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On this, the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9), it is altogether fitting to revisit the moral question of their development and use.

Operating under the best intelligence that indicated the Nazis were working on their own bomb project, it was clearly rational for the U.S. to undertake its own bomb project, initially instigated by Albert Einstein (aided by Leo Szilard) in the now-famous 1939 letter to President Roosevelt that “a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium” could lead “to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”

Through numerous twists and turns, it came down to Leslie R. Groves—the military administrator and driving force behind the U.S. atomic bomb program—finding the right scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, to orchestrate a pantheon of independent thinkers and focus them on building the bomb before the enemy did.

But what if this ultimate weapon also ushers in a new world in which its development results in an arms race in which each side believes that the most rational strategy is to arm to the teeth … just in case the other side does? This is called the Hobbesian Trap (after Thomas Hobbes who first articulated the problem), or the security dilemma (after game theory analysis) or the other-guy problem—“I don’t want nukes but the other guy does, so….”

Thus, the approach-avoidance conflict that confronted Oppenheimer during and after Los Alamos. “We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life,” he analogized.

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On July 16, 1945, the Trinity plutonium bomb was detonated at the newly established White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, marking the first detonation of a nuclear weapon in history. Modern radiochemical analyses estimate its yield at approximately 25 kilotons of TNT. The blast sent a mushroom cloud roughly 38,000 feet (11.6 kilometers) into the atmosphere and left a broad, shallow crater at ground zero, where the intense heat fused desert sand into a radioactive greenish glass known as trinitite. The flash, sound, and shock wave were detected across a wide area of the Southwest; the explosion was visible as far away as El Paso, Texas, roughly 150 miles away.

The Trinity ExplosionLeslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer inspect what’s left of the tower that held the “gadget.”On August 6, 1945, the Little Boy gun-type uranium-235 bomb exploded with an energy equivalent of 16–18 kilotons of TNT, flattening 69 percent of Hiroshima’s buildings and killing an estimated 80,000 people and injuring another 70,000.

Aftermath of HiroshimaThree days later the Fat Man plutonium implosion-type bomb with the energy equivalence of 19-23 kilotons of TNT leveled around 44 percent of Nagasaki, killing an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 people and severely wounding another 60,000.1

Before and aftermath of NagasakiAs documented in the memo below dated August 10, 1945, if the Japanese had not surrendered Major General Groves had another Fat Man-type plutonium implosion bomb ready to go after August 24 that would have likely killed another 50,000 to 100,000 people.

Had the Japanese military hardliners had their way to continue the war into the fall, Groves had three more bombs readied for September and another three for October. Here he instructs his Chief of Staff that the next bomb will be ready to drop on after August 24. Emperor Hirohito capitulated on August 15, thereby saving millions of lives of his citizens. U.S. President Harry Truman was not exaggerating when he threatened Japan with “a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this Earth.”

Like Oppenheimer, Truman agonized about dropping more nukes on Japan, troubled as he was by the thought of more innocents and noncombatants being killed. He wrestled that decision away from the military. (Note Groves’ handwritten addendum to his memo above that “It is not to be released on Japan without express authority from the President.” U.S. presidents have had sole authority to use nuclear weapons ever since.)

However, further bombings proved unnecessary. On August 15 Emperor Hirohito, against the wishes of many of Japan’s military leaders, who were plotting to kidnap him and force the nation to fight until the bitter end (they had five million soldiers and many millions of civilians prepared to resist invasion to the point of death), announced on the radio that Japan would capitulate. On September 2 they signed the surrender documents in Tokyo Bay, ending the Second World War.

Was the Atomic Bomb project necessary? Since 1945 a cadre of critics have proffered the claim that atomic bombs were unnecessary to bring about the end of World War II (or, at least, the Fat Man Nagasaki bomb was superfluous), and thus this act was immoral, illegal, or even a crime against humanity. Robert Oppenheimer and other physicists like Leo Szilard who worked on the Manhattan Project expressed reservations. “The physicists have known sin,” Oppenheimer opined. He went to Truman and confessed “Mr. President. I feel I have blood on my hands,” to which the President recalled “I told him the blood was on my hands—to let me worry about that.” Truman promptly dismissed Oppenheimer and told Secretary of State Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.”4

In 1946 the Federal Council of Churches issued a statement declaring, “As American Christians, we are deeply penitent for the irresponsible use already made of the atomic bomb. We are agreed that, whatever be one’s judgment of the war in principle, the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible.”5 In 1967 the linguist and longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy Noam Chomsky called the two bombings “the most unspeakable crimes in history.”6

More recently, in his history of genocide titled Worse Than War, the historian Daniel Goldhagen opens his analysis by calling the U.S. President Harry Truman “a mass murderer” because in ordering the use of atomic weapons he “chose to snuff out the lives of approximately 300,000 men, women, and children.” Goldhagen opines that “it is hard to understand how any right-thinking person could fail to call slaughtering unthreatening Japanese mass murder.”7 Goldhagen defines “genocide” broadly enough to equate it with “mass murder” (without ever defining what, exactly, that means). In morally equating Harry Truman with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, Goldhagen allows himself to be constrained by the categorical thinking that prevents one from discerning the different kinds, levels, and motives for large scale military aggression. By this reasoning, nearly every act that kills a large number of people could be considered genocidal because there are only two categories—mass murder and non-mass murder.

By contrast, continuous thinking allows us to distinguish the differences between types of mass killings (some scholars define genocide as one-sided killing by armed people of unarmed people), their context (during a state war, civil war, ethnic cleansing), motivations (termination of hostilities or extermination of a people), and quantities (hundreds to millions) along a sliding scale. In 1946 the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin created the term genocide and defined it as “a conspiracy to exterminate national, religious, or racial groups.”8 That same year the U.N. General Assembly defined genocide as “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.”9 More recently, in 1994 the highly respected philosopher Steven Katz defined genocide as “the actualization of the intent, however successfully carried out, to murder in its totality any national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, gender, or economic group.”10

By these definitions, the dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy were not acts of genocide. The difference between Truman and the others is in the context and motivation of the act. In their genocidal actions against targeted people, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot had as their objective the total elimination of a group. The killing would only stop when every last pursued person was exterminated (or if the perpetrators were stopped or defeated). Truman’s goal in dropping the bombs was to end the war with Japan (which it did), not to eliminate the Japanese people (which it didn’t). That the U.S. provided considerable financial, personnel, and material support to help rebuild Japan into a world economic power puts the lie to the eliminationist accusation.11

More broadly morally, if we ground morality in the survival and flourishing of sentient beings,12 by that measure, then not only did Fat Man and Little Boy end the war and stop the killing, the bombs saved lives—very probably millions of lives, both Japanese and American. My father, Richard Shermer, was possibly one such survivor.

During the Second World War he served aboard the USS Wren (DD-568), a Fletcher-class destroyer assigned to protect aircraft carriers and other large capital ships from Japanese submarines and from Kamikaze planes on what was called antiaircraft radar picket watch. His ship was so attacked several times but sustained no major damage. The Wren was part of the larger fleet that was working its way toward Japan, escorting the carriers whose planes were bombarding the Japanese homeland in preparation for the planned invasion. My father told me that everyone onboard dreaded that day because they had heard of the horrific carnage resulting from the invasion of just two tiny Japanese islands—Iwo Jima and Okinawa. If that was any indication of what was to come with a full-scale invasion, the contemplation of it was almost too much to bear.13

The author’s father, Richard Shermer, in 1945, serving aboard the USS Wren.During the invasion of Iwo Jima there were approximately 26,000 American casualties that included 6,821 dead in the 36-day battle. How fiercely did the Japanese defend that little volcanic rock 700 miles from Japan? Of the 22,060 Japanese soldiers assigned to fight to the bitter end, only 216 survived.14 The subsequent battle for Okinawa, 340 miles from the Japanese mainland, was fought even more ferociously, resulting in a staggering body count of 240,931 dead, including 77,166 Japanese soldiers, 14,009 American soldiers, plus an additional 149,193 Japanese civilians living on the island who either died fighting or committed suicide rather than let themselves be captured.15 With an estimated five million Japanese soldiers and 28 million Japanese civilian militia prepared to defend their nation to the death,16 it was clear to all what an invasion of the Japanese mainland would entail.

It is from these cold hard facts that Truman’s advisors estimated that between 250,000 and one million American lives would be lost in an invasion of Japan.17 General Douglas MacArthur estimated that there could be a 22:1 ratio of Japanese to American deaths, which translates to a minimum death toll of 5.5 million Japanese.18 By comparison, cold though it may sound, the body count from both atomic bombs—about 200,000–300,000 total (Hiroshima: 90,000–166,000 deaths, Nagasaki: 60,000–80,000 deaths19)—was a bargain.

In any case, if Truman hadn’t ordered the bombs dropped, General Curtis LeMay and his fleet of B-29 bombers would have continued pummeling Tokyo and other Japanese cities into rubble. When asked to predict when the war would end based on his bombing program, LeMay said September 1, because that was when there would be nothing left of Japan to bomb. The death toll from conventional bombing would have been just as high as that produced by the two atomic bombs, if not higher. Previous mass bombing raids had produced Hiroshima-level death rates, and it is likely that more than just two cities would have been destroyed before the Japanese surrendered.

Compare, for example, Little Boy’s energy equivalent of 16,000–19,000 tons of TNT to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey estimate that this was the equivalent of 220 B-29s carrying 1,200 tons of incendiary bombs, 400 tons of high-explosive bombs, and 500 tons of anti-personnel fragmentation bombs, with an equivalent number of casualties. In fact, on the night of March 9-10, 1945, 279 B-29s dropped 1,665 tons of bombs on Tokyo, leveling 15.8 square miles of the city, killing 88,000 people, injuring another 41,000, and leaving another million homeless.20

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, 279 B-29s dropped 1,665 tons of bombs on Tokyo, leveling 15.8 square miles of the city, killing 88,000 people, injuring another 41,000, and leaving another million homeless. This is the result.These facts also help refute the claim that the alternative scenario of dropping an atomic bomb on an uninhabited island or bay to demonstrate its destructive force would have worked to convince the Japanese to surrender. Given that Japan refused to capitulate even after numerous cities were obliterated by conventional bombs and Hiroshima was erased from the map by an atomic bomb, it seems unlikely this more benign strategy would have worked.21 And as noted earlier, even after the two atomic bombs were dropped, Japan’s military leaders were still determined to drive the country into total Götterdämmerung.

On balance, then, dropping the atomic bombs was the least destructive of the options on the table. Although we wouldn’t want to call it a moral act, it was in the context of the time the least immoral act by the criteria of lives saved. That said, we should also recognize that the several hundred thousand killed is still a colossal loss of life. The fact that the invisible killer of radiation continued its effects long after the bombings should dissuade us from ever using such weapons again.

Along that sliding scale of evil, in the context of one of the worst wars in human history that included the singularly destructive Holocaust of six million murdered, it was not, pace Chomsky, the most unspeakable crime in history—not even close—but it was an event in the annals of humanity never to be forgotten and, hopefully, never to be repeated.

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“Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is far from clear how to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from lumpy gray matter?” —DAVID J. CHALMERS, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996)

The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously stated that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.”1

The mystery of subjective experience, also known as the “hard problem of consciousness,” concerns how and why we have such experiences at all. The subjective, first-person experiences of sensory and mental phenomena, such as the striking redness of a rose or the tang of a lemon on the tongue, are referred to as “qualia.” The ultimate quest of neuroscience is to explain how qualia are produced by the brain and to explain how it is that our brain produces a distinct sense of self—an entity experiencing those qualia, possessing also agency, a coherent sense of stability and continuity, and a personal narrative.

Across history, most people have found it extremely difficult to conceive of conscious experience as the product of physical processes, often viewing the mind or soul as distinct from the body—humans are natural-born dualists.2 People naturally hope—indeed are often convinced—that their consciousness is not extinguished by the death of the brain. Furthermore, we find our own subjective perceptions arrestingly compelling, failing to understand or accept how unreliable our minds are in many situations. Taken together, these natural human tendencies account for the widespread human belief in spirits, afterlives, and other forms of postmortem existence. The practice of burying the dead with tools, ornaments, and other goods among early Homo sapiens and possibly Neanderthals suggests that such ideas may have very deep roots.

We are also strongly biased to see purpose everywhere, including in the universe itself. We long to feel that we are here for a special, intended reason.3 It is therefore unsurprising that theories portraying consciousness as fundamental to reality and pervading the universe have gained renewed attention and popularity in recent years.

Despite these deep intuitive pulls, most scientifically credible theories of consciousness today are materialist (physicalist)—and for good reason: every other phenomenon once thought to require something beyond physical explanation has eventually yielded to one. Within that materialist frame, there are a number of competing theories at this still early stage in the science of consciousness.

Leading Theories and Other Strong Contenders In a five-part series that I wrote for Psychology Today on the leading theories of consciousness,4 I described the specifics of the major candidate theories, drawing from an influential 2022 Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper by Anil Seth and Timothy Bayne, outlining the four leading theories selected by the authors:

1. Higher-Order Theories
2. Global Workspace Theories and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
3. Integrated Information Theory
4. Re-entry and Predictive Processing Theories

These are indeed all strong contenders—perhaps more or less equally—but all four have weaknesses. For one thing, there is an insufficient emphasis on evolution.5 And, these theories variably—and often insufficiently—integrate attention, learning, and affect. There are other strong contenders that, I think, more satisfactorily address these elements, which I address in this article.

Theories of consciousness must be firmly rooted in evolutionary biology.It has been famously said that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,6 yet consciousness seems so different from other biological functions—thoughts and feelings seem ethereal and untethered from anything physical. Self-awareness seems like a phenomenon utterly divorced from anything that could possibly be produced by cells comprised of physical particles.

As soon as the first cell evolved there was an inside and an outside, and therefore the beginnings of a subjective-objective divide between the body and the outside world.

People used to think of life itself that way, too. Living things were believed to possess some sort of animating essence—élan vital—that accounted for their difference from inanimate matter. People could not imagine how the same material particles that comprise inanimate matter could be arranged in such a way as to make something alive without adding a special, mysterious nonmaterial essence. No one worries about that now because we know how biological processes give rise to living tissue and organisms.

Likewise, we have long known from clinical neurology and from my own field, clinical psychiatry, that disruption, disassembly, or enhancement of brain circuitry—subtle or major—can radically alter any aspect of the mind. And yet the mystery of how exactly the brain produces consciousness remains unexplained. How does this emerge from an approximately three-pound organ with the consistency of tofu?7 How can a purely physical thing feel like something? The answer is to be found in an evolutionary process of emergence.

In the Beginning Let’s go back nearly four billion years, long before animals had brains or even a nervous system, back to simple single-celled organisms like bacteria. This is not to suggest that simple unicellular organisms possessed consciousness, but they possessed its building blocks: behavior and the precursors of sensing, learning, and memory.

Properly understood, behavior, detection (sensing), learning, and memory do not require a nervous system. Nervous systems evolved later, followed by central nervous systems, enabling greater coordination and behavioral flexibility. At the most basic level, responses to stimuli can be characterized as either approach (e.g., to a nutrient) or withdrawal (from something noxious or dangerous). Behaviors in more complex organisms are basically just more elaborate versions of this. In fact, some of the genes involved in learning are the same in complex animals as in protozoa, which are very primitive single-celled organisms lacking a nervous system and which evolved at least 1.5 billion years ago.8 Nervous systems, and especially more complex brains, ultimately enabled organisms to regulate their behavioral responses and internal physiological states through such capacities as:

prediction, planning, delaying or inhibiting, remembering (storing patterns of information from past encounters), learning (modifying behavior through conditioning, or through remembering previous outcomes, or in higher animals through imitation), and weighing different behavioral responses (comparing), and evaluating outcomes of behavior.

Consciousness probably evolved to enable nonreflexive behavior. By allowing organisms to maintain and manipulate internally generated representations detached from the immediate sensory environment, consciousness supports delayed responses, planning, mental simulation, and flexible action.9 And even in humans, most behavior is carried out by nonconscious processes. Here are some of the milestones in the evolution of cell signaling, nervous systems, and consciousness:

• Primitive cell signaling began 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago in the first single-celled organisms (prokaryotes—bacteria and archaea—which reproduce asexually by simple cell division); followed around two billion years ago by larger, relatively more complex single-celled organisms (eukaryotes, such as protozoa; eukaryotes contain a nucleus and organelles and reproduce sexually, which introduces more genetic diversity).
• Neurons formed diffuse (noncentralized) nerve nets in multicellular organisms (in hydra and jellyfish-like creatures) around 600–700 million years ago.
• Precursors of centralized nervous systems in small, primitive worm-like creatures in the Cambrian period, began almost 550 million years ago.
• More richly interconnected central nervous systems in more complex invertebrates and vertebrates appeared from the Cambrian period onward.
• Progressively more sophisticated capacities of brains emerged in larger animals (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and cephalopods) in the last few hundred million years, enabling them to form internal representations of their environment and of themselves (i.e., maps or models of their external environment and of their own body and actions), with correspondingly more flexible behaviors.
• Many mammals and some birds developed a more advanced form of cognition, involving the capacity to form and manipulate complex internal models. Higher mammals may have developed a basic sense of self. Primates, especially humans, developed the ability to internally represent their own thinking patterns more reflectively. Probably only humans developed the ability to be aware of being aware, reflecting on their own existence as a conscious being.

It’s worth noting that subjectivity is built into the very nature of life: as soon as the first cell evolved, there was an inside and an outside, and therefore the beginnings of a subjective-objective divide between the body and the outside world. Subjective experience is inaccessible to external observers.

The Origins of Purpose and Meaning Purpose emerged with life itself, long before consciousness evolved. Living organisms act in ways that promote survival and reproduction, whether or not they possess consciousness. Consciousness evolved later as an adaptation that allowed more flexible control of behavior in pursuit of those biological aims.

The mind is a kind of map.

Although a simple bacterium has no consciousness, it can nevertheless detect glucose in its environment, move toward it, and ingest it to convert it into energy. In a minimal biological sense, a bacterium behaves as an intentional agent, and it makes an “effort” to achieve its purpose or aim. An intentional agent can interpret patterns as being about something of value in its environment—glucose, for instance, signifies or means energy to the bacterium.10 An agent forms an internal representation of things in its environment (in this case, glucose) so as to recognize, respond to, and process that thing. These processes are entirely mechanistic, analogous to a lock-and-key interaction. The internal representation has meaning and value to the organism, in the sense that it represents something good or bad for the organism—promoting or impeding its survival and propagation.

Thought and Information A thought is a representation of something, a likeness, a thing that depicts another thing by having characteristics that correspond to it. A picture, image, imprint, or mold of an object is a representation of that object, as is a map. The mind is a kind of map. The brain—and its functional product, the mind—evolved as a map of the body’s relation to its external environment. Our thoughts are maps representing things that our brains have either perceived with our senses, felt with our emotions, or formed as an action plan.

Information requires a physical medium. Whether encoded in ink on paper, electronic states in a computer, or patterns of neural activity in a brain, information cannot exist independently of a physical representation. Thoughts, memories, and mental representations are therefore inseparable from their underlying neural substrate.11 Information acquires meaning from its correspondence to actual things in the world and to other information.

Internal representations are models of the body and the world, physically encoded in neural activity and connectivity. They have a relational nature to the reality they map; they are direct correlations to physical things. They arise when sensory systems transform physical signals—light (photons), sound (air vibrations), touch (mechanical stimuli), smell (chemicals), and signals from the body itself—into patterns of neural information.

Thus, the brain forms models of the world and of itself in relation to the world. Through learning and experience, these networks become organized into increasingly sophisticated models that guide perception, memory, prediction, and behavior. The ability to form internal representations is a key ingredient of consciousness.12

Memory, Learning, and Emotion Brains evolved the ability to store salient representations, retrieve them later, integrate them with new information, and update them through experience.

Memories and concepts are encoded in distributed networks spanning many brain regions. Just as no single pixel contains an image, no single neuron contains a memory or concept. Furthermore, individual neurons participate in numerous overlapping representations, allowing memories to be interconnected and associated with one another. This also helps explain how the brain can store vast amounts of information while flexibly integrating new experiences with old ones.

In neuroscience, an “engram” refers to the physical trace of a memory. When part of the network is reactivated by a cue or reminder, the broader pattern can be reconstructed, allowing the memory to be recalled.

Because the brain’s model of awareness lacks access to its own billions of neurons, synapses, and electrochemical processes, awareness appears to the brain itself to be a nonphysical essence rather than a biological process.

Learning is based on establishing correlations between things. Behavioral conditioning occurs through rewards and consequences reinforcing or weakening those associations.

According to an elegant theory by Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, learning may actually be the fundamental driver of the evolution of consciousness:13 “The evolution of learning and the evolution of consciousness are intimately linked, even entangled.”14 Their theory proposes that a form of associative learning or conditioning that they call “unlimited associative learning” (UAL) is an evolutionary marker of simple consciousness.15, 16 Before the evolution of UAL, organisms tended to respond to stimuli reflexively. After UAL, they can evaluate alternative responses before acting. This transforms the adaptive landscape.

Complex animals possess an inherent drive to learn, driven by curiosity and what neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp termed the “SEEKING” system—one of several basic emotional circuits he identified as evolutionarily ancient and shared across mammals.17

Positive and negative reinforcement obtained through associative learning gives experiences positive or negative valence, laying the foundation for affect. Thus, brains assign value to stimuli—goodness or badness. This forms the basis for the evolution of feeling and emotion, and the fuel for motivation and goal-directedness.18 Underlying all of this is homeostasis: the maintenance of physiological stability is central to affect.

In mammals, the evaluative aspect of meaning is supported by interactions between distributed cortical representations and subcortical systems involved in affect and action, which assign significance to patterns based on their relevance for the organism’s needs and goals.

Understanding emotions, then, may be fundamental to understanding subjective experience. As the neuropsychologist Mark Solms notes, unlike other forms of information processing, you can’t have a feeling without feeling it.19

Predictions and Expectations Many neuroscientists view the brain as a prediction machine. Rather than passively receiving sensory information, it continually generates expectations about the world and updates them in response to incoming evidence. Mental representations are central to this process.

Anil Seth’s predictive-processing account describes conscious experiences as “controlled hallucinations” generated by the brain’s attempts to predict and regulate both the external world and the body’s internal state. According to Seth, conscious experience is closely tied to these predictive processes, particularly those involved in maintaining the body’s physiological stability through anticipatory regulation.20

It’s worth noting that subjectivity is built into the very nature of life: as soon as the first cell evolved there was an inside and an outside.

Related ideas are captured by Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle, which proposes that organisms continually act to reduce uncertainty by improving their predictions and bringing sensory inputs into alignment with those predictions. Through this process, brains become increasingly effective at navigating their environments.21

Cognition, Intelligence, and Consciousness Cognition refers to the mental processes involved in acquiring, processing, storing, and using information; intelligence is how effectively those processes are deployed. Consciousness, by contrast, concerns subjective experience.

Joseph LeDoux defines cognition as the ability to form internal representations and use them to guide behavior. Even relatively simple animals can act on stored representations of food, danger, or other biologically significant stimuli, rather than merely responding reflexively to what is immediately present. Mammals and some birds appear capable of a more advanced form of cognition, using internal models to simulate or imagine potential outcomes, evaluate alternatives, and guide flexible, goal-directed behavior. This capacity for prediction and planning greatly expands behavioral control and adaptability.

Where does this happen in the brain? There is a longstanding debate over whether consciousness arises primarily from cortical or subcortical brain systems. Most current theories emphasize the cerebral cortex, whereas others argue that the foundations of consciousness lie in evolutionarily older brainstem and subcortical circuits involved in arousal, emotion, and motivation.

It feels like something to have a thought and to be a self because we are that information. The sense of self is built from self-representations.

A growing middle-ground view holds that subcortical systems generate arousal, motivation, valence, and perhaps rudimentary feelings, while cortical systems elaborate these states into richer perceptual, cognitive, and self-reflective forms of conscious experience. The debate has important implications for animal consciousness, influencing whether consciousness is viewed as largely restricted to animals with complex forebrains, such as mammals and birds, or as extending more broadly across vertebrates and perhaps even some invertebrates.

Nonconscious Cognitive Processes Joseph LeDoux emphasizes the “cognitive unconscious”—the nonconscious cognitive processes that allow us to control complex behaviors without having to call upon consciousness. Most of our routine behavior, and even quite complex behavior, is carried out by nonconscious cognitive processes—everyday movements, much of language processing, tasks like driving a car for an experienced driver, and so on. Many actions can be “delegated” to nonconscious cognitive processes, which reduces the cognitive load on conscious information processing. But conscious information processing enables greater behavioral control and more flexible responses to stimuli than do nonconscious cognitive processes.

Although many nonconscious processes depend on evolutionarily older subcortical systems, nonconscious cognition occurs throughout the brain. Indeed, most of the brain’s cognitive work—including much of its cortical processing—takes place outside conscious awareness.

Complex, Abstract Representations Whether conscious or not, all of this cognitive work depends on internal representations. At a basic level, these are simply sensory images. But what about abstract thought? Complex brains form representations of representations—hierarchies or ladders of representations built upon one another. Abstract mental concepts are constructed as higher-order representations from symbolic, analogous correspondences to physical things; they are still assembled, at bottom, from the building blocks of sensory perceptions and movements, upon which all other thoughts are built.

Abstract thoughts are, in essence, still maps corresponding to the external environment and the individual’s position in it. Like maps (and all representations), they preserve relationships that correspond to features of the world. One thing reminds us of another because of some similar feature. Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander argue that making analogies is a fundamental mechanism of thought. Our brains continually map similarities between new and familiar situations, allowing past experience to guide present understanding. Language reflects this process: we routinely describe abstract concepts in physical terms, speaking of “bright” ideas, “deep” problems, or “bitter” remarks. On this view, abstract thinking is built from increasingly sophisticated representations ultimately grounded in sensory experience.22

Self-Representations and Self-Awareness Antonio Damasio proposes a model for how the self emerges in gradations, in organisms of increasing evolutionary complexity—a simple organism develops a rudimentary form of “self-awareness” by forming a map of its body and its position in the physical space it occupies. Damasio calls the most basic representation of self the protoself—a nonconscious precursor to self-awareness that may exist even in relatively simple organisms.

It’s a very basic level of awareness: neural patterns mapping the body’s physical structure.23 These self-representations combine with affect (feeling) to provide a sense of ownership of the body and of perception, a feeling of presence and agency—the sense of being an entity that is doing the experiencing. A feedback loop of the brain’s modeling, predicting, and controlling of the body’s internal state and actions reinforces the sense of self.24

This is not unlike Douglas Hofstadter’s idea of self-reference and formal rules,25 in which the sense of self emerges from recursive self-representations—what he calls a “strange loop”:26 the brain forming models of its own modeling processes.27

We are the sum of all our complex, dynamically interconnected brain networks.

Thus, it feels like something to have a thought and to be a self because we are that information. The sense of self is built from self-representations. We are the sum of all our complex, dynamically interconnected brain networks. We are composed of a lifetime of remembered experiences, knowledge, learned behaviors, and habits. We are all of that information, physically embodied in patterns of neural connectivity.

Along these lines, Michael Graziano proposes that the brain evolved a simplified internal model—or schema—of its own attentional processes, much as it maintains a model of the body. This schema is a simplified “cartoonish” representation that depicts an internal capacity for awareness without representing the underlying neural mechanisms that generate it.28

Because the brain’s model of awareness lacks access to its own billions of neurons, synapses, and electrochemical processes, awareness appears to the brain itself to be a nonphysical essence rather than a biological process. According to Graziano, this helps explain why people so naturally experience consciousness as something immaterial.29

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Consciousness remains one of the deepest mysteries in science. We still do not know precisely how neural activity gives rise to subjective experience, nor why there is “something it is like” to be a conscious organism.

Yet the mystery no longer appears quite as impenetrable as it once did. Modern neuroscience increasingly points toward a gradual evolutionary story. The building blocks of consciousness can be seen to emerge step by step: sensing, learning, memory, internal representations, prediction, valuation, feeling, self-modeling, and, in humans, language and reflective self-awareness.

Living organisms have an inside and an outside. Central nervous systems evolved to model, predict, and control both as fully as possible. As brains became more complex, animals developed increasingly sophisticated representations and models of themselves and their environment. Conscious experience is inextricably rooted in how the self and the world are represented from the internal perspective of a living creature—a perspective that is simply inaccessible to, and can only be inferred by, an external observer.

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Steve Stewart-Williams on Evolutionary Psychology, Pseudoscience, and the Politics of GenderIn this conversation with Timur Sevincer and Nikil Mukerji, Steve Stewart-Williams, author of the new book A Billion Years of Sex Differences, discusses what evolutionary psychology actually claims, how the field can deepen our understanding of human nature, where the field has gone wrong, why the charge of pseudoscience misses the target, and how skeptics should respond when real science becomes politically unwelcome.

Common Misunderstandings About Evolutionary Psychology Timur Sevincer: As skeptics, we care about pseudoscience, but also about exaggerated, distorted, or plainly false scientific claims. Which claims about sex differences or evolutionary psychology are most often misrepresented?

Steve Stewart-Williams: The list is long!1 A common view is that evolutionary psychology is a way to justify existing social roles, especially traditional sex roles. Another is that it’s a way to excuse misbehavior, especially male misbehavior. Both claims are false. Explaining a behavior is not the same as morally justifying it. To think otherwise is to commit the naturalistic fallacy—the mistaken assumption that what’s natural is therefore morally right. We have to decide for ourselves what’s right and wrong. We shouldn’t let natural selection dictate our ethics. Evolution can explain behavior without excusing it.

Another common claim is that evolutionary hypotheses are unfalsifiable.2 Evolutionary hypotheses are falsifiable, and plenty have been falsified. More of my own hypotheses have been falsified than I’d care to admit. I’ve come up with a hypothesis and done the research, then reality has said: “No, you’re wrong about that.”

Most human sex differences are statistical differences with large overlap.

A further misunderstanding is that evolutionary psychologists think men and women are virtually different species: women are monogamous, men are promiscuous; women are choosy, men will sleep with anything that moves; men care only about a woman’s looks, women only about a man’s resources. None of this is what evolutionary psychologists claim. Most human sex differences are statistical differences with large overlap. Both sexes can form committed relationships and both can be interested in casual sex. Both sexes are choosy about long-term partners and both care about looks.

Finally, many people assume that if a trait has an evolutionary component, it must therefore be fixed or biologically predetermined. That’s not the claim. Genes may push development in certain directions, but they’re not the only influences. Learning, culture, incentives, and institutions also matter.

Timur Sevincer: I teach open-minded, curious, and intelligent students. However, some of these misunderstandings seem to be very common before they engage with evolutionary psychology in more depth. In rare cases, some course evaluation comments continue to portray evolutionary psychology as pseudoscience even after extensive discussion of overwhelming empirical evidence. Those ideas must come from somewhere.

Explaining a behavior is not the same as morally justifying it … Evolution can explain behavior without excusing it.

Steve Stewart-Williams: I’ve encountered that too, though less in Malaysia, where I now teach, than in the UK. Some people appear to associate evolutionary psychology with outdated or harmful ideas before they’ve really looked at the evidence. They’ve picked up widespread but mistaken views about the field. I think there’s been a successful misinformation campaign against it.

Is evolutionary psychology pseudoscience? Nikil Mukerji: Pseudoscience is not simply unfalsifiability. Some pseudosciences, such as homeopathy, are eminently falsifiable and have been falsified. The core issue is that they fake doing science. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, for example, has famously defined bullshit as indifference to truth.3 Science, by contrast, is governed by truth-directed norms: heeding evidence, testing claims, trying to find out what is the case. Pseudoscience fakes participation in that truth-seeking practice. That is why the pseudoscience charge cannot be a mere insult. One has to say what exactly is wrong with the claim or field. Does it avoid falsification? Does it ignore counterevidence? Does it only imitate the surface of science?

Steve Stewart-Williams: Exactly. Anyone can say, “You’re a pseudoscientist!” It’s like that Spider-Man meme where the two Spider-Men point accusingly at each other. The label alone doesn’t settle anything. You have to say what, specifically, is wrong with each claim.

Claims in evolutionary psychology aren’t all equally strong. Some are weak, some have been falsified, but some are excellent. The right approach is to avoid thinking “evolutionary psychology is all good” or “evolutionary psychology is all bad,” and instead to evaluate each hypothesis or theory on its merits.

A Field That Can Be Wrong Timur Sevincer: Could you give examples of how evolutionary hypotheses can be falsified?

Steve Stewart-Williams: A famous example is the kin-selection explanation of same-sex sexual orientation, associated with E.O. Wilson. Same-sex sexual orientation is puzzling in evolutionary terms. Wilson suggested that it might be a form of kin altruism: instead of having children of one’s own, someone might help siblings or other relatives to have children, thereby passing on their genes indirectly through them.4 But people did the research, and the verdict is that this explanation is probably false.5

Timur Sevincer: Another example might be the dual-mating or ovulatory-shift idea: the idea that women might seek investment from one kind of man and “good genes” from another, with preferences shifting around ovulation. There were T-shirt smell studies and other work that initially attracted considerable attention,6, 7 though the literature has since become more contested.

Steve Stewart-Williams: I’m very skeptical of the ovulatory-shift hypothesis. To be fair, the debate isn’t over—there are still people on both sides of the issue. But I’m much more persuaded by the people who say that the evidence hasn’t borne it out.

Timur Sevincer: How does evolutionary psychology fare after the replication crisis?

Steve Stewart-Williams: It hasn’t emerged unscathed, but I think it fares fairly well. It does better than social psychology, though not as well as behavior genetics. The most robust claims in the field are those grounded in well-established theories from evolutionary biology: sexual selection theory, parental investment theory, parent-offspring conflict theory, kin selection theory. These aren’t just free-floating speculations. They’re grounded in principles that have been demonstrated across many species. This is especially true for many sex differences.

Another reason the field has done well in certain areas is that it was seen as controversial from the outset. To persuade people, evolutionary psychologists have often had to clear a higher evidential bar. David Buss’s work on mate preferences, which found that men and women differ on average in how strongly they prioritize certain traits in long-term partners, used extensive cross-cultural evidence.8, 9 Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s work on homicide and step-parenthood, the so-called “Cinderella effect,” that children are at greater risk of abuse and violence from stepparents than from biological parents, drew on large archival datasets.10 The sex difference in interest in casual sex has multiple converging lines of evidence: cross-cultural evidence, real-world dating data, cross-species patterns, and links to prenatal hormonal exposure.11 This convergence increases our confidence in the hypothesis.

Nikil Mukerji: There is an interesting complication here. A low replication rate can be a warning sign. But in some pseudoscientific or ideological literatures, one finds suspiciously high positive-result rates: everything seems to confirm the preferred story. So a perfect replication rate can be suspicious as well.

Steve Stewart-Williams: Yes. To do replication properly, you need open science practices, preregistration, methods that could falsify the hypothesis, and ideally multiple research groups, including people with different prior commitments. Even if a claim is falsifiable in principle, one isn’t really doing science unless one uses methods that could in principle falsify it.

The sexes do differ on average, and I think there’s an evolutionary contribution to some of those differences. We can’t just lie about that. The right response is to tell the truth carefully and responsibly.

Social psychology deserves credit here. The fact that we know about its replication problems shows that many in the field are testing their claims and trying to improve. A low replication rate isn’t fatal if researchers are actively checking their findings and weeding out false positives. The problem is that, until recently, they often weren’t.

The Ethical Trap Nikil Mukerji: Some findings in evolutionary psychology are bound to annoy people, especially in certain political milieus. Are you concerned that this kind of science might play into the wrong hands? How do you deal with the ethics of communicating sex differences?

Steve Stewart-Williams: Claims about sex differences can certainly be misused if people exaggerate the size of the differences, or if people infer that, because a difference has an evolutionary basis, it’s therefore good or should be preserved. That can do harm. If we exaggerate differences, we may lower our expectations for one sex in certain domains.

But I have two responses. First, the sexes do differ on average, and I think there’s an evolutionary contribution to some of those differences. We can’t just lie about that. The right response is to tell the truth carefully and responsibly.

That means emphasizing that most human sex differences aren’t huge.12, 13 There’s a lot of overlap between the sexes. Everyone should get a fair chance. And the fact that something is natural, genetic, or partly shaped by evolution has no direct moral implications.

Second, denial can also do harm. It’s not the case that exaggerating sex differences is dangerous while minimizing them is harmless. We can get this wrong in both directions.

Nikil Mukerji: So denial is wrong in principle, and one can also make a consequentialist case against it.

Steve Stewart-Williams: Exactly.

Timur Sevincer: This is also a communication problem. Many people hear “sex differences” and immediately think one is defending misogyny or fixed social roles. In my own teaching, I often begin by saying: there is usually substantial overlap between the sexes, most differences are small, evolutionary influences don’t make differences fixed or unmalleable, and aa trait’s evolutionary origins don’t make it morally good.

Nikil Mukerji: And acknowledging average differences doesn’t necessarily make people conform to them. In some cases, it could even have the opposite effect: if people are aware of an average tendency, they may consciously decide not to follow it. Recognizing statistical differences and encouraging individuality are not incompatible.

Steve Stewart-Williams: I think that’s right. It’s also important to take people’s concerns seriously. Some people worry that evolved sex differences will be used to revive old claims about male superiority or fixed gender roles. Given our history of anti-female sexism, that worry is understandable. But the right response isn’t to shut down the discussion. The right response is to discuss the evidence carefully.

Socialization, Stereotypes, Patriarchy Timur Sevincer: When people think about sex differences, they often default to three explanations: socialization, stereotypes, and patriarchy. Boys and girls are raised differently; stereotypes become self-fulfilling; women are forced into roles by structures created by men. You deal with these explanations in A Billion Years of Sex Differences. Where do they fall short?

Steve Stewart-Williams: Well, let me start by saying that I think “fall short” is the right phrase. It’s not that they have no merit. It’s impossible to believe that socialization has no impact on behavior. Stereotypes have an impact. Cultural factors matter. But they’re not enough on their own.

Take parental treatment. It’s often invoked as an explanation for sex differences. But there’s research suggesting that, at least in the West, parents don’t treat sons and daughters particularly differently in many important ways.14 Behavior genetics also suggests that, within the normal range, the shared family home doesn’t have a massive impact on how people turn out.15 This doesn’t mean genes explain everything. The environment matters too. But the simple parental-socialization story is weaker than many people assume.16

On patriarchy, the gender-equality paradox is a serious problem for simple versions of the story. For many traits, sex differences are larger, not smaller, in wealthier, more individualistic, more gender-equal nations.17, 18 That’s the opposite of what one would expect if the differences were due to strict sex roles or patriarchy. I’m not saying that every difference follows this pattern, or that culture is irrelevant—in fact, the gender-equality paradox is itself a cultural effect. What I am saying, though, is that it challenges certain traditional sociocultural explanations for differences between the sexes.

On stereotypes, the work of Lee Jussim has been a major influence on me. Stereotypes can be self-fulfilling to some extent, but the main causal direction is usually from social reality to stereotype, not from stereotype to social reality.19 In the case of sex differences, stereotypes are partly shaped by actual average differences that people perceive in the world, and they correspond reasonably well to the actual sex differences.20 In some cases, those stereotypes might then amplify or galvanize the differences. But they don’t create them out of nothing.

Nikil Mukerji: There is a habit of reasoning that often gets in the way here. Instead of asking whether a claim is true, one asks: “What makes you say that?” and “Who does this help?” Truth recedes into the background.

Steve Stewart-Williams: That can become a form of conspiracy theorizing. If someone says, “You only believe that because you’re a man,” or “You only believe that because you’re defending your group,” that’s a claim about motive. But even if the motive attribution were true, it wouldn’t show that the claim is false. It’s essentially just an ad hominem argument.

What Denial Costs Timur Sevincer: Many people understand that exaggerating sex differences can do harm. What is less obvious to many is that downplaying differences can also do harm. Can you give examples?

Steve Stewart-Williams: One is that, if we minimize sex differences in psychological disorders, we may fail to spot them in the less affected sex. ADHD often presents differently in girls than in boys, and the standard description fits boys better. That means girls with ADHD may be overlooked. Autism may also be overlooked in girls because it presents differently than in boys—for example, it tends to involve fewer repetitive behaviors. Conversely, depression in men more often involves substance use and aggression than in women, so male depression may be missed.

It’s not the case that exaggerating sex differences is dangerous while minimizing them is harmless. We can get this wrong in both directions.

There are social and occupational examples as well. If we ignore average differences in occupational interests, we may assume that every gender gap in a field is due entirely to bias. Bias exists, but sex differences in interests also matter. Men are, on average, more interested in things and things-related jobs; women are, on average, more interested in people and helping professions.21 If we ignore that, we may misdiagnose the cause of gaps and pour resources into interventions that don’t address the real causes.

It can also lead to coercive policies. If one reserves positions for one sex, or chooses a less qualified candidate to achieve numerical parity, one may reverse bias rather than remove it. On top of that, it can cast doubt on the competence of the supposedly benefited group. Even beneficiaries themselves may wonder whether they really deserved the position. And portraying STEM as saturated with sexism may deter some girls and women who would otherwise enjoy those fields.

Discrimination exists. But exaggerating it, and ignoring the progress that has been made, can backfire.22 And we shouldn’t overlook the fact that there’s also evidence of discrimination against men in some hiring contexts.23, 24

The Slippery Word “Gender” Nikil Mukerji: In A Billion Years of Sex Differences you are quite critical of the concept of gender. Why?

