{"id":273,"date":"2021-03-19T17:37:29","date_gmt":"2021-03-19T22:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/genr8.pw\/blog\/?p=273"},"modified":"2024-11-09T12:44:47","modified_gmt":"2024-11-09T17:44:47","slug":"transcript-the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast-season-4-episode-6-gad-saad-infectious-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genr8.pw\/blog\/2021\/03\/19\/transcript-the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast-season-4-episode-6-gad-saad-infectious-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"TRANSCRIPT = The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast &#8211; Season 4 Episode 6: Gad Saad: Infectious Ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"525\" height=\"296\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5eBcKlBaaoc?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[START]<br>[Music]<br>hello everybody<br>today i have the distinct pleasure<br>of speaking with dr Gad Saad<br>a friend of mine a colleague an early<br>supporter of mine when those were<br>few and those were few and far between<br>when when all the publicity emerged<br>initially surrounding me and the videos<br>i made regarding uh<br>bill c-16 in canada Gad was one of the<br>first people to interview me<br>and he took i would say a substantial<br>risk in doing so<br>um we stayed in contact since then<br>doing some podcasts together we&#8217;ve done<br>each other&#8217;s podcasts<br>um and we spoke together at a free speech rally in<br>toronto and that&#8217;s a couple of years ago<br>now three years ago i think<br>yeah three tumultuous years to say the least<br>gad has recently written the parasitic mind<br>how infectious ideas are killing common sense<br>and a number of other books as well<br>which you can see arrayed<br>behind him the consuming instinct a<br>contributor to the evolutionary basis of<br>consumption if i remember correctly no<br>the sole author of that one but the other one<br>is the edited book right and that&#8217;s evolutionary psychology<br>in the behavior in the business sciences exactly yeah<br>so we&#8217;re going to talk about god&#8217;s book today but<br>a variety of other things too so and i<br>think the conversation will naturally tend<br>towards the topics that are outlined in<br>the book and in any case<br>um so let&#8217;s start with that you talk<br>about infectious ideas anyways i should<br>say it&#8217;s very nice to see you guys thank<br>you very much for coming on to this<br>podcast youtube jordan it&#8217;s uh it&#8217;s so<br>nice to have you back<br>in the public sphere i can speak for<br>millions of fans we&#8217;ve missed you and<br>i&#8217;m delighted to be with you<br>well i tell you for me it&#8217;s a lifesaver man<br>to be able to come back after being sick for so long and and<br>to be able to jump back into doing this<br>i i&#8217;m certainly not at my peak by any<br>stretch of the imagination but it&#8217;s such a relief that<br>i still have a life waiting to be picked up<br>and that i can ask people to<br>come and talk to me and they will and i<br>can start communicating with people again<br>it&#8217;s literally a lifesaver and i mean<br>that most sincerely so<br>i really do appreciate you coming to<br>talk to me and i hope we get a long ways today<br>there&#8217;s lots of things i want to talk to you about um<br>you talk about infectious ideas and<br>let&#8217;s talk about that a little bit<br>um your book<br>so i&#8217;m gonna i&#8217;m gonna take a<br>bit of a critical stance to begin with i think<br>your book concentrates a lot on infectious ideas<br>on the left and of course that&#8217;s been a<br>particular preoccupation of mine in<br>recent years although i was<br>i spent a lot of my career dissecting<br>infectious ideas on the right<br>because i was very appalled as any<br>reasonable person would be about what happened<br>i mean it&#8217;s ridiculous to even have to<br>say it but i was preoccupied in some sense what<br>by what happened in germany in the 1930s and the 1940s<br>and the infectious ideas that possessed<br>that entire community<br>that entire country<br>and the devastating consequences of that<br>and so it&#8217;s obviously the case that<br>infectious ideas can emerge<br>across the political spectrum maybe even<br>in the moderate center but certainly on<br>the right but your book concentrates<br>almost solely on the excesses<br>the ideological excesses of the left and<br>i&#8217;m wondering what you think of that as a scientist<br>sure uh it&#8217;s a great point that you<br>raise and i actually address it<br>uh very early in the book where i argue that<br>it is absolutely not the case that<br>it&#8217;s only one side of the political<br>aisle that could be parasitized by bad<br>ideas and idea pathogens<br>the reason why i specifically focus on uh<br>ideas stemming from the left is not<br>because this is a political book but rather because<br>i operate and you you&#8217;ve operated your<br>entire life within an ecosystem called<br>the you know academia and within the<br>context of academia the idea pathogens that are<br>most likely to proliferate are those<br>that are stemming that are being spawned by leftist professors<br>this certainly does not apply that the<br>right could not itself be parasitized by<br>countless other idea pathogens so it&#8217;s<br>not because i was trying to take a<br>political position but rather<br>as any epidemiologic epidemiologist would do<br>or and or i call myself a parasitologist<br>at the human mind<br>i happen to be focusing on idea pathogens<br>that are the ones that define my daily reality<br>exactly okay i i can i can sympathize<br>with that because i would say as well that as a<br>an academic i haven&#8217;t felt the pressure<br>of right wing conspiratorial theories in<br>relationship to my work<br>but i would say this is this is<br>something that has happened is that<br>i started to talk about political ideas because of<br>the consequences of left-wing<br>ideological thinking in the academy<br>and what happened as a consequence of<br>that was that i was branded as you have<br>been as a right-wing thinker an alt-right thinker<br>maybe even a nazi because i was called<br>out on more than one occasion and i<br>think that might be true of you too<br>although you make a more a less<br>believable nazi than me i would say<br>given your background um a less<br>plausible nazi let&#8217;s say<br>so i found that when i objected to the<br>to the excesses of the left the people<br>who sprang to my defense tended<br>logically enough to come from the right<br>and and there were tendrils<br>feelers out from even the more radical<br>right to see if<br>because i was opposed to the radical<br>left that i might be a supporter say of<br>the radical right and<br>what was interesting about that to me<br>watching that is that<br>you tend to think better of people when<br>they come to your defense<br>and so i noticed uh<br>what would i say<br>it&#8217;s it&#8217;s hard to keep your centrist bearings<br>when you go after one side of the<br>political equation and you&#8217;re befriended<br>at least in part by the other<br>or the or the the feelers are there and<br>so i&#8217;m wondering<br>what you think about that do you think<br>that have you shifted more towards the right<br>as a consequence of of yeah<br>opposing the radical left i don&#8217;t think<br>so because oftentimes people ask me<br>you know you never espouse a particular<br>position about your political tribe and and<br>i answer them not to be coy or to be<br>evasive i tell them<br>that&#8217;s because i truly don&#8217;t believe<br>in sort of an all-encompassing label<br>that defines my political positions there are<br>many positions on which you would think<br>oh this is a conservative position so<br>for example when it comes to open door policy<br>or aka immigration policy then you would<br>think i&#8217;m quote conservative when it comes to<br>you know capital punishment for predatory serial pedophiles<br>i have absolutely no moral restraint in the idea of<br>executing someone who&#8217;s raped five<br>children that would be considered a conservative idea<br>when it comes to social issues then you<br>would think of me as<br>extremely socially liberal and quote progressive so<br>so really my own personal tribe is one<br>that is defined by examining each individual<br>issue and then proposing a position<br>based on sort of universal foundational<br>principles so the fact again that i<br>criticized largely the left says nothing<br>about my ability to<br>have most of my friends be leftist<br>by me believing in many of their uh positions<br>it&#8217;s simply that you know it&#8217;s the way i<br>like to compare it is<br>if i were an endocrinologist who specializes<br>in treating diabetes it would be silly<br>for someone to come to me and say but wait a second<br>dr sad how come you&#8217;re never exploring<br>melanoma don&#8217;t you know that melanoma is a deadly disease<br>well of course it is i just happen to be<br>someone who is studying<br>diabetes that doesn&#8217;t state anything about the dangers<br>of the endless other panel plea of<br>diseases that might afflict human beings<br>and so i think it&#8217;s really very much in that spirit that<br>i wrote this book it&#8217;s not at all that<br>the right cannot be parasitized<br>take for example anti-scientific reasoning<br>often times my leftist colleagues will<br>pretend as though it is the right<br>who engages in anti-science rhetoric now<br>let&#8217;s take a discipline that<br>i&#8217;m in evolutionary psychology well when<br>it comes to the rejection of evolution<br>it is much more likely to be people on<br>the right who reject evolution<br>when it comes to evolutionary psychology in particular though<br>it&#8217;s a lot more likely to be people on<br>the left who reject<br>you know evolutionary arguments for to<br>explain for example sex differences<br>so it&#8217;s not that one party is<br>anti-science more than the other is that<br>each party has its own<br>anti-scientific lenses and myopia<br>okay so i guess these questions are<br>particularly germane given what happened<br>in washington in the last two weeks and<br>what still might happen in the next few<br>days we&#8217;ll see<br>there&#8217;s i&#8217;ve noticed recently<br>among friends and family members as well as<br>more broadly in the culture that there is a<br>pronounced increase in the degree to which<br>conspiratorial theories in particular<br>and paranoid theories are propagating<br>on the right i think now i don&#8217;t know much about keelanon<br>i&#8217;ve been out of the loop and and i i<br>should be more on top of that but i&#8217;m not but<br>i do know that that it&#8217;s<br>popular and pervasive and i do know that<br>trump&#8217;s claims to have won the election are supported<br>by a network of conspiratorial thinking<br>i was speaking with douglas murray about<br>that and you tell me what you think<br>about this this is<br>sort of the conclusion of our discussion<br>was that so trump claims that he lost it<br>or that he won the election<br>and and actually that he wanted by a substantial margin<br>that&#8217;s the claims as far as i&#8217;ve been<br>able to uh understand them<br>and then to believe that this is what<br>you have to believe<br>you have to believe that the electoral<br>system in the united states is broken to<br>the degree that fraud is widespread and<br>pervasive and of sufficient magnitude to<br>move an election you have to believe<br>that people as close to trump as mike<br>pence have become part of a<br>conspiratorial network or have been shut<br>down by people who are able to put<br>sufficient pressure on him<br>you have to believe that the judiciary<br>in the united states which i believe has<br>ruled something like 60 times<br>against his claims and one time in favor<br>you have to believe that it&#8217;s become<br>uncontrollably corrupt even on the republican side<br>even when those republicans were<br>nominated by trump or<br>trump&#8217;s people and you have to believe<br>that the only person standing on moral high ground<br>through all of this has been trump and<br>each of those propositions seems to me<br>to be have a low probability of truth and their<br>combined probability is infinitesimally small<br>so but there&#8217;s widespread support for<br>trump&#8217;s claims that he<br>that he won the election and was robbed of it and so<br>so someone who is looking at your book<br>especially from a leftist perspective<br>would say well not only are you concentrating<br>on the wrong side of the equation with<br>regards to clear and present danger but um<br>the the omission of analysis of<br>conspiratorial thinking on the right<br>shows a blind spot that is of sufficient magnitude to threaten<br>the stability of society now not to say<br>that you&#8217;re personally responsible for<br>that by any stretch of the imagination but<br>um see i&#8217;ve really been thinking about this because<br>i have felt as an academic that the<br>greatest threat to my<br>scientific inquiry into my free inquiry<br>has clear and to my students for that<br>matter has clearly come from the left<br>but well but<br>there&#8217;s no doubt that conspiratorial thinking<br>is on the increase on the right<br>i mean i knew that was going to happen five years ago<br>and that&#8217;s partly the sorts of warnings that<br>i was trying to put out that<br>with enough cage rattling the rate was<br>going to wake up and<br>but well i&#8217;ll let you comment on that so to go back<br>i guess to to to reiterate what i said<br>earlier but in a slightly different way<br>uh i think what you&#8217;re this the the<br>argument that you&#8217;re making<br>is that the susceptibility to believe<br>the s there&#8217;s actually now a a<br>psychometric scale which perhaps you&#8217;re<br>aware of that actually<br>measures susceptibility to bs<br>uh it&#8217;s actually published i think in<br>the journal called judgment and<br>decision making and there&#8217;s been several<br>follow-ups of that work<br>uh so really looking at the<br>our ability to believe nonsense using a psychometric scale<br>uh all all i think that you are demonstrating and<br>the question that you&#8217;re posing is that<br>uh the