Abandon Ideology | Gad Saad - The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast #S4E6

[Music] hello everybody today i have the distinct pleasure of speaking with dr gad sod a friend of mine a colleague an early supporter of mine when those were few and those were few and far between when when all the publicity emerged initially surrounding me and the videos i made regarding uh bill c-16 in canada gad was one of the first people to interview me and he took i would say a substantial risk in doing so um we stayed in contact since then doing some podcasts together we've done each other's podcasts um and we spoke together at a free speech rally in toronto and that's a couple of years ago now three years ago i think yeah three tumultuous years to say the least gat has recently written the parasitic mind how infectious ideas are killing common sense and a number of other books as well which you can see arrayed behind him the consuming instinct a contributor to the evolutionary basis of consumption if i remember correctly no the sole author of that one but the other one is the edited book right and that's evolutionary psychology in the behavior in the business sciences exactly yeah so we're going to talk about god's book today but a variety of other things too so and i think the conversation will naturally tend towards the topics that are outlined in the book and in any case um so let's start with that you talk about infectious ideas anyways i should say it's very nice to see you guys thank you very much for coming on to this podcast youtube jordan it's uh it's so nice to have you back in the public sphere i can speak for millions of fans we've missed you and i'm delighted to be with you well i tell you for me it's a lifesaver man to be able to come back after being sick for so long and and to be able to jump back into doing this i i'm certainly not at my peak by any stretch of the imagination but it's such a relief that i still have a life waiting to be picked up and that i can ask people to come and talk to me and they will and i can start communicating with people again it's literally a lifesaver and i mean that most sincerely so i really do appreciate you coming to talk to me and i hope we get a long ways today there's lots of things i want to talk to you about um you talk about infectious ideas and let's talk about that a little bit um your book so i'm gonna i'm gonna take a bit of a critical stance to begin with i think your book concentrates a lot on infectious ideas on the left and of course that's been a particular preoccupation of mine in recent years although i was i spent a lot of my career dissecting infectious ideas on the right because i was very appalled as any reasonable person would be about what happened i mean it's ridiculous to even have to say it but i was preoccupied in some sense what by what happened in germany in the 1930s and the 1940s and the infectious ideas that possessed that entire community that entire country and the devastating consequences of that and so it's obviously the case that infectious ideas can emerge across the political spectrum maybe even in the moderate center but certainly on the right but your book concentrates almost solely on the excesses the ideological excesses of the left and i'm wondering what you think of that as a scientist sure uh it's a great point that you raise and i actually address it uh very early in the book where i argue that it is absolutely not the case that it's only one side of the political aisle that could be parasitized by bad ideas and idea pathogens the reason why i specifically focus on uh ideas stemming from the left is not because this is a political book but rather because i operate and you you've operated your entire life within an ecosystem called the you know academia and within the context of academia the idea pathogens that are most likely to proliferate are those that are stemming that are being spawned by leftist professors this certainly does not apply that the right could not itself be parasitized by countless other idea pathogens so it's not because i was trying to take a political position but rather as any epidemiologic epidemiologist would do or and or i call myself a parasitologist at the human mind i happen to be focusing on idea pathogens that are the ones that define my daily reality exactly okay i i can i can sympathize with that because i would say as well that as a an academic i haven't felt the pressure of right wing conspiratorial theories in relationship to my work but i would say this is this is something that has happened is that i started to talk about political ideas because of the consequences of left-wing ideological thinking in the academy and what happened as a consequence of that was that i was branded as you have been as a right-wing thinker an alt-right thinker maybe even a nazi because i was called out on more than one occasion and i think that might be true of you too although you make a more a less believable nazi than me i would say given your background um a less plausible nazi let's say so i found that when i objected to the to the excesses of the left the people who sprang to my defense tended logically enough to come from the right and and there were tendrils feelers out from even the more radical right to see if because i was opposed to the radical left that i might be a supporter say of the radical right and what was interesting about that to me watching that is that you tend to think better of people when they come to your defense and so i noticed uh what would i say it's it's hard to keep your centrist bearings when you go after one side of the political equation and you're befriended at least in part by the other or the or the the feelers are there and so i'm wondering what you think about that do you think that have you shifted more towards the right as a consequence of of yeah opposing the radical left i don't think so because oftentimes people ask me you know you never espouse a particular position about your political tribe and and i answer them not to be coy or to be evasive i tell them that's because i truly don't believe in sort of an all-encompassing label that defines my political positions there are many positions on which you would think oh this is a conservative position so for example when it comes to open door policy or aka immigration policy then you would think i'm quote conservative when it comes to you know capital punishment for predatory serial pedophiles i have absolutely no moral restraint in the idea of executing someone who's raped five children that would be considered a conservative idea when it comes to social issues then you would think of me as extremely socially liberal and quote progressive so so really my own personal tribe is one that is defined by examining each individual issue and then proposing a position based on sort of universal foundational principles so the fact again that i criticized largely the left says nothing about my ability to have most of my friends be leftist by me believing in many of their uh positions it's simply that you know it's the way i like to compare it is if i were an endocrinologist who specializes in treating diabetes it would be silly for someone to come to me and say but wait a second dr sad how come you're never exploring melanoma don't you know that melanoma is a deadly disease well of course it is i just happen to be someone who is studying diabetes that doesn't state anything about the dangers of the endless other panel plea of diseases that might afflict human beings and so i think it's really very much in that spirit that i wrote this book it's not at all that the right cannot be parasitized take for example anti-scientific reasoning often times my leftist colleagues will pretend as though it is the right who engages in anti-science rhetoric now let's take a discipline that i'm in evolutionary psychology well when it comes to the rejection of evolution it is much more likely to be people on the right who reject evolution when it comes to evolutionary psychology in particular though it's a lot more likely to be people on the left who reject you know evolutionary arguments for to explain for example sex differences so it's not that one party is anti-science more than the other is that each party has its own anti-scientific lenses and myopia okay so i guess these questions are particularly germane given what happened in washington in the last two weeks and what still might happen in the next few days we'll see there's i've noticed recently among friends and family members as well as more broadly in the culture that there is a pronounced increase in the degree to which conspiratorial theories in particular and paranoid theories are propagating on the right i think now i don't know much about keelanon i've been out of the loop and and i i should be more on top of that but i'm not but i do know that that it's popular and pervasive and i do know that trump's claims to have won the election are supported by a network of conspiratorial thinking i was speaking with douglas murray about that and you tell me what you think about this this is sort of the conclusion of our discussion was that so trump claims that he lost it or that he won the election and and actually that he wanted by a substantial margin that's the claims as far as i've been able to uh understand them and then to believe that this is what you have to believe you have to believe that the electoral system in the united states is broken to the degree that fraud is widespread and pervasive and of sufficient magnitude to move an election you have to believe that people as close to trump as mike pence have become part of a conspiratorial network or have been shut down by people who are able to put sufficient pressure on him you have to believe that the judiciary in the united states which i believe has ruled something like 60 times against his claims and one time in favor you have to believe that it's become uncontrollably corrupt even on the republican side even when those republicans were nominated by trump or trump's people and you have to believe that the only person standing on moral high ground through all of this has been trump and each of those propositions seems to me to be have a low probability of truth and their combined probability is infinitesimally small so but there's widespread support for trump's claims that he that he won the election and was robbed of it and so so someone who is looking at your book especially from a leftist perspective would say well not only are you concentrating on the wrong side of the equation with regards to clear and present danger but um the the omission of analysis of conspiratorial thinking on the right shows a blind spot that is of sufficient magnitude to threaten the stability of society now not to say that you're personally responsible for that by any stretch of the imagination but um see i've really been thinking about this because i have felt as an academic that the greatest threat to my scientific inquiry into my free inquiry has clear and to my students for that matter has clearly come from the left but well but there's no doubt that conspiratorial thinking is on the increase on the right i mean i knew that was going to happen five years ago and that's partly the sorts of warnings that i was trying to put out that with enough cage rattling the rate was going to wake up and but well i'll let you comment on that so to go back i guess to to to reiterate what i said earlier but in a slightly different way uh i think what you're this the the argument that you're making is that the susceptibility to believe the s there's actually now a a psychometric scale which perhaps you're aware of that actually measures susceptibility to bs uh it's actually published i think in the journal called judgment and decision making and there's been several follow-ups of that work uh so really looking at the our ability to believe nonsense using a psychometric scale uh all all i think that you are demonstrating and the question that you're posing is that uh the capacity for people to think in non-critical ways is not restricted to a political aisle the left could be anti-scientific the right can be anti-scientific the left can succumb to idea pathogens the right can succumb to idea pathogens in chapter six of my book i talk about a particular cognitive malady which i coined as ostrich parasitic syndrome i think ostrich parasitic syndrome is something that all people can succumb to by the way not only the left and the right can succumb to ostrich perisic syndrome being highly educated and otherwise intelligent