Join the conversation with Dr. Mike Mazza from the Einrand Institute as we navigate the purpose and future of philosophy amidst the changing tides of higher education. Our engaging chat begins with a casual banter on motorcycles, only to transition into an examination of America's unique approach to commercializing universities. As Dr. Mazza unfurls his wisdom on the philosophy of science, we pay homage to the likes of Newton and Darwin, whose monumental work still echoes through the scientific community. Together, we tackle the fine line distinguishing philosophers from professional intellectuals and how these deeply reflective individuals influence sectors from business to policy-making.
Strap in as we dissect the closure of the once-influential graduate school bootcamp at UNRAN University and reflect on what guidance it offered to scholars. We then journey into a hypothetical world where education systems operate free from government strings, discussing the survival of philosophers in a pure market landscape and the historical examples, such as Bell Labs, that showcase the fruitful alliance of private investment and scientific breakthroughs. This episode isn't just about the theoretical—it's an exploration of how philosophy can and does intersect with the practical aspects of our lives.
As we wrap up our thought-provoking exchange, we take a hard look at the value of a humanities degree versus the potential of alternative educational pathways like vocational schools. Dr. Mazza shares insights into the importance of public scientific standards, the perils of science journalism, and the role of peer review in maintaining—or muddling—the integrity of scientific research. Whether you're a philosopher at heart or a professional navigating the complex world of science and technology, this episode offers a rare glimpse into the intricate dance between the philosophical and the empirical.
Join the conversation with Dr. Mike Mazza from the Einrand Institute as we navigate the purpose and future of philosophy amidst the changing tides of higher education. Our engaging chat begins with a casual banter on motorcycles, only to transition into an examination of America's unique approach to commercializing universities. As Dr. Mazza unfurls his wisdom on the philosophy of science, we pay homage to the likes of Newton and Darwin, whose monumental work still echoes through the scientific community. Together, we tackle the fine line distinguishing philosophers from professional intellectuals and how these deeply reflective individuals influence sectors from business to policy-making.
Strap in as we dissect the closure of the once-influential graduate school bootcamp at UNRAN University and reflect on what guidance it offered to scholars. We then journey into a hypothetical world where education systems operate free from government strings, discussing the survival of philosophers in a pure market landscape and the historical examples, such as Bell Labs, that showcase the fruitful alliance of private investment and scientific breakthroughs. This episode isn't just about the theoretical—it's an exploration of how philosophy can and does intersect with the practical aspects of our lives.
As we wrap up our thought-provoking exchange, we take a hard look at the value of a humanities degree versus the potential of alternative educational pathways like vocational schools. Dr. Mazza shares insights into the importance of public scientific standards, the perils of science journalism, and the role of peer review in maintaining—or muddling—the integrity of scientific research. Whether you're a philosopher at heart or a professional navigating the complex world of science and technology, this episode offers a rare glimpse into the intricate dance between the philosophical and the empirical.
I had a great conversation with Dr Mike Mazza. He's an associate fellow at the Einrand Institute where he teaches at the Einrand University. Dr Mazza received his PhD in philosophy from St Louis University. His research is focused on the philosophy of science, especially the metaphysics of causation. Our conversation could be broken up into two fundamental parts. The first part after we talked a little bit about motorcycles and what he does at the Einrand University, we talked about what is a university.
Speaker 1:I have long believed that America is great at taking some of these old world institutions and ways of doing things and making them commercial and being creative in the restructuring of them. Not only have we done that in America with the university, yet we dug into what is a university, what is the role, what is the purpose, how could it be used? How is it being used today? What is good about it, what is bad about it. We really dug into this idea of what is a university and how can it be different and better. The second half of the conversation is delving a little bit more into Dr Mike Mazza's special specialty in the philosophy of science. We talked about Newton and Darwin and a bunch of other subjects of that nature. I hope you will stick around for this fascinating conversation with my friend, dr Mike Mazza. What's up, mike? Hey Kirk, welcome to my apartment and to the America Show.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for coming over, and your cool BMW bike that's right. It's pretty cool and you keep trying to get me to get my Harley back.
Speaker 2:We need to put together an Objectivist Writing Group.
Speaker 1:I think Although, well, it sounds like you said Writing Group.
Speaker 2:I think we have that. We have plenty of those. We have plenty of those. We need writing groups.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we need some writing groups. My problem is one you would smoke me in that thing. Even in my Harley was pretty you know like. I've seen some speed things with Harleys where they do pretty well long distance but man, they don't go fast.
Speaker 2:Their acceleration is not good, it's kind of embarrassing. Well, I have good acceleration. My top speed isn't too impressive, oh, OK, yeah, I think the top speed is not really. That bike is more the aesthetic than the performance. No, it's a cool bike for sure.
Speaker 1:OK, so I wanted to start off by so. You are an associate fellow at the Einrand Institute, Correct? So your day-to-day job is actually as a professor or teacher of sorts at the university.
Speaker 2:I guess you could say that. I mean I split my time between a number of things for ARI. I guess if I were tracking hours meticulously, most of my time would be spent for ARI related tasks.
Speaker 1:OK.
Speaker 2:Grading, teaching, prepping office hours with students, planning lesson planning, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:So, but you're also doing new ideal, you're doing Ocon talks, things of that nature as well. What do you think most of your time goes?
Speaker 2:I should have added up Well, right now, most of it goes towards ARI. So I'm teaching a course on reasoning, I'm grading for the course on Objectivism being taught by Ankor Gatte, I'm doing office hours with students. In both, we have an assignment called a tutorial assignment, where the students write a longer paper and then meet one, the tutorial. Tutorial.
Speaker 1:OK.
Speaker 2:And the students meet with us one-on-one and talk about their papers. So I do, I guess, about one of them a week.
Speaker 1:OK, so my first big question. I've had my own thoughts about this for a long time. I'm not a PhD, I'm not a philosopher, I'm not a professor. What is a philosopher today, do you think?
Speaker 2:Today. I mean in terms of if you look at the people who make money and their jobs as philosophers, they're university professors Almost without exception. I mean you could? The exceptions would be people in sort of think tanks. Which think tanks like us, I guess, is I'm not a university professor and there are people who I would consider philosophers who aren't teachers.
Speaker 1:Alex Epstein, I think you consider Alex a philosopher. Alex is a philosopher. Yeah, I think that's interesting. So Alex Epstein is the author of the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Fossil Future. I know he refers to himself sometimes as a philosopher.
Speaker 2:I think that's fair. But people like Sam Harris I would think of, as he might not call himself that, but what he does. I mean he wrote a book on free will. He wrote a book on secular justification for his moral views. That's philosophy. And then he writes about cultural trends and what drives them. Sometimes he's pretty good and philosophical and deep, other times he's kind of not. But I mean, I still think of that as doing philosophy. But those are the exceptions, not the rule. Most people who are professional philosophers are university professors. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I guess I'm trying to distinguish between philosopher and intellectual, like professional intellectual, and I do think there's a clear difference, like I remember listening to Onkar once and even Ben, when they were talking about free will and they talked about it quite differently than Sam Harris even does. For them they were especially Ben, who I think knows quite a bit about in both of them do, but that's their specialty, I believe, or to some degree right. For Ben Bayer, I think his epistemology was what he got his special.
Speaker 2:When he was in university. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:One of the things that Ben and both and Onkar did was they were able to put Sam Harris's unique argument, which is the video that I'm referring to. They did a video on Sam Harris and they put it in the context of, like the history of philosophy and they were saying that here are arguments and it's really not that different, but he is actually doing something unique here and that sounds that seems very different than like what Alex Epstein does. So there seems to be something very unique about a philosopher, or maybe that's just history of philosopher, but, like I think Onkar once put it as a, he thought about going into law school and this was like an alternative and there's similarities in that in certain regards. In this regard, I think, Similarities between philosophy Like putting understanding the arguments.
Speaker 1:who's made those arguments? What's new or different or old hat about this argument?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, what's similar about philosophy in the law is that it's self-consciously about argumentation. At least, that's part of what philosophy does is try and make all of the assumptions explicit and check them and argue about though are these assumptions true? And the similar things go on in the law, where you make assumptions, there's certain things that are assumed for a case, and then you reason from them, and then should we assume these things? So there are some similarities there. But the reason I think Alex is a I think of Alex as a philosopher is especially in his more recent work, when he's talking about, I think what is his terminology, the knowledge system, how knowledge is generated and then disseminated through the culture. I mean that's, if he were a professor, they would say he's doing social epistemology. I mean basically what they would call that. So there's actually a name for that thing.
Speaker 2:Interesting and he has interesting things to say about it. They're original as far as I know. I'm not an expert in the history of social epistemology, but it seems novel, plausible claims he's making about how that works.
Speaker 2:And then he's diagnosing problems in the culture and specifically in the dissemination of knowledge about climate and that's generating a view of how knowledge is generated and disseminated through a culture and then applying that view to the contemporary, to a contemporary issue. That's philosophy in a sense. I mean, that's kind of what you see in a lot of Ayn Rand's essays. She'll talk about some abstract philosophical principle in the context of a cultural issue she thinks is pressing. So she'll both introduce some theoretical points and then apply them. Some of what she says about what is a philosophical principle comes up in the context of her talking about Watergate and Richard Nixon. And so Alex is talking about how knowledge is generated and disseminated, but in the context of climate science. And yeah, but generally, I mean you could expect the same structure to exist in other areas of research. So I think of that as philosophy. It's much more applied than you might, than is typical for university professors. University professors tend not to do things so applied and so presently relevant.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, so that's why.
Speaker 1:because at the UNRAN University there's the, the, and Ayn Rand had the term the new intellectual and there's the terms professional, intellectual, and so there's a question of, like, what the different professions could look like, what their focus is, what they're spending their time working on, and you know, as a in terms of the path people and young people could take now, and I think it might be more open to more different types of careers than it was, you know, even 20, 30 years ago, where, if you were really interested in you know, if you read Kierkegaard and Hegel and you were like, oh, this is interesting and which is a pretty unique branch of the human, I think, or or or a lock or Rand or anybody right, and it's a pretty unique person. That is like. I'm going to continue doing this to myself.
Speaker 1:It's not just a phase, it's not just a phase Like I'm going to continue this and so you know, it's like I can see a professor who's going to continue doing that at a university. They're going to have class students in front of them, of other you know unique people, but most of them probably 80% of them, will go off into other things. Hopefully, what the professor will convey is a certain in the best. In my view, the best possible world is a certain different ways of thinking. That, I think, is what a professor and a philosophy on an undergraduate should really be helping college students with them. And you might disagree, but that that's what I think of like a philosopher in today's context.
Speaker 1:And then an intellectual is kind of a philosopher applied or someone who's thinking about these issues, but they're, they don't seem to be as obsessed Maybe that's the best word for with the theoretical, pure theoretical, where they're really, you know, in that world of like big arguments way above everyday world. Like Alex is very obsessed with reality, and I don't mean that in like other philosophers aren't necessarily, but I just mean he's really thinking about how does a, an executive at a oil firm, think about? What's the, the arguments going against them, the laws that are starting to impinge on their business. And how can I reach them in their language that they use? Give them some new language to model to help them solve this very the problem. X, and he's obviously amazing at it. He's brilliant. He's super inspired by Alex. I don't mean to demean him by saying he's, you know not that, but there's, there's.
Speaker 2:My point is just obviously a difference Not a, not a, not a yeah, so there's a theorist.
Speaker 1:I mean he'll come up with new theories. I think he'll also talk to really smart philosophers and learn, learn like CIP he has said publicly many times that the whole thing is from a conversation with Ankar of a lot. Ankar, I would say, is more of a philosopher, right? So that that's what I'm saying. Like is there a distinction that matters or not? What?
Speaker 2:does that really matter? I mean, so there is a distinction between, I think, a philosopher and an intellectual. I think intellectual is just the broader category, so it's okay.
Speaker 1:So philosophers, one type of intellectual, and then there, and then there's then there's a phenomenon called public intellectual which is somebody who's producing intellectual output for, not for other researchers and intellectuals. Wait, wait, putting that out there for like niche people in their field.
Speaker 2:So there is a type of person who produces research. That is, who am I writing this journal article for? Well, it's other researchers in my field.
Speaker 1:Sure Okay.
Speaker 2:And then there are people who might not do that at all or do a mix of things, and their, their audience would be broader than that. It doesn't necessarily have to be just like the every man like general audience. You could like, if I wrote a philosophy of science article, in my audience wasn't other philosophers of science but other was scientists, and science journalists say, yeah, that's not for other researchers, but it's also not for the general public. So there's, there's a kind of array of folks you might sell your intellectual products to, and on the I guess the one like extreme would be other researchers and on the other side of that would just be every everyone kind of general audience product. And then you know there's in between and the same person might do a mixture of both or so.