Steve Stewart-Williams: I don’t think it’s a very useful concept, partly because it’s not just one concept. Sometimes “gender” is just a synonym for sex. Sometimes it refers to masculinity and femininity. Sometimes it refers to sex differences supposedly due to nurture rather than nature. Sometimes it refers to social roles, stereotypes, gender identity, or clusters of personality traits.

The nurture-based definition is especially problematic. It often assumes what should be demonstrated: namely, that nurture is the sole cause of the difference. Many recurring male-female differences involve both nature and nurture. If one defines gender as the nurture part and sex as the nature part, most female-male differences become partly sex differences and partly gender differences. That’s an awkward way to frame things.

Other definitions have other problems. If “gender” means personality profiles, for instance, then the claim that there are many different genders collapses into the trivial observation that every person has a unique personality profile. At that point, we’re talking about personality, not something clearly linked to sex.

We should be able to say: Yes, some past claims were wrong and sexist; no, that doesn’t mean every claim about sex differences is wrong or sexist.

For these and other reasons, I prefer to talk about sex rather than gender. In biology, sex is defined by gametes: females are organized around the production of eggs; males around the production of sperm. Sex-linked traits such as chromosomes, genitals, hormones, masculinity, femininity, sex-typical behavior, and personality traits don’t define sex. Instead, they’re among the many traits that evolved to facilitate reproduction via either eggs or sperm.

Why This Topic Can Set Rooms on Fire Timur Sevincer: Why do sex differences, sexual behavior, and evolution sometimes provoke such strong emotions? In principle, one could discuss them scientifically.

Steve Stewart-Williams: The topic is inherently combustible. A big part of the reason is our history of sexism against women. Early scientists made false and sexist claims about women’s intellectual abilities, so it’s understandable that people worry. If we open the door to evolved sex differences, are we going to slide back into Victorian ideas about male superiority and fixed roles?

But the science of sex differences actually refutes those early sexist claims. Shutting down the discussion is the wrong reaction. We should be able to say: Yes, some past claims were wrong and sexist; no, that doesn’t mean every claim about sex differences is wrong or sexist.

Unfortunately, a modern trend on campus and elsewhere is to fight unwelcome ideas not with arguments and evidence, but with accusations, complaints to authorities, protests, occupations of classrooms, and so on. These are intimidation tactics as much as anything else. It’s anti-intellectual. In principle, anyone with any view can use intimidation tactics. Thus, intimidation can’t sort out who’s right and who’s wrong.

I had my own taste of this. A paper I wrote on sex differences in STEM25 caused an online controversy and led to calls for retraction. The issue reached the diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) office at the University of Nottingham’s UK campus. They did not like the paper! To their credit, though, they defended my academic freedom, and I was promoted to full professor despite listing the paper as one of my main pieces of work. But the experience was still worrying. I didn’t seriously think I’d lose my job, but I did wonder whether expressing perfectly reasonable views about sex differences might make it difficult for me to get another academic job.

Some people worry that evolved sex differences will be used to revive old claims about male superiority or fixed gender roles … That worry is understandable. But the right response isn’t to shut down the discussion. The right response is to discuss the evidence carefully.

That was part of why I started my Substack, The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter. I wanted a fallback. If the worst came to the worst, I wanted another way to make a living. And it’s worked out well: I’m no longer financially dependent on my academic job. It’s a great position to be in. I’ve always tried to write honestly and openly about the topics I cover, even when knowing it might not be popular. But now I do so with a lot less trepidation.

Can persuasion still work? Nikil Mukerji: Some of these controversies are not only about evolutionary psychology itself, but also about deeper disagreements concerning evidence, reasoning, and the interpretation of scientific claims. How does one talk to people who have been taught that logic is a tool of oppression? They often fail to separate the truth of a claim from alleged motives for making it.

Steve Stewart-Williams: Even people who officially reject reason and evidence may still be moved by logical arguments. They might not change their minds immediately, but they may eventually. Social psychologists call that a sleeper effect, and it’s a well-documented phenomenon.

Nikil Mukerji: My suspicion is that another causal factor is needed. Some people change their minds after reality punches them in the face. Then they remember that someone had explained the matter differently.

Steve Stewart-Williams: That could well be right. But persuasion is still worth attempting. It won’t work on everyone. Nothing will work on everyone. But across history, humanity has moved away from superstition toward more scientific ways of thinking. That suggests that slow persuasion is possible.

Can evolutionary science inform moral reasoning? Nikil Mukerji: In A Billion Years of Sex Differences, you reject the inference from “natural” to “good,” but David Sloan Wilson and colleagues26 argue that evolutionary psychologists often overcorrect here: Hume’s famous point about the is-ought distinction is simply that an ought cannot be derived exclusively from an is, not that natural facts have no ethical relevance. So when you say that the science of sex differences cannot answer policy questions because those are ultimately about values, how do you avoid turning a valid warning against “natural = good” into a stronger and false separation between facts and ethics? More concretely: should evolved sex differences alter our moral and political reasoning about fairness, coercion, individual freedom, and the costs of eliminating gender gaps—and if so, exactly how?

Steve Stewart-Williams: I don’t think anyone argues that evolved facts have no ethical relevance. They just argue that the fact that something has an evolutionary origin doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good, bad, or anywhere in between.

Example: It might be the case that, if a given sex difference has an evolutionary origin, it would be hard to eliminate, and that doing so would do more harm than good. As a result, we might decide that we shouldn’t try to eliminate it. But the reason for that decision wouldn’t be that the sex difference is natural; it would be that trying to eliminate it would do more harm than good. In other words, we’d be dealing with a consequentialist argument, not an argument from nature.

Importantly, this cuts both ways. If eliminating a socially constructed sex difference would do more harm than good, then we shouldn’t do that either, even though the difference isn’t “natural.” And if eliminating a natural difference would boost general well-being, we should do it despite its natural origins. In itself, the nature-nurture question is irrelevant to the ethical question.

We can turn the tables here as well: Why should we exclude certain facts from our ethical reasoning just because they happen to have an evolutionary origin? To do so is to risk falling prey to an anti-naturalistic fallacy!

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Three-year-old Yu, from the southwestern Japanese island of Kyushu, worried his mother, Kimi. He suffered from nightmares and anxiously searched everywhere for smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. One day he told Kimi that he remembered himself on the hundredth floor of a skyscraper, beside another skyscraper that looked similar. “I spoke English and worked with a computer,” the toddler continued. “Then something terrible happened in the neighboring building. The firefighters arrived, but too late. I also tried to escape, but—boom! There was a tremendous collision, and I died.”

Today Yu is 12 years old. In a shared video call with him and his mother, he appears as a sweet boy wearing a buttoned shirt and large glasses. He is happy to speak English. “I always preferred this language,” he says, adding that he still remembers the two towers, and how he tried to escape and go down the stairs, but it was impossible. “I was shocked—it was all so strange,” Kimi says of hearing the story for the first time. “I couldn’t tell whether he was inventing it, and the story itself was horrifying, but he was so serious.”

Two years ago, Yu and Kimi flew to New York, accompanied by Professor Masayuki Ohkado, a researcher of past-life memories from Chubu University in Japan. “The surroundings there felt more familiar to me than the neighborhood where I live today,” Yu says about New York.

The three visited the 9/11 Memorial Museum, where Yu claimed he recognized the person he once was. Later they met that person’s sister. Yu has an unusual fondness for classical music and also collects toy Volkswagen Beetles. It turned out that the “previous personality” listened to classical music and drove a Beetle. He, too, wore large glasses. “I was very moved to discover who I had been,” Yu says. “It calmed some part of my soul that had been restless. I had a strong feeling that everything was finally settled.”

In four apartments inside a residential building in Charlottesville, Virginia, research is underway that may be unparalleled in its significance for human existence—and equally unmatched in the criticism and ridicule it provokes. The rooms house a research group with a rather dry name: the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS). Although the division is part of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, its offices are located several kilometers from the main campus. Once you hear what the department’s dozen or so members actually do, it becomes easier to understand why: they search for empirical evidence of extraordinary human experiences and abilities. And they mean extraordinary. Among the phenomena they investigate are near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and abilities such as telepathy or precognition. Not exactly the sort of thing mainstream science tends to focus on.

The centerpiece is the line of research pursued by the division’s founder, established in 1967. Professor Ian Stevenson was a renowned psychiatrist who, at a certain point, decided to devote his career to investigating children’s “memories” of “past lives.”

Nearly sixty years later, DOPS remains more or less unique in the academic world. Surprisingly, the division is thriving. Psychologist Professor Philip Cozzolino continues Stevenson’s pioneering work there. “It’s hard to believe how far we’ve come,” he says in a video interview with Haaretz magazine. “We have the largest team we’ve ever had, a biography of Stevenson has just been published, HBO is making a documentary about us. And all of this started with one person. You would expect the opposite to happen—that people would only mock us. Of course that exists, but we’ve grown, and we continue to attract attention, for all the right reasons.”

DOPS is a fully academic research group. When Cozzolino speaks of “the right reasons,” he does not mean that it is difficult to imagine anything more fascinating, bizarre, and emotionally stirring than the thousands of stories of children claiming to remember past lives, all cataloged in the division’s library. Rather, as he puts it, those “right reasons” are that “we continue to investigate as scientists without an agenda, taking the subject seriously.”

It turns out that the study of reincarnation has itself been reborn. Stevenson focused on locating as many children as possible who spoke about what sounded like previous lives, mentioning details such as names, places of residence, professions, and causes of death. If the information was detailed enough, he tried to determine whether it matched a person who had actually lived, while also ruling out natural explanations for the child’s knowledge, such as having heard the story from a relative. Today the researchers are no longer focused on collecting additional stories, but rather on examining the phenomenon in the laboratory. “We accumulated this body of evidence, and now we are trying to move beyond it, to understand the process,” says Cozzolino’s research partner, Professor Marieta Pehlivanova.

Previous studies have shown that the brain functions differently when remembering and when imagining. Among other things, the researchers want to examine the brain activity of children who claim to remember past lives in three situations: when recalling something experienced in their present lives, when recalling something “experienced” in a past life, and when imagining something—to determine whether the brain activity associated with past-life memories resembles that of memory or imagination. In addition, the researchers compare these findings to brain scans of children without past-life memories, with similar demographic backgrounds, who were asked to remember something they had experienced, imagine something, and imagine having experienced something in another life.

Reincarnation! There is perhaps no subject in which the danger of deception—and self-deception—is greater.

Another line of research focuses on trauma. “Many children remember lives that ended violently or in some kind of accident,” Pehlivanova explains. “That is a central feature of past-life memories.” Using imaging devices, the researchers examine whether these children show evidence of trauma exposure even in the absence of trauma in their current lives.

Psychiatrist Professor Bruce Greyson, who succeeded Stevenson as director of DOPS in 2002 and served in the role for twelve years, says that most of the cases studied by his predecessor involved children from cultures that already believed in reincarnation, which weakened their evidential force. “It was difficult to find cases in the West at that time,” the researcher explains. Today, thanks to the internet and social media, DOPS receives an average of about 125 inquiries a year, almost all from American parents.

One particularly interesting case investigated by the division, Greyson says, involved a four-year-old boy named Ryan Hammons from Oklahoma. One night Ryan told his mother, Cindy, “I think I used to be someone else.” He told her that he remembered himself dancing, that he had wanted to become an actor in Hollywood but failed and instead became an agent. Not exactly the typical story.

Ryan would not let the matter go, and Cindy began researching the subject online and tried to calm the distressed boy with books about Hollywood. One day, while flipping through a book about 1930s cinema, Ryan pointed to a figure standing behind the leading actor. “That’s me, Mom,” he said. “I found myself!” The mother contacted DOPS, and the division’s director at the time, Professor Jim Tucker, tracked down the actor’s name in a film archive. It turned out that the man had been a Broadway dancer who dreamed of becoming an actor but received only minor roles before eventually becoming a successful agent.

Cozzolino notes that one of the most intriguing details in the story is that Ryan repeatedly said he had died at the age of 61, even though the medical file listed the man’s age at death as 59, which was also what his family believed. Tucker’s investigation uncovered a document showing that he had in fact been 61 when he died.

“This is not proof of reincarnation,” Greyson emphasizes. “First of all, this is not part of an experiment. Beyond that, we don’t know where the child got the information. Maybe there are fields around us from which information can be accessed, rather than from a previous incarnation? But he had information he should not have had access to, so it can’t simply be dismissed as fraud. And there are many such cases.”

“I don’t feel any need to change people’s minds,” says Cozzolino. “I want to ask questions that can be examined scientifically and report the answers. The people who mock us usually have no idea what we actually do. Precisely because of its nature, our field is more difficult and rigorous than many other areas of research.”

Writing about this field is also more difficult than usual. Reincarnation! There is perhaps no subject in which the danger of deception—and self-deception—is greater. But there is also no subject with greater potential to transform the way we understand our lives and our deaths. Almost bizarrely, although there is probably no culture in human history that has not engaged with the subject, no one thought to investigate it systematically and scientifically—until Ian Stevenson arrived.

Perhaps consciousness is a fundamental phenomenon of existence and of the universe, rather than merely a by-product of brain activity.

Lekh Pal Jatav, the sixth of eight children in a family from the village of Nagla Devi in northern India, was born without fingers on his right hand. X-rays revealed that there were no bones there at all. Such a condition, in which all the fingers are absent from one hand, is extraordinarily rare and had been documented only once before in the medical literature—more than a hundred years before Lekh Pal’s birth. But that was nothing compared to what happened when the toddler finally began to speak (only at the age of four). He told his older sister that he had been with “Chacha” when his fingers were caught in a machine and cut off, and asked her to go home to “Tal” to visit his real mother. Several months later, a guest from the village of Nagla Tal, about ten kilometers away, arrived at a wedding in Nagla Devi. She told Lekh Pal’s mother that, strangely enough, there had been a boy in her village named Hukum Singh whose fingers had been severed at the age of three when he tried to help his father while he was operating a fodder cutter. Hukum died about a year after the accident, only a few months before Lekh Pal was born. When Lekh Pal was five years old, he visited Hukum’s family and, according to those present, recognized the family members, including the father—Chacha.

This astonishing story, alongside an astonishing photograph of Lekh Pal’s hand itself, appears in one of the dullest, most unreadable, and most subversive books in the history of science—Reincarnation and Biology. Spanning 2,226 pages, the book painstakingly documents hundreds of cases of children born with birthmarks, scars, moles, and various physical deformities who, at a young age, claimed to remember previous lives that included events capable of explaining these physical anomalies.

The book is Stevenson’s magnum opus, and he is widely regarded as the most prominent researcher ever to investigate the possibility of life after death through reincarnation. Stevenson did not fit the common image of a paranormal investigator. He was quiet and introverted, an outstanding physician who published dozens of studies in the most prestigious scientific journals. For many years he chaired the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, which during his tenure (and still today) was ranked among the ten best public universities in the United States.

Alongside his respectable identity as a psychiatrist and academic, Stevenson possessed an immense curiosity about the greatest mystery of all: what happens to us after death? Some would say science answered that question long ago: nothing. We die, and then there is no one left for anything to “happen” to. Stevenson believed that given the possibility—however remote—that this might not be the case, the subject deserved serious investigation. He devoted roughly fifty years of his life to this research and secured substantial funding for it.

By the time of his death in 2007, Stevenson had documented around 2,500 cases of children who claimed to remember previous lives. A new biography by Jesse Bering now presents, in unprecedented detail, both the man and his research, reviving once again the question: could it be that death is not the absolute end?

Ironically, Stevenson was born on Halloween, October 31, 1918. His father, John, was a well-known political journalist. His mother, Ruth, was interested in the occult. He studied at the medical school of McGill University and graduated at the top of his class. He specialized in psychiatry and later trained as a psychoanalyst.

Stevenson published numerous articles as well as an influential book on the medical interview. “The psychiatrist should notice changes in the pitch and timbre of the patient’s voice as he talks,” he noted. “[W]atch for the play of emotion in the patient’s face, in the posture of his body, and in his movements and gestures.” In the not-so-distant future, his skills as an interviewer would prove critical in assessing the credibility of stories told by children and families about memories of past lives.

Although Stevenson never claimed to have proven that reincarnation actually exists, he pointed out what he saw as a problem with the materialist position—namely, the idea that consciousness and mind are merely products of the brain.

In the 1950s Stevenson conducted some of the earliest studies on psychedelic drugs. He also experimented on himself with substances such as LSD and mescaline on five different occasions. During one of these experiences, he later recounted, he had a powerful sensation of remembering an event from another life. In later years Stevenson was criticized because his personal beliefs may have influenced his research. He replied that such beliefs had no relevance whatsoever to the evaluation of the evidence he uncovered.

At the age of 39, Stevenson was appointed department chair. Alongside his intense work as an administrator, researcher, and therapist, he began collecting newspaper reports about memories of previous lives. He also traveled to India, where he investigated several cases himself.

Stevenson’s wife, Octavia, did not approve of the direction he was taking. “Everything is going great for you, and you’re just ruining a promising career,” she reproached him. But Stevenson was unwilling to let go of the potentially revolutionary task. “This research may bring about a conceptual revolution that will make the Copernican revolution seem trivial in comparison,” he wrote early in his career as a reincarnation researcher.

Stevenson’s early studies attracted the attention of Chester Carlson, the inventor of the Xerox machine—one of the richest men in the world, who also had an interest in parapsychology. Over the years, Carlson showered Stevenson with grants worth tens of millions of dollars. These funds enabled him to devote himself exclusively to the study of rebirth and even persuaded the administrators of the University of Virginia to approve the creation of a department dedicated to researching paranormal phenomena. This led to the publication of his first collection of cases in 1966, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. The use of the word “suggestive” was important. Stevenson never claimed to have proven the idea of reincarnation. Keep that in mind as we continue the narrative.

After some time, Stevenson refrained from publishing cases that included physiological manifestations in the child’s body corresponding to an injury or other biological feature in the body of the “previous personality.” This was his strongest card. Even the most impressive case, in which a child remembers numerous specific details (such as the case of Ryan Hammons, where researchers claimed that 55 specific statements about his previous life were verified), could theoretically be explained by information somehow obtained from family members—or even telepathically, a possibility impressive enough from a parapsychological perspective, but far less dramatic than the claim of rebirth. But how does one explain missing fingers?

Stevenson spent 30 years working on Reincarnation and Biology. The book’s two volumes contain hundreds of rather mundane cases discussing at length insignificant pigment marks. But they also include highly intriguing cases, such as a girl born without the lower part of her right leg who spoke about the life of a girl killed by a train; or a boy with a braided-rope pattern on his deformed wrists who said he had been tied up and thrown into a well in a previous life; or a girl born with dozens of large birthmarks covering her body who remembered many details from the life of a 30-year-old woman who burned to death in an accident. Eighteen childrenremembered lives ending in gunfire and bore two distinct birthmarks corresponding to the bullet’s entrance and exit wounds.

In sixty of the cases, Stevenson managed to obtain documentation from the previous life—hospital records, police reports, and sometimes even postmortem photographs. This allowed him to compare the remembered events with the current bodily marks.

Most of the cases Stevenson investigated came from countries such as India or Burma. According to him, this was because parents in those countries tended to take their children’s memories seriously. Nevertheless, the last book he published, five years before his death, included a collection of cases from Western families.

One such case involved sisters Joanna (11) and Jacqueline (6) Pollock from northern England, who were killed by a car. About a year later, their mother gave birth to identical twin girls—Gillian and Jennifer. The twins did not possess explicit memories of previous lives, yet their personalities and behavior resembled those of Joanna and Jacqueline. Such similarity could be explained by parental suggestion, but there were also several unexplained physical phenomena. Despite their identical genetic makeup, only one of the twins had two distinct birthmarks—in precisely the same locations where Jacqueline had had a scar and a birthmark.

Rare cases like these—involving identical twins raised in the same environment yet displaying striking differences in specific respects—offered some support for Stevenson’s hypothesis that, alongside genes and environment, there exists a “third factor” in the development of personality and bodily structure. “Heredity may account for resemblances between members of the same family,” he argued. “Reincarnation may account for some of the differences.”

In addition to reincarnation, Stevenson researched other areas of parapsychology. Among other things, he wrote a book about emotional and sensory telepathy—situations in which a person inexplicably experiences another person’s emotions or pain (for example, a woman suddenly feeling pain in her palm at the exact moment her daughter burned her hand in a chemistry-class accident at school). An article in which he documented how a well-known medium succeeded in guessing the images on face-down cards at rates exceeding statistical expectation, despite strict supervision, was published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

Nevertheless, Stevenson was highly skeptical of the very field to which he belonged. “You can get all the legitimate researchers in this field in a phone booth,” he once wrote. He was especially critical of studies of reincarnation based on hypnosis, arguing that when people are hypnotized and asked to “return” to previous lives, the process tends to evoke fictional material rather than genuine memories.

Although Stevenson never claimed to have proven that reincarnation actually exists, he pointed out what he saw as a problem with the materialist position—namely, the idea that consciousness and mind are merely products of the brain. “Certainly,” he wrote, “the mind expresses itself through the brain, and disturbances of the brain disturb the functions of the mind. Anyone can prove this to himself with an ounce or two of whisky.” But this fact, he argued, does not prove that consciousness is identical to brain activity. A common analogy for the idea is that of a radio receiver: if a radio breaks, the radio waves themselves remain unaffected.

Professor Emily Kelly of DOPS worked alongside Stevenson for 30 years, from 1978 until his death. “The great questions he tried to shed light on were ‘Who are we as human beings?’ and ‘Why are we who we are?’” she tells Haaretz magazine.

Professor Jesse Bering, a psychologist at the University of Otago, began his academic career working with chimpanzees in an attempt to understand what distinguishes them from us. He concluded that the ability to understand the psychological states of others—theory of mind—was uniquely human. Only humans, he argues, can think in a complicated way about what another person thinks or feels. Some animals possess an excellent sense of smell; others can fly. Human beings are the “psychologists” of the animal kingdom. “We are constantly thinking about how others think and feel.”

But theory of mind is rooted in us so deeply that even after someone dies, we continue imagining how that person thinks and feels. For twenty years, Bering has studied this universal cognitive bias—the belief that consciousness continues after death. That is how he came across Stevenson. He began immersing himself in Stevenson’s writings, initially hoping to show that even the man regarded as the most serious researcher in the field had fallen prey to the same biases. “Contemporary research in social cognition shows how easily people detect meaning where none exists,” he says. “I thought that through these modern lenses I would be able to debunk Stevenson’s evidence, as one can do with most parapsychological research.”

Instead, Bering encountered an unexpected difficulty. “My theoretical framework cannot explain how a two-year-old child knows things about a dead person he never met,” he says. “That simply is not social cognition. My work focuses on how people think about dead minds, whereas Stevenson focused on how dead minds think.”

What about the argument that the brain is like a radio receiver that is needed to decode radio waves, but is not itself the waves?

Bering found himself drawn into Stevenson’s world. After nearly a decade of work, he published the first biography of Stevenson: The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson. “I approached the subject completely certain that there is no such thing as reincarnation,” he says. “Even now I would not describe myself as a believer, but I am no longer quite as certain.” In an interview, I asked Bering what caused this shift. “Mainly the fact that Stevenson was an extraordinarily knowledgeable and rigorous researcher who was fully aware of all the counterarguments and still found evidence that could not be explained.” He added: “Everything I say is true only if one accepts Stevenson’s word. I do accept it. After all these years of work, I feel that I know him better than many people I encounter in everyday life. He was an honest man who was not motivated by money or fame—quite the opposite, in fact. But he was genuinely obsessed with the subject, like an artist devoted to his craft. I came away convinced that he was ‘the real thing.’”

Rabih Abu Diab was born into a Druze family in Lebanon. He said that in a previous life he had been a famous soccer player and a successful pop star. One would have to be especially naïve to attribute any credibility to such memories. After all, many children dream of becoming soccer players or successful singers. Yet investigators later discovered that there really had been a man in Lebanon with golden feet and the voice of a nightingale named Saad Halawi, who died during the civil war. Yet, when the research team questioned Rabih about his memories, he was unable to recount anything that was not already widely known in Lebanon.

Rabih had already met some members of his “previous” family before the research team arrived, but he still had a half-sister he had never encountered. The team, led by Professor Christopher French, arranged such a meeting and documented it. “All that was missing was for the sister to write her name on her forehead,” French recalled the meeting. “She couldn’t have given him more hints—and he still didn’t recognize her.” French, who heads the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and who specializes in naturalistic explanations for experiences that appear paranormal, was not surprised. He noted that “The typical story goes like this. A toddler starts talking and says things that are open to interpretation. In the West, some of these statements are sometimes interpreted as descriptions of an ‘imaginary friend,’ while in cultures such as the Druze one they may be interpreted as descriptions of previous lives.”

According to French, even if a child knows details about a deceased person, this does not necessarily point to any hidden meaning. “Even Stevenson admitted that it is impossible to completely rule out every possible way in which the child might have acquired the information,” says French. “Parents, for example, may ask leading questions that unintentionally convey a great deal of information, resulting in the creation of false memories. We know that false memories are easy to implant and extremely common.”

What about cases involving marks on the body? Or cases in which the child remembers details for which no possible source of learning could be identified? “I assume they are not genuine, much as happens with charlatans or magicians who convincingly appear to possess powers they do not actually have,” French continued. “Even if there was no deliberate attempt to deceive, I suspect these memories are not real. It is simply a natural human tendency to believe in rebirth. I was not persuaded by Stevenson’s studies, and the most promising explanation in my view is that these are false memories.”

Another prominent skeptic is Professor Susan Blackmore of the University of Plymouth, who originally began as a parapsychology researcher following a dramatic out-of-body experience. “I was out of my body for two hours,” she told Haaretz. “It was more vivid and real than ordinary life, and I wanted to understand how that could be. I was completely convinced of the existence of astral worlds and life after death.”

After twenty years of research that yielded no findings, Blackmore became convinced she had been mistaken. “If you look at near-death experiences, for example, once we have neurological studies, the entire phenomenon is fully explained by heightened activity in certain areas of the brain.”

When I asked Blackmore how she explained cases like that of Lekh Pal Jatav, I was in for a surprise. The well-known researcher raised her hand to the camera and showed that she too suffers from a congenital defect that caused shortened fingers on one hand. “Is it rare?” she asked. “I don’t know, but probably not extremely. A doctor told me the umbilical cord likely wrapped around the fingers. Are there photographs of the man from the previous life whose fingers were cut off? That would have been more impressive.”

Blackmore pointed out that Stevenson traveled to India and relied on interpreters. “That’s unavoidable, but think about their motivation—to help, to produce good stories. And there is also the motivation of the children, who wanted to tell stories that would make them famous. There is a widespread cultural belief in reincarnation, so is it really surprising that there are so many such stories?”

One of Blackmore’s more surprising arguments actually comes from Buddhism. The researcher, who has practiced Zen for 45 years, recalls the Buddha’s teaching that the “self” is not a continuous entity. “In terms of modern science, I think he meant that the self is a sensation that appears and disappears, a product of a neural network. This allows rebirth to be understood differently. There is constant life and death—in our everyday experience. But there is no reincarnation of souls, because there is nothing there to reincarnate. It simply makes no sense.”

The historian of science Dr. Michael Shermer is perhaps the world’s most prominent skeptic today. In 1992 he founded the Skeptics Society, which he still directs, and the long-running Skeptic magazine. “There is no such thing as reincarnation,” he says bluntly. Research into past lives is riddled with problems, Shermer notes, such as the tendency to focus on unexplained anomalies. “What about all the children who have dreams and fantasies that never connect to anything? If you count only the ‘hits’ and ignore the ‘misses,’ that’s a statistical error. And when you examine, for example, birthmarks on children’s bodies—how similar do they have to be to the mark or wound on the previous person?”

Shermer invokes the “law of truly large numbers,” which states that given a sufficiently large number of events, even highly improbable occurrences are bound to happen. “When there are billions of people, of course there will also be very strange anomalies,” he says. “The whole thing is complete nonsense. There is no such thing as a soul, no separate consciousness—there is only brain activity.”

What about the argument that the brain is like a radio receiver that is needed to decode radio waves, but is not itself the waves? “I have a radio here” (he points to the cabinet behind him). “When it receives radio signals that are present in this room, I can go to the station and see where they are being produced. But where am I supposed to go when it comes to consciousness? Where was my consciousness before I was born? The answer is ‘nowhere.’ It did not exist.”

Toward the end of the interview, Shermer softens a bit, admitting, “It is true that there is something about human consciousness that is very strange. ‘What is consciousness?’ is a question science cannot answer. Perhaps theology, philosophy, or metaphysics will be able to do so.”

♦ ♦ ♦

In March 2005, the person closest to me on earth died. The depth of the rupture and grief is difficult to describe. Everything fell away—a total loss of grounding.

Three years later, in a corner of the basement floor of the Jerusalem Literary Gallery, I came across Twenty Cases. Naturally, I bought it, hoping to find some support, or at least a clue. I read the book over the course of more than a year. It is clearly not a light text, nor one intended to provide comfort. It seemed instead to offer a kind of medicine—but of an unexpected sort, mixing ingredients that are difficult to swallow because they appear so foreign and contradictory.

In no scientific discipline can uncertainty be eliminated, but it can be reduced.

Gardner Murphy was an extraordinary figure in the history of psychology. During the 1940s and 1950s, he served both as president of the American Psychological Association and as president of the American Society for Psychical Research. Murphy wrote: “I saw, as no one but a psychologist can see, the massive ‘impossibility’ of personality without the body, of thought without cerebral cortex, of feeling without basic ganglia, of learning without the articulation of nerve cells … For all that, I saw the force of the evidence … for a genuine continuity.” That is what I felt after finishing the book. On the one hand, Stevenson operated according to the rules of the scientific world and presented astonishingly detailed evidence. On the other hand, that same evidence pointed toward something that sounds utterly absurd to anyone raised within the framework of Western scientific thinking. Reincarnation? As Blackmore put it so simply: no way.

Yet the unease would not let go. On the one hand, throughout all of recorded human history, despite an intense desire to prove the idea of reincarnation, not a single case compelling enough to settle the debate once and for all has been found. On the other hand, is there even anything that could truly count as “proof”? One could always argue that the case involves fraud, misunderstanding, information obtained by some ordinary means, or mere coincidence. “It would seem wiser to abandon this concept [of proof], which after all is virtually unknown anyway in other branches of science,” Stevenson once remarked. In no scientific discipline can uncertainty be eliminated, but it can be reduced. To Stevenson’s credit, he accomplished that.

The dominant approach in Western science and philosophy for several centuries has been materialism—the idea that everything in the universe is entirely material. This includes consciousness, which according to this view is nothing more than electrical activity in the brain. But materialists tend to forget two important facts. The first is that consciousness is wholly “qualitative” in nature; its essence is subjectivity. Therefore, in principle, it cannot be described in the quantitative-objective language of science, nor can it be directly observed in experiments through measuring instruments.

The second fact is that, according to physics, what lies at the foundation of reality is not particles—that is, material entities—but rather fields and wave functions. In a lecture delivered late in life, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck said: “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: there is no matter as such.”

If that is so, perhaps consciousness is a fundamental phenomenon of existence and of the universe, rather than merely a by-product of brain activity. And if so, perhaps it does not cease with the death of the body, as materialism dictates? “I think a rational man, if he wants, can believe in reincarnation based on the evidence I have collected,” Stevenson wrote, in a characteristic blend of modesty and self-confidence. Did he himself believe? It is not entirely clear.

About a year before his death, Stevenson wrote an article summing up his winding career. He concluded it with the words: “Let no one think that I know the answer. I am still seeking.” Perhaps that is his legacy to humanity: that we can, with clear thinking and without embarrassment, allow ourselves to think that perhaps there is something more—and to continue seeking.

This article is based on an article first published in Haaretz on May 28, 2026.

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Before I dive in, a disclosure: I haven’t eaten meat since I was about 18 years old. That’s right, I’ve intentionally deprived myself of the joys of filet mignon and wagyu. And while most of my reasoning is centered around animal welfare (severe crowding and brutal killing processes among them), there are a number of other reasons why some are concerned about factory farmed meat. Among them are greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, pollution from animal waste, and safety issues around antibiotic resistance, genetic manipulation, and disease transmission.

That’s why I find the idea of lab-grown meat particularly fascinating.

Yet there’s something unsettling for many people when I bring it up. There’s a resistance, or what you might unscientifically refer to as the “yuck” factor. It’s mostly an emotional response. Lab-grown meat, to many people, intuitively feels unnatural, like a bad science experiment. In a recent study with 1,587 participants, 35 percent of meat-eaters and 55 percent of vegetarians weren’t even willing to taste it.

Those who are willing report that it doesn’t quite taste like the “real thing,” even though in blind experiments subjects often have trouble telling the difference. There’s also legitimate skepticism about the unknown long-term effects of consuming lab-grown protein since this is a new technology. Some health experts consider it ultra-processed food and note that while it’s similar to real meat, it’s not identical. Conventional meat contains the nine essential amino acids that our bodies cannot produce on their own, as well as vitamin B, iron, zinc, and various minerals. Cultivated meat tries to mimic that but the ratios aren’t always exact. One study, for example, found lower contents of protein and essential amino acids, but higher levels of total fat and cholesterol. But this was based on testing of a particular company only.

And then there’s the matter of cost. Although it has come down significantly over the past few years to a level approaching competitiveness with organic meat, it’s still a more expensive option than many consumers are willing to engage with. For now, it seems to be a novelty.

For companies within the cultivated meat industry, there’s been a number of technical and regulatory barriers to overcome. While lab-grown meat is sold—in a limited capacity—in countries like the United States, Singapore, Israel, and Australia, it cannot yet be sold in much of the world, including countries like Canada where it is classified as a “novel food.” Health Canada states that it requires strict pre-market safety assessment of cell-cultivated foods on a case-by-case basis. No approvals have been given to date.

Still, several companies operate within this emerging industry. Mosa Meat, which produces cultivated beef, was among the first, creating one of the first cultivated burgers in 2013, and has been at the forefront of pursuing approvals in several jurisdictions as well as raising some solid funds. Upside Foods, along with GOOD Meat, were among the first to obtain U.S. approval for cultivated chicken.

Lab-grown meat, to many people, intuitively feels unnatural, like a bad science experiment.

Others have struggled and failed. Believer Meats, for example, despite receiving FDA and USDA clearances, ultimately could not make its finances work and ceased operations. Likewise, Meatable in Europe.

While many countries are exploring regulatory frameworks, the challenge to these companies comes from getting consumer buy-in and economics. Production costs remain high and scaling is difficult.

Recently, at Web Summit, I spoke to Dr. Uma Valeti, cardiologist, founder, and CEO of Upside Foods. His company was responsible for creating its first cultivated meatball in 2016, followed by cultivated chicken in 2017—both grown directly from animal cells.

He says that there are a lot of misconceptions about cultivated meat production. Often people imagine it being made in a lab-like environment, but it is more akin to a food production facility. “This is the cleanest food production facility you can imagine,” he says, “You can go into a brewery, a winery, yogurt maker, and this is going to be cleaner than that. It is going to be a billion times cleaner than a slaughterhouse where meat is made.”

As more people discover his product through channels like a recent Mr. Beast video, Dr. Valeti says that he encounters a lot of curiosity from people.

So, how does one grow cultivated meat? The process involves taking a cell from an animal and providing it with nutrition so that it keeps doubling, just like it would in the body of an animal, Valeti explains. “And we do it in a much cleaner setting and we also do it in a much shorter period because the only job for these animal cells that we’re making for meat is to be delicious [and nutritious].”

The process takes two to four weeks, depending on the species. “After that, we just shape it into the product people are used to seeing.” Like a chicken tender, burger, or sausage—using the same equipment that’s currently being used for processing conventional meat.

Valeti believes that cultivated meat is tastier than traditional because it can be engineered to be superior in terms of its nutritional profile, offering health benefits of having lower cholesterol, lower saturated fat, better iron content, and so on. It can also be modified in terms of making more intense or milder flavor profiles, or gaminess. It’s just a matter of picking the types of cells in the feed, not unlike grass-fed or grain-fed, according to Valeti. Indeed, the technology allows the modification of things like amino acids, fat profile, as well as vitamins and minerals. The cell culture environment can also be adjusted to make the protein more or less fatty, or combined with more water or binders to lower protein contents as it is shaped.

It’s also possible to modify its protein contents, to be higher or lower, depending on personal needs. For example, an athlete or someone looking to build muscle will want more. But someone with chronic kidney disease or those who’ve had dialysis would need to decrease their intake.

There’s also legitimate skepticism about the unknown long-term effects of consuming lab-grown protein since this is a new technology.

Valeti argues that cultivated meat could also dramatically reduce risks associated with pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella while eliminating the need for routine antibiotics. “You could have a meat production facility right next to your Starbucks,” he tells me. “You could walk around, it could be next to your community, your kids’ school, your church. It could be in the community. It doesn’t have to be segregated far away from the city or outside the state borders.”

He explains that Upside Foods’s production facility has been built with glass walls around it. It offers full transparency. The company hosts tours for middle school, high school, and undergrad students. “They’re totally blown away and they love seeing meat being made this way versus where they know it’s [currently] coming from.”

He understands the hesitation by many people. “Whenever you talk about a lab, it’s an experiment that’s being conducted, right?” And many cynics point to the lack of long-term data. But, he argues, the “biggest risk to humanity right now is the current experiment of confining billions of animals in tiny, tiny locations that set up the breeding environment for germs to spread at incredible rapidity and pace that can have uncontrollable and exponential risk of pandemics and zoonotic diseases.”

This is an experiment we conduct daily, he says. In fact, he argues, it is the largest lab-grown experiment in the world: “We add more billions of animals into the food system. And right now we have 80 to 100 billion animals.”

While we may not yet have long-term data on consumption of cultivated food, we do have a lot of data on the food that’s available in the current system. “We already know that the current supply chain causes enormous amounts of chronic diseases associated with cancers and cardiovascular issues,” he says.

Valeti no longer eats traditional meat, but he grew up eating it and loves the taste. But for the first time in history, you no longer need to raise and kill an animal to eat meat. “For the first time, we have a choice,” he says.

Meanwhile, global demand for meat has only grown, yet resources are scarce. Could this approach create an unlimited supply of meat? Valeti thinks so, but cost remains a factor. “When we started, we were a thousand times more expensive than organic meat prices,” he says. Today, it is closer to being on par.

For now, it seems to be a novelty.

Still, even if cost is brought down further, it will take some time to properly scale, establish supply chains, and then there’s also the matter of energy. These can be energy-intensive operations—energy is necessary in order to run the reactors that house the cells as they grow and power the facilities. It’s difficult to compare directly the difference between energy intake from cultivated meat and traditional chicken, or beef. Estimates put cultivated meat energy use at a range of anywhere from 25–250 MJ/kg depending on bioreactor design and production scale. Meanwhile estimates for conventional pork are at around 17–20 MJ/kg and chicken is at 15–30 MJ/kg, but that doesn’t take into account land and water use as well as methane, a significant additional environmental cost. For reference, a typical consumer HVAC system in your home uses around 20–50 kWh/day depending on how hot it is.

Another common concern I hear from those more hesitant to embrace this new technology is that it would cause certain animals to go extinct. But what kind of life is it anyway to be held in a tiny cage with restricted movement and poor conditions, only to be eventually slaughtered? The animals that have gone extinct in the last hundred years have gone extinct because of biodiversity loss, the intense amount of deforestation that has happened to feed the factory-farmed animals that live their entire lives in confinement and suffering.

Humans don’t have to give up eating meat; we can simply make the process better.

Valeti sees cultivated meat production as the cutting-edge future of farming. He notes that the current average age of a farmer in the U.S. is 60 years old, and younger people aren’t going into the traditional path. And, he says, it is a cleaner workplace with massively lower risk of occupational hazards and more transferable skills.

I bring up the visceral reactions of the people I’ve spoken to about eating lab-grown meat in preparation for our conversation. That “ick” factor I referenced earlier seems to dominate. Valeti thinks it can be overcome simply by tasting cultivated meat.

But the science and technology may be advancing faster than public trust. For all the debate over taste, ethics, sustainability, and cost, the question that keeps returning is simpler: will humans be willing to give it a try?

The choice is there.

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In many domains, the old moral vocabulary remains in place even as the social pattern has reversed, or at least become far more complicated. Women now outperform men across most of education, earn the majority of advanced degrees, and have made major gains in professions once considered male strongholds.

If the feminist view of modern society were fully adequate, one would expect male advantage to be obvious across the institutions that shape everyday life. But the pattern is far messier than that. Men have lower college enrollment and graduation rates, higher suicide rates, greater incarceration, higher rates of homelessness, and are far more likely than women to be sentenced to death, even for comparably heinous crimes.1 Those are not marginal anomalies but central social facts, and any framework that continues to describe men, in general, as the unambiguous beneficiaries of systemic privilege must somehow explain why so many of society’s worst outcomes are concentrated among them.