does not inoculate you from many of these uh cognitive distortions and and and you know irrational ways of thinking so you would typically think oh well you know while professors who are in the business of you know critically thinking would be the ones who might be immune from this and meanwhile as i described in the book the ones who spawn all of this nonsense are typically professors so again to reiterate i truly don't think that it is a political statement to argue that people can think irrationally i simply chose to focus on the left because as you said uh that's the world that i inhabit that's the though the dangers come from those folks now that doesn't mean that listen i in 2017 when you and i finally appeared uh at that event in uh in toronto i had received because of what had happened with that journalist where she wasn't invited and so on and do you remember all that stuff jordan sure faith goldie faith goldie exactly i can remember where he made the extraordinarily difficult decision to not include her on the free speech panel right and more than that i mean we sort of advised the organizer what our thinking was and then ultimately it was up to her since she was the one who was organizing well by simply stating that the and the number of death threats that i had received and i and without being able to absolutely know for sure i would predict that based on the demographic profile of many of the people who were sending me death threats they would have been much more on the right right so again it's not as though i am negating the possibility that people on the right could could be absolutely insane in their own unique and flowery ways all i'm doing though in the book is i am focusing on diabetes without rejecting the fact that melanoma could also be important so again it's really i hope that people don't read the book as though it is a political treatise it just so happens that that's the ecosystem that i reside in so what do you think the metaphor buys you i mean you're a biologically oriented thinker you talk about ideas in some sense as if they're analogous to life forms and and so let's explore that metaphor a little bit what do you think that buys you in terms of explanatory power well what it does is it contextualizes uh the the fact that many people slowly walk into the abyss of infinite lunacy in complete complicity so let me let me give you a couple of analogies because again in part it's just uh prose that allows me to draw a powerful analogy but i actually do think that there are literal comparisons in using those biological metaphors so take for example the spider wasp the spider wasp looks for a spider to sting rendering it zombified it's still alive it then carries this much larger spider into its uh burrow and then it uh while the spider is fully alive but zombified it lays an egg and then the offspring will eat the spider the spider in vivo well i argue that political correctness is akin to the spider wasps sting right it zombifies us into being complicit in our silence leading us slowly into the bureau of infinite lunacy so you could view it as just powerful writing rhetoric or literally the equivalent a mimetic form equivalent of what happens in biological systems take now when i talk for example about parasitic ideas well in neuroparasitology what you typically study is how a particular parasite will end up making its way to the brain of its host altering its neural circuitry so that then the host will engage in behaviors that are maladaptive to it but adaptive for the parasite and so when i was trying to come up with a powerful way of explaining why do people hold on and get infected by these alluring parasitic ideas i thought aha the neuroparasitologic parasitological framework is the ideal framework to try to explain why otherwise supposedly rational people could completely become parasitized by insanity right why it would be that the lgbtq community could suddenly become in favor of queers for palestine as that this is an actual group so it's queers for paris time for palestine but down down zionist pigs so tel aviv is one of the most welcoming spots for the lgbtq community and so if i'm a member of that community it would make rational sense for me to be supporting a system a political system a country where i could live in safety and freedom but instead i walk around saying queers for palestine that sounds parasitic it sounds like the idea the framework that would cause me to say queers for palestine rather than tel aviv is not a good position to hold because as someone who comes from the middle east i can tell you that uh lgbt community in gaza or the west bank are not usually embraced with infinite warmth so this is why i thought that using a neuro person's logical model would be really apt in describing why we become so intoxicated with these bad ideas okay so a parasite takes over a host so that the parasite can replicate so it has an interest in the outcome so to speak or it acts like it has an interest in the outcome that might be a more accurate way of of thinking about it so in order for that parasite metaphor to hold true the ideas the ideas which are acting as parasites would have to have an interest in the outcome so are you presupposing that ideas i guess you're presupposing like dawkins that ideas compete in a darwinian fashion and those that are the best at taking over their hosts are the ones that propagate the the difference between and i of course i i cite dawkins work uh yes memetic stuff the difference between say a mimetic approach and the approach that i take in the book is i guess twofold one memes uh can be negatively valenced they could be neutral and they can be positively valence right so memes a jingle if i start humming a jingle and you happen to hear me you know humming that jingle jordan then you might hum it as well and so my mimetic jingle has now infected your brain so that could be a completely neutral beam or it could be a positive beam so first the the valence of memes can be you know all possible options whereas the the parasitic idea passages that i'm speaking of i'm implicitly if not explicitly stating that they are negative that's one number two uh the mimetic framework operates as though they're viral whereas um there's a unique element to it being parasitic right so pathogens can be viruses they could be bacteria they could be parasites they could be fungi and so i am the reason why i call them idea pathogens is because pathogen is a broader term that can incorporate viral infection or parasitic infestation so there are a few of these types of nuances between the approach that i'm taking and the one that uh dawkins took so many years ago so a parasite tends to make a host act in ways that that aren't that good for the host exactly and it seems to me that that's potentially where the metaphor breaks down here because it see it also seems to me that people who are pushing these ideas forward or who are allowing themselves to become possessed by them which is a metaphor i've used actually gain as a consequence so they're working they're working for the same purposes as the parasite and so then you have to wonder if that actually constitutes a parasite i mean the people who are pushing a given ideological position or even a given theoretical position hypothetically benefit from pushing that position as a consequence of the effects it has on their success within their broad community sorry if i interrupt no i think i would look at it as does the parasitizing of your mind result in the proliferation of the idea pathogen the idea pathogen doesn't care about you know your reproductive fitness so for example take islamophobia if i can if now i'm speaking as a uh you know islam islamic supremacist if i want my society to become more islamic or not my society the west to be more islamic spreading islamophobia as a narrative is certainly very good so if i could convince a lot of people in intelligentsia in the humanities and the social sciences that it is islamophobic to ever criticize anything about islam so if the islamophobia memeplex to use dawkins term or i would call it more of an idea pathogen if i can parasitize enough minds to repeat this then that is islamophobia memplex by its spreading from brain to brain has an ultimate goal of creating greater islamic islamization of the west i don't care about the reproductive fitness of the humanities professor who is spreading that islamic islamophobia idea pathogen do you follow what i mean so yeah well but it might be to your benefit if you actually did enhance the function of your host if by being parasitized by the idea pathogen it improves the reproductive fitness of the host yes or in or in this situation maybe the the ideological or the academic status of the host because then the ideas could be spread more rapidly that it certainly does right so if if we can create an echo chamber where we could then spread that idea pathogen more readily as happens like in the in the academic ecosystem that's perfect but the reality is the reason why i like the term parasitic rather than mimetic is because by having so go back to the example of queers for palestine by having someone from the lgbt community fighting hard against islamophobia and fighting hard against the zionist pigs and so on and it is actually detrimental to my reproductive fitness i mean or never mind my reproductive fitness my survival right being someone who is a member of the lgbt community and standing up for a system that would be brutal and repressing me is not exactly a good rational strategy to pursue and yet i pursue it precisely because i have been infected by a parasitic idea pathogen you follow what i'm saying all right well i follow it but it doesn't it doesn't explain to me exactly the motivation for putting the idea forward you know because the idea the idea isn't literally hijacking the nervous system of its host in the same way that the parasitic wasp that you described hijacks the nervous system of the spider like there's no direct there's no direct uh well there is connection between the ideas and and the motivations of the host and so i guess that's partly i'm striving to understand that yeah so i mean in the sense that the parasitic wasp is actually causing a neuronal alteration a direct neuronal alteration that causes the spider to become uh zombified you're right but ultimately you know not to to be too reductionist ultimately everything that we do including our ideas could be translated to neuronal firings right right but you have to hopefully you'll be able to specify that mechanism so so that leads to well i mean i i'm not suggesting that you should have pushed your research to the point where you could specify the neural mechanisms but it does open up a problem i would say maybe the problem would be what you see in some sense in the continual debate between right and left might be construed in the terms that you're using as a constant battle between proponents of the claim that one set of ideas is parasitical well the other set isn't and so for example people who object to a biological definition of sex or gender would claim that the reason that that the person who puts that claim forward has been parasitized by an idea in your parlance and i think this is actually quite close to the claim that is made um but that the true reason for the claim so the true the true motivation for the claim is is something operating behind the scenes is that the person who's making the claims is uh bolstering their position of power or maintaining their position in the status quo or attempting to put down another group but mostly for the purposes of maintaining the status quo within which they have an interest so they're actually not putting forth an idea that has any objective validity but but being possessed in some sense by an idea that has a function similar to the function that you're describing so how do you using this metaphor how do you protect yourself or protect even the entire critical game where ideas are assessed from degenerating into something like claim and counter claim that all the ideas that are arguing are nothing but or that are competing or nothing but parasites so at first i'm going to here maybe surprisingly be more charitable in uh attributing a cause to the people who originally espoused and spawned all those idea pathogens and so when i was looking at all those pathogens and by the way let me just mention them very quickly for your viewers who may not have yet read the book so post-modernism would be the grand daddy of all idea pathogens cultural relativism identity