Speaker 1:That makes sense, yeah, so one of the reasons I'm asking that is you have a. I saw that you have a course on a bootcamp, for is that correct? Course on ARU, a bootcamp for getting into graduate school.
Speaker 2:That did exist at one point. And it was yeah, it's gone, Sorry folks, yeah, it's defunct gone. I guess. Okay, just there, there were.
Speaker 1:There was not a graduate school yeah, there were a number of people applying to graduate school.
Speaker 2:Also, you put this for them, we put this together for them like what to think about, like so how to think about whether or not you should go to graduate school and how to go through the process of applying. And the reason it ended is just that most of the people who were in the position of needing that advice were also getting it from their, their university.
Speaker 1:Okay, and there was nothing unique you thought you could provide.
Speaker 2:Well, I could if if you didn't have access to that, any form of that advice so if you're an undergrad? So when I was an undergraduate applying to master's programs, I went to an advisor and they were kind of like, oh, here's this list of schools you might apply to, and that was about all the advice I got. So somebody who's in that position I could help a lot. But somebody who's in a really good master's program and the master's program has a track record of getting their students into good PhD programs and they really know how to do that, they'll get better advice than me.
Speaker 1:I see.
Speaker 2:And we had. It turns out, we actually had a lot of people who were in that situation and not many who were in the situation of get, having no guidance. So, it was sort of in organizing, and I thought it was the reverse, that most of the students were not getting any guidance. Okay, but then, you know, after having a couple of weeks of this, we sort of realized that it wasn't exactly needed.
Speaker 1:So most of the people going into ARU at this time recently are in good master's programs.
Speaker 2:No, that was just a group of people in our extended network. Some of them had finished the previous program we had called the Objectives Academic Center. Some of them were in ARU. Some of them were junior fellows. Some of them were just people we knew, who we thought were smart and wanted to work with. It was a kind of mixture of people. It wasn't. This is this predated ARU.
Speaker 1:I see, okay, yeah, wait wait, did you start working on ARI?
Speaker 2:September 2020.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's only three years.
Speaker 2:Two and a half years, two and a half years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, okay, yeah. So I'm interested in the university. I mean I work at the. I, I, I, I, I of course I'm in and I know a little bit about the university, but it's, and I was always a graduate of the four year program, um, so I'm always just curious cause it's so new, it's and and I I really am optimistic and hopeful about what it can do in a really dynamic, different, possibly different market for universities and what people, especially in the um, in the humanities right, I think, the schools that are teaching for science and the hard sciences and engineering, I think those are probably still I'm sure they'll tweak on the edges, but those are pretty good, I would imagine. I think the and I'm sure a lot, I know a lot of people agree with me the humanities is kind of a disaster in my, in my view, um and I'm I don't know if you agree with that, but Well, I do think there is a value to a humanities degree at the uh in in a mainstream university, but I think?
Speaker 1:Do you consider mainstream? Uh, not Like a prestigious.
Speaker 2:Well, the state school.
Speaker 1:Oh, you think a state school?
Speaker 2:Uh yeah, A state school, a Harvard, just uh, I guess it doesn't really make Like university, Colorado. What's a non-mainstream university? I mean I wouldn't go to like a, a Liberty university or some kind of religious institution like that. Um, so I mean a, a university that sees itself as giving a secular education. I mean some Catholic universities will qualify for that. It's qualified as that Like.
Speaker 1:I see.
Speaker 2:I'm George town or St Louis university or like that.
Speaker 1:but there are University of Colorado. You think something? I?
Speaker 2:mean but the, the value that you get out of those humanities degrees.
Speaker 1:Um, I didn't get any value, bro. What are you talking about?
Speaker 2:Well, I paid off my loan. It's a value, non-humanity, like I did not make.
Speaker 1:I paid off with separate things, but that's not.
Speaker 2:that's the value is that, um, it gives you skills you probably should have picked up from a good high school education by the time you're a sophomore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've heard that I don't like that. No, yeah, that's not good. That's horrible. I'd pay that. That's not good.
Speaker 2:But that's if you're, if you're, if you're 20 and you're um and you're, you know your public, your public schooling has failed you.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where do you go to remedy that? Yeah? Um and a a, a, a respectable university If you actually, you know, do your work and think like just enrolling and screwing off in college.
Speaker 1:if you which I think is what most people use it for.
Speaker 2:they it's your ticket to the middle class, so long as you get a gentleman C and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Um, gentlemen, so my dad calls it, I like that. So I, um, I don't know, like I went to the university of Colorado, denver Maybe it's cause I went to Denver, I don't know. I thought I was a liberal arts major, um, and on my degree was actually film theater production, with a minor in philosophy. Uh, just because I was so interested in it at the time, I kept taking all the classes like, well, what do I need to do to make this a minor? Not that that mattered.
Speaker 2:I think that all the stuff you just said I did not get from them, I got on my own and I always see, and I mean that a hundred percent, that's probably, that's probably true, but I don't think you're the typical student, so I'm I'm thinking so what's the value to somebody who's uh is super interested in ideas and um and is uh above average intelligence and things like that?
Speaker 2:I'm thinking what's the value to the average person Like, who comes out of a mediocre public school and um, the value of a humanities degree is that people who have the skill of being able to uh, have the basics of the skill of being able to follow a complex argument over the course of you know, a hundred page plus book and then write your own argument and construct um logical, uh chains of thought from the constructed, constructed grammatical sentence, a logically argued, uh reasoned paragraph, into a.
Speaker 2:That kind of thing you're supposed to get, by the time you're, I don't know, a sophomore in high school. I think I'm not a. I'm not a uh, I don't have experience in the, it's just to put a year on it, but it's the sort of thing that, like, I had an above average high school education and I could do that by the time I was in um college and then when I had my freshman writing class, I was just completely blown away that here were other people 18, 19 years old and they couldn't put together. They could barely put together a coherent sentence.
Speaker 1:I couldn't do that to.
Speaker 2:I was like 27 put together a coherent sentence.
Speaker 1:Not, I don't. I mean not consciously, not under my control, so I I read a lot.
Speaker 2:You didn't know the rules, of the rules of grammar I don't mean like that, I mean just like write me a paragraph about, um, uh, you know about what you did, what you did uh yesterday afternoon but I believe that would have been disjointed before 27.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because I think part of learning the rules of grammar if you do it properly isn't actually learning like what is a gerund and all these things which are helpful.
Speaker 2:I agree with that, but but what I'm saying is, if you're a let's say you're a philosophy major or an English major, what you'll do is if you actually do the work is you'll read a bunch of, um, well structured pieces of writing that that make arguments, and then you'll have to, uh, construct your own and you'll get feedback from people who know how to do this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what I did. I mean maybe I just I don't know like I remember, I just I maybe it's because I just have such a strong bias and hatred of it that I just cannot see the good. And then also I'm listening to you, I I understand what you're saying with the English. So my degree was film production, yeah, so maybe that was part of it.
Speaker 2:If you majored in some kind of you know, BS studies, gender studies, something like that, I'm sure you wouldn't get this out of what I'm talking about. Out of that, You'd get it at. You know, you're reading great works of literature, or the history of philosophy or the history of ideas, if you took like political theory or whatever they call it now, um, um, who knows?
Speaker 1:I think it's a yeah.
Speaker 2:And then you know then. Then, like you were saying earlier, the quantitative kind of hard sciences are way better than the in terms, comparatively, way better than the humanities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I still have my troubles with it. Not sure I 100% agree, like like the standard student is really getting that.
Speaker 2:I mean, I understand that it's maybe available, but you can get it if you look for it. I mean there, I don't think in high school.
Speaker 1:You get it if you look for it, by by just reading and doing those things.
Speaker 2:I'm not convinced about that.
Speaker 1:I mean I just didn't see the professors like there was a few professors that were okay. Most of them were just not at that caliber. I mean there was. I had like a good history of Greek, a Greek history professor. Um, there was a couple. Maybe the philosophy professor was okay, one of them was okay, I don't know that. That would.
Speaker 2:where did you go? University of Colorado, denver, denver. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Um so not, it was not.
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah, the mileage may vary, like the the. The better the university, the better the professors are going to be.
Speaker 2:So I went to Rutgers university, which has one of the top philosophy departments in the world. Yeah, so my, but if, if I went to um a place with a mediocre philosophy department, I still think I would be able to learn certain things from them. Um, if you're, but if you're, you know you're scraping the bottom of the barrel um then yeah, then then there is, then there is an issue of then it's more like a chance Like you might have that really great professor and then the rest are just kind of like dialing it in. They have tenure, they don't care.
Speaker 1:But that still just leaves it open to us. So I understand that the value is potentially there in a lot of places, like if you really go at it, you, you do the extra stuff and you know you really think about, sure, um, but that's not how. I don't think that's how it necessarily works, especially if it's not how it should be, but it also. That's not how like they're not selling it in that way.
Speaker 2:That's also true.
Speaker 1:And so that kids aren't even thinking of it as that way.
Speaker 2:Oh right, yeah. So if the question is is there a value? There's that value, but is the but? If the question is like should that take four years of your life and cost you a quarter million dollars? And there's other.
Speaker 1:It didn't cost me that I would see it as a color of.
Speaker 2:Denver. And now, now I don't know I mean, but I mean like at the place where it costs that hopefully they, I'm getting something other than just remedial skills.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I'm hoping, or at least the remedial skills. Um, I, I don't know, I I've really had a hard time. So where I my back up bringing, and you know, middle class, working class folk where academics and professors were a joke, like they're losers in my worldview growing up, right there, these are people who, like I, have to my taxes, pay their loser salary or whatever, and, oh God, whatever, they don't do anything. Um, I mean, that's not like stuff we talked about at the dinner table or anything, but that was the if you ask somebody that would be.
Speaker 2:That would be like the general idea of like, what do you think of English professors? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Like I didn't. We didn't have like friends who were English professors or anything. I have grown to respect them more because of objectivism, reaching them and I opened my eyes to their value and um, it inspired me and a lot of positive things because of objectivism. I still think that the way universities are today, like I don't think it would be a world shattering event if all of them just collapsed now like today With the humanity, if the humanities, the humanities, dissolved yeah, I think that would, on net, be a good thing.
Speaker 2:But if the other departments for which there are no replacements for yeah, like engineering and yeah, that would be a catastrophic, catastrophic disaster of all Now that doesn't mean that the university system is the optimal system under which those things should be done. Yeah, so what is a university. It is a medieval institution. Yeah, like 1300s, right, yeah, the design to teach you the quadridium and the sacred texts.
Speaker 1:No, that's the. I thought it was the triumvirate.
Speaker 2:Triumvirate, but there's a four, part one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that came later. Right, Is that later? Yeah, I believe, because isn't it?
Speaker 2:it's like math, science, history, rhetoric. It's rhetoric, grammar, theology and theology and probably geometry, something like that and theology would I mean.
Speaker 1:Those aren't terrible if you translate them to like philosophy and rhetoric and there's some value to that, although I think that could be done by the time you're 16 years old. Yeah, they also didn't.
Speaker 2:Well, but that was more like the age of people who finished those. But there was, I mean there wasn't as much known back then, so there couldn't be a whole slew of departments.
Speaker 2:But, the point is that those we still have the same, I mean just like even to the point of the clothes we wear at graduation. It's all like medieval decisions that are just carried on and copied and like why is there a break every summer? Yeah, and everybody just does that. And we just yeah, there's a summer break. And like if you're a professor, that's a lot of fun because you get a, you work nine months and then you have summer break, like you did when you were a little kid.
Speaker 1:Although a lot of the contracts I understand, unless you're tenured is you only get paid for those right.
Speaker 2:Is that correct?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, is that just like high school and well, well, you get through 12.
Speaker 2:Yeah, actually I don't know. So I never had one of those positions. I always had per class contracts. But even if you don't, you're a salary. So you, yeah, you don't, you just have to save up your money. So if you get, if your university professor professorship pays you $90K a year plus benefits, okay, maybe you don't get a paycheck in June, july and August, but you still get. Oh, that okay. So you just yeah, that would be how it would work out. And then you know there's summer perks. Like you can teach a class in the summer. I once lost a graduate student teaching opportunity because a professor wanted a new deck and he was supposed to say he wanted to teach in. I think the dead on was like April and like three weeks before the semester started. He's like I want to teach this class.
