inherently directed towards enslaving people, which is a very, very, very stupid argument. But it also seems to imply that if those values are represented by this conduct and they can exist in a system in which some people are just an out group that get to be slaves and have no rights.

But it's still really logical. There's a lot of reason involved. And we were doing science because we were counting above 100, so it protects all the boxes. Oh, that loads of those slaves. Oh, boy. We had people counting them all day. Nate, I don't think you could have set up the next paragraph better. So I'm going to go into it now.

And this actually isn't from the same article. This is from an article called In Defense of Scientism from Where Else Quillet. Our favorite big brain review. Beginning. Begin now. However, I must add as much as it pains me to. It sounds like a brand of razor. I must add as much as-

Or a very, very tiny feather pen. I must add as much as it pains me to that Quillet also published a rejoinder to this article that wasn't bad. So, and it had six blades. Yeah, exactly. It was the best- It had a moisturizing strip. It was the best that a man, man, I said, could get. Shaves your brain very smooth.

So, this is from the article in Defense of Scientism. Although eugenics, social Darwinism and quote-unquote scientific racism are often used to besmirch the reputation of science, they in fact illustrate why science is so important. Social Darwinism, for example, wasn't really a science because it did not promote a judicious approach to policy determined by a careful study of outcomes. You know what this is? Rather, it promoted a values-based approach to policy determined by a priori philosophical and moral assumption.

You know what this is? This is the thing that they accuse like socialists of doing, of being like, oh, that wasn't real communism. Yeah. So, Francis Galton was trying to do science in one country. That's the mistake. It wasn't real science unless you're doing science all over the world. Yeah.

Also, it's like, no, no, no. You don't understand. Social Darwinism was bad. So, what was a grievance study? Turns out, who knew it was a grievance study? We do now, of course, because we know better. But back then, of course, they didn't know. Fortunately, we have the long, wiggish run of the development through history

to know that we had to make those mistakes back then. So, we knew for sure that we couldn't like make someone into a scullery made by measuring their brain pan. Well, and once again, they've just like massively missed the point because like the whole point is that, yeah, there's nothing like inherently wrong with science as a discipline, but that people are bringing their own like moral outlooks and assumptions to science and thereby applying science in ways which are bad.

Like, no one is saying like, oh, there's something wrong with like measuring the boiling point of water. People are saying like, it's bad to then be like, oh, we've now got this boiling substance. Why don't we just tip it on some black people? Like, that's the problem. That was all science for like 200 years, too. Basically.

Yeah, the Manhattan Project wasn't science. That was ideology. Yeah. And there's the other thing, right? Like, that's writing as though social Darwinism and scientific racism have stopped simply because they're bad ideas. No, some of their more overt manifestations have gone underground, but we still are, for example, testing people like Nate,

you were saying earlier, testing people for job applications based on sets of data that are just a bunch of white men. But also, I mean, some of the scientific racism that they're decrying in this op-ed has been very overtly encouraged on the same website that this is being published on. Yes. Like, there have been full-throated defenses of phrenology. Literally phrenology.

Phrenology itself in Colette. So the idea that like, oh, it's really bad. I mean, we did publish it yesterday, but today's a new day. The sun came up. We realized maybe it's not so good. All my articles where I defended the practice of phrenology were lessons. Exactly. What's interesting as well is that people don't distinguish between

the scientific method and any particular conversation about science. So yes, scientific method, if you follow it. Yes, truth. We love it. We love a little bit of tasty truth there. But if I'm trying to convince you of my point or if I've like written a paper, then rhetoric comes into play in persuasion. There's this fantastic economist called Deirdre McCluskey who wrote a book called

The Rhetoric of Economics, where she went through like the last 20, 30 years of economics papers and analyzed them as a literary text. She was like, these are the metaphors they use. These are like the appeals to authority. This is where you persuade it. And she makes the point that like, if you're a scientist and you're writing a paper, and you cite another scientist's paper in which they've done an experiment, unless you've repeated their experiment yourself,

you're basically making an argument from authority. So yes, scientific method, we love it. Very, very tasty. It gives us lots of lovely toasters and atomic bombs and all kinds of wonderful things. And you know, raises that shave your brains move. But any kind of conversation where I'm persuading you of the truth of what I'm saying, there's going to be some philosophy in there somewhere. Well, because it's philosophy tends to come in to answer these whys.

Well, why am I persuading you to what end? And again, the scientificians, they have an answer for that as well. They're trying to edgy out at every way. They're doing a stick and move. So here is further from this argument. Sorry, here is further from this article. As Sam Harris has argued in his book, The Moral Landscape. The Moral Landscape.