Education is perhaps the clearest example. Boys now underperform girls on nearly every major academic indicator. Girls do better in reading and writing, earn higher grades, and graduate from high school and college at higher rates. Women now receive the majority of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees.2 The National Center for Education Statistics reports that by the fall of 2022 women made up 52 percent of all faculty at degree-granting postsecondary institutions.3

Large-scale initiatives continue to be organized around improving outcomes for girls and women, while boys’ declining performance is treated less as a social emergency than as an awkward fact that does not fit the script. In the most recent national NCES/IPEDS completion data available, in 2023–2024 female students received about 59.4 percent of associate’s and bachelor’s degrees combined. NCES’s current projections nevertheless show the imbalance persisting: in 2024–2025 female students were projected to receive about 61.3 percent of associate’s and bachelor’s degrees combined, rising slightly to about 61.7 percent by 2031–2032.4 There is no equivalent national campaign to address male educational decline, no broad moral consensus that boys are being left behind, and little appetite for asking whether the institutions themselves may be serving them poorly.5, 6, 7

The college gender gap is now wider than it was when Title IX was enacted, only now in the opposite direction.

Even mainstream commentators who are not writing from an anti-feminist perspective have begun to acknowledge the scale of the problem. In The Atlantic, for example, Derek Thompson noted that American colleges now enroll roughly six women for every four men, and that men accounted for more than 70 percent of the enrollment decline over the previous five years.8 Richard Reeves has likewise argued that boys and young men now lag girls on almost every measure of educational success from pre-K to postgraduate study, and he notes the striking irony that the college gender gap is now wider than it was when Title IX was enacted, only now in the opposite direction.9 Then it was a national crisis demanding legislative reform of the educational system, today it is barely discussed in the halls of Congress.

Even some elite technical universities appear to admit women at substantially higher rates than men despite drawing much larger male applicant pools. In a recent analysis of IPEDS data from 2001 to 2024, for example, James Nuzzo found that female applicants were admitted at higher rates than male applicants every year at MIT, Caltech, and Carnegie Mellon, and in most years at Georgia Tech. The average female-to-male admission ratio was reported as 2.20 at MIT, 2.23 at Caltech, 1.54 at Carnegie Mellon, and 1.31 at Georgia Tech. These findings do not by themselves prove unlawful discrimination, but they do complicate the familiar claim that women remain systematically excluded from elite technical education.10

The same asymmetry appears in health and psychological well-being. Men are less likely to seek help, more likely to die by suicide, and are often underserved by the very systems put in place to care for those experiencing vulnerability. Although men make up about half the population, they account for nearly 80 percent of U.S. suicides. The federal government maintains an Office on Women’s Health, but there is still no directly comparable HHS Office of Men’s Health, despite repeated calls for one.11, 12 The relatively limited institutional attention paid to male-specific problems such as prostate and testicular cancer, male victimization in domestic violence, and male sexual assault reveals how easily men’s suffering is overlooked. These are not obscure issues. They are serious, measurable forms of suffering. But because they happen to men, they do not easily trigger the same public expressions of compassion or the same assumptions of structural injustice that similar patterns affecting women would almost certainly generate.13, 14, 15

A psychologically serious framework should ask when traits are adaptive, when they are maladaptive, and under what conditions they serve human flourishing.

What is especially telling is that concern about boys is now surfacing even from figures whose public careers were built around advancing girls. In a 2025 Time essay, Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani wrote, “While we were pushing our girls forward, we were leaving our boys behind,” and went on to note that boys and men are less likely to go to college and more likely to die by suicide or overdose. Her point was not that girls no longer matter, but that a culture serious about fairness can no longer afford to treat male struggle as an afterthought. That concession matters precisely because it comes from someone who can hardly be dismissed as hostile to women’s advancement.16

Criminal justice tells a similar story, and in some ways an even harsher one. Men make up the overwhelming share of the incarcerated, the violently victimized, and the death from high-risk aggression.17, 18 Male victimization rises sharply beginning in adolescence and peaks in the mid-twenties, when men become far more likely than women to be killed. For example, in the United States in 2023, men accounted for about 78 percent of homicide victims, compared with 22 percent women.19 These patterns are highly relevant to any honest discussion of sex, power, and vulnerability. Yet they are rarely centered in mainstream feminist discourse, because they complicate the cleaner narrative in which men are primarily portrayed as perpetrators and women primarily as victims. A skeptical observer might conclude that male suffering is not denied outright so much as downgraded—acknowledged in passing, then quietly absorbed into a framework that still insists men are the privileged sex.

The problem, then, is not simply that some people fail to care enough about boys and men. It is that the dominant interpretive model is poorly equipped to recognize male disadvantage as disadvantage. When women struggle, institutions are encouraged to ask what social barriers are holding them back. When men struggle, institutions are more likely to ask what is wrong with men. The first response invites reform; the second invites diagnosis, moralizing, or indifference. That difference in framing matters because it determines which problems receive resources, research attention, and public sympathy—and which are treated as self-inflicted wounds.

This is where the language of privilege becomes especially misleading. Of course, some men hold enormous power, just as some women do not. But it does not follow that men as a class are uniformly advantaged in the institutions most people actually inhabit: schools, clinics, family systems, low-status labor, or the criminal justice system. What we are witnessing is not universal male dominance. That blind spot persists because an ideology built to detect female oppression has difficulty recognizing that men, too, can be on the losing end of institutions, norms, and cultural assumptions.20

The blind spot is not merely institutional; it is cultural as well. Even explicitly anti-male hostility is often treated as less serious than hostility directed at women. A recent peer-reviewed analysis of extremist Reddit communities found no systematic differences between misogynistic and misandric groups in their linguistic, emotional, and structural features, suggesting that gendered hate directed at men and women may be more similar than our public discourse is comfortable admitting.21 This does not mean online misandry is the central issue, nor does it prove broader institutional discrimination against men. But it does show that contempt for men exists in recognizable, organized form and deserves to be taken more seriously than it usually is.

Once this becomes visible, the next question is unavoidable: what happens when institutions stop merely overlooking male disadvantage and begin actively interpreting masculinity itself as a problem?

The Pathologizing of Masculinity The problem is not merely that institutions often overlook male disadvantage. In some cases, they go further, treating masculinity itself as something suspect. Few examples illustrate this more clearly than the American Psychological Association’s Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men.22 The guidelines are explicitly grounded in a feminist and social constructionist framework, one that treats masculinity primarily as a culturally imposed set of expectations rather than as a complex human reality shaped by biology, development, temperament, and culture together. That theoretical choice shapes how male behavior is interpreted from the outset. Masculinity is no longer approached first as something to understand, but as something to critique.

Masculinity is no longer approached first as something to understand, but as something to critique.

This posture becomes most obvious in the document’s treatment of traditional male traits. The guidelines state that “traditional masculinity”—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression—is, “on the whole, harmful.” They further instruct psychologists to examine the role of “power, privilege, and sexism” in the development of boys and men. The cumulative effect is unmistakable: characteristics long associated with masculinity are framed less as neutral traits with potential strengths and weaknesses than as liabilities linked to oppression and dysfunction. In this framework, masculinity is not simply a style of being; it is a clinical problem in need of correction.23

That is a remarkable stance for a therapeutic profession to adopt, especially in fields where women are a clear majority.24 A male client who enters therapy seeking help for depression, anxiety, loneliness, or failure is already vulnerable. If the institutional framework guiding his therapist encourages her to see stoicism, competitiveness, assertiveness, or traditional role commitments primarily as symptoms of power, privilege, or social harm, then therapy risks becoming something other than care. It risks becoming reeducation. Instead of helping men understand themselves, the profession begins by telling them that the very traits most central to their identity are morally suspect—a mental-health framework that positions male identity as inherently problematic, fails the test of neutrality, and may undermine trust from the very beginning.25, 26

The trouble here is not that masculine traits can never become destructive. Of course they can. Risk-taking can become recklessness. Stoicism can harden into emotional isolation. Dominance can become abuse. But the same is true of traits more commonly associated with women: empathy can become overaccommodation, agreeableness can become passivity, nurturance can become self-erasure. A psychologically serious framework should ask when traits are adaptive, when they are maladaptive, and under what conditions they serve human flourishing. What it should not do is begin with the assumption that one sex’s characteristic tendencies are, on balance, harmful. Yet that is precisely the impression the APA framework leaves. It offers a language of critique, but very little language of appreciation, balance, or contextual understanding.27, 28

The consequences are not merely theoretical. Men already underuse mental-health services, are less likely to seek psychological help, and are far more likely to die by suicide.29, 30, 31 Under those conditions, a therapeutic model that implicitly tells men their identity is part of the problem is badly timed, to put it mildly. Rather than meeting men where they are, it risks alienating them further. Rather than building trust, it may confirm their suspicion that elite institutions do not understand them and are not especially interested in trying. The guidelines may do more harm than good: by pathologizing traditional masculinity, they may repel the very population they claim to serve.32, 33

Behind all this lies a deeper ideological issue. The APA guidelines do not simply offer clinical advice; they import a broader critical-theory view of sex and identity into therapeutic practice. Masculinity is interpreted through the lens of power, privilege, and structural domination, while alternative explanations—biological, developmental, evolutionary, or even straightforwardly temperamental—receive little serious engagement. The result is ideological narrowing whereby male psychology is no longer treated as a subject of open inquiry. It is treated as a moral field to be managed. And once a profession charged with healing begins from that premise, it should not be surprising if many men conclude that it has stopped trying to understand them and has started trying to correct them.34, 35, 36

When women struggle, institutions are encouraged to ask what social barriers are holding them back. When men struggle, institutions are more likely to ask what is wrong with men.

Boys and men are commonly told that they should open up, seek help, and be vulnerable. But when they do, they enter institutions increasingly shaped by theories that view core aspects of their identity with suspicion. The message, however politely phrased, is hard to miss; it is an ideology of care that too often begins with suspicion and blame.

Skepticism and the Need for Symmetry A skeptical culture should demand more than slogans, moral urgency, and politically convenient explanations. It should insist on symmetry. The same standards of evidence applied to claims of female disadvantage should also be applied to claims of male disadvantage. The same openness to structural explanations granted when women fall behind should be granted when boys and men do. And the same willingness to consider biology, temperament, incentives, development, and choice in explaining male outcomes should also be permitted when explaining female outcomes. Concepts such as patriarchy and social construction too often function as starting assumptions rather than as hypotheses subjected to serious empirical testing.37, 38, 39

A more rigorous approach would begin by admitting that sex differences and sex disparities do not explain themselves. Some reflect injustice. Some reflect trade-offs. Some reflect evolved predispositions interacting with modern institutions. Some reflect cultural expectations that help one sex in one context and hurt it in another. Serious inquiry should sort among these possibilities rather than treating one ideological narrative as morally mandatory. Feminist scholarship has too often narrowed that inquiry by treating alternative explanatory frameworks, especially evolutionary ones, as politically suspect before they are even evaluated on their merits.40, 41

A mental-health framework that positions male identity as inherently problematic, fails the test of neutrality, and may undermine trust from the very beginning.

This is why the issue is larger than feminism alone. It is about whether our institutions still believe in the basic norms of intellectual fairness. A skeptical institution should not decide in advance who counts as oppressed and who counts as privileged, then interpret every new fact through that template. It should be willing to discover that women are disadvantaged in some places, men in others, and that both realities can be true at once. It should be willing to ask whether schools serve boys poorly, whether therapy alienates men, whether current diversity programs are aimed at yesterday’s inequities rather than today’s realities, and whether moral prestige has become detached from empirical evidence.

If skepticism means anything, it means resisting explanations that flatter our politics while ignoring contrary evidence. It means asking, with equal seriousness, what harms women and what harms men. Until that symmetry is restored, our gender debates will remain less a search for truth than a competition among moral narratives.

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A review of: The Spy Archive: Hidden Lives, Secret Missions, and the History of Espionage by Dexter Ingram (IN Network, 2025) and The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB by Gordon Corera (Pegasus Books, 2026).

Has espionage changed over time? And what inspires people to betray their country? Two new books tackle these questions and more from different perspectives. The Spy Archive by Dexter Ingram is a history of espionage, from ancient times to the early 21st century. The similarly titled book The Spy in The Archive tells the story of one man’s journey from KGB officer to defector.

I initially worried that Ingram’s The Spy Archive was so short that it might be little more than an extended encyclopedia article. My fear was first challenged by its back cover praise by prestigious intelligence professionals and by Ingram’s own experience in the field, which the text confirms gives his advice and critiques a value that a historian could not provide. As I read The Spy Archive, I also grew to appreciate Ingram’s choice to focus on technique over politics. Of course, his historical survey hits most of the expected highlights, in Europe and the U.S., including the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, The American Revolution, two World Wars, the Cold War, and modern issues such as drone strikes and internet based attacks.

Along the way Ingram comments that the most effective and long-standing multi-nation intelligence sharing alliance in history is known as Five Eyes, which leading news outlets have reported since publication that at least one member country has expressed concern over continuing to share intelligence with the U.S.

Skeptics will appreciate that Ingram directly mentions critical thinking, though some may be disappointed that he includes discussion of Biblical espionage in the chapter on ancient espionage. I applaud Ingram though for giving a disproportionately large amount of space to such topics as what has and hasn’t changed in spying technology (such as comparing an ancient false bottomed earthen jar to a Cold War era hollow coin), and discussing how female and African American spies have sometimes been more effective due to sexism and racism. He even gives full chapters to the history and influence of spying within Asia, spying in fiction, and to ethical issues, including the toll that life or death decisions can have on intelligence agents who work in offices.

One of his odd inclusions: Ingram says that World War II Nazi leader Klaus Barbie was saved from a war crimes trial by doing work for U.S. military intelligence, which is not mentioned in the indexes of the survey texts The Secret World by leading intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, A Century of Spies by the late Jeffrey T. Richelson of The National Security Archive, nor in the second edition of the reference book Spy Book by U.S. government Norman Polmar and writer Thomas G. Allen.

Ingram’s doubts about the efficacy of “enhanced interrogation” surprised me, as did his ambivalence about the mass U.S. spying revealed by Edward Snowden. However, Dexter Ingram’s experience as a U.S. Navy pilot and State Department counterterrorism expert made it impossible for me to dismiss his opinions as liberal virtue signaling.

It’s always a challenge what to include in a short text, but I was shocked that he barely mentions Soviet espionage against the U.S. atomic bomb, and that in an entire chapter on ethics there is no extended discussion of the dilemma that information gained by a broken code or active spy is sometimes not acted upon because it would stop the flow of information. Less seriously, Ingram also got at least one name wrong (U.S. Navy traitor John Walker’s daughter was actually named Laura). In a side note, Walker’s contemporary, Aldrich Ames, the treasonous ex-CIA agent who is also mentioned, died in prison in January of 2026 after the book’s publication.

Of more concern than inconsistent inclusions is that Ingram’s statements sometimes seem contradictory. One example is the question of the valuable intelligence technique of multisource validation. How can Ingram credit it to the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu in one chapter, later comment that the technique was used in the Middle Ages, in a subsequent chapter credit the famous Renaissance author and spy Machiavelli as pioneering the technique, and then call Napoleon’s use of multisource validation “revolutionary?” The most concise contradiction is Ingram’s incoherent comment that whistleblowers can help the system correct itself.

The contrast to Gordon Corera’s The Spy in The Archive could not be wider, a multi-topic, multi-chronology history written so smoothly it could serve as a model for clear writing, while also being almost as suspenseful as spy fiction.

The most serious problem with the book is organizational. I like foreshadowing and “reflections” about the material discussed, but here it almost seems random, such as having introductory material in the center of a chapter and substantive material only in the introductory or reflection sections, as well as material in one chapter that would fit better in another chapter. There are too many examples of material being discussed twice, sometimes at length and usually without acknowledgement or good reason. At worst, the material is so disordered that it is hard to follow (especially in the last two chapters) despite the sentences themselves not being badly written.

The contrast to Gordon Corera’s The Spy in The Archive could not be wider, a multi-topic, multi-chronology history written so smoothly it could serve as a model for clear writing, while also being almost as suspenseful as spy fiction. Like Ingram, Corera breaks the story into small parts, but in Ingram this creates disorder, while in Corera it makes for a faster read.

The true story is extraordinary: an archivist for the KGB became disillusioned by the lies and brutality revealed in the archives that were the Soviet Union’s most well kept secrets. So over the course of many years he took a massive amount of notes and smuggled them out of the archive each day hidden in his shoes, and finally escaped Russia with the help of British Secret Service agents, who were armed with automatic weapons for good reason. The trove that the archivist, Vasili Mitokhin, so dramatically made available to the West, revealed the identities of as many as a thousand Soviet agents in 36 countries.

There have already been books about these revelations, most prominently The Sword and the Shield, co-authored by Mitrokhin and historian Christopher Andrew. In contrast, The Spy in the Archive is about Mitrokhin’s personal evolution from enthusiastic KGB agent to archivist to defector. Along the way Corera skillfully interweaves key moments in the history of the Soviet Union and also made me feel the culture of fear enforced by Soviet security forces which is the underpinning of both the Soviet story and the evolution of Mitrokhin’s disillusionment. (I imagined echoes of this culture of neighbor turning on neighbor with recent news of possible bounties for women leaving Texas to seek abortions). Worst of all, the top secret KGB archives revealed that it was common for brutal punishment to be insisted upon even when the prosecutors knew the charges to be completely false, even when based solely on personal malice or gain.

Mitrokhin’s struggle to get his material published is suspenseful beyond his fear of being caught. A risky approach to the Americans was dismissed without consideration, and British diplomats were understandably slow in believing that Mitrokhin was telling the truth. Then, the agents struggled to convince the English government to fund the exfiltration of Mitrokhin and his family, as the Cold War ended and intelligence service budgets were slashed. But the dramatic escape happened, Mitrokhin was given a new life in England, and his notes were turned into books that forced the rewriting of Cold War history.

Stress remained: Mitrokhin was enraged that the first published book based on his notes (the aforementioned Sword and the Shield) ignored the evils within the Soviet Union. It also saddened Mitrokhin to realize, sooner than his new British government friends did, that Putin was lying about his openness to democracy (post-Cold War Russian spying is fully documented in Calder Walton’s recent book Spies, which I reviewed in Skeptic v30n1). Perhaps it is better that Mitrokhin did not live to see Russia’s January 2026 launch of a nuclear capable missile into Ukraine.

The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB is nearly a perfect book, from its apt subtitle to the emotions rendered so vividly throughout the text.

It’s a gripping and historically important story told extremely well. There are only a few details that I wish had been mentioned, such as the difficulty (or not) of exfiltrating Mitrokhin’s notes, and more directly and extensively discussing how they were determined to be genuine. Corera should also have mentioned the comparable exfiltrated notebooks of defector Alexander Vassiliev, and how many books were published based on Mitrokhin’s material during his lifetime.

But these are quibbles: The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB is nearly a perfect book, from its apt subtitle to the emotions rendered so vividly throughout the text. Ingram’s The Spy Archive could have been a very nice book if it had had a good content editor or coauthor to rewrite it from Ingram’s rough draft, which is what large portions of the published book read like, obscuring its strengths.

One link between the two books is betrayal: Ingram notes that most recent U.S. traitors were partly motivated by money but also as by feeling underappreciated by their intelligence agency employers, and Corera concludes that Mitrokhin’s motivations had more aspects of this than he wanted to admit, perhaps even to himself.

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For generations, the mystery of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) has been viewed through a narrow lens of mechanical engineering, split between fears of foreign espionage and fantasies of extraterrestrial invasion. By viewing these anomalies strictly as hardware, we ignore a far more grounded explanation: biology. This article explores the “Atmospheric Life” hypothesis, proposing that UAPs are not manufactured machines, but undiscovered, highly adapted biological entities native to Earth’s upper atmosphere. By examining their non-mechanical flight patterns, organic physical structures, sensor misinterpretations, and total lack of military retaliation, we can reframe a modern security panic as a groundbreaking frontier of natural science.

A Mystery SolvedFor decades, the conversation around Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) has been dominated by two main theories: secret military technology or visitors from distant galaxies. However, a compelling alternative hypothesis looks downward instead of upward. What if these anomalous objects are actually undiscovered, highly adapted biological entities native to Earth’s atmosphere?

When we strip away the sci-fi assumptions, the erratic flight patterns, shapes, and behaviors of many documented UAPs look far more like organic wildlife than mechanical craft.

Avian and Insectoid Flight MechanicsThe most common piece of evidence cited for the technological nature of UAPs is their radical flight behavior. Witnesses and radar tracking often describe sudden changes in direction, instant acceleration, and erratic hovering.

While these movements may baffle aerospace engineers, they are entirely familiar to biologists. Watch a common housefly, a dragonfly, or a starling murmuration. These animals dart, pivot, change velocity instantly, and hover in ways that defy standard human aviation. The erratic “ping-pong” flight patterns often reported in UAP sightings strongly mirror the hunting and mating flights of insects or the chaotic, synchronized movements of birds.

Real-world animal behaviors perfectly mirror what we see in famous UAP footage. Rather than breaking the laws of physics with advanced technology, these objects may simply possess biological flight mechanisms that we do not yet understand.

Atmospheric Leviathans: The Cigar-Shaped Ocean ParadoxBeyond small, nimble UAPs, there are frequent reports of massive, cylindrical, or “cigar-shaped” objects hovering silently in the upper atmosphere. In a technological context, a craft of this size represents a massive logistical footprint or a looming mothership. In a biological context, it represents a giant apex predator or filter feeder.

Think of Earth’s oceans. Massive creatures like blue whales, whale sharks, and deep-sea siphonophores float effortlessly through a dense fluid medium. Earth’s atmosphere is also a fluid medium, just a less dense one. A large, slow-moving, cigar-shaped UAP behaves remarkably like a whale or a shark cruising through the deep ocean.

Concluding that UAPs are hostile or extra-planetary requires a massive leap of imagination.

These entities could be low-density, gas-filled biological organisms that spend their entire lifecycles drifting through the stratosphere, entirely indifferent to the human world below. Historical cryptozoology theories have long proposed the existence of such “atmospheric jellyfish” and sky-dwelling organisms.

The Misinterpretation of Biological TissueA major roadblock to the biological theory is our reliance on technology to detect these entities. Modern defense networks use radar, infrared camera arrays, and thermal sensors to scan the skies. When these systems register an object, we automatically assume it is made of metal, carbon fiber, or titanium.

However, radar and thermal sensors can easily misinterpret biological tissue. Dense flocks of birds and swarms of insects routinely create massive, solid-looking anomalies on radar screens. Furthermore, a creature with a highly reflective outer membrane, or one that generates its own bioluminescent heat signature, could trick infrared sensors into displaying a sharp, mechanical outline. We might be looking at skin, blubber, and organic defense mechanisms, but viewing them through sensors calibrated only to find hardware.

The Absence of Military AggressionThe prevailing geopolitical narrative frames UAPs as national security threats. This fear-based perspective assumes that anything unknown in our airspace must be a foreign adversary or an invading force. However, real-world data contradicts this assumption.

In recent years, modern militaries have actively tracked, engaged, and even shot down several unidentified objects. If these entities were part of a technologically superior, militarily organized foreign power or alien civilization, standard military doctrine dictating a counter-attack would apply. Yet, no such retaliation has ever occurred.

When a wasp nest is disturbed, or a bear is cornered, it defends itself violently. But when a deep-sea creature or a migrating bird is harmed by humans, the species as a whole does not organize a strategic military counter-offensive. The total lack of coordinated tactical retaliation from UAPs strongly suggests they lack military organization, strategic intent, or a concept of warfare. They react like wildlife—either fleeing or remaining entirely indifferent to human aggression.

Reclaiming the Phenomenon from Sci-FiConcluding that UAPs are hostile or extra-planetary requires a massive leap of imagination. It forces us to invent complex interstellar civilizations, vast government conspiracies, or foreign technologies centuries ahead of everyone else on Earth. These are all unlikely compared to the biological hypothesis, which provides a much more grounded and parsimonious explanation. Earth’s biosphere is incredibly resilient and adaptable.

Just as we are still discovering bizarre new lifeforms in the deepest trenches of our oceans, it is entirely possible that our upper atmosphere harbors its own unique ecosystem. By viewing UAPs through the lens of biology rather than warfare, we can strip away the unneeded fear and recognize these phenomena for what they likely are: just another undiscovered wonder of our natural world.

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Most debates about the origins of Christianity fall into a culturally entrenched groove: the apologist marshals evidence for a physical resurrection of Jesus; the skeptic counters with naturalistic explanations against it. Both sides, however, share a fundamental error—they assume that “Resurrection” meant “Resuscitation” to the first Christians, treating the walking, talking, fish-eating corpse as the primary historical datum to be either defended or dismantled.

By examining the earliest recoverable evidence—specifically the letters of Paul—we discover that the real question is not “Did the physical resurrection of Jesus literally happen?” but “Did the original disciples even claim that it did?” When we shift the axis from metaphysical debate to source criticism, the traditional question doesn’t get answered—it dissolves.

The “Resurrection” began as a spiritual vision interpreted through an apocalyptic lens, and only later crystallized into a physical narrative to serve the institutional needs of a growing church. Understanding this evolution allows us to explain the rise of Christianity without recourse to the supernatural, relying instead on the well-documented mechanisms of human psychology, sociology, and history.

What follows is a chronological reconstruction: first, the historically probable circumstances of the crucifixion and burial; second, the acute psychological crisis this created for the disciples; and third—critically—an analysis of Paul’s earliest epistles to demonstrate that the original apostolic claim was entirely visionary in nature, before tracing how and why that spiritual claim was retroactively physicalized by later Gospel writers into the familiar empty-tomb narratives.

The Crucifixion: What We Can Be Confident AboutJesus of Nazareth was crucified under the reign of Pontius Pilate around 30 CE. This is one of the most historically secure facts about him, attested not only by Christian sources but by non-Christian historians: Tacitus, writing c. 115–117 CE, mentions that “Christus” was executed under Pilate; Josephus, writing around 93 CE, references the same event. Though scholars recognize that Christian scribes interpolated portions of the Josephus passage, the core reference to his execution under Pilate remains widely accepted. The crucifixion is simply not in historical doubt—nor is the death itself. The swoon theory—suggesting that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross but fell into a comatose-like state and later appeared to his disciples—is rejected by virtually every serious scholar, including deeply skeptical ones. Roman executioners were professionals whose lives depended on their thoroughness.

What is less often appreciated is the specific theological catastrophe the crucifixion represented for the disciples. A crucified messiah was not a martyred hero awaiting vindication. Deuteronomy 21:23 was explicit: anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse. The cross was, within the only theological framework these people possessed, formal proof that God had rejected Jesus. And the Messiah, in their tradition, had a specific job description: defeat the Romans, rebuild the Temple, and establish world peace. Jesus had done none of these things. He died the death of a failed revolutionary, leaving Israel still under occupation. This is why Jews do not accept Jesus as the Messiah. They were expecting a conquering warrior and witnessed only an executed preacher, crucified in between two common (one repentant, one unrepentant) thieves.

Thus, the Jewish disciples of Jesus were in freefall, searching desperately for any shred of meaning. The later Gospel claims that Jesus repeatedly predicted his resurrection are exposed as a literary invention by the simple fact of the disciples’ behavior. Had he foretold rising on the third day, his followers would not have hidden in terror, nor would the women have brought spices to anoint a permanent corpse. The disciples were not waiting for a promised victory. They were in a nosedive, searching desperately for any shred of meaning.

This silence is historically significant. Because Jesus apparently never framed his death as purposeful—as atonement, as apocalyptic necessity, as anything—his followers were forced into reactive, improvised theology after the fact. The varying theological emphases visible across the New Testament are the scars of a movement that spent its earliest years trying to retroactively make sense of a catastrophe their leader never prepared them for.

The Burial and the Empty TombThe earliest Christian writer, Paul, writing decades after the fact, never mentions an empty tomb, and his silence is telling. In 1 Corinthians 15, mounting a desperate evidential defense against resurrection skeptics, he lists every proof available: visionary appearances to Peter, the Twelve, five hundred people, James, all the apostles, himself, and finally to scripture. No tomb. No women. No burial site discovery. Even Paul’s mention of the resurrection of Jesus was described in 1 Corinthians (15:44) as a spiritual event rather than a literal one:

It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.

More than silence, Paul actively describes the resurrection in terms that exclude a resuscitated corpse: “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” His seed analogy is explicit—the physical body remains in the ground while something entirely new emerges from it. This is not the language of a man who believed a corpse had walked out of a grave.

Even the now-famous “empty tomb” doesn’t appear in our written sources until Mark’s Gospel, composed around 70 CE, forty years after the events therein described. What the evidence does reliably establish is this: women went to find Jesus’s body Sunday morning and could not locate it—a detail that passes the criterion of embarrassment on multiple grounds. Women’s testimony was legally invalid in first-century Jewish culture; no one fabricating an apologetic story would make them its sole witnesses. Mark preserves their reaction with brutal honesty: “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled … They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). This is not the response you invent for a resurrection proof.

Most tellingly, Mary Magdalene’s first assumption was naturalistic: “They have taken the Lord, and we do not know where they have laid him” (John 20:2). The primary witness assumed relocation or theft, not miracle. Even enemy attestation confirms this: Matthew 28:13–15 preserves a Jewish counter-claim of body theft—significant not because it’s true, but because it confirms the body’s absence was not in dispute, only the explanation for its absence.

The most historically probable explanation for the empty tomb follows directly from Jewish law. Under Deuteronomy 21:22–23, executed criminals had to be buried before sundown to prevent ritual pollution. The Mishnah explicitly barred criminals from honorable family tombs, mandating designated unmarked graves instead (Sanhedrin 6:5). Jesus, crucified and explicitly cursed under Jewish law, was in all likelihood disposed of accordingly—hastily, without ceremony, in an unmarked criminal’s grave.

Crucially, even in the latest, most physically-oriented Gospel accounts, nobody actually touches Jesus. Luke has Jesus invite verification—“touch me and see”—but the text never records the disciples doing so. John constructs the entire Thomas scene to combat Docetism (the belief that Jesus’s physical body and early sufferings were an illusion), yet never narrates Thomas touching the wounds—only a confession of faith. What is entirely absent across all four Gospels is spontaneous physical affection: no one embraces Jesus, kisses him, or clings to him in tearful relief—the involuntary human response to reunion with someone beloved and lost. What we get instead are controlled, almost clinical encounters: invitations to touch wounds, prohibitions against holding, failures to recognize a familiar face. This is precisely what we would expect from visionary experiences of a spiritual presence. It is entirely inconsistent with physical reunions involving a tangible human body.

Reading the sources chronologically makes the tradition’s development unmistakable. Paul in the 50s CE: no tomb, only visions, explicitly spiritual resurrection language. Mark at 70 CE: women go to a burial site, but no identification of whose tomb, no appearance narratives, ending abruptly in terror and silence—the promise of a Galilean appearance made but never narrated. Matthew and Luke in the 80s CE: the tomb is now explicitly Joseph’s, guards and earthquakes appear, physical appearance narratives proliferate. John in the 90s CE: maximum specificity—a garden tomb, Thomas invited to probe wounds, the secret disciple motif fully developed.

The empty tomb was not the source of the resurrection claim. It was a later frame built around it—an ambiguous memory retroactively recruited as apologetic proof once the tradition had developed far enough to need it.

Across six decades the story moves from vague to specific, from confusion to certainty, from spiritual to physical.

The mechanism is straightforward. Once resurrection belief had formed through visionary experience in Galilee, the earlier memory of the women’s confusion was retrospectively read through that new framework. What had originally meant “we couldn’t find the body—we don’t know where they laid him” was recast as “we found the tomb empty, confirming physical resurrection.” The empty tomb was not the source of the resurrection claim. It was a later frame built around it—an ambiguous memory retroactively recruited as apologetic proof once the tradition had developed far enough to need it.

The Visions: The Psychological Heart of the MatterHere the reconstruction reaches its most important point: where and how the resurrection belief actually originated.

After the crucifixion, the disciples fled Jerusalem—they were targets at risk of arrest—and retreated to Galilee, which created what we might call a verification vacuum. By the time the disciples had processed their grief and eventually returned to Jerusalem to preach the resurrection, weeks or months had elapsed. In the Judean climate, decomposition is rapid. Even if the authorities had cared enough to excavate a common criminal’s trench to refute a sect of Galilean fishermen, the body would have been unrecognizable. But this forensic reality is largely beside the point—because the original claim was not that a resuscitated corpse had vacated a tomb. It was that the exalted Lord had appeared in visions. No decomposing body could disprove a spiritual experience.

In Galilee, weeks after the crucifixion, Peter experienced a powerful event that the earliest texts describe purely as a vision or appearance (ōphthē). While we cannot psychoanalyze Peter across two millennia, the textual record is clear: he genuinely experienced something he could only interpret as Jesus being present and alive.

Let’s assume that Peter was not lying, not performing, and not part of a conspiracy, and that he genuinely experienced something he could only interpret as Jesus having returned to life. He had no concept of grief hallucination. He was an apocalyptic Jew who knew the women had gone looking for the body and found nothing. His worldview provided exactly one category for what he had experienced: resurrection. God had raised Jesus from the dead—vindicating him after the apparent curse of crucifixion, confirming him as the Messiah, and inaugurating the End Times resurrection that Jewish theology had long predicted and that Peter already believed was coming. When Peter experienced this powerful spiritual vision, his Jewish apocalyptic background provided exactly one category for what he had experienced: resurrection.

What “Resurrection” Originally Meant (and How It Changed)This is one of the most important insights in understanding Christian origins, because it fundamentally reframes what we’re trying to explain.

Paul’s letters are the earliest Christian documents we have, written in the 50s CE—before any of the Gospels. When Paul describes the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, the language is strikingly different from what the later Gospels would say. He speaks of a “spiritual body” (soma pneumatikon) and explicitly says “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” While many scholars rightly note that “flesh and blood” is a Hebrew idiom for mortal, corruptible human nature rather than a strict denial of all physicality, Paul’s choice to repeatedly emphasize spiritual transformation over fleshly continuity is revealing.

He applies the same word—ōphthē, meaning “appeared to”—uniformly to all resurrection witnesses: Peter, the Twelve, the five hundred, James, and himself. He draws no distinction between their experiences and his own Damascus Road encounter, which he describes elsewhere not as a physical meeting but as apokalypsis—revelation: in Galatians 1:12 and 1:16, Paul says God “revealed his Son in me,” the language of vision, not of encountering a body. Had the earlier appearances been physical while his was visionary, he would have been forced to explain why his experience constituted equally valid evidence. He conspicuously does not feel that need.

The standard objection inverts this inference: rather than Paul’s visionary experience pulling the others toward visionary status, the physical appearances pull his toward physical status—with Acts providing the dramatic corroboration. This objection, however, runs directly against the methodological principle this essay has consistently applied. Acts was written decades after Paul’s letters by someone other than Paul, and its physicalization of the Damascus Road contradicts Paul’s own account. Paul’s self-description governs.

Paul’s theology does not merely transform the physical body—it renders the physical remains entirely irrelevant to the resurrection claim. The husk stays in the soil because the original claim never concerned the husk.

His seed analogy (1 Cor 15:37) makes the structural case explicit. You bury a seed, it dies, and a different plant rises—the casing decomposes; it does not stand back up. This is not rhetorical accommodation to a Greek audience repulsed by resuscitation, though Paul was certainly writing to such an audience. The argument is structural: if Paul believed the physical husk itself had vacated the tomb, the analogy would be fundamentally broken. He reaches for precisely this metaphor because it describes what he understood the resurrection to be—not resuscitation, but the emergence of something qualitatively new from what was left behind. Paul’s theology does not merely transform the physical body—it renders the physical remains entirely irrelevant to the resurrection claim. The husk stays in the soil because the original claim never concerned the husk.

The exaltation claim—that God raised Jesus and seated him at the right hand of divine authority—fully satisfied everything the original crisis demanded. A resuscitated corpse answers a question the crisis never asked: not “has God vindicated Jesus?” but “what happened to the body?” The physicalization therefore cannot be explained as the natural outgrowth of the original experience. It requires its own explanation—one that lies, as we will see, in the later institutional pressures of a movement needing to anchor itself against both Docetism and the chaos of ongoing visionary claims.

This reading is reinforced by an ontological statement in the same chapter. In 1 Corinthians 15:45, Paul declares that “the last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (pneuma zōopoioun). This is not metaphor, and it is not accommodation to Greek sensibility—it is a direct claim about what the risen state is. A writer operating within a tradition of physical resuscitation does not describe the risen state of that body as spirit. That Paul does so, without qualification or apology, is the single most direct Pauline support for the exaltation reading and remains significantly underexploited in the literature.

There is a further argument embedded in Paul’s background. As a Pharisee, his starting point was the cultural belief in a physical resurrection. This makes his consistent silence on fleshly encounter historically significant. If the Jerusalem disciples had touched wounds or eaten fish with the risen Jesus, Paul would have been intimately aware of it through his direct consultations with Peter and James (Galatians 1:18). To a Pharisee, such evidence would have been the most persuasive argument available—direct confirmation of Jewish resurrection dogma. He would not have buried it in seed metaphors. Instead, he avoids the language of flesh entirely—and if his concern were purely rhetorical, he could easily have found Greek-compatible framing for a physical claim, as he demonstrably could reframe Jewish concepts for Gentile audiences throughout his letters.

Critically, this framework predates Paul. Philippians 2:6-11 is accepted across the theological spectrum as a pre-Pauline hymn—some of the earliest recoverable Christology. Its movement is from pre-existence through humiliation through death to a single culminating event: exaltation—“God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name above every name.” There is no physical resuscitation language anywhere in it; the resurrection is absorbed entirely into the exaltation. Since this predates Paul, the exaltation-without-physicalization framework was not his theological invention but the tradition he received—which corroborates precisely what he claims in 1 Corinthians 15:3. Romans 1:3-4 and Philippians 3:20-21 run in the same direction, describing the resurrection as cosmic appointment and transformation into soma tēs doxēs—body of glory—the vocabulary of theophany rather than resuscitation.

Moreover, Paul is not inventing this theology in a vacuum. In 1 Corinthians 15:3, he explicitly states he is passing on a creed he “received”—technical language for a formal oral tradition transmitted to him by the original disciples during his Jerusalem visit around 35 CE. Scholars widely date this creed to within a few years of the crucifixion. The fact that the tradition was formalized so early and remained entirely visionary demonstrates that the spiritual interpretation preceded intergenerational oral drift by decades. Paul did not invent the “spiritual body” concept; he inherited it. The later shift to a physical corpse in the Gospels was therefore not merely a departure from Paul—it was a departure from Peter and James as well.

The physical resurrection narrative, in other words, has no apostolic anchor. This challenges the idea that Paul and the Jerusalem apostles were divided on the nature of the resurrection. It also directly dismantles the common apologetic claim that Paul preached idiosyncratic spiritual theology while the Jerusalem church independently preserved a tradition of physical resurrection. The creed he received from them suggests otherwise.

Finally, Paul never mentions Jesus eating food, nor anyone touching him. In 1 Corinthians 15, arguing strenuously against resurrection skeptics and marshaling every piece of evidence available, he fails to cite the single most powerful physical proof imaginable. His silence is deafening.

Therefore, the original claim was not “Jesus walked out of the tomb with a physical body, ate breakfast with us, and we touched his wounds.” It was “God raised Jesus from death—we encountered him as spiritually alive through powerful visionary experiences.” Resurrection, in its earliest documented form, then, was a spiritual and visionary claim, not a physical resuscitation claim. The physical resuscitation narrative came later.

Sincere Belief vs. Theological ConstructionThere is an apparent tension in this reconstruction that must be addressed: how can the original disciples be completely sincere while later Gospel writers invented physical narratives? The answer lies in the evolution of the movement and in ancient literary standards. The first generation experienced genuine, sincerely believed visionary encounters. Decades later, anonymous Gospel authors operating under Greco-Roman biographical conventions engaged in deliberate theological construction—shaping narratives, inventing dialogue, and dramatizing encounters to combat heresies like Docetism. In the ancient world, this was standard literary practice, not malicious fraud. They were writing theology, not modern history.

Reading the Gospels in the order they were written rather than the order they appear in our bibles, we can watch the resurrection tradition become progressively more physical across six decades. Mark, the earliest Gospel (c. 70 CE), provides the critical clue. Though the original manuscript ends abruptly at 16:8 without narrating an appearance, it contains a specific promise: the young man tells the women that Jesus “is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him” (Mark 16:7). This confirms that the earliest tradition located the experiences in Galilee—precisely matching our reconstruction of the disciples returning home in defeat—rather than in Jerusalem.

But Mark offers no physical proofs whatsoever: no eating of fish, no touching of wounds, no tangible body. More tellingly, having announced a meeting in Galilee, he refuses to narrate it. If the disciples had encountered a resuscitated Jesus in the flesh, it is inconceivable that the earliest Gospel would gesture toward that meeting and then fall silent. Mark’s silence suggests that in 70 CE the tradition was still understood as a visionary encounter in Galilee—distinct from the physical legends Matthew, Luke, and John would later construct to prove he was not a ghost.

The Paradox of Physical ContactPerhaps the most revealing pattern in the resurrection accounts operates through absence rather than presence. When we examine what these texts actually narrate about physical contact with the risen Jesus, we discover a systematic gap the Gospel writers themselves seem unable to resolve—and it constitutes powerful evidence that the original experiences were visionary rather than physical.

Even in the latest, most physically-oriented accounts, nobody actually touches Jesus. In Luke 24, Jesus explicitly invites verification—“touch me and see”—but the text never records the disciples doing so. In John 20, Mary Magdalene is told “do not hold on to me,” preventing contact before it occurs. Most significantly, in the Doubting Thomas scene, Jesus invites Thomas to put his hand into the wounds—but the text never narrates Thomas doing it. He simply responds with a confession of faith.