politics biophobia the fear of using biology to explain human affairs militant feminism uh you know critical race theory each of these is an idea pathogen so as i was trying to think of some common thread that runs through all these ideal pathogens very much like if i were an oncologist i may be someone specializing in pancreatic cancer which is very different than melanoma and yet of course all cancers at least share the one mechanism of unchecked cell division right so even though they might manifest themselves and project through different trajectories there is some consilient commonality across all cancers and so i was trying to look for a similar synthetic explanation for what do all these idea pathogens have in common and here's where i'm going to be charitable i think that these idea pathogens start off from a noble place and they start off from a uh a desire to pursue a noble cause but regrettably in the pursuit of that noble cause then they end up then they meaning the the proponents of those idea pathogens end up willing to murder truth in the service of pursuing that otherwise noble goal right so for example if we take equity feminism most people who are going to be watching this show are probably equity feminists i'm an equity feminist and if i can speak for you i bet you're an equity feminist which means basically what we are you know men and women should be equal under law under the law there should not be any institutional uh sexism or misogyny against one sex or the other so the christina huff summer position so we can start off with that being a great idea right well we could even push that a little bit further and say that if we had any sense we'd want the the sexes to be open up to equal exploitation so to speak because everybody has something to offer and that only a fool would want to restrict half the population from offering what they have to offer even if he was driven by nothing but self-interest fair enough great and so the problem then arises when militant feminism comes in they argue that in the service of that original goal and the desire to squash the patriarchy and the status quo and so on we must now espouse a position that rejects the possibility that men and women are distinguishable from one another not better not worse but there are evolutionary trajectory that would have resulted in recurring sex differences that are fully explained by biology and by evolution while militant feminists will reject that and hence they'll have they'll suffer from biophobia another idea pathogen in the service of that original noble goal so think first i'll just do one more if i may cultural relativism the idea that who you know there are no human universals each culture has to be identified based on its own merits and so on again it starts off with a kernel of truth it seems to make sense the gentleman who first espoused this franz boaz the anthropologist out of colombia was trying to uh stop the possibility that people might use biology in explaining differences between cultures and so on and therefore and justify them that way exactly and right the biologists would say this is how it is and therefore that's how it should be exactly so in the service of that original noble goal they then end up building edifices of evidence for the next 100 years where the word biology is never uttered right i mean and that's been my whole career right which is i go into a business school and i look at organizational behavior and consumer behavior and personnel psychology and all of the other panoply of ways that we manifest our human nature in a business context and never do we ever mention the word biology well how could you study all of these purposes of important behaviors without recognizing that humans might be privy to their hormonal fluctuations to me it seems like a trivial trivially obvious statement to most economists this is hearsay what does what the hormones have to do with the economy so again you start off with franz boaz having a noble cause but then it metamorphosizes into complete lunacy in the service of that original noble goal so i think if i were to look for a consilient explanation as to why all these idea pathogens arise it's because they start off with a kernel of truth with a noble cause but then they metamorphosize into [ __ ] all right so here's another way that they might be conceptualized as parasites too um imagine that the academy has built up a reputation which is like a reputation is like a storehouse of value in some sense so you get a good reputation if you trade equitably with people and then your ability to trade equitably is relatively assured in the future right you'll be invited to trade and so reputation is like a storehouse in some sense now academia at least in principle or the intellectual exercise has built up a certain reservoir of goodwill which is indicated by the fact that people will pay to go to universities to be educated and the hypothesis there is that the universities have something to offer that's a practical utility of of sufficient magnitude so that the cost is justifiable you go to university and you come out more productive and the reason you come out more productive is because the intellectual enterprise that the university has been engaged in has had actual practical relevance and you you might justify that claim by pointing to the fact that um the technological improvements that have been generated in no small part by raw research have radically improved the standard of living of people everywhere in the world and some of that's a consequence of pure academic research a fair bit of it pure scientific research now what happens is that other ideas come along that don't have the same functional utility but have the same appearance and so they're not so much parasite they don't so much parasitize individuals let's say as they they they parasitize the entire system the system has has built up a reputation because it was offering solutions of pragmatic utility even training students to think clearly and to assess arguments clearly and to communicate properly has tremendous economic value if you do it appropriately because that means they can operate more efficiently when they're solving problems now but once that system is in place with its academic divisions and its modes of proof and all of that it can be mimicked by um by systems that that perform the same functions putatively but don't have the same pragmatic uh they don't have the same history of demonstrating practical utility well let me give you an example um the idea of peer review a peer review works in the sciences because there's a scientific method and because you can bring scientists together and you can ask them to adjudicate how stringently the scientific method was adhered to in a given research program but then you can take the idea of peer review and you can translate it into us a field like let's say sociology and you can mimic the uh academic writing style that's characteristic of the sciences and you can make claims that look on the surface of them to have been generated using the same technologies that the sciences use but all it is is a facade yeah and it's the so that's where the it's that it's at that level where the parasitic metaphor seems to me to be most appropriate and so so let me let me that you raised a great point uh so a couple of things to mention here number one i i reside in a business school it's and if i were residing in an engineering school i would probably say the exact same thing that i'm about to say which is the idea pathogens that i discuss in the parasitic mind have simply not proliferated in the business school and in the engineering school for exactly the reasons that you began enunciating at the start of your of your of the current comment right because those disciplines are coupled with reality i cannot build a good economic model using postmodernist economics i cannot build a econometric model of consumer choice that literally that predicts well you know how you know that develops an ai model that learns what i should prefer on amazon using feminist glaciology so i cannot build a bridge using postmodernist physics so because those disciplines are intimately coupled with reality it becomes a lot more difficult for their epistemology to be parasitized by idea patterns yes okay okay so so now this brings up some questions about exactly what constitutes a claim to truth and and i think engineering is actually a really good place to start because scientists often claim and i've had discussions with sam harris about this a lot and we never did get to the bottom of it partly because it's too damn complicated but you know i tend to adopt a pragmatic theory of truth even in the scientific domain and what that essentially means is that your theory predicts the consequences of a set of actions in the world and if you undertake those set of actions and that consequence emerges then your theory is true enough so what what it's done is it's just demonstrated its validity within that set of predictions now whether it can predict outside that's a different question hopefully it could it would be generalizable but it's at least it's true enough to have predicted that outcome and so in engineering and i would say also in business maybe not in business schools but certainly in business in engineering and you build when you build a bridge there's a simple question which is does the bridge stand up to the load that it needs to uh it needs to be resistant to um and if the answer to that is yes then your theory was good enough to build that bridge now maybe you could have built it more efficiently and maybe there's a more uh you could have got more strength for less use of materials and time that's certainly possible but there is that there's the bottom line there that's that's very very close and in business it's the same thing which is part of the advantage of a market economy is that your idea can be killed very rapidly and that's actually an advantage because it helps you determine what a valid idea is in that domain and what a valid idea isn't and it does seem like the closer that disciplines in the universities have adhered to the scientific methodology the more resistant they have been to these parasitic ideas in your terminology we should go over again exactly what those ideas are right um just just so that everybody's clear about it when i start with post modernism since this is one that you've uh tackled all so many times yeah you want to define it and do you want to uh let's let everybody know exactly what we're talking about at its most basic level post-modernism begins with the tenet that you know there is no objective truth that we are completely shackled by subjectivity we're shackled by a wide range of biases and so to argue about absolute truths is silly and so maybe okay so so sorry let me add a bit to that so we can flesh it out so the post-modernists also seem to claim and i'm going to be as charitable as i possibly can in this description because i don't want to build up a straw man um they're very very concerned with the effect that language has on defining reality yes and the french postmodernist thinkers in particular seem to have come to the conclusion that reality is defined in totality by language there's no getting outside of the language game there isn't anything outside of language so that's where they differ would be exactly that right deconstructionism language creates reality is exactly what you just described correct right and it's it's a weak theory in some sense because it doesn't abide by its own principles so for example and this is one of its fundamental weaknesses as far as i'm concerned is that daradah says that but then he acts as if and also explicitly claims that power exists right right right and so that language so if you're building realities with language the question arises of why you would do that and the answer seems to be for the post-modernists is that it's power and that's a quasi-marxism in right right okay so you do you think that that seems fair don't you think what would someone who was a post-modernist agree with that definition uh i mean yes the the problem though is that postmodernism allows for a complete breakdown of reality as understood by a three-year-old it is a form of this is why by the way in the book i i refer to it as intellectual terrorism and i don't use these terms just to kind of come up with poetic prose i genuinely mean so i i compare post-modernism to the 911 hijackers who flew planes onto buildings uh i i argue that the postmodernists fly buildings of [ __ ] into