Love it, the famous star. That's like Plato, Soctes and my boy Sam. That name. So as Sam Harris argued in his genius book, the underlying value most people agree upon is that some form of human flourishing is an intrinsic good. Brilliant, he's nailed it. We're done.

We could go and nailed it, Sam. And that we can define human flourishing objectively. It's just brain shit, isn't it? I've built this machine that measures flourishing out of 10, and I put it on your brain, and then that's it. I've solved it. That's a 10 out of 10 flourish, right there. Basically, Sam Harris is just going through the conceptual framework

of the Scientology e-reader. I mean, I built my brain flourish detection machine. It's showing that I'm at 10 out of 10, so you should listen to me. And it's showing all these Muslim women who've chosen to wear them a cup. They're all at zero out of 10, which is why we should bomb Yemen. Yeah, exactly. This is air tight. So he says that he knows that some form of human flourishing is an intrinsic good

rather than, say, aesthetics because of the following airtight argument. Would anyone argue that... Alice, not now. Would anyone argue that because beauty is the most important good in the world, it might be good to shoot innocent people in the head because the resulting stream of blood is aesthetically pleasing? This is basically you wouldn't download a car. Well, it's just...

Well, I think one of these things that the scientificians, much as the, let's say, liberal policy wonks like to do, is use these absurd examples. Like, Jeremy Corbyn wants to fund the NHS a little bit more equals gulags. Well, DM philosophers are like the Joker, right? It's like, oh, well, as soon as you get interested in, like, aesthetics, no, you won't become interested in, like, the works of Titian or something. You will become interested in, like, murder in order to do, like,

weird, like, finger painting with the blood. Yes, obviously. The only people who care about beauty for its own sake are, like, serial killers who leave cryptic notes. 100%. But what Sam Harris is trying to do here... And reply, guys. What Sam Harris is trying to do here is make the point

that because we have a moral intuition that no matter how aesthetically pleasing it is, if that someone's blood leaving their shot head might be, that it is still we can all agree that it's better to not kill them. I'm just glad he got to see Joker, like... Well, because the thing that it's here is, like, he's making this absurd, absurd comparison that bears absolutely no relationship to anything, to illustrate an abstract point that's not really arguing anything.

Well, yeah, it seems to be this idea that you say this is good, but here's an insanely cherry-picked example that could never exist in real life, that no sane person would make. But because we agree that's bad, your initial point is also bad. And it's like, I mean, I don't know. Like, I don't want to go reducto-ad absurdum here, but it's just one of those things where, like, this doesn't strike me. It's a particularly serious argument.

This is just like, oh, you like good things. What if I told you the good things are bad? QED-owned. Well, in fairness, we've taken, like, a very small piece of his argument in the moral landscape. Like, he's saying here that, like, everyone agrees that human flourishing is the best thing, right? And he's like saying, well, you know, nobody would say that beauty is the best thing or that, you know, like, crisps are the best thing. Unless human flourishing was produced by beauty. Yeah, exactly. But that's what he doesn't consider.

Which he doesn't consider at all. Yeah, he's like, well, where the real problem's coming is the next step, he says, and human flourishing is something that can be measured in XYZ way that we don't really need to think critically about at all. Yeah. Human flourishing is basically measured by... How many times you know? It's measured by the lie detector they hook Mo up to on that one episode of The Simpsons.

But how many times you know it has to be over a hundred, because that's science and everything else. It's also funny, Ollie, to have you critique it this way, because ultimately we realize that our entire show hinges on us doing the straw man argument nonstop. Like, in a funny way, in a way that we like. But yeah, basically we are kind of cherry picking. This is an entertainment show. I don't know why I'm in such a thorough mood today.

Usually I'm much more inclined to just take the piss. So, we sort of have established this, right? But we can also talk about why this is important. And I'm going to go back to 2006, when Harvey Mansfield, a student of noted newly minted corpse, Harold Bloom, wrote this. Ladies and gentlemen, dye some highlights into your hair and rip your jeans,

because upon some ethnic trainers, because it is 2006, we're listening to Good Charlotte. We have a crush on the saxophone player in the Zootons. Oh yeah, we're listening to Valerie by the Zootons. Yeah, exactly. 13 years old and I have a crush on Heather, who sits next to me in geography.