Speaker 1:So yeah, what a jerk. They have all the power. So, yeah, university is a 13th or 14th century invention that we're still in some of its model. There's there's a kind of romanticism to it that is some of it's good. So, you know, I'd be curious for you, like what, when you were starting to want to be an academic as a profession, was some of it associated with the you know romance of a university, like there's people in coffee shops talking about big ideas and not really campus life didn't appeal.
Speaker 2:I mean campus. Campus life is nice because it's a whole bunch of people who have similar interests to you like, generically they're all interested in ideas, even if they're not specifically interested in philosophy. So, they tend to be more intellectual, more curious, more argumentative, if you enjoy that kind of like conversation. So that's, it has a certain type of appeal to a certain type of person and definitely appealed to me. But the reason I wanted to be a philosophy professor was that was the only place you could be a professional philosopher.
Speaker 1:So now you. You know I was like the craft.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm talking about these decisions I made in like 2006 and seven to go into graduate school. So it was not like it was not people blogged but they didn't make money off of it. It was like still a hobby.
Speaker 2:That wasn't an option, yeah, so it wasn't like I somebody now could, I'd be still questioning somebody who would think this but, coming out of undergraduate, I want to be a philosopher. I'll just do podcasts and YouTube and a blog. I'm skeptical that you can start that way, as opposed to transition to that still, but there are other there are other.
Speaker 1:Do you mean like as a?
Speaker 2:philosophy as a full time job and I'm going to. This is how I'm going to support myself. I'm going to support myself as a philosopher by making videos or something like that, like you don't think, you think that that's still too tenuous.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think the people who have done that, and done it well, are either transitioning from some they already had public notoriety, like Jordan Peterson or Sam Harris, or they have some kind of pizzazz. They're really good at making certain things entertaining. There's a former graduate student who has a YouTube channel that's called like counterpoints or something like that. She's very entertaining.
Speaker 1:So if you're a kind of you don't think philosophers have to be entertaining at all?
Speaker 2:I mean, if you like, for me, like I don't have any, like you know, performance skill, so it would just have to. Oh, you're interested in this philosophy of science topic and then I can entertain you based on the content. But well, but so I mean this person does like skits and makes jokes, and but it's all it has content to it. So there's like a whole people can do that if you're good, if you have that talent. But that is how-.
Speaker 1:I mean, I agree with you, that's a different skill set, yeah.
Speaker 2:There are very high quality philosophy blogs and podcasts and YouTube videos that don't get a lot of hits because it's just some guy or woman just sitting there is. Let me tell you about Play-Doh, and they really, you know they'll tell you about Play-Doh better than you'll get Play-Doh at any university, but it's not particularly-.
Speaker 1:Well, but should that person have ever been a professor if they're so bad that nobody wants to watch them?
Speaker 2:Well, usually those people are also professors.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's even worse. Yeah, Because that means they're torturing their kids. They're poor kids. Like, why couldn't? Like if you're gonna, especially if you're gonna do something that's so already established?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean so you need to. So it's not like if you need a performer skill in addition to your foster skills.
Speaker 1:But I think that's true of anybody, unless you're going into pure theory and you're really trying to push the edges of something Like if you're teaching Play-Doh, you should learn how to make Play-Doh interesting. That should be part of your job.
Speaker 2:Well, it depends on what kind of job you have and you want. So if you have a research professorship, let's say, which is the In Play-Doh, yeah, in Play-Doh, or any other area of philosophy, what you do is you do research on Play-Doh, you write books and articles about Play-Doh and then you teach graduate seminars on Play-Doh to people. And who takes those seminars? They People who already are super into Play-Doh.
Speaker 1:But there's been so much rent about him. Are you saying that there's so much new?
Speaker 2:But should there be those professorships?
Speaker 1:That's what I'm asking, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you can't make it entertaining or interpretive to today's audience.
Speaker 2:It's hard to answer that question. Should there be people whose job is to do cutting edge researchers and teach and mentor new researchers?
Speaker 1:Yes, so that's what they're doing yourself. So they're teaching the cutting edge people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those people are the equivalent of a cancer researcher who has a lab where he mentors new cancer researchers.
Speaker 2:He's not seeing patients, and that kind of thing. That is what the equivalent is in philosophy. Now, does it make sense to have that kind of thing in philosophy? That's a good question. But those are the kind of jobs that people who teach philosophy actually have. Some people just teach undergrads and you're right, that's part of the job is to get everybody interested in this and communicate why this is important to learn and keep it alive and exciting in their mind. That's part of the job.
Speaker 2:If you're teaching graduate students, people who are getting masters and PhDs in philosophy, they come in kind of already believing that and they're already excited to learn it. Now maybe if you say I'm going to teach a class on the obscure figure you students have never heard about, then yeah, you'd have to sell that figure. Why is this important to learn? Is it just Mike's niche little thing that just he cares about, or no, it's really valuable for everybody here. You have to make that case. But I mean, if you're teaching, I had a professor who was like that and he was a really good mentor, teacher of philosophy, of epistemology. But how great would he have been as an undergrad teacher. I don't know about that, but that just wasn't his job.
Speaker 1:I had never heard of that. I thought of it that way, but that makes a lot of sense. I still think it should be very delimited. Then I feel like it's probably bloated and expanded beyond all comprehension.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how many people would really need that job? How many?
Speaker 1:people in that position. I feel and I'm not convinced that most people go into it, that that's their passion for it. Well, this is or there's just some interest in like, can I make money talking about Play-Doh? It's like, well, you can, but being interesting about it is part of your job.
Speaker 2:This goes to the question you asked earlier about the university system. The university system is a combination of public dole and charity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a good way of putting it. I've never heard of that, so it would remove all of the governmental funding and support.
Speaker 2:It's not just that they give money to universities. They're state universities, the NHS, the National Humanities National Humanities something they fund Society. Yeah, they fund they're a government granting institution. There's a national science, there's the equivalent in the hard sciences, where you send grant proposals to them and they give you money. All of this stuff, remove all of that from the world. How many philosophers would there be doing what?
Speaker 1:I mean there's not an answer to that question, but it would probably be a lot less.
Speaker 2:Maybe it'd be a ton more. I mean, I have no idea. It's like how many there's allegedly a doctor's shortage. How many doctors should there be? Well, the way you answer that question is look at what the market demands, and if there's no market. You can't really say how many there should be, and there's not really a market for philosophers. What there are is Well, education.
Speaker 1:Like training of the mind.
Speaker 2:There's an education, but even-.
Speaker 2:You're talking about the research yeah, but no, but just think more broadly. There's public education at the K through 12 level too. So what would it look like if there were really a free market of education top to bottom, in every respect? Would there be more? Would there be less philosophers? Would there be universities? Would there be more something like apprenticeships? Maybe the best way to learn chemistry is not that there's a department of chemistry. Maybe you get an internship at Dow Chemicals and you're mentored by somebody who knows. And what would philosophy look like?
Speaker 2:I've thought for a while that in that kind of situation, what job would a philosopher of science have? And I think they'd work for something like Bell Labs. They'd A philosopher of science. A philosopher of science, yeah, there's some kind of research institution. They teach researchers the history of their field with an epistemological bent. This is how. Not every problem is just a sui generis research problem. There are people who have confronted similar puzzles in the same field in the past and like here's how they solve them. How many people would there need to be like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then the market Obviously the market, because there's so much of what probably would be done by private corporations in the pursuit of profit is just offloaded onto the universities. It's called basic research or theoretical research. Where does theoretical research and physics happen? Not at Google. It happens at Harvard.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and then they do talks at Google, but they publish and then Google hires them or something to do something or what happens is Like with. Ai no.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking something more along the lines of this. So I think it's solid state hard drives are based on some quantum and physics research done in the 80s. The guy won a Nobel Prize, but it's obviously worth trillions of dollars. And how did it come about? Well, this guy had a university position somewhere. He probably made just under six figures for most of his life and he came up with this insight and he published a paper and then other people thought, okay, why would Apple bother paying for any of that when it's done by the universities?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. So like they would have had to put the money into the researching of that to hope to one day get that Like. I was reading the chat, gpt person or whatever to put that together. I think it's Microsoft is looking at a billion dollars to put into that. No, I don't know. Do you know anything about him or that Not?
Speaker 1:in particular, but I bet it's something similar where it's like a guy or a couple of nerds in school or whatever figuring something out real genius style and they come up with something cool and now they could. But I see what you're saying, like they're being floated by this academic circuit.
Speaker 2:Abstract. Theoretical research in the sciences is so obviously materially valuable now in a way that maybe even a hundred years, wasn't that the idea that it wouldn't get done if it wasn't done by the universities, I think is crazy. Like that, if there were no, if nobody was producing?
Speaker 1:Oh, just because it's so clear how valuable. The value line is from this paper and it's not like that's not just Because that has been the argument of universities of like look all the stuff that's coming out of us and you know, in terms of these great innovations which is true, but yeah, that is a clear argument in the opposite.
Speaker 2:That it doesn't need to be done by the university.
Speaker 1:now, that doesn't need to be done by taxpayer money.
Speaker 2:What would it actually look like if people were free to do this? I don't know. Maybe it would still be something like a university and it would be funded by a consortium of technology companies, or maybe it would be done in house and they'd keep research confidential.
Speaker 1:I mean there's an infinite way.
Speaker 2:I mean companies could come together, pool money together and say like okay, we're going to split whatever comes on, so long as they're paying taxes anyway, and it's being done on somebody else's dime, why would you do it yourself? Why do it yourself?
Speaker 1:No, I agree, and it's an interesting thing because it could really go in any direction. And I see what you're saying. I mean, I think Alex Epstein, one of his first big articles was on Rockefeller and the history.
Speaker 1:And he talked about how research and development was invented by Rockefeller, essentially because he wanted to figure out things like how do I get most value out of this kerosene and I want to make more money, and so like I need chemists and how do we do that? And then that's where all that, and then they came up with revolutionary ways to come with some chemicals.
Speaker 2:Bell Labs is a good example of this. I mean a lot of the early.
Speaker 1:Apple University. They're expanding in Austin. Oh are they.
Speaker 2:I actually don't know too much about what exactly they're doing.
Speaker 1:Well, they have a campus here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but what are they attempting to accomplish with that?
Speaker 1:I think they're Well. I don't know if this campus is like, Because I know they have a campus in California. That was Steve Jobs Vision. That was about there was going to be a learning component to it for sure, Heavy learning component.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but do they see that as a charity thing or do they see that as part of the yeah, I didn't look into that.
Speaker 1:I don't think it is charity. I don't think it's that, but I could be wrong, I don't want to. I don't think it's like open to the public either. I don't think it's just anybody can walk in and try this. It's really for their employees. I mean, how many employees do they have? 800,000, 500,000, or something like that.
Speaker 2:But why did it but my?
Speaker 1:question is why do?
Speaker 2:they need to do that. What's the goal of that?
Speaker 1:So the only thing I remember. So I've read two of Steve Jobs's bios, but it's been years. But one of the things I remember is he really wanted to convey some deeper things about what Apple's trying to do.
Speaker 2:Okay, and he Wanted to teach the employees about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he wanted a place where he could really teach employees and get, so it was about really educating them on the Apple way. Okay, that makes sense, and the Apple way of thinking, and I do think there's also an element of the engineering part and sharing ideas. Now, I don't think it was like in Bell Labs necessarily Maybe there'd be, I don't.
Speaker 2:It's not like they've said. Hey, you know what? It would be better if we just hired the brightest 15-year-olds and taught them computer science ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe I don't know yeah.
Speaker 2:That'd be a good idea though, right? Maybe I mean again it's the same thing Like maybe it would be, but if you're 15 and you've got a or a job offer, if you've got a scholarship to Harvard or I don't know, mit, computer Science, right?
Speaker 1:That's probably better.
Speaker 2:MIT or Caltech or something, or Apple wants to hire you and train you Maybe. That's probably a tough decision. I don't know which is the better choice.
Speaker 1:Well, we're talking the fantasy land of a free market. So yeah, you're right. And this market?
Speaker 2:Maybe MIT doesn't exist in a free market. Instead, that's all internal to Boston Dynamics and all those kind of places.
Speaker 1:Those guys are doing some crazy stuff. So, yeah, we talked about what is the university. So you have your own views about how you think it might operate. What about? Oh, you do or you don't.
Speaker 2:I mean, I have some speculation on what it would look like if we had a free market in higher education, I think basically what would happen?
Speaker 1:Well, that's what the Iron Renn University is, kind of, yeah, but it's, it's a kind of a big argument it still exists in a world that it's like private schools competing with public schools.
Speaker 2:Like, as good as they are, they're still yeah, but I already pay for the other one and it's so now I have to pay twice for this. So it's got to be really exceptional.