capacity for people to think<br>in non-critical ways is not restricted<br>to a political aisle the left could be<br>anti-scientific the right can be<br>anti-scientific the left can succumb to<br>idea pathogens the right can succumb to<br>idea pathogens in chapter six of my book i talk about<br>a particular cognitive malady which i coined as<br>ostrich parasitic syndrome i think<br>ostrich parasitic syndrome is something that<br>all people can succumb to by the way not<br>only the left and the right can succumb<br>to ostrich perisic syndrome<br>being highly educated and otherwise intelligent<br>does not inoculate you from many of these<br>uh cognitive distortions and and and<br>you know irrational ways of thinking so<br>you would typically think oh well<br>you know while professors who are in the<br>business of you know<br>critically thinking would be the ones<br>who might be immune from this<br>and meanwhile as i described in the book<br>the ones who spawn all of this nonsense<br>are typically professors so again to<br>reiterate i truly don&#8217;t think that<br>it is a political statement to argue that people can<br>think irrationally i simply chose to focus<br>on the left because as you said uh<br>that&#8217;s the world that i inhabit that&#8217;s the though<br>the dangers come from those folks now<br>that doesn&#8217;t mean that listen i in 2017<br>when you and i<br>finally appeared uh at that event<br>in uh in toronto<br>i had received because of what had<br>happened with that journalist where she<br>wasn&#8217;t<br>invited and so on and do you remember<br>all that stuff jordan<br>sure faith goldie faith goldie exactly i<br>can remember where he made the<br>extraordinarily difficult decision to<br>not include her on the free speech panel right<br>and more than that i mean we sort of<br>advised the organizer what our thinking<br>was and then ultimately it was up to her<br>since she was the one who was organizing<br>well by simply stating that<br>the and the number of death threats that<br>i had received and i<br>and without being able to absolutely<br>know for sure i would predict that based on the<br>demographic profile of many of the<br>people who were sending me death threats<br>they would have been much more on the right right<br>so again it&#8217;s not as though i am negating the possibility<br>that people on the right could could be<br>absolutely insane in their own<br>unique and flowery ways all i&#8217;m doing<br>though in the book is<br>i am focusing on diabetes without<br>rejecting the fact that melanoma could<br>also be important so again<br>it&#8217;s really i hope that people don&#8217;t<br>read the book as though it is a political treatise<br>it just so happens that that&#8217;s the<br>ecosystem that i reside in<br>so what do you think the metaphor buys you<br>i mean you&#8217;re a biologically oriented<br>thinker you talk about<br>ideas in some sense as if they&#8217;re<br>analogous to life forms<br>and and so let&#8217;s explore that metaphor a<br>little bit what do you think that buys you<br>in terms of explanatory power well what<br>it does is it contextualizes uh<br>the the fact that many people slowly<br>walk into the abyss of infinite lunacy<br>in complete complicity so let me let me<br>give you a couple of analogies because again<br>in part it&#8217;s just uh prose that allows<br>me to draw a<br>powerful analogy but i actually do think that there are<br>literal comparisons in using those biological<br>metaphors so take for example the spider wasp<br>the spider wasp looks for a<br>spider to sting rendering it zombified<br>it&#8217;s still alive it then carries this much larger spider<br>into its uh burrow<br>and then it uh while the spider is fully alive but zombified<br>it lays an egg and then the offspring will<br>eat the spider the spider in vivo<br>well i argue that political correctness<br>is akin to the spider wasps<br>sting right it zombifies us into being complicit<br>in our silence leading us slowly into the bureau<br>of infinite lunacy so you could view it as just<br>powerful writing rhetoric or literally<br>the equivalent a mimetic<br>form equivalent of what happens<br>in biological systems take now when i<br>talk for example about parasitic ideas<br>well in neuroparasitology what you<br>typically study is how a particular parasite<br>will end up making its way to the brain of its host<br>altering its neural circuitry so that then the host<br>will engage in behaviors that are<br>maladaptive to it but adaptive for the parasite<br>and so when i was trying to come up with<br>a powerful way of explaining why do people hold on<br>and get infected by these alluring parasitic ideas<br>i thought aha the neuroparasitologic<br>parasitological framework is the ideal framework<br>to try to explain why otherwise supposedly rational people<br>could completely become parasitized by insanity right<br>why it would be that the lgbtq community<br>could suddenly become in favor of<br>queers for palestine as that this is an actual group<br>so it&#8217;s queers for paris time for<br>palestine but down down zionist pigs<br>so tel aviv is one of the<br>most welcoming spots for the lgbtq community<br>and so if i&#8217;m a member of that community it would make<br>rational sense for me to be supporting<br>a system a political system a country<br>where i could live in safety and freedom but instead<br>i walk around saying queers for<br>palestine that sounds parasitic<br>it sounds like the idea the framework<br>that would cause me to say queers for palestine rather than<br>tel aviv is not a good position to hold because<br>as someone who comes from the middle<br>east i can tell you that<br>uh lgbt community in gaza<br>or the west bank are not usually embraced<br>with infinite warmth so this is why i<br>thought that using a neuro person&#8217;s logical model<br>would be really apt in describing why we become<br>so intoxicated with these bad ideas okay so<br>a parasite takes over a host<br>so that the parasite can replicate<br>so it has an interest in the outcome so to speak<br>or it acts like it has an interest in<br>the outcome that might be a more accurate way of<br>of thinking about it so in order for<br>that parasite metaphor to hold true<br>the ideas the ideas which are acting as<br>parasites would have to have an interest<br>in the outcome so<br>are you presupposing that<br>ideas i guess you&#8217;re presupposing like<br>dawkins that ideas compete in a darwinian fashion<br>and those that are the best at taking over their hosts<br>are the ones that propagate the the difference between<br>and i of course i i cite dawkins work uh<br>yes memetic stuff the difference between<br>say a mimetic approach and the approach<br>that i take in the book is i guess<br>twofold one memes uh<br>can be negatively valenced they could be<br>neutral and they can be positively<br>valence right so memes<br>a jingle if i start humming a jingle and<br>you happen to hear me<br>you know humming that jingle jordan then you might<br>hum it as well and so my mimetic jingle has now<br>infected your brain so that could be a completely neutral<br>beam or it could be a positive beam so first the<br>the valence of memes can be you know all possible options<br>whereas the the parasitic idea passages<br>that i&#8217;m speaking of<br>i&#8217;m implicitly if not explicitly stating<br>that they are negative<br>that&#8217;s one number two uh<br>the mimetic framework operates as though they&#8217;re viral<br>whereas um there&#8217;s a unique element<br>to it being parasitic right so pathogens can be<br>viruses they could be bacteria they<br>could be parasites they could be fungi<br>and so i am the reason why i call them idea pathogens<br>is because pathogen is a broader term that can<br>incorporate viral infection or parasitic<br>infestation so there are a few of these types of<br>nuances between the approach that i&#8217;m<br>taking and the one that<br>uh dawkins took so many years ago<br>so a parasite tends to make a host act in ways that<br>that aren&#8217;t that good for the host exactly and<br>it seems to me that that&#8217;s potentially where the metaphor<br>breaks down here because it see<br>it also seems to me that people who are<br>pushing these ideas forward or who are<br>allowing themselves to become possessed by them<br>which is a metaphor i&#8217;ve used actually<br>gain as a consequence so they&#8217;re working<br>they&#8217;re working for the same purposes as the parasite<br>and so then you have to wonder if that<br>actually constitutes a parasite<br>i mean the people who are pushing a<br>given ideological position or even a given theoretical position<br>hypothetically benefit from pushing that position<br>as a consequence of the effects it has<br>on their success within their<br>broad community sorry if i interrupt no<br>i think i would look at it as<br>does the parasitizing of your mind<br>result in the proliferation of the idea pathogen<br>the idea pathogen doesn&#8217;t care about you<br>know your reproductive fitness so for example take<br>islamophobia if i can if now i&#8217;m speaking as a<br>uh you know islam islamic supremacist<br>if i want my society to become more<br>islamic or not my society the west to be more islamic<br>spreading islamophobia as a narrative is<br>certainly very good so if i could convince<br>a lot of people in intelligentsia in the<br>humanities and the social sciences<br>that it is islamophobic to ever<br>criticize anything about islam<br>so if the islamophobia memeplex to use<br>dawkins term or i would call it more of an idea pathogen<br>if i can parasitize enough minds to repeat this<br>then that is islamophobia memplex by<br>its spreading from brain to brain has an<br>ultimate goal of creating greater<br>islamic islamization of the west<br>i don&#8217;t care about the reproductive<br>fitness of the humanities professor<br>who is spreading that islamic<br>islamophobia idea pathogen do you follow<br>what i mean so<br>yeah well but it might be to your<br>benefit if you actually did enhance the<br>function of your host<br>if by being parasitized by the idea pathogen<br>it improves the reproductive fitness of the host<br>yes or in or in this situation maybe the<br>the ideological or the academic status<br>of the host because then<br>the ideas could be spread more rapidly<br>that it certainly does right so<br>if if we can create an echo chamber<br>where we could then spread that<br>idea pathogen more readily as happens<br>like in the in the<br>academic ecosystem that&#8217;s perfect but<br>the reality is the reason why i like the term<br>parasitic rather than mimetic is because by<br>having so go back to the example of queers for palestine<br>by having someone from the lgbt community<br>fighting hard against islamophobia and<br>fighting hard against the<br>zionist pigs and so on and it is actually<br>detrimental to my reproductive fitness i mean or<br>never mind my reproductive fitness my<br>survival right being someone who is a<br>member of the lgbt community<br>and standing up for a system<br>that would be brutal and repressing me is not<br>exactly a good rational strategy to pursue<br>and yet i pursue it precisely because i have been infected<br>by a parasitic idea pathogen you follow<br>what i&#8217;m saying all right well i follow<br>it but it doesn&#8217;t<br>it doesn&#8217;t explain to me exactly the<br>motivation for putting the idea forward<br>you know because the idea the idea isn&#8217;t literally<br>hijacking the nervous system of its host<br>in the same way that the parasitic wasp that you described<br>hijacks the nervous system of the spider<br>like there&#8217;s no direct<br>there&#8217;s no direct uh well there is<br>connection between the ideas and<br>and the motivations of the host and so i<br>guess that&#8217;s partly<br>i&#8217;m striving to understand that yeah so i mean<br>in the sense that the parasitic wasp is actually<br>causing a neuronal alteration a direct neuronal<br>alteration that causes the spider to become<br>uh zombified you&#8217;re right but ultimately<br>you know not to to be too reductionist ultimately<br>everything that we do including our<br>ideas could be translated<br>to neuronal firings right right but you have to<br>hopefully you&#8217;ll be able to specify that mechanism so<br>so that leads to well i mean<br>i i&#8217;m not suggesting that you should<br>have pushed your research to the point<br>where you could specify the neural mechanisms<br>but it does open up a problem i would say<br>maybe the problem would be<br>what you see in some sense in the continual debate<br>between right and left might be construed<br>in the terms that you&#8217;re using as a constant battle between<br>proponents of the claim that one<br>set of ideas is parasitical well the<br>other set isn&#8217;t<br>and so for example people who object to<br>a biological definition of sex<br>or gender would claim that the reason that<br>that the person who puts that claim<br>forward has been parasitized by an idea<br>in your parlance and i think this is<br>actually quite close to the claim that is made<br>um but that the true reason<br>for the claim so the true the true<br>motivation for the claim is is something<br>operating behind the scenes<br>is that the person who&#8217;s making the claims is uh<br>bolstering their position of power or<br>maintaining their position in the status<br>quo or attempting to put down another group<br>but mostly for the purposes of<br>maintaining the status quo within which<br>they have an interest<br>so they&#8217;re actually not putting forth an idea that has<br>any objective validity but<br>but being possessed in some sense by an idea that<br>has a function similar to the function<br>that you&#8217;re describing so<br>how do you using this metaphor how do you protect yourself<br>or protect even the entire critical game<br>where ideas are assessed<br>from degenerating into something like<br>claim and counter claim that<br>all the ideas that are arguing are<br>nothing but or that are competing or nothing but parasites<br>so at first i&#8217;m going to here maybe surprisingly<br>be more charitable in uh<br>attributing a cause to the people who originally espoused<br>and spawned all those idea pathogens and so<br>when i was looking at all those<br>pathogens and by the