The world has fallen in love with Jessica Simpson again. Heather, if you're listening, get in touch. It's about science. Look, get in touch, but a hundred times or more, okay? Yeah, exactly. So, going back to 2006, and this is Harvey Mansfield's book, Manliness. Now, if you know anything about Harvey Mansfield,

you would know about Manliness. Well, basically, Harvey Mansfield just likes to write like translations of comments on translations of Machiavelli, where he likes to sort of imagine that Machiavelli was a secret liberal instead of an aggrieved poster. He's essentially like David... He's basically like, what if David Brooks had an academic career?

So, in his new book, Mansfield states that manliness can be defined as confidence in a situation of risk, and that women innately don't like to compete, are risk averse, less abstract, into emotional. And so, he can make a scientific definition of what manliness is on the basis of what he imagines women do. That seems very normal. That seems like the action of a guy who fucks.

Absolutely. Definitely seems like the writing of someone who has confidence in a situation of risk, right? Yeah. Please don't do not criticize me, or you hate science. Exactly. But that's the thing. You can see that it's true because it's all around you,

and you shouldn't ask why it might not be true, or what forces might be producing it, because you just take the world as a priori, just right in front of you, and then your job is to sort of work out the implications of whatever it is that you've seen without really asking why any of it's there. It's weird that confidence in a situation of risk

is consistent with not understanding the risk. Or with being full, like... Yes, you're being very, very, very manly by standing in the middle of no man's land and just looking around you. I think you could do like a fascinating, like Nazi style experiment with a guy like this, where you just like from birth lock him in a room

where all he has access to is like the worst hentai. And so he grows up to a point where he has to be like, the huge glistening titties. What does that mean for the human condition? He never questions why huge glistening titties. People are watching my channel again. Indeed.

And like this is the thing. That's the sort of more political self-serious version, but it also happens with the I fucking love science people as well. It's like when Neil deGrasse Tyson, who we've returned to, says something like, quote, in my day, the word awesome was reserved for things like curing polio and walking on the moon, not food or TV shows.

Well, actually, it wasn't really your day, was it, Neil? Because the day is actually just the Earth turning on its axis of 23.5 degrees. We haven't actually found a way to isolate whose day it is. Yeah, exactly. But what he means is that, oh, the stupid taste of ordinary people are stupidly holding humanity back.

And if only they would get less stupid, like me, then humanity wouldn't be in such a bad position because two and a half men is the thing that caused the sovereign debt crisis. I'm imagining a horrible Rick and Morty episode where they go to a planet entirely of Neil deGrasse Tyson's. Well, that would just make everybody who loves Rick and Morty just come immediately.

Wait, Neil deGrasse Tyson's wife gives birth to their child and she's like, Neil, look, isn't she amazing? No, she's not amazing. She's a baby. She's merely the product of human reproduction. So far, she's achieved absolutely nothing. Coming back in 25 years when she's achieved something. Please don't ask me about my sexual harassment allegations. That's ideology, not science.

Exactly. All of those things that people are saying is ideology is because they hate science. But it's also a profoundly stupid point because, again, it just takes the world as it is. What would this be? This would be like thrown-ness, right? That you're thrown into the world

and you're just looking at it and you're sort of taking it as it is and you're saying, those stupid people like the stupid shows and I know the science would do the smart thing and so that's why society's bad. But it misses the point that network executives not people decide what goes on TV and that's based on what network executives

decide people might like. It's a worthwhile hypothesis that both you, Neil deGrasse Tyson and network executives just have a thinly veiled contempt for ordinary people and so make degrading and stupid culture for them to consume. I guess. Is this something he tweeted? Yes.

I mean, Whomst among us has not tweeted something ill-considered? If it wasn't Neil deGrasse Tyson, I'd be more willing to be slightly forgiving, but I think that's really revealing of the point of view that society is dumb and I'm smart and if only society were smart like me, then we wouldn't have all this politics. It's basically, I mean, it reminds me,

I'm not gonna say it absolutely is, but it reminds me of the sort of statue-twitter argument in the sense that the people who show up to basically denigrate anything that they perceive as not being canonical and that anything that's popular or anything that espouses something that isn't related to Greco-Roman sculpture, for example, or renaissance paintings is somehow low culture

and it's always ties into a weird white nationalist kind of conception of the world, but invariably, it's weird pedantry and it's weird kind of one-upmanship about a perception of cultural value. I'm not surprised that Neil deGrasse Tyson, the patron saint of being pedantic online, is gonna espouse stuff that's adjacent to that

but it's weird to see where that goes and you'd like to think that someone at least who you'd hope sees the ripple effects of what he says in the real world would be like, okay, well, maybe this is a little bit simplistic, but invariably like, I don't know, he's made a brand out of being this person who is gonna be pedantic and is gonna come in

to remind you that actually it's not amazing that this video happened where a cow made a sound, a man screaming because actually amazing things are like a nuclear reactor or something like that. You were watching Fleabag, that's cool. Lowers glasses, theatrically. I was just reading about the moon landing. They're all Wikipedia guys.