Speaker 1:But if I had to do it over again, I would not do college, I don't think.
Speaker 2:You don't think so.
Speaker 1:Not for me. I do think there's a market, but I do think I gained immensely from it.
Speaker 2:If I were not pursuing higher.
Speaker 1:So I think for you you need to do the university route and I think that makes sense If you want to.
Speaker 2:There are certain careers that you have. You cannot practice law without a law degree. So if you want to be a lawyer, you have to go to law school, which means you have to go to undergraduate. So there's certain but yeah, if you're not and same thing with philosophy you need to teach it. You need at least a master's, even if you want to teach it at community college. So certain professions if you want to go into, you either have to by the nature of the profession or almost certainly do just based on what options are available or possible. There's other things. So I mean one of the. I have a friend who's an objectivist, who's in. He's a software engineer done exceptionally well for himself, he's self-taught, he dropped out of college. So was that the good choice for him? Probably, that was probably the right choice. Like, if you want to do that, do you need a four-year degree to be a software engineer or can you do some combination?
Speaker 1:of. Oh, I sort of have some Lots of.
Speaker 2:Combination of one of these coding schools plus your own practice and get a job where you have people who can mentor you and teach you more. Is that a better career path and it's very plausible to me that that is.
Speaker 1:I mean, look, I think the majority of kids who go to college do not need to go to college, and I mean outside of engineers and yeah. And the humanities, which I think is the majority of people right who go get a four-year degree. I don't think the majority are getting high-level science and electrical engineering degrees.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure. I don't know the numbers.
Speaker 1:But I mean like, so if we just take that out and just talk about the humanities, I just I mean, I just don't think that most of us do.
Speaker 2:I mean, obviously, the value of the humanities is something that could be offered by a non-university for a fraction of the cost.
Speaker 1:And that's my main point, which is what I'm excited about with the Iron Renn University is the potential for the future. I think so. Now the issue is, like you're saying making the argument to people who have the view that the way to a better life is going to some university, which is what the universities are banking on. Right, it's like look at this shiny thing, you come here and you will definitely have a better life. Like parents are still, no matter what they might say politically, they're still like when they're kids Is this preparing my kid for SAT so they can get into? They'll chant like down. I hate universities, but then they're kids.
Speaker 1:Got a good hey, buddy, you got to study, so you get into good school.
Speaker 2:There's still that view. There's movements away from that, was it? One of the major accounting firms is no longer requiring degrees. They just want you to take some kind of knowledge test. There are other things happening that I read about happening like that that are If that maintains and gets larger, then take a generation. But then eventually there'll be parents who are like yeah, I don't think I needed to go to college and I did and it was a waste of money. There'll be more people like that.
Speaker 1:Well, our generation could do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe we're the first ones.
Speaker 1:I highly doubt that somebody whose degree did nothing for them in their life is going to then pressure their kid to do the same stupid thing.
Speaker 2:Well, the pressure, though, would come from Society at large. Well, sure, but also, just every job requires a bachelor's. Like every non-manual labor job, or most non-manual labor jobs want you to have some kind of you know, even manual, you need a GED. So at some point having a. There was a period of time that just what jobs don't require a bachelor's? Like the jobs you don't want? This was the attitude a lot of people had. Yeah, and it's the even to be, you know something like-.
Speaker 1:Well, that's why I ended up finishing.
Speaker 2:As secretary of work or managing, like I had a boss when I worked in a auto parts warehouse and my boss had a sociology degree. He's like, yeah, I don't do this, there's a garbage degree. But every job I played, you know I needed that degree to get this job. And what do I do now? I manage the employees in the warehouse. Yeah, like, should you need a degree for that? Well, you should. You need a certain level of knowledge and like ability to be organized and do work and show up on time, like all those kind of skills. And so you need some skills and the BA winds up being a proxy for those skills. But as soon as there's other reliable proxies, then you don't need that anymore and fewer and fewer places are requirement and that's how to erode.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it all eroded by that, and then I mean I think it already is eroding by that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we're seeing the beginnings of the you know the cliff falling apart or whatever. Whatever the cliff falling apart, the erosion metaphor is, it's there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I. That's why I think, like by the time our kids are adults, we wouldn't do that to them.
Speaker 2:I mean People of our age who have kids. Well, but you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:But as millennials, we're the same age, I think 37, 38, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so yeah, I just think there's, there's, that's already happening. I know university is a real big potential for making the argument, for you know, like if we and I think ARI and or ARU and when I did OAC was way more rigorous, and like doing this and accomplishing this, Like I'm way more proud of like the B that I got at A OAC than like an A that I got some crap you know history of theater class in, you know, in a normal university.
Speaker 1:So I just I think that that that what we offer is way more indicative of that. It's just an issue of making the argument to the wider public and getting it out there. And, by the way, there are students who are actually doing the course, courses at ARU, who aren't in college. Like, this is their college right now and it's a good, you know, it's a good thing for students to, who don't know what they want to do and don't want to get into an expensive degree. They could like try it out and see if they like it for a year or two.
Speaker 2:I think that's a good way to think about it. You know a lot of people do gap years between high school and college. They try to figure it out. The problem with that is you can't figure out whether you want to go to college without having at least some knowledge of what it's like to be in college. And something like ARU gives you like kind of like a hint of that. Like, so you take one class and you do assignments, you write papers, you read things. You kind of have a seminar style discussion. It's more, being a student is a little more autonomous. You have more nobody's like. You didn't do your homework. You know detention, like on your case.
Speaker 1:It's like you didn't do your homework.
Speaker 2:Somebody might send you a reminder if you haven't done a few homeworks or you still participating in the class, like that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:But I'm not gonna I'm not your mommy, I'm not gonna come chase you to do your homework, and that's what it's like in college. I mean, in college the professor is nobody cares. If you check out, you know that's your. You're an adult now, you've checked out. It's good to see what it's like to be a student in that kind of environment.
Speaker 2:I think, because I saw, and I'd see this in freshman, like when I taught university class, like regular university classes, there was a certain kind of person who, now that nobody was breathing down their necks and like in high school, you're like literally in the building all day, all the time, and you have one class after one class after one class. Now you have five classes a week and you have all this downtime. And there's a certain type of person who, now that they have all this freedom to plan their own day and everything, nothing gets done and they have a and that's, that's could just be like, yeah, I really I turns out. I really don't like this kind of academic type work. The reason I did it in the past was cause, kind of I was forced to. Now that I have the ability not to do it, I'd rather do other things and hopefully those other things are productive. For more often than not in colleges they're unproductive.
Speaker 1:They're just when do you get all the social stuff, though? That's the only downside, so, like there's, that's one of the pleasantries of a university is the getting your getting a serious girlfriend, breaking up with your serious girlfriend or getting broken up with, and all the you know, and just friendships that last forever, so that you know that that part, that piece is challenging to the point, there is value yeah, there is value to that.
Speaker 2:The downside to all that is, college life is still, even though you have much more autonomy, it's still. It's a fantasy camp in a different way.
Speaker 1:Fantasy camp. Yeah, why is it fantasy camp? Well you're, I mean I, the humanities, I would agree, it's fantasy camp.
Speaker 2:For for some people like it's not because they have a job and they pay for everything themselves.
Speaker 2:That's me, that's my job, but for a lot of a lot of people like who pays rent and for food, and it's still mom and dad. So what do you do with all your time? And while you kind of take, they kind of take their classes, they sleep all day, they play video games, they go to parties, and I mean you can even live that way and be a good student. Like, what do you do in your spare time not being a student? Oh, I get drunk on the weekends, and like that's what people do. The thing that's good about college, I think for a lot of people and especially you know a lot of smart people and I was I was like this go to college and all of a sudden it's. This is especially true if you have a small high school. I graduated with 160 500 in mine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a lot, but Rutgers was 40,000 people. So like there's so many different kind of people that if you were kind of a loner in high school, or if you kind of didn't have any deep friendships in high school and then you go to someplace that has 40,000 students, like there's gonna be another 100 people that are just like you and like now you can have a friend, and oh, and there's. You know, it's not the same 75 girls I've known since I was in kindergarten.
Speaker 1:It's all these different people and you kind of and that's.
Speaker 2:but you can get that by moving to a city, Like you don't have to go to college.
Speaker 1:You can, yeah, but they're not all in a similar geographic area. They're not all. She's not sitting right next to you.
Speaker 2:She doesn't like you know like. If you move to, you know, I mean I think new things would pop up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you move to.
Speaker 2:Brooklyn or Austin or something and you're 20 and can't meet people, like you need to learn how to meet people. You need to learn how to meet people. And if you're too, or you need to talk to get some kind of mentor or therapist or something Like there's only so much just putting you in an environment can do to help you. Like for some people it's just yeah, like that's the thing, and then, like that was like for me, like you just go to college and oh, it's not so bad being more social, and then you just become more social, but for other people it's no, I'm still afraid of my own shadow, like I was in high school, and that's not gonna get fixed, no matter where you put them. That you need somebody to help you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, to me that, though, is gonna be the harder thing to knock down in people's minds, because so many people I talk to, especially successful people and you know, outside of objectivism, just friends of mine you know they really valued the networks they built in college and they really see that as a fundamental aspect of their success. Like you know, oh yeah, my old college friend got me my second best job that now like you know, I met my wife in this club and junior yeah you know, and like sororities, fraternities, of course, are a big part of that and that's the one that's gonna be, I think, for them harder.
Speaker 1:you know, for the people that are our age, having kids will be harder for them because they will see it as like the emotion of going there.
Speaker 2:And that's really we're stricken. It's like an experience, it's a right of passage. It's right of passage, yeah, just as soon as other things pop up to kind of replace that, and hopefully, in a healthier way?
Speaker 1:Hopefully in a healthier way.
Speaker 2:I know more than a few people who have successful long-term relationships based on Tinder dates.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess I was reading an article about how it's. You know, like 10 years of something like New York Times said like 10 years of swiping right has led to loneliness, depression and, you know extra, suiciders. Yeah, it's very morose.
Speaker 2:I've read an article that's like what online dating does is people match up really late and then are really really late. People match up very quickly and then what's left are people who need more help dating and just swiping.
Speaker 1:Clearly true, the top tier people get more than they normally would and the bottom tier get less or more, none, yeah, it's bad in a certain sense.
Speaker 2:It's bad for that, it's good for some people and it's bad for others so if it's bad for you, maybe it's really bad because it just kind of like rubs it in that you have difficulties, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But yeah. So I think that'd be a difficult, difficult sell on the university. So, okay, that's the university. You know it's an interesting topic about for me in terms of because we both work at a new university or a potential growth one, and there's some good options.
Speaker 2:A new alternative.
Speaker 1:A new alternative is a good way of putting it. Char, I'm like leave my dog. My size is my dog's. I don't have to. That's why I lock you in a bedroom. So I want to talk about you, though before I let you go, we talked about this university, so you're interested in logic, that's is that your specialty.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't say it's my specialty, it's just one area of interest I have. I'm interested in, I guess, most broadly I'd say, the foundations of knowledge, and in terms of more narrow interests, that's manifested as philosophy, science, what is? What is causation? What's a law of nature? If there is such a thing, what's the basic justification for the experimental method, for the use of mathematics and physics? And then, related to that is logic and the nature of rational thought.
Speaker 1:So Now you're teaching a science. What kind of science? Philosophy course.
Speaker 2:Well, so in last spring I taught a course in the history of philosophy of science. Currently I'm teaching a class. That's introduction. It's an introduction to philosophical thinking. Okay.
Speaker 1:Those are very different.
Speaker 2:So there's the. Yeah, those are different. They're not unrelated, but this one the one I'm teaching currently is much more a 101 class, whereas the one I taught in the spring was much more like a advanced undergraduate class.
Speaker 1:Now, what do you say? Like history of philosophy of science? So these are the thinkers that have shaped the philosophy of science. The philosophy of is that correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what I taught was a course on two philosophers who had a strong influence on Charles Darwin. Oh, okay. Specifically on how he did his thinking and research.
Speaker 1:So a guy named Erasmus.
Speaker 2:William, sorry, John Herschel and William Hewell.
Speaker 1:Oh, never mind that.
Speaker 2:So they're both not well known to the public and to the public If you've heard of John Stuart Mill, who's much more of a people who are much more aware of him. In his lifetime he had some pretty heated, famous debates with William Herschel on the nature of science and Mill went on to become the person people remembered and Hewell was sort of forgotten for about a hundred years and then now is kind of going through something of a renaissance and interest in him Because he said it's rightly so. I think he's a really interesting 19th century person and the fact that his work had such an influence on I mean he coined the term science and he was instrumental in organizing and standardizing a lot of the research practices use of statistics and science, the scientific society, scientific journals.