way let me just<br>mention them very quickly for your viewers<br>who may not have yet read the book so<br>post-modernism would be the grand daddy of all<br>idea pathogens cultural relativism<br>identity politics biophobia the fear of using biology<br>to explain human affairs militant feminism uh<br>you know critical race theory each of<br>these is an idea pathogen<br>so as i was trying to think of<br>some common thread that runs through all<br>these ideal pathogens very much like if<br>i were an oncologist<br>i may be someone specializing in pancreatic cancer<br>which is very different than melanoma<br>and yet of course all cancers<br>at least share the one mechanism of unchecked<br>cell division right so even though they<br>might manifest themselves and project through different trajectories<br>there is some consilient commonality across<br>all cancers and so i was trying to look for a similar<br>synthetic explanation for what do all these idea pathogens<br>have in common and here&#8217;s where i&#8217;m<br>going to be charitable<br>i think that these idea pathogens start off<br>from a noble place and they start off<br>from a uh a desire to pursue a noble cause<br>but regrettably in the pursuit of that noble cause<br>then they end up then they meaning the<br>the proponents of those idea pathogens<br>end up willing to murder truth<br>in the service of pursuing that otherwise noble goal<br>right so for example if we take equity feminism<br>most people who are going to be watching this show<br>are probably equity feminists i&#8217;m an<br>equity feminist and if i can speak for<br>you i bet you&#8217;re an equity feminist<br>which means basically what<br>we are you know men and women should be<br>equal under law under the law<br>there should not be any institutional uh sexism or misogyny<br>against one sex or the other so the christina huff summer<br>position so we can start off with that<br>being a great idea<br>right well we could even push that a<br>little bit further and say that if we had any sense<br>we&#8217;d want the the sexes to be open up to<br>equal exploitation so to speak<br>because everybody has something to offer<br>and that only a fool would<br>want to restrict half the population<br>from offering what they have to offer<br>even if he was driven by nothing but self-interest<br>fair enough great and so the problem<br>then arises when militant<br>feminism comes in they argue that in the service<br>of that original goal and the desire to<br>squash the patriarchy and the status quo and so on<br>we must now espouse a position<br>that rejects the possibility that men and women<br>are distinguishable from one another not better not worse<br>but there are evolutionary trajectory<br>that would have resulted in<br>recurring sex differences that are fully<br>explained by biology and by evolution<br>while militant feminists will reject<br>that and hence they&#8217;ll have they&#8217;ll suffer from biophobia<br>another idea pathogen in the service of that<br>original noble goal so think first i&#8217;ll<br>just do one more if i may<br>cultural relativism the idea that who<br>you know there are no<br>human universals each culture has to be<br>identified based on its own merits and so on<br>again it starts off with a kernel of<br>truth it seems to make sense<br>the gentleman who first espoused this franz boaz<br>the anthropologist out of colombia was trying to<br>uh stop the possibility that people might use<br>biology in explaining differences<br>between cultures and so on and therefore<br>and justify them that way<br>exactly and right the biologists would<br>say this is how it is and therefore<br>that&#8217;s how it should be<br>exactly so in the service of that original<br>noble goal they then end up building edifices of<br>evidence for the next 100 years where<br>the word biology is never uttered right<br>i mean and that&#8217;s been my whole career right which is<br>i go into a business school and i look<br>at organizational behavior and consumer<br>behavior and personnel psychology<br>and all of the other panoply of ways that we manifest<br>our human nature in a business context<br>and never do we ever mention the word<br>biology well how could you study<br>all of these purposes of important behaviors<br>without recognizing that humans might be<br>privy to their hormonal fluctuations<br>to me it seems like a trivial trivially obvious statement<br>to most economists this is hearsay what<br>does what the hormones have to do with the economy<br>so again you start off with franz boaz<br>having a noble cause<br>but then it metamorphosizes into complete lunacy<br>in the service of that original noble<br>goal so i think<br>if i were to look for a consilient<br>explanation as to why all these idea pathogens arise<br>it&#8217;s because they start off with a kernel of truth<br>with a noble cause but then they metamorphosize into<br>all right so here&#8217;s another way that<br>they might be conceptualized as parasites too<br>um imagine that the academy has built up<br>a reputation which is like a reputation<br>is like a storehouse of value<br>in some sense so you get a good<br>reputation if you trade equitably with people<br>and then your ability to trade equitably is<br>relatively assured in the future right<br>you&#8217;ll be invited to trade and so<br>reputation is like a storehouse<br>in some sense now academia at least in<br>principle or the intellectual exercise<br>has built up a certain reservoir of goodwill<br>which is indicated by the fact that<br>people will pay to go to universities to be educated<br>and the hypothesis there is that the<br>universities have something to offer<br>that&#8217;s a<br>practical utility of of sufficient magnitude so that<br>the cost is justifiable you go to<br>university and you come out more productive<br>and the reason you come out more<br>productive is because the intellectual<br>enterprise that the university has been engaged in<br>has had actual practical relevance and<br>you you might justify that claim by<br>pointing to the fact that<br>um the technological improvements that have been<br>generated in no small part by raw research have<br>radically improved the standard of<br>living of people everywhere in the world<br>and some of that&#8217;s a consequence of pure<br>academic research a fair bit of it<br>pure scientific research now what<br>happens is that other ideas come along<br>that don&#8217;t have the same functional utility<br>but have the same appearance and so<br>they&#8217;re not so much<br>parasite they don&#8217;t so much parasitize individuals<br>let&#8217;s say as they they they parasitize the entire system<br>the system has has built up a reputation because it was<br>offering solutions of pragmatic utility<br>even training students to think clearly<br>and to assess arguments clearly and to communicate properly<br>has tremendous economic value if you do<br>it appropriately because that means they<br>can operate more efficiently when<br>they&#8217;re solving problems<br>now but once that system is in place<br>with its academic divisions and its<br>modes of proof and all of that it can be<br>mimicked by um by systems that<br>that perform the same functions putatively but<br>don&#8217;t have the same pragmatic uh<br>they don&#8217;t have the same history of<br>demonstrating practical utility well let<br>me give you an example<br>um the idea of peer review<br>a peer review works in the sciences because<br>there&#8217;s a scientific method and because you can<br>bring scientists together and you can ask them to<br>adjudicate how stringently the<br>scientific method was adhered to<br>in a given research program but then you<br>can take the idea of peer review and you<br>can translate it into us<br>a field like let&#8217;s say sociology<br>and you can mimic the<br>uh academic writing style that&#8217;s<br>characteristic of the sciences<br>and you can make claims that look on the<br>surface of them to have been<br>generated using the same technologies<br>that the sciences use<br>but all it is is a facade yeah<br>and it&#8217;s the so that&#8217;s where the it&#8217;s that<br>it&#8217;s at that level where the parasitic<br>metaphor seems to me to be<br>most appropriate and so so let me let me<br>that you raised a great point uh<br>so a couple of things to mention here number one<br>i i reside in a business school<br>it&#8217;s and if i were residing in an<br>engineering school i would probably say<br>the exact same thing that i&#8217;m about to say which is<br>the idea pathogens that i discuss in the parasitic mind<br>have simply not proliferated in the business school<br>and in the engineering school for<br>exactly the reasons that you<br>began enunciating at the start of your<br>of your of the current comment right<br>because those disciplines are<br>coupled with reality i cannot build<br>a good economic model using<br>postmodernist economics i cannot build a<br>econometric model of consumer choice<br>that literally that predicts well<br>you know how you know that develops an<br>ai model that learns<br>what i should prefer on amazon using feminist<br>glaciology so i cannot build a bridge<br>using postmodernist physics so because those disciplines<br>are intimately coupled with reality<br>it becomes a lot more difficult for their<br>epistemology to be parasitized by idea patterns yes okay<br>okay so so now<br>this brings up some questions about<br>exactly what constitutes a claim to truth and<br>and i think engineering is actually a<br>really good place to start because<br>scientists often claim and i&#8217;ve had<br>discussions with sam harris about this a lot and<br>we never did get to the bottom of it<br>partly because it&#8217;s too damn complicated but<br>you know i tend to adopt a pragmatic<br>theory of truth even in the scientific domain and<br>what that essentially means is that your<br>theory predicts the consequences of a<br>set of actions in the world<br>and if you undertake those set of actions and that<br>consequence emerges then your theory is true enough<br>so what what it&#8217;s done is it&#8217;s just<br>demonstrated its validity within that set of predictions<br>now whether it can predict outside<br>that&#8217;s a different question hopefully it<br>could it would be generalizable but it&#8217;s at least<br>it&#8217;s true enough to have predicted that outcome and so<br>in engineering and i would say also in business<br>maybe not in business schools but<br>certainly in business in engineering<br>and you build when you build a bridge<br>there&#8217;s a simple question which is<br>does the bridge stand up to the load<br>that it needs to<br>uh it needs to be resistant to<br>um and if the answer to that is yes then<br>your theory was good enough to build that bridge<br>now maybe you could have built it more<br>efficiently and maybe there&#8217;s a more<br>uh you could have got more strength for<br>less use of materials and time that&#8217;s certainly possible but<br>there is that there&#8217;s the bottom line<br>there that&#8217;s that&#8217;s very very close and<br>in business it&#8217;s the same thing which is<br>part of the advantage of a market economy is that<br>your idea can be killed very rapidly and<br>that&#8217;s actually an advantage because it<br>helps you determine what<br>a valid idea is in that domain and what<br>a valid idea isn&#8217;t<br>and it does seem like the closer that<br>disciplines in the universities have<br>adhered to the scientific methodology<br>the more resistant they have been to<br>these parasitic ideas in your terminology<br>we should go over again exactly what those ideas are<br>right um just just so that everybody&#8217;s<br>clear about it when i start with post<br>modernism since this is one that you&#8217;ve<br>uh tackled all so many times yeah you<br>want to define it and do you want to<br>uh let&#8217;s let everybody know exactly what<br>we&#8217;re talking about at its most<br>basic level post-modernism begins with<br>the tenet that you know there is no<br>objective truth that we are completely<br>shackled by subjectivity we&#8217;re shackled by a<br>wide range of biases and so to argue about absolute truths<br>is silly and so maybe okay so so<br>sorry let me add a bit to that so we can flesh it out<br>so the post-modernists also seem to<br>claim and i&#8217;m going to be as charitable<br>as i possibly can in this description<br>because i don&#8217;t want to build up a straw man<br>um they&#8217;re very very concerned with the<br>effect that language has on defining reality<br>yes and the french postmodernist thinkers in particular<br>seem to have come to the conclusion that<br>reality is defined in totality by<br>language there&#8217;s no getting outside of<br>the language game there isn&#8217;t anything outside of language<br>so that&#8217;s where they differ would be<br>exactly that right deconstructionism<br>language creates reality is exactly what<br>you just described correct right and<br>it&#8217;s it&#8217;s a weak theory in some sense<br>because it doesn&#8217;t abide by its own principles so<br>for example and this is one of its<br>fundamental weaknesses as far as i&#8217;m concerned is that<br>daradah says that but then he acts as if and also<br>explicitly claims that power exists right<br>right right and so that language so if<br>you&#8217;re building realities with language<br>the question arises of<br>why you would do that and the answer<br>seems to be for the post-modernists is that it&#8217;s power<br>and that&#8217;s a quasi-marxism in right<br>right okay so you do you think that that<br>seems fair don&#8217;t you think<br>what would someone who was a<br>post-modernist agree with that definition<br>uh i mean yes the<br>the problem though is that postmodernism allows<br>for a complete breakdown of reality as<br>understood by a three-year-old it is a form<br>of this is why by the way in the book i<br>i refer to it as intellectual terrorism<br>and i don&#8217;t use these terms just to kind<br>of come up with<br>poetic prose i genuinely mean so i i<br>compare post-modernism<br>to the 911 hijackers who flew<br>planes onto buildings uh i<br>i argue that the postmodernists fly buildings<br>of into our edifices of reason<br>and maybe if i could share<br>a couple of personal interactions that i&#8217;ve had<br>with