This omission is extraordinary. John wrote his Gospel in the 90s CE specifically to combat Docetism—the heresy claiming Jesus was a pure spirit. If any text needed explicit physical verification, this was it. Had Thomas actually plunged his hand into the wound, John would have narrated it in vivid detail: perhaps the most powerful proof of physical resurrection imaginable. The invitation is extended; the act remains unconfirmed. This suggests the author was constrained not merely by theological agenda, but by what the collective memory of his community actually preserved.

If the encounters had genuinely been physical, the tradition would have preserved either the touching itself or a consistent explanation for why it never occurred. It preserves neither—a double absence that exposes the fundamental tension John faced: despite overwhelming apologetic pressure to prove physicality, he could not narrate the one event that would have settled the matter, because the collective memory shaping his sources knew such contact had never happened.

This brings us to the deeper function of John’s “do not hold on to me” command. By the 90s CE, a glaring problem existed in the tradition: across all the reported appearances, no one had actually touched the risen Jesus, despite this being the most obvious and powerful form of verification. John’s solution is elegant—have Jesus himself prohibit contact, thereby transforming absence into explained prohibition.

The prohibition inadvertently confirms what it tries to conceal: the original experiences were visionary encounters without physical contact.

This is narrative damage control, a classic example of ancient theological construction. If touching had actually occurred, there would be no need to explain why it didn’t happen. The prohibition inadvertently confirms what it tries to conceal: the original experiences were visionary encounters without physical contact. John cannot narrate what the tradition doesn’t preserve, so instead he narrates why it didn’t happen, creating theological cover—“I have not yet ascended”—for a historical gap.

The Missing Human ResponseThis textual gap becomes even more devastating when we consider the human reality of what the later Gospels claim occurred. People who loved Jesus deeply—who had spent three years eating, traveling, and living with him—are suddenly reunited with him after watching him die in agony. The involuntary human response to such a reunion requires no theology, no instruction: you rush to embrace the person, weep, hold their hands, cling to them. It is what you might expect humans do when someone they love returns from the dead.

But this never happens in a single resurrection account across all four Gospels. Nobody embraces Jesus. Nobody kisses him or clings to him in tearful relief. Matthew’s isolated “clasped feet” is, as established, a liturgical gesture rather than a preserved human memory. What we get instead are controlled, almost clinical encounters—an invitation to touch wounds, a prohibition against holding, disciples failing to recognize the person standing in front of them. In John 21, the disciples who allegedly eat breakfast with Jesus on the beach sit in reverent silence, “none of them daring to ask ‘who are you?’”—a reaction that makes perfect psychological sense for a visionary encounter with an awe-inspiring spiritual presence, and no human sense whatsoever if their old friend was physically sitting among them passing grilled fish.

The reverent distance, the withheld recognition, the complete absence of spontaneous physical affection: all of this is precisely what we would expect from people encountering something they cannot quite process or fully comprehend. It is entirely inconsistent with people reunited with the physical body of someone they love.

The Complete PictureLet us bring these elements together. Jesus was executed and buried hastily in an unmarked criminal grave before sundown Friday, as the law mandated. Women went Sunday morning to complete the burial rites but could not locate the body in the unmarked criminal burial area; genuinely confused and frightened, their disorientation preserved in the criterion-of-embarrassment details. Weeks or months later, in Galilee, Peter had a powerful visionary experience which, interpreted through his apocalyptic Jewish framework, became the source of resurrection belief. That belief spread through group psychology and additional visionary experiences.

This reconstruction requires no conspiracy, no fraud, no deliberate deception. Everyone involved was completely sincere.

Decades later, the authentic memory of the women’s confusion was retroactively reinterpreted as the discovery of physical proof. The empty tomb story developed from vague to specific across sixty years—Joseph’s new tomb, the physical details, the appearance narratives—each addition serving the evolving theological needs of a decentralized movement confronting philosophical heresies like Docetism, until anonymous Gospel writers, operating under accepted ancient literary conventions, had materialized the original spiritual visions into the flesh-and-bones narratives we read today.

This reconstruction requires no conspiracy, no fraud, no deliberate deception. Everyone involved was completely sincere. It requires only documented human phenomena: routine burial practices; grief hallucinations; well-documented group religious psychology; oral tradition evolving over six decades as it does in every culture. Every element is a known, documented aspect of human psychology, sociology, history, or medicine. Nothing unprecedented is required.

Is this reconstruction certain? No—history rarely offers certainty about events so long ago, preserved in limited sources. But it is coherent, it accounts for all the available evidence, and it requires no violations of natural law. It shows how a world-changing religious movement could arise from the intersection of human psychology, cultural context, and the natural evolution of tradition—all operating according to patterns we can fully observe and understand.

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In the early 1990s, the human brain began to glow. Not literally, of course. But for the first time, scientists could watch living brains change while a person was still alive, still thinking, still themselves. People crawled into a doughnut-shaped machine, formally known as a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, and waited as the computer translated tiny shifts in blood oxygen levels into ember-flecked images on a screen.1 The colors were not thoughts. They were proxies: The scanner translated changes in blood oxygenation and blood flow—indirect consequences of neural activity—into colored statistical maps.

Still, it was hard to look away. For the first time, thoughts seemed to leave footprints.

It felt like a breakthrough in the most visceral sense of the word. Something that used to be entirely private, the quiet fact of having a mind, was now casting a measurable shadow. When you see a footprint, you know something passed through. The question is whether such a footprint could also describe exactly how it feels for the individual to walk.

Consciousness is difficult to wrap our heads around, and it would be dishonest to pretend this isn’t the reality.

First, we need to pin down exactly what we mean by “consciousness,” because the word has become an amalgamation of colloquialisms and jargon that leads people to talk right past each other.

In ordinary conversation, consciousness often means being awake. It means not asleep, not fainted, not under anesthesia. But when philosophers and neuroscientists argue about consciousness, they usually mean something more intimate: subjective experience. Not just that the brain processes information, but that it feels like something to be the one doing the processing. There is something it is like to see a stop sign’s reflection against gray dusk. There is something it is like to feel a sharp white heat shoot up your arm as your hand recoils from brushing the rim of a pan. There is something it is like to be you, even if you cannot quite describe that “you” without sounding vague.

This is sometimes called phenomenal consciousness. It is the “what-it-is-like-ness” of experience, the texture of being inside your own life. It is not merely that you can detect red, but that red has a particular quality when it appears in your mind. It is not merely that a nerve signal travels, but that pain hurts, and how that pain feels for you, specifically. You can measure what the eye detects and what the nerve transmits, but the felt part, the interior part, is the elusive thing that refuses to sit still.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel illustrated this difficulty with a famous thought experiment: What is it like to be a bat?2

Bats navigate the world through echolocation, emitting high-frequency calls and constructing a mental map from the echoes that bounce back.3 Neuroscientists can study their auditory cortex, measure the timing of sonar pulses, and map the neural circuits that process those signals.

Yet even with all that information, something remains missing. Knowing everything about how echolocation works does not tell you what it feels like to experience the world that way. The bat’s perspective remains locked inside the bat.

The simplest version of the problem looks like this:

The brain is physical. Neurons are physical. Electrical and chemical signals are physical. Blood oxygen is physical. All of this belongs to the world of things you can weigh, scan, slice, stain, or label.

Experience does not obviously belong to that world. Experience is private. You can describe your fear to me, but I cannot access your fear the way I can access a video of you getting jump scared at a sleepover. Your consciousness is the one thing you can never physically step outside of to observe directly, because stepping outside of it would still be an experience. Even if you are to reflect on your conscious experiences, this is still inherently a conscious experience.

This gap between physical mechanisms and subjective experience is what people mean by the “hard problem” of consciousness.4 The “easy” problems—easy only by comparison—are questions like how the brain integrates information, how attention works, how memory is stored, and how perception becomes behavior. These are hard in the ordinary sense: they require clever experiments, careful measurement, and decades of work. But they are the kinds of questions that at least yield to investigation. The hard problem is different in kind, not just in degree. It is why any of that processing is accompanied by a felt perspective at all. Why is there an inner movie rather than only circuitry?

This is not a new question. For centuries, the greatest minds noticed the strangeness of mental life and reached for an explanation that matched its feeling.

What we consider our thoughts and emotions mystified early philosophers. On the surface, these facets of cognition seem distinct from the physical objects we can interact with since they are only accessible to us, separate from the material world. It would not have been illogical to suspect that mind and matter were different kinds of things.

René Descartes is the name most people associate with that suspicion. In the seventeenth century, he formalized it into dualism, the idea that the mind and body are fundamentally different substances. The body is physical, extended in space. The mind is not. Descartes famously used his method of doubt to conclude that he could doubt the existence of his body or even his reality, but not his thoughts. This provided the basis of his cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am.

This argument works because it begins with something rooted in intuition and thus feels unshakable. Whatever else might be uncertain, experience itself seems real. The problem is that dualism, once you try to stretch its bounds to conform to the real world, runs into a question that sounds almost childish until you realize you cannot answer it.

Your consciousness is the one thing you can never physically step outside of to observe directly, because stepping outside of it would still be an experience.

If the mind is immaterial, how can it work to control all of our movements—from running a marathon to the spasms of muscle twitches that follow?

Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia asked Descartes exactly that in their correspondence. Her critique was mechanistic, almost clinical. If the soul lacks physical size and does not take up space, how can it give rise to voluntary movement? How does an immaterial thing push a material one? Descartes never offered a mechanism that fully satisfied his critics. The interaction problem lingered, a loose thread that philosophy could not tie off neatly.

That thread tugged thinkers toward another possibility: maybe mind and body are not two different media interacting awkwardly. Maybe the mind is not separate from matter. Maybe the mind is what matter does when it is arranged in a particular way.

Enter monism, a family of views that collapses mind and body into one underlying reality. For a long time, that conversation remained largely philosophical—until science entered the picture. The story changed, not because science answered the question immediately, but because it offered something the old debates lacked: leverage.

Science is good at taking mysteries and turning them into mechanisms. It is how we got from alchemy to chemistry, from vague “vapors” to electricity, and from superstition to medicine. And the brain, once it came into view as an organ that could be mapped, studied, and—like other organs—injured, began to behave like the kind of thing science could understand.

When seemingly nonphysical aspects of our lives go awry, such as personality or memory, we now often search for a bodily explanation. That instinct has become so normal that we barely notice it. Someone becomes depressed, and we talk about serotonin. Someone has a stroke, and we talk about damaged tissue. Someone’s behavior changes, and we talk about trauma, hormones, tumors, neurotransmitters, and sleep deprivation. We are, without always realizing it, treating the mind as a biological process.

The clearest early evidence came not from a laboratory, but from an accident. Phineas Gage was a railway worker in the 1800s.5 An iron rod shot through his skull, destroying part of his frontal lobe. Miraculously, he survived. But those around him reported striking changes in his temperament.6 From this, a core idea emerged: a physical injury to the brain appeared to alter aspects of personality and self-control. Suddenly, personality did not look immaterial or immutable. It looked vulnerable. The historical record is thinner and more contested than textbook retellings suggest, but Gage remains an important case because his severe frontal injury was followed by reported changes in social conduct, planning, and temperament.

And once you accept that, you begin to notice this pattern everywhere. Speech can disappear from lesions or cuts to the brain. Moods can shift with chemical intervention. Memory can dissolve as tissue degenerates. The brain is not simply correlated with mental life. It is necessarily entangled with it. The most parsimonious scientific conclusion is that human consciousness depends on brain activity.

But here is the moment where the story has to slow down, because it is easy to mistake a powerful conclusion for a final one: The brain is necessary for consciousness. That does not yet tell us what consciousness is or how it emerges.

If you smash a radio, the music stops. If you replace a component, the music changes. From that, you can learn that the radio matters for the music. But if you want to understand music, you cannot stop at the claim that “music comes from the radio.” You would need to understand signals, decoding, speakers, and, in a deeper sense, you would need to explain why certain patterns of sound evoke feelings of sadness or nostalgia in a listener.

The brain is not a radio, and consciousness is not simply a broadcast, but the structure of the reasoning is similar. Brain injury demonstrates this dependence. It does not yet explain experience.

So, what does?

The next move in neuroscience was to stop treating the brain as a black box and start watching it work. That is where we pick back up from the fMRI and its glowing scans. An fMRI does not record neurons firing directly. It measures changes in blood oxygen, signifying neural activity. When an area is more active, neurons consume more oxygen for energy, the rate of blood flow changes, and the scanner can detect that. This is why those early fMRI images felt so revolutionary. They made mental life visible in a new way. Not visible as a thought bubble floating above a head, but visible as a physical pattern inside tissue.

It is hard to overstate how alluring that visibility can be. If you can see the brain change when a person thinks, then maybe consciousness is simply the sum of these patterns. Maybe the “problem of consciousness” is actually one of measurement, and once we create the right tools, the mystery will dissolve into nothingness.

There was a particular moment that made this belief in brain imaging flare. A patient diagnosed as being in a vegetative state was asked to imagine two different things: playing tennis and walking through a city they’re familiar with.7 These mental tasks reliably produce different patterns of brain activity in regions of the brain that are far separated, making it easy for researchers to discern which task is being conceived in the scans.

The patient’s brain produced distinct patterns aligned with the instructions, allowing researchers to interpret one pattern as one answer and the other as another answer. A person who could not speak could still communicate by thinking. That study was a powerful reminder that the absence of a voice is not the absence of a mind. It also suggested something with much wider implications: that mental content could be decoded.

Decoding is no longer a faraway concept confined to science fiction. It has become a tangible research goal, and the technology pushing it forward is not only the scanner but also artificial intelligence. Before we get there, we need one more piece of groundwork: the idea that the brain does not passively record the world; it actively constructs our perceptual experience of it.

The brain takes input from the senses and builds a model of the world. What you experience is not raw data. It is nothing more than an inference, stitched together so seamlessly that you never notice the seams.

Take your eyes. You might assume your visual field is uniformly detailed and colored, like a high-resolution screen. But color-sensitive cells are concentrated in the small central region where you are directly looking. Color-sensitive cones are densest in the fovea, and color discrimination declines sharply toward the periphery. Yet our experience of a richly colored world is more uniform than the retinal input itself. That coherence is not in your eyes; rather, it is manufactured in your brain.

Cartoon by Oliver Ottitsch for SKEPTICOr take this: tihs snetecne is hradly lgeible at frist glnace, and yte yuor bainr qciukly rsetores it wouthit mcuh eorfft. Your perception is not simply receiving. It is repairing, filling, and predicting.

This is the hinge between Phineas Gage and decoding. Gage showed that damaging the brain can change the mind. Decoding asks a more audacious question: if the mind leaves patterns in the brain, can we read those patterns in the other direction? Can we start with the footprint and infer the walker?

Here is what a typical decoding experiment looks like today:

A volunteer lies in an fMRI scanner and looks at a sequence of images. Faces. Animals. Landscapes. Street scenes. Text. The scanner records patterns of activity in visual areas of the brain while each image is seen. That creates a dataset: image in, brain pattern out.

Then the researchers train an AI model. The model’s job is to learn associations between patterns of neural activity and visual features.8 It does not “understand” an image the way you do. It does not have a childhood memory attached to a beach or a fear attached to a dark alley. It is doing something closer to statistical analysis. Given a particular neural pattern, what visual features are likely present?

What we experience as the moment of choice may be less a cause than a caption.

After training, the researchers test the model. They show the volunteer a new image, one that the model has never seen. The scanner records the volunteer’s brain activity. The model receives the neural pattern and generates a reconstruction, an image that approximates what the volunteer is looking at. Often, it is blurry. Often, details are wrong. But sometimes—in a way that makes your stomach drop—the reconstruction is recognizable. You can tell it is a face. You can tell it is a street. You can tell it is a dog. Sometimes the model can even approximate images the volunteer is imagining, not currently seeing.

That last part is where the idea of a private mind starts to wobble.

While it’s tempting to call this mind reading, it’s also important not to overstate it. What the model is doing is not pulling a full-color movie from the brain as if the brain contains a hidden screen. The model is trained to infer content from correlates, making sophisticated guesses, trained on many examples. Still, the fact that the guess can be accurate at all is astonishing. This suggests that subjective content has enough regularity and enough physical signature that an external system can learn to predict it.

In other words, experience leaves footprints, and now we can sometimes sketch what made them. If we can reconstruct what someone is seeing from a scanner, what stops us from reconstructing the rest of their conscious experience?

It is one thing to say the brain is responsible for mental life. It is another thing to watch that claim take shape on a screen. A face becomes a face again, not because the person described it, but because an algorithm matched a pattern of oxygen shifts to a visual template it has learned. The boundary between inside and outside, between private and observable, begins to feel less like a law of nature and more like a temporary limitation of tools.

This is why decoding feels like the pinnacle of science. It is not only impressive, but it shifts the story we have told ourselves about our own minds. For most of human history, your inner life was the last place no one could reach. People could misread you. People could manipulate you. People could punish you for what you said. But your raw experience, the stream itself, belonged to you by default. Decoding makes that default feel negotiable.

At first, that negotiation sounds straightforward, even hopeful. If a person cannot speak, perhaps decoding can help them communicate. If someone is trapped in paralysis, perhaps we can build an interface that translates intention into action. The same technology that unsettles can also restore.

But then the implications widen. Consider what John-Dylan Haynes and colleagues found when they used brain imaging to predict which of two choices a subject would make,9 several seconds before the subject reported becoming consciously aware of deciding. The neural groundwork for the decision had already been laid. The conscious experience of choosing came after. These studies suggest that neural activity can bias or partly predict some choices before people report conscious awareness of deciding. They do not show that all deliberation is post hoc, nor do they settle the question of agency, but if that finding holds, the story we tell ourselves about deliberation—that we weigh options, then decide, then act—may be a narrative the brain constructs after the fact. What we experience as the moment of choice may be less a cause than a caption.

A single neuron is shown with 5,600 of the nerve fibers (blue) that connect to it. The synapses that make these connections are in green. (Credit: Daniel Berger and Jeff Lichtman, Harvard University)That is why these tools demand more than scientific attention. If decoding can reach not only what you perceive but what you were about to decide before you knew it yourself, then the question of consciousness stops being academic. It becomes a question about what we mean by agency and who we hold responsible for what.

Is this reading thoughts, or is it closer to reading smoke and inferring fire? Is this accessing someone’s experience, or is it building a model that predicts what experience is likely happening? That distinction might sound like mere semantics until you remember what we defined consciousness as in the first place.

Phenomenal consciousness is not simply the presence of information. It is the felt quality of information. It is not just the data of how red a stop sign is, but the redness of red as it appears in your mind.

Decoding, in its current form, is extraordinarily good at tracking content. It can often tell that the brain is seeing a face, a street, an animal, a shape, or an object. It can sometimes approximate the image itself. But content is not the whole mystery. The mystery is that content comes with an experience.

This is where it helps to picture two different achievements side by side.

One achievement is like translating a language. If I give you a sentence in Spanish and you translate it into English, you have preserved the meaning, at least approximately, even though the words are different. Decoding is doing something like that. It takes a physical pattern and translates it into a guess about meaning: face, street, dog, tennis, home.

The other achievement is explaining why language is accompanied by understanding at all. You can build a machine that translates sentences without ever “knowing” what it is like to mean them. Translation and experience are separable.

That is the uncomfortable possibility lurking underneath decoding. Dr. Janel Le Belle, a neuroscientist at UCLA who studies the intersection of brain biology and conscious experience, puts it plainly:

The decoding studies don’t explain any mechanism that turns neural activity into subjective awareness, so they don’t resolve the deeper questions about the nature or origin of consciousness itself.10

The decoding experiments are an impressive feat of science. But impressive and complete are not the same thing. The hard problem does not dissolve just because the footprints have become easier to read.

A grain of sand’s worth of tissue requires petabytes to describe—and the human brain contains roughly one million times that volume.

This is where many physicalists say, fine, then let’s go deeper. Physicalists hold that consciousness is entirely a product of brain matter, and if decoding is a translation problem, perhaps what we need is a complete dictionary of the brain. Not just broad regions lighting up, not just proxies for activity, but the wiring itself. The full architecture. The connectome.

The ambition behind connectomics is truly grand: to map the brain the way you might map a city, down to its streets and intersections, except the streets are axons and the intersections are synapses, and there are enough of them to make your head hurt.

For years, the sheer scale of the task made the idea seem nearly impossible. Even a speck of brain tissue contains staggering complexity. A cubic millimeter of cortex contains roughly fifty to sixty thousand neurons and hundreds of millions of synapses woven into a dense electrical web.11 Capturing this detail requires images at nanometer resolution, which means that reconstructing even that tiny volume produces an avalanche of data.

A recent example shows just how large that avalanche can become. In 2025, the MICrONS consortium—led by teams at the Allen Institute, Baylor College of Medicine, and Princeton University—released one of the most detailed wiring diagrams and functional maps of mammalian cortex yet assembled. The project reconstructed a cubic millimeter of mouse visual cortex and surrounding visual areas, capturing more than 200,000 cells and roughly 523 million synapses. Crucially, it did not only map structure. It also linked that wiring diagram to recordings of neural activity from tens of thousands of neurons while the mouse viewed visual stimuli.

The result is less a finished map of the mind than a proof of scale. Even a grain-of-sand-sized fragment of cortex contains an almost absurd density of structure and activity. Mapping it required advanced microscopy, machine-learning reconstruction, and enormous data infrastructure. If this is what one cubic millimeter demands, the prospect of mapping an entire human brain—or individual brains—at comparable resolution remains, at present, far beyond our reach.12

A separate Harvard-Google project made the scale problem feel even more concrete by reconstructing a cubic millimeter of human cortical tissue at nanoscale resolution. That tiny sample contained roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses, generating about 1.4 petabytes of data. The fact that so much information is required to describe so little brain tissue is precisely what makes whole-brain connectomics both tantalizing and overwhelming.

The result is less a finished map than a starting point. If a cubic millimeter requires petabytes of data to chart, mapping the entire human brain would require datasets so large that today’s data storage systems struggle even to imagine them.

That number is worth sitting with, not just because it is impressive, but because it reveals something about the very nature of the problem. The brain is not only mysterious in principle. It is daunting in practice. A grain of sand’s worth of tissue requires petabytes to describe—and the human brain contains roughly one million times that volume.13

Still, you can feel the temptation. If we could map the connectome, the logic goes, then the mystery would have nowhere to hide. The elusive consciousness would be pinned down by its circuitry. The brain would be explainable in the way a computer is explainable.

But the twist is that even a perfect map might not do what we want it to do.

A wiring diagram is not the current running through it. A map of Los Angeles is not the feeling of driving through it at night with the windows down.

A complete inventory of the brain’s connections might tell us how information can move, where integration is likely to happen, what pathways support attention, memory, vision, language, and emotion. It might tell us why certain injuries abolish speech or change personality. It might even help us predict what a person is seeing with frightening accuracy.

As Le Belle puts it, the connectome “may be more helpful in understanding neurodiversity and perhaps the structural changes in certain brain disorders,” but falls short of capturing the dynamic cognitive processes that produce consciousness.

What connectomics is missing is why any of those processes should be accompanied by experience. And this is where the hard problem returns, not as casual philosophy trivia, but as a real limit on what any of these tools can claim. To see why, imagine a theater.

The brain is not simply correlated with mental life. It is necessarily entangled with it.

Neuroscience is getting better and better at cataloging the backstage machinery—the pulleys, the lights, the wiring, the stage directions. Decoding can sometimes infer what scene is playing from the patterns of activity alone. Connectomics promises the most detailed blueprint of the building we have ever had. But the hard problem is not a question about the machinery. It is a question about why there is an audience at all. Why is there a point of view in the seat? A blueprint of every beam and wire cannot answer that. It can tell you everything about how the theater was built and nothing about what it feels like to watch the play.

That is why decoding can feel like it is approaching consciousness, and still not settle it. The distance between brain activity and mental content narrows. The idea of total mental privacy slowly erodes. The very prospect of decoding makes the mind look measurable in a way it never has before. But all of that measurability—the narrowing distance, the eroding privacy—still leaves the deepest question untouched.

In the early 1990s, the brain began to glow, and it felt like the beginning of an answer. Three decades later, with decoders, models, and reconstructions, the glow has become clearer, sharper, and more interpretable. What we have gained is extraordinary: we can follow the footprints further than we ever have. What we have not yet gained is the feeling of walking.

And maybe that is the real story. Science is not failing. It is doing exactly what it does, mapping the physical world with increasing precision. The question is whether consciousness, the interior fact of experience, is the kind of thing that becomes fully visible when the map is complete, or whether it remains, in some stubborn way, the one part of reality that can be described from the outside but never fully captured there.

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Might luminous meteoric dust be a possible explanation for some of the mysterious orbs spotted by pilots in World War II known as foo fighters?As a member of the government-appointed UAP Science Advisory Council headed by the Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, itself on the heels of my being a member for five years of Dr. Loeb’s Galileo Project searching for hard evidence of what these objects could be, I was intrigued by a preprint paper posted by Dr. Loeb on his Medium column, with a link to the paper by the highly respected atmospheric chemist John Birks, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, titled: “UAP Orbs: Magnetically Confined Dusty Plasmoids Produced by Meteors.” The abstract briefly explains the proposed hypothesis:

Analysis of 508 orb sightings reported to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) indicates that these silent, floating luminous objects often exhibit plasma-like behavior and emit visible light of varying colors for durations of up to an hour or more. In this work, citizen-science reports of orb observations are shown to be significantly correlated (~3σ) with reports of meteor fireballs, suggesting a meteoritic origin. We propose that some orbs may represent a previously unrecognized type of weakly ionized dusty plasma formed by stabilization of meteoric dust in the lower atmosphere.

The keywords here are suggesting, propose, and may. No one—not Birks, not Loeb, not me—are suggesting that all UAP orbs are explained by luminous meteoric dust. It’s possible Birks’ model explains none of them. The point of science is to find natural explanations for assumed natural phenomena. Before we say something is out of this world, let’s first make sure that it is not in this world.

UAPs as Illuminous Meteor DustWith these caveats in mind, here are a number of excerpts from Dr. Birks’s paper. After reading these, continue to the reports by World War II pilots of foo fighters below and note the similarities (and differences) between them, in the context of considering this as a possible explanation for at least some of the foo fighter orbs:

The most often reported orb is a bright white or bluish white sphere, observed to be as bright or brighter than Venus and larger by a factor of several diameters. Many are a yellowish white, while others are orange or even bright red. A few are blue or green. Many observers report that orbs flicker or sparkle in one or more colours, including all colours of the rainbow, and many report that the orb is surrounded by a corona.

Estimated sizes range from that of a basketball to that of a house or even larger, but often there is no estimate of size because of a lack of a reference point against the dark sky. The median reported size is approximately in the range of 1-3 m. Orbs occur singly, but about as often with one or more additional orbs of varying sizes, brightnesses and sometimes colours. Observers often report that orbs continuously change shape but on average are spherical.

these silent, floating luminous objects often exhibit plasma-like behavior and emit visible light of varying colors for durations of up to an hour or more.

reports of orb observations are shown to be significantly correlated (~3σ) with reports of meteor fireballs, suggesting a meteoritic origin.

We propose that some orbs may represent a previously unrecognized type of weakly ionized dusty plasma formed by stabilization of meteoric dust in the lower atmosphere.

luminous orbs represent a rare but physically real atmospheric phenomenon

the strong correlation between orb observations and meteor activity reported here provides a solid physical starting point. Although novel in several respects, the proposed framework is based on established physical principles, and its components are testable through laboratory experiments, targeted atmospheric measurements, and more detailed theoretical modelling. It may even be possible to generate orbs in the laboratory from magnetic nanoparticles of iron.

Here are the figures from Birks’ paper showing what these orbs look like. Compare these to the photographs of foo fighters from World War II below.

Critique of the Meteor ModelIn response to this model, Avi Loeb invited John Birks to a video conference call with the UAP Science Advisory Council on July 7, where council members had the opportunity to ask him questions and challenge his hypothesis. Here is Avi’s summary of the council’s response to Dr. Birks’s model:

The questions raised at the meeting shed doubt on his model being able to explain UAP, especially those which are accelerating well beyond the level expected for dust clouds drifting in the wind. In particular, it is unclear how dust clouds could condense out of the debris from meteors or space trash, since the debris tail gets diluted and smeared by the Earth’s atmosphere across a much larger scale than the observed orb sizes.

The social media response to this paper, along with Avi’s and my own posting of it online, was uniformly negative among proponents of UAP, denouncing our attempt to find a natural explanation for the unexplained phenomena (assuming any of them even read the paper). Avi explained that, “This is exactly how science works. One has to take seriously a model and examine whether it stands up to the constraints of the data, assuming standard physics.” Indeed, the next day the George Mason University economist, futurist, and author Robin Hansen asked an AI program to assess Dr. Birks’s paper, concluding in a long and technical reply:

Birks never requires the dust to accompany the meteor down — he just asserts that what is left of an ablated meteor that terminates in the lower troposphere is a trail or cloud of dust and then spends all his effort on keeping an already-formed compact cloud together (magnetic dendrites, few-kT dipole bonds). The step from "trail" to "1-m ball" is simply skipped, and that step looks dynamically prohibited, not merely rare.

And within a day Dr. Birks replied to Hansen/AI:

After reading the Claude response you sent earlier, I concur that it would still be a big problem to accumulate enough mass in a long column. I concede that I hadn't given enough thought to the initial formation of the dust cloud. Keep in mind that it is not necessary to form the orb at ground level, although my original idea was that they were formed along a meteor dust trail extending into the troposphere. They are perhaps more likely formed high in the atmosphere, even in the stratosphere where explosive ablation can occur and deposit a large fraction of its mass along a very short path. That could result in a much higher local concentration and in a region where diffusion of particles is much faster. Once formed into a loosely connected mass, it will sink to the lower atmosphere until it reaches a level where its heat generation makes it buoyant.

What a paradigmatic and praiseworthy example of science at its best: adversarial collaboration, open-peer debate, and Karl Popper’s “conjecture and refutation” process to get closer to the truth.

Foo FightersLet’s see how Dr. Birks’s model holds up in the context of one of the earliest reports of UFOs in the modern age—those logged by both allied and Nazi pilots reporting luminous orbs in the atmosphere near their planes over Europe, along with American pilots who recorded similar reports in the Pacific, all of which came to be called foo fighters. (The name derives from a popular comic strip called Smokey Stover, which featured a firefighter who referred to fire as foo, and to himself as a foo fighter.)

In the European Theater, an August 1940 report from the British Royal Air Force recorded a number of observations made by pilots and crewmen, who initially thought perhaps the Nazis were experimenting with new technologies, which they were wont to do.

In September of 1942, the Operational Research Section of the British Air Ministry produced a report noting that balls of fire appeared to drip fragments of multiple colors that lasted around 30 seconds before burning out, and another observation of colored balls of light at an altitude of around 6,000 or 7,000 feet, suggesting that perhaps the Nazis were firing mortars into the air, or on rockets, although they noted that none of the phenomena had impacted or damaged any planes.

On November 28, 1942, an RAF bomber crew saw what seemed to be a solid object with four evenly-spaced pairs of red lights attached, which the crew estimated it to be around 200 to 300 feet long and traveling around 500 miles per hour.

Another report from May of 1943 quoted crewmen who said they saw a reddish-orange meteor outside of Duisburg, Germany, which they reported as flying from north to south and falling as it moved. Strangely, the object appeared to emit a green burst at least three times.

An RAF report from January 1, 1944, noted that a British Mosquito pilot had seen two rockets between Halberstadt and Hanover that appeared to change course and overtake his plane, but then just as suddenly disappearing. Another pilot said he saw a fiery head and blazing stern when the object passed within a couple of hundred meters from his plane.

Reports from January 28 and 29, and on February 3, 1944, reported pilots seeing an elusive red light that left a trail of flames and black smoke. On February 4, during a raid over Frankfurt, crewmen said they saw a stationary silver ball about 10 miles away that seemed to hover. On February 19, two different crews reported seeing a silver cigar-shaped object like an airship in the distance, one of whom added that the airship appeared to have a line of windows along the bottom.

The most famous foo fighter report is that from a flight in November, 1944, when pilots Donald Myers and Ed Schlueter of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, flying along the Rhine north of Strasbourg, reported seeing “8 to 10 bright orange lights off the left wing…flying through the air at high speed. Later they appeared farther away. The display continued for several minutes and then disappeared.” The phenomena got its name when a rattled Myers brought to the pilots’ post-mission meeting a copy of the Smokey Stover comic strip and after slamming it down on the table announced “It was another one of those fuckin' foo fighters!” A few nights later, another crew saw a huge red light flying over their plane at what they estimated to be 200 mph, and among the pilots of the 415th squadron, “Fuckin' foo fighters” became the term of choice with the press, who dutifully redacted the expletive.

In the Pacific Theater, a report from May 14, 1944 notes that a B-29 crew was followed by a red or flame-colored ball of fire that appeared immediately after they released the plane’s bombs. A report from August 1944 noted several sightings over Sumatra, including a crew that said they saw reddish-orange balls of light and groups of light appear out of nowhere on their right side, after which it exploded into four or five fragments each.

On January 10th, 1945, an American crew off the coast of Iwo Jima saw an amber light overtake them on their right before it disappeared into the clouds ahead. In March, 1945, a crew reported seeing a few lights that appeared to be anchored to an object that then followed them as they made evasive turns before pulling away. On June 18th, 1945, a flight crew said they were tailed for over 40 minutes by a light that alternated between a bright red and dusky orange.

Suggested Causes for Foo FightersBall Lightning. These rare, glowing, floating spheres of light often associated with electrical storms are among the most popular explanations of foo fighters, but only some resemble these pilot descriptions.

St. Elmo’s Fire. Some commentators have suggested this as an explanation, but these glowing electrical discharges are rare, short-lived, and usually anchored to a ship’s mast, mountain top, plane’s wing, etc., not floating about on its own like most foo fighters.

Reflections, Optical illusions, and Hallucinations. These may explain some foo fighters, as pilots have long noted that sunlight or glare reflecting off ice crystals in the atmosphere can produce an image that looks like an orb; as well, pilots reported seeing afterimages from bright flak explosions that were not orbs in the air; finally, high-altitude night flying, along with combat stress, can play havoc with one’s visual system. Hallucinations also seem unlikely, given the number of incidents, the number of different pilots and observers, and the sheer volume of reports available to U.S. intelligence services by the end of the war.

Electromagnetic Phenomena. These are broader plasma-like effects related to atmospheric electricity that could create glowing orbs without a solid object (which may explain why they don’t appear on radar). This is what the postwar Robertson Panel (a 1953 CIA-linked scientific review of UFO reports), suggested as an explanation for the foo fighters.

Soviet spy planes. A less popular explanation involves Russian technology, although in a counterfactual, if the USSR had such orb weaponry wouldn’t they have used it more directly on the battlefield, rather than playfully buzzing allied pilots?

Nazi secret weapon “Feuerball” (Fireball). After their stunning success with jets and rockets (albeit too late to turn the tide of the war), speculation about else the Nazis had developed include flying saucers, jet-propelled flak mines, and drones with glowing effects from spinning gas jets. But post-war analysis did not turn up any evidence that the Nazis had such secret weapons.

V-2 Rockets misidentified. This is a viable explanation, but pilots and ground observers correctly identified them in most circumstances, so it seems that, at most, this would explain only a few foo fighters.

Misdirection and disinformation. Governments are believed to discredit UFO witnesses and stigmatize UFO research, but that idea is mostly applied to the 1950s and 1960s, not the 1940s.

Extraterrestrial or Unknown Origins. Ufologists suggest that aliens (or whoever) were monitoring the war via these orbs. We know Nazis existed, and we know about their technology and have back engineered it (turning the V-2 rocket into the Apollo mission!) But unless and until we can see the aliens and their spaceships for ourselves, skepticism is the null hypothesis to which we should default.

♦ ♦ ♦

Could some foo fighters be luminous meteoric dust? Maybe. Much more needs to be done to test this hypothesis. But this is how progress is made in explaining UAPs.

I say this because social media critics who are quick to dismiss this and other attempted natural explanations, when asked what they think explains UAPs, promptly jump to far less likely explanations for which there is no evidence whatsoever, including extraterrestrial beings, alien-human hybrids, interdimensional beings, ultraterrestrial beings, cryptoterrestrials, or even far-future human time-travelers who have returned to our time.

Most of these hypotheses violate known science, or would require significantly new physics and biology that contradicts much of what we know about the universe and the laws of nature. And as Avi regularly reminds the members of the UAP Science Advisory Council and the Galileo Project, CERN just spent $10 billion in particle-colliding experiments and found no new physics. So let’s stick with what we know about the world, before we speculate about what we don’t know.

I know, science has been wrong about a lot of things, but as I wrote in the final chapter of my book Truth:

Think of science as an expanding sphere of knowledge. As the sphere of the known expands into the aether of the unknown, the proportion of ignorance seems to grow—the more you know, the more you know how much you don’t know. But in this mathematical metaphor note what happens when the radius of a sphere increases: the expansion of the surface area is squared while the increase in the volume is cubed. So as the sphere of scientific knowledge expands the volume of the known increases by a ratio of 3:2 over the surface area of the unknown—the more you know the more of the unknown becomes known. It is at this boundary where we can stake a claim of true progress in the search for truth.

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Nearly half a decade ago, I wrote an overview1 for this magazine of the debates—and, let’s face it, vicious culture wars—around what’s become known as “gender-affirming care” for youth—psychological and medical interventions based on an internal “gender identity.”

Since then, many revelations about both the research and history of youth gender medicine, and a series of shocking scandals, have emerged. Thus, I assumed that by 2026, many more people, from parents to politicians, would have a deeper understanding of these issues, and that, instead of fighting, we’d be discussing the best, safest, and fairest approach to treating gender dysphoric youth.

Well, you know what they say about assuming. We’re still fighting, and still looking at gender-affirming care through a political lens—rather than through one of ethics and science.

I’m going to recap that original piece here, then go through the significant changes that have taken place since 2022 to explain where we are now—and where we still need to go.

A Brief History Youth gender medicine—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sometimes surgeries like double mastectomies or orchiectomy (removal of testicles)—began in the late 1980s in the Netherlands. Doctors found that adults who’d medically transitioned had increased rates of psychological problems—and even completed suicide—after the procedures.2 They surmised that the problem was an inability to “pass” as the opposite sex, especially for natal males. The effects of male puberty, like Adam’s apples and broad brows, were difficult to overcome. Treating children before puberty with what was then called “gender identity disorder,” Dutch clinicians wrote, would lead to “higher percentages of individuals who would more easily pass into the cross sex role” before “the development of secondary characteristics.”3

Youth gender medicine started not because treatment had been successful for adults, but because it hadn’t been. The goal was to pass as the opposite sex, thus alleviating distress about the sexed body. Two Dutch studies, published in the 2010s, suggested that early intervention accomplished these goals.4 The Dutch only treated patients with early-onset gender identity disorder, who lived in supportive families, and whose other mental health problems were attended to. They cautioned against socially transitioning prepubescent kids.

Though some American doctors provided sporadic access to these interventions, they officially arrived here only in 2007, when the first youth gender clinic opened at Boston Children’s Hospital. They were unable to replicate the Dutch approach, for many reasons: lack of socialized medicine, not enough trained psychologists, and an increasingly politicized atmosphere, which derided clinicians evaluating patients, and determining whether or not they could transition, as “gatekeeping.”

American clinicians developed an alternative approach known as “affirmation,” which involved not questioning the young person’s gender identity, and viewed transition as a human right, rather than a psychological and medical intervention. Meanwhile, dozens of new gender identities emerged, from nonbinary to neutrois to bigender. The Obama and Biden administrations both focused heavily on institutionalizing gender identity, prohibiting discrimination based on it, which ultimately led to trans girls and women—that is, natal males—in girls’ and women’s sports and spaces.5 Schools were required to teach about or protect gender identity, in order to retain federal funding—even for school lunches6—and young people with novel gender identities found each other through social media. The number of young people identifying as trans exploded, from 0.6 percent of adults to three times as many youth.7 In Oregon alone, one in 250 girls took testosterone between 2016 and 2023; the state saw a 10-fold increase in girls and 14-fold in boys.8 It was one of the swiftest and most all-encompassing rights movements—and accompanying medical fields—the world has ever seen.

But much of the movement’s rise depended on hiding basic facts—and censoring dissent.

Gender and Sexuality: Birds of a Feather Despite many advocacy groups asserting that gender and sexuality are separate,9 they’re actually often linked. Many children who suffered from what was, until 2013, called “Gender Identity Disorder” desisted; they stopped feeling dysphoric or wanting to transition, and many grew up to be same-sex attracted.10 That is, there’s a large crossover between early-onset gender dysphoria and later homosexuality.

The claim that transition mitigated suicide risk wasn’t based in fact or science, but was often wielded by advocates to silence critics.

Males who are not feminine and same-sex attracted, and who often experience distress at their sexed bodies or social category later in life, are thought to be “autogynephilic”: attracted to the idea of themselves as women.11 Their distress was also rooted in sexuality, albeit one many people will not admit.

The former category were kids like Jazz Jennings. The latter: adults like Caitlyn Jenner. The ever-widening umbrella of trans flattened them into the same cohort, assuming they needed the same treatment.

Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria In the 2010s, a third cohort of adolescent-onset cases emerged, which a public health doctor and researcher named Lisa Littman described as “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.”12 Unlike with early-onset gender dysphoria—often a precursor to homosexuality—or autogynephilia, ROGD came on suddenly and mostly in girls, many of them suffering from other mental health problems and after sustained social media use; there were also more boys, perhaps 30 percent of the adolescent patients, and whose parents thought they were ROGD, too.13 Littman theorized it was a form of “social contagion”—a term that, while technically neutral—offended those fighting for trans rights and increased acceptance. The term was quickly politicized and attacked by most liberal institutions and supporters of gender-affirming care—rather than studied, as it should have been. A new cohort, and new clusters of patients, shouldn’t necessarily access the same treatment as other cohorts, even if they share a diagnosis or a social category like trans.

The Suicide Myth Proponents of youth gender medicine asserted that it was life-saving. By that, they meant that people under the trans umbrella tend to have higher rates of suicidality than the average population and that social and medical transition would decrease those rates.

Unfortunately, no good evidence supports that claim. Suicidality is generally the result of multiple factors, and even in one of the few follow-up studies conducted in this country in recent years, some patients felt better after transition, while two out of 314 committed suicide after social and medical transition.14 The claim that transition mitigated suicide risk wasn’t based in fact or science, but was often wielded by advocates to silence critics. Even ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, a trans man, admitted before the Supreme Court that completed suicide “thankfully and admittedly, is rare.”15

Detransitioners Much of the culture war has centered around detransitioners—those who medically transition and then try to reverse course as much as their bodies can, living as their natal sex. Proponents of youth gender medicine insist detransitioners are rare, and that most detransition for “external” reasons, like stigma, access, or cost.16

The truth is, the rate of detransition is unknown,17 and many people clearly detransition for internal reasons; regret; the realization that gender identity was not the source of their troubles; or internalized homophobia, to name a few.

As there are no billing codes or guidelines for detransition—and Democrats have repeatedly blocked any bills requiring health care for them—detransitioners have enormous trouble getting their medical and psychological needs met.18 We don’t know what percentage detransition, and we also don’t know how to help those that do.

Systematic Reviews and European Retreats American advocacy groups like GLAAD declared that, about gender-affirming care, “the science is settled.”19 Former Assistant Secretary of Health, Admiral Rachel Levine, called it “suicide prevention” and “well-established medical practice.” Yet by 2022, we knew that neither of those statements was accurate.20

Several European countries had already shifted their approaches toward caution and away from medical intervention. England,21 Finland,22 and Sweden23 had all commissioned systematic evidence reviews (as had the state medical board in Florida)—comprehensive analyses of all available research studies on the topic. They all came to the same conclusion as Sweden’s health board did, that “existing scientific evidence is insufficient for assessing the effects of puberty suppressing and gender-affirming hormone therapy on gender dysphoria, psychosocial health, and quality of life of adolescents with gender dysphoria.”24 That is: the evidence base was so weak that no one could determine if transition carried benefits, while many risks were relatively clear. This applied even to the original Dutch studies, the basis for all youth transition; they actually couldn’t prove any benefit of medical intervention. Thus, per Sweden, pediatric gender treatments were actually “experimental.” In the face of weak evidence, these countries advocated for the least invasive treatment: psychological support.

In response, a Dutch paper questioned why gender-affirming care was required to show benefit at all, dismissing “the expectation that transition should lead to improvement,” as a “normative assumption.”25

Sanctuaries and Bans In America, there aren’t nonpartisan medical groups. Major U.S. medical organizations—such as the American Medical Association (AMA), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), Endocrine Society, and similar groups—are professional associations that engage in advocacy, lobbying, and policy promotion, rather than purely neutral, nonpartisan scientific bodies. In other words, we have advocacy groups that represent the interests of their clinician members. Initially, none of those medical associations shifted, even based on these consistent findings from some of the most liberal countries, with the best health care, in the world. They saw transition more as a human right than a medical issue.

Activists in America and Canada pushed for counseling to understand the source of one’s gender dysphoria to be labeled “conversion therapy.”26 They conflated talking about the source of one’s distress with electroshocking gay people, putting clinicians in the very uncomfortable position of having to protest conversion therapy bans. In 2025, the Supreme Court upheld the right to practice such therapy, but Colorado effectively banned it anyway.27

Furthermore, the U.S. lacks universal healthcare, which makes the government fiscally responsible to its citizens, who would not want their taxes covering treatments with uncertain benefits and certain harms.

So, in the absence of any mechanisms to debate or reform, the issue was subsumed by politics. Beginning in 2021, some Republican-majority states banned gender-affirming care for minors. Beginning in 2022, some Democratic-majority states created “sanctuaries,” which allowed minors from states where interventions were banned to access treatments, in some cases without parental consent.28 We have essentially created a patchwork quilt, mirroring abortion, in which gender-affirming care is banned in some states and legal in others.

WPATH Scandal In 2022, an advocacy group made up of clinicians and activists, known as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) released its long-awaited eighth “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People.”29 For the first time, it included a separate chapter on treatment for adolescents, distinct from treating prepubescent children. Though a draft of the document had included an ethics chapter, it was removed from the final version, and a new chapter on “eunuch gender identity” was added.

Despite the completion of several systematic reviews, mentioned above, SOC-8 claimed that a “systematic review regarding outcomes of treatment in adolescents is not possible.” Instead, authors summarized selective studies with positive findings, declaring only that “the data show early medical intervention … can be effective and helpful for many transgender adolescents seeking these treatments.” WPATH claimed they’d crafted the document “based on the best available science and expert professional consensus.”

When the new standards first appeared online, they included recommended age minimums for interventions: blockers at whatever age puberty began; 14 for cross-sex hormones; 15 for mastectomy (breast removal); 16 for breast augmentation (creation of breasts); 17 for vaginoplasty (creation of a neo-vagina), metoidioplasty (lengthening of clitoris to resemble a small penis), and orchidectomy (removal of testicles); and 18 for phalloplasty (creation of a phallus). See table above.

The federal government, medical associations, and advocacy groups had conspired to advance their political goal over science.

By the end of the day WPATH published its report, the age limits had disappeared from the document, which WPATH chalked up to a publishing error.

But when advocacy groups like the ACLU sued the states that had banned pediatric gender medicine, amicus briefs and evidence made their way to the Supreme Court.30 We learned what really happened.

WPATH had contracted Johns Hopkins’s Evidence-Based Practice Center to conduct systematic evidence reviews. When they found the same low-quality evidence as the systematic reviews described earlier in this article, WPATH suppressed their publication, allowing only the sharing of data that would be “for the benefit of advancing transgender health in a positive manner.”31 Fearful that age minimums would add fuel to the bans’ fire, the American Academy of Pediatrics and Dr. Rachel Levine, a trans woman who was then the Assistant Secretary of Health, pressured WPATH to remove all age limits for surgeries. The federal government, medical associations, and advocacy groups had conspired to advance their political goal over science.

This enormous scandal warranted little coverage in the press, and didn’t impact the gender medicine industry.

The Cass Review and the American Response—or Lack Thereof In 2022, England announced the closure of its only national youth gender clinic, Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) following evidence reviews and investigations into the clinics.32 It didn’t officially shutter until 2024, the year that esteemed British pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass released an “Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people.”33 The four-year investigation found pediatric gender medicine to be “an area of remarkably weak evidence.” Cass advised that there were many pathways to gender dysphoria, and many pathways out of it; called for an end to specialty gender services; and urged caution for socially transitioning minors, among many other recommendations for reform.

The Cass Review was the most comprehensive work ever crafted on the subject of pediatric gender medicine, but many activist and advocacy groups opposed it, insisting it was politically motivated or methodologically flawed. Initially, the British Medical Association sided with the activists,34 but after conducting its own review35 (yes, it was a review of a review of a review), the BMA largely endorsed Cass’s findings.36

In America, most liberal media outlets and supporters37 of gender-affirming care either ignored the Cass Review or impugned it, rather than wrestling with its findings.

If no benefit could be proven, and harms were known, was gender-affirming care for youth ethical?

WPATH responded that they were “deeply concerned about the facts regarding the Cass Review’s process and content, as well as its consequences for the provision of care for trans and gender diverse youth.”38 They argued that Dr. Cass had no experience working with trans children, when it was her objectivity that qualified her. They asserted that the Review contained no research, but that was the point: to evaluate the research that had been used to justify youth gender medicine, and which, it turned out, didn’t do so. They politicized and denied the science, critiquing the methodology, or asserting that personal experience with trans patients was what mattered. A group of clinicians from Yale, UCSF, and elsewhere, calling themselves “The Integrity Project,” claimed the Cass Review was based on “profound misunderstandings of the evidence base,”39 accusing the Cass Review of repeating “spurious, debunked claims about transgender identity and gender dysphoria.” In particular, they objected to engaging with Littman’s theory of a social contagion and a new cohort of trans youth—not because the demographic changes weren’t clear, but because they found the theory of demographic change offensive. They attacked the studies showing high rates of desistance as outdated, even though the age of the research matters much less than the quality. They argued that puberty blockers should not improve rates of gender dysphoria alone, so that if studies showed they didn’t have benefits, that was fine. In other words, rather than engage with the Cass Review’s recommendations of reinventing gender services for youth so they are more holistic, they argued against there being any problems at all.

The Trump Doctrine This was the state of youth gender medicine—hopelessly politicized, with supporters unwilling to budge, and Republicans steaming ahead—when, in November 2024, Donald Trump won reelection. His win was partly attributed to his political ads with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”40 He was capitalizing on the average American’s antipathy toward identity politics, and Democrats’ prizing the needs of a small minority over the majority. Indeed, none of the aforementioned revelations had inspired a shift in rhetoric or policy from the left side of the aisle.

Gender identity is a belief, not a truth—and medicating according to it is a contested intervention, one that seems to make some people feel better, and others feel irrevocably harmed.

From the moment he took office, Trump set about rolling back laws and policies that privileged gender identity above sex. He released executive orders that defined male and female based on body types, not identity. He restored Title IX to refer to sex, not gender identity, undoing both President Obama’s and Biden’s changes. His cabinet removed public funding for gender-affirming care.

To many Democrats and liberals, as well as people beneath the trans umbrella, the changes felt hateful and harsh—a step backward from a world in which gender identity was a legitimate category and way of dividing society. Some of the policy decisions of the Trump administration may have been overreach, such as banning all trans people from the military. Bans are blunt instruments, not nuanced policy tools, which I personally believe should be used minimally and carefully. But other changes, such as those relating to medical treatments, what was being taught in school, or policies built on gender identity were responding to the available evidence.41

The HHS Review The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also commissioned a review of the existing evidence, which resulted in an American version of the Cass Review. “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” written by a politically diverse group of critics of youth gender medicine, included what we’d learned about the evidence base, as well as an important addition—one WPATH had subtracted: a chapter on medical ethics.42

The Review asked if youth gender medical practices were “consistent with widely accepted principles of medical ethics”—especially beneficence (improvement in the patient) and nonmaleficence (avoiding harm). If no benefit could be proven, and harms were known, was gender-affirming care for youth ethical? If doctors were overstating benefits, such as reducing suicidality, and underselling risks, could anyone truly give informed consent?

These were important questions. But because the document had been ordered by the Trump administration, it, too, was perceived as political and dismissed by most of the media and medical associations.

ASPS Statement Despite the systematic evidence reviews, the rising voices of detransitioners, and the retreat in many European countries, most American medical associations refused to budge.

The one exception was the 11,000-member American Society for Plastic Surgeons. After the Cass Review’s 2024 release, the ASPS released a statement that “there is considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy for the use of chest and genital surgical interventions for the treatment of adolescents with gender dysphoria.”43 In 2026, after the HHS Review, ASPS released an official position statement noting that due to the low-quality evidence, ethical considerations, and known harms, “there is insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio for the pathway of gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions in children and adolescents.” They recommended that no one under 19 transition:

Consistent with ASPS’s August 2024 statement that the overall evidence base for gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions is low certainty, and in light of recent publications reporting very low/low certainty of evidence regarding mental health outcomes, along with emerging concerns about potential long-term harms and the irreversible nature of surgical interventions in a developmentally vulnerable population, ASPS concludes there is insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio for the pathway of gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions in children and adolescents. ASPS recommends that surgeons delay gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.44

Rethinking Gender Identity Among the most important issues with pediatric gender medicine is what is being treated. If originally transition was to alleviate distress, and make it easier to pass, those goals have largely been discarded in the face of a revolutionary approach to gender identity—not just male and female, but dozens of neo-identities and pronouns like xi and xir to match.

Few proponents have stopped to ask what gender identity is, and to question whether everyone has one. In fact, there are several theories of gender identity.45 One is that it’s simply an awareness of one’s sex—and one would need such an awareness in order to be distressed about it. Another is that it’s a cognitive phase, when toddlers become aware that there are two sex categories, and that they belong to one or the other. They base their sense of what category they belong to on their adherence to gender norms. By around age six or seven, that phase cedes to another: gender constancy, when kids realize their category is based on bodies, not stereotypes.

The third theory is that gender identity is a sense of oneself as man, woman, both, neither, or some other category, completely independent of the body. This theory has prevailed, and remained largely unquestioned—but it needs to be. That is a subjective belief—one anyone is entitled to. But it is not an objective fact, as biological sex is. Still, many young people, including those who’ve gone to medical school, were reared with this version of gender identity as an indisputable reality, and do not understand that it is a political category, not a biological one.

Clinicians, teachers, parents, and patients should be informed of these various competing theories, and not simply taught one of them as a fact.

What Now? Halfway through 2026, very little has been resolved. Many pediatric gender clinics shuttered in the face of President Trump’s executive orders, but others have sued to stay open or are actively fighting to. In Democratic-majority states, sports and spaces remain divided by gender identity—in Republican-majority states, by sex. Amid chaos and instability in the U.S., it’s hard to have a nuanced conversation about anything, let alone one of the most profoundly divisive issues of this century. Accusations of bigotry are often used against those who argue for a more cautious approach.

In order to come to any kind of resolution, we need to distinguish between subjective and objective truths—as Skeptic founder Michael Shermer puts it, “what is actually true, not just what we want to believe is true.” He writes that “a scientific truth is a claim for which the evidence is so substantial it is rational to offer one’s provisional assent.”46 There is no substantial evidence about gender-affirming care, and its proponents have given unequivocal, not provisional, assent. Gender identity is a belief, not a truth—and medicating according to it is a contested intervention, one that seems to make some people feel better, and others feel irrevocably harmed.

What we can do is continue to calmly state the facts that do exist, and help people understand the complexity of gender-affirming care, outside of politics. Those for it, and those against, almost always have the same goal in mind: the well-being of children.

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I was having lunch with a friend, a respected internist, and asked him whether his trans patients posed any particular medical concerns. I asked because I had received an email from a Canadian physician who, I thought, perfectly summarized his position. “I love my few transgender males,” he wrote. “They all have other mental health issues. Lovingly I explain to them that I will always treat them with respect, but that I would not be intellectually honest or medically compassionate if I also did not treat them medically as someone who has every cell in their body female.”

The letter made me think of the recent research on the long-term, potentially harmful effects of administering estrogen to transgender women who have every cell in their body male—effects such as increased risks of cardiovascular and cognitive problems.1 I also wondered what such information portended for doctors who are treating young transgender people who, in the manner of all young people, are not thinking about their future health.

My friend agreed with the Canadian’s position on treatment, musing about the origins of his patients’ determination to transition—given, he said, how much they had endured, psychologically, socially, and medically, to do so. “Why would anyone put themselves through all that, even take on possible medical risks down the line, if there wasn’t some deep-seated need or yearning?” he said. Then he added, “Of course, I am speaking from only a few anecdotes.”

Anecdotes are powerful. Humans think in anecdotes, tell stories of anecdotes, draw conclusions from anecdotes, and make social policies based on anecdotes. In this case, they led my friend to infer that most, if not all, trans people must have an inborn identity as being the other sex and will suffer any misery required to feel right in their own bodies. What might disconfirm that understandable inference? One thing would be the existence of “detransitioners” who put themselves through hormonal and surgical procedures and later changed their minds. After all, if transgender people are impressive because of all they are prepared to undergo in order to live as the other sex, consider how impressive it is for detransitioners to admit they had made a devastating mistake.

The vast majority of people who invest time, money, surgery, and commitment into any activity will justify it rather than admit that it wasn’t worth it—let alone that it was harmful. Most people will pile on new costs to the “sunk costs” of the lost investment, rather than tolerate embarrassment, shame, and a massive plummet of self-esteem, and that’s just if they buy the wrong overpriced car or still think vaccines cause autism. What if that investment was a mastectomy at age 13 or loss of your reproductive ability at age 15? What if you became estranged from your parents in a fury because they tried to caution you? What if you lost your beautiful soprano voice, never to be regained?

Consider how impressive it is for detransitioners to admit they had made a devastating mistake.

Let’s stipulate that these questions are enormously complex to study empirically. The vast majority of transgender people report initial satisfaction, even exhilaration, and say they have no complaints or regrets. Indeed, “postsurgical euphoria” is common, though short-lived. Further, it is difficult to determine how many detransitioners there are (as a percentage of those who undergo extensive hormonal or surgical interventions), partly because some get off the medical train but retain the new gender identity, and partly because large numbers stop seeing their original specialists and thereby drop from view. (This is a widespread problem in assessment of all medical procedures because unhappy patients—“that laminectomy did not end my back pain as you promised”—tend to abandon their physicians rather than return and complain. Thus the doctor can cheerfully, if mistakenly, conclude that all went well.) Indeed, one study of 100 detransitioners found that 76 failed to inform their clinicians that they had detransitioned.2 No wonder endocrinologist Michael S. Irwig titled his paper “Detransition Among Transgender and Gender-Diverse People—An Increasing and Increasingly Complex Phenomenon.”3

And an increasingly important one, because the trans phenomenon primarily affects young people, whose adolescent identities—and brains—are still works in progress. UCLA’s Williams Institute School of Law reported in August 2025 that while only about one percent of Americans aged 13 and older (2.8 million) identify as transgender, three fourths are under 35 and one fourth are between ages 13 and 17. If even a few percent of that one percent are changing their minds, that’s tens of thousands of young people, and their experiences offer crucial information for practitioners and policy makers. Detransitioners are speaking up at conferences, online, and in lawsuits against their medical practitioners who permanently altered their bodies, but like whistleblowers everywhere, their bravery is often dismissed, and they pay a high social price for deviating from transgender orthodoxy. Most lament how many members of the LGB and trans communities that once welcomed and celebrated them now shun and vilify them.

To better understand the factors that lead young people to identify as transgender and then to detransition, data analyst M. Lal and psychiatrist Stephen B. Levine analyzed the stories told by 37 detransitioners—25 biological females and 12 biological males—on publicly available video testimony.4 Their scholarly goal was to identify the main factors (they call “pathways”) into transition and those that eventually led them to change course. Of course this group is not representative of all detransitioners, as if such a sample could ever be created, but their stories corroborate much of what is already known about the young people who find themselves caught in the gender-affirming world and later struggle to get out. Most of the group had originally transitioned in their mid-teens and detransitioned in their twenties, with some not detransitioning until their late thirties.

To know how and why these women and men abandoned their trans identities, we need to know how they adopted them to begin with. Consistent with almost all other studies, Lal and Levine found a high prevalence of concurrent conditions long known to accompany gender dysphoria in young people: psychological disorders (notably autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, eating disorders); sexual abuse; childhood neglect and a history of abusive relationships; and, sadly, homophobia. When young people take a deep dive into the internet to find explanations of their symptoms and suffering, they encounter communities that actively persuade adolescents who are uncomfortable with their bodies, or who have emotional disorders, that they are “really” trans and their problems would vanish with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Many of Lal and Levine’s participants explicitly described the message they heard over and over: “If you are uncomfortable in your body, you are transgender.”

Well, no, you probably aren’t. There are many reasons adolescents (or anyone else) might feel uncomfortable with their bodies. Shall I count the ways? But the normal discomforts, pleasures, and surprises of puberty are magnified for young people on the autism spectrum, who, Lal and Levine found, misattributed the concrete thinking styles, sensory processing difficulties, and social deficits typical of autism to having gender dysphoria. One explained how having a transgender identity provided “a structured, rule-based community” that alleviated his social isolation. Another said that the dysphoria label “perfectly fit” his “severe OCD, undiagnosed autism, and a general sense of alienation.” Participants with ADHD spoke of how transitioning provided a focused goal for their hyperfixations, soothing their unflagging restlessness.

A second route to transitioning, for nearly half of this cohort, was the motive not to become the opposite sex but rather to escape the sex they were. Many had been sexually abused: One young woman’s distress over her developing breasts “was just from sexual abuse,” she said, yet when she told that to her physician, she was given puberty blockers immediately. Another described his transition as “surgical self-harm” to destroy the “boy whose presence was only worthy of contempt” from his father.

In a gloomy reflection of the state of male-female relations today, a significant number of the participants wanted to transition as a way of opting out of the heterosexual dating market. “[My] eating disorder and dysphoria came from the same place,” said one young woman. “If I had less fat, I would look less female.” Several of these women wanted to create a nonsexual, androgynous body rather than a masculine one, to escape the feeling that their body “was on display—like it was somehow ‘there for boys’ or ‘there for men.’”

For their part, several biological males described transition as a “flight from manhood” and a way to suppress what they felt was an overactive libido. (Note to boys: That’s normal, guys—you’re teenagers.) One said he wanted a “sexual lobotomy” to destroy the “brainwashing” that male sexuality was inherently evil. Some wanted to distance themselves from cultural claims of “toxic” masculinity and the “predatory” male; one associated a “caricature of maleness” with being “brutish” and concluded that “I can’t possibly be that.” Another said he had absorbed “a lot of rhetoric about how much men suck.”

Finally, a third route to transitioning was homophobia, another factor that turns up repeatedly in studies of adolescents in gender clinics. Eleven biological males transitioned primarily to escape the stigma associated with being gay; one said that he “100%” wanted to avoid the shame of homosexuality. Several biological females felt that living as a trans man was preferable to living as a masculine lesbian; one transitioned in an effort to bypass the complexities and stigma she associated with being lesbian.

The vast majority of people who invest time, money, surgery, and commitment into any activity will justify it rather than admit that it wasn’t worth it—let alone that it was harmful.

The bottom line? Not one of the participants in this study said “I always knew I was born in the wrong body.” On the contrary, Lal and Levine give us a picture of 37 teenagers, hitting puberty while suffering from serious mental issues and troubled family dynamics, confused about their bodies and about their sexuality, some scared of men (if female) and others scared of women (if male), some scared of having heterosexual desires and others scared of having homosexual desires, all going online to seek answers and reassurance. Fully 28 of the 37 participants said that their willingness to transition was driven by peers online, with one likening the spread of transgender ideology to a “mimetic virus.” Another said his identity “metastasized” after going on the online message board Reddit, and one noted that she “didn’t even know what transgender was” until she went on the internet.

And while the internet is brimming with transgender activists making the direct case to vulnerable teens that they are “trans,” it is also full of strange byways that can seduce young people indirectly. Some of the straight females said their wish to transition stemmed from an intense immersion in the “Boys’ Love” subculture, “a genre of Japanese fiction,” write Lal and Levine, “typically created by women for a female audience (distinguished from homoerotic media created by and for gay men). Identifying as a gay man allowed them to experience romance and sexuality while bypassing the vulnerability and objectification they associated with their female bodies.” What began as a mildly kinky game solidified into an identity when online communities validated this fascination as evidence of a “hidden trans identity.”

Once the transition process began, participants felt “validation euphoria,” joy and relief caused by having discovered what appeared at first to be the key to their distress. This relief was heavily reinforced by what some participants called “love-bombing” from online communities and gender-affirming peer groups. Sometimes the love-bombing came at the price of parent-hating, often fostered by adults online and in person to protect the transitioner’s new identity from parental scrutiny and doubt. Sometimes the animosity was already present: One participant admitted to engineering a “test” of her parents’ commitment to her trans identity in order to justify cutting ties with them, which she had long wanted to do. Another transitioned as a way to rebel against her mother’s demands that she conform to narrow notions of femininity, including the mother’s micromanagement of her daughter’s hair and makeup.

A solution to my symptoms, plus freedom from my parents? A teen dream. The ensuing exhilaration suppressed any lingering doubts … for a while.

Although most practitioners and supporters of gender-affirming treatment regard validation euphoria as evidence that justifies medical interventions (“my daughter/son is so happy now, it must have been the right decision”), they are assuming that what is true at first will last indefinitely. But research across many kinds of medical treatments should give us pause. For example, in the pre-Viagra years, when insertion of a penile prosthesis was a leading treatment of erectile dysfunction, the men in one study initially reported “renewed masculine self-esteem” and relief from the humiliation and marital guilt they had felt; no surprise that most said they would have the surgery again. And yet, in follow-ups ranging from one to four years after the procedure, the men “tended to be negative or disappointed about postoperative pain, penis size, postoperative sexual frequency, and prosthesis malfunctions.” And the longer the postoperative period, the more hesitations the men reported about whether they would undergo the operation again.5

What, then, does it take to refuse to sink under the weight of such sunk costs? To say “this was a bad decision,” let alone to detransition? At first, participants said, the psychological cost of acknowledging error was prohibitively high and too painful to bear, given the irreversible sacrifices they had already made, including estrangement from their families, loss of healthy tissue, and continuing medical complications, medications, and treatments. One woman described feeling “like a zombie” and “numb” while on testosterone, yet said she stayed on it because of the psychological and physical investments she had already made in her new identity.

But over time, the burden became too great. A young man said that his peer-generated animosity toward his parents caused a “Luciferian destruction” of his life that he yearned to put back together. For 15 participants, severe or life-threatening medical complications, including pulmonary embolisms, demanded immediate reevaluation. One came to feel that her new male identity was a parasitic “AI in a human female body” that was “ruining” her life. Many reported that cross-sex hormones were exacerbating their distress rather than alleviating it; indeed, one participant had a psychotic breakdown, which he attributed to an extreme physiological reaction to cross-sex hormones. One said that her “body almost felt like it was just going into complete shutdown” after starting puberty blockers. Some were horrified by seeing their medically altered bodies: the sight “really screw[ed] with my head,” said one, and another described “reverse dysphoria,” feeling like a “man trapped in a woman look-alike body” as a result of estrogen and surgery. Two described their distress upon realizing that their altered bodies were attracting partners seeking sex with preteens or specifically with transgender partners.

A major instigator of detransitioning was finally having to face the long-term physical costs of transition. For biological males, this often meant accepting the permanent loss of sexual function. One described the sensation in his postsurgical genitals as a “really cruel deep pain.” Another reflected that his search for his “true self and … a better life” had instead resulted in his having “done nothing but self-isolate and hate myself,” with the lasting consequences being “chronic pain, a lack of an endocrine system, and fertility taken away.” Biological females mourned the irreversible loss of fertility and the potential to breastfeed. One said she had dismissed the importance of having breasts at age 13 but felt the tragedy of their loss acutely as an adult. Four biological women had had backgrounds in vocal performance, and the permanent voice deepening caused by testosterone was a major source of grief. One said she felt like “The Little Mermaid,” the fairy-tale character who sacrifices her voice in exchange for human legs. Another called the drop from soprano to tenor the “most radical side effect” of her transition. A third said she had become “pretty much tone deaf.” For so many, the physical desexualization they actively sought as overwhelmed adolescents—going through gender transition to suppress libido and reproductive potential—became a primary source of grief as maturing adults.

As the physical and emotional costs of transitioning piled up for these young people, regret and rage followed: anger over the rapid initiation of hormones and surgery, inadequate psychiatric evaluations, and abandonment by their doctors when they expressed doubts and concerns about their care. Over and over the detransitioners repeated the wish that their doctors had provided more clinical “pushback” in diagnosis instead of routinely and immediately pressing them to begin puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and eventually surgical interventions.

Unhappy patients tend to abandon their physicians rather than return and complain.

Yet once out of immersion in the transgender world, realizing that their lived experience did not align with the gender-affirming ideology of their online and social peers, most of the participants in this study said they have been able to rebuild their social and sexual lives. For many, stopping hormonal treatment restored libido or altered their arousal patterns; gay men and lesbians felt sexual and relational clarity. And as the participants matured, they were better able to separate their preexisting psychological disorders and emotional problems from the transgender explanation for them. Having realized that transitioning did not resolve those problems, these participants were able to seek proper treatment.

Despite the medical and social hardships of detransitioning, most of the participants in Lal and Levine’s study described the profound relief of doing so. They spoke often of the process of “radical acceptance”—abandoning the pursuit of an idealized body and living with the reality of their biological sex. This resolution, many said, brought them peace with their bodies at last. One participant said that she started healing the moment she stopped taking the testosterone. “For the first time,” she added, “I’m actually happy with my life.”

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On June 14, 2025, Vance Boelter assassinated Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman, along with her husband Mark, in their home. Boelter also shot and wounded Minnesota state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, and attempted to shoot their daughter Hope. Reporting on the perpetrator of these murders on a National Public Radio broadcast, commentator Odette Yousef noted (emphasis added):

We know that he graduated from a school in Texas called the Christ for the Nations Institute, which has put out a statement condemning the violence and saying it’s not what the school teaches. But the CFNI is considered to be a precursor to a movement that is now referred to as the New Apostolic Reformation. And we know that when Boelter was in Africa two years ago, he spoke during sermons about his belief in modern-day prophets and apostles in the U.S., and experts say this is distinct to NAR theology. And so, you know—now the NAR up until recently has been considered a fringe strand of the evangelical right. It’s a neo-charismatic expression of Christianity.1

The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) stresses a belief in modern day revelations, that God actively communicates new messages—beyond those written in the canon of the Christian scriptures—to believers. These modern-day apostles believe God is telling them they are charged with transforming society to create God’s kingdom on Earth; in other words, turning the United States into a theocracy in general and a Christian nation in particular. The NAR grew out of the Charismatic or Pentecostal movement. Charismatic Christians believe that the spiritual gifts (Gr. charisma) of the disciples, as narrated in the Book of Acts—speaking in tongues, healing by the laying on of hands, ability to work miracles and the gift of prophecy—are not only available to Christians today, but are in fact normative. That is, they expect to witness these manifestations of the Holy Spirit on a regular basis in their church services.

They expect to witness these manifestations of the Holy Spirit on a regular basis in their church services.

One of the main tenets of the New Apostolic Reformation that troubles many Christians is that since these new apostles and prophets of the NAR, by claiming to receive new revelations, believe they have a divine anointing. As such, these self-proclaimed new prophets might assert heretical ideas beyond what mainstream churches are willing to endorse. In this regard, consider Paula White-Cain, head of President Trump’s White House Office of Faith. As one of the leaders of the NAR, she has claimed an anointing giving her the ability to make things holy by her mere presence:

At The River Church in Tampa, Fla., Paula declared on stage, “Wherever I go, God rules. When I walk on White House grounds, God walks on White House grounds. When I walked in The River, God walked in The River. When I go into the dry cleaners, that dry cleaning place becomes holy. I have every right and authority to declare the White House as holy ground because I was standing there and where I stand is holy.”2

The idea that places can be made holy extends even to objects, according to White:

There have been times that I have taken prayer cloths that have been anointed as a point of contact. I put them in my loved one’s sneakers; I put them under their bed. I put them on parts of my body that I believe God for healing.3

Being among the anointed, White feels she has the power to pass divine blessings on to others:

On her website and social media, televangelist Paula White has a special offer for what she calls the “Passover season” when “your obedience to align yourself with the desires of God” can “release seven specific supernatural blessings for your body, your family, your finances and your future.”4

She further states:

I believe that when you honor God on Passover, starting on April 12, at sundown through Good Friday on the 18th, and concluding on Easter Sunday, you can receive these seven supernatural blessings for you and your house. According to Exodus 23, God will assign an angel to you. He’ll be an enemy to your enemies. He’ll give you prosperity. He’ll take sickness away from you. He will give you long life. He’ll bring increase in inheritance, and He’ll give a special year of blessing. You’re not doing this to get something, but you’re doing it in honor to God, realizing what you can receive.5

Of course, such blessings don’t come cheap. In the case of the Easter blessings above, the price is $1,000. If this seems a bit mercenary, consider Paula White’s own words, interspersed with bits of glossolalia at her “Unleashed” Conference on February 26, 2026:

I want $100,000 to come in. I want $100,000. There’s ten people who can give $10,000. There’s a hundred people who can give $10,000. Get a check. Make it payable to Paula White ministries. There are people who are watching now. If you say, “I don’t have it,” give a hundred dollars. This is the sacrificial seed. This isn’t for me. This is about kids who will die without you being obedient.6

Paula White’s selling of Easter blessings calls to mind the selling of papal indulgences that so incensed Martin Luther that he wrote his Ninety-five Theses in 1517, sparking the Protestant Reformation. The haranguing of her audience, and the demand that $100,000 be sent to Paula White Ministries, would seem to have more to do with wealth than worship.

White’s mercenary bent, apparently part of her “anointing” via a new revelation, would seem in fact to be the latest version of what is known as the “prosperity gospel,” which teaches that one’s faith is divinely rewarded by financial blessings. This “new revelation” stands in stark contrast to the words of Jesus as stated in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes (Lk. 6:20):

And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”

Not only do the Christian scriptures argue that the poor are blessed and that poverty is not a symptom of God’s displeasure, but they also caution against striving for material wealth. Consider these passages from the Gospel of Matthew:

Mt. 6:19–21: Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Mt. 6:24: No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.

Mt. 19:21–24: Jesus said unto him, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.Then said Jesus unto his disciples, “Verily I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again, I say unto you: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

Intimately involved with the NAR is the Seven Mountains Mandate, which was founded in 1975 by two prominent evangelical leaders, Bill Bright (1921–2003). founder and leader of Campus Crusade for Christ, and Loren Cunningham (1935–2023) founder and leader of Youth With a Mission. Its initial aim was to influence seven key spheres of society.

The organization became more dominionist oriented after a meeting in 2000 between Cunningham and motivational speaker Lance Wallnau, and the 2013 publication of Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate, by Wallnau and Bill Johnson, the leading pastor of Bethel Church in Redding, California. This is a charismatic megachurch with over 11,000 members.

The “Babylon” the title referred to is, of course, secular society. The seven “mountains” refers to seven spheres of society these evangelical, charismatic leaders wish to capture and rule. The seven are: (1) government, (2) church, (3) education, (4) family, (5) news media, (6) celebration (arts, music, theater, cinema and sports) and (7) business.

It should come as no surprise that one of the main targets of these dominionists in the education mountain is the teaching of evolution. Here is a Facebook post by Wallnau on evolution (emphasis in the original):

EVOLUTION is losing and GOD is being rediscovered in science! That’s right - remember it’s called the THEORY of evolution and it is getting bombed and dismantled by scientists at the same time that Genesis creation account is emerging as the only logical option. This is HUGE folks.7

The intellectuals who reject faith are no longer able to prop up “survival of the fittest” rhetoric to slam religion. They can’t make the argument since the data says otherwise. This forces them to come up with an alternative and so two theories suggest that the driving force behind creation was … (wait for it), aliens from outer space. The other promising alternative is wrapped up in a rather complex version of modern Gnosticism that’s cooked up parallel universes.

Both options seem to be a bigger leap of faith than just simply believing that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. What’s hard to believe is that God created Pastors who deny Gods [sic] power to create.

Since Wallnau doesn’t back up his assertions with supporting evidence in the post above, it’s impossible to tell how and by whom the theory of evolution is “getting bombed,” how “God is being rediscovered in science,” or which scientists, if any, are proposing that the evolution of life on Earth is being directed by aliens from outer space or that evolutionary theory is in any way connected with Gnosticism. This body of unsupported assertions would seem to be an expression of the usual creationist tactic of boldly declaring something as fact and setting up straw man arguments with the assumption that one’s certainty will not be challenged by the faithful.

We must remember that, in the spiritual warfare mindset of Christian dominionists, there are no neutral positions.

Advocating the teaching of creationism isn’t the only tactic the Seven Mountains Mandate uses to take over the “mountain” of education. Much more insidious are their attempts to dismantle public education. Speaking of this process as it was occurring in North Carolina in 2024, Jennifer Copeland, Executive Director of the North Carolina Council of Churches pointed out that, in North Carolina, public funding for vouchers and charter schools had, by that time, greatly increased, while public school funding in that state had stagnated:

By underfunding public schools, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy that public schools are struggling. Our teachers are unequipped; our buildings are in disrepair; our books are out of date; and the worse schools become, the more legislators can argue for charter schools and private school vouchers. The more money that goes to vouchers, the less there is for public schools, and the worse public schools become.8

Rev. Copeland also pointed out that the private schools in North Carolina benefiting most at the expense of public education were primarily conservative Christian schools that favored the teaching of creationism, did not teach sex education, and were opposed to any form of abortion, including the use of mifepristone in the early stages of pregnancy.

Dr. Matthew Boedy of the University of North Georgia has made similar points, specifically about the Seven Mountains Mandate:

Significantly expanding voucher laws has allowed the Seven Mountains Mandate to punish public schools, and they wish to punish public schools for what they say is their curriculum, a secular, anti-Christian curriculum that’s indoctrinating students. The Seven Mountains Mandate movement wants to punish public schools by withholding millions of dollars from state coffers that would fund public education. But that’s not the only thing they want to do. They want to re-energize or re-Christianize public schools. Specifically, they want to add patriotic elements. These patriotic elements can be seen in the 1776 Commission that was started by President Donald Trump at the end of his first term.9

The words “1776 Commission” sound innocuous. However, historians overwhelmingly criticized the commission’s report, saying it was “filled with errors and partisan politics.”10 The commission was terminated by the successive President, Joe Biden and re-established by President Trump in January 2025.

Considering that the Seven Mountains Mandate obviously has an ideologically based curriculum in mind, one might wonder about the “secular anti-Christian curriculum that’s indoctrinating students,” against which Christian Nationalists are opposed. We must remember that, in the spiritual warfare mindset of Christian dominionists, there are no neutral positions. All ideas not specifically in the evangelical Christian camp, all thoughts not taken “captive to the obedience of Christ,” are seen to be of the enemy.

At the end of the progression of education are colleges and universities, and the Seven Mountains Mandate has targeted them, along with public schools:

Wallnau also warned the movement would reform American universities: “The universities are the hotbed of resistance. Time to make them a priority of reformation. For real!”11

By “reform” dominionists mean an end to pluralism and “taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

Closely aligned with control of education as effectively controlling society is control of the media, along with education, one of the seven mountains. The Mandate’s strategy for taking control of the broadcast media is twofold, as it is in education. That is to defund public broadcasting and attack mainstream media, while at the same time overlooking violations and errors on the part of their allies.12

While control of the media would logically extend to control of arts and entertainment, it wouldn’t seem to have anything to do with science and technology. However, Craig Nash, writing on the subject above, notes that the Seven Mountains Mandate’s increasing control of the media affects what the public perceives as scientifically valid.13

As noted by the National Library of Medicine, Christian nationalists are among those most strongly opposed to vaccination, as well as hygienic precautions against the spread of COVID-19:

Even before the pandemic, Christian nationalists expressed belief that as God’s chosen people, Americans will be protected and privileged if they uphold their identity as a Christian nation and biblical principles. Of course, this does not lend itself well to COVID-19 preventative healthcare measures. As Perry et al. note for Christian nationalists “the solution to the crisis is not to take behavioral precautions like handwashing, mask-wearing, or social distancing, but to increase America’s collective devotion, attending religious services and repenting of national sins (e.g., abortion, homosexuality, general lawlessness).” In fact, they find that Christian nationalists are less likely to take such precautionary measures and more likely to engage in incautious behaviors, such as attending gatherings with more than 10 people.14

Along with education and media, politics is, of course, one of the “mountains of influence” the Seven Mountains Mandate seeks to control. It is, in fact, perhaps the most important one. Politically, those of the Seven Mountains Mandate are fiercely loyal to Donald Trump. In 2023 Lance Wallnau even claimed that God’s wrath would descend on those politicians who opposed Trump:

Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau warns that God will soon start killing those who “have been standing in the path” of what God intends to accomplish through Trump: “It looks to me like there could be some sudden deaths coming in May.”15

Along with President Trump, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R), has the support of and ties to the Christian Nationalist movement. This has been known as far back as 2023, when NPR reported on his relationship with several NAR leaders such as Pastor Jim Garlow, who hosted online prayer sessions for election integrity in the United States.16

Speaking of Johnson’s Christian Nationalist ties and their implications, Congressman Jared Huffman (D), member of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, wrote:

Speaker Johnson is deeply connected in political practice and philosophy to Christian Nationalism, more so than any other Speaker in American history. He has spent decades working to deny, reject, and undermine the constitutional separation of church and state, including trafficking in fake histories about our nation’s founding and distorting the meaning of the Establishment Clause. He has spent much of his career trying to impose sectarian-based moral codes on others. He has a long record of opposing and undermining civil rights and liberties in the name of religion. And he has collaborated closely with hate groups and Christian Nationalist extremists to advance a theocratic agenda by transforming our pluralist constitutional republic into a “biblically sanctioned government.”17

Breaking down the separation of church and state is a major goal of Christian dominionists, since it stands as a legal barrier against a Christian Nationalist state with religiously based laws. One of their main tactics in attacking this separation to assert that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment only prohibits government from imposing a state religion and that it doesn’t prohibit the involvement of religion in government. They also point out that Thomas Jefferson’s assertion in his letter to the Danbury Baptists that there was a wall of separation between church and state did not have the force of constitutional law.