Speaker 2:Science is the term I remember off the top of my head, but there's a whole list of like regular English words now that he made up in the courses. So he's had a large impact on the history of science over the last 150 years or so, but not in the sense of like I'm a Hewellian, somebody would say, and I'm carrying the Hewellian torch, whereas there are people now who are, even though they might not call themselves Milzians, they are the utilitarians and empiricists in thinking about science.
Speaker 1:So he was. So what you just told me was about the terms he created, but what kind of impact specifically?
Speaker 2:Well, so he on Darwin or on science outside of the door?
Speaker 1:Science brought.
Speaker 2:Well so, besides coining the term, Besides coining the term so he, I would say two things. So one is he professionalizes, he's part of the push to professionalize science. So for a period of time science was like a hobby that gentlemen did. Natural philosophers yeah natural philosophers, if you were born into money and you were so inclined in terms of your Experiment.
Speaker 2:Interest and your intelligence. You would do experiments and you would pay to go on voyages around the world. And there was the Royal Society where you would send research and paper and papers and they would probably say but there was a kind of they might send a guy like that to America. Well, so In the early days to gather samples have you ever seen the movie Master and Commander?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, it's a great movie Long time ago, yeah, it was.
Speaker 2:Remember the character who's kind?
Speaker 1:of just on the ship.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Like that was a thing people did. Yeah, no, all the time. Yeah, they would go on. You know all kind of military ships and commercial ships and they would just go around to the world and collect different samples of you know, here, get this bird, put it in a cage and make a drawing of some beetle and you know all that kind of stuff. So that's how they categorize things around the world. But, you know, to kind of make this more organized and rigorous, there's journals now and there's and that's what Hewlett did or helped what it helped to do.
Speaker 2:You started the process, so he was.
Speaker 1:Now, what did? But didn't Newton have something Cause? Wasn't he part of, like the?
Speaker 2:Yes, he was the head of the. There was a Royal Society. Royal Society is much older than Hewlett, but Cause my understanding was Hewlett.
Speaker 1:Newton like put some really important terms and into place. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Well, what I mean by professionalizing science? I mean making science look like it does today, as opposed to the way science you know a lot of it was. You would write letters to other scientists is how. I got it Is how there were. You wouldn't write a paper, you would write a letter to, to your Just like look at this bug that I found.
Speaker 2:Or look at this proof I have of you know looking, and then then somebody would say oh, this is why there's these debates over who discovered what first, and it's referring to letters.
Speaker 1:No, I didn't realize that. That makes sense, yeah.
Speaker 2:So more like you're publishing.
Speaker 1:My letter was lost. I was the one who invented that, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think so the Newton-Leibniz controversy over who came up with calculus first was settled by people, by Newton's letters, I think. Oh okay, and it was. I'm not certain about that, but I think that's right.
Speaker 1:And so who was it?
Speaker 2:It was Newton, he did so, oh, okay, I mean it was independent discoveries but Newton, newton was first, I think, or I know Newton was first. I'm pretty confident that Leibniz discovered it independently.
Speaker 2:Oh got it, but no, just in terms of the journals with standards of publications and things like that is.
Speaker 2:There was a push for this kind of reform in Victorian science, and Hewlett was a major person in that, and that's not actually what we talked about in the class, though. No, that's more like sociology of science, which is interesting and important and could be. It's a class. So what I think is most important about Hewlett is that Hewlett and Herschel and a few other people were reformers in not just the social organization of science but in the epistemology of science. So they were arguing that science, properly understood, is inductive, along the lines of Francis Bacon's philosophy, which Francis Bacon was an earlier English philosopher who advocated for the use of experiments in science and for massive gathering of data and generalizing from it, the kind of modern conception of science as data gathering and generalizing inductively. And these people Hewell and Herschel and some others Charles Babbage thought that English science was stagnating because it had abandoned this approach, and they were arguing for a revival of the inductive Baconian approach in science, and Hewell wrote extensively and systematically on how to properly do scientific induction.
Speaker 1:He gave them the guidance when they needed it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's a question of exactly how did Hewell influence Darwin? I mean, hewell was the headmaster at Cambridge when Darwin was a student there. Darwin read, or probably read, hewell's multi-volume history of the inductive sciences. Darwin used some kind of phrasing and phraseology that seems to originate in some other books Hewell wrote Unfortunately there's no smoking gun note like I read Hewell doing blah, blah, blah. So there's a kind of a little bit of detective work. You have to philosophical detective work, just a match. Hewell advocates doing science this way and it really looks like Darwin's doing just that here and Darwin saying that that's the right way to do science.
Speaker 1:Now, is it possible that Darwin just figured that out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Darwin's also a genius.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like he just like it's possible that this is just the way it should be right. Yeah, it's the best way. It's obvious to him.
Speaker 2:I mean, given how prominent Hewell was at the time, and we know that Darwin admired Hewell and Hewell's work we just don't like-.
Speaker 1:Well, and probably, I would imagine, is this true. Hewell wrote it down more systematically yeah, if someone's trying to solve a problem. They may say, oh, I just need to do this, and they may not go into it in depth, but Hewell would probably say, okay, yeah, you need to do this in this situation and here's why, in a lot more depth, yeah, so Hewell advocates organizing your explanations in a specific way.
Speaker 2:He calls conciliants. That, and that's probably what he's most remembered for this idea that there are a good theory will explain a variety of absent. This explanation, things that are different and disconnected and you wouldn't think are connected to begin with, so Different, disconnected. So think of this way. What reason would you have to think that falling apples, the tides, the motion of the moon and the motion of Mars have any connection to each other, other than that they're just motions and you wouldn't really absent some kind of Newtonian understanding?
Speaker 1:Yeah, cause I know Newton. Yeah, you know Newton, right.
Speaker 2:But no, newton said these are all effects of gravity, like so okay, the apple goes up and down right towards the earth. Well, that's gravity. But the moon goes around and around in a circle. It's not falling right.
Speaker 2:And the tides aren't falling. They're going in and they're going out and they're going. Well, it turns out that in a certain sense yeah, they actually are falling. The tides are falling towards the moon and then away from the moon, and then a little bit towards this and then away from this on them, and the moon is falling constantly towards the center of the earth and it's just moving so fast that it never actually changes its distance from the center. So he's advocating that this is a reaching. These kind of this kind of explanatory unit. Unity is a hallmark of good inductive theory formation.
Speaker 1:And that's what Hewell is coming up with.
Speaker 2:That's what Hewell is advocating as a epistemologist. And then, lo and behold, darwin's reasoning takes just this structure. Now if Hewell is right and that's the right way to reason about science, then you can imagine that some brilliant scientist would reason that way without having read Hewell. So there is a question how much is Hewell, how much is Darwin just being Darwin?
Speaker 1:So Newton was not operating under this.
Speaker 2:Newton did that too, but he wouldn't. I don't think he would necessarily really say that's what he's doing explicitly, Like he's just doing that, and any scientist, in so far as they're actually succeeding and explaining the world, is doing that. And the question is, can you-.
Speaker 1:But he's making it explicit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can you articulate the steps that you have to follow to do this successfully? Are you self-conscious that you're doing it? I mean, anytime you're doing, you can become self-conscious of something you're already doing. You can then do that thing even better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it was just reapplied and over again Like why did this work, but this isn't working over here?
Speaker 2:It's like all of philosophy is like this, right, so we're all already doing in a certain way. We already all know everything there is to know about epistemology. Like we know things and we know it, somehow we're doing something. And the question is what exactly are we doing? And you have to reflect. And then, as soon as you can, the more you can articulate what it is that you're doing, what it is that's right about what you're already doing, then you can do that same thing over again better. Like the concept formation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like we all form concepts somehow.
Speaker 2:Like little kids know or little kids know how to speak articulately in English. They don't know any rules of grammar. They hear Yoda talk and they know it's funny and they know it's not right, but they couldn't explain why. But then at some point you learn a little bit of grammar in grade school and then your writing and communication can become better and more clear. You can become a better speaker. Now I know grammar, I use Grammarly and and lo and behold, like there's some new rule and it'll tell me you violated this rule in here and changed it according to the rule and now it's better. Of course it's more clear, it's more articulate, concise, whatever, because of this. So there's still things that you can learn, but I already knew how to speak Grammarly. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I mean that's that's true of science and making your scientific.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you-.
Speaker 1:Experiments even more efficient, so you're not wasting so much time. Right right, well, so did you know? So I've been dying to tell someone this, and I know you probably know this, but it's like I know nothing about science. I've read a lot of science fiction, especially 19th century, and I've read a little bit about-.
Speaker 2:Like Jules Verne.
Speaker 1:I mean that's late.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's late.
Speaker 1:So like yeah, that's later, but even earlier than that, like ETA Hoffman, you know, poe Hawthorne, people like that.
Speaker 2:They wrote something with science fiction, yeah, like.
Speaker 1:Rapiti's daughter. They wrote about, like what science is? You know, they were concerned about things that are a little bit different of a light. They were concerned about, you know, I mean, like Mary Shelley and it like that Frankenstein is a science fiction.
Speaker 2:Science fiction sure.
Speaker 1:Because you consider the first science fiction right In certain regard, but there are some others. Actually, you know, I think you could see it like, depending on how you define it, like Gulliver's Travels, have some of this with the, have scientists in it. There's even some work by Cyrano de Bergerac, the real guy. That's sometimes where he's like actually, although it's very imaginative, like people say. Like you know, again, this depends how you define science fiction. But anyway, the point is like, if you look at the rhetoric, you know, I was researching a little, studying that, and I found out that Newton spent like 30 years of his life investigating the philosopher's stone.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Did you know that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, he, he, he yeah.
Speaker 1:And part of that is like if he might have had this formalized process. I wonder if you, because so there was actually a really interesting video that I cannot find anywhere. I was looking for it all last night and it was this. Really this guy who was a history of philosophy, of science person, or maybe just a history of science professor, it was a perimeter something.
Speaker 2:Oh, perimeter institute.
Speaker 1:Yeah, perimeter institute, and he actually replicated what was done on a royal stage regularly of turning iron into gold, and it was just a trick, basically, and it's something that Newton saw and or heard and became obsessed with it Because. But so the argument that this professor on the stage today was saying, or 10 years ago, was that it was very legitimate for Newton to go down this road at his, you know, given the context, given what he was known as. Yeah, it's like when we hear it.
Speaker 2:It's like that's freaking nuts.
Speaker 1:Like, why was he? But again, there was like real evidence, there was real. The best thinkers of the time are thinking this and so it took him 30 years to disprove that process. But I saw that fascinating, like that's the kind of thing that a good process will not necessarily just eradicate, that you have to go through the process. But if you had a systematic process that would like, well, check this off, check. Okay. No, this isn't a real thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know a whole lot about Alchemy, but from what I do know, I think one of the things that I do know, I think one of the problems so one is it has goals that are not purely just. I wanna know the truth. It's like I wanna turn lead into gold, right? So one of the things that went on with the Alchemists was that you kind of wanna keep that a little secret so they wouldn't share results the way like if you're a chemist who just wants to understand why, what exactly is going on when something burns, you're just interested in what that is. The gold is bragging rights. Basically, it's just I figured it out, Look, and I'm gonna show you and share it with everybody and I kind of get credit Like, well, I mean, it could just be, you just wanna figure it out. Now, I figured it out. I'll keep it to myself just cause I don't care if you don't know that.
Speaker 1:Well, there's also theories that you might find the flaws were stoned of, like immortality or something like that. There's all kinds of things like the gold isn't Like you'll really be able to touch God, in a sense, which is what they go into.
Speaker 2:The goal of Alchemy wasn't just the creator's voice. Like to understand chemical change it was to make.
Speaker 1:They didn't know it that in that way, yeah, they knew it as like there was some kind of source material out in the world that they could find, that could touch creation.
Speaker 2:But it turns out that these people actually discovered a lot of important truths in chemistry. One of the issues is that, since there was this element of secret keeping, different people would have different terminologies and mean different things by the same words, and so there was a real problem of transmitting knowledge from person to person, generation to generation, which goes to the sociology of science, kind of thing Like one of the things that's important for scientific progress is we're well past the point in which anyone mind can know everything in a field, so it's really important no more Aristotle's.
Speaker 1:No more Aristotle.
Speaker 2:I mean probably no more Newtons either. Yeah, we could. Just to do an experiment. If you look at these journal articles about the large Hadron Collider, like there's hundreds of authors on the paper just because to do the experiment requires somebody has a whole PhD and like calibrating a certain sensor and if that sensor is not like doing what it's supposed to be doing, then the whole experiment is junk.