postmodernists that capture the<br>extent to which they depart from reality<br>may i do that sure and then we&#8217;ll get back to<br>elucidating the list of ideas that<br>you&#8217;ve you&#8217;ve defined as as parasitic<br>fantastic so in 2002 and i think this story might be<br>particularly relevant to you jordan because of course<br>you you know you broke through in the in the public conscience<br>because of the gender pronoun stuff well<br>you&#8217;ll see that this 2002 story<br>was prophetic in predicting what would<br>eventually happen so in 2002<br>one of my doctoral students had just uh defended his dissertation<br>and we were going out for a celebratory<br>dinner it was myself my wife<br>uh him and his date for the evening<br>and so he contacts me before the<br>the we you know we go out for the dinner and he<br>kind of gives me a heads up and he says<br>well you know my date is a<br>graduate student in cultural anthropology<br>radical feminism and post-modernism kind of the<br>holy trinity of and so i<br>basically the reason why he was telling<br>me this is he&#8217;s basically saying<br>hopefully please be on your best<br>behavior let&#8217;s not<br>yes and you recount this in the book<br>yeah okay so yeah<br>that&#8217;s okay no go ahead i&#8217;m just letting<br>everybody know yes yes exactly<br>and so uh i said oh yeah don&#8217;t worry i&#8217;m<br>you know i get it i get you this is your<br>night i&#8217;m gonna be on my best behavior<br>of course that wasn&#8217;t completely true<br>because i couldn&#8217;t resist<br>trying to at least get a sense what this woman<br>what her positions were so at one point<br>i said oh i hear that you are a<br>postmodernist yes do you mind so i&#8217;m an evolutionary psychologist<br>i i do believe that there are certain human universals<br>that serve as kind of a a bedrock of<br>uh similarities that we share whether we<br>are peruvian nigerian or<br>or japanese do you mind if i maybe<br>propose what i consider to be human<br>universal and then you can tell me<br>how that you don&#8217;t think that that&#8217;s the<br>case because absolutely go for it<br>is it not the case that within homo sapiens only women<br>bear children is that not a human<br>universal so then she<br>she scoffs at my stupidity at my narrow mindedness at my<br>misogyny says absolutely not no<br>it&#8217;s not true that women bear children<br>she said no because in<br>some japanese tribe in their mythical folklore<br>it is the men who bear children and so<br>by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm<br>that&#8217;s how you you know keep us barefoot and pregnant<br>so once i kind of recovered from hearing such a position<br>i then said okay well let me take a less<br>maybe less controversial or contentious<br>uh example is it not true from any<br>vantage point on earth<br>sailors since time immemorial have<br>relied on the premise that the sign<br>sun rises in the east and sets in the<br>west and here jordan she used the kind<br>of language creates reality the derida position<br>she goes well what do you mean by east<br>and west those are arbitrary labels<br>and what do you mean by the sun that<br>which you call the sun<br>i might call dancing hyena exact words<br>i said okay well the dancing hyena rises<br>in the east assets in the west<br>and she said well i don&#8217;t play those<br>label games so the reason why this<br>is a powerful story that i continuously recount and<br>hence included in the book is because<br>she wasn&#8217;t some<br>you know psychiatric patient who escaped<br>from the psychiatric institute she was<br>exactly aping what postmodernists<br>espouse on a daily basis to their<br>thousands of adoring students<br>when we can&#8217;t agree that only women bear children<br>and that there is such a thing as east<br>and west and that there is such a thing as the sun<br>then it&#8217;s intellectual terrorism<br>all right so back back to the the parasite idea<br>so sure okay no no let&#8217;s not do that<br>let&#8217;s finish listing the ideas that<br>you&#8217;d describe in your book as<br>as having this commonality so there&#8217;s post-modernism<br>and we already defined that as the hypothesis that<br>reality is constituted by language<br>right which by the way is a close as a close<br>ally to another idea pathogen social<br>constructivism or if you want<br>social constructivism on steroids which<br>basically and the reason why i add the on steroids because<br>social constructivism the idea that we<br>are prone to socialization no<br>serious behavioral scientists would<br>disagree with that and no avowed evolutionary behavioral<br>scientists would disagree with the idea that<br>socialization is is an important force<br>in shaping who we are<br>okay no no serious intellectual would<br>deny that language shapes our conceptions of reality<br>exactly right so the issue is degree<br>exactly the problem and hence the steroid part<br>is where you argue that everything that we are<br>is due to social constructivity right<br>it&#8217;s the collapse of a multivariate<br>scenario into a univariate scenario inappropriate collapse<br>and that&#8217;s by the way i remember your brilliant uh<br>chat with the woman from the british<br>woman that you know i don&#8217;t remember her name the<br>the the lobster stuff where cathy newman<br>cathy newman thank you<br>where you made exactly that point about<br>multifactorial right where you were<br>she was arguing everything related to the gender gap<br>must be due to misogyny when the reality<br>is that of course there might be 17<br>other factors with greater explanatory power that explains<br>why we&#8217;re there but she can&#8217;t see the<br>world in a in a multifactorial way she<br>only sees it as due to a single look<br>but this might that might have some<br>bearing on on the attractiveness of<br>of certain sets of ideas we might even<br>see if it&#8217;s the attractiveness of the<br>so-called parasitic ideas<br>i think it was einstein who said that it<br>probably wasn&#8217;t i probably got the<br>source wrong but it doesn&#8217;t matter that<br>a scientific explanation should be as simple as possible<br>but no simpler right right and so<br>and and that&#8217;s an occam&#8217;s razor exactly<br>with a bit of a modification there and you want to<br>a good theory buys you a lot and and<br>you want your theory to buy you as much<br>as possible because it means you only have to learn<br>a limited number of principles and you<br>can explain a very large number of<br>phenomena so um but<br>there&#8217;s there&#8217;s the attraction of the inappropriate collapse of<br>the complex landscape into its simplified<br>counterpart whereby you you rid yourself<br>of complexity that&#8217;s actually necessary and inevitable<br>what that means is that you couldn&#8217;t<br>make progress employing your theory in a<br>pragmatic way but if you don&#8217;t ever test it<br>in a way that it could be killed you&#8217;ll<br>never find that out right<br>and so it&#8217;s it&#8217;s very easy in my new book<br>which is called beyond order i wrote a<br>chapter called abandon ideology and<br>i&#8217;m making the point in there that um<br>you it&#8217;s it&#8217;s very tempting to collapse<br>the world into um to collapse the world such that<br>one explanatory mechanism can account for everything<br>and that it&#8217;s a game that intellectuals<br>are particularly good at because<br>their intellectual function enables them to generate<br>plausible causal hypotheses and so<br>you can take something like power or sexuality<br>or relative economic status or economics for that matter<br>or love or hate or resentment and you can<br>generate a theory that accounts for virtually everything<br>relying on only one of those factors and<br>that&#8217;s because virtually everything that human beings do<br>are is affected by those factors and so<br>that that that that&#8217;s that pro<br>is it it&#8217;s that it&#8217;s the attractiveness<br>of that simplification that accounts for<br>the attractiveness of these<br>is it the attractiveness of that<br>simplification that accounts for the<br>attractiveness of these parasitic ideas<br>so i would say the the idea of you or the the<br>the process of finding a simple<br>explanation for an otherwise more complex phenomenon<br>maybe could be linked to i don&#8217;t know if<br>you&#8217;re familiar with the work do you know<br>are you familiar with gert gigarenzer yes right so<br>so if you remember in his work which by<br>the way i love the fact that he roots it<br>in an evolutionary framework<br>yes i like his work a lot great i actually had gone<br>uh many years ago he he his group had<br>invited me to spend some time at the max planck institute<br>and so he&#8217;s got the idea of fast and frugal<br>heuristics right yes right it&#8217;s a<br>pragmatic theory essentially exactly<br>because it basically says look uh<br>you know economists think that<br>before we choose a given car<br>we engage in these elaborate laborious<br>calculations because we&#8217;re seeking to maximize our utility<br>because otherwise we we won&#8217;t pick the<br>optimal car if we don&#8217;t engage in utility maximization<br>of course while that&#8217;s a beautiful<br>normative theory it doesn&#8217;t describe<br>what consumers actually do because<br>you and i when we chose our last car we<br>didn&#8217;t look at all available options<br>on all available attributes before we<br>make a choice rather we couldn&#8217;t<br>we couldn&#8217;t we used too many exactly we<br>used a simplifying strategy<br>and in the backlash of digerenzer it would be a<br>fast and frugal heuristic because we&#8217;ve evolved i mean<br>if i sit there and calculate all of the<br>distribution functions of what happens<br>if i hear a rustling behind me that the<br>tiger will eat me before i finish all of the<br>distributions right the calculations all the distributions<br>therefore in many cases when i deploy a fast and frugal heuristic<br>it makes perfect adaptive sense but the downside of that<br>so to go back to your point is that<br>oftentimes i will apply<br>a fast and frugal heuristic when i<br>shouldn&#8217;t have done so<br>right so for certain complex phenomena my<br>innate pension to want to seek that<br>one causal mechanism is actually in this case suboptimal so<br>knowing when i should deploy the fast<br>and frugal heuristic and when i should<br>rely on more complex multifactorial reasoning<br>is the real challenge here okay so<br>so let&#8217;s say that a robust discipline<br>offers a set of simplifications that are pragmatically useful<br>okay and then being a<br>um developing mastery in the application of those heuristics<br>boosts you up the hierarchy that is<br>built around their utilization<br>okay so you have a theory that allows<br>you to get a grip on the world<br>and and to do things in the world like build bridges<br>and then if you&#8217;re good at applying that<br>theory you become good at building bridges and that<br>and because people value that that gives<br>you a certain amount of status and<br>and authority and maybe even power but<br>we&#8217;ll go for status and authority<br>so you have the simultaneous<br>construction of a system that allows you<br>to act in the world in a manner that<br>is productive but also organizes a social<br>organized society now it seems to me the<br>post-modernists get rid of the<br>application to the world side of things<br>so they really have constructed<br>a language game that actually operates<br>according to their principles of reality<br>it isn&#8217;t it isn&#8217;t hemmed in by the<br>constraints of the actual world except<br>in so far as that world<br>consists of a struggle for academic power<br>and endless definitions of reality<br>within the confines of a<br>of a language game i&#8217;ve actually argued<br>exactly for what you just said and<br>speculatively trying to explain why<br>otherwise intelligent people like michel<br>foucault and jacques lacan and jack derida<br>would have espoused all the nonsense<br>that they did and i argue<br>and i think there is some evidence to<br>support my otherwise speculative hypothesis<br>so let me let me put it in colloquial<br>terms so i am one of those<br>post-modernists i&#8217;m jacques laca or i&#8217;m<br>you know jack derida and i&#8217;m looking with envy at<br>the physicist and the biologists yeah<br>and the neuroscientists and the mathematicians<br>getting all the glory they&#8217;re the hot quarterbacks on campus<br>getting all the pretty uh women right uh<br>why aren&#8217;t we getting any attention well<br>you know what if i<br>create a world of full profundity where<br>i appear as though i&#8217;m saying something<br>deeply profound and meaningful<br>whereas in reality i&#8217;m uttering complete gibberish<br>then maybe my pros can be as impenetrable<br>as those hottie mathematicians right they are physicists<br>yep exactly i happen to be generally if<br>you do iq ranking among the disciplines<br>the physicists are the smartest surprise surprise<br>and so so we have physics envy exactly so<br>our physicist envy economists have physics envy<br>and that&#8217;s why they&#8217;ve created now sub<br>disciplines of economics that are<br>completely mathematical but fully devoid<br>from any real world applications it all stemmed originally from<br>wanting to be accepted in the in the at the table<br>of serious scientists right you&#8217;re<br>making two arguments now i think<br>i i think one is that<br>in the example you just gave it&#8217;s actually the<br>thinker that&#8217;s the parasite right because the thinker<br>wants to ratchet him or herself up the<br>hierarchy and attack who&#8217;s the thinker is it<br>yes exactly exactly the originators of<br>these of these theories<br>in your in your example they want to<br>accrue to themselves the meritorious<br>status that a true scientist or engineer<br>would have generated yes okay and so and<br>they do that by setting up a<br>false system that looks like the true system<br>but doesn&#8217;t have any of this real world practicality<br>and they justify that by eliminating the<br>notion of the real world<br>yes and so in that case going back to our earlier conversation<br>in that case the originator of the parasite<br>is