our edifices of reason and maybe if i could share a couple of personal interactions that i've had with postmodernists that capture the extent to which they depart from reality may i do that sure and then we'll get back to elucidating the list of ideas that you've you've defined as as parasitic fantastic so in 2002 and i think this story might be particularly relevant to you jordan because of course you you know you broke through in the in the public conscience because of the gender pronoun stuff well you'll see that this 2002 story was prophetic in predicting what would eventually happen so in 2002 one of my doctoral students had just uh defended his dissertation and we were going out for a celebratory dinner it was myself my wife uh him and his date for the evening and so he contacts me before the the we you know we go out for the dinner and he kind of gives me a heads up and he says well you know my date is a graduate student in cultural anthropology radical feminism and post-modernism kind of the holy trinity of [ __ ] and so i basically the reason why he was telling me this is he's basically saying hopefully please be on your best behavior let's not yes and you recount this in the book yeah okay so yeah that's okay no go ahead i'm just letting everybody know yes yes exactly and so uh i said oh yeah don't worry i'm you know i get it i get you this is your night i'm gonna be on my best behavior of course that wasn't completely true because i couldn't resist trying to at least get a sense what this woman what her positions were so at one point i said oh i hear that you are a postmodernist yes do you mind so i'm an evolutionary psychologist i i do believe that there are certain human universals that serve as kind of a a bedrock of uh similarities that we share whether we are peruvian nigerian or or japanese do you mind if i maybe propose what i consider to be human universal and then you can tell me how that you don't think that that's the case because absolutely go for it is it not the case that within homo sapiens only women bear children is that not a human universal so then she she scoffs at my stupidity at my narrow mindedness at my misogyny says absolutely not no it's not true that women bear children she said no because in some japanese tribe in their mythical folklore it is the men who bear children and so by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm that's how you you know keep us barefoot and pregnant so once i kind of recovered from hearing such a position i then said okay well let me take a less maybe less controversial or contentious uh example is it not true from any vantage point on earth sailors since time immemorial have relied on the premise that the sign sun rises in the east and sets in the west and here jordan she used the kind of language creates reality the derida position she goes well what do you mean by east and west those are arbitrary labels and what do you mean by the sun that which you call the sun i might call dancing hyena exact words i said okay well the dancing hyena rises in the east assets in the west and she said well i don't play those label games so the reason why this is a powerful story that i continuously recount and hence included in the book is because she wasn't some you know psychiatric patient who escaped from the psychiatric institute she was exactly aping what postmodernists espouse on a daily basis to their thousands of adoring students when we can't agree that only women bear children and that there is such a thing as east and west and that there is such a thing as the sun then it's intellectual terrorism all right so back back to the the parasite idea so sure okay no no let's not do that let's finish listing the ideas that you'd describe in your book as as having this commonality so there's post-modernism and we already defined that as the hypothesis that reality is constituted by language right which by the way is a close as a close ally to another idea pathogen social constructivism or if you want social constructivism on steroids which basically and the reason why i add the on steroids because social constructivism the idea that we are prone to socialization no serious behavioral scientists would disagree with that and no avowed evolutionary behavioral scientists would disagree with the idea that socialization is is an important force in shaping who we are okay no no serious intellectual would deny that language shapes our conceptions of reality exactly right so the issue is degree exactly the problem and hence the steroid part is where you argue that everything that we are is due to social constructivity right it's the collapse of a multivariate scenario into a univariate scenario inappropriate collapse and that's by the way i remember your brilliant uh chat with the woman from the british woman that you know i don't remember her name the the the lobster stuff where cathy newman cathy newman thank you where you made exactly that point about multifactorial right where you were she was arguing everything related to the gender gap must be due to misogyny when the reality is that of course there might be 17 other factors with greater explanatory power that explains why we're there but she can't see the world in a in a multifactorial way she only sees it as due to a single look but this might that might have some bearing on on the attractiveness of of certain sets of ideas we might even see if it's the attractiveness of the so-called parasitic ideas i think it was einstein who said that it probably wasn't i probably got the source wrong but it doesn't matter that a scientific explanation should be as simple as possible but no simpler right right and so and and that's an occam's razor exactly with a bit of a modification there and you want to a good theory buys you a lot and and you want your theory to buy you as much as possible because it means you only have to learn a limited number of principles and you can explain a very large number of phenomena so um but there's there's the attraction of the inappropriate collapse of the complex landscape into its simplified counterpart whereby you you rid yourself of complexity that's actually necessary and inevitable what that means is that you couldn't make progress employing your theory in a pragmatic way but if you don't ever test it in a way that it could be killed you'll never find that out right and so it's it's very easy in my new book which is called beyond order i wrote a chapter called abandon ideology and i'm making the point in there that um you it's it's very tempting to collapse the world into um to collapse the world such that one explanatory mechanism can account for everything and that it's a game that intellectuals are particularly good at because their intellectual function enables them to generate plausible causal hypotheses and so you can take something like power or sexuality or relative economic status or economics for that matter or love or hate or resentment and you can generate a theory that accounts for virtually everything relying on only one of those factors and that's because virtually everything that human beings do are is affected by those factors and so that that that that's that pro is it it's that it's the attractiveness of that simplification that accounts for the attractiveness of these is it the attractiveness of that simplification that accounts for the attractiveness of these parasitic ideas so i would say the the idea of you or the the the process of finding a simple explanation for an otherwise more complex phenomenon maybe could be linked to i don't know if you're familiar with the work do you know are you familiar with gert gigarenzer yes right so so if you remember in his work which by the way i love the fact that he roots it in an evolutionary framework yes i like his work a lot great i actually had gone uh many years ago he he his group had invited me to spend some time at the max planck institute and so he's got the idea of fast and frugal heuristics right yes right it's a pragmatic theory essentially exactly because it basically says look uh you know economists think that before we choose a given car we engage in these elaborate laborious calculations because we're seeking to maximize our utility because otherwise we we won't pick the optimal car if we don't engage in utility maximization of course while that's a beautiful normative theory it doesn't describe what consumers actually do because you and i when we chose our last car we didn't look at all available options on all available attributes before we make a choice rather we couldn't we couldn't we used too many exactly we used a simplifying strategy and in the backlash of digerenzer it would be a fast and frugal heuristic because we've evolved i mean if i sit there and calculate all of the distribution functions of what happens if i hear a wrestling behind me that the tiger will eat me before i finish all of the distributions right the calculations all the distributions therefore in many cases when i deploy a fast and frugal heuristic it makes perfect adaptive sense but the downside of that so to go back to your point is that oftentimes i will apply a fast and frugal heuristic when i shouldn't have done so right so for certain complex phenomena my innate pension to want to seek that one causal mechanism is actually in this case suboptimal so knowing when i should deploy the fast and frugal heuristic and when i should rely on more complex multifactorial reasoning is the real challenge here okay so so let's say that a robust discipline offers a set of simplifications that are pragmatically useful okay and then being a um developing mastery in the application of those heuristics boosts you up the hierarchy that is built around their utilization okay so you have a theory that allows you to get a grip on the world and and to do things in the world like build bridges and then if you're good at applying that theory you become good at building bridges and that and because people value that that gives you a certain amount of status and and authority and maybe even power but we'll go for status and authority so you have the simultaneous construction of a system that allows you to act in the world in a manner that is productive but also organizes a social organized society now it seems to me the post-modernists get rid of the application to the world side of things so they really have constructed a language game that actually operates according to their principles of reality it isn't it isn't hemmed in by the constraints of the actual world except in so far as that world consists of a struggle for academic power and endless definitions of reality within the confines of a of a language game i've actually argued exactly for what you just said and speculatively trying to explain why otherwise intelligent people like michel foucault and jacques lacan and jack derida would have espoused all the nonsense that they did and i argue and i think there is some evidence to support my otherwise speculative hypothesis so let me let me put it in colloquial terms so i am one of those post-modernists i'm jacques laca or i'm you know jack derida and i'm looking with envy at the physicist and the biologists yeah and the neuroscientists and the mathematicians getting all the glory they're the hot quarterbacks on campus getting all the pretty uh women right uh why aren't we getting any attention well you know what if i create a world of full profundity where i appear as though i'm saying something deeply profound and meaningful whereas in reality i'm uttering complete gibberish then maybe my pros can be as impenetrable as those hottie mathematicians right they are physicists yep exactly i happen to be generally if you do iq ranking among the disciplines the physicists are the smartest surprise surprise and so so we have physics envy exactly so our physicist envy economists have physics envy and that's why they've created now sub disciplines of economics that are completely mathematical but fully devoid from any real world applications it all stemmed originally from wanting to be accepted in the in the at the table of serious scientists right you're making two arguments now i think i i think one is that in the example you just gave it's actually the thinker that's the parasite right because the thinker wants to ratchet him or herself up the hierarchy and attack who's the thinker is it yes exactly exactly the originators of these of these theories in your in your example they want to accrue to themselves the meritorious status that a true scientist or engineer would have generated yes okay and so and they do