In this latter assertion they are quite correct. However, there have been numerous Supreme Court rulings on the scope of the Establishment Clause. Most notable is the 1947 verdict in Everson v. Board of Education. In that ruling the Supreme Court broadly interpreted the Establishment Clause (emphasis added):

The “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment means at least this: neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups, and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson,the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect “a wall of separation between church and State.”18

While various other Supreme Court decisions have modified this view in limited situations, this decision still stands with the force of Constitutional law.

Wallnau saw God’s wrath descending on those opposed to Donald Trump, which he derived directly from the spiritual warfare mindset of the NAR and the Seven Mountains Mandate:

In the NAR worldview, cultural change is not merely political or social but considered a supernatural mission; opponents are not simply wrong but possibly under the sway of demonic influence. Elections become spiritual battles.

This belief system views pluralism as weakness, compromise as betrayal, and coexistence as capitulation. Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank based in Somerville, Massachusetts, defines the Seven Mountains Mandate as “the theocratic idea that Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.”19

Thus, particularly in politics, those opposing the Seven Mountains Mandate cannot be viewed merely as opponents, but must be seen as enemies, and indeed enemies inspired and animated by Satan. The logical outcome of this kind of thinking was carried out by Vance Boelter when he assassinated Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and attempted to kill John and Yvette Hoffman and their daughter Hope.

Along with demolishing any and all secular authority, the theocratic state envisioned by Christian nationalists would suppress religious liberty in favor of fundamentalist Christianity, replace egalitarian views with patriarchy, deny access to broadcast media to all views but their own, use education to indoctrinate children as much as teach them, suppress all forms of artistic expression not explicitly fundamentalist Christian, and substitute religious dogma for science.

We would do well, as a matter of self-defense, to beware.

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On America’s 250th Anniversary, a New Look at its Founding DocumentIt is altogether proper for so many commentators on this 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding to treat the Declaration of Independence as a work of political philosophy unprecedented in history—drafted, edited, and approved as it was by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, James Madison, and the other Founding Fathers, who were the intellectual heirs of the Enlightenment. I would like to consider this document, and the founding of the United States, one level deeper, namely as a product of not only the Enlightenment, but the Scientific Revolution that preceded it as well.

Many of the Founding Fathers were, in fact, natural philosophers—scientists in today’s jargon (the word wasn’t coined until 1834)—who deliberately adapted the method of data gathering, hypothesis testing, and theory formation to their nation building. Their understanding of the provisional nature of findings led them to develop a social system in which doubt and dispute were the centerpieces of a functional polity. Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Madison, and the others thought of social governance as problems to be solved rather than as power to be grabbed. They thought of democracy in the same way they thought of science—as a method, not an ideology. They argued, in essence, that no one knows how to govern a nation, so we have to set up a system that allows for experimentation. Try this. Try that. Check the results. Repeat. As Jefferson wrote in 1804:

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth.

Think about the 50 different states, each with its own constitution and set of laws. These are 50 different experiments in taxation, regulation, gun control, abortion, and the like. However, Jefferson noted, as in science where open peer criticism and the freedom to debate increases the probability of discovering provisional truths, this daring new political experiment depended on open access to knowledge and the freedom of its citizens to see and to think for themselves:

Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.

Even the fundamental principles underlying the Declaration of Independence, which is usually thought of as a statement of political philosophy, were in fact grounded in the type of scientific reasoning that Jefferson and Franklin employed in other sciences. Consider the foundational line, “We hold these truths to be self-evident….” Jefferson’s original phrase was “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” Why was it changed?

Jefferson’s original phrase was “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” Why was it changed?

According to author Walter Isaacson, on June 21, 1776, in reviewing the Declaration Franklin “crossed out, using heavy backslashes that he often employed, the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase, ‘We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable’ and changed them to the words now enshrined in history: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’.” Isaacson explains why in his book The Greatest Sentence Ever Written:

The idea of “self-evident” truths was one that drew less on John Locke, who was Jefferson’s favored philosopher, than on the scientific determinism espoused by Isaac Newton and on the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume.

Jefferson’s final draft of the Declaration of Independence with Franklin’s backslash of “sacred and undeniable” replaced with “self-evident.”Hume, the great Enlightenment philosopher whose writings were well-known to the Founding Fathers, famously made a distinction between analytic truths that are self-evident by definition (cardiologists are doctors) and synthetic truths for which you need to check the evidence to see if they are true (cardiologists are rich). By using the word “sacred,” Isaacson continues, “Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not, that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religion. Franklin’s edit turned it instead into an assertion of rationality.”

As for the Declaration’s claim “all men are created equal,” far from religion being the source of this greatest of all moral precepts, Jefferson explained in a letter its inspiration half a century later:

Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.

This shift from religious faith to scientific rationality was the result of two intellectual revolutions: (1) the Scientific Revolution,dated roughly from Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543 to Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687; and (2) the Enlightenment, dated from approximately Newton to the French Revolution.

The first revolution led directly to the second, as intellectuals in the 18th century sought to emulate the great scientists of the previous centuries in applying the rigorous methods of the natural sciences and philosophy to explaining human and social phenomena. This marriage of philosophies resulted in Enlightenment ideals that placed supreme value on reason, scientific inquiry, human natural rights, liberty, equality, freedom of thought and expression, and on a diverse, cosmopolitan worldview that most people today embrace.

Newton, in particular, was exalted by the Founding Fathers as one of the greatest minds of all time, and by the late 18th century in diverse fields strove to be the Newton of their time. In his 1748 work The Spirit of the Laws, for example, the French philosophe Montesquieu consciously invoked Newton when he compared a well-functioning monarchy to “the system of the universe” that includes “a power of gravitation” that “attracts” all bodies to “the center” (the monarch). By “spirit” Montesquieu meant “causes” from which one could derive “laws” that govern society.

Following Montesquieu, a group of French scientists known as the physiocrats declared that all human societies are “regulated by natural laws.” One of these physiocrats, François Quesnay—a physician to the king of France who later served as an emissary to Napoleon for Thomas Jefferson—modeled the economy after the human body, in which money flowed through a nation like blood flows through a body, and ruinous government policies were like diseases that impeded economic health. He argued that even though people have unequal abilities, they have equal natural rights, and so it was the government’s duty to protect the rights of individuals from being usurped by other individuals, while at the same time enabling people to pursue their own best interests. This led them to advocate for minimum government interference in the economy, private property, and the free market, which they called laissez faire.

The physiocrat movement grew into the school of classical economics championed by David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers that form the basis of the free market economic policy of the United States today. The very title of Adam Smith’s classic 1776 work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, reveals that it was a work of science in its search for the “nature” and “causes” of wealth. The founders had all read it and understood its underlying premise that natural laws govern economies, that humans are rationally calculating economic actors whose behaviors can be understood, and that markets are self-regulating by an “invisible hand,” which Smith analogized to Newton’s gravity.

The concept underpinning the Declaration of Independence is known as moral realism, which is central to how we think as a nation and our way of life. Moral realism says that right and wrong, just and unjust, moral and immoral, are not the whimsical products of power or culture, but discoverable through reason and science. In the same way that Galileo and Newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that really are out there, so too did the founders purport to discover moral laws and principles about human nature and society that really do exist. As James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper #51:

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angles were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Just as it was inevitable that the astronomer Johannes Kepler would discover that planets have elliptical orbits—given that he was making accurate astronomical measurements, and given that planets really do travel in elliptical orbits, he could hardly have discovered anything else—scientists studying political, economic, social, and moral subjects will discover certain things that are true in these fields of inquiry, such as that democracies are better than autocracies and that market economies are superior to command economies.

Just ask yourself, where would you rather live, North Korea or South Korea? The answer is obvious. Would you rather be fed or starving, educated or illiterate, free or enslaved? As Abraham Lincoln articulated the principle four score and several years after the Declaration of Independence (in his 1858 debate with Stephen A. Douglas):

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.

And in his Annual Message to Congress in 1862:

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.

Our founding ancestors discovered these rights and principles as self-evident truths about our nature, and their application has led to the abolition of slavery, torture, cruel-and-unusual punishment, capital punishment, corporeal punishment, witch crazes, inquisitions, and pogroms, and were the legal foundation for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, children’s rights, and even animal rights.

So, on this 250th anniversary of the founding of our nation, let us all remember these political principles were also grounded in rational and even scientific truths about the human condition.

This article originally appeared in The Boston Globe on July 5, 2026.

Note from author: The original published version in The Boston Globe does not contain the quotes from Walter Isaacson about Franklin’s edits of Jefferson’s original statement “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” to “We hold these truths to be self-evident” as it may be disputable as to whether or not those are Franklin’s back-slashes in the draft. I am leaving it in here in hopes that some historians can comment on the controversy, and await Walter Isaacson’s response to my query. As he wrote an entire book on that one sentence, one presumes that his confidence is high that those are Franklin’s edits.

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As a professional magician and author, I have spent years investigating claims—supernatural, paranormal, or otherwise—to see how well they hold up under scrutiny. Here, I will examine two biblical accounts involving the prophets Elijah and Elisha, stories often described as miracles, but which may not necessarily require that interpretation. The analysis draws on my broader research into dozens of miracle accounts, biblical and otherwise, focusing on careful reading of the text in context. We’ll work through the process together: considering their original context, the perspective of the initial audience, and relevant linguistic, cultural, and scientific factors.

Not every event described as extraordinary in the Bible is necessarily intended as a miracle.

Prophets like Elijah and Elisha, active in Israel’s northern kingdom during the 9th century BCE, are featured in biblical narratives describing remarkable events. Elijah’s accounts often highlight dramatic confrontations and symbolic acts, while Elisha’s stories emphasize healing, provision, and restoration. Both demonstrate the authority and influence attributed to prophets, but the narratives differ in tone, focus, and style. Examining these differences highlights the textual choices and emphases that shape how the events are described, providing a foundation for careful, context-aware interpretation.

Not every event described as extraordinary in the Bible is necessarily intended as a miracle. Some accounts highlight surprising outcomes without requiring a suspension of natural law. This article examines two such examples—one featuring Elijah and one featuring Elisha—to illustrate how historical context, language, and cultural practices provide alternative ways to interpret these stories.

Case Study 1: Elijah Outruns a ChariotFollowing a devastating three-year drought and the execution of 450 prophets of Baal by King Ahab, 1 Kings 18:46 records: “Then the hand of the Lord was on Elijah, and he belted his cloak around his waist and outran Ahab to Jezreel.” Many readers interpret this passage as describing Elijah being supernaturally empowered to outrun a horse-drawn chariot—a feat that would seemingly qualify as miraculous, but does the text actually support that interpretation?

Examining these differences highlights the textual choices and emphases that shape how the events are described, providing a foundation for careful, context-aware interpretation.

Some have pointed to Jeremiah 12:5 as implying that outrunning a horse might be possible. In this verse, God challenges the prophet: “If you have run with infantrymen and they have tired you out, How can you compete with horses?” Rather than suggesting the feat is physically possible, the passage uses hyperbole to make a rhetorical point: those struggling with smaller challenges shouldn’t expect to succeed at greater ones.

The phrase “the hand of the Lord was on [name]” appears frequently in the Hebrew Bible and is generally understood as a figure of speech. Depending on context, it can indicate that a prophet felt compelled to act (as in the Elijah account), experienced inspiration (Jeremiah 15:17), or received authority for a particular role (Ezekiel 1:3). It does not necessarily imply supernatural strength or speed.

In Elijah’s case, if the phrase is read as indicating he felt compelled to act, practical considerations of travel become central. Horse-drawn chariots in antiquity were powerful but not built for sustained high-speed travel over long or difficult terrain. Uneven ground, muddy roads after rain, and the limited endurance of horses would reduce overall speed. Conversely, a person accustomed to walking or running long distances could cover ground more efficiently, particularly along a direct path.

Not every event described as extraordinary in the Bible is necessarily intended as a miracle.

It is important to note that the text does not specify Elijah and Ahab began from the same location. Elijah had already sent his servant to instruct Ahab to “go up” and eat and drink; “go up” may indicate a different spot on Mount Carmel or follow the biblical idiom for traveling to Jerusalem. By the time the message reached him, Elijah may already have begun his journey—likely before the first rains arrived. This renders a competitive race improbable; instead, Elijah’s advance reflects a purposeful journey, possibly along a more direct route, explaining his arrival before Ahab without invoking supernatural speed.

In 1 Kings 18:46, the Hebrew uses the verb וַיָּרָץ (“ran”) paired with לִפְנֵי (“before”), literally “he ran before Ahab.” The same construction appears in Genesis 32:3, where Jacob sends messengers לְפָנָיו (“before him”)—to indicate moving ahead to announce, prepare, or lead the way. In biblical usage, this phrasing highlights precedence or heralding rather than speed, reinforcing that Elijah’s movement reflects purposeful, goal-directed action. Elijah’s advance may symbolize heralding—announcing the king’s return to Jezreel and signaling a tentative return to the God of his ancestors. This interpretation is especially plausible in light of the execution of the 450 prophets of Baal, which marked a decisive turning point in Israel’s widespread worship of Baal.

While Elijah’s story illustrates how language, context, and cultural practices can explain an event traditionally viewed as miraculous, the next account offers a briefer, more enigmatic episode: the revival of a man who touched Elisha’s bones.

Case Study 2: The Man Who Touched Elisha’s BonesSome biblical accounts of extraordinary events are described in vivid detail, while others are mentioned only briefly. The passage in 2 Kings 13:21 is an example of the latter: “And as [some Israelites] were burying a man, behold, they saw a marauding band; and they threw the man into the grave of Elisha. And when the man touched the bones of Elisha he revived and stood up on his feet.”

Traditionally, theologians have interpreted the story as evidence of lingering prophetic power or a symbolic affirmation of Elisha’s status.

Unlike more developed miracle stories, this passage offers minimal context. The resurrected man is never mentioned again, and the text does not provide details about his identity, condition, or whether anyone witnessed the event. Traditionally, theologians have interpreted the story as evidence of lingering prophetic power or a symbolic affirmation of Elisha’s status. However, read in context, the passage functions more as a brief note on Elisha’s enduring influence than as a detailed eyewitness account. Some scholars classify it as etiological—a story meant to explain or reinforce the prophet’s reputation.

The northern kingdom of Israel in the 9th century BCE was politically unstable, with frequent conflict against neighboring peoples such as the Moabites east of the Dead Sea. Moabite raids created urgent, chaotic circumstances that help explain the burial scenario described in 2 Kings 13:21. The sudden appearance of raiders meant that the burial party likely had little time for careful preparation and placed the body in the first tomb available—Elisha’s.

Concerns about premature burial were widespread in antiquity, since rapid interment carried a real risk of burying someone still alive.

Burial customs reflected both religious obligations and practical concerns. Jewish law required burial on the day of death, often within hours, because the hot climate accelerated decomposition. Bodies were typically placed in rock-cut tombs or caves, where flesh decomposed over several months, leaving bones after roughly a year. Coupled with the urgency of a raid, these practices could allow someone mistakenly presumed dead to be buried without detection.

Within this context, the phrase “revived”—or “came to life” in some translations—can be understood in multiple ways. While it may indicate literal resurrection, it could also describe recovery from a state that only appeared to be death—such as unconsciousness or coma. Concerns about premature burial were widespread in antiquity, since rapid interment carried a real risk of burying someone still alive.

The biblical texts themselves provide limited detail, leaving room for interpretation. Attention to context, language, and cultural practices allows alternative readings.

Historical and modern cases illustrate this phenomenon. Essie Dunbar, an early 20th-century South Carolina woman, suffered an epileptic seizure and was declared dead; when exhumed at her sister’s insistence she was found to be alive. In 2015, Neysi Pérez, a pregnant teenager in Honduras, was pronounced dead and buried, only to be heard screaming from inside her tomb the next day. Even George Washington requested a delay in burial to avoid the risk of premature interment. (Caskets in these times were sold with an external bell that could be rung from inside.) In this context, it is plausible that the man in 2 Kings 13:21 was mistakenly presumed dead, and that being moved into Elisha’s tomb—combined with shock, cool air, or physical impact—could have revived him.

The story’s inclusion likely owes more to the fact that the tomb belonged to Elisha than to any detailed description of miraculous power. Elisha’s reputation as a prophet would have made any unusual event linked to his remains noteworthy to later storytellers and editors of the biblical text.

Reframing the MiraculousBoth stories—Elijah outrunning a chariot and the man who touched Elisha’s bones—are often cited in tradition as examples of divine intervention. However, the biblical texts themselves provide limited detail, leaving room for interpretation. Attention to context, language, and cultural practices allows alternative readings: Elijah’s running can be understood in terms of terrain, travel practices, and idiomatic expression, while the revival of the man in Elisha’s tomb may reflect mistaken presumptions of death rather than literal resurrection.

For readers examining extraordinary claims, these stories illustrate how attention to historical context, language, and cultural practices can clarify what the texts describe and why they mattered to their original audience.

Note: Biblical citations are taken from the New American Standard Bible (NASB), 2020 edition, unless otherwise indicated.

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Institutionalized experiments take a while to fail so fully as to be discredited. The 1917 Russian Revolution put its people “seventy years on the road to nowhere,” three generations of poverty, fear, and violence (as the news media, quoting protesters, declared in the regime’s last year).1 Poles who survived communism dismissed it as something that “looks good on paper.”

The situation with schools or colleges of education—a division within a university devoted to teaching its students to be teachers and school leaders, commonly called, “ed schools”—is not nearly so bad. While elite ed schools have been and often are steeped in the political/cultural ideology of the day, whatever that might be, non-elite ed schools are less radical. Most education professors at state universities bearing directional names, such as Southern Mississippi, North Texas, and Central Michigan—who train the bulk of teachers and principals—actually have worked in schools, an experience that tends to instill more pragmatism than ideology. Most educational leadership professors are former principals with backgrounds as athletic coaches, and accordingly less fans of Critical Theory than of the Friday Night Lights. Those with real-world experience have taught me the most about our schools.

Yet a skeptical examination of ed schools reveals a century-plus experiment that failed, harming millions of students, particularly the disadvantaged. The best education professors should go back to leading or teaching in schools rather than keeping afloat insular, often arrogant institutions. Especially as regards the teaching of reading, the failings of ed schools are painfully obvious and, unfortunately (and ironically), it is illiterate students who pay the price for their failure.

Long before the rest of higher education, ed schools succumbed to the lure of the big bottom line, focusing on raising revenue rather than mentoring young minds.

As the Chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Alabama, it is my contention that American ed schools were bad from the beginning, spreading academic mediocrity and compliance mindsets that left K–12 educators ill-suited to resist the various deeply flawed fads and fallacies that came their way. Worse, long before the rest of higher education, ed schools succumbed to the lure of the big bottom line, focusing on raising revenue rather than mentoring young minds.

Yet you can’t replace something with nothing, so I will end my analysis with ideas about how we could have different and far better ed schools, in part by creating education markets, coupling school choice with varied alternatives for educator training and certification.

Bad From the BeginningYou can’t understand an institution without knowing its history. Reporting for my school newspaper in 1976, I asked retiring Baltimore County school superintendent Dr. Joshua Wheeler, known for his progressive policies, why our 110,000-student system did not require proficiency tests since, as everyone knew, some students graduated even though they were illiterate. Dr. Wheeler explained that, “the purpose of public education is not to educate students. The purpose of public education is to provide an education for those few who want it.” In that case, I suggested, everyone including taxpayers might be happier if we let students drop out. Dr. Wheeler retorted, “we can’t do that. Crime would go up. Unemployment would go up. Parents would be angry … and whenever we do require more homework and start failing kids, parents complain that their kids are working too hard.”2

From the beginning, such anti-learning mindsets have dominated ed schools. As scholars such as David F. Labaree3 and Raymond E. Callahan4 detail, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, what were termed “normal schools,”5 which had trained teachers, were repackaged as teachers colleges and, eventually, middling universities. Elite institutions such as Columbia University developed their own ed schools (which Columbia segregated from the rest of campus), in response to political demands to produce greater numbers of teachers and school leaders to meet expanding demand.6 From 1900 to 1940 the percentage of high school-aged children actually in high schools grew from 11 percent to 73 percent, fundamentally changing the institutions. Local businesses wanted these new high schools to produce compliant factory workers and to improve their community’s reputation. Further, as Dr. Wheeler suggested, keeping children in school and out of the workforce looked like a good idea, since a teen sleeping on a school desk is a student, while the same teen sleeping on a park bench is an unemployment statistic.

Two ed school ideologies exploded in popularity, even while eroding standards. As E.D. Hirsch chronicles in The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them,7 idealistic progressives (Hirsch terms them “romantics”) such as John Dewey, argued that emphasizing content meant deemphasizing children, so he viewed memorization and book learning as dehumanizing and interfering with children’s natural curiosity. Such misguided idealism has done enormous damage to schooling, enabling the adoption of failed techniques, such as whole language to teach reading (more on that below).

The doctorate in education, the EdD, has never carried much respect in academic circles.

Though the idealists (whom Labaree terms “pedagogical progressives”) get more attention, “administrative progressives” had more impact. Administrative progressives agreed with pedagogical progressives that traditional book learning (“to educate students” as Dr. Wheeler put it) should be marginal in school. Yet in contrast to the idealists, administrative progressives wanted schools to serve the purpose of social utility rather than individual fulfillment, so they created schools that were bureaucratic, not organic. All too many administrative progressives believed that few students (and fewer still among minorities) had the capacity to learn much, thus making academic achievement inherently elitist.

One sees this in the 1918 Cardinal Principals of Secondary Education issued by the National Education Association, then an administrator organization rather than a teachers’ union. The Cardinal Principals lists seven goals for schooling, with a single goal—Command of Fundamental Processes—covering nearly all scholarly disciplines. (The other goals were health, worthy use of leisure, citizenship, worthy home membership, vocation, and ethical character.) As Labaree notes:

If school subjects have to be adjusted to the capacities of the students and to the requirements of the job market, and if most students have modest capacities and most jobs have modest skill requirements, then only a few classes need provide a rigorous academic content for the college bound elite, while most students need classes that are less academic, less demanding, and better suited to their modest future roles in society. This is a straightforward prescription for diluting academic content.8

While few educators have ever heard of the Cardinal Principals, the document’s ideas defined education for generations of educators and remain dominant today. As critics Hirsch and Diane Ravitch9 detail, contempt for knowledge meant freedom: both in ed schools and real schools, teachers can do what they want in a way that engineers cannot. After all, it is tougher to cover up a fallen bridge than an illiterate graduate.

Symbolically, many administrators claim authority over parents and teachers by invoking their first name, “Dr.”

Institutions define themselves by what they are not. From the beginning, ed schools distinguished themselves from the rest of academia by their indifference to academic content: after all, the teacher’s job was not to educate children. Other professors noticed. The doctorate in education, the EdD, has never carried much respect in academic circles. Labaree, who taught in Stanford’s ed school concludes:

Those teaching in the university think of those in ed schools as being academically weak and narrowly vocational. They see ed school teachers not as peers in the world of higher education but as an embarrassment, who should not be part of the university at all. To them the ed school looks less like a school of medicine than a school of cosmetology.10

As Jonathan Wai and I have detailed, ed schools have low standards and give out high grades. Both undergraduate and graduate ed students average lower intelligence test scores than other students, and elite universities do not pick EdDs to be their chancellors.11

There is little evidence that earning graduate degrees makes either teachers better at their jobs.

Further, as American Enterprise Institute scholar Rick Hess and former Columbia ed school (Teachers College) dean Art Levine demonstrate,12, 13 there is little evidence that earning graduate degrees makes either teachers or their leaders better at their jobs; indeed, when surveyed, they say as much. The same holds for teacher certification.14

Yet graduate degrees in education serve important economic and symbolic purposes. K–12 educators get pay raises for obtaining graduate degrees, and their tuition (usually paid by their employers) produces a cash stream for colleges. Symbolically, many administrators claim authority over parents and teachers by invoking their first name, “Dr.” I have never met a physics PhD who insisted on being called “Doctor,” and seldom met an EdD who didn’t. In this sense, education graduate degrees recall Lord Farquaad’s giant, somewhat phallic castle, which led Shrek to ask, “do you think maybe he’s compensating for something?”

There are (at least) two other unfortunate legacies of administrative progressives, sexism and compliance cultures, each reinforcing the other.15 Administrative progressives bureaucratized, consolidating small schools where many principals still taught (and which were often led by women) into large, differentiated bureaucracies. Encouraged by school boards, emulating the business best practices of 1918 scientific management methods, administrative progressives transformed schools into factories where the workers (teachers) batch-process students under the direction of professional managers (principals and superintendents) who prize compliance and uniformity.

While most teachers are women, most principals and superintendents are still men.

At a time when “professional” meant male, administrative progressives hit upon athletic coaching as a career path to attract men into teaching, with the prospect of fast promotion into administration. By the middle of the 20th century, it seemed only natural that in schools male administrators would boss around female teachers, who were expected to be compliant, not self-directed. Even today, while most teachers are women, most principals and superintendents are still men. Most male principals are former coaches who stress teamwork and compliance over integrity, covering up rather than exposing scandals to protect schools’ reputations, and showing loyalty to colleagues who have strayed.16 For women, the plurality fast track into administration is to become a curriculum specialist. As in education generally, this subfield possesses no specific scientific knowledge, so its “experts” stress compliance to rules and regulations, while showing loyalty to higher-ups. Generally, neither male nor female school leaders focus very much on academic learning beyond basic minimum requirements.

The Decline and Fall of Schools, But Not Ed SchoolsDespite ed school deficiencies, public schools held together until 1970 or so, chiefly because of discrimination in the workplace. The fact that college-educated Black people and women had few career paths other than teaching, ironically enabled schools to hire high talent for low wages. Smart teachers often kept schools from straying too far into intellectual vacuity. And ironically, civil rights laws (and social norms) changed all that. From 1970 to 2005, among female high school graduates in the top tenth of cognitive ability, the proportion entering teaching fell from roughly a quarter to a tenth, with similar changes among African Americans.17 The daughters of teachers went into more prestigious, more lucrative fields; in the case of two of my relatives, college teaching and investment banking.

This did not seem to trouble ed schools, nor the school leaders they trained. Both my experiences as a school board member (when I once had to explain to an award-winning principal why he should hire math teachers who know math) and the empirical evidence indicate that in hiring teachers, the leaders trained by ed schools prefer compliance over intelligence.18 Political leaders are only now realizing that we cannot get better schools without raising pay for new teachers in order to get more of the most talented people to give teaching a try; some will like it and stay.19

Compliance-oriented, intellectually mediocre school bureaucracies developed by schools of education have cost trillions of dollars, while simultaneously damaging equity, higher education, and democracy.

Contempt for academic knowledge likely explains an interesting conundrum exposed by the rise of homeschooling. Parents untrained in medicine could not remove their children’s tonsils. Parents untrained in law could not capably represent their children in court. Yet currently, the bulk of the empirical evidence indicates that on both student achievement and socio-emotional skills, students homeschooled by parents do as well as or slightly better than those taught by certified teachers (even in calculus!).20 Granted, homeschooling families tend to have relatively high motivation and are thus a self-selected sample, but mere enthusiasm would not close the gap that separates amateurs from professionally trained doctors or lawyers. The fact that it does for education undermines the claim that ed schools produce education professionals.

The compliance-oriented, intellectually mediocre school bureaucracies developed by schools of education have cost trillions of dollars, while simultaneously damaging equity, higher education, and democracy.

Regarding equity, the flight of the bright from teaching came at a time when schools needed them most. Schooling began bureaucratizing in the early 20th century, at a time of stable two-parent and extended families, unlike today. From 1960 to 2010, the percentage of children spending substantial periods either without parents or in single-parent homes skyrocketed from under a tenth to about half, and far more in disadvantaged communities. Statistically, this likely explains the academic achievement and wealth gaps separating Asian Americans from White Americans, and in turn, White Americans from African Americans.21 Family fragility requires smarter, more innovative teachers than ed schools produce, ones attuned to the needs of these children.

The success of certain charter schools that have closed achievement gaps, staffed by teachers trained outside schools of education, demonstrates that most disadvantaged children can master the material when educators keep order, build relationships with parents and students, and set measurable, achievable goals to get kids reading at grade level before leaving elementary school. The successful methods used by such poverty-high achievement schools were consistently resisted by ed schools, even before Critical Race Theory could be invoked to cast teaching disadvantaged children math and standard English as culturally insensitive, despite parental objections.22

Contempt for academic knowledge likely explains an interesting conundrum exposed by the rise of homeschooling.

Even mainstream journalists, who normally defend ed schools, are starting to agree. For over a half-century, armies of education professors, paid consultants, and for-profit publishers dissuaded teachers from using phonics to teach reading, as journalist Emily Hanford details in her six-part podcast, “Sold a Story: How teaching kids to read went so wrong.”23 They dismissed decades of empirical research that demonstrated that phonics works far better for the vast majority of students as being “reactionary,” instead requiring the use of progressive methods such as “three cueing,” in which students guess what a word is without understanding how its letters sound. (There are superb professional musicians who play only “by ear,” or even teach students to start out by imitating what the teacher plays before learning to read sheet music. But no one teaches music by having their student first begin by guessing at what a song or passage of written music sounds like, even though music notation is much more intuitively obvious than writing).

Steeped in compliance to authority, many teachers assumed that the education professors knew best because they were professors, and then blamed themselves for not doing it right. When the George W. Bush administration and some state governments legally mandated phonics-based reading instruction, certain education professors and their allies sabotaged implementation. This harmed everyone, but particularly disadvantaged students, whose families were less likely to teach phonics at home (as my dad did) or employ tutors.

Regarding higher education, ed schools have been part of a broader movement to make universities more bureaucratic and less intellectual, in effect, more like K-12 schools. Since 1990, administrative staff (who often make more than teachers), frequently with doctorates in education, have outnumbered college professors and usurped faculty governance, as Benjamin Ginsberg details in The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters.24 A large literature suggests that the habits of schools of education—batch-processing students and boosting their bottom line while shorting academic standards—have in recent years become the norm in most non-STEM departments throughout higher education. Empirical studies by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa25 find little measured academic learning in college, with unfortunate later-life outcomes.26 In short, in terms of their academic rigor, higher education institutions have increasingly become like ed schools, emphasizing social utility in ways that undermine it.

Parents untrained in medicine could not remove their children’s tonsils. Parents untrained in law could not capably represent their children in court.

There is a second huge cost to higher education, with implications for free speech, critical thinking, and democratic governance. Increasingly, administrators impose compliance to “best practices,” even when, in the case of sexual matters27 and race relations, empirical evidence indicates the new orthodoxies are unscientific and ineffective, failing to lessen conflict, diversify leadership, or fit scientific evidence.28 In Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America,29 the African American Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter makes a compelling case that Anti-Racist higher education and corporate bureaucrats have imposed ineffective practices, while terminating their critics and blocking practices (including teaching phonics) that would reduce real inequities.

What is to be done?Ed schools operate in a monopolistic manner and under the direction of bureaucratic experts. But what if the bureaucratic experts are wrong about the techniques of schooling? Or what if many parents want their children to get more out of school than mere social utility? As the history of ed schools, and of large and powerful organizations in general demonstrates, one shouldn’t rely on the “experts” to self-correct.30 Even with the of best intentions, what if what the experts dictate works for some students but not others? Montessori schooling—a method of education that is based on self-directed activity, hands-on learning, and collaborative play—might be best for some students, especially those from socially and economically advantaged homes who receive content knowledge at home and become bored or frustrated with normal classroom routines. A more disciplined school experience might work better for those from less fortunate circumstances. And every student works best at the speed appropriate to their development.

So should we simply defund ed schools and pension off their professors? As noted, teacher and leader certification from ed schools does not seem to produce more effective educators. Yet policymakers, parents, and prospective educators are used to ed schools; and for the latter, they do enable valuable networking. The bottom line is that you can’t replace something with nothing. If we defunded ed schools, they would likely reappear, just under a new name or in a different form.

One alternative would be to restructure ed schools around academic disciplines that have demonstrated rigor and scientifically established bodies of knowledge.

One alternative, advanced by my collaborators and myself, would be to restructure ed schools around actual academic disciplines that have demonstrated rigor and scientifically established bodies of knowledge. And there’s an instructive precedent. Long marginal members of academia, in the 1960s business schools reformed with a focus on applied mathematics, economics, and behavioral science, gaining more respect and more students. Today, an MBA often helps get a well-paying job. Ed schools could likewise reform by offering their students content that teachers and school leaders really need. Psychology (especially learning theory), biology, statistics, and content knowledge in the disciplines taught in K–12 schooling would make good candidates.31 Unfortunately, ed school professors, even if informed and well-intentioned, are not incentivized to do this; indeed, existing certification and accreditation organizations (whose approval is required for federal funding) would likely derail such efforts.

Teacher certification and school accreditation systems encourage uniformity precisely where variety is needed.

A broader answer would be to replace the existing bureaucratic mindset with pluralistic ones.32 The prevailing systems of teacher certification and school accreditation encourage uniformity precisely where variety is needed. If there’s one thing true about students it is that they vary: one size never fits all. The current system is hamstrung by the way it empowers a small number of nontransparent state bureaucrats and accreditors whose “best practices” fail to reflect either public goals or scientific knowledge about how to achieve those goals.33 And there are better ways.

Mehta and Teles34 have shown that successful professions build, select, and train for knowledge and independent judgment rather than mere compliance to rules and deference to superiors. Only a professional- rather than a compliance-based human capital model (along with higher pay) seems likely to build respect for teachers as professionals. Further, education models that work well for certain students and teachers fail for others, leading Mehta and Teles to question the wisdom of a single uniform certification system as opposed to multiple systems (such as for Montessori schooling, the high performance-oriented No Excuses schooling, and Classical schooling), each with their own training and distinct certification pathways, as is the case in more rigorous fields such as architecture and psychotherapy, where the clients legitimately want and need different things.

Coupled with school choice that provides a range of options, as is the case in countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands (which have better schools than the United States), such systems could incentivize schools of education to reform and so produce the educators parents really want for their children … or else lose market share to those institutions that do. Despite having been trained by certified teachers, most parents, regardless of socioeconomic or demographic particulars, actually want math teachers who actually know math. Therein lies hope and a pathway to the future.

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The shaky source behind a foundational myth of the Epstein conspiracy theoryAmong the various, often feverish, conspiracy theories surrounding the deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein, perhaps the most intriguing posits that his deviant activities were part of a state-sanctioned operation to compromise powerful figures on behalf of an intelligence agency, the Israeli Mossad being the most common candidate. This narrative, which circulated for years in the more conspiratorial corners of the internet, has become mainstream enough that a former prime minister of Israel recently felt compelled to publicly refute it.

The cornerstone of this narrative is an oft-cited quote attributed to Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. Attorney who oversaw Epstein’s 2008 plea deal in Florida and later served as Labor Secretary in the first Trump administration. As the story goes, Acosta claimed he was told by someone to leave Epstein alone because Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and this explains how Epstein got his supposedly lenient deal.

Like a game of telephone, the particulars of the provocative quote seem to change with each retelling. Peter Thiel intimated to Joe Rogan that Acosta raised his right hand and swore it in “congressional testimony;” Megyn Kelly declared Acosta said it on the record; Mike Benz claims Acosta said it publicly; Candace Owens suggested Acosta told it to reporters. Tucker Carlson claims that Acosta confirmed the quote was true but couldn’t recall who told him Epstein belonged to intelligence.

Within Epstein conspiracy circles, Acosta’s quote is assumed to be settled fact, even if some details have been forgotten with time. But the quote’s sanctity is belied by its flimsy foundation: it can be traced to a single anonymous source in a 2019 Daily Beast article by the journalist Vicky Ward.

Like a game of telephone, the particulars of the provocative quote seem to change with each retelling.

Ward recounted a conversation she had with a “former senior White House official” a couple of years prior. Ward’s source, clearly collegial with Epstein, describes him glowingly and notes his connection to Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. According to this mysterious official, Epstein’s name had come up when Alex Acosta was being interviewed by the Trump transition team for the role of Labor Secretary. Acosta allegedly explained that he’d signed off on the controversial plea deal because he had been told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” was above Acosta’s pay grade, and to back off. Contrary to the confident assertions of influencers, the quote was allegedly uttered behind closed doors, and certainly not in congressional testimony, on the record, publicly, or to reporters.

Ward’s reporting has drawn both praise and unease. Graydon Carter, Ward’s esteemed former editor at Vanity Fair, told The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, “My staff, to a person, did not trust her.” Carter’s recent memoir, When The Going Was Good, doubles down, noting that fact-checkers “regularly expressed concern about her reporting.” Others have echoed this refrain. One former colleague, speaking to Chotiner, claimed Ward held “zero credibility with the fact-checking and legal departments.” Another said Ward had provided “inaccurate quotations.” Chotiner was more blunt, telling The New Yorker readers that “many of the things that she told me—and had told her podcast listeners—turned out to be untrue.”

Darryl Cooper has offered his opinion on the matter, telling Tucker Carlson’s audience of millions that “I don’t think Ward would make that up.”

Darryl Cooper has offered his opinion on the matter, telling Tucker Carlson’s audience of millions that “I don’t think Ward would make that up.” For her part, Ward stands by her reporting. “I can't name my source,” Ward recently told The Megyn Kelly Show, “but nothing has happened since then to make me think that there was anything wrong with that person's memory or what they told me.”

Ward’s source is said to have been a “former senior White House official” in the Trump administration, as of July 2019, who was friendly with Epstein a couple of years before his death. They also had knowledge of Epstein’s then unknown connection to Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. We also know that Vicky Ward had spent two years writing a critical book on Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Kushner, Inc., published in early 2019.

Shortly after being ousted as Trump’s chief strategist in August 2017, Steve Bannon met Jeffrey Epstein through Michael Wolff, author of the explosive Fire and Fury for which Bannon was a key source. According to Michael Wolff, Bannon and Epstein spent an enormous amount of time together and became very close friends. Given his bitter and well-attested feud with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Bannon's role as a key source for Ward's book was, as with Fire and Fury, transparently obvious. So obvious, in fact, that one book reviewer for NPR wrote:

…Bannon’s ideas quietly permeate the book without attribution. Surely [Ward] could only write phrases like “Bannon thought to himself” because he talked to her. But she remains coy.

Through his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, Bannon was also aware of Epstein's connection to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. In Too Famous, Michael Wolff recounts Bannon gesturing towards Epstein’s framed photo gallery and remarking on a photo of a laughing Mohammed bin Salman embracing Epstein. Snapshots of Epstein’s framed photo gallery, which also included a photo of Bannon, were published by The New York Times in August.

While there’s no definitive proof that Steve Bannon was Vicky Ward’s source, just as there’s no definitive proof that Donald Trump was pretending to be a spokesman named John Miller, the available evidence strongly suggests Ward’s source was Steve Bannon.

Steve Bannon, a polarizing figure even in conservative circles, is widely viewed as a sensationalist showman with a penchant for disinformation. He is quoted as saying “the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Vicky Ward, who has appeared on Steve Bannon’s The War Room, has noted his sometimes forgotten background in Hollywood and praised his flair for dramatic storytelling.

Making false statements to federal investigators or Congress is a serious crime. Making false statements to Vicky Ward is not.

Alex Acosta, the former Labor Secretary, has no such reputation. When asked at a press conference if he was ever made aware that Epstein was an intelligence asset, Acosta said he couldn’t address it because of guidelines, but that he would hesitate to take this reporting as fact. Acosta was later asked by federal investigators from the Department of Justice if he had knowledge of Epstein being an intelligence asset. Under oath, Acosta said “The answer is no.” Additionally, none of the subjects of a DOJ investigation regarding Epstein’s 2008 plea deal believed it to be the case that Epstein was an intelligence asset. In recent congressional testimony, Acosta reiterated to lawmakers that he was not aware of Epstein having any foreign or domestic intelligence connections.

Making false statements to federal investigators or Congress is a serious crime. Making false statements to Vicky Ward is not. So to believe that Acosta went easy on Epstein because he belonged to intelligence requires us to trust Ward’s anonymous source, almost certainly the untrustworthy Steve Bannon, and to believe that Acosta, and all the other subjects of the DOJ investigation, decided to risk jail time by lying to federal investigators.

Conspiracists have devoted countless hours scrutinizing the mundane posts of a Reddit account named “maxwellhill,” which they believe belongs to Jeffrey Epstein’s erstwhile confidante, Ghislaine Maxwell. One prominent conspiracist, Whitney Webb, was initially inspired to write two laboriously long volumes scrutinizing Epstein’s supposed intelligence connections after coming across Acosta’s purported “belonged to intelligence” quote. Curiously, the source of seemingly the most authoritative quote yet that Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence asset has never been scrutinized by conspiracists, despite the telltale clues. And can you blame them? Never let some dubious source get in the way of a good yarn.

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The drug cabinet of a pregnant woman today is already a minefield of anxiety. Now a potent new variable has been introduced: political theater. When the President of the United States and the Secretary of Health and Human Services suggested on September 22, 2025 that acetaminophen—known globally as paracetamol and in the U.S. by the brand name Tylenol—causes autism, the public health impact was immediate, sweeping, and, crucially, dangerous.