actually getting i mean literally reproductive fitness<br>right well but it&#8217;s also acting as a<br>parasite on a system that&#8217;s functional<br>but then you could say on top of that<br>now he&#8217;s allowing ideas to enter his consciousness<br>and some of those will<br>some of those will fulfill the function<br>of producing this faux<br>reality in which he can rise and so it&#8217;s it&#8217;s<br>it&#8217;s a parasitical set of ideas within a parasitical strategy<br>yes yes i like it and by the way for it<br>for this particular parasitic sleight of hand<br>to work it relies actually on a<br>principle that you and i probably teach<br>in sort of the introductory psychology course so<br>fundamental attribution error the the idea<br>of that that people sometimes attribute<br>uh this dispositional traits to<br>otherwise for example situational<br>variables or vice versa right<br>i did well on the exam because i&#8217;m smart<br>rather than because the exam was easy right<br>well they jacques de vida being the brilliant<br>parasite that he was he was relying on<br>exactly that and let me explain how<br>if i get up in front of an audience so<br>now i&#8217;m jacques de vida<br>or jacqueline and i espouse a never-ending<br>concatenation of of syllables that are<br>completely void of semantic meaning<br>but that sound extraordinarily profound<br>two things can happen<br>the audience member can either say i<br>don&#8217;t understand what jacques laconte is saying<br>because i&#8217;m too dumb and he&#8217;s very profound<br>or i don&#8217;t understand what jack lacroix is saying<br>because he&#8217;s a charlatan who&#8217;s engaging in full profundity<br>well guess what most people in the<br>audience go for the former<br>right when i when i explained this to my<br>wife by the way she said you know what<br>you just liberated me<br>from a sense of feeling that i was inadequate in college<br>when i did it&#8217;s really a complicated problem like<br>look my assumption generally is that if i don&#8217;t<br>it&#8217;s not always this that i can&#8217;t read<br>physics papers in physics journals um<br>i&#8217;m not mathematically gifted and so there are<br>all sorts of scientific and mathematical claims that i can&#8217;t<br>evaluate yeah but most of the time when i read a book<br>if i don&#8217;t understand it<br>i believe that the author hasn&#8217;t made it clear<br>and and i&#8217;ve read some difficult people<br>i&#8217;ve read jung who&#8217;s unbelievably difficult um<br>nietzsche uh and neuroscience texts<br>jacques pancep jeffrey gray gray&#8217;s book neuropsychology of anxiety<br>that bloody book took me six months to<br>read it&#8217;s a tough book it&#8217;s 1500<br>references something like that and<br>an idea pretty much in every sentence<br>very very carefully written but a very<br>complicated book but i<br>hit the i read foucault and i could<br>understand him but i thought most of<br>what he said was trivial<br>of course power plays a role in human<br>behavior but it doesn&#8217;t play the only role<br>of course mental illness definitions are<br>socially constructed in part<br>every psychiatrist worth his salt knows<br>that it&#8217;s hardly a radical claim<br>um when i hit lacan and derek i was like no<br>sorry what you guys are saying it&#8217;s not<br>that i&#8217;m stupid it&#8217;s that you&#8217;re playing a game<br>you had enough self-confidence in your cognitive abilities<br>that you didn&#8217;t succumb to their<br>fundamental attribution sleight of hand right<br>so you you&#8217;re one of those rare animals<br>that said wait a minute<br>he&#8217;s saying because i know that i can think<br>and i&#8217;m not getting him the problem is<br>that most people that are sitting<br>passively in the audience<br>didn&#8217;t come with your confidence well<br>maybe that&#8217;s it maybe it&#8217;s that they<br>also didn&#8217;t have a good alternative like<br>i was fortunate eh because by the time i started reading<br>that sort of thing i&#8217;d always already established<br>something approximating a career path in<br>in psychology in clinical psychology<br>with that with a heavy biological<br>basis and so but if i was a student who<br>had encountered nothing but<br>that kind of theorizing and i i was interested in<br>in having an academic career i might well believe that<br>learning how to play that particular language game<br>was valid and also the only route to<br>success i mean one of the things that<br>really staggers me about<br>the post-modernist types that i read and encounter<br>is that they they have absolutely no exposure to biology<br>as a science whatsoever they don&#8217;t know anything about<br>evolutionary theory by the way not just post-modernists<br>most social scientists yes certainly the<br>ones walking around in the business school<br>think that biology is some nazi vulgar<br>oh it&#8217;s the same it&#8217;s the same in<br>psychology to some degree and but my<br>my sense has been that psychology has managed to steer<br>clear of the worst excesses of let&#8217;s call it this<br>this degeneration into<br>this abandonment of pragmatic yeah<br>necessity they&#8217;ve managed to steer clear<br>to that to the degree that they&#8217;re<br>that these sub-disciplines have been rooted in biology<br>it&#8217;s actually been a corrective it&#8217;s<br>interesting you say this because i<br>i and i discussed this briefly in the book i gave once<br>uh when my first book was released this<br>this one right here evolutionary basis of consumption<br>uh this is a book where i try to explain<br>how you can apply evolutionary thinking<br>to understand our consumatory nature<br>uh i had given two talks at uh university of michigan<br>the first day on i think it was a thursday i gave<br>uh the exact same thought in the so i<br>was giving the exact same talk<br>in two different buildings two different audiences<br>on one day it was in the psychology department and as<br>for your viewers who don&#8217;t know<br>university of michigan has consistently<br>always ranked in you know the top three<br>to five psychology departments in<br>the united states my former doctoral<br>supervisor got his phd in psychology<br>in university of michigan uh he actually overlapped with amos<br>versky by the way just a little bit of a historical uh<br>you know uh parenthesis uh so i give the talk<br>on thursday in front of the psychology department<br>and because as you said<br>many of them are neuroscientists<br>biological psychologists and so on<br>they&#8217;re listening to it and they&#8217;re like<br>oh yeah this is gorgeous good stuff god love it<br>the exact same talk the next day at the business school<br>which again you would think based on<br>what we said earlier they should be very<br>pragmatic in their theoretical orientations if<br>if something explains behavior then i should accept it<br>but because they were so bereft of biological based thinking<br>jordan i couldn&#8217;t get through a single sentence it was<br>as if i was metaphorically dodging<br>tomatoes being thrown at me i couldn&#8217;t<br>get through maybe five or six slides of my<br>talk because they were so aghast and<br>and felt such disdain for my<br>arguing that consumers are driven by<br>biological mechanisms and so<br>business schools can drift away from the real world<br>um i think more effectively than the<br>engineering schools can or or the biologists<br>and you&#8217;d hope that the necessity of<br>contending with free market realities<br>would protect the business school to some degree<br>but my experience with business schools<br>while often positive has often been that<br>um the theorizers couldn&#8217;t necessarily<br>produce a business right well it&#8217;s interesting because<br>i found that when i give a talk in front of<br>business practitioners then it&#8217;s always very well received<br>when i give that same talk in front of business school professors<br>depending on how vested they are in their aquari paradigms<br>it either goes well or not so if they<br>are hardcore social constructivists<br>then i am a nazi i am a biological<br>vulgarizer it&#8217;s it&#8217;s grotesque what are<br>you talking about with all this hormone business<br>so the practitioners are not vested<br>in a paradigm if i can offer them some<br>guidelines for how to design advertising<br>messages that are maximally effective<br>using an evolutionary lens<br>they go sure sign me up i don&#8217;t care<br>right right because there&#8217;s a there&#8217;s a<br>practical problem to me<br>so everybody has two practical problems we might say<br>broadly speaking one is contending with the actual world<br>so because you have to get enough to eat<br>that that&#8217;s the world of biological necessity<br>and then there&#8217;s the world of<br>sociological necessity which is<br>which is produced by the fact that you<br>have to be with others while you<br>solve your biological problems and you<br>can solve your biological problems by<br>adapting extraordinarily well to the sociological world<br>as long as the sociological world has<br>its tendrils out in the world and is solving problems so<br>you can be a postmodernist and believe<br>that there&#8217;s nothing in the world except<br>language as long as the university is<br>nested in a system that&#8217;s dealing with<br>the world well enough to feed you<br>and that isn&#8217;t your immediate problem so<br>you lose the corrective<br>okay so let&#8217;s continue with the list of<br>let me give you another one that i think<br>you&#8217;re particularly i think sensitive to<br>it you&#8217;ve probably also opined on<br>so the die religion which stems from<br>identity politics another idea pattern die<br>is the acronym for diversity inclusion and equity<br>that is such a dreadfully bad<br>parasitic idea because it really removes<br>so let&#8217;s again speak in the context of<br>academia but it could apply to other contacts that<br>apply to hr departments human resources department<br>yes i i think before i start<br>are you you&#8217;re out of your position at<br>the university of toronto now jordan are you or<br>leave you&#8217;re on leave okay well maybe<br>it&#8217;s a good thing because<br>since you were last at the university environment<br>the thai religion has only proliferated with much greater<br>alacrity so that now when you apply to grants<br>for grants uh you know with all of the<br>major grants the equivalent<br>for our american viewers the equivalent<br>of say an nsf grant the national science foundation<br>we have similar grants for people in engineering<br>or social sciences or natural sciences in canada<br>you have to have a a die statement that basically says<br>you know you know what have you done in<br>the past to to advance<br>die causes what will you do if you get<br>this grant if you if<br>this grant were granted to you how would you uphold<br>die principles and there is a colleague of mine<br>a physical that&#8217;s for sure<br>oh my god exactly so yeah that&#8217;s unbelievable<br>a physical chemist at one of our mutual<br>alma maters mcgill university maybe i&#8217;ve<br>given too much information here<br>was denied a grant because<br>it didn&#8217;t pass the die threshold right in other words<br>it didn&#8217;t matter what was what was the substantive content<br>of his grant application the scientific content<br>he just wasn&#8217;t sufficiently conv by the way right so<br>so that&#8217;s an indication that&#8217;s a situation where<br>the elevation of that particular ideological game<br>that&#8217;s been elevated over the game of science<br>exactly now that would be fine if they were both games<br>but science isn&#8217;t a game<br>right it&#8217;s a technique for solving it&#8217;s<br>a technique for solving genuine problems<br>science is what allows you and i friends<br>that haven&#8217;t otherwise seen each other physically<br>for many years to reconnect today and<br>have a fantastic conversation<br>as if we were sitting next to each other<br>it&#8217;s science that did that it&#8217;s not postmodernism<br>it&#8217;s not bugabooga it&#8217;s not indigenous knowledge<br>now again people think let me mention<br>what i just said now indigenous knowledge<br>yeah people will think oh oh that&#8217;s<br>racist that&#8217;s that&#8217;s that&#8217;s hateful<br>if i want to study something about the flora or<br>fauna of an indigenous territory where<br>indigenous people have lived there for thousands of years<br>i can defer to their domain specific knowledge<br>because they&#8217;ve lived within that ecosystem so<br>specific knowledge about a particular<br>phenomenon could be attributed to group a knowing<br>more than group b that&#8217;s what ethnobotanists do<br>exactly but the epistemology<br>of how i study the flora or<br>fauna how i adjudicate scientific issues<br>within that ecosystem there isn&#8217;t a<br>competition between the scientific method<br>and indigenous way of knowing there is<br>only one game in town it&#8217;s called the scientific method<br>yeah well that&#8217;s what knowing is that&#8217;s<br>the thing that&#8217;s why there&#8217;s only one game is because<br>there there&#8217;s there<br>as soon as we use the word knowing and we<br>apply it in a domain that would pertain<br>to indigenous knowledge and a domain<br>that would pertain to science as soon as we use the<br>uniting word knowledge we&#8217;re<br>presupposing that knowledge is one<br>thing and knowledge is knowledge has to be something like<br>the use of abstractions to predict and control<br>the use of abstractions to predict and<br>control it&#8217;s as simple as that and<br>you could be predicting and controlling<br>all sorts of things but<br>you act in a way you act in a manner<br>that is intended to produce the outcome that you desire<br>and the better you are at that the more knowledge you have<br>right so imagine if now in the university<br>you&#8217;re the dye principles are not only<br>being used to determine who gets a shared professorship<br>who gets a grant uh who do we hire as an assistant professor<br>uh but it&#8217;s also used to make the point<br>that there isn&#8217;t a singular epistemology<br>for seeking truth which by the way i<br>would love later to talk about chapter<br>seven in my book where i talk about<br>how