He made a show himself and he made Cosmos. Yes, he did, where he flies a spaceship into a bear's vagina. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, if he's made Cosmos and he's put like a lot of... What happened to the bear? Was it okay? No, it didn't.

He's made Cosmos, which like had a big production value. You'd obviously put a lot of effort into it. So I'd probably be pretty upset as well if I'd made a TV show like that and then like, I don't know, family guys like beating him in ratings and stuff like, yeah, I can understand why he'd be like a little bit better about that.

That's one show that would also fly a spaceship into a bear's vagina. It is family guy. That is the real horseshoe theory. The important thing to remember and why you should never take any of these people very seriously is I think something Ollie has revealed, which is they're just posters.

They're posters who want faves. But just they want to be clapped at to be like goody good boys. But additionally, like, I think we can ask... Unlike this podcast. Yes. No, no. We want to be booed, baby.

We welcome your hatred. Is your hatred pure? The views of the hosts of Trash Feature do not represent the views of Ollie Thorne. Yes, they do. So I think that we cannot... We can't talk about this. We can't move on from this without talking

about what the political goal is of scientism and why scientism is so popular, right? And I think you can't understand that without understanding the so-called squared hoax, which in brief was a group of academics, James Lindsay, Peter Bogasi, and Helen Pluckrose, who essentially wrote 20 nonsense papers and then submitted them to various gender studies

or post-colonial studies journals. And then when, I believe, three of them were actually published, they said, aha, this proves that all queer theory or anything vaguely post-modern is just nonsense. And that's where the term grievance studies was coined. And there was an enormous amount of triumphalism over this that ignores a lot of the realities of what goes in

to say publishing a paper in an academic journal frequently that you pay to be considered for. But there was a lot of triumphalism over this because I think their goal is the annihilation and discrediting of any field of study that is not merely concerned with finding a new atom. Because why do these people do what they do? I mean, I don't know, maybe these three

had just a lot of personal resentment for humanities departments where no one wanted to sit with them at lunch. But it was celebrated because it reassured people in power that all these things that were questioning their nice, tidy, positivist reductionist worldview and where all of their hierarchies were basically natural was actually illegitimate

and that they were safe from criticism. In effect, they were creating a safe space. Whoa. 3 out of 20 is not even that many. No. I can't do maths at all. But that's like, what's three times five? They?

Yeah. God, I hope that's right. Didn't Coolette get hoaxed recently as well and by their own logic, or whatever, get totally discredited? Yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah, that's happened a couple of times, actually.

Yeah, where people have invented fake stories and they've been playing a snicker because they sound really racist and really objective. And so, of course, Coolette wants to publish that. It's almost as though Coolette will publish anything. Well, it's this, but the reason that it's being celebrated and what a lot of, sort of, let's say,

right-wing media was able to do with this is they were able to say, ah, look, that obscure academic journal published a paper on why dogs having sex in the park is bad. And so therefore, therefore we don't have to listen to, like, trans people, when they tell you they are who they say they are,

or we don't have to listen to, like, Black Lives Matter when it says that police killings aren't exactly, you know, normal and fine. No, possible, it's for trans people. Well, as a trans people, I do have to say that listening to us is very annoying, but you still have to do it, so... But it's also one of these things where it's like

entire governments have oriented their economic policy around the Laffer curve, and somehow that doesn't discredit the concept of economics as a discipline, but because apparently some not particularly highly regarded journals publish stuff that you describe as pay-to-play, Riley, like that somehow discredits the discipline,

like that seems to me like a weirdly right-wing argument to say, see, it's all made up based on a few nitpicked things that we've managed to cobble together. It's also a very institutional view of how philosophy progresses, which, you know, a lot of philosophers are guilty of as well, but they say, oh, because the journals published it,

the whole discipline is rotten. Whereas, you know, actually, if you look into the history of something like queer theory, and perhaps some handsome person is making a video about queer theory at this very moment, they will be out when this podcast comes out. Robert Downey Jr. Yeah, if you look into the history of something like queer theory, it's been shaped quite a lot by people in the streets