Speaker 2:So there's this issue of sociology of science, and one of the things that was learned pretty early in figuring out these kind of sociological questions about knowledge is public standards are really important, like this is what this word means and this is how we're and like. Then you have debates over how to define combustion or how to define oxygen or whatever, but it's we're sure we're all talking about the same thing and it's a like major breakthrough still happen when people realize no, you were talking about this and we were talking about that and they're related but they're different and oh, what's the difference? And we can articulate that these are two different substances. We thought they were the same. That's important. Standards of measurement, too, and units, like all that stuff is somebody had to figure that out that this is the meter, is this thing, and there's literally a physical object that's a meter long or there's a literal I think it's the most spherical manmade sphere is the kilogram object, which is the standard for all measurements.
Speaker 2:So that's the kilogram, and that's really because you need to, especially when you're doing experiments that need to be super, super, super precise.
Speaker 1:I mean for like measurements. You can't just say the king's foot is the foot, I mean that's not accurate. The royal foot.
Speaker 2:You can if your margin of error is, like, really big and everybody has a print of the king's foot or something. But, yeah, beyond a certain point it needs to be, and that's why now they wanna understand, they wanna define lengths in terms of how far light travels in a specific amount of time, or things like that. Yeah precision is so important Public precision like that we can all share the same precision is really important for the transmission of knowledge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I wonder, I almost I think that part of why Newton spent so much time on it besides, the process wasn't there was, I don't know he might have mentioned this, but that he had to basically recreate all experiments to some degree, right, cause the guy goes through a lot of different things. That Newton in his notes is that we know that he did this kind of experiment, he was looking for this kind of geological proof or whatever, and so we had to do these things, so things that other I don't know if I know that, but other alchemists might have been trying and he just had to do it again cause they didn't share anything.
Speaker 1:So you're basically just repeating the same thing, that it's like if he would have gone the right little village, monk or whatever, he would have figured out. Oh yeah, my grandfather did that exact thing 100 years ago.
Speaker 2:It's like what. That's why research journals are important. So yeah, and Google's important too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and Google's important. Like 90s, figure out how to get all yeah and then chat GPT. I just ask it a question.
Speaker 2:I mean a good scientist maybe can evaluate a paper in an afternoon, but if you had to do the whole experiment that you're evaluating in that paper on your own, like years? So it's a major part of progress is just how easy it is to share results.
Speaker 1:So can I? I'm gonna skip to something that, based on just what you just said, that worries me about. The studies show phenomenon Right Like studies show this. Studies show that. I mean, I would really hope that the serious scientists out there know to like just what to look for right away, so they're not wasting their time on all this. Because according to all the studies show one everything I've ever eaten, drank and drank, or studies have shown will kill you, will kill me and it's, or something along those lines, or will give me superhuman strength and, like I'll, last forever.
Speaker 1:Apparently, drinking a glass or two of wine will be great for me. But another ounce and I'll be an alcoholic Like I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean I don't wanna sound like there's not. I don't wanna come across as there's no problem with the way certain areas of research are conducted, or peer review or thing, but that kind of thing is almost always incompetent journalists and university PR departments.
Speaker 1:I don't know, studies do not, so scientists do know.
Speaker 2:Studies will show that. You know, the study will say like we looked at a certain number of people who ate eggs every Wednesday and like there was a very, very, very small, but they'll say statistically significant, which doesn't mean it matters, it just means it registers as a possible effect in some kind of way of measuring. So they'll be like I used to eat eggs on Wednesday We've measured some chance that there's a small effect that that might increase your. You know I said just super qualified that because when they actually have those studies they'll be super they usually super qualify them themselves that there might be some unknown mechanism relating, when you eat an egg, to your cholesterol level.
Speaker 2:If you just was reading something this morning about, You're stuck on this Eating, eating, eating large breakfast and then tapering off your consumption of food during the day is supposed to be better for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is the opposite of what I've always been told, or what I've been told recently, which is always like just feast at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:So I'm like, but how?
Speaker 1:do I do that when I when I'm lifting 500 pounds a jerk like I'm lifting weights. I can't do that and people give such. Anyway, I'm gonna go off on this health tangent.
Speaker 2:But there's the actual research, I mean it's. So it's the same sort of, it's the same phenomenon that Alex Epstein talks about with what the actual research in climatology says and then what the public actually gets like from the New York times or whatever. And um, there's the same. There's that phenomenon all across science and science journalism, which is just that there are a certain combination of bad incentives and ignorance and kind of willful posturing on the part of certain kind of journalist activist type people that the possibility of a small effect relating eggs to cholesterol turns into eggs give you, you know, tar in your veins. At the time the average person kind of gets it from the six o'clock news.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then we think about.
Speaker 1:Do they really do that Do?
Speaker 2:eggs give you tar in your veins. Find out tonight at 11. Like that kind of stuff, but see.
Speaker 1:Arnold Schwarzenegger says it's the basis of all his diets and it's like Rocky eats.
Speaker 2:Rocky eats raw eggs, Whatever those guys are doing.
Speaker 1:They're doing something right. Whatever these study guys, I look at them and I'm like, yeah you're not doing it right. So if I'm going to follow somebody, I mean, so this is health.
Speaker 2:But that's it, that goes to like. So what, what value does a university have? Well, somebody who's a science journalist should know how to evaluate a scientific research paper and should know how to accurately report its findings.
Speaker 1:And it's all good start to their career.
Speaker 2:Yeah there's all kinds of people who report on the sciences and they you know they, maybe they do know how and they, but they also know they'll get more attention if they hype it up, and or maybe they just don't. So they there. It is a real thing that people think statistically significant means like it, like it's a lot. Like significant usually means oh, it's a significant effect, right, like yeah, he ate eggs. There's a significant relationship between eating eggs and having cholesterol. You mean like, what does that mean? In in the mind of somebody who doesn't know that that's a special word. And it means like, yeah, eggs will give me really bad cholesterol. Not that we looked at 1000 people and you know the people that ate eggs had like a 10th of a point higher on some cholesterol measure and like that doesn't matter. But it might matter in this sense of we can measure it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so there's like two, so one thing. So my concern, based on what we were saying earlier, is that scientists would waste their time on this, but it sounds like they know most good. I mean most relevant important scientists doing something important would hopefully be able to quickly identify this kind of garbage. Yeah, and that's. That's my official term right. I'm going to add that to the lexicon of scientific knowledge and epistemology.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. It's not that they know it's garbage, but it's also a question of are they producing garbage? So like I don't think they are, I think what's? I mean the science? I mean, on the whole, it's not that there's never, it's not that garbage doesn't get published, but it's. But it's on the kind of thing that that we're worried about right now, like these but that's what the public sees, too.
Speaker 1:That's yeah, that's part of this.
Speaker 2:That's not at the that's. That's at the. That's not at the knowledge generation level, that's at the dissemination level.
Speaker 1:This is what this is, Alex Epstein's knowledge systems.
Speaker 2:Knowledge systems yeah.
Speaker 1:Aspect of it where, when you go high enough, or is it high or low enough or whatever, and in between there's there's kind of systematizers, so you get these, so you.
Speaker 2:You know we both, we both spend some time in the gym. I'm sure we are both familiar with all kind of weird strategies for eating, that you eat this thing at this time of day, and I'll do, and it's people will try to systematize whole theories of. He's just a complete fraud.
Speaker 1:I have more. Now he's a fraud, but before I don't know he was but but but there's a.
Speaker 2:There's a strategy of eating. I did it for a couple, a couple months. What strategy? It's called carb back loading, if you've ever heard of that. Carb back loading yeah it's you, it's you back. Load high, high, what's it? Gi carbs, like really sugary things Is that different than like carb unloading. Well, so the strategy is you eat them towards the end of the day, after you work out.
Speaker 1:I have definitely heard so.
Speaker 2:So there'll be more partition towards growth and recovery than fat storage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's, that's is that not true?
Speaker 2:you're saying, Well it's, it's one of these things, it's like it's like there's some research that shows small effects in this direction. But, but then the systematizer is like take that. And they think, oh, now I know that there's this causal relationship and and I can devise some whole strategy of eating and then what it comes? No. And then by the time it's by the time that's disseminated towards bros in the gym.
Speaker 1:It's like oh man, just you know you're on steroids, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But just eat a bunch of you know eat a bunch of sweets or you know eat a bunch of donuts. After you lift they're like, oh, because they're trying to sell their they're trying to back load their carbs. They're trying to get all their car. Why aren't?
Speaker 1:they trying to sell their system? Oh well, they're trying to make it more appealing.
Speaker 2:So there's like a when this is going wrong. There's like, like, like, so the research will be whatever. It's just the research, and then, and then it's it's it's valid or not. And then then it gets to the systematizers and it gets garbled and it gets farther from what was actually found. And then by the time it gets to the average diet, or it's just, it's not even it's, it's worse than what the systematizer is saying.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I can just eat whatever donuts I want, as long as I eat them at night and like now, I'm okay, which is one kind of thing. People say, yeah, yeah, that's a real example.
Speaker 1:Which is dangerous and stupid. But yeah, generally speaking, yeah.
Speaker 2:But that's. But that's why you know epistemology is important because, yes, that now we understand what's going on, you have that perspective that there's this breakdown in the knowledge, that there's a whole system of the production and dissemination of knowledge and there's a break. Why don't the journalists know better? Why don't science journalists learn any of this stuff? And some of them do.
Speaker 2:But what seems like the incentives and then why are people who aren't knowledgeable of this writing these kind of articles Like? I'm sure that, like bonafide science, journalists wouldn't write the kind of like eggs turn my blood into tar kind of thing. It's probably just somebody who doesn't know anything about this. Somebody just said write this thing. There's this, you know, we got a PR release from some nutrition department at the local university.
Speaker 1:Like write it up, and then well then, there could be confusions with yeah, and then there's off on top of that, there's just pure confusion because sometimes it seems to use statistics and like I'm thinking of, like COVID stuff, for instance, and so it seems like there was a lot of confusion even among quote unquote legitimate doctors and scientists, and part of it seemed to be a misunderstanding of the studies that were being presented at various times.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's my limited understanding of what was going on, because like there's people there's scientists and doctors from all over the spectrum saying very different things, and they were doctors and scientists with legitimate degrees and they were looking at the same studies. You know, like the whole ivermectin thing, and you know part of it is they didn't quite understand the study and the study wasn't finished because there was a big new study that had that was going to be a meta study and that meta study showed what was really going on.
Speaker 1:And so to jump the gut like someone should know that if they're a scientist and they're going to give advice like take ivermectin or not, they should know that, well, these studies aren't sufficient yet right.
Speaker 2:I mean, I don't know about the particular case whether it's really an issue of how people understand. My understanding is that some of the ivermectin research was fraudulent. So fraudulent research is different than like statistics. Oh, I didn't hear that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there was some of. It was like they were done in third world countries. They found out what really occurred was ivermectin's great it's for tapeworms Like that was the job and the people were curious, so like that so that was really what was, and then, that their body was naturally able to.
Speaker 2:the bodies were stronger, but stronger and checked the way tapeworms. I've heard that too, but I've also read if and maybe there were some frauds as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so some studies having well, because that's the other thing the meta study pointed out actually is there were some frauds, but that's partly because where the studies were done, which is in some third world countries where what the standards weren't as high, and so there was some, they were pointing out like these studies are fraudulent. That was part of the meta study.
Speaker 2:So if you have fraudulent studies in the meta study, then the meta study is no good, because the meta study is a study of like no, but they were finding that.
Speaker 1:They were that that's part of what they were discovering. Oh, they were doing, they were Okay so maybe you're using meta, maybe I'm using yeah, so there's something called a meta study, which basically aggregates similar data from a variety from a from a from a like a large number of studies, so it's like you combine all. Yeah, so I but if you're studying, I think I was reading about the study, the meta study, an article that was composing it.
Speaker 2:Right. So if people, if what people are doing is just here's the study that was published I wonder if this is a good one. You? Can think of that as like going to the meta level or something, but there's actually a thing called a meta study, that's something different.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. Yes, there was a meta study as well, but I think it was the latter, the looking at these various studies and aggregating what was really going on. But anyway, the point is that people were giving advice about ivermectin before all the evidence was it and they were very adamant about it, and that to me seems part of this same dissemination and systematizers or whatever. Or is it different?