to seek truth which is maybe relevant to<br>the many conversations that you and sam<br>have had because i introduced<br>i think a a a very powerful way<br>of adjudicating different claims of<br>truth and we can talk about that as soon<br>as that&#8217;s the nominological network<br>exactly thank you jordan so we can talk<br>about that if you want later<br>but i mean imagine how grotesque it is<br>to teach students that i mean is there a lebanese<br>jewish way of knowing is there a green<br>eyed people way of knowing is there an indigenous way<br>the distribution of prime numbers is the<br>distribution of prime numbers<br>irrespective of the identity of the<br>person who is studying the distribution of prime numbers<br>isn&#8217;t that what liberates us from the<br>shackles of our personal identity you<br>know when you can say that<br>and you can still say that people use<br>knowledge to obtain power<br>that&#8217;s a primary that&#8217;s a primary post-modernist<br>claim people use knowledge to obtain<br>power now that gets<br>exaggerated into the statement that people<br>only use knowledge to obtain power and<br>that&#8217;s all that&#8217;s worth<br>obtaining and then of course that<br>becomes wrong because both of those<br>claims are too extreme<br>but even in science you can criticize<br>science and the manner in which science is<br>practiced by saying well scientists are biased<br>just and self-interested just like all other people<br>and they&#8217;re going to use their theories<br>to advance themselves in the sociological world<br>yes and and and then you can be<br>skeptical of their theories for exactly that reason<br>but then you also have to point out that<br>well scientists have recognized this and just like<br>the wise founders of the american state<br>put in a balance a system of checks and balances<br>scientists have done the same thing and said well because<br>we&#8217;re likely to be blinded<br>even when making the most objective<br>claims about reality that we can we&#8217;re<br>likely to be blinded by our<br>self-interest so we&#8217;ll put scientists into<br>verbal competition with one another to help<br>determine who&#8217;s playing a straight game<br>and so the checks are already there and and<br>which which is to say that you can adopt<br>much of the criticism<br>that the postmodernists level against<br>the scientific game without throwing the<br>baby out with the bathwater<br>you still say well despite all that<br>despite the human nature<br>despite the primate nature of the<br>scientific endeavor and the jockeying<br>for position that goes along with it<br>there&#8217;s still a residual that constitutes<br>progressive um what progressive<br>expansion of the domain of knowledge<br>well so when you&#8217;re talking about the checks and balances<br>that replication is something that is<br>central to the scientific method<br>that is second nature in physics or<br>chemistry or biology but not in the social sciences<br>is where the social sciences fail now<br>obviously you know about the reproducibility<br>crisis and so on i mean i i yeah i was<br>always less pessimistic than<br>about that than everyone else because i<br>or not everyone but most people because<br>i always assumed that<br>95 of what i was reading wasn&#8217;t<br>reproducible and that we were bloody<br>fortunate if we ever got<br>five percent of our research findings<br>right it&#8217;s still five percent<br>five percent improvement in knowledge if<br>that&#8217;s an annual rate let&#8217;s say that&#8217;s<br>an unbelievably rapid rate of knowledge accrual and<br>if ninety-five percent of it is noise well<br>c&#8217;est la vie it it&#8217;s not a hundred percent but<br>but by the way that&#8217;s one of the things<br>that i love so much about evolutionary psychology which<br>might allow us to segue eventually into neurological networks<br>is uh many of the phenomena<br>that evolutionists study by the very nature of<br>for example them there being human universals<br>it forces you to either engage in a<br>conceptual replication or rather a direct replication<br>of that phenomenon so for example if you want to demonstrate<br>that facial symmetry is one of the<br>markers that are used when deciding that someone is beautiful<br>i can demonstrate that in 73 different cultures<br>right right we could talk about the<br>normal logical networks a little bit so<br>this is a this is a way to establish let<br>me let me introduce it a bit<br>okay because i think this is a simple<br>way of introducing it<br>what you want to do to demonstrate that<br>something is real you sort of triangulate<br>except you use more than three positions<br>of reference so for example<br>we&#8217;ve evolved our senses are a normal logical<br>network system so we say that something is real<br>if we can see it taste it smell it<br>touch it and hear it now each of those senses<br>relies on a different set of physical phenomena<br>so they&#8217;re unlikely to be correlated randomly<br>and we&#8217;ve evolved five senses because<br>it&#8217;s been our experience evolutionarily<br>that unless you can<br>identify something with certainty across five independent dimensions<br>it&#8217;s not necessarily real but we go even<br>farther than that in our attempts to<br>define what&#8217;s real outside of our conceptions<br>once we&#8217;ve established the reality of<br>something using our five senses<br>then we consult with other people to see<br>if we can find agreement on the<br>phenomenon and then we assume that if my five senses<br>and your five senses report the same<br>thing especially if there&#8217;s 50 of us and not just two<br>and that and across repeated occasions<br>then probably that thing is real and a<br>normal logical network is sort of the<br>formalization of that idea<br>across measurement techniques in the<br>sciences yeah i i love the way you use the census to<br>introduce this because there is a term<br>that i didn&#8217;t i didn&#8217;t describe this<br>phenomenon in the parasitic mind but<br>i&#8217;ve discussed it in other contexts<br>i call it sensorial convergence so for<br>example there&#8217;s a classic study in evolutionary psychology<br>by uh two folks that i know well one of whom is<br>a friend of mine randy thornhill where they<br>asked women to rate the pleasantness<br>of t-shirts that were worn by men<br>and it turns out that the one that they judge as<br>most pleasing of olfactorially speaking<br>is the one that is also identifying the guy<br>who is the most symmetric yes so in other words<br>there is sensorial convergence so that<br>two independent senses are arriving<br>at the same final product in this case<br>the product being the optimal mail<br>for me to choose and it would make<br>perfect evolutionary sense for there to<br>be that sensorial conversion so<br>right and in the in the book you<br>introduced the nomological network which<br>isn&#8217;t discussed<br>very frequently in books that are that are written<br>popularly right that&#8217;s an idea that that<br>hasn&#8217;t been discussed much<br>yes outside of specialty courses say in<br>in methodology in psychology i actually<br>think the psychologist came up with the<br>idea of normal logical network<br>so i&#8217;m going to describe what you just<br>said and tell you how my<br>approach of neurological answers is if<br>is grander if you&#8217;d like<br>so the the folks who came up with the<br>term normal logical networks and psychology<br>were coming up with a homological<br>network of triangulated evidence<br>when establishing the validity of a psychological construct right<br>so you&#8217;re establishing convergent<br>validity and discriminant validity right<br>uh the the campbell and fisk stuff which<br>by the way if there are any graduate<br>students in psychology what<br>never mind graduate students psychology<br>any any student should read the 1959 paper<br>the multi-trait multi-method matrix by campbell and fix<br>it&#8217;s one of the most right and there&#8217;s<br>an earlier one as well by cronbach and<br>meal in 1955.<br>struck validity and psychological tests<br>exactly right and it was part of the<br>american psychological association&#8217;s<br>efforts to develop standards for<br>psychological testing so it is<br>in fact a method of defining what&#8217;s real<br>how do you know that something&#8217;s real<br>and that&#8217;s what a normal<br>so if each of these validity constructs points to<br>ticking off this this construct as being valid<br>then i&#8217;ve now in a normal logical<br>network sense establish the<br>the veracity of that construct the<br>validity of that construct right and<br>that&#8217;s actually something a bit different than<br>maybe than a pragmatic uh a proof of truth because<br>from the pragmatic perspective the the theory is evaluated<br>with regards to its utility as a tool this is more<br>more like an analogy to sensory reality exactly<br>if something registers across multiple different<br>methods of detecting it it&#8217;s probably real<br>detecting it across cultures<br>across space across time<br>across methodologies across paradigms so<br>it&#8217;s really the grand daddy<br>of nomological networks if cronbach and<br>campbell and fisk were talking in a more<br>limited sense of how do you validate<br>a psychological contra construct this is<br>saying how do you<br>validate the veracity of a phenomenon<br>how do i establish that toy preferences<br>are not singularly socially constructed<br>how can i establish that<br>so maybe right and you do that by<br>studying primates for example you study<br>prime so not here i&#8217;m doing a cross<br>species now i&#8217;m gonna do across cultures<br>now i&#8217;m gonna do a cross time period and<br>then you might look at<br>androgenized versus non-androgenized<br>children and you can look across<br>a variation in hormonal status i am so delighted by how<br>closely you&#8217;ve read the book i am<br>honored my good man uh<br>that you&#8217;re exactly right and so if<br>one box within my pneumological network<br>did not convince you<br>often times the the data in that one box<br>is sufficient to convince you<br>but if it isn&#8217;t then by assiduously<br>building that entire network<br>i&#8217;m gonna drown you in a tsunami of evidence<br>and so i i consider this an incredibly powerful way<br>to adjudicate between competing by the<br>way this is why<br>in the book i demonstrate that it is not<br>only used for scientific phenomena or evolutionary phenomena<br>by building a normal logical for the question of<br>is islam a peaceful religion or not in other words<br>i could use this this grand epistemological tool<br>to tackle important phenomena even if<br>they are outside the realm of science<br>does that make sense yes definitely well<br>it&#8217;s a matter of<br>it so to to put it simply it&#8217;s a matter of collecting evid<br>okay um if you study us<br>if if you approach a phenomenon from<br>one perspective you might see a pattern<br>there but then the question is<br>are you seeing that pattern because of<br>your method or are you seeing that pattern<br>like are you reading into the data or<br>the data revealing the pattern<br>and the answer to that is with one<br>methodology you don&#8217;t<br>know exactly so what you want to do is<br>use multiple methodologies and<br>and the more separate they are in their approach<br>the better and so when i wrote my when i<br>wrote maps of meaning which was my first book<br>i wanted i was looking for patterns and<br>but i was skeptical of it i wanted to ensure that<br>the patterns i was looking at<br>sociologically and in literature<br>and were also manifest in psychology and in neuroscience<br>and i thought that that was ford that gave me<br>the ability to use four dimensions<br>of triangulation so to speak right and the claim<br>was well if the pattern emerges across these disparate<br>modes of approach it&#8217;s probably it there&#8217;s more<br>there&#8217;s a higher probability that it&#8217;s<br>real and so a psychology that&#8217;s<br>biologically informed is going to be<br>richer than one that isn&#8217;t because<br>your theory has to not only account for<br>behavior let&#8217;s say in the instance<br>but it also has to be in accord with<br>what&#8217;s currently known about the<br>function of the brain<br>exactly and that&#8217;s the approach that<br>you&#8217;re taking to analysis of business problems<br>exactly and by the way it it is truly a<br>liberating way to view the world because<br>it allows you in a sense to<br>so if you have epistemic humility you&#8217;re able to say<br>you know if now you jordan you were to<br>ask me hey you know in canada<br>justin trudeau passed the laws legalizing cannabis<br>what do you think of those laws well<br>then i would say you know what i have<br>epistemic humility i simply don&#8217;t know enough<br>i haven&#8217;t built the requisite normal logical network<br>to pronounce a definitive position on<br>this on the other hand<br>if you ask me a question on a phenomenon<br>for which i have built my nomological network<br>then i can enter that debate at that conversation<br>with all the epistemic swagger that i&#8217;m afforded<br>by the protection of having built that gnomological network<br>so it&#8217;s a really wonderful way to view<br>the world because it allows me to exactly know<br>when i can engage an issue with with<br>with well-deserved self-assuredness<br>and where and when i should say you know<br>i really just don&#8217;t know enough about this topic<br>and by the way and someone like you<br>who&#8217;s of course also been a professor for many years<br>if you establish that epistemic honesty with your students<br>it&#8217;s actually quite powerful because if<br>an undergraduate student asks me a<br>question and in front of everyone i say<br>wow you really stumped me with that<br>question you know what why don&#8217;t you<br>send me an email and let me look into it<br>what that does is it builds trust with<br>those students because it&#8217;s saying<br>this guy is not standing up in front of<br>us pretending to know everything as a matter of fact<br>he was willing to admit that he was<br>stumped by the student of a 20 year old<br>okay so so let&#8217;s let let me ask you something about that<br>epistemic humility