that by setting up a false system that looks like the true system but doesn't have any of this real world practicality and they justify that by eliminating the notion of the real world yes and so in that case going back to our earlier conversation in that case the originator of the parasite is actually getting i mean literally reproductive fitness right well but it's also acting as a parasite on a system that's functional but then you could say on top of that now he's allowing ideas to enter his consciousness and some of those will some of those will fulfill the function of producing this faux reality in which he can rise and so it's it's it's a parasitical set of ideas within a parasitical strategy yes yes i like it and by the way for it for this particular parasitic sleight of hand to work it relies actually on a principle that you and i probably teach in sort of the introductory psychology course so fundamental attribution error the the idea of that that people sometimes attribute uh this dispositional traits to otherwise for example situational variables or vice versa right i did well on the exam because i'm smart rather than because the exam was easy right well they jacques de vida being the brilliant parasite that he was he was relying on exactly that and let me explain how if i get up in front of an audience so now i'm jacques de vida or jacqueline and i espouse a never-ending concatenation of of syllables that are completely void of semantic meaning but that sound extraordinarily profound two things can happen the audience member can either say i don't understand what jacques laconte is saying because i'm too dumb and he's very profound or i don't understand what jack lacroix is saying because he's a charlatan who's engaging in full profundity well guess what most people in the audience go for the former right when i when i explained this to my wife by the way she said you know what you just liberated me from a sense of feeling that i was inadequate in college when i did it's really a complicated problem like look my assumption generally is that if i don't it's not always this that i can't read physics papers in physics journals um i'm not mathematically gifted and so there are all sorts of scientific and mathematical claims that i can't evaluate yeah but most of the time when i read a book if i don't understand it i believe that the author hasn't made it clear and and i've read some difficult people i've read jung who's unbelievably difficult um nietzsche uh and neuroscience texts jacques pancep jeffrey gray gray's book neuropsychology of anxiety that bloody book took me six months to read it's a tough book it's 1500 references something like that and an idea pretty much in every sentence very very carefully written but a very complicated book but i hit the i read foucault and i could understand him but i thought most of what he said was trivial of course power plays a role in human behavior but it doesn't play the only role of course mental illness definitions are socially constructed in part every psychiatrist worth his salt knows that it's hardly a radical claim um when i hit lacan and derek i was like no sorry what you guys are saying it's not that i'm stupid it's that you're playing a game you had enough self-confidence in your cognitive abilities that you didn't succumb to their fundamental attribution sleight of hand right so you you're one of those rare animals that said wait a minute he's saying [ __ ] because i know that i can think and i'm not getting him the problem is that most people that are sitting passively in the audience didn't come with your confidence well maybe that's it maybe it's that they also didn't have a good alternative like i was fortunate eh because by the time i started reading that sort of thing i'd always already established something approximating a career path in in psychology in clinical psychology with that with a heavy biological basis and so but if i was a student who had encountered nothing but that kind of theorizing and i i was interested in in having an academic career i might well believe that learning how to play that particular language game was valid and also the only route to success i mean one of the things that really staggers me about the post-modernist types that i read and encounter is that they they have absolutely no exposure to biology as a science whatsoever they don't know anything about evolutionary theory by the way not just post-modernists most social scientists yes certainly the ones walking around in the business school think that biology is some nazi vulgar oh it's the same it's the same in psychology to some degree and but my my sense has been that psychology has managed to steer clear of the worst excesses of let's call it this this degeneration into this abandonment of pragmatic yeah necessity they've managed to steer clear to that to the degree that they're that these sub-disciplines have been rooted in biology it's actually been a corrective it's interesting you say this because i i and i discussed this briefly in the book i gave once uh when my first book was released this this one right here evolutionary basis of consumption uh this is a book where i try to explain how you can apply evolutionary thinking to understand our consumatory nature uh i had given two talks at uh university of michigan the first day on i think it was a thursday i gave uh the exact same thought in the so i was giving the exact same talk in two different buildings two different audiences on one day it was in the psychology department and as for your viewers who don't know university of michigan has consistently always ranked in you know the top three to five psychology departments in the united states my former doctoral supervisor got his phd in psychology in university of michigan uh he actually overlapped with amos versky by the way just a little bit of a historical uh you know uh parenthesis uh so i give the talk on thursday in front of the psychology department and because as you said many of them are neuroscientists biological psychologists and so on they're listening to it and they're like oh yeah this is gorgeous good stuff god love it the exact same talk the next day at the business school which again you would think based on what we said earlier they should be very pragmatic in their theoretical orientations if if something explains behavior then i should accept it but because they were so bereft of biological based thinking jordan i couldn't get through a single sentence it was as if i was metaphorically dodging tomatoes being thrown at me i couldn't get through maybe five or six slides of my talk because they were so aghast and and felt such disdain for my arguing that consumers are driven by biological mechanisms and so business schools can drift away from the real world um i think more effectively than the engineering schools can or or the biologists and you'd hope that the necessity of contending with free market realities would protect the business school to some degree but my experience with business schools well often positive has often been that um the theorizers couldn't necessarily produce a business right well it's interesting because i found that when i give a talk in front of business practitioners then it's always very well received when i give that same talk in front of business school professors depending on how vested they are in their aquari paradigms it either goes well or not so if they are hardcore social constructivists then i am a nazi i am a biological vulgarizer it's it's grotesque what are you talking about with all this hormone business so the practitioners are not vested in a paradigm if i can offer them some guidelines for how to design advertising messages that are maximally effective using an evolutionary lens they go sure sign me up i don't care right right because there's a there's a practical problem to me so everybody has two practical problems we might say broadly speaking one is contending with the actual world so because you have to get enough to eat that that's the world of biological necessity and then there's the world of sociological necessity which is which is produced by the fact that you have to be with others while you solve your biological problems and you can solve your biological problems by adapting extraordinarily well to the sociological world as long as the sociological world has its tendrils out in the world and is solving problems so you can be a postmodernist and believe that there's nothing in the world except language as long as the university is nested in a system that's dealing with the world well enough to feed you and that isn't your immediate problem so you lose the corrective okay so let's continue with the list of let me give you another one that i think you're particularly i think sensitive to it you've probably also opined on so the die religion which stems from identity politics another idea pattern die is the acronym for diversity inclusion and equity that is such a dreadfully bad parasitic idea because it really removes so let's again speak in the context of academia but it could apply to other contacts that apply to hr departments human resources department yes i i think before i start are you you're out of your position at the university of toronto now jordan are you or leave you're on leave okay well maybe it's a good thing because since you were last at the university environment the thai religion has only proliferated with much greater alacrity so that now when you apply to grants for grants uh you know with all of the major grants the equivalent for our american viewers the equivalent of say an nsf grant the national science foundation we have similar grants for people in engineering or social sciences or natural sciences in canada you have to have a a die statement that basically says you know you know what have you done in the past to to advance die causes what will you do if you get this grant if you if this grant were granted to you how would you uphold die principles and there is a colleague of mine a physical that's for sure oh my god exactly so yeah that's unbelievable a physical chemist at one of our mutual alma maters mcgill university maybe i've given too much information here was denied a grant because it didn't pass the die threshold right in other words it didn't matter what was what was the substantive content of his grant application the scientific content he just wasn't sufficiently conv by the way right so so that's an indication that's a situation where the elevation of that particular ideological game that's been elevated over the game of science exactly now that would be fine if they were both games but science isn't a game right it's a technique for solving it's a technique for solving genuine problems science is what allows you and i friends that haven't otherwise seen each other physically for many years to reconnect today and have a fantastic conversation as if we were sitting next to each other it's science that did that it's not postmodernism it's not bugabooga it's not indigenous knowledge now again people think let me mention what i just said now indigenous knowledge yeah people will think oh oh that's racist that's that's that's hateful if i want to study something about the flora or fauna of an indigenous territory where indigenous people have lived there for thousands of years i can defer to their domain specific knowledge because they've lived within that ecosystem so specific knowledge about a particular phenomenon could be attributed to group a knowing more than group b that's what ethnobotanists do exactly but the epistemology of how i study the flora or fauna how i adjudicate scientific issues within that ecosystem there isn't a competition between the scientific method and indigenous way of knowing there is only one game in town it's called the scientific method yeah well that's what knowing is that's the thing that's why there's only one game is because there there's there as soon as we use the word knowing and we apply it in a domain that would pertain to indigenous knowledge and a domain that would pertain to science as soon as we use the uniting word knowledge we're presupposing that knowledge is one thing and knowledge is knowledge has to be something like the use of abstractions to predict and control the use of abstractions to predict and control it's as simple as that and you could be predicting and controlling all sorts of things but you act in a way you act in a manner that is intended to produce the outcome that you desire and the better you are at that the more knowledge you have right so imagine