Speaker 2:I don't know enough about the like. If you're asking specifically about what's going on with people advocating ivermectin and ivermectin and why, is it? Because of confusion, incompetence, deception, like I don't know enough to be confident to answer any. My sense which I'm not, I don't want to claim certainty on is that it's people should know better, which is more towards the deception the scientist, the scientists, the people who are making these recommendations. But again, I don't. That's my just preliminary judgment. I mean, if I wanted to have certain, I had to really get into it. And then I have a question to myself of could I even get to the point where I'm certain about this? Because I don't? You'd need to know more medicine, I think. Is this really something somebody should know better than to advocate Like I don't know? I mean I don't know enough, but like when do I know when? When, at what point does a doctor know enough to say you should do this? Yeah, like.
Speaker 2:I'd have to know that too, to really say are people doing something that's just mistaken, or maybe another possibility is what they're? They're advocating something that's wrong but reasonable. I mean, I just have to know a whole lot more. There's a lot of possibilities. I've tended to read more, you know, just based on who I know and follow on various social media, I tend to see the the deceptions being pointed out more, more and that could just be bias in my sourcing, or it could be no, that could be really, yeah, you haven't done a systematic study yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, I get that, you know. I was just curious, because we were talking about these different types of studies, that there's a process that has been that Huell has kind of helped make it more prominent and more efficient, and I was worrying about scientists today wasting their time because they do need to do one PhD to calibrate one part of a machine that like. So then you want to be as efficient as possible to make all of that work more.
Speaker 1:But then of course, the dissemination is also critical because you know we're having a more anti science world.
Speaker 2:If you want to use. If you want to use, I would be cautious of taking here's the kind of sociology of science lessons you can take.
Speaker 2:You know, I still think we have to wait a good 10 years before we can have the kind of hindsight that's not for COVID, that's not like clouded by all the things that seem really important right now that in 20 years now will just be baffling to people who weren't in the thick of it. But also like when the public doesn't really have a stake in scientific research and when being on one side or the other side of some scientific debate doesn't get you called a fascist or something. Science is really messy and hard and people fight and are controversial and don't talk to themselves. And then now it's in this. It's like that same thing, just magnified a thousandfold.
Speaker 1:People are not talking to each other.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they won't, because they're scared of you, you took ivermectin. You can't come to. You can't come to Thanksgiving or that kind of. You were opposed to lockdown. So that means you're this and you advocated lockdowns. That means you're that. I mean, you can't take a crisis example and think, oh, this is going to be a core data point for my theory of, like, how scientific journals should run or something along those lines, and you okay, it's the wrong level of analysis. Yeah, you'd want to afford when.
Speaker 1:when people are more, I'm more considered concerned, based on what you were saying, with scientists wasting their time because I want them to be more efficient. Is what we're trying to get to with what you were studying or your teaching?
Speaker 2:Oh sure.
Speaker 1:Right, because if they're more efficient than I live longer, right. If they're better at their job and they have better tools, then I get to live a little bit longer, hopefully.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean your cancer faster Like. Is that correct in terms of if they're wasting their time going down the wrong way?
Speaker 2:like? What's the value of the epistemology of science and the sociology? Of science is to make it more efficient, less error prone, but not just like. That is one of the but also there are certain things maybe we couldn't discover if we didn't know how to do science, and there's more things to learn about how to do science.
Speaker 1:And that's what I'm mostly concerned with. So there's two things.
Speaker 2:So Seattle one is another thing, of course but Doing what we already know how to do better and then doing things we don't know how to do it all yet. So there was a period of time where there was a question is maybe we shouldn't do experiments because, like, we're trying to figure out the way nature is and you're intervening, that's kind of cheating, isn't it? You're setting things up to go a certain way when they wouldn't go that way naturally to begin with. So maybe experimental research is not the right approach. Maybe you just have to more passively observe nature.
Speaker 1:Be a much longer process, I would imagine. Yeah. Well, like you talked about, rodents, for instance, like getting hundreds of rodents and doing something that kills hundreds of them, or something.
Speaker 2:I mean, like I want to know what freefall, how freefall works. Let's evacuate all the air out of a tower and drop something from it. That's cheating, because freefall doesn't occur in a vacuum. Isn't that cheating?
Speaker 1:So do you mean freefall is in freefall, like jumping off an out-and-pire state building freefall.
Speaker 2:Or just dropping something from a height or putting bacteria in a Petri dish. Bacteria don't live in Petri dishes, they live in the body. Any kind of manipulation or intervention in order to figure out how something works isn't really figuring out how it works naturally. It's cheating, it's manipulating nature to. That's the way.
Speaker 1:So you study the plague. When there's a plague, you take the bodies and you're like, oh, this is a plague body and there's an actual plague.
Speaker 2:It's not like an ethical point, like it's cheating. It's an epistemological cheating. That's not how nature really behaves on its own.
Speaker 1:That's the kind of.
Speaker 2:That's the kind of.
Speaker 1:It feels like that's an excuse, though, for an ethical point.
Speaker 2:But the point isn't like we should revive this debate. It's just that, yeah, that's how some people thought about it, and there was a period of time where people just didn't do experiments. And there were also ethical reasons not to do specific experiments, like don't do autopsies, don't cut open bodies. That's ethical, not epistemological. Stem cell research, yeah, now stem cell research. Now we don't do vivisection now usually.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's certainly not on people. If you weren't worried about ethics, you could learn a whole lot more about human bodies and behavior. If you just treated human beings like literal lab rats.
Speaker 1:By the way, this is 19th century science fiction.
Speaker 2:19th century science fiction.
Speaker 1:What you just said.
Speaker 2:Vivisection and.
Speaker 1:If you don't care about morality you can learn anything. That is, I think, I would say.
Speaker 2:Well, it's not that you can learn anything, it's that you can learn certain things more rapidly. It's not how you, as a scientist, put it but this is how literature person could put it.
Speaker 1:It's, like you can, the mad scientist of Dr Frankenstein and Dr Repiccini and there's several others, and the HD Wells and others. That's what they were obsessed with they were obsessed with knowledge and the attainment of knowledge at all costs, and they didn't care about the morality. That was the point and that's what they had to learn, or destroyed them.
Speaker 2:I see it, I see it.
Speaker 1:What you just said is the basis of 19th century and a lot of modern science fiction, I think, Anyway. Yeah, I agree that's a separate subject, but I finally knew something you were talking about.
Speaker 2:I guess the point I was getting at is, at some point people didn't know even should we do an experiment, like a basic idea? We manipulate nature in order to reveal its secrets? Should we do that? Is that somehow going to lead us astray or will that lead us closer to the truth? We just decided that. It's decided because people start doing this and it's obviously productive. Then there's a question how do you do it? How do you do it better? Now, if you talk to research scientists, there's actually a it's not really funny to me big bang episode, big bang theory.
Speaker 1:I know those two. I've never seen it.
Speaker 2:There's one where there's two of the people arguing about who's a better scientist, and one of them says you wouldn't know a confounding variable if it bit you on your slide rulers Some kind of geek talk, geek insult, yeah, yeah, but it's like yeah, the idea of a confounding variable that you have to control for when you design an experiment, that's all. Somebody had to figure that out Before you knew that you could. Still, it's not like you didn't learn anything from science or from an experiment, but you can't learn as much. We don't have or at least there's no reason to think we have methodological omniscience about science. So we know that we don't know a whole lot of things about how we can do science better, and good epistemology of science would help us do that. And then, on the sociological side, is peer review productive? I mean, I've my sense of.
Speaker 2:I mean in the hard sciences put aside, I think it's a joke in the humanities. But put the hard sciences and what it's supposed to do is well, there's certain agreed upon standards for what a good statistical analysis of data, blah, blah, blah, is, and it turns out that bad stuff gets through peer review like just bad basics, even the hard gets through all the time and it's not clear that it's the peer review does anything other than make researchers have to go through the peer review hurdle.
Speaker 2:So I read something recently is pretty convincing that what would be better is if everybody just forgot about peer review and posted things on. There's a website called I think you say archive, but it's spelled like A-R-I-X something. It's where physicists and mathematicians and computer scientists post like pre-publication prints.
Speaker 1:I see.
Speaker 2:And then I use just Put your stuff up there and with that, people read your abstract and then read the paper and forget about the, because stuff gets through peer review. That's wrong all the time. So all that's doing is wasting everybody's time when we can just read papers on our own and that's the kind of review is just. Oh, this is a good result and it looks valid, so I'm gonna.
Speaker 1:Now, peer review is like multiple people peer reviewing it, not just one person.
Speaker 2:The way it works in blinded peer review is you have a journal Journal of Podcast Research and I submit.
Speaker 1:So it's true, I'm launching it today.
Speaker 2:You're the editor of it. I submit a paper to you on how to do a good podcast and, as the editor, you assign my paper to some reviewers say three, and you don't. You either I prepare it this way or you do it. You make it so you can't identify the author of the paper and you give it to these people. It's gonna blind read. They don't know who wrote the paper. Even though it's easy it's trivially easy most of the time to figure out who it is anyway.
Speaker 2:Yeah, syntax and style and there's like two people doing research on this one thing yeah, okay, even easier. Or you just Google three lines from the paper and the paper's already online somewhere and you just see. So it's already a little bit of a joke, but the idea is this removes biases. So if somebody who hates me happens to review my paper, they don't know it's by me, so they won't hold that against it, they'll just give a review of the content.
Speaker 1:So there's no thought that goes into who's doing the peer reviewing.
Speaker 2:It's supposed to be people who are experts in the thing being reviewed.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 2:So now in philosophy.
Speaker 1:Well, let's put aside philosophy. Yeah, so that.
Speaker 2:And I don't know in the sciences does that actually happen consistently? Do they always give it to people who know the material?
Speaker 1:Well, what does that mean? Yeah, what level. And the editors Are these people who are just not busy enough with their real work and they're.
Speaker 2:No, it's Guilty, I mean. I mean. So that's part of the problem is that you don't get paid to do this. It doesn't help. You get tenure Well as a writer.
Speaker 2:What's the incentive to do it? You kind of feel like guilty. You publish all the time and you feel guilty about it. Or maybe somebody sends you a paper and it seems really interesting the paper. So you think, oh, I'm going to read this anyway. I might as well write this guy to paragraph review or something like that. So there's a question about but everybody knows about the hoaxes on the humanities journals where they send goofy fake papers to the Journal of Gender Studies about how dogs are toxic.
Speaker 2:Men to Mexican women the dog park or whatever, and they're fake papers and they get peer reviewed and they get published. But there's similar things in the sciences, where they'll send out papers that have fabricated data and nobody notices, or that commit major statistical errors and nobody notices. I was under the impression that if you were going to publish a paper where you had collected a bunch of data, you had to also provide the data. And that's not always the case. Usually you have to give it over on a request, but what's the penalty if you don't?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they may not even request all the time. The assumption is sometimes enough. You think you might have to, so oh, we won't do it because they know they have to.
Speaker 2:So the question is like what the hell is the point of all this?
Speaker 1:It seems like just a big burden on people, and then people write things.
Speaker 2:Now, when you're doing this research, you're partially thinking will this pass peer review? That's part of it's now shaping how you do the research. And there's another motive in addition to just I want to solve this problem or figure it out. And now there's incentives to spin research one way or the other, or outright fabricate or fudge. And then on top of that there's a kind of question of well, the original motivation for this system was that it would make research better. So people have done research on does this actually make things better? The answer seems to be probably not. And if it does, it's so marginal that the question is is this worth the cost?
Speaker 2:And there's something I'd like to learn more about. Is this claim that there's been a noticeable, measurable and not just significant in the ordinary sense of the word significant slow down in the production of new theoretical knowledge since about the mid 20th century, which also coincides. If that's true, the question is what's the cause of that, or cause is it could be. There's multiple things. It's also around the time that peer review starts going. None of the early none of Einstein papers were peer reviewed, none of the early quantum mechanics papers were peer reviewed.
Speaker 2:Darn was not peer reviewed yet.
Speaker 1:Newton is not.
Speaker 2:Most of that was done, but there were magazines and journals that you'd publish in. It's just not a peer review. The editor would just say this looks interesting.
Speaker 1:I think peer like I can't imagine peer reviewing as possibly very beneficial. And this just from my not like my not knowing anything about it, but hearing you talk about it even for a few seconds, because I could just make an analogy or a comparison to like writing fiction and getting people's feedback on it. And it's in a similar way where, even if they're good fiction writers, that doesn't mean that they're understanding what I'm trying to accomplish with this fiction piece and that's part of there's a whole context that goes into it and there's everything else and they would have to like be a part of it, not just read. You know this, casually, on the side, when they're doing other things and they're not getting paid for it, motivations are all wrong. I mean, I think about this all the time with writing fiction.