in relate because we<br>want to tie this back<br>you defined a number of um intellectual subfields as<br>included in this parasitic network let&#8217;s say<br>um under the parasitic rubric<br>and it be reasonable to say that one of the<br>then you&#8217;re left with a question which<br>is how do you identify valid<br>theories of knowledge from invalid theories of knowledge<br>it seems to me that post-modernism has<br>to deny biological science because<br>biological science keeps producing<br>facts claims keeps making claims that are<br>incommensurate with the post-modernists<br>now it seems to me that a reasonable approach<br>would be to say well the claim can&#8217;t be real unless it<br>meets the tenets of the postmodernist theory but also<br>manifests itself in the biological sciences<br>it has to do both<br>it can&#8217;t just do one or the other<br>now maybe that wouldn&#8217;t work for the<br>biologists but the fact that the postmodernists<br>tend to throw biology out is one of the facts that sheds<br>disrepute on their intellectual endeavor<br>as far as i&#8217;m concerned because<br>if they were honest theorists<br>they&#8217;d look for what was solid in<br>biology and ensure that the theories<br>that they&#8217;re constructing were in<br>accordance with that rather than having to throw the<br>the entire science out the window either<br>by omission not knowing anything about<br>it or by defining it as<br>politically suspect and so so i&#8217;ll<br>introduce here another term i didn&#8217;t discuss this<br>much in in this book in the parasitic<br>mind but i certainly have discussed it<br>in some of my other words<br>so the the notion of conciliance<br>which is so let me let me introduce this<br>term for for your viewers who don&#8217;t know it<br>the the term was reintroduced into the<br>vernacular by e.o wilson<br>the the harvard biologist uh<br>who wrote a book in the late 1990s of<br>that title conciliance unity of knowledge<br>so conciliance is very much related to<br>the idea of neurological networks because<br>consilience is basically saying that can you put<br>a bunch of things under one explanatory rubric so<br>physics is more consistent than sociology<br>not necessarily although notwithstanding<br>what you said earlier about the iq of physicists<br>it&#8217;s not because physicists are smart<br>and sociologists are dumb<br>it&#8217;s because physicists operate using<br>a conciliant tree of knowledge<br>which by the way evolutionary theorists<br>also do you start with a<br>meta theory that then goes<br>into mid-level theories which then goes<br>into universal phenomena which then generates hypotheses<br>so that the field becomes very organized<br>the problem with postmodernists<br>is that they exist in a leaf node of right<br>it is perfectly unrelated to any<br>consilient tree of knowledge<br>therefore they could never advance<br>anything because as you said earlier<br>they exist within an ecosystem where they<br>reward one another but they can never build<br>coherence right that&#8217;s why physics and<br>biology and the neurosciences and chemistry are prestigious<br>it&#8217;s not because they are necessarily<br>more scientific than sociology<br>it&#8217;s because they take conciliance at heart<br>does that make sense<br>yes it it i mean i think to some degree too that<br>you know you also have to note that the<br>phenomena that physicists deal with<br>are in some sense simpler than the<br>phenomena that sociologists deal with right so<br>the physicists and the chemists and even<br>the biologists to some degree have<br>plucked the low-hanging fruit<br>that&#8217;s augusto cult by the way who said<br>this right august cult<br>created a hierarchy of the sciences and<br>perhaps because he was a sociologist inclined<br>he he placed sociology at the apex of the<br>sciences precisely arguing what you just said which is<br>it&#8217;s a lot easier to study the crystallography<br>of a diamond than it is to study the<br>rich complexity of humans within a social system<br>right although it that doesn&#8217;t make it<br>simple it&#8217;s still really complicated so<br>so i you know it still requires a<br>tremendous amount of intelligence to be a physicist<br>and to manage the mathematics because although the<br>theories have tremendous explanatory<br>power they&#8217;re still very sophisticated so okay so<br>i i&#8217;ve been trying to think about this<br>from the perspective of a postmodernist to say<br>well we&#8217;re making the claim that biology<br>and chemistry and physics all these this multitude<br>of pragmatic disciplines engineering um<br>to some degree psychology and business<br>they&#8217;re valid enterprises and they need<br>to take each other&#8217;s findings into account<br>so the post-modernist might say well these<br>variant various disciplines don&#8217;t take<br>our findings into account<br>and so they&#8217;re being just as exclusionary<br>as we are right now is that a valid argument<br>no because there are no useful uh<br>findings that they&#8217;ve come up with and<br>if you annoy any please tell me about them<br>i actually challenged are they useful in restructuring<br>society so that it&#8217;s fairer<br>no why not that&#8217;s the claim right and no no no<br>no but it&#8217;s not that straightforward because<br>it&#8217;s not like so let&#8217;s let&#8217;s make the<br>presumption for a moment that these are<br>essentially left-wing theories it&#8217;s<br>it&#8217;s the case that it&#8217;s not the case<br>that the left wing politically has had nothing to offer<br>the improvement of society right you see<br>all sorts of ideas that are<br>generated initially by the left that<br>move into the mainstream that<br>have have made society a more civil<br>place i mean maybe that&#8217;s the<br>introduction of the eight-hour workday<br>or the 40-hour workweek or<br>universal pension or at least in canada and<br>and most other countries apart from the united states<br>universal health care and i mean almost<br>everybody now presumes that those things are<br>um that they&#8217;ve improved the quality of<br>life for everyone rich and poor alike<br>and and i think<br>i think that that&#8217;s a reasonable claim<br>is the is the<br>is the are the claims of the<br>post-modernists justified by the<br>political effects of their actions<br>can you give me an example of a postmodernist<br>nugget that had it not been espoused<br>specifically by a postmodernist the world would be<br>a poorer place whether it be practically theoretically<br>epistemologically can you think of one<br>off the top of your head jordan<br>i can only do it generally like in the<br>manner that i just did to say that well<br>it&#8217;s it&#8217;s part of it&#8217;s part of the the<br>the domain of left-wing thought and it&#8217;s<br>not reasonable to assume that nothing of<br>any benefit has come out of the domain of<br>left-wing thought it&#8217;s i mean that&#8217;s a very general<br>it&#8217;s a very general analysis i&#8217;m not<br>pointing to a particular theorem<br>for example right but see take for example<br>in your field of clinical psychology we can say<br>okay cognitive behavior therapy by<br>studying that process and then by<br>testing it using the scientific method<br>in terms of its efficacy in reducing<br>anxiety symptoms in in patients<br>if i say nothing more i&#8217;ve just offered<br>a single example of a valuable<br>insight coming from clinical psychology<br>whether it be theoretical<br>or in the practice of therapy and of<br>course there are many more than that singular<br>cbd example that i just gave it would<br>not be hyperbolic for me to say<br>and maybe i don&#8217;t know enough about<br>post-modernism but i think i do<br>you can&#8217;t even come up with one i don&#8217;t<br>mean you i mean in general yeah<br>no one can come up with a single example<br>as simple as me just enunciating the<br>the value of cognitive behavior therapy<br>at that level you can&#8217;t come up with one postmodernist insight<br>the only insight that we have is that we<br>are shackled by subjectivity<br>we are shackled by our personal biases<br>and that is true<br>and any human being with a functioning<br>brain could have told you that<br>so do we need to build that kind of criticism<br>has been leveled within fields by the<br>practitioners in those fields many times<br>including by the postmodernist to their field<br>i i i would hesitate to say i would say you know<br>reflexively i would say no because if<br>everything&#8217;s a language game then why<br>play the post-modernist game<br>you know why does it why does it obtain<br>privileged status in the hierarchy of of truth claims if<br>if if if there&#8217;s nothing more than the<br>world that&#8217;s produced by language<br>well i i i think i mean because some of<br>your viewers might be saying well why<br>are they spending so much time on postmodernism and<br>there are other idea practices the<br>reason why actually it&#8217;s important to<br>talk about post-modernism because it&#8217;s<br>it&#8217;s a fundamental attack on the epistemology of truth<br>that&#8217;s right and that is something we<br>need to point out why that&#8217;s right<br>exactly right so so i had a a a very<br>good friend of mine who actually happens<br>to be a clinical psychologist<br>also just a lovely guy uh who<br>once asked me very politely he said you know god<br>do you mind if i ask you a personal<br>question i said go ahead<br>he said how come you are such a truth<br>defender and so on<br>and you&#8217;re perfectly happy to criticize<br>all these leftist idea pathogens<br>very much along the lines of what how<br>you started our conversation today jordan<br>and yet you&#8217;re not as critical of donald trump&#8217;s<br>attacks on truth and so let me answer<br>that question here because in a second<br>that&#8217;s a good one right so trump<br>attacks specific truth statements<br>i have the biggest penis all women have<br>told me that i&#8217;m the greatest lover<br>ever there&#8217;s never been a president who is<br>as great as me i have the biggest audiences<br>at my rallies each of these might be demonstrably<br>false and lies and therefore they are<br>attacks on a particular truth statement<br>that to me is a lot less problematic while<br>it is reprehensible i disagree with any form of lying<br>that is a lot less concerning to me than<br>a group of folks that are devoted<br>to attacking the epistemology of truth<br>okay define that and and define the epistemology of truth<br>so that we can get right down for the body is a way<br>of tackling truth the normological<br>networks that we spoke about earlier<br>is a way of adjudicating between<br>competing statements as to what is true or not<br>those are so the scientific method and<br>and all of its offshoots are ways by which<br>we&#8217;ve agreed that that&#8217;s the epistemology by which<br>we create core knowledge and then build<br>that front right okay so so let&#8217;s let&#8217;s<br>outline that a little bit so<br>so that&#8217;s that&#8217;s a really good point i<br>so there are there are degrees<br>there are degrees of assault on truth<br>yes and the more fundamental the axiom that you&#8217;re<br>assaulting the more dangerous your assault bingo<br>okay so so the non-postmodernist claim<br>so maybe this is the enlightenment claim<br>perhaps is that there is a reality<br>i think it&#8217;s deeper than that because i<br>think it&#8217;s that&#8217;s actually grounded in<br>in judeo-christian christianity and and even<br>and and grounded far beyond that<br>probably grounded in biology itself<br>but it doesn&#8217;t matter for the sake of<br>this discussion there is an objective world<br>there is a knowable reality yes<br>okay there&#8217;s a no knowable reality that<br>multiple people can have access to<br>there&#8217;s a noble reality but our biases and<br>and limitations intellectually and and physiologically<br>make it difficult for us to to know it<br>it&#8217;s complex and we&#8217;re limited<br>there&#8217;s a method by which we can overcome that<br>the method is the nomological method<br>which you just described<br>essentially which is the the use of multiple<br>um lines of evidence yes<br>lines of evidence derived from multiple sources multiple people<br>multiple places across time that enables us to determine<br>with some certainty what that objective reality is<br>that enables us to predict and control things<br>for our benefit beautiful okay<br>and the post the post modernists<br>the postmodern attack is on all of that<br>everything it&#8217;s that&#8217;s<br>and that&#8217;s why now i hope you might<br>agree that it&#8217;s not too<br>harsh for me to say they are<br>intellectual terrorists because they put<br>these little bombs of bs that blow up the<br>pneumological network that blows up the epistemology of truth<br>right and so you&#8217;re making a claim even<br>beyond that though in in the book which is<br>and this is the claim that i want to get<br>right to which is that<br>they put forward that theory in order to<br>benefit from being theorists<br>that that benefit accrues to them<br>personally as they ratchet themselves up their<br>respective intellectual hierarchies and gain the status<br>and power that goes along with that and<br>the fact that it does<br>damage to the entire system of knowledge itself<br>is irrelevant that&#8217;s that&#8217;s<br>that&#8217;s that&#8217;s uh<br>what do you call that damage that you<br>don&#8217;t mean when you bomb something<br>collateral damage collateral damage<br>right so they&#8217;re willing to<br>sacrifice the entire game of truth seeking<br>to the promotion of their own individual careers within this<br>within the language hierarchy that that<br>that they&#8217;ve built and by the way that you you hit<br>on a wonderful segue to another i think<br>important point in the book<br>and that is the distinction between deontological ethics<br>and consequentialist ethics right<br>deontological ethics for the viewers who don&#8217;t know<br>if i say it is always wrong to lie<br>that&#8217;s an absolute statement right if i say<br>it is okay to lie if i&#8217;m trying to spare<br>my spouse&#8217;s feelings that&#8217;s a consequential statement<br>well it turns out in many cases<br>the ones