and by activists. So this idea that philosophy only comes from the academic ivory tower and people who are out of touch, it's just not true at all. Fee-for-street philosophy? Yeah. Well, I mean, Jess, but yeah. Is it possible that, because as we know,

often when, for example, I imagine that a lot of these academics who are really head up about academic disciplines they don't consider worthy are quite a lot like the sort of people who write articles in publications such as The Spectator in terms of general outlook. And if there's one thing we've learned about spectator articles is that they usually begin with a parody paragraph

that states what they consider to be a ridiculous position, which is usually completely correct. And if the article ended there, it would be correct. So it's possible to me that these academics may have actually accidentally written good papers by like trying to go, oh, what would they think? Oh, the racism is bad.

Yeah, ridiculous. Yeah, we'll write that one down. Yeah. What else? Oh, yeah, you can't determine people's performance by measuring their skulls. Yeah, we'll put that one in there. Yeah.

They'll publish this. They'll look like such fools. It's becoming an award for it. No, no, no. Get the Nobel Prize. Socastically accepting a Nobel Prize because you like have made significant steps of racism, but you were making the jack-off motion

the whole time. Right, but that's one other thing before we do move on, right? I think a lot of these people, one of the reasons, like Ollie, why I think they're so in love with the official philosophy, the institutionalized philosophy, is that they're in love with definitions.

Philosophy is what happens in the philosophy department. Science is what happens in the science department. Anything that happens in the bar is socializing. Anything that happens on the street is just a distraction, etc. It's the same thing where like, it's ultimate, like the dumbest person who argues like this is Ben Shapiro, where if you say something like,

well, actually a mother's right to terminate a pregnancy, blah, blah, blah, is this, he just responds to the dictionary definition and is like, well, that handles that, as though the dictionary is just in these categories, they're just naturally occurring and meaningful. Well, the dictionary was handed to Moses on stone tablets, is that right?

Let's say hypothetically, you're kind of 100. Let's say you're kind of 150, how are you going to do that? How are you going to do that? You get to 100 and then you run out of stuff that's not science, so you have to start using science. Yeah, I mean, Ben does moral philosophy at speed, like he's on moral speed, just philosophy, like Ben is a man who does philosophy in public,

in my opinion, poorly, and I think I can prove that. Get a room, Ben. And I think I have proved that on my show, but like, it's interesting that he has disdain for things like that when, again, like he's doing it and the same is true of Jordan Peterson as well, whom I've also talked about on my show, a man who tries to do philosophy

and I think one of the things I regret about my episode I did in Jordan Peterson is that I went into incredible debt about like how Petersonian ontology is just like very contradictory. I think I've gone into more depth on Jordan Peterson's philosophy than perhaps anyone else has ever, including him. Whereas actually, you don't actually need to go that deep to realize that it's very silly. Accidentally improving Jordan Peterson's philosophy.

On the one hand, and Gizek on the other, where you decide to take all of this at face value and do like a detailed philosophical inquiry, and Gizek takes one look at him and is just like, yeah, I will just sit here and make fun of him. The 10th anniversary edition of 12 Rules for Life like thanks me in the forward. No, this is the one thing I didn't want to happen.

I'm listening to this man who cannot win an argument with a two-year-old. Who is that? Romanian Gizek. Romanian Joker Gizek. We live in a society. I want to close out with a reading. An example of some beautiful scientism that I found recently.

And the times, of course. Where else would it be? Victorian times were happiest study of national mood finds. Which Victorians did they interview for this particular study? They measured their brain with the brain fulfillment machine that Sam Harris invented. They accidentally only read half of the book The Tale of Two Cities. We didn't have time. It was awesome.

Direct quote from Charles Dickens. That's first-hand witness testimony right there. Are you suggesting that when you say he read half the book, you mean that it was cut at some point lengthwise? Yes, reading half of every sentence. So, here's how they did it. Maybe it's just because people love swabbing chimneys. To do 23 and me on a chimney.

On June 22nd, 1887, the Times reported how 26,000 children had, quote, disported themselves from noon to Dewey Eve in Hyde Park to Mark Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. That's such a fauntal Royass quote. I have to distort myself from noon to Dewey Eve. Damn, we used to be so fancy back in the day. We were so happy.

And according to an analysis of the national mood over the past 200 years, it was the most content Britain had been. Do we want to know how they carried out the analysis? Damn, back in the day, we were content, and now all we're doing is content. We don't know what else to say. It does.