Speaker 1:Reading fiction is like you know, I know I could put if I were to put my name on something famous that people like you hadn't read, I said, give me feedback on this, you'd probably tear it apart and I was like that's one of the most famous Nathaniel Hawthorne stories of all time and it's amazing work of art. And you know, like people have a fundamentally different perspective when they're reviewing something one way or the other than when they're digesting it. And it seems like a better model, like is what Ayn Rand did with her editing, which is she would get editors feedback but she was the arbiter of what went in and didn't, and what changed and didn't. And that seems to me make the most sense is like maybe the person could put it out for some feedback, but they're the ones figuring out what's good and bad about the review, because a review can be good or bad, just like an article could be good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean complaints about incompetent reviewers. If you follow, like I follow people on philosophy Twitter, so there's a philosophy, there's a philosophy, there's an everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's like the reviewer will say this person obviously doesn't understand the work of Professor Smith. Lo and behold, they're reviewing a paper by Professor Smith, so that's like that's the best thing. I mean it's so awesome.
Speaker 2:Or the reviewer will insist that something that isn't mistake is a mistake. And then now there's a question of like okay, how does this get resolved? Because the reviewer clearly doesn't understand this well enough to be reviewing it. Is the editor going to do the right thing and like, make a decision? Or? But then that seems to go against the peer review thing, because the editor is not supposed to be doing it. You give it to the peer reviewers to review and they give that anyway. Yeah, so I think there's a real question about whether or not that's a sensible system. Even in the hard, hard sciences and in the humanities it is.
Speaker 1:Well, in the humanities, it's obvious.
Speaker 2:It's obviously a joke, even to people in the humanities. Yet what keeps it around, I think in large part, is that when you go up for tenure you have to prove your worth in some sense, and you're often proving your worth to people who are not just your peers and your field but, like the dean and board, external reviewers and there's also reviewers from other fields and they don't really have the equipment to evaluate whether or not your research is good. So they either just have to completely defer to the judgment of the people who are actually in your field or you know what they can do is okay. You published in journals, and I can. I don't understand physics, but I know what a top physics journal is. You published in the top physics, Is it a kind of? That is part of the supposed value of it is that it's a way to like objectively show to outsiders that you're in fact knowledgeable in your field.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think there's actually something to that, but I don't think that needs to be accomplished by peer review. It can just be accomplished by well, I mean now, it's now. You could just do it by like citation counts or how often your papers downloaded from a website. You know if everybody in your field sites your paper, obviously that's an important paper and you're an knowledgeable person.
Speaker 1:If nobody sites your paper, that's influence, so that's a measuring measuring influence?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the question the question, though, is for how can an outsider judge that you're actually an expert in your field? And one way is to just defer to other people in your field who you already accept as expert in the field that you already accept as expert.
Speaker 1:Well then, how do you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so how do you get them, and that's another question. But if you had some kind of system, which is the idea of peer review, is that it's blind, like blind peer review. So you're not just getting published because you have all the right connections, you're getting published because the quality of that's the ideal.
Speaker 1:But it's, but it's it still sounds like it doesn't work. It's giving you the, the false. It's like faux confidence in this, the value of this versus, like you know, having really high standards for what looks like good science. I think that makes more sense to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is having objective standards for what? They would. They would say I mean in the question there's a question of who is they? Because everybody seems to have a problem with the system. Everybody ask.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Um, but the defense of this system would say, yeah, I mean, peer review is supposed to embody those standards. So the point of reviewing it is that somebody who knows the standards applies into the paper and they say, okay, this um, you know they didn't do the data gathering correctly. They committed this mistake, they didn't control for an obvious confounding variable, they forgot to carry the two, all that kind of stuff. That's what the review is. A reviewer might catch. That might be the value of peer review, and that things that create a commit obvious mistakes don't get the they're through this filter. That would, if that, if that actually worked, that would be a valuable thing. Then you wouldn't read papers that had obvious mistakes in them and even if it was a good paper, it would get caught that had the obvious mistake. The mistake would get fixed. Then it would be an even better paper.
Speaker 2:But, it turns out, the things that have obvious mistakes get through all the time. Um, you know the the, the thought that um, or the claim that vaccines caught autism, cause autism, came from a peer review paper that was retracted was retracted like a decade later because it was never a good study to begin with, but it got through. And then now that you have this system, it creates like a kind of prestige effect around things that make it through. So this is supposedly legitimate research, even though it was never legitimate research. It was just a mistake that it got through because it was bad to begin with, but now it has. You know now and you know it's a conspiracy. That's why it was retracted, not cause it was bad.
Speaker 1:You can understand why a normal, you know person, uneducated, you know, I don't mean that in a bad way, just like not gone to school or college, working class might feel that way. Yeah, because they don't understand and it's like well, why do they if?
Speaker 2:there was no peer review system, then you couldn't say this like you would have. It would, um, if there there might be some other proxy for like value, um. But one thing that the peer review system um makes possible is for people to say this made it through peer review and that like legitimizes it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean but this is so dangerous. So just because, like I wasn't, there's something recently about an Alzheimer's premise. Um, there was some premise from 30 years ago that got through and it was the premise.
Speaker 2:Everyone, assumed by everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was assumed by everybody and it's like this is what I was talking about and we should probably wrap up here in a minute, but it's, but this is. This is why I'm worried about it, why I think what you're doing is important and, you know, maybe the it's because people made all this. You know, just to wrap up, that thought just all these scientists had this assumption that was based on this peer review paper and that put all this research in the wrong, uh, vent avenue. They were all going on the wrong road and now they're finally starting over. So we've lost 30 years, or 20 or whatever it was, of time and people have died and gone through Alzheimer's, and it's like, you know, that's, that's, that's, this is a you know when, when you are making the argument of what is the value of what you do in a snapshot, to me that's it. Yeah, is this, is this issue of? Like these people are going down the wrong path for whatever period of time, because they had the wrong epistemology and they didn't. They didn't quit.
Speaker 2:We weren't fast enough at improve because nothing is going to be perfect, right? I don't know that. I don't know that. I remember reading about it but you do have to like no, no matter how, even even like total epistemological omniscient is not going to stop.
Speaker 1:There's no such thing as like flawless yeah.
Speaker 2:There's no such thing as people aren't going to make mistakes anymore. But you want to get there faster is what I'm saying, and I think yeah, I think there's a T that some like field might go off the rails for 30 years.
Speaker 2:Like that's, that's, that's there's also there's certain things that I just don't think there's any solution to, other than people have to value intellectual honesty, like the forensic field of bite mark analysis. To me, bite Bite mark analysis, like where they try to match a victim's bite, like the bite on a body of somebody who is murdered.
Speaker 1:Yeah, these are teeth and these match Ted Bundy. That's how they match Ted.
Speaker 2:Bundy, yeah, but that whole thing is pseudoscience.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And there was a great expose of this in the Washington. Post by Radley Balco, I think, wrote this sounds like something he would write. I wish I didn't realize. I didn't imagine this would come up, so I can't remember exactly.
Speaker 1:I mean yeah.
Speaker 2:But, but.
Speaker 2:But the point is just that there's a whole field and they give each other degrees and certifications and the whole thing is, I mean, the reason I what convinced me that this is all garbage is that they got a whole bunch of people that are supposedly experts and bite marks and they showed them a bunch of different you know cases to, and they looked and these people were no better getting than chance at getting it right and they were like the experts were contradicting each other and yet people are going to jail based on this kind of testimony.
Speaker 2:But now you and then the standards for what scientific evidence in the courts are is is there? It's something like is there a field of people that have certification and there's no way to get outside of some of some field once it's going and say that this whole field is legitimate is illegitimate. So this kind of perpetuates itself and there's nothing that that can can like. There's no epistemology that I think that can stop that at the level of. There's always going to be astrologists, there's always going to be pseudo scientists. What you can do is more marginalize them by adopting better standards, but there's not going to be, like some, some discovery and epistemology that don't make it so that mistakes don't happen and people aren't dishonest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but there's okay. I'm sorry. I know we're trying to wrap up with this one. There's something that is still sticking with me on this is that there seems to be fundamental difference between the two different the pseudo science and the oh, this is science, this is correct way of doing it. But no, it's not. And now we've gone down 30 years because of this.
Speaker 2:I see.
Speaker 1:So like that's. That sounds very different to me.
Speaker 2:Like I understand pseudo science, I mean I need to know the to actually say anything about that case.
Speaker 1:So even based on what you've said about peer review, that is, you could forget the Alzheimer's example you could see how, like a peer reviewed article could be very influential. People could start accepting it because it's peer reviewed and because and then they're going down this road of cancer research and it's the wrong road and they're not checking it again because it's already been peer reviewed. That's different than like pseudo science. Like wait a second, this guy's just making this crap up as he's going right.
Speaker 2:So peer review is supposed to be. It's a technology to implement good epistemology.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, that's my. It's like it's, it's, it's. It sells itself as healthy produce. Is this a good? Is this a?
Speaker 2:good technology to implement epistemology in the. I think ultimately, the way you answer that is the kind of how often do mistakes get through? How glaring of a mistake gets through how often? How often does this? Does the Alzheimer's type thing happen? I mean, if it happens like once in a blue moon, maybe that's, but it prevents a whole lot of worse things from happening. Maybe then it is valuable overall. So I don't want to like I'm a peer review skeptic, but I don't want to say opposition to peer review is not purely philosophical, it's also it's like a cost benefit thing, because it's a, it's a piece of, it's a way to implement a certain certain epistemological standards. The epistemological good, epistemological standards could be poorly implemented, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, and I understand that you haven't done a systematic review of peer reviews, as a system.
Speaker 2:So we're kind of going off the cuff of our knowledge of this and I should say my skepticism of it is more based in my knowledge of it in the humanities than it is Like what I I think it's clear in the humanities. But it's.
Speaker 2:I'm kind of like it's really bad here and that's kind of influencing how I'm like the light I'm shining on the emotional attachment, yeah, my emotional attachments, and I'm, you know, I'm taking more seriously criticisms of it than the defenses and I'm trying to, you know, think of how somebody might defend it, but I think ultimately it's more a technological question. Like you know, the kind of things that come up with social media are similar. Look at how fast disinformation spreads and like, isn't that something bad about social media? But then you can, on the other hand, you can say, yeah, but look how quickly good information can spread.
Speaker 1:And so on the whole is this?
Speaker 2:is this a positive or a negative for the dissemination of knowledge? And I mean that's okay if. If the bad is so is like if the bad stuff that gets spread through social media tends to we all, like people who care about the truth, like notice that and are really upset about it and maybe you're just not noticing how much good stuff has spread because of it. That just kind of sits in the background.
Speaker 1:And you could also choose to spread good stuff. Yeah, I think people, Okay, so I think that's. That's good. We've solved science at this point and no, there's a lot to talk about. I hope you'll come back at some point. I guess the last, very light question is what is you know, what's inspiring you? What do you want to work on? You know is just a closing, closing thing.
Speaker 2:Um, what I'm most interested in working on presently is some of what we've already talked about. Uh, I'm I'd like to write something based on the course I taught on Huell and Herschel and Darwin. Um, they're partially based. The article would discuss the importance and value of philosophy of science to practicing scientists and the kind of um uh historical, uh evidence in favor of that thesis would be, in part, that it's had a positive impact on people like Darwin. Um, I'm interested in writing some of the uh, some of the Rand scholarship type articles that go in the Iran society philosophical uh studies, uh books.
Speaker 1:Um, these are for professors, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's, it's for. I think of it. As for um students of philosophy more Okay, Um, that's the that would, but it's not the general public type of article. It's not the general public type of article, the philosophy of science article I just mentioned. I'd pitch towards scientists and science journalists and people who are consumers of science. Um, yeah, yeah, that sort of audience and not a general audience. Um, ultimately, I'd like to write a book on the foundations of science, causality and laws of nature, and um, metaphysics of science.
Speaker 2:Uh, that's the metaphysics of science that's more of a longterm causality.
Speaker 1:What is a?
Speaker 2:cause and um how understanding what causes influences the kind of uh methods we use to discover them, uh, that that sort of uh topic. So that's, that's a kind of longterm project, all right.
Speaker 1:Well, that's. I hope you get cited on that and your Ocon talk will be about one of those topics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it'll be. It'll be about, uh what? What is an explanation?
Speaker 1:What is an explanation?
Speaker 2:We use that word all the time. What is that?
Speaker 1:I like that. What does?
Speaker 2:that mean what? Uh, what makes an explanation good versus not?
Speaker 1:You should do that at the beginning of Ocon, or maybe even before, because people are always trying to explain things. And I'm like I don't know if this makes any sense even though you say it in a very intelligent way. So very good, All right, Mike. Well, thank you so much. Man Appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for choosing for the paper. That's great Thanks.