Why Science Got So Political and What to Do About It

Yeah, I wonder. I wonder who has won the culture war. There's certainly a battle that's been won in terms of like control of social media. Control of social media is absolutely left. Well, this is unfortunate for conservatives, but technology is a force that also pushes left. So if you look all throughout human history, like the left essentially grows and grows and grows, right? Why is that? Is it inexorably that as some commentators have said, Leviathan slouch is left, right? Leviathan is the government. Why does it slouch left? And I think a lot of that has been because of technology. Technology has made it so that it makes more like industrial revolution technology. We all band together. We're wards of the state, right? Contraception is a technology that kind of helps lean left where it takes away from the family unit. Abortion is a technology, right? It wasn't possible thousands of years ago. So technology actually empowers the individual. The individual means that you have the breakdown of family structure and religion and all that. And I'm not necessarily opposed to that, but it does mean that there's a leftward shift to it. Now we are getting a small set of technologies that actually can take you more rightward. Encryption is an example because encryption makes it easier to have privacy. It makes it easier to have money that is outside of the state. Guns 3D printing of guns is an example of a technology that is more of a rightward shift. But generally technology leads the world left. Yeah, it's also usually highly educated people that are involved in technology in the first place. And I think when you look at universities in particular, they tend to lean left in this country as well. Well universities, what happened to the university is very interesting. Universities first became the arbiters of data and intellectualism and what's right and wrong. So there's a time period when it was like, should we be doing that or not? Well, let's look at the university. What do they have to say? What are the smartest people, the professors, the think tanks have to say? And the university's got this credibility from the hard sciences. So they got this from physics and math and computer science and chemistry because these deliver real things, the Manhattan Project, the microprocessor, the space vehicles and so on, the electric car. So they gained this mantle of authority and legitimacy from the hard sciences. So then come the social sciences kind of sneaking, then you get economy, economics. And microeconomics is a real discipline, real science, real math behind it, logic, reason. And then you get macroeconomics, which can be politicized a little bit more voodoo. And then you get social studies and then you get gender studies and then you get blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so what happened is that because we took scientists to be the high priests of our new world, science itself has gotten corrupted and the social sciences, and you can tell they're fake sciences because they're the word science tacked on at the end, have come in and hijacked the universities and become the new think tanks. And so essentially what you see going on today in the universities is a war between the social sciences and the physical sciences. And the crossover point is biology, right? Where you can see like the whole gender is a social construct movement is attacking biology and evolutionary biology. Just like in the social sphere, they're coming after the comedians, right? But you can see the struggle going on in the universities. And I would say the physical sciences are essentially losing that war. What can be done? Or is it just something that has to play out? Do we have to realize the consequences of the foolishness? Well, the good news is the physical sciences have a reality on their side. Yeah, but it's not even, I mean, in many ways it's not respected. Yeah. At the end of the day, your aircraft still has to fly. Your microprocessor still has to compute. So there's only so far they can take it. But I do see, for example, in biology, a lot of biologists are facing this difficult thing where they have to say things that they know are not true to keep their job. Like what? Oh, you had Brett Weinstein on here. Right? So that's a clear example. So there's just the crossover line of what is acceptable and what's not is entering into biology. And biology will probably suffer the most. Synthetic biology, for example, will, you know, a lot of this will end up in China because it won't be, you won't be able to map facts and reality and actions together. You won't be able to get grants. You won't be able to get the adulation of your peers. I don't know enough here. So now I'm in shaky territory, but it's just my sense that that crossover battleground right now is an evolutionary biology. Economics lost. Well, it's certainly in terms of gender and that sort of, that seems to be one of the major battlegrounds. Yeah. And it's also going to happen, for example, blank slate theory. You know, are we nature? Are we nurture? Yes. It's kind of socially unacceptable to say that, you know, a lot of it is nature and not nurture or vice versa, depending on which side you're on. Right. Those kinds of discussions get corrupted. They do get corrupted and it's really unfortunate because that's an unbelievably important thing to understand. Like what makes a person a sociopath? What makes a person a super successful person, a winner? What makes a person a drug addict? What are these factors? You can't have a reasonable conversation about climate science anymore. It's not a science. It's all politicized. You can't even bring it up. Everyone's got their minds made up already. Well, it's what's uncomfortable to me is people have their minds made up and they don't even have the data. On most of these topics, people are talking past each other anyway. They're talking about different things. Like when you get into gun control, for example, right? One side is talking about the right to bear arms in case a tyrannical ruler or king tries to take over the country. The other side is talking about school shootings and protecting people in their homes from crime. So they're just talking about two different things. And it's just not politically acceptable to even talk about the same thing. Or when it gets to immigration, the right is talking about, or the left is like bundling together illegal immigration and legal immigration into one thing. Whereas on the right, sometimes you've got racist hiding in there, so it doesn't help their cause. They're talking about two different things. If they were talking about the same thing, which is how many immigrants should we let into the country and what are the criteria for that, that would be a very different conversation than no immigrants or everybody comes in. And then also on the left, you have this benefit that everybody who's currently coming in illegally is going to vote for the left because of where they're coming from and their socioeconomic circumstances. To me, the test of any good system is you build a system, hand it over to your enemies to run for the next decade. So for example, if you want a censorship on Twitter or Facebook, you should build that system and then hand it over to the other side to run. So if you're a left-winger who's promoting censorship, let somebody else run it. Along with immigration, if you want an immigration system, build the system, then hand it over to the other side to run in. That's how you know it's a good system.