Do we want to know how they measured the skulls of people in the past? Yes. Researchers at Warwick and Glasgow University. Sorry, Alice. And at the Allen Turing Institute in London tracked the happiness of four countries, Britain, the US, Italy, and Germany,

by analyzing the tone and language used in millions of books and newspaper articles. Springtime for Hitler. Well, that's the strange thing. It would find that, yes, it was probably happier because it was just tone. Damn, it sucks when they don't analyze all the libraries of actual Victorian literature

written by actual Victorians. It was just, I'm dying of rickets over and over and over again. It's an absolutely miserable time. All work and no play is exactly what I'm doing. Exactly. The study suggests that the 1880s, when the British Empire was approaching its peak,

was the country's most optimistic decade. The most big hair decade of the 19th century. It's very, very telling that they say the 1880s when the empire was at its height, rather than the 1880s when anything else was going on. Many, many other things were happening in the 1880s, but it's very, very interesting they say, people were happy when the empire was up.

Yeah, they were. But reorganize the Republic into the first galactic empire. We all remember the hits of the 1880s, like, Mao Mao Mao, how do you like it? I mean, to be fair, that's the 1950s. Yeah. That's actually good.

We must have been doing something to them in the 1880s, but yes, the rebellion was in the 1950s. Extremely angry lesses from Kenya. We were defo in Kenya in the 1880s. For sure. Doing some shit. Some musical number is a shame about these sepoys or something like that.

But they're saying like, yeah, in the 1880s, everyone was happy. And anyway, we're just going to look at what was happening to make them all happy. Oh, wait, sorry, bull, bull, bull. How do you like it? How do you like it? There we go.

This is the reductionist view of history that works, is I don't know what the British empire was doing at this time, but it was evil. So, I don't know if... So, famously, there was a significant amount of migration from what was called the Pale of Settlement, basically, like the Jewish areas of the Russian empire because of pogroms in the late part of the 19th century.

And a lot of people who were fleeing persecution in the Russian empire went to Western Europe. Many came to the United Kingdom, and many also went onward from the United Kingdom or from elsewhere in Europe to the United States. Now, famously, New York City, which was like the hub of immigration from across the Atlantic, which was really shitty. Like, there's a whole tenement museum in New York City

about how fucking awful it was at this time. Many... I've read accounts of this that people who emigrated from the UK and then to New York, basically Jewish refugees, commented on, wow, New York tenements are awful, but nothing could be as fucking bad as Whitechapel. Because it was so shitty here that even, like,

the horrible, like, nightmare cholera slums of New York City, like, God, what a paradise compared to fucking London. I'm glad that in 140 years' time, there was going to be this guy called Jeremy Colbin. I don't know. So, here's the thing, Nate, it does sort of respond to this. The researchers admit that the era was also notable for high rates of disease, child labor,

inequality, and poor housing. But spirits were bright. Oh, let's look at the ghost. The ghost of Christmas. So, it says, spirits, among the reading classes, at least, were bright. Oh, it does say that. Okay, so that's not just me noticing. That's because the only people who were writing books were named

like Geoffrey of Nantesworth and had, like, fucking huge palatial estates where their families had owned land for hundreds of years. I mean, like, come on. And they were happy. Yeah, like, they were very happy. If you weren't happy in the 1880s, you didn't read a newspaper.

You read a series of, like, pictographic pamphlets about which sex worker had been murdered that week. I have had the most droll, Sabbath, enjoying oneself upon the croquet lawn. I molested a peacock. What a fantastic, what a fantastic decade it's been for the common man. Nate, your point about New York being more liveable.

I think it was just a more whimsical city because you still had Tammany Hall and, as discussed previously, like, shaving hobos to have them vote a second or third time. Whereas here, we just had, like, serial murders and cholera. Exactly. You know, it was all, like, little boys and caps calling you mister as they tried to sell you a newspaper. Exactly, whimsy.

Yeah, it turns out one of their friends, though, he was robbing you of all your nickels. Oh, damn. So, the researchers used a database of 14,000 words which were scored at a scale of one to nine according to how happy they were. Why one to nine? I don't know.

Who uses that scale? It's it to keep it as economic. Philosophy, who cares? Nine, nine is the maximum happy. I know, get into the times, get in touch. I will design you a happiness scale that goes to 10 if you pay me 20,000 pounds. Well, we can make people just 10% happier, just like that.

Yeah. This scale goes to 11. Oh, interesting, they used the word chartreuse. That's a four. Chartreuse is four out of nine happy. That's what this article is saying. What does chartreuse even mean? It's a color.