Acetaminophen is known globally as paracetamol and in the U.S. by the brand name Tylenol.

This article, written from a perspective of scientific skepticism and practical medicine (I’m a full-time practicing physician), will look at the claims linking prenatal acetaminophen use to neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), specifically ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). We will look at the observational evidence that initially raised alarms, the methodological rigor that subsequently debunked causality, and the immediate, real-world risks created by scaremongering that rests on shaky research that has failed to convince the scientific community.

Correlation is Not Causation and the Problem of the Autism “Epidemic” The debate over acetaminophen (APAP) and autism occurs against a backdrop of dramatically increased NDD diagnoses. Over the past two decades, autism diagnoses have risen by nearly 300 percent. This rise has fueled the persistent, yet misleading, phrase “epidemic of autism.”

Autism diagnoses have risen by nearly 300 percent. Epidemiologists argue that this surge is caused by a profound change in definition and therefore detection.

However, epidemiologists consistently argue that this surge is not caused by a new environmental or pharmaceutical change affecting incidence, but rather a profound change in definition and therefore detection. Dr. Christine Ladd-Acosta, Vice Director of the Wendy Klag Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities, explains that the increase is primarily due to two factors: (1) the broadened definition of Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD) and (2) widely successful public healthprograms that increased screening and community awareness. The highest rates of increase are seen in individuals with “more subtle phenotypes” who may previously have gone undiagnosed, suggesting enhanced identification, not increased occurrence.

While the descriptor “epidemic” implies a sudden, rapid increase, the gradual 10–20 percent rise every two years observed in autism rates does not fit the definition. This distinction is critical, as it reframes the search for environmental causes from a desperate hunt for the single culprit behind a sudden catastrophe, to a more careful epidemiological effort to understand subtle risk factors interacting with strong genetic predispositions.

The Evidence for Association—and Why It Doesn't Prove CausationAcetaminophen has long been recommended as the safest pain medicine for use during pregnancy. Yet, starting in the 2010s, observational studies—asking parents of children with a diagnosis of NDD what medication they had used during the pregnancy—began reporting a measurable association between prenatal exposure and NDDs, primarily ADHD and, to a lesser extent, ASD.

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have identified clear statistical correlations. For example, an umbrella review of five systematic reviews reported significant associations between maternal prenatal acetaminophen use and ADHD outcomes in children, with Risk Ratios (RR) ranging from 1.08 to 1.34. One meta-analysis found acetaminophen exposure yielded an RR of 1.34 for ADHD outcomes and 1.19 for ASD outcomes.

(Risk ratio is a measure that compares the likelihood of a specific event occurring in one group versus another. It is calculated by dividing the risk of an event in an exposed group by the risk of the same event in a non-exposed or control group. A risk ratio of 1 means no difference in risk, a ratio greater than 1 indicates an increased risk, and a ratio less than 1 signifies a decreased, or protective, risk.)

Furthermore, some analyses suggested a dose-response relationship, indicating that the risk was magnified by prolonged use. Exposure lasting 28 consecutive days or longer was associated with an RR of 1.63 for ADHD outcomes. Associations were also linked more strongly to use in the third trimester, a period of rapid fetal brain development and differentiation.

The existence of a statistical association is insufficient for proving causality.

The skeptical mind should acknowledge that these associations might be pointing to a biologic possibility that could elevate a statistical correlation above chance. Acetaminophen is known to cross the placenta due to its lipid solubility and low molecular weight. Hypothesized mechanisms include its role as an endocrine disruptor and potential links to genital malformations. Researchers have suggested that acetaminophen use might indirectly affect the developing fetal brain by modulating the endocannabinoid system or altering dopamine metabolism and levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), pathways relevant to ADHD and ASD etiology. These potential connections have not been proven but have spurred some researchers to issue a “call for precautionary action” based on the accumulated evidence of association.

But we need to remind ourselves—over and over—that the existence of a statistical association, even one supported by theories of possible mechanistic causal factors—is insufficient for proving causality. This is where methodological rigor—the true measure of scientific skepticism—comes into play. The primary weakness of early observational studies is their susceptibility to confounding (in which other variables distort the observed relationship between an independent cause and a dependent effect variable in a study), for example “familial confounding,” or unobserved factors shared within a family that influence both the likelihood of drug use and a child’s risk of developing an NDD.

The most powerful counter-argument against the causal link comes from the nationwide Swedish cohort study, which analyzed 2,480,797 children born between 1995 and 2019. Initially, crude models without strict controls showed that “ever-use” of acetaminophen during pregnancy was associated with a marginally increased risk of autism (Hazard Ratio [HR], 1.05) and ADHD (HR, 1.07). This is the association cited by those advocating for caution. However, the researchers followed up with a careful siblingcontrol analysis. This design compares outcomes between full siblings where one was exposed to acetaminophen prenatally and the other was not. Because siblings share similar genetics, socioeconomic background, and exposure to many familial environmental factors, this comparison effectively removes the influence of stable, unobserved confounding variables. The results were unequivocal:

• In the sibling control analysis, acetaminophen use during pregnancy was not associated with autism (HR, 0.98; risk difference [RD], 0.02 percent).
• The use was also not associated with ADHD (HR, 0.98) or intellectual disability.

The study’s authors concluded that the associations observed in less-robust models “may have been attributable to familial confounding.” Renee Gardner, one of the study’s authors, suggested that genetic tendencies that increase the risk of autism often overlap with genes influencing pain perception, meaning the genetic risk factor causes both pain (leading to paracetamol use) and autism, making the painkiller an innocent bystander.

Why were some pregnant women using Tylenol in the first place, some as long as four weeks in a row?

This leads us to look at the indication for use. Why were some pregnant women using Tylenol in the first place, some as long as four weeks in a row? Untreated maternal conditions like fever, chronic pain, or inflammation are known risk factors for adverse outcomes in offspring. If the mother is taking acetaminophen because she has a severe infection or chronic migraine, the drug may simply be a proxy for the underlying illness, which is the true confounding factor in the observed association.

One common, though often overlooked, familial confounder involves the complex relationship between pain sensitivity and neurodevelopment. As Gardner explained, maternal conditions like hypermobility (unusually flexible joints)—which can cause joint pain requiring painkillers—are also “more likely to have autistic children.” If researchers fail to account for this overlap, “painkillers can wrongly appear to be a risk factor.”

Skeptics should also look at the evidence countering this study. Critics, including Ann Bauer and Shanna Swan, argue that the Swedish study’s conclusion—that the association is entirely confounded—is premature due to methodological limitations. They point out, for example, that the reported acetaminophen usage rate in the Swedish cohort (7.5 percent) was “far lower than what is reported in studies around the world” (which typically report around 50 percent). This suggests high rates of exposure misclassification, which, if not dependent on the outcome, “would bias results toward the null, or ‘no effect’.” In other words, if many exposed mothers were misclassified as unexposed, the benefit of the sibling control design is dampened.

Furthermore, these critics caution that the sibling-control design, while excellent for controlling for confounders, might inadvertently control for mediators—variables that lie on the causal pathway between exposure and outcome. If acetaminophen triggers a biological change (e.g., endocrine disruption) that is genetically sensitive and leads to NDDs, the sibling control could eliminate this genuine causal mechanism, introducing a different form of bias. Given that experimental animal studies have identified biological mediators related to the endocannabinoid system and oxidative stress, Bauer and Swan urge “caution in interpreting the study’s conclusions regarding the causal relationship.”

Enter PoliticsThis critique highlights that while the Swedish study drastically undercut the causality argument, the scientific door remains slightly ajar, requiring continued prudence regarding heavy or chronic use. Unfortunately, the scientific nuances of familial confounding, misclassification bias, and mediators versus confounders were recently abruptly jettisoned from public discourse in favor of dramatic political statements.

The political rhetoric took the association several steps further than the cautious scientific findings would allow.

The claims linking acetaminophen to autism, notably pushed by President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are based, in part, on research showing evidence of an association, such as the review co-authored by Harvard Public Health Dean Andrea A. Baccarelli. However, the political rhetoric took the association several steps further than the cautious scientific findings (above) would allow. President Trump flatly advised, “Don’t take Tylenol. Don’t take it. Fight like hell not to take it,” alleging it was associated with a “very increased” autism risk.

This message has been criticized for being “mistakenly and cruelly pitch[ing] women’s needs against the best interests of their baby.” Professor Sarah Hawkes noted that the rhetoric introduces “stigma and guilt” for parents of autistic children. The fear is magnified by the FDA's decision to initiate the process of including a warning about a “possible association” with autism risk on product safety labels, even while emphasizing that causality has not been established. Since the White House’s announcement, it has also been reported that hospitalized and outpatients who are male, and women who are not pregnant, have been refusing to take acetaminophen out of fear of the unknown. The key point here is that this advice—to avoid the drug at all costs—ignores the known, immediate risks of non-treatment:

1. Risk of Untreated Illness: Fever in pregnancy is not benign. Untreated high fever is associated with miscarriage, congenital malformations (including cardiac defects and neural tube defects), preterm delivery, and intrauterine fetal demise.
2. Risk of Substitution: Acetaminophen remains the safest over-the-counter analgesic during pregnancy. Discouraging its use risks pushing women toward alternatives such as ibuprofen (a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug or NSAID), which has documented, proven risks in pregnancy, including fetal kidney damage and premature closure of the ductus arteriosus (a temporary blood vessel that connects the aorta—the main artery of the body—to the pulmonary artery—the artery that carries blood to the lungs—in the fetus). As epidemiologist Prof. Laurie Tomlinson noted, “Paracetamol is far and away the safest painkiller in pregnancy so if women are more reluctant to take it they are going to be suffering unnecessarily.”

Summary of Risks and RecommendationThe highest-quality scientific evidence, specifically the robust methodology of sibling-control analysis, does not support a causal link between maternal acetaminophen use and the risk of ASD or ADHD. The observed initial statistical associations are best explained as familial confounding.

However, given the political and public health landscape, we can suggest a balanced approach, acknowledging the persistence of associations in some studies and the biological plausibility of harm from chronic, high exposure.

Summary of Risks at This Time

| Risk Category | Nature of Risk | Evidence Status | | Exposure Risk (Acetaminophen) | Theoretical, marginally increased absolute risk of NDDs (e.g., 0.09 percent for autism). | High Confounding: Overwhelmingly attributable to familial and underlying health factors (e.g., indication for use). Weak evidence of a causal link. | | Avoidance Risk (Untreated Symptoms) | Proven, severe risks from untreated fever (miscarriage, congenital malformations, fetal demise). | Established: Strong evidence that the harms of untreated fever/pain outweigh the non-causal associations of the treatment. | | Substitution Risk (Alternative Drugs) | Proven risks from using alternative analgesics (e.g., Ibuprofen). | Established: Acetaminophen is the safest available first-line treatment. | | Societal Risk (Scaremongering) | Increased maternal anxiety, guilt, and mistrust in medical science. | Observable: Direct consequence of irresponsible public statements. |

Recommendation for Risk ManagementClinicians and pregnant women should remain rational and evidence-driven, resisting the “theater of scaremongering.” Acetaminophen remains the safest and most effective first-line treatment for pain and fever during pregnancy. The key management recommendation is judicious use:

1. Use Only When Necessary: Health professionals should advise women to use acetaminophen only when medically required, such as for persistent pain or high fever.
2. Minimal Dosage, Minimal Duration: Follow the guideline of using the “lowest effective dose for the shortest possible duration” under medical guidance. This is good advice for ALL medications.
3. Prioritize Fever Treatment: High fever must be treated due to its documented risks to the fetus. Pregnant women should be reassured that treating fever with acetaminophen is safer than allowing the fever to persist.

In the complex nexus where politics, public health, and perinatal science meet, skepticism demands we follow the most rigorous evidence. That evidence confirms that while caution is warranted in all drug use during pregnancy, the proven risks of foregoing necessary treatment far outweigh the confounding-laden claims of a causal link between Tylenol and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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Recognizing the specifics of transmission was one of the greatest points of contention that arose during the COVID pandemic. And of all the aspects of our COVID response that went wrong, I maintain that the most consequential failure of the public health and medical establishments was not understanding, accepting, and promoting what we needed to do to effectively address the critical role of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, meaning via both droplets and aerosols. (While many people think of spray cans of deodorant, air fresheners, and similar products when they hear the word “aerosol,” in science and public health, an aerosol is any particle, regardless of size, that is suspended in the air.) Smoke, fumes, rainy mist, even dust from a volcano eruption can be aerosolized. Smoke from a large forest fire can travel hundreds of miles through the air, as we in the northern United States saw in the summer of 2023 when our air quality was affected by wildfires in Canada.

Respiratory transmission of dangerous microbes is not only among the most crucial considerations in all of epidemiology but also one of the most daunting. You can diet in an effort to lose weight. You can give up smoking to improve your lung function. You can exercise to strengthen your heart and enhance muscle tone. But you can’t stop breathing. And this means that when there’s a potentially deadly threat lurking invisibly in the air, each breath we take can be a pathway into our bodies—a route that is accessible to both droplets and aerosols.

Aerobiology is the study of biologic (i.e., not chemical) particles such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, and pollen. Aerobiologists and their colleagues in industrial hygiene study how infectious agents spread in droplets and aerosols. They conduct sophisticated air testing in laboratories to reach a detailed understanding of how respiratory protection devices work. Now, the distinction between small droplets in the air and floating aerosol particles might seem subtle or insignificant, but to those who specialize in aerobiology, and to epidemiologists like me, it is profound, with tremendous implications for how we approach disease prevention. So, what’s the difference, and why is it critical to pandemic preparedness going forward?

Droplets are tiny globs of liquid that come out of your nose or mouth when, say, you sneeze or cough. They can be expelled when you sing or shout, as anyone who’s been in the front row at a play or concert may have observed, watching performers’ spit project, along with their words or song, illuminated in the bright stage lights. As small and generally unnoticeable as these particles may be, they’re heavy enough to fall to the ground by force of gravity.

Droplets travel short distances or sink to the nearest surface. This is where the guidance for maintaining six feet of social distancing came from during the COVID pandemic. Many who argued that COVID was spread through droplets figured that since the infected droplets would have to be propelled into mucous membranes to take hold, keeping six feet away from other people would make it unlikely you could catch the disease that way.

Aerosol particles come out of your nose or mouth as droplets do, but if you want to understand an aerosol, think about how you can smell perfume across a wide mall hallway from the stores that sell it, or the last time you saw dust particles streaming in the sunlight coming through a window in your house.

If I’m in a room speaking, within minutes, small particles expelled from my mouth and nose will be floating in the air, even though no one may see or feel them. If you’re in that room, you’re going to inhale my particles and exhale particles of your own—what I call “swapping air.” Droplets come largely from coughing or sneezing, and the droplet hits you in your nose, eyes, or mouth, like an incoming projectile. Compare these droplets to the free-floating aerosol particles circulating from that same cough, sneeze, or even just breathing. The aerosols are present in that same six-foot “social distance” zone as the droplets are, but aerosols are also potentially present even yards away. You can see how the transmission of a respiratory pathogen via an aerosol versus a droplet is a game changer in terms of the ease with which a virus can spread. And if the people who are infectious aren’t showing any symptoms yet, and don’t even know they are spreading it, as was often the case with SARS-CoV-2, that ratchets up the risk another significant notch, with no corresponding indication of the threat.

Using surgical (sometimes called procedure) masks against an aerosol-transmitted virus is the equivalent of putting a screen door on a submarine and expecting it to keep water out.

Outside, air currents move and spread the viral particles quickly and far enough apart that the danger of infection decreases, though it certainly isn’t nonexistent. But inside, even in a large room, the concentration of viral particles means that we “swap air”—and whatever is suspended in that air—much more efficiently in enclosed spaces.

Most people are now familiar with measures to prevent droplet transmission because we tried them in an attempt to stop SARS-CoV-2 spread. Think back to the early days of COVID, when banks, store checkout lanes, front desks at apartment buildings, etc., put up glass, plastic, or plexiglass barriers to keep people separated from one another. That may have done some good in protecting folks from sneezes and coughs, but unless those partitions provided a complete and unbroken separation from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, with no air mixing between the two sides (making any kind of interaction almost impossible), they weren’t accomplishing anything when it came to aerosol particles.

When I saw those kinds of barriers, I’d ask, “If someone was smoking a cigarette on the other side of the partition, would you be able to smell it?”

“Yes, of course” was the usual answer.

“Then you’re not protected from aerosol transmission.”

This is what we call hygiene theater. In July 2020, Derek Thompson, a staff writer for The Atlantic, published an article on the subject, criticizing measures being taken during that early stage of the pandemic that provided a false sense of security but did little to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Untold millions, if not billions, were spent on such measures. Imagine if we had, instead, invested some of that money ahead of time into stockpiles of personal protective equipment (PPE)—specifically, N95 respirators—for our healthcare workers, first responders, and essential employees, like those who work at food-processing plants and shipping facilities.

This was one of the greatest failures from the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a lesson we must learn now so we can do better next time. We should have educated everyone that the most effective way to avoid breathing in SARS-CoV-2—an aerosol- and droplet-spread virus—was to use an N95 respirator (officially called an N95 filtering facepiece respirator) correctly and consistently. Using surgical (sometimes called procedure) masks against an aerosol-transmitted virus is the equivalent of putting a screen door on a submarine and expecting it to keep water out. To encourage, let alone mandate, the use of “masks” without both making clear that the only highly effective ones are N95 respirators and explaining how they must be worn for maximum protection was a major mistake.

Unfortunately, right from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a proliferation of problematic studies “proving” that methods to prevent transmission—such as wearing N95 respirators rather than surgical, cloth, or even no mask—made little to no difference. So-called experts with no training in industrial hygiene, aerobiology, respiratory protection, or epidemiology wrote analysis pieces or conducted masking studies that were seriously flawed from a scientific perspective. Nonexpert journalists would expound on such studies with no sense of how little they actually knew or understood. Of note, some of the most problematic studies were published by the CDC in their highly respected and relied upon Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

This is what we call hygiene theater.

This brings us to one of the most controversial and misunderstood aspects of the COVID pandemic, which I fear will raise significant impediments as we try to plan and prepare for future pandemics: the entire subject of masks and masking. There is a lot of responsibility to go around for the misinformation on this topic, from the media to politicians to the public health community itself. Several years into the COVID-19 pandemic, it was still not clear to most of the public if they should be wearing a mask at all, let alone how different types of masks provide different levels of protection, yet this is the most useful information one could have.

There are a host of issues around the subject, from what type of masks actually offer protection and under what circumstances, to how to make PPE available to everyone who needs it, and how to educate people on when and how to wear such equipment. In the early days of COVID, with medical PPE in short supply, we were told to protect ourselves with some sort of nose and mouth covering but leave the N95 respirators to front line healthcare workers. Many people resorted to bandanas pulled up over their noses, which made them look like outlaws in old Western movies but hardly did anything to keep them from inhaling viral aerosols. This is not meant to mock people who were sincerely trying to protect themselves but to underscore how challenging it was for people to ferret out good information.

Early in the COVID pandemic, in February 2020, U.S. surgeon general Dr. Jerome Adams tweeted that masks did not offer any benefit to the average citizen in preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission. On April 1, 2020, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, having established a rapid COVID-19 expert consultation committee, reviewed the possibility of a bioaerosol spread of SARS-CoV-2 and concluded, “While the current SARS-CoV-2 research is limited, the results of available studies are consistent with the aerosolization of virus from normal breathing.”

There was not a single scientific paper or other authority cited to support the idea that cloth masks provided any respiratory protection from airborne transmission.

That same month, the CDC published “Recommendation Regarding the Use of Cloth Face Coverings, Especially in Areas of Significant Community-Based Transmission,” which stated, “CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission” (italics added).

There was not a single scientific paper or other authority cited to support the idea that cloth masks provided any respiratory protection from airborne transmission. Also on the site was a handout from the CDC’s NIOSH, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health—the government agency responsible for research and recommendations for the prevention of work-related accidents and illness, recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on respiratory protection—with text stating that a surgical mask “Does NOT provide the wearer with a reliable level of protection from inhaling smaller airborne particles and is not considered respiratory protection.” Further, it warned, “leakage occurs around the edge of the mask when the user inhales.”

Is it any wonder people were confused?

The word “surgical” sounds authoritative and scientific, as if something surgeons use in operating rooms must be the ultimate standard. In fact, surgical masks were never designed to create an airtight barrier between operating room personnel and the air in the room. They were designed, essentially, to keep surgeons and nurses from sneezing, coughing, or otherwise “dripping” into the patient’s open surgical field, and to protect them from blood spatter from the wound. And they might not even do that effectively.

Given that, I was stunned when I saw Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC during the first Trump administration, on CNBC, holding up a paper surgical mask as he testified on Capitol Hill on September 16, 2020, declaring, “These face masks are the most important, powerful public health tool we have [against the coronavirus]. We have clear scientific evidence they work, and they are our best defense.” He added, “I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine.” I found the lack of clarity on the type of mask he was talking about an alarming and irresponsible example of the kind of incomplete, misleading information that had plagued the CDC and other presumably reliable sources since the beginning of the pandemic.

Does this mean we shouldn’t have been wearing masks during COVID or that we shouldn’t plan to have them for the next pandemic? Absolutely not! What it means is that we need to get better at defining our recommendations and basing our advice on the best scientific evidence available, and at sharing it in the clearest terms possible.

How a mask protects you from inhaling a virus is all about fit and filtration, and only one kind of mask meets the critical requirements of these two essential features. By this, of course, I mean a respirator—a term that is often confused by the public and media with “ventilator” (a machine normally seen in hospitals and other healthcare facilities that helps you breathe) but that in truth refers to a face covering that could well save your life in the next pandemic.

If an infected and uninfected individual are both using fit-tested N95s, it would take about 25 hours of exposure for an uninfected person to inhale an infectious dose.

Tests have shown decisively the difference an N95 respirator makes against no protection or any other type of mask. For example, when an infected person is in the proximity of an uninfected, unprotected person, transmission of a sufficient virus dose can cause infection in fifteen minutes or fewer. One achieves only five to fifteen minutes of additional protection with the use of a typical cloth or surgical mask. In contrast, if an infected and uninfected individual are both using fit-tested N95s, it would take about 25 hours of exposure for an uninfected person to inhale an infectious dose! That’s how much difference a certified N95 respirator can make.

Cross section of N95 mask layer showing filtering material (purple) made from melt blown polypropylene fibers forming a chaotic web, which are smaller with greater surface area than cotton, making them highly effective filters. (Credit: E.P. Vicenzi/Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute and NIST)The special filtration material in N95s is known as melt blown fiber. It’s a synthetic material that is electrostatically charged, which allows it to filter out potential airborne pathogenic particles. In laboratory test conditions, N95 respirators can filter at least 95 percent of particles. The real-world efficiency of an N95 filter is generally higher than what is seen in a laboratory setting. China’s KN95, as well as Europe’s FFP2, Australia and New Zealand’s P2, Japan’s DS, and South Korea’s 1st Class employ similar filtration material, though the fit may not be as tight or precise.

And the fit of a respirator is just as important as the material for optimal protection. Think of swim goggles. There is no leakage through the plastic lens, but if the seal around the eyes is poor, the goggles quickly fill with water. Cloth face coverings and surgical masks do not fit tightly against the face, so major leakage of air occurs with both inhalation and exhalation. N95 respirators, even when not fit-tested as required for occupation-related protection, can create a good seal if placed firmly and tightly on the face. A mask with some empty space is actually more comfortable to wear. That’s why N95s are cup-shaped or otherwise provide more space within while maintaining a seal.

Respirators are commonly used in construction, mining, and general manufacturing, by artists working with materials that may be harmful if inhaled, and by people living in areas affected by wildfires. In fact, typically only about 10 to 20 percent of N95s are sold for healthcare purposes—and that’s at the peak of a bad flu season. Before the COVID pandemic, N95s were mostly used to protect workers from inhaling dangerous aerosolized chemicals from paints, solvents, and other substances. Such respirators may have a small valve that lets the wearer’s exhalation out efficiently while keeping the bad stuff from getting in. In that context, it doesn’t matter that the wearer’s breath is getting out without being filtered. With the advent of COVID and use of respirators for nonindustrial applications, it became clear that, even though less comfortable, the hospital type of respirator—without the valve—was the one to protect wearers from the particles around them and protect others from their potentially infectious exhalations.

In the United States, to earn N95 designation, a device must be approved by NIOSH. Though part of the Atlanta-based CDC, NIOSH is headquartered in Washington, DC, with research labs around the country.

In hospital settings, it is recommended that N95s be used for a single shift and then discarded or sanitized, though during the shortage of N95s early in the pandemic, some healthcare systems had workers reuse N95s after storing them for five days to reduce virus on the respirator surface or trapped in the melt blown fiber. We didn’t have studies on how effective this technique was. But we found during the pandemic that people who wear them outside healthcare settings—for example, during visits to a grocery store—can use them for several days at least, particularly if they are kept clean.

In my line of work, we call that a chin diaper, and it is useless, like wearing a mask in a restaurant only until it's time to eat.

Admittedly, wearing a respirator for a long period of time can be uncomfortable, even for hospital workers who are used to them. Still, if you want to protect yourself from aerosol pathogens, respirators will work in any public setting where you are concerned for your safety.

On top of the relative ineffectiveness of cloth and surgical masks for filtration, our studies at CIDRAP showed that 25 to 30 percent of people routinely wore their masks below their noses. In my line of work, we call that a chin diaper, and it is useless, like wearing a mask in a restaurant only until it’s time to eat. If you give the virus an opportunity, you can’t be surprised if it finds its way in. And finally, facial hair and respiratory protection don’t mix well. If you’re wearing your mask—even an N95—over a beard, it is not providing a perfect seal.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic we did have a shortage of N95s for critical use in healthcare. However, by late spring 2021, increased domestic production of N95s and the import of respirators from Asia resulted in an adequate supply to support recommendations for their everyday use. On June 30, 2021, the FDA revoked three Emergency Use Authorizations that were issued in spring 2020 to combat the respirator shortage.

Yet the messaging to the public didn’t change. It pains me to think of all the lives that might have been saved if it had.

Adapted by the authors from The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics, by Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, and Mark Olshaker. Copyright © 2025 by Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, and Mark Olshaker. Used with permission of Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

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“And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?” —Matthew 7:3

“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.”
—Thomas Carlyle, Historian & Essayist

Schools, from kindergarten to graduate programs, are always ground zero in any culture war. Ban their books! Fire their teachers! Extremists from both the right and the left share this censorious impulse to protect their children from dangerous ideas—dangerous ideas being defined as anything on which people disagree, usually sex, race, gender, sex, history, religion, prejudice, and did I say sex? They deliver propaganda. We tell the truth. They indoctrinate our children. We educate them.

My favorite bias is the bias that we are unbiased.

Let’s stipulate that everyone is biased. The brain comes packaged with a bunch of self-serving mechanisms (the confirmation bias, hindsight bias, and so on) that allow us to justify our own perceptions and beliefs as being accurate, realistic, and wise. My favorite bias is the bias that we are unbiased. Social psychologist Lee Ross named this phenomenon “naive realism,” the conviction that we perceive objects and events clearly, “as they really are,” so anyone who disagrees with us is not seeing clearly.

Richard FeynmanScience, which might be defined as the systematic effort to force us to see clearly especially when we are wrong, is always under attack from those who cannot tolerate the mere existence of dissonant views. Today, however, the venom of polarizing ideologies has been poisoning the process more than ever. How true, but now how quaint, seems the sublime observation by Richard Feynman to students in his 1964 class at Cornell University:

If your guess disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.

We read that now and shake our heads, knowing how so many people, including scientists and scholars who should know better, respond when an experiment disputes a belief: “Your guess is racist/sexist/socialist/other-ist, simply because you tried to test the veracity of something we already know is true.” “The experiment is wrong, because it is impossible for my guess to be wrong, because I’m right.” “The experiment is biased.” “Your interpretation is biased.” “You are biased. You are racist and reactionary.” “No, you are biased. You are a communist and a socialist to boot.” “Plus, your ideas are revolting.”

I got to thinking about the problem of bias in my own profession when I was sent a copy of Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology (edited by Craig Frisby, Richard Redding, William O’Donohue, and the late, much admired Scott Lilienfeld). This massive collection—33 chapters running some 950 pages—is a scholarly effort to describe the academic and intellectual harms to psychological science, academia, and society when the vast majority of its practitioners identify themselves as liberal to progressive.1 I fully agree, which is why I find it unfortunate that the title blurs “ideological and political.” I, along with many (most?) politically liberal psychologists of my generation, am as horrified and dismayed by the left-wing ideological changes imposed throughout academia as any conservative is—just as many politically conservative people are horrified and dismayed by the rise of ideologically driven right-wing extremists.2

Both extremes are currently doing great damage to our society. Nevertheless, the rise of today’s Ideological Left is indisputably a major factor underlying the uncritical acceptance of Critical Race Theory, hiring requirements stipulating that applicants have done enough for “diversity,” and (failed) efforts to change prejudices, “implicit biases,” and “microaggressions,” real and assumed, through censorship of dissenting views and mandatory sensitivity (re-education) workshops. It’s now the Ideological Left that, waving the banner of justice and diversity for all except those who disagree with them, has put entire areas of investigation virtually off limits, and caused countless brilliant scientists to be excoriated, shunned, or suspended for taking on taboo subjects or questioning current orthodox beliefs. The eminent gender scientist J. Michael Bailey has a chapter in the Frisby volume, describing how he has been attacked from the right for his work on sexual orientation and from the left for his research on trans issues, daring to dispute the inaccurate—dare I say biased—claims of trans activists. Recently, under pressure from such activists, The Archives of Sexual Behavior caved, retracting a paper he co-authored with Suzanna Diaz on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.3

The scientific fight against bias and dogma is never ending, and the ideological wheel is always turning.

The most taboo topics are genetic, evolutionary, or other biological explanations of behavior and group differences. Evolutionary biologists Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja have written despairingly of the ideological capture of their profession.4 I filed their superb lament under “read this and weep,” remembering how, in the 1970s, feminist psychologists fought hard against the way biological explanations were being applied in the justification of inequality and misogyny. Who imagined that from there it would be only a short step from correcting a bias in research to imposing new biases—not letting biology raise its nose, or paw, in explaining anything. At the time, research was also profoundly biased by focusing on the “normal” male, with findings often wildly and inappropriately generalized to women; Robert Guthrie’s splendid book, Even the Rat Was White, identified deeply embedded biases in the study of race. (One colleague, noting that rats are nocturnal but researchers study them in daytime, said, “actually, psychology is the study of the white male sleepy rat.” Psychology had plenty of biases to correct.)

Thus, the scientific fight against bias and dogma is never ending, and the ideological wheel is always turning. The New School for Social Research was founded in New York City in 1919 as an act of protest against university presidents who had fired pacifist professors for opposing America’s decision to enter the First World War; nearly a hundred years later, in 2015, the Heterodox Academy was founded “as a response to the rise of [progressive Left] orthodoxy within scholarly culture that leads people to fear shame, ostracism, or any other form of social or professional retaliation for questioning or challenging a commonly held idea.” In previous eras universities were perfectly willing to silence or eject liberal faculty and students who protested the Vietnam War or wouldn’t sign loyalty oaths in the heyday of anticommunist fervor. Nor have Conservative Christian colleges welcomed liberals and atheists with open arms or allowed them unlimited free speech.

In every era too, there have been the ideologically committed academics and practitioners who try to kill the messengers of news that threatens their beliefs and, more important, their livelihoods. In the late 1990s, when psychiatrists and psychotherapists were being convicted of malpractice for their use of coercive methods to generate false recovered memories and multiple personalities, one recovered-memory practitioner offered his clinical colleagues at a convention this advice:

I think it’s time somebody called for an open season on academicians and researchers … in particular, things have become so extreme with academics supporting extreme false memory positions, so I think it’s time for clinicians to begin bringing ethics charges for scientific malpractice against researchers, and journal editors—most of whom, I would point out, don’t have malpractice coverage.

Some psychiatrists and clinical psychologists took his counsel and sent harassing letters to researchers and journal editors, made spurious claims of ethics violations against scientists studying memory and children’s testimony, and filed nuisance lawsuits aimed at blocking publication of critical articles and books. None of these pre-internet efforts were successful at silencing the memory scientists, but they paid a big price for their courage in anger, frustration, and considerable expense.5

Perhaps, then, instead of talking about a liberal-conservative bias in education, we should be thinking about liberal-conservative biases and orthodoxies by topic. The bias that is most relevant today is what Keith Stanovich, that stalwart promoter of critical thinking, calls the “myside bias,” which lives in the intersection of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. In 2021, when the din echoing across the political chasm was at it loudest, he published The Bias That Divides Us, arguing that we don’t live in a post-truth society so much as a “myside” society.6 Each side is perfectly able to value the truth and respect the facts, he argues, but only insofar as those facts confirm what their side believes on a particular subject. “Intelligence does not inoculate against it,” Stanovich noted, “and myside bias in one domain is not a good indicator of bias shown in any other domain.”

Bias and other cognitive blind spots are especially prevalent among the most intelligent and highly educated members of society, precisely because they see themselves as being smarter and less vulnerable to bias.

For example, as other researchers have found, among conservatives, higher levels of scientific literacy and education are associated with reduced acceptance of climate change, the importance of vaccination, and trust in science; among liberals, the reverse is true.7 But whereas most liberals accept the scientific evidence that supports climate change and vaccination, many—to pull up a random example from myownside—do not accept the evidence that questions the safety and necessity of “gender affirming” medical interventions on young teenagers. As people trek step by step into the territory of ideology, their views tend to become increasingly impervious to data. Indeed, Stanovich finds, as did Elliot Aronson and I in our book on cognitive dissonance, that bias and other cognitive blind spots are especially prevalent among the most intelligent and highly educated members of society, precisely because they see themselves as being smarter and less vulnerable to bias. Yale-educated Ted Cruz, anyone? Harvard-educated Robert F. Kennedy Jr., anyone? The Supreme Court, anyone? Accepting lavish gifts and trips from mega-billionaires doesn’t affect their decisions, or does it?

Photo by Ante Hamersmit / UnsplashWhat is new about the latest turn of the ideological wheel in universities and many organizations is the institutionalization of rules, language, and policies that permit, indeed require, the exclusion of those who dissent from the new progressive orthodoxy. What is new is the immediate availability of an army of authoritarian activists who mobilize at the drop of a tweet to get scientific articles retracted from once-serious journals and their editors fired. What is new is that too often, the journals capitulate. What is new is that universities and scientific institutions have stopped being the grown-ups, fearful for their wallets if they say no to organized social media pressure.

My modest proposal is that we focus our energies issue by issue, domain by domain, ever aware of our own myside biases, and to hell with labels.

But some of the problems across academia today stem from generational and economic changes that have nothing to do with liberal bias. For example, the seeds of “safetyism,” students demanding intellectual and emotional protection from any dangerous ideas they might encounter in college—otherwise known as “education”—were planted decades ago by a generation of fearful, overprotective parents who controlled every aspect of their children’s lives, as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt describe so well in The Coddling of the American Mind.8 Colleges responded with a return to in loco parentis policies, since students and parents insisted on them. At the same time, the corporatization of universities had transformed students into paying consumers, with the ensuing need for administrations to yield to their “demands” for everything from safety to higher grades to the power to censor unwelcome speakers. (Another turn of the wheel: my college cohort had lots of demands too, from getting the U.S. out of Vietnam to letting boys into our rooms. We marched with signs that said “in loco parentis is loco” and “the Open- Door policy failed in China, too.”)

So my modest proposal is that we focus our energies issue by issue, domain by domain, ever aware of our own myside biases, and to hell with labels. I will always be liberal in supporting child labor laws, abortion on demand, expanded access to voting, and many other issues. But I resigned from the ACLU years ago for its failure to support teachers who were being fired for espousing dissenting ideas and for defending those who would fire them on “social justice” grounds. I will protest where I can the once-“liberal” organizations that fail to defend free speech and civil rights, including women’s rights. To change the currently entrenched ideological culture on most college campuses and a growing number of mainstream institutions, we will need the best efforts of liberals and conservatives alike, and damn the dissonance that will ensue.

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“If there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do us no harm.”1

Ever since a Hezbollah suicide bomber in 1983 blew up a truck packed with explosives and killed 241 Marines in Beirut, combating Islamic terrorist organizations has been a priority for U.S. intelligence, security, and law enforcement agencies. However, for those of us who have followed the spiraling growth of Islamic terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s, it seemed as if the U.S was sluggishly reactive. They made little headway in extensive counterterrorism programs designed at penetrating and dismantling Islamic terror groups.2

How was it possible for the hijackers and their plot to remain off the radar of intelligence and law enforcement?

The 9/11 attack put a spotlight on the failures of the security agencies tasked to protect the U.S. against acts of terror. How was it possible for 19 hijackers and their ambitious plot to remain off the radar of intelligence and law enforcement? The truth, as I discovered during 18 months of reporting for my book, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, was not that the plot had gone undetected, but rather that the agencies responsible for monitoring and fighting terrorism had failed to share information, something that would have made it possible to connect the dots before the attack occurred.

The failures were more substantive than mere interagency rivalries between the CIA, FBI, NSA, and local law enforcement. Exclusive interviews I had with top intelligence officers and FBI officials revealed that the origins and depth of the dysfunction inside America’s counterintelligence programs was an internecine bureaucratic war that left little room for working together. Sharing information was given lip service but seldom practiced, particularly when the intelligence at stake was judged as having “high value.”

If the CIA had alerted the State Department, the two Saudis would have been on a watch list that barred them from entering the United States.

The most serious failure was the CIA’s tracking of two terrorists, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, when they moved from Saudi Arabia to California in 2000. If the CIA had alerted the State Department, the two Saudis would have been on a watch list that barred them from entering the United States. Once in California, however, the CIA could not legally monitor them domestically. The Agency not only lost track of the two Saudis but failed to let the FBI, which is specifically authorized to act within the U.S., know they were here. In July of 2001, only two months before 9/11, an FBI memo warned the American intelligence community that some bin Laden followers might be training at U.S. flight schools in preparation for an aerial terror attack. The CIA was unaware that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi had taken flight training while living in the U.S.

If the CIA had shared its information about the two Saudis, al-Mihdhar might have been detained in June 2001, when he returned to Saudi Arabia and his visa had expired. Or when an Oklahoma state trooper pulled over al-Hazmi for speeding and a driver’s license check in the national database would have triggered security alerts. Sharing the CIA security concerns about the duo would have meant the Transportation Department had a red flag on them. The pair even used their own names when making reservations on American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon.

“Responsibility and accountability were diffuse,” the 9/11 Commission Report concluded a year after I had published Why America Slept.3 That was a diplomatic understatement of the paralyzing dysfunction between intelligence and security agencies and policy makers. The unintended consequence of such discord was to give the advantage invariably to the terrorists.

My reporting revealed that the dearth of cooperation between the country’s top security and intelligence services was not new to 9/11. Exposing how and why the breakdowns to communicate between agencies had begun and persisted for decades explains why the world’s best law enforcement and intelligences agencies ended up fighting each other instead of combating Islamic terrorism.

“We knew that the Islamic threat was the next security problem for the U.S., and we had known it since the 1970s,” Duane “Dewey” Clarridge told me in a rare no-questions-off-limit interview in the wake of 9/11.4 Clarridge was a CIA legend. He was twenty-three when he joined the Agency in 1955 and over the next thirty years earned a reputation as one of its most accomplished covert operatives. Clarridge served in Nepal, India, and Turkey, before returning to headquarters in the 1970s. He became the chief of covert operations for the Near East Division, later ran Arab covert ops, then moved to the Latin American Division, before becoming the Rome station chief. It was during his three years in Arab operations that Clarridge became familiar with the key Islamic terrorists.

“We were running operations in Beirut against an alphabet-soup of Palestinian terror groups,” recalled Clarridge. “At the same time, Carlos the Jackal was running around Europe, pulling off stunts like trying to use a grenade launcher to down an El Al airplane at Orly, or shooting his way into the Vienna OPEC meeting, killing three, and kidnapping the Saudi and Iranian oil ministers. We had our hands full.”5

The Rivalry for Control of Operations and Investigations Between the CIA and FBI continues.

Terrorists ambushed and murdered Richard Welch, the CIA’s Athens station chief, two days before Christmas in 1975. Clarridge and his senior CIA colleagues wanted to go after the terrorists with covert assassination plans. The Agency’s timing was poor, however. Senate hearings into past misdeeds produced months of sordid headlines about the Agency’s 1960s assassination plots working with the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro, mind-control experiments, and failed foreign coups. Those hearings “permanently changed the way Clandestine Services operated,” says Clarridge. “It changed the rules of the game for us.”6

Congress initiated a process by which the Agency had to submit plans for its covert ops to a committee chaired by the president. Congress would be notified within sixty days after the president signed off. Permanent congressional oversight committees were established. The coup de grâce was President Ford’s Executive Order 11905 on February 18, 1976, that barred U.S. government agencies from undertaking assassinations.

The CIA abruptly halted its plans to eliminate Welch’s killers. For the next seven years, the Agency instead engaged in a mostly unsuccessful campaign to gather intelligence on leading Islamic terror groups in the hope of alerting allies to upcoming attacks.

The suicide truck bomber changed everything.