if now in the university you're the dye principles are not only being used to determine who gets a shared professorship who gets a grant uh who do we hire as an assistant professor uh but it's also used to make the point that there isn't a singular epistemology for seeking truth which by the way i would love later to talk about chapter seven in my book where i talk about how to seek truth which is maybe relevant to the many conversations that you and sam have had because i introduced i think a a a very powerful way of adjudicating different claims of truth and we can talk about that as soon as that's the nominological network exactly thank you jordan so we can talk about that if you want later but i mean imagine how grotesque it is to teach students that i mean is there a lebanese jewish way of knowing is there a green eyed people way of knowing is there an indigenous way the distribution of prime numbers is the distribution of prime numbers irrespective of the identity of the person who is studying the distribution of prime numbers isn't that what liberates us from the shackles of our personal identity you know when you can say that and you can still say that people use knowledge to obtain power that's a primary that's a primary post-modernist claim people use knowledge to obtain power now that gets exaggerated into the statement that people only use knowledge to obtain power and that's all that's worth obtaining and then of course that becomes wrong because both of those claims are too extreme but even in science you can criticize science and the manner in which science is practiced by saying well scientists are biased just and self-interested just like all other people and they're going to use their theories to advance themselves in the sociological world yes and and and then you can be skeptical of their theories for exactly that reason but then you also have to point out that well scientists have recognized this and just like the wise founders of the american state put in a balance a system of checks and balances scientists have done the same thing and said well because we're likely to be blinded even when making the most objective claims about reality that we can we're likely to be blinded by our self-interest so we'll put scientists into verbal competition with one another to help determine who's playing a straight game and so the checks are already there and and which which is to say that you can adopt much of the criticism that the postmodernists level against the scientific game without throwing the baby out with the bathwater you still say well despite all that despite the human nature despite the primate nature of the scientific endeavor and the jockeying for position that goes along with it there's still a residual that constitutes progressive um what progressive expansion of the domain of knowledge well so when you're talking about the checks and balances that replication is something that is central to the scientific method that is second nature in physics or chemistry or biology but not in the social sciences is where the social sciences fail now obviously you know about the reproducibility crisis and so on i mean i i yeah i was always less pessimistic than about that than everyone else because i or not everyone but most people because i always assumed that 95 of what i was reading wasn't reproducible and that we were bloody fortunate if we ever got five percent of our research findings right it's still five percent five percent improvement in knowledge if that's an annual rate let's say that's an unbelievably rapid rate of knowledge accrual and if ninety-five percent of it is noise well c'est la vie it it's not a hundred percent but but by the way that's one of the things that i love so much about evolutionary psychology which might allow us to segue eventually into neurological networks is uh many of the phenomena that evolutionists study by the very nature of for example them there being human universals it forces you to either engage in a conceptual replication or rather a direct replication of that phenomenon so for example if you want to demonstrate that facial symmetry is one of the markers that are used when deciding that someone is beautiful i can demonstrate that in 73 different cultures right right we could talk about the normal logical networks a little bit so this is a this is a way to establish let me let me introduce it a bit okay because i think this is a simple way of introducing it what you want to do to demonstrate that something is real you sort of triangulate except you use more than three positions of reference so for example we've evolved our senses are a normal logical network system so we say that something is real if we can see it taste it smell it touch it and hear it now each of those senses relies on a different set of physical phenomena so they're unlikely to be correlated randomly and we've evolved five senses because it's been our experience evolutionarily that unless you can identify something with certainty across five independent dimensions it's not necessarily real but we go even farther than that in our attempts to define what's real outside of our conceptions once we've established the reality of something using our five senses then we consult with other people to see if we can find agreement on the phenomenon and then we assume that if my five senses and your five senses report the same thing especially if there's 50 of us and not just two and that and across repeated occasions then probably that thing is real and a normal logical network is sort of the formalization of that idea across measurement techniques in the sciences yeah i i love the way you use the census to introduce this because there is a term that i didn't i didn't describe this phenomenon in the parasitic mind but i've discussed it in other contexts i call it sensorial convergence so for example there's a classic study in evolutionary psychology by uh two folks that i know well one of whom is a friend of mine randy thornhill where they asked women to rate the pleasantness of t-shirts that were worn by men and it turns out that the one that they judge as most pleasing of olfactorially speaking is the one that is also identifying the guy who is the most symmetric yes so in other words there is sensorial convergence so that two independent senses are arriving at the same final product in this case the product being the optimal mail for me to choose and it would make perfect evolutionary sense for there to be that sensorial conversion so right and in the in the book you introduced the nomological network which isn't discussed very frequently in books that are that are written popularly right that's an idea that that hasn't been discussed much yes outside of specialty courses say in in methodology in psychology i actually think the psychologist came up with the idea of normal logical network so i'm going to describe what you just said and tell you how my approach of neurological answers is if is grander if you'd like so the the folks who came up with the term normal logical networks and psychology were coming up with a homological network of triangulated evidence when establishing the validity of a psychological construct right so you're establishing convergent validity and discriminant validity right uh the the campbell and fisk stuff which by the way if there are any graduate students in psychology what never mind graduate students psychology any any student should read the 1959 paper the multi-trait multi-method matrix by campbell and fix it's one of the most right and there's an earlier one as well by cronbach and meal in 1955. struck validity and psychological tests exactly right and it was part of the american psychological association's efforts to develop standards for psychological testing so it is in fact a method of defining what's real how do you know that something's real and that's what a normal so if each of these validity constructs points to ticking off this this construct as being valid then i've now in a normal logical network sense establish the the veracity of that construct the validity of that construct right and that's actually something a bit different than maybe than a pragmatic uh a proof of truth because from the pragmatic perspective the the theory is evaluated with regards to its utility as a tool this is more more like an analogy to sensory reality exactly if something registers across multiple different methods of detecting it it's probably real detecting it across cultures across space across time across methodologies across paradigms so it's really the grand daddy of nomological networks if cronbach and campbell and fisk were talking in a more limited sense of how do you validate a psychological contra construct this is saying how do you validate the veracity of a phenomenon how do i establish that toy preferences are not singularly socially constructed how can i establish that so maybe right and you do that by studying primates for example you study prime so not here i'm doing a cross species now i'm gonna do across cultures now i'm gonna do a cross time period and then you might look at androgenized versus non-androgenized children and you can look across a variation in hormonal status i am so delighted by how closely you've read the book i am honored my good man uh that you're exactly right and so if one box within my pneumological network did not convince you often times the the data in that one box is sufficient to convince you but if it isn't then by assiduously building that entire network i'm gonna drown you in a tsunami of evidence and so i i consider this an incredibly powerful way to adjudicate between competing by the way this is why in the book i demonstrate that it is not only used for scientific phenomena or evolutionary phenomena by building a normal logical for the question of is islam a peaceful religion or not in other words i could use this this grand epistemological tool to tackle important phenomena even if they are outside the realm of science does that make sense yes definitely well it's a matter of it so to to put it simply it's a matter of collecting evid okay um if you study us if if you approach a phenomenon from one perspective you might see a pattern there but then the question is are you seeing that pattern because of your method or are you seeing that pattern like are you reading into the data or the data revealing the pattern and the answer to that is with one methodology you don't know exactly so what you want to do is use multiple methodologies and and the more separate they are in their approach the better and so when i wrote my when i wrote maps of meaning which was my first book i wanted i was looking for patterns and but i was skeptical of it i wanted to ensure that the patterns i was looking at sociologically and in literature and were also manifest in psychology and in neuroscience and i thought that that was ford that gave me the ability to use four dimensions of triangulation so to speak right and the claim was well if the pattern emerges across these disparate modes of approach it's probably it there's more there's a higher probability that it's real and so a psychology that's biologically informed is going to be richer than one that isn't because your theory has to not only account for behavior let's say in the instance but it also has to be in accord with what's currently known about the function of the brain exactly and that's the approach that you're taking to analysis of business problems exactly and by the way it it is truly a liberating way to view the world because it allows you in a sense to so if you have epistemic humility you're able to say you know if now you jordan you were to ask me hey you know in canada justin trudeau passed the laws legalizing cannabis what do you think of those laws well then i would say you know what i have epistemic humility i simply don't know enough i haven't built the requisite normal logical network to pronounce a definitive position on this on the other hand if you ask me a question on a phenomenon for which i have built my nomological network then i can enter that debate at that conversation with all the epistemic swagger that i'm afforded by the protection of having built that gnomological network so it's a really wonderful way to view the world because it allows me to exactly know when i can engage an issue with with with well-deserved self-assuredness and where and when i should say you know i really just don't know enough about this topic and by the way and someone like you who's of course also been a professor for many years if you establish