who espouse those parasitic idea pathogens<br>are engaging their consequentialist<br>ethical system right because what they&#8217;re saying is<br>if i murder truth in the service of this more important<br>noble social justice goal so be it<br>right whereas if you are an absolutist a deontological<br>you&#8217;re positing an objective reality<br>even in the domain of ethics<br>well that&#8217;s another place where the the postmodern<br>effort fails is that it can&#8217;t help but<br>refer to things that are outside of<br>the language game so by relying on consequentialist<br>ethics and i&#8217;d have to i haven&#8217;t been<br>able to think it through<br>just figure out whether i agree with<br>your claim that the postmodernists tend<br>to be consequentialists it makes sense to me<br>and i think that their emphasis on hurt<br>feelings is an indication of that<br>right never because there&#8217;s no objective<br>reality you can&#8217;t sacrifice people&#8217;s<br>feelings or lived experience<br>to any claim about objective reality<br>but by doing that they elevate the subjective<br>to the position of ultimate authority<br>and you know maybe that&#8217;s maybe that&#8217;s<br>part of the driving motivation<br>is the the the desire to elevate the subjective<br>to omniscience exactly and and this is why<br>and so i know you&#8217;re not mathematically<br>uh you know minded<br>but if i can just divert into my background of mathematics<br>in the book i talk about the field of operations research<br>which is the field where you try to<br>xamaritize if you&#8217;d like to to put in axiomatic form<br>the objective function that you&#8217;re<br>trying to maximize or minimize right<br>so for example when i was a a research<br>assistant when i was a<br>undergrad and a graduate student i<br>worked on a problem called the<br>two-dimensional cutting stock problem<br>so if you have for example rectangles of metal<br>and you get an order to produce<br>20 x by y sub sheets within that broader metal<br>how should i do the cut as to minimize the waste of metal<br>so operations research is a field that<br>is commonly applied for example in<br>in business problems where you&#8217;re trying<br>to minimize the queue time that consumers weight<br>or maximize profits right so it&#8217;s a very<br>very complicated mathematical field applied mathematics field<br>to solve real world problems so now<br>let&#8217;s apply it to this consequentialist story<br>in the old days the objective function of a university<br>was maximize maximize intellectual growth<br>maximize uh human knowledge<br>today it is on the idea that there was knowledge<br>that was that was genuine there was a difference between<br>forms of knowledge some were better than<br>others some are more valid than others<br>right so that&#8217;s part of the claim that<br>you can have knowledge at all<br>exactly whereas now the objective function is<br>minimize hurt feelings or it might be maximize<br>learning whilst minimizing her feelings well you know<br>i wouldn&#8217;t mind that so much if if the claim that<br>feelings were ultimately real was made<br>tangible because then at least we&#8217;d have<br>an ultimate reality that was outside of words but<br>you can&#8217;t say that the world is a<br>construct of words and then<br>say at the same time but there&#8217;s nothing<br>more real than my subjective feelings<br>like i have some sympathy for that<br>because i&#8217;m not sure that there is anything more real than pain<br>all things considered like pain seems really real to me<br>and it&#8217;s fundamentally subjective<br>and i think that a lot of what we consider ethical behavior<br>is an attempt to minimize pain given its fundamental reality<br>so it&#8217;s not like i don&#8217;t believe that<br>subjective feelings are real and important<br>but i&#8217;m willing to claim that there is such a thing<br>as real and important and true and so<br>it&#8217;s so it&#8217;s it&#8217;s logically coherent for me to<br>to to to make that claim it&#8217;s the<br>incoherence of the claims that bothers me<br>well it&#8217;s part of what bothers me well<br>we should we should probably sum up to some degree<br>because we&#8217;ve been i know i know i but<br>i&#8217;m starting to get<br>i&#8217;m starting to get tired and and i&#8217;m<br>starting to lose my train of<br>concentration and so i don&#8217;t<br>i don&#8217;t want to do anything but a top<br>rate job on this let me summarize for a<br>second what we&#8217;ve discussed and then<br>if you have other things to add that we<br>haven&#8217;t talked about then we can go there so<br>we talked about ideas as parasites and<br>and then we spent some time<br>unraveling what parasite might meant might mean and<br>the conversation moved so that we kind<br>of built a two-dimensional<br>or a two-strata model of paracitation of<br>a parasitical idea there&#8217;d be the<br>parasitical behavior of the theorist who puts forth<br>a theory that mimics a practically useful theory<br>in a in in the attempt to accrue to himself<br>or herself goods that have been produced<br>by theories that actually have broad practical utility<br>so there&#8217;s that and then there&#8217;s the parasitical idea that<br>serves that function for the person<br>who&#8217;s using it in a parasitical way okay so<br>and then we talked about um<br>postmodern ideas in particular as examples of that<br>and i guess the one one of the things we<br>haven&#8217;t tied together there is<br>exactly how the why is it necessary or<br>why has it happened that the<br>ontological and epistemological claims of the postmodernists<br>aid and abet the parasitical function<br>that&#8217;s that&#8217;s a tough one like<br>why did they take the<br>the shape they actually took yeah that&#8217;s<br>i actually i<br>i make an attempt to explain that and let<br>me know if if you buy it so remember<br>earlier i was talking about<br>what are some of the commonalities<br>across the idea pathogens<br>yeah and i said that they they kind of<br>start off with a kernel of truth and they<br>start off with some noble original goal<br>the other thing that i would say which i think<br>answers the question that you just posed<br>is that each of those idea pathogens<br>frees us from the pesky shackles of reality<br>right so in a sense they are liberating right so postmodernism<br>yes liberates me from capital t<br>truth there is my truth there is my lived experience<br>the prefix liberates me<br>from the shackles of my biology and my<br>genitalia so it&#8217;s the attractiveness of that<br>liberation that that provides the<br>that provides the motive at least in<br>part of the parasite<br>exactly right i if biology is useless i<br>don&#8217;t need to know anything about it<br>and people do that a lot people do that<br>a lot look social constructivism another<br>one of those idea pathogens<br>frees me from the shackles of<br>realizing that i will never be nor will<br>my son be the next michael jordan<br>because social constructivism as<br>espoused originally in by<br>behaviorism right the the famous quote<br>which i i cite in the book<br>give me 12 children and i can make<br>anyone a beggar or a surgeon or whatever<br>that is basically saying that it&#8217;s only the<br>unique socialization forces that<br>constrain you in life<br>that don&#8217;t turn you into the next<br>michael jordan there is nothing<br>a priery that didn&#8217;t start us all<br>with equal potentiality well that&#8217;s a lovely message<br>well it&#8217;s two now you got two messages<br>there is my subjective reality is the only reality<br>that&#8217;s the first thing and the second<br>thing is socialization can produce any outcome<br>so that&#8217;s a huge that&#8217;s a huge exp<br>that&#8217;s a huge expansion of my potential power<br>right i&#8217;m right by dint of my existence<br>and my ability to modify the nature of reality is<br>without without restriction yeah exactly<br>exactly and therefore it is hopeful<br>because it frees me from the shackles<br>of the constraints of reality right i<br>want to believe that<br>any child that i could have produced<br>could have genuinely had<br>an equal probability of being the next<br>albert einstein or michael jordan that&#8217;s<br>hopeful that&#8217;s wonderful<br>it&#8217;s also rooted in right so i<br>think all of these idea pathogens<br>share the the common desire for people to<br>believe hopeful messages that are rooted in nonsense<br>well that&#8217;s probably a good place to start<br>hey jordan so nice to see you we&#8217;ve been<br>discussing the parasitic mind<br>by Gad Saad and<br>when was it published uh october 6<br>of this past year so it&#8217;s just a bit<br>more than three months how is it doing<br>it&#8217;s if it&#8217;s do if you&#8217;re comparing it to all possible<br>books it&#8217;s a match smashing success if<br>we compare it to jordan peterson&#8217;s last book<br>then it&#8217;s not doing very well so it&#8217;s life is about<br>i don&#8217;t want to compare my next book to that book so<br>but it&#8217;s been doing well eh it&#8217;s doing<br>very well thank you oh good i&#8217;m i&#8217;m glad<br>to hear it i&#8217;m glad to hear it so<br>do you think we did we miss anything in our discussion<br>well i like what we did but is was the<br>discussion sufficiently complete so that<br>you&#8217;re satisfied with it i i<br>more than anything i&#8217;m just satisfied<br>that you&#8217;re feeling better that<br>your family&#8217;s doing well that you&#8217;re<br>back into this on the saddle<br>and that hopefully will have your voice<br>and i&#8217;ve been trying to hold the fort but<br>having someone like you missing makes it<br>that much tougher so i&#8217;m i&#8217;m so glad you&#8217;re back<br>big e hug to you and thank you so much<br>for inviting me jordan thank you it um<br>thank you very much for<br>for talking with me i found it very<br>enjoyable and i i felt that i<br>i got i know something more than i did when i started<br>the conversation which is always the<br>hallmark of a good conversation and<br>um i mean we can dig into these things<br>the things we discussed today endlessly<br>we never get to the bottom of them fully but<br>but maybe a little bit farther with each genuine conversation<br>and and maybe maybe the next when your book comes out<br>you&#8217;ll be sure to come on my uh show so<br>that we can decide yes well if i if i have the wherewithal<br>and the energy i&#8217;d be happy to do that and<br>maybe we can discuss some of the things<br>that where we haven&#8217;t established any<br>concordance i know that<br>i i&#8217;ll just i noticed that you had talked<br>admiringly about role theory in the parasitic mind and<br>i kind of and i&#8217;ve noticed before that<br>you&#8217;re not very fond of the idea of<br>archetypes and i thought<br>without something we could talk about at<br>some point because let&#8217;s do it i think<br>archetypes are biologically instantiated roles and so<br>it seems to me that we could probably<br>come to some agreement on that front<br>i actually agree with you if we leave it<br>within the biological realm<br>then an analysis of archetypes works<br>well for me when we start<br>introducing a bit of the kind of mythological<br>occultist stuff that regrettably one of your heroes engages<br>in that&#8217;s when i start yeah well that&#8217;s<br>something that we could profitably discuss<br>because i i think there&#8217;s a much stronger biological<br>um well look at it this way god if you imagined<br>imagine a culture imagined an ideal<br>and then imagine that approximations to that ideal<br>people who approximated that ideal were<br>more biologically fit as a consequence<br>they were more attractive<br>which you would be if you embodied a true ideal<br>well so what that would mean is that<br>over time the society would come to<br>evolve towards its imagined ideal<br>yes so that makes a biologically<br>instantiated archetype a very complicated thing<br>because it starts in imagination but it ends<br>instantiated in biology and and no one&#8217;s<br>ever come up with a real mechanism for that<br>right it doesn&#8217;t but but that works you<br>you posit an ideal<br>then if you manifest it you&#8217;re more<br>attractive then the ideal starts to become<br>something that evolution tilts toward<br>so i&#8217;m in agreement with everything you<br>said so maybe we won&#8217;t have much to disagree about<br>yeah well we&#8217;ll we should be able to<br>clear things up anyways and sometimes<br>that&#8217;s a good way of resolving disagreements<br>i look forward to adjourning so okay<br>okay god thanks very much hey<br>my pleasure all right bye bye bye<br>[Music]<br>[END.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[START][Music]hello everybodytoday i have the distinct pleasureof speaking with dr Gad Saada friend of mine a colleague an earlysupporter of mine when those werefew and those were few and far betweenwhen when all the publicity emergedinitially surrounding me and the videosi made regarding uhbill c-16 in canada Gad was one of thefirst people to interview &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/genr8.pw\/blog\/2021\/03\/19\/transcript-the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast-season-4-episode-6-gad-saad-infectious-ideas\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;TRANSCRIPT = The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast &#8211; Season 4 Episode 6: Gad Saad: Infectious Ideas&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa73B2-4p","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genr8.pw\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genr8.pw\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genr8.pw\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genr8.pw\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genr8.pw\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/genr8.pw\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274,"href":"https:\/\/genr8.pw\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions\/274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genr8.pw\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genr8.pw\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genr8.pw\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}