Oh, okay. And also a liquor. But all the fancy people know that color. It's not what chartreuse used to be called when it was fancier. Even fancier, we can make it fancier. Exactly. It's a liquor exclusively for old Carthusians.

Of course, you know the noun for fucking chartreuse. But what color is the tie, Riley? I don't fucking know. I've never worn a tie. That's not true. That's not true. I've worn many ties. Listen, Riley's wearing three ties right now.

I only wear ties around my head because I'm a party animal, but I'm still at the office. Because you're a business ninja. So, allowances were made, of course, for shifts in the meaning of certain words and habits of the public, which I assumed they did, was, well, we're going to have chartreuse be a four out of nine happy in 1880,

but we're going to take it down to a two by 1950 to allow for a shift in the mood of the public. I'm just imagining Wittgenstein reading the sentence, allowances were made for the changing of meaning of words, just like, oh, my God, I've wasted my whole life. You can just allow for that. You can just do it. And it still works.

Oh, God. I have to completely reverse my entire career again. Wittgenstein kicking down his machine that measures happiness that goes to a scale of 14.5 for some reason. The results of our study, and don't forget, the study only looks credible if you're stupid because it involves numbers. Remember, the study involves assigning words a number

out of nine for how happy they are. Suggest only a weak link between economic productivity and happiness. We are richer than our Victorian forebears, but less cheerful. I also have another really funny thing to point out, which is that there was recently, I want to say it was in London,

but they discovered the body of somebody who had basically been killed in the medieval period. And what they think was probably a murder. But one of the comments they made was that his teeth were pretty good because people used their jaws for stuff and you didn't have access to sugar. And so the development of people's mouths weren't that bad. Whereas the absolute worst period of time to have teeth

in human history, apparently, was the 18th and 19th century in London because it just fucking sucked and people's teeth rotted out of their head because of so much sugar and zero access to dental care. And so it's one of those things that's like, I mean, they literally just had people's mouths rotted out because of like horrendous fucking lack of hygiene, but like everyone was happy.

They were really happy. Because they got fucked up on gin. Like, what was it? William Hogarth. Everyone just liked doing that. So what the conclusion that's drawn here, and this is by Thomas Hill from the University of Warwick says, what's remarkable is that national subjective well-being,

all of those words doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting. Damn, power lifting world champions there. Is incredibly resilient to wars. Unless you die. Or even unless you just have a recent memory of the fact that like, I don't know, some of the largest protest movements in history happened to protest the Iraq war. I can't imagine why a study of newspapers would reveal

that newspapers were being optimistic about the war. I can't imagine there's any reason why a national newspaper would write optimistic messages about a national conflict. It's because they're written democratically by everyone. Everyone votes on each war based on the hour of nine. People were so happy in the 1880s because only one guy survived the third Afghan war and he was just like, oh, it was brilliant. And so as a result, no complaints.

Everyone they could survey from that war was really happy about it. Okay, so there's two things that are going on here. First of all, they're assuming that what makes people happy and doesn't, you can only correctly assess by doing weird analyses of the stuff they write and not by what they literally state they do and don't want. Correct. Also, there's like some fucked up logical sleight of hand here because you go back to the bit where they say like,

we are richer than our Victorian forebears. Well, we're richer in general because we now have a higher GDP and our society for all of its faults is more equal than Victorian society. A very high bar. Time of recording. The people that they are studying, i.e. people who wrote newspapers, are much richer than the average person is now in 2019.

Milo, Milo, Milo, Milo. They've given you a bunch of numbers and you're just doing grievance studies at them. I should publish you in a journal, one of 20. And they're now using this argument as to like, well, this is why we should go back to the Victorian era and make everyone poor again? I mean, I don't think they're-

Apart from the rich. I think what they're saying, they're not necessarily saying that, but what they are trying to sort of advance is the argument of people are actually happier when they're in war and don't really need to be rich. Exactly. I mean, we've all read that poem, Adult Chat to Coromest, which is about how awesome a war is.