that epistemic honesty with your students it's actually quite powerful because if an undergraduate student asks me a question and in front of everyone i say wow you really stumped me with that question you know what why don't you send me an email and let me look into it what that does is it builds trust with those students because it's saying this guy is not standing up in front of us pretending to know everything as a matter of fact he was willing to admit that he was stumped by the student of a 20 year old okay so so let's let let me ask you something about that epistemic humility in relate because we want to tie this back you defined a number of um intellectual subfields as included in this parasitic network let's say um under the parasitic rubric and it be reasonable to say that one of the then you're left with a question which is how do you identify valid theories of knowledge from invalid theories of knowledge it seems to me that post-modernism has to deny biological science because biological science keeps producing facts claims keeps making claims that are incommensurate with the post-modernists now it seems to me that a reasonable approach would be to say well the claim can't be real unless it meets the tenets of the postmodernist theory but also manifests itself in the biological sciences it has to do both it can't just do one or the other now maybe that wouldn't work for the biologists but the fact that the postmodernists tend to throw biology out is one of the facts that sheds disrepute on their intellectual endeavor as far as i'm concerned because if they were honest theorists they'd look for what was solid in biology and ensure that the theories that they're constructing were in accordance with that rather than having to throw the the entire science out the window either by omission not knowing anything about it or by defining it as politically suspect and so so i'll introduce here another term i didn't discuss this much in in this book in the parasitic mind but i certainly have discussed it in some of my other words so the the notion of conciliance which is so let me let me introduce this term for for your viewers who don't know it the the term was reintroduced into the vernacular by e.o wilson the the harvard biologist uh who wrote a book in the late 1990s of that title conciliance unity of knowledge so conciliance is very much related to the idea of neurological networks because consilience is basically saying that can you put a bunch of things under one explanatory rubric so physics is more consistent than sociology not necessarily although notwithstanding what you said earlier about the iq of physicists it's not because physicists are smart and sociologists are dumb it's because physicists operate using a conciliant tree of knowledge which by the way evolutionary theorists also do you start with a meta theory that then goes into mid-level theories which then goes into universal phenomena which then generates hypotheses so that the field becomes very organized the problem with postmodernists is that they exist in a leaf node of [ __ ] right it is perfectly unrelated to any consilient tree of knowledge therefore they could never advance anything because as you said earlier they exist within an ecosystem where they reward one another but they can never build coherence right that's why physics and biology and the neurosciences and chemistry are prestigious it's not because they are necessarily more scientific than sociology it's because they take conciliance at heart does that make sense yes it it i mean i think to some degree too that you know you also have to note that the phenomena that physicists deal with are in some sense simpler than the phenomena that sociologists deal with right so the physicists and the chemists and even the biologists to some degree have plucked the low-hanging fruit that's augusto cult by the way who said this right august cult created a hierarchy of the sciences and perhaps because he was a sociologist inclined he he placed sociology at the apex of the sciences precisely arguing what you just said which is it's a lot easier to study the crystallography of a diamond than it is to study the rich complexity of humans within a social system right although it that doesn't make it simple it's still really complicated so so i you know it still requires a tremendous amount of intelligence to be a physicist and to manage the mathematics because although the theories have tremendous explanatory power they're still very sophisticated so okay so i i've been trying to think about this from the perspective of a postmodernist to say well we're making the claim that biology and chemistry and physics all these this multitude of pragmatic disciplines engineering um to some degree psychology and business they're valid enterprises and they need to take each other's findings into account so the post-modernist might say well these variant various disciplines don't take our findings into account and so they're being just as exclusionary as we are right now is that a valid argument no because there are no useful uh findings that they've come up with and if you annoy any please tell me about them i actually challenged are they useful in restructuring society so that it's fairer no why not that's the claim right and no no no no but it's not that straightforward because it's not like so let's let's make the presumption for a moment that these are essentially left-wing theories it's it's the case that it's not the case that the left wing politically has had nothing to offer the improvement of society right you see all sorts of ideas that are generated initially by the left that move into the mainstream that have have made society a more civil place i mean maybe that's the introduction of the eight-hour workday or the 40-hour workweek or universal pension or at least in canada and and most other countries apart from the united states universal health care and i mean almost everybody now presumes that those things are um that they've improved the quality of life for everyone rich and poor alike and and i think i think that that's a reasonable claim is the is the is the are the claims of the post-modernists justified by the political effects of their actions can you give me an example of a postmodernist nugget that had it not been espoused specifically by a postmodernist the world would be a poorer place whether it be practically theoretically epistemologically can you think of one off the top of your head jordan i can only do it generally like in the manner that i just did to say that well it's it's part of it's part of the the the domain of left-wing thought and it's not reasonable to assume that nothing of any benefit has come out of the domain of left-wing thought it's i mean that's a very general it's a very general analysis i'm not pointing to a particular theorem for example right but see take for example in your field of clinical psychology we can say okay cognitive behavior therapy by studying that process and then by testing it using the scientific method in terms of its efficacy in reducing anxiety symptoms in in patients if i say nothing more i've just offered a single example of a valuable insight coming from clinical psychology whether it be theoretical or in the practice of therapy and of course there are many more than that singular cbd example that i just gave it would not be hyperbolic for me to say and maybe i don't know enough about post-modernism but i think i do you can't even come up with one i don't mean you i mean in general yeah no one can come up with a single example as simple as me just enunciating the the value of cognitive behavior therapy at that level you can't come up with one postmodernist insight the only insight that we have is that we are shackled by subjectivity we are shackled by our personal biases and that is true and any human being with a functioning brain could have told you that so do we need to build that kind of criticism has been leveled within fields by the practitioners in those fields many times including by the postmodernist to their field i i i would hesitate to say i would say you know reflexively i would say no because if everything's a language game then why play the post-modernist game you know why does it why does it obtain privileged status in the hierarchy of of truth claims if if if if there's nothing more than the world that's produced by language well i i i think i mean because some of your viewers might be saying well why are they spending so much time on postmodernism and there are other idea practices the reason why actually it's important to talk about post-modernism because it's it's a fundamental attack on the epistemology of truth that's right and that is something we need to point out why that's right exactly right so so i had a a a very good friend of mine who actually happens to be a clinical psychologist also just a lovely guy uh who once asked me very politely he said you know god do you mind if i ask you a personal question i said go ahead he said how come you are such a truth defender and so on and you're perfectly happy to criticize all these leftist idea pathogens very much along the lines of what how you started our conversation today jordan and yet you're not as critical of donald trump's attacks on truth and so let me answer that question here because in a second that's a good one right so trump attacks specific truth statements i have the biggest penis all women have told me that i'm the greatest lover ever there's never been a president who is as great as me i have the biggest audiences at my rallies each of these might be demonstrably false and lies and therefore they are attacks on a particular truth statement that to me is a lot less problematic while it is reprehensible i disagree with any form of lying that is a lot less concerning to me than a group of folks that are devoted to attacking the epistemology of truth okay define that and and define the epistemology of truth so that we can get right down for the body is a way of tackling truth the normological networks that we spoke about earlier is a way of adjudicating between competing statements as to what is true or not those are so the scientific method and and all of its offshoots are ways by which we've agreed that that's the epistemology by which we create core knowledge and then build that front right okay so so let's let's outline that a little bit so so that's that's a really good point i so there are there are degrees there are degrees of assault on truth yes and the more fundamental the axiom that you're assaulting the more dangerous your assault bingo okay so so the non-postmodernist claim so maybe this is the enlightenment claim perhaps is that there is a reality i think it's deeper than that because i think it's that's actually grounded in in judeo-christian christianity and and even and and grounded far beyond that probably grounded in biology itself but it doesn't matter for the sake of this discussion there is an objective world there is a knowable reality yes okay there's a no knowable reality that multiple people can have access to there's a noble reality but our biases and and limitations intellectually and and physiologically make it difficult for us to to know it it's complex and we're limited there's a method by which we can overcome that the method is the nomological method which you just described essentially which is the the use of multiple um lines of evidence yes lines of evidence derived from multiple sources multiple people multiple places across time that enables us to determine with some certainty what that objective reality is that enables us to predict and control things for our benefit beautiful okay and the post the post modernists the postmodern attack is on all of that everything it's that's and that's why now i hope you might agree that it's not too harsh for me to say they are intellectual terrorists because they put these little bombs of bs that blow up the pneumological network that blows up the epistemology of truth right and so you're making a claim even beyond that though in in the book which is and this is the claim that i want to get right to which is that they put forward that theory in order to benefit from being theorists that that benefit accrues to them personally as they ratchet themselves up their respective intellectual hierarchies and gain the status and power that goes along with that and the fact that it does damage to the entire system of knowledge itself is irrelevant that's that's that's that's uh what do you call that damage that you don't mean when you bomb something collateral damage collateral damage right so they're willing to sacrifice the entire game of truth seeking to the promotion of their own individual careers within this within the language hierarchy that that that they've built and by the way that you you hit on a wonderful segue to another i think important point in the book and that is the distinction between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics right deontological ethics for the viewers who don't know if i say it is always wrong to lie that's an absolute statement right if i say it is okay to lie if i'm trying to spare my spouse's feelings that's a consequential statement well it turns out in many cases the ones who espouse those parasitic idea pathogens are engaging their consequentialist ethical system right because what they're saying is if i murder truth in the service of this more important noble social justice goal so be it right whereas if you are an absolutist a deontological you're positing an objective reality even in the domain of ethics well that's another place where the the postmodern effort fails is that it can't help but refer to things that are outside of the language game so by relying on consequentialist ethics and i'd have to i haven't been able to think it through just figure out whether i agree with your claim that the postmodernists tend to be consequentialists it makes sense to me and i think that their emphasis on hurt feelings is an indication of that right never because there's no objective reality you can't sacrifice people's feelings or lived experience to any claim about objective reality but by doing that they elevate the subjective to the position of ultimate authority and you know maybe that's maybe that's part of the driving motivation is the the the desire to elevate the subjective to omniscience exactly and and this is why and so i know you're not mathematically uh you know minded but if i can just divert into my background of mathematics in the book i talk about the field of operations research which is the field where you try to xamaritize if you'd like to to put in axiomatic form the objective function that you're trying to maximize or minimize right so for example when i was a a research assistant when i was a undergrad and a graduate student i worked on a problem called the two-dimensional cutting stock problem so if you have for example rectangles of metal and you get an order to produce 20 x by y sub sheets within that broader metal how should i do the cut as to minimize the waste of metal so operations research is a field that is commonly applied for example in in business problems where you're trying to minimize the queue time that consumers weight or maximize profits right so it's a very very complicated mathematical field applied mathematics field to solve real world problems so now let's apply it to this consequentialist story in the old days the objective function of a university was maximize maximize intellectual growth maximize uh human knowledge today it is on the idea that there was knowledge that was that was genuine there was a difference between forms of knowledge some were better than others some are more valid than others right so that's part of the claim that you can have knowledge at all exactly whereas now the objective function is minimize hurt feelings or it might be maximize learning whilst minimizing her feelings well you know i wouldn't mind that so much if if the claim that feelings were ultimately real was made tangible because then at least we'd have an ultimate reality that was outside of words but you can't say that the world is a construct of words and then say at the same time but there's nothing more real than my subjective feelings like i have some sympathy for that because i'm not sure that there is anything more real than pain all things considered like pain seems really real to me and it's fundamentally subjective and i think that a lot of what we consider ethical behavior is an attempt to minimize pain given its fundamental reality so it's not like i don't believe that subjective feelings are real and important but i'm willing to claim that there is such a thing as real and important and true and so it's so it's it's logically coherent for me to to to to make that claim it's the incoherence of the claims that bothers me well it's part of what bothers me well we should we should probably sum up to some degree because we've been i know i know i but i'm starting to get i'm starting to get tired and and i'm starting to lose my train of concentration and so i don't i don't want to do anything but a top rate job on this let me summarize for a second what we've discussed and then if you have other things to add that we haven't talked about then we can go there so we talked about ideas as parasites and and then we spent some time unraveling what parasite might meant might mean and the conversation moved so that we kind of built a two-dimensional or a two-strata model of paracitation of a parasitical idea there'd be the parasitical behavior of the theorist who puts forth a theory that mimics a practically useful theory in a in in the attempt to accrue to himself or herself goods that have been produced by theories that actually have broad practical utility so there's that and then there's the parasitical idea that serves that function for the person who's using it in a parasitical way okay so and then we talked about um postmodern ideas in particular as examples of that and i guess the one one of the things we haven't tied together there is exactly how the why is it necessary or why has it happened that the ontological and epistemological claims of the postmodernists aid and abet the parasitical function that's that's a tough one like why did they take the the shape they actually took yeah that's i actually i i make an attempt to explain that and let me know if if you buy it so remember earlier i was talking about what are some of the commonalities across the idea pathogens yeah and i said that they they kind of start off with a kernel of truth and they start off with some noble original goal the other thing that i would say which i think answers the question that you just posed is that each of those idea pathogens frees us from the pesky shackles of reality right so in a sense they are liberating right so postmodernism yes liberates me from capital t truth there is my truth there is my lived experience the prefix liberates me from the shackles of my biology and my genitalia so it's the attractiveness of that liberation that that provides the that provides the motive at least in part of the parasite exactly right i if biology is useless i don't need to know anything about it and people do that a lot people do that a lot look social constructivism another one of those idea pathogens frees me from the shackles of realizing that i will never be nor will my son be the next michael jordan because social constructivism as espoused originally in by behaviorism right the the famous quote which i i cite in the book give me 12 children and i can make anyone a beggar or a surgeon or whatever that is basically saying that it's only the unique socialization forces that constrain you in life that don't turn you into the next michael jordan there is nothing a priery that didn't start us all with equal potentiality well that's a lovely message well it's two now you got two messages there is my subjective reality is the only reality that's the first thing and the second thing is socialization can produce any outcome so that's a huge that's a huge exp that's a huge expansion of my potential power right i'm right by dint of my existence and my ability to modify the nature of reality is without without restriction yeah exactly exactly and therefore it is hopeful because it frees me from the shackles of the constraints of reality right i want to believe that any child that i could have produced could have genuinely had an equal probability of being the next albert einstein or michael jordan that's hopeful that's wonderful it's also rooted in [ __ ] right so i think all of these idea pathogens share the the common desire for people to believe hopeful messages that are rooted in nonsense well that's probably a good place to start hey jordan so nice to see you we've been discussing the parasitic mind by gad sod and when was it published uh october 6 of this past year so it's just a bit more than three months how is it doing it's if it's do if you're comparing it to all possible books it's a match smashing success if we compare it to jordan peterson's last book then it's not doing very well so it's life is about i don't want to compare my next book to that book so but it's been doing well eh it's doing very well thank you oh good i'm i'm glad to hear it i'm glad to hear it so do you think we did we miss anything in our discussion well i like what we did but is was the discussion sufficiently complete so that you're satisfied with it i i more than anything i'm just satisfied that you're feeling better that your family's doing well that you're back into this on the saddle and that hopefully will have your voice and i've been trying to hold the fort but having someone like you missing makes it that much tougher so i'm i'm so glad you're back big e hug to you and thank you so much for inviting me jordan thank you it um thank you very much for for talking with me i found it very enjoyable and i i felt that i i got i know something more than i did when i started the conversation which is always the hallmark of a good conversation and um i mean we can dig into these things the things we discussed today endlessly we never get to the bottom of them fully but but maybe a little bit farther with each genuine conversation and and maybe maybe the next when your book comes out you'll be sure to come on my uh show so that we can decide yes well if i if i have the wherewithal and the energy i'd be happy to do that and maybe we can discuss some of the things that where we haven't established any concordance i know that i i'll just i noticed that you had talked admiringly about role theory in the parasitic mind and i kind of and i've noticed before that you're not very fond of the idea of archetypes and i thought without something we could talk about at some point because let's do it i think archetypes are biologically instantiated roles and so it seems to me that we could probably come to some agreement on that front i actually agree with you if we leave it within the biological realm then an analysis of archetypes works well for me when we start introducing a bit of the kind of mythological occultist stuff that regrettably one of your heroes engages in that's when i start yeah well that's something that we could profitably discuss because i i think there's a much stronger biological um well look at it this way god if you imagined imagine a culture imagined an ideal and then imagine that approximations to that ideal people who approximated that ideal were more biologically fit as a consequence they were more attractive which you would be if you embodied a true ideal well so what that would mean is that over time the society would come to evolve towards its imagined ideal yes so that makes a biologically instantiated archetype a very complicated thing because it starts in imagination but it ends instantiated in biology and and no one's ever come up with a real mechanism for that right it doesn't but but that works you you posit an ideal then if you manifest it you're more attractive then the ideal starts to become something that evolution tilts toward so i'm in agreement with everything you said so maybe we won't have much to disagree about yeah well we'll we should be able to clear things up anyways and sometimes that's a good way of resolving disagreements i look forward to adjourning so okay okay god thanks very much hey my pleasure all right bye bye bye [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,474,248

Rating: 4.7837381 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism

Id: 5eBcKlBaaoc

Length: 114min 12sec (6852 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AxePagode]

My favorite quote in the interview.

"Cultural Anthropology, Radical Feminism, and Post Modernism - The Holy Trinity of Bullshit." - Gad Saad

This made me laugh out loud.

[u/letsgocrazy]

This episode was recorded on January 18, 2021

Gad Saad and I discuss, among other topics, ideas as parasites, postmodernism, social constructivism, applying evolutionary thinking to understand our consummatory nature, epistemic humility, nomological networks, the degrees of assault on truth, and more.