What's remarkable is that national subjective well-being is incredibly resilient to wars. Even temporary economic booms and busts have little long-term effect. We can see the American Civil War and our data, the revolutions of 48 across Europe, the roaring 20s and the Great Depression. But people quickly return to their previous levels

of subjective well-being after these events were over. Our national happiness is like an adjustable spanner that we open and close to calibrate our experiences against our recent past. We have to open and close spanners. Like a skull caliper. Yeah, it's a caliper, but for how happy you are. And you can tell because it opens from one to nine

and you know how open it is based on what words people are using. I mean, like, if there were a nuclear war tomorrow, assuming it didn't strike London, then the next day's newspaper, Front Page, would have enormous font announcing the war and then there would be a skybox on top of about 10 best soups for autumn. And it's like, yeah. So the idea that you're going to look at this

and be like, oh, well, they were just so happy because what was in newspapers? I mean, newspapers exist so that they can sell them. Like, they're not just going to be like, wow, someone died of cholera and it fucking sucked. I mean, like, I also assume that that was so common as though to not warrant notice. Yeah, that was the Victorian vibe check.

It was just dying of cholera. But it also just completely fails to account for like what actually happens. And she's like, oh, it's really weird. Like, you know, after World War II, you know, all the economies picked up and there were like jobs for everyone. It's like, yeah, because we had to pre-build all the shit

that was fucked and half the people were dead. Like they seem to look at this weird shit as though it was like, like the war was just this crazy adventure that everyone went on. Like people got home from the Holocaust and were like, oh boy, what a doozy. You're not going to believe what happened to me back there. Like that's not how it happened.

It's like a drill tweet. It's like, yes, several million people died, but also a lot of people got to work on time. So who can say whether it's good or bad? Exactly. And indeed, noticing that we've gone, we've gone for a pretty good amount of time. I might sort of bring us around to our close,

which is that this, not just this view of science, but this way of understanding reality, of processing what's going on around you. I mean, where you can just reason from whatever is in front of your face. This is where we get like the Liz Truss argument that development of society equals more delivery. Like things are easier for me,

so they must be better overall. And it's the intellectual equivalent of Homer Simpson trying to find Lincoln's gold in the White House by counting four score and 20 from an arbitrary starting location. Yes. I agree. I fully fucking agree.

Like fulfilling that data that night. Yeah. I just look at it more that... I don't know. I'm going to defer to Ollie's to take on this because you're the actual philosopher. I'm just a dude who wants to use fancy words, but this just seems like...

I mean, you're a philosopher. This seems like a weird exercise in Sophistry for the point of basically trying to encourage people and say, even if it gets bad, it's actually good because when it was bad, it was good too. And to me, like the... I don't know. We've had a lot of complaints on here

about British journalism, but this just strikes me as the kind of thing that... I'm not necessarily talking about the journalism. I'm talking about the whole run of what we've been talking about today, where all of this, just the random counting, the counting of stuff and the assigning it of values, just the decision that, well,

if you're arguing against what I'm doing by counting, you must be against the concept of counting, obviously. It all rolls up politically into the world of more delivery equals more development equals more freedom equals better because it is unable to challenge that sort of long upward march of progress narrative that ultimately has given us, like,

I don't know, a slightly faster phone. It basically implies that the people who get crushed by this underfoot during this ostensible forward momentum just don't matter enough to warrant mention. Precisely. Exactly. Deliverer is science. I mean, many people may have died in the Great War,

but do you hear them complaining about his newspapers afterwards? You don't. I mean, a guy might have died bringing me my delivery meal, but I got fed and that was very good and I really liked it. And you're going to write lots of, like, positive little words on that nine-scale thing

about your delivery experience. Absolutely. You're going to use nine out of nine positive words. The only source we have on the First World War is by the guy who owns the Vickers machine gun factory. Wall-to-wall best four years of my life, champs. It was the best of times. Nothing follows. Best of times. Stop.

So, I think with all of that being said, I can say this was a real nine out of nine experience, haven't you, Ollie Thorn? And that, where should people check you out online? My name is Ollie Thorn. I run a YouTube channel called Philosophy Tube. If this show comes out on the 29th, then I will probably just have had an episode out on Queer Theory,

which is also a musical and which also contains a personal revelation about my life. So, you may like to check that out. I think it's my best work yet. Love a personal revelation. Oh, you're going to love this one. And here's another personal revelation. You can get a second episode of this show every week

for $5 a month on Patreon. And that's science, folks. That is quite literally science. That number doesn't go above 100, so you know what? It actually... You can understand it without wearing a coat. But the total amount of money we make is above 100. Yeah, so you need to be a scientist to understand that,

but not to do the $5 thing. You don't need to be a scientist to do that one. No, just do that and be reassured in the knowledge that somewhere a graph is going up because of you. Exactly. All right, everybody, let's get those graphs up and we'll see you later in the week. Bye.

Thanks for watching.