The suicide truck bomber who struck the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983 changed everything. CIA Director William Casey and FBI Director William Webster immediately dispatched teams to find out what happened. There were conflicts between those teams from the start. They got so bad that the agents of the rival agencies sometimes got into screaming and shoving matches. The FBI team returned home early, angry and frustrated by what it complained was dismissive treatment by its CIA counterparts.7 The CIA’s new Beirut station chief, William Buckley, ultimately offered an olive branch to the FBI: he invited the Bureau to dispatch another team to Lebanon and investigate free of CIA micromanagement. The FBI solved the case by tracing a fragment of an axle from the bombing truck to an Iranian factory that had links to the Iranian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

But by the time the FBI reached that conclusion, Iranian-sponsored terrorists had managed to kidnap Buckley in Beirut. That prompted President Reagan to create the government’s first joint task force to battle terrorism. The Restricted Interagency Group for Terrorism was chaired by the CIA’s director of covert operations, and it consisted of single representatives from the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Council. Dewey Clarridge was the Agency rep. The FBI’s man was Oliver “Buck” Revell, the assistant director for criminal investigations (I knew Buck well; he was the FBI Supervisor in Charge of the Dallas office when I researched the JFK assassination for my 1993 book, Case Closed). The National Security Council selected a U.S. Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North as its representative.

The new anti-terror group was in a rush to free Buckley before he could be tortured into giving up secrets. North wanted to use DEA informants—heroin traffickers who promised to deliver Buckley for $2 million. Dallas businessman Ross Perot agreed to finance the ransom to avoid U.S. laws that prohibited paying money to drug dealers. But the FBI, under the cautious leadership of William Webster, a former judge whom Jimmy Carter had appointed to run the Bureau, strenuously objected. North then backed a Clarridge operation to kidnap a Lebanese Shiite cleric, the head of Islamic Jihad, the organization holding Buckley. Clarridge wanted to trade the cleric for the CIA station chief. Again, the FBI’s fierce resistance scuttled the plan.

Clarridge fumed at the FBI’s intransigence and lobbied Casey to give the Agency more power in fighting terrorism. In January 1986, with a green light from Ronald Reagan, Casey created the Counterterrorism Center (CTC). Clarridge became its chief and he directed a staff of two hundred CIA officers, mostly analysts, as well as ten people loaned from other government intel and security agencies.8

Clarridge initially wanted to rely on the CIA’s foreign stations for surveillance, intel gathering, and informer recruitment, but that was not feasible since they were running at capacity. And, as Clarridge recalled, “the station chiefs were each narrowly focused on their own geographic divisions, while terrorism was a global problem that respected no boundaries.”9

Much to Clarridge’s disappointment, his only remaining option was to rely on the FBI for most of CTC’s field and operational assistance. It was against his better judgment since he thought the Webster-run FBI was far too risk-averse. Working with the Bureau also meant Clarridge had to run operations plans past FBI lawyers. “No one was very excited at the prospect of sharing national security secrets with lawyers at Justice,” recalled Clarridge.10

Clarridge quickly proposed an ambitious and risky operation to kidnap the Islamic Jihad hijackers of TWA Flight 847 and to fly them to America for trial. Webster contended the operation was likely to fail and that it likely violated both international and U.S. laws. The standoff between Clarridge and Webster killed the plan.

The next proposed CTC op was to kidnap Mohammed Hussein Rashid, a top bomb maker who had gotten explosives past airport security machines hidden in a Sony Walkman. A CTC operation to grab Rashid in the Sudan failed. Clarridge blamed the FBI, whose field agents were responsible for what the bureaucracy dubbed an “extraordinary rendition.” The Bureau complained that the Agency’s intelligence was flawed.

The unintended consequence of such discord was to give the advantage invariably to the terrorists.

The deteriorating CIA and FBI tensions worsened during a series of bungled operations. Not only did it botch the Rashid kidnapping, but a squad dispatched to free Beirut station chief Buckley also failed. It was also unsuccessful in tracking down the Libyan terrorists who bombed a Berlin disco frequented by American soldiers. The 1985 hijackings of TWA Flight 847 and the cruise liner Achille Lauro were headline news and made the U.S. look vulnerable and weak.

The FBI began a whisper campaign in Washington that the CIA’s jealous stewardship of CTC was its ruination. Those back door complaints resulted in a task force headed by Vice President George H.W. Bush. It proposed the FBI run its own “intelligence fusion center” to complement the CTC, but its recommendations were never implemented.11

Senior CIA officials complained bitterly to Reagan’s national security team that the FBI was overly cautious.

Senior CIA officials complained bitterly to Reagan’s national security team that the FBI was overly cautious and that America was vulnerable to Islamic terrorists who had entered on legal visas and had set up sleeper cells. Reagan responded in September 1986 by creating the Alien Border Control Committee (ABCC), an interagency task force designed to block the entry of suspected terrorists while also finding and deporting militants who had entered the country illegally or had overstayed their visas. The CIA and FBI joined the ABCC effort with great fanfare.

The ABCC had its first success only six months after its formation. The CIA tipped off the FBI about a group of suspected Palestinian terrorists in Los Angeles and the Bureau arrested eight men. But instead of being lauded, civil liberties groups contended that the ABCC should not be allowed to use information from the government’s routine processing of visa requests. Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, a strong civil liberties advocate, led a successful effort to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act so that membership in a terrorist group would no longer be sufficient reason to deny anyone a visa. The Frank amendment meant a visa could only be denied if the government could prove that the applicant had committed an act of terrorism.12 The amendment thereby rendered the ABCC toothless.

Meanwhile, the worsening relationship between the CIA and FBI hit a nadir within a couple of years when the weapons-for-hostages (Iran–Contra) scandal broke. The three key figures were the CIA’s Casey and Clarridge and the National Security Council’s North, all senior Counterterrorism Center officials. The FBI’s Buck Revell worried that the CIA and NSC might have violated U.S. laws prohibiting aid being given to the Contras and negotiating with terrorists. After Casey testified to Congress in November that he did not know who was behind the sale of two thousand TOW missiles to Iran (though the Agency was actively involved), Revell told FBI Director Webster that he thought Casey and other top Agency officials were obstructing justice. Webster authorized the Bureau to open a criminal investigation.

The failure of the country’s two premier national security agencies to work together seamlessly … only works to the benefit of America’s many enemies.

Casey was incapacitated by a stroke and hospitalized in early December. He resigned as CIA Director after surgery for a brain tumor a month later. Reagan tapped Robert Gates, the Agency’s Deputy Director, to take charge. But Gates soon withdrew his name when it became clear that questions about his role in Iran– Contra had scuttled any chance for Senate confirmation.13 After Gates’s withdrawal, Reagan offered the CIA job to Republican Senator John Tower, the head of the president’s Iran–Contra board. Tower declined. Reagan then got a no from James Baker, his chief of staff.14 Reagan and his team were in a panic. There were a dozen names on their list of possible CIA directors, but the president was set to make his first comments about the Iran–Contra scandal in a highly anticipated address to the nation on the evening of Wednesday, March 4. Reagan wanted to pick a new CIA director before that speech. Everyone agreed it had to be someone who would easily obtain Senate confirmation. That narrowed the field. On the morning of his national speech, Reagan met with FBI Director William Webster—who was in the final year of a 10-year contract to run the FBI—and surprised everyone by offering him the CIA post.

The news that the cautious FBI director had been asked to run the CIA sent shock waves through Langley and the ranks of senior spies. Webster was a Christian Scientist who relished a reputation as an inflexible straight arrow. He boasted his only vices were chocolate and tennis. Historian Thomas Powers concluded that the “CIA would rather be run by a Cub Scout den mother than the former head of the FBI.”15 Webster was disparaged by top officers like Clarridge, who had come to know his risk-averse management style.

“Since we at CTC had been working so closely with the FBI on terrorism,” Clarridge told me, “we had already heard a lot about Webster, and none of it was good. From the street level to the top echelons, they detested Webster because they saw him as an egotistical lightweight, a social climber, and a phony.”16

Webster had no background in foreign policy or world affairs. While Casey was judged inside the CIA as a kindred risk-taking spirit, especially by the covert teams, Webster’s cautious nature was exacerbated by an overwhelming fear of failure coupled with his strict insistence on not bending the letter of the law.

One of Webster’s first moves was to replace the CIA’s popular George Lauder, who had spent twenty years in the Operations Directorate, with William Baker, an FBI colleague. It was such an unpopular choice that no one clapped when Baker was introduced in the CIA’s main auditorium. When Baker told the agents they should study a new house manual called “Briefing Congress” and embrace the four “C’s”—candor, completeness, consistency, and correctness—many in the audience audibly snickered. “It was vintage FBI,” one agent in attendance told me. “It was what we expected.”17

Baker was not the only FBI colleague Webster brought along. Peggy Devine, his longtime executive secretary, had earned the nickname “Dragon Lady” at the Bureau. Also, his FBI chief of staff, John Hotis, and a group of “special assistants” made up what CIA employees derisively dubbed either the “FBI Mafia” or the “munchkins.” Some in the FBI contingent had Ivy League law degrees, but none had any intelligence background. And they effectively sealed Webster off from the rest of the Agency.

There was a widespread sentiment inside the CIA that the FBI had gone from being a partner to an avowed enemy.

Meanwhile, the FBI investigation that had begun under Webster into the Iranian arms sales had kicked into high gear. FBI agents raided Oliver North’s office and retrieved key documents his secretary did not have time to shred. Another FBI team served an unprecedented warrant at CIA headquarters in Langley, VA. The agents ordered Clair George, the CIA deputy director for operations, to open his office safe. It contained a document, with two of George’s fingerprints, that showed he had misled Congress. That produced a ten-count indictment against George and the removal of three CIA station chiefs. As for Clarridge, a few days before the statute of limitations expired, he was indicted on seven counts of perjury and making false statements to Congress. Inside the CTC, many employees wore T-shirts with slogans supporting him.

There was a widespread sentiment inside the CIA that the FBI had gone from being a recalcitrant partner to an avowed enemy whose purpose was to destroy the Agency’s hierarchy and its way of conducting its operations. As Clarridge noted:

We could probably have overcome Webster’s ego, his lack of experience with foreign affairs, his small-town-America world perspective, and even his yuppier-than-thou arrogance. What we couldn’t overcome was that he was a lawyer. All his training as a lawyer and a judge was that you didn’t do illegal things. He never could accept that this is exactly what the CIA does when it operates abroad. We break the laws of other countries. It’s how we collect information. It’s why we’re in business. Webster had an insurmountable problem with the raison d’être of the organization he was brought in to run.18

Clarridge was not the only one who thought Webster’s legal background was a handicap for running a spy agency. Pakistan’s President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq once asked Webster how it was possible for a lawyer to head the CIA. Webster did not answer.

Even before Clarridge’s indictment, Webster had officially reprimanded him for his role in Iran–Contra and after promising to reassign him as the CTC director, had forced him to resign in June 1988. I spoke to nearly a dozen former operatives from the Directorate of Operations who confirmed, on background only, that the anger Clarridge expressed on the record about Webster was widespread throughout the CIA. The Agency had long prided itself on an unwritten code—Loyalty Up and Loyalty Down—and many CIA veterans felt that Webster had trashed that by going after agents like Clarridge.

It got worse for Webster when he tasked his chief of staff, John Hotis, and Nancy McGregor, a 28-year-old law clerk who had been one of his FBI administrative assistants, to rewrite the CIA’s regulations for covert operations. Webster had infuriated many intelligence agents when he compared covert ops to the FBI’s use of undercover agents in criminal probes. Under the new Webster rules, lawyers had to sign off on all covert plans. There was a long checklist required to get operations approved. The informal and fast-moving process of the past was history. Webster argued his rules instilled long overdue accountability in the Agency’s covert work. It was, countered CIA officials, the same framework that existed at the FBI and that had hindered the Bureau’s investigations for decades.

With the new rules in place over covert operations and having purged the CIA of half a dozen senior officers connected to Iran–Contra, some of the criticism of Webster started going public. Tom Polgar, a retired agent, wrote in an opinion editorial in The Washington Post that “the new watchword at the agency seems to be ‘Do No Harm’—which is fine for doctors but may not encourage imagination and initiative in secret operations.”19

Meanwhile, William Sessions, a former federal judge from San Antonio and a close friend of Webster’s had become the new FBI director. With encouragement from Webster, Sessions expanded the number of FBI agents serving in counterintelligence abroad. Instead of welcoming the help, it further irritated the CIA leadership who considered the FBI as inept competitors who were only likely to compromise intelligence operations.

Webster thought he could reform the Agency to share information with the FBI. In April 1988, Webster announced a totally redesigned Counterintelligence unit. Headquartered in Langley, VA, its mission was to teach CIA and FBI agents how to compile, organize, and share data that would be useful to both agencies. The first test of that cooperation happened in December 1988 when 270 people were killed when a bomb blew up Pan Am Flight 103 above Lockerbie, Scotland. The U.S. government did not disclose that three Middle East-based CIA officers flying home for the Christmas holidays were among the victims.

Israel’s Mossad intelligence had warned the CIA two weeks earlier. The CIA had never passed the warning to the FBI.

Israel’s Mossad intelligence had warned the CIA two weeks earlier that they had intercepted information that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the U.S. would be bombed in December. Pan Am Flight 103 was a Frankfurt to U.S.-bound plane. The CIA had never passed the warning to the FBI.

Webster’s redesigned CTC was put in charge of the U.S. investigation. In Scotland, more than a thousand police, soldiers, and bomb technicians scoured hundreds of square miles around the crash site. They bagged thousands of pieces of evidence, and in that haul was a fragment of a circuit board the size of a small fingernail. It matched an identical board found in a bomb-timing mechanism used in a 1986 terror attack in the West African country of Togo. CTC tracked the circuit board to a consignment of timers manufactured by a Swiss company that had sold twenty of them to Libya.

Although progress had been made on finding out how the bombing was done, according to one U.S. official, it was not very long before the investigation was a “chaotic mess” of noncooperation.20 Within a few months, there were competing theories about who was responsible. The CIA blamed Iran for hiring a Damascus-based radical Palestinian faction to carry out the operation. Taking out the American plane was, according to Vincent Cannistraro, a CIA’s senior CTC officer, payback for the mistaken 1988 downing of an Iranian Airbus by a U.S. naval cruiser, which resulted in 290 civilian deaths. Cannistraro had become, after Clarridge’s departure, the major power inside CTC and its driving force.

Meanwhile, the FBI thought Libya was the sole culprit, seeking revenge for the U.S. bombings in 1986.

Both agencies leaked their internal disagreements. Anonymous CIA officials were quoted in the press mocking the FBI’s analytical reports on the bombing as being “like essays from grade school,” whereas an unidentified FBI agent said that “CIA believe they have a lot, but it’s a Styrofoam brick.”21

Even when the Libyans became prime suspects, the two agencies fought over what should be done. The FBI wanted to wait for indictments and then arrest those charged. The CIA’s Webster, not surprisingly, supported the letter-of-the-law approach. But inside the CIA, especially in CTC, agents bristled that the Libyans were beyond the reach of U.S. law. Cannistraro argued for “removing” the suspects at any cost, even if that meant assassinating them or allowing Israel to do it on behalf of the U.S. But Webster would broker no such discussion. Frustrated with Webster’s limitations on covert ops, Cannistraro abruptly resigned in September 1990, just before Iraq invaded Kuwait. “The CTC is starting to look too much like the FBI,” he disparagingly told a former colleague after giving Webster his notice.22

A 1990 Senate panel concluded that Webster’s efforts had failed to overcome the extensive fragmentation and competition in the government’s counterintelligence efforts. The panel concluded that it was virtually impossible to cure the dysfunction by merely insisting that the CIA and FBI drop their long-standing mutual distrust and dislike. Only by completely recreating America’s intelligence and crime-fighting apparatus, the panel suggested, might it be possible to make substantive progress.

The CIA and FBI have overhauled their training … but skepticism that there is any benefit to partnering remains a significant obstacle.

The 9/11 Commission made a series of recommendations for changes that could finally force the CIA and FBI and other elements of the national security apparatus to work together more effectively. There are thousands of internal intelligence documents released since 2001, as well as Inspector General Reports from the CIA and FBI, that have given great lip service to the “imperative of reform.”

The result over two decades later?

The CIA and FBI have overhauled their training of intelligence analysts, streamlined the management of the information collected and analyzed, and improved the coordination between the analytical units and operational teams. There are now redundancies designed to prevent intel from falling between the cracks. And there is greater accountability for failures.

Do the CIA and FBI work together better today than before 9/11?

What about the cooperation between the premier American law enforcement/intelligence agencies? Conversations with half a dozen currently serving and former officials from both the CIA and FBI give a mixed picture at best. The deep animosity from the Clarridge/Webster days is now mostly history. No one thinks of the other agency as a threat to its own survival. But skepticism that there is any benefit to be had by partnering with one another remains a significant obstacle to cooperation. CIA officers continue largely to view the FBI as highly paid police officers who are hobbled by Department of Justice lawyers. The FBI officials to whom I spoke pointed repeatedly to the CIA’s approval of torture for 9/11 detainees as a key reason the main terrorists at Guantanamo Bay have not gone to trial. “Maybe they would be better off,” one former FBI Counterintelligence officer told me, “if they had lawyers who told them when they were crossing the line instead of just rubber stamping every wild idea coming out of Langley.”

Do the CIA and FBI work together better today than before 9/11? Yes, in many respects. They have often had little choice with the rapid growth of more than 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) since 1980. In the JTTFs, the FBI and CIA are only two of more than 30 law enforcement and intelligence agencies supplying analysts, investigators, linguists, and hostage rescue specialists, to combat international terrorism directed at the homeland. Since they do not run the operations, their sniping at each other is not as evident. But that does not mean the JTTFs are free of finger pointing between all the partners. For instance, a 2009 arrest of three Afghans in a terror plot in New York City was widely heralded as a law enforcement triumph, but I discovered that FBI agents were privately furious at New York Police Department detectives for blowing a chance to snare a larger terror sleeper cell.23

Infighting among those tasked with enforcement makes it exponentially more difficult.

The rivalry for control of operations and investigations between the two 900-pound security gorillas in the U.S.—the CIA and FBI—continues. So does the desire to take credit for successful missions and put the blame on the other for failures. There are billions in annual budgets at stake and the reputation each seems jealously to guard. “They don’t make us better,” one retired CIA analyst contended in a conversation I had this summer. “They just compromise what we do best.”

That attitude cannot be eliminated through any series of bureaucratic reforms suggested by presidential commissions and Congressional hearings. It is a shame, however, because the failure of the country’s two premier national security agencies to work together seamlessly to fight terrorism and today’s enormous criminal cartels only works to the benefit of America’s many enemies. Crime and punishment is a difficult enough subject when the targets are international terrorists. However, infighting among those tasked with enforcement makes it exponentially more difficult.

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NASA is at the very heart of America’s self-image and our nation’s stature across the world.

Today America’s space efforts are second to none; in fact, they are literally the envy of the world. Yet, if nothing is done by President Trump or the Congress, 2026 budget legislation will force NASA to summarily execute over 50 working space missions, bought and paid for by the American taxpayer. This is all set to happen this year.

Keep America Great: Save NASA from Having to Kill Dozens of Paid For, Working Space Missions This FallThose 50+ missions on the chopping block cost tens of billions of dollars to design, build, and launch. Throwing away such large taxpayer investments is fiscal irresponsibility at its worst. And just as bad, it’ll unilaterally cede first place in planetary exploration, astrophysics, and other areas of space exploration to Europe and the Chinese, voluntarily submerging the US to third or fourth place in all these areas. These already-active space missions include New Horizons—exploring the very farthest reaches of our solar system in history, Juno exploring Jupiter and its moons, the Mars rovers, virtually every astronomical telescope NASA has in space other than Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, the Lunar reconnaissance orbiter—NASA’s only operating lunar mapping mission, as well as healthy and productive spacecraft studying the Sun, the Earth, and more.

To prevent this, we must tell the President and Congress not to allow it.

President Trump has often placed American leadership in space high on his priority list, and I for one am deeply appreciative of that. I also endorse our getting astronauts back to the Moon as critical to American space leadership, as the President and Congress have rightfully endorsed. But so is keeping the lead we have in other kinds of space exploration.

Yet that leadership is now in a danger of our own doing. Sure, cancelling dozens of working space missions could yield funding that could be put into accelerating human lunar exploration, but only a tiny amount—about 5 percent of NASA’s budget. Reigning in the cost over runs on NASA programs now in development will save many times that, without harming either American stature, or NASA’s worldwide, powerful, soft power projection the way the planned mission cancellations will. Those cost overruns are where the real gold is to accelerate human lunar exploration and to stay in front of the Chinese.

Please make your voices heard, this week and this month, before it’s too late. Write the President. Write the Senators and Congresspeople who decide NASA’s budget. Here are the politicians making these decisions to whom you should write, tag on social media, and otherwise let your voices be heard. Click their name to view their official contact information.

Senate NASA appropriations leadership:Chair: Jerry Moran (R-KS)
Ranking Member: Chris Van Hollen (D-MD)

House NASA appropriations leadership: House Appropriations Committee. This committee is responsible for the overall NASA budget.
Chair: Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK)

Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee Chair: Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY)
Ranking Member of Full Committee: Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT)

House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. This committee oversees the scientific and technological programs of NASA and other agencies.
Chair: Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX)
Ranking Member: Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)
Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee Ranking Member: Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-NC)

Tell them to keep NASA’s fleet alive, and by doing so to keep America in first place in space.

Your action on this really matters, because once these space missions are turned off this fall and winter, their radio receivers will be forever disabled, and they can never be resuscitated.

The space suicide countdown is upon us, right now. Raise your voice against it. Tell them the savings to be had from it are tiny, misguided, irresponsible, and financially upside down. Fiscal responsibility, patriotism, and America’s stature in space all hang in the balance of our actions these next critical weeks in September.

President Trump has made it clear he supports space exploration. Write him directly or alert him on social media with the message that these cuts risk allowing China to surpass America in space, so if we want to Make America Great Again, stopping the termination of these existing space missions is a must to keep the USA #1 in space rather than unilaterally ceding the field to other nations.

You can write the President at:The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500.

Or to reach out more quickly, send him an email at this White House web page: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

And you can call this number at the White House to leave citizen comments: 202-456-1111.

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The phrase “trust the science,” once an epistemic humble appeal to evidence, has in recent years morphed into an imperious demand. As trust in institutions, including scientific ones, continues to spiral downward,1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 many academics and scientific organizations seem to believe the solution lies in louder messaging, greater moral certainty, progressive political activism, and the routine denigration of “science deniers” (or, worse, pseudoscientists!). These efforts now saturate social media feeds, blog posts, and podcasts, often delivered with the exasperated insistence that the masses must, above all, trust in science.

It isn’t working.

Science earned its authority not by telling people what to believe or how to live, but by serving the public in offering high-quality information that helps people solve problems and achieve their goals. But in the age of social media, a growing number of scientists appear less interested in the patient work of discovery and more interested in being political influencers. They post partisan hot takes, endorse candidates, and signal ideological commitments, often leveraging their authority as scientists to advance personal or political aims. This doesn’t just alienate half the country (usually the right-leaning half); it undermines the hard-won and always precarious reputation of science as a dispassionate arbiter of truth. The more we scientists insert ourselves into political battles, the more we risk losing the very authority we seek to protect.

Trust Is Earned, Not Demanded Trust doesn’t come from demands for deference. It comes from repeated demonstrations of competence. It’s earned by delivering results. Evolutionary scholars have documented status conferral across cultures, showing that generating benefits for others is the primary path to earning prestige and influence.12, 13 Status gained through dominance or coercion can work in the short term, but it breeds resentment and unstable hierarchies, not durable trust.

Humans are deeply attuned to and wary of attempts to seize power, especially when those attempts feel illegitimate.14 Even political leaders, whose roles require a public pursuit of power, must tread carefully. As Smith and colleagues observed:

People accept and revere leaders who are believed to be sacrificing for the welfare of the group, who clearly desire no personal benefits from their leadership, or, better yet, did not desire leadership in the first place … Strong, modest, reticent leaders are looked up to because of their actions and because such leaders lack political ambition.15

Assuming the film Conclave generally captures the reality of how popes are chosen, similar social forces apply to winning the papacy too. Chi entra papa in conclave, ne esce cardinale—“Whoever enters a conclave as pope, exits a cardinal.” Transparent campaigning or politicking are likelier to decrease rather than increase chances of becoming Pope.16

Smith and colleagues go on to suggest that one reason politicians are so widely despised is that they must openly declare their desire for power. Politicians may hold influence, but they are also among the least trusted and most intensely disliked individuals in public life. Visible attempts at power invite skepticism and contempt.

The Lucky Lot of Scientists Unlike politicians, scientists aren’t required to declare their ambition (even though many may privately harbor it). Indeed, scientists are almost uniquely positioned to earn prestige in society without appearing power-hungry. The scientific method, though imperfect, is specifically designed to minimize biases, flawed analyses, and imprecise claims. Thanks to peer review, growing transparency norms, and a culture of empirical accountability, science is the best system for arriving at truths (at least for now).

So long as scholars stick to their core mission—identifying and describing empirical reality—they can offer something genuinely useful to the world. Scientific insights provide the foundation for every modern advancement: better technology, lifesaving medicine, more effective institutions, and all manner of life hacks that help individuals pursue lives aligned with their values.

In the age of social media, a growing number of scientists appear less interested in the patient work of discovery and more interested in being political influencers.

Science has something helpful to offer. And helpfulness leads to status and influence.

Of course, discovering genuinely new and useful information is hard. It can take years of uncertain and tedious work. And in some disciplines, the well of discovery may be running dry. Firing off a polarizing tweet, by contrast, might take just a few minutes and still deliver thousands of likes, hundreds of new followers, and a fleeting but real sense of importance.

The Seduction of Influence The job of an academic used to be much quieter. Scholars were known to their students, immediate colleagues, and those in their broader subdiscipline, but few scholars reached public awareness, and when they did—as in the examples of Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, who rose to public intellectual stardom—were punished by colleagues and accused of sacrificing scholarship for “popularization.”17, 18 Now, with podcasts, blogs, and especially social media, scholars frequently speak directly to the public, amassing followers, attention, and influence. This shift allows scholars who have relevant expertise to share knowledge about pressing societal issues. However, this attention marketplace also distorts academic incentives. Likes, retweets, and follows reward attention-grabbing content rather than careful analysis.

Ideally, science rewards rigorous, methodical work, a system that is constraining and at times, painfully slow. The influencer economy operates on precisely the opposite logic. It rewards negative, emotional, divisive content.19, 20 It moves fast, so rewards are delivered more quickly, making it even more alluring. A viral tweet can return more validation in twelve hours than a peer-reviewed paper offers in two years. And the more you post—and the more emotionally charged the language used in the post—the greater your chances of going viral. Quantity trumps quality, since each tweet, however meagre, is one more shot to win 𝕏 (Twitter) for the day.

Earlier generations of scholars earned prestige over decades through meaningful contributions to their fields. A rare few reached broader public fame. Today, a scholar with little expertise but strong opinions and a fiery temperament can swiftly reach “public intellectual” status. It doesn’t take much experience with social media to learn that the currency of influence is provocation, not precision, and that fanning the flames of controversy drives engagement.

In playing the role of partisan thought leaders, scientists increasingly engage in behaviors that may boost their online stature and serve their ideological causes, while undermining public trust in scientists generally.

Such quick-won influence is seductive. It allows scholars to build personal brands, shape public opinion, and rise to hero status in their ideological tribes. The temptation to wrap one’s political beliefs in the authority of “science” is hard to resist.

However, in playing the role of partisan thought leaders, scientists increasingly engage in behaviors that may boost their online stature and serve their ideological causes, while undermining public trust in scientists generally. A recent study found that scientists who post more political content on 𝕏 are seen as less credible than politically neutral scientists.21 This same study also found that scientists were aware of the reputational costs of posting political opinions on social media, yet in a sample of nearly 98,000 academics on X, roughly half chose to do so despite potential damage to their status.

A smaller but still substantial subset of academics go further, using their platforms to insult or belittle perceived political enemies: Christians, Republicans, Trump voters, conservatives, White people, men, rich people, old people, straight people, cisgender people, Jewish people, ruralites, and anyone who defends any of the above. (Since academics lean far to the political left, the above targets are the most popular, but some on the right post to “own the libs,” denigrate the “libtards,” and generally despair the “blue-haired, nose-ringed, tattooed, screaming progressives.”) Meanwhile, labeling someone “sexist” no longer requires treating women worse than men. It might mean treating them equally (anti-affirmative action sexism) or even treating them better (benevolent sexism). Add it all up, and the list of people implicitly or explicitly treated as backward bigots by the academic elite likely includes a large majority of the population. It should not be surprising, then, that many of those accused of bigotry are skeptical of scholars who publicly mock their identities, values, or way of life.

Sometimes, the problem is not mockery but overconfidence. Driven by fear that the public might behave selfishly or irrationally if given too much nuance, some scientists bend the truth—delivering simplified, confident messages that sound authoritative but overstate the evidence. This was especially visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health advice was often communicated as based on authoritative fact, only to be overturned, revised, and then reversed again. Scientists cannot be blamed for not having all the answers in the face of a novel virus. They can, however, be blamed for pretending they did and for failing to acknowledge previous errors when their advice changed. Instead of humility, the public was often met with new denunciations, new taboos, and new claims of scientific certainty.

A forthcoming paper by Graso and colleagues explore this dynamic directly.22 They found that scientific communicators who embraced accountability—by inviting discussion of dissenting views, acknowledging uncertainty, and taking responsibility for previous errors—elicited more trust and engagement than those who adopted authoritarian messaging, dismissed dissent, or labeled critics as “anti-science.” Despite concerns that the public must be controlled with simple, clear, and confident messaging, it may be that “honesty is the best policy” for maintaining long-term public trust in, and thus deference to, science.

Political activism in academia not only makes us look bad, it undermines the very thing we claim to offer: impartial, high-quality information.

Of course, individual scientists are free to denounce what they view as backwards or regressive ideas. However, this creates a collective action problem. Individual scholars may benefit from posting provocative, politically charged content. Yet as more scientists behave like partisan activists, public trust in the broader institution of science declines.

Politicization of Scientific Institutions The damage is likely greater still when scientific institutions become politicized. This includes universities, scientific journals and their publishers, and academic professional societies. When these institutions act like political activists, it signals that politicization isn’t limited to a few rogue academics. It suggests broad, institutional-level buy-in from the scholarly community.

Research across management, psychology, and political science finds that when organizations and institutions “take sides” in ongoing political conflicts, the reputational consequences are almost uniformly negative.23, 24, 25, 26, 27 The costs of politicization are so well-documented that scholars often treat it as a threat imposed on science, something weaponized by politicians and special interest groups to discredit inconvenient findings.28, 29 It is puzzling, then, that scientific institutions have so eagerly politicized themselves and continue to do so.

Some of the most striking examples of institutional politicization come from impactful academic and academic-adjacent journals such as Nature, Scientific American, and The Lancet, all of which have issued political candidate endorsements in recent years. If these were obscure or mid-tier journals, the reputational effects might be limited. However, these are among the most prestigious scientific publications in the world, so when they engage in political activism, people notice. And people don’t like it.

In a compelling demonstration of the public’s aversion to such endorsements, a recent study by Floyd Zhang randomly assigned a subset of participants to read about Nature’s endorsement of Joe Biden.30Among Trump supporters, exposure to this endorsement reduced trust in Nature’s informedness and impartiality and made them less likely to read articles in Nature. Any positive effects among Biden supporters were smaller and inconsistent. The Biden endorsement also reduced Trump supporters’ trust in U.S. scientists more broadly, while having little effect on Biden supporters. The endorsement also had virtually no influence on participants’ attitudes toward Trump or Biden. In other words, the endorsement was unlikely to have swayed any votes, but quite likely damaged trust in Nature, and potentially in the scientific community more broadly. Virtue signaling at its counterproductive worst?

Just as individual scientists use social media to advertise their political graces, so do scientific institutions. Springer Nature, for example, changed its 𝕏 logo to the Progress Pride flag. These public political displays, though certainly within the rights of a private organization, likely erode perceptions of the impartiality of scientific institutions, and thus the scientists within them.

Scientific institutions … should not endorse political candidates or take sides in ongoing political controversies.

One of us has examined how perceptions of politicization shape public trust, support, and willingness to defer to the expertise of various scientific disciplines and academic professional organizations.31 At the disciplinary level, we find strong associations between the perception that professors allow political values to influence their work and perceptions of (1) how trustworthy the discipline is, and (2) how skeptical students should be about what professors in that field teach. The disciplines perceived as least politicized (including math, physics, chemistry, English, nursing, and computer science) are also the most trusted and provoke the least skepticism. In contrast, disciplines viewed as highly politicized (including religious studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, and political science [perhaps an unfortunate name choice]) tend to be the least trusted and elicit the most skepticism.

Although these patterns are somewhat stronger among political outgroup members (typically conservatives), the relationships are nearly always negative across the political spectrum. Even left-leaning members of the public express lower trust and greater skepticism toward disciplines they perceive as allowing political values—including left-leaning values—to influence their work.

In follow-up studies, we tested the causal effects of politicization on trust and related outcomes. In one experiment, participants read about a fictional society of economists and its recent conference. In the control condition, participants simply learned about the organization’s standard activities. In the politicized conditions, the society had invited either a Democratic or Republican governor to deliver the keynote address, advocating for policies aligned with their respective parties.

In both politicized conditions, participants reported lower trust and greater skepticism toward the society itself and toward economists more generally. These declines were largest among political outgroup members (e.g., conservatives responding to a Democratic speaker), but trust dropped even among ingroup members. That is, compared to the control group, conservatives reported lower trust even when the speaker was a Republican, and liberals reported lower trust even when the speaker was a Democrat.

We found similar results in a later study involving a fictional public health professional society that engaged in political advocacy on social media. Whether advocating for left-leaning or right-leaning causes, trust and willingness to defer to the organization’s expertise declined (compared to a control condition). Although there were small positive effects among ideologically extreme ingroup participants, these were outweighed by much larger negative reactions among outgroup members, resulting in a net reputational cost. These costs extended to virtually all evaluations of the professional society. Participants exposed to the political tweets viewed the society as:

1. likelier to harm public health,
2. contributing to division and conflict,
3. abusing their power,
4. more biased,
5. more dishonest,
6. more selfish,
7. and more in violation of their own personal values.

Together, these findings suggest that when academic disciplines or professional societies engage in visible political activism, the public reacts strongly and negatively. Moreover, these reputational costs are not limited to the specific organizations involved. Perceived politicization can erode trust in entire disciplines and professional communities.

Warnings Not Heeded For at least 30 years, scholars have warned that progressive activism was spreading through academia and potentially distorting scholarly priorities, publishing standards, and even empirical results.32, 33This concern reached crescendo in the early 2010s after Jonathan Haidt delivered a timely and compelling speech about political bias in social psychology, pointing out that in a room of thousands of scholars, there were few if any Republicans, and that this almost certainly was damaging scholarship. Since then, scholars have contended that ideological homogeneity and the subsequent politicization of science was undermining the integrity of science,34 contributing to the replication crisis,35 proscribing topics at odds with a progressive agenda,36 elevating other dubious ideas aligned with the progressive worldview,37 causing discrimination against conservatives,38 leading to a hostile atmosphere that violates the free speech rights of some and intimidates many others into self-censorship,39, 40 while corroding trust in the institution of science.41

From Congress to campuses, confidence in American institutions is in free fall. Public trust in media, science, government, and higher education has collapsed—revealing a widespread perception that elite institutions no longer serve the people they claim to inform.Political activism in academia not only makes us look bad, it undermines the very thing we claim to offer: impartial, high-quality information. Social media amplified the problem, laying bare the extremism and hostility that were once confined to internal conversations. If the scientific community previously enjoyed at least a patina of neutrality, that sheen has largely worn off. Academia long infused scientific work with political values, largely without consequence. Now, thanks in part to highly visible activist behavior by scholars and institutions, we are paying the proverbial piper.

The solution lies in a collective recommitment to the core values of science and a scaling back of everything else.

It is unfortunate but unsurprising that the political right now wants to punish academia and often delights in the hostile rhetoric and acts taken by the Trump administration against elite universities across the United States. One need not endorse these efforts nor encourage belligerent anti-academic rhetoric to acknowledge that academia bears some responsibility for its deteriorating reputation among conservatives and its declining authority with the broader public.

We cannot control public opinion, nor can we dictate the actions of elected officials. However, we do have control over our own behavior. If we are serious about regaining credibility, then we must begin by holding ourselves accountable. (If every person in your department votes Democrat and you don’t know a single person who votes Republican, you’re in a political bubble and stand next to no chance of being politically neutral and objective when it comes to studying social and political issues, and your students are not going to get an impartial education.)

The Path Toward Credibility Academia often responds to problems by engaging in bureaucratic bloat. In this case, however, credibility cannot be restored through creating more committees or issuing new strategic plans. Instead, the solution lies in a collective recommitment to the core values of science and a scaling backof everything else.

Scientific institutions (departments, universities, publishers, journals, professional societies) should not endorse political candidates or take sides in ongoing political controversies. They should resist the temptation to post ideological content on social media or use official platforms to signal tribal allegiance. Institutions should recommit to merit, and eliminate programs and priorities that elevate other divisive moral and political values (think DEI). When leadership elections arise, we should choose scholars committed to scientific integrity, not political activism.

Individual scientists should also rethink their public engagement. Building a brand around partisan identity or expressing open hostility toward large swaths of the population might attract attention, but it does not improve scholarly credibility. Neither does issuing sweeping “consensus statements” on unresolved social issues. Where true consensuses exist, there is no need for such statements. Instead of overstating certainty, scientists should model epistemic humility, acknowledging uncertainty where it exists, and being transparent about the limitations of our knowledge. Given the long history of scientists getting things wrong, scientific findings should be communicated tentatively, not as “proven” facts. And scholars should resist the urge to demand, “Trust the science!” The moment such a command is felt necessary is usually the moment there is no single, settled science to trust.

Science is not a body of dogmas to be trusted or deferred to. Rather, it is a process that is always provisional and whose primary virtue is precisely that it disdains all authority save that of the rational mind.

♦ ♦ ♦

Scientists are human. And like other humans, they desire fame and power and often choose the quickest route to obtain them. This is why scientific institutions are necessary. They restrain the worst excesses of each scientist, and like a free market, they often use the fuel of individual ambition to power an engine of knowledge that benefits everybody.

When scientific institutions are degraded by political bias, when they no longer check individual desires for status or influence, science as an institution suffers. It degenerates into a tool for individual advancement and a bludgeon to smite political foes. As consequence, people become skeptical not just of this or that theory, this or that paper, but of its entire claim to be the pursuit of objective truth. As a result, they come to view the university not as vital part of the culture but as a hostile, politically motivated bully.

It is tempting to anoint oneself with the authority and credibility of science so as to assume the status of moral and political authorities. If, however, we want science to continue to have that authority, we must return to the slow, unglamorous, often tedious process that made the findings of science worthy of credibility in the first place.

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Zero and Nothing. They sound like such simple words, but have you ever thought about what they actually mean? When a calculation results in zero, one takes a second look. Why can’t you divide by zero? When zero appears as a multiplier in a long equation, all other terms, no matter how complex, magically vanish leaving zero as the result. When you read a food label that says zero sugar, zero pesticides, or no additives present, what does that really mean? When a rocket countdown reaches zero, liftoff occurs! You would not want to be at ground zero in an epidemic or explosion. How do you feel when the balance of your bank account is zero in contrast to the feeling of securing a zero-interest no-fee credit card? When asked what your friend is doing, nothing may be their answer but then one often becomes suspicious. What does emptiness connote in philosophy, and does the concept of nothingness have significance to you?

I have always been fascinated by the concept of and definition of zero. The idea of nothing, as well as its assignment to the specific number 0, is encountered in many fields ranging from philosophy to mathematics, as well as the pure sciences of physics and chemistry to its practical application in areas including toxicology, food safety, statistics, finance, and the law. We are constantly exposed to zero in areas far beyond mathematics where we are tempted with zero calorie soda to credit cards with zero percent interest. In gambling, the placement of 0 and 00 on the roulette wheel ensures that the house has the advantage since the most common bets of red or black and even or odd lose when the ball lands on a zero. Other counting numbers do not share this unique aura. One could make an argument for the noninteger numbers π and ∞, but zero easily assumes greater prominence and consternation in wide ranging swaths of human endeavor.

Philosophy Zero is a misfit amongst the normal so-called counting numbers. It defies definition as it reflects nothing, emptiness, or a void. The ancient Greeks abhorred the concept of emptiness and the void. Zero causes headaches when first encountered in arithmetic, where one is forbidden to divide by it. Zero occupies a unique position in our numbering system as it is the only counting integer that does not relate to any actual quantity. It came into existence centuries after all the counting numbers were introduced in civilizations across the world, originating in first millennium India and only then migrating to Europe in the 13th century. It first appeared as a placeholder in the numbering schemes of many civilizations and only later assumed its place as a true number.

Zero was inextricably linked to the void and nothingness, beliefs that often engendered fear and even chaos.

Nothingness and emptiness were and remain central constructs of major schools of both Eastern and Western philosophies and religions. Psychologically they can be the drivers of anxiety and depression in the West or the enlightened goals of meditative peace in the East. The concept of nothingness arose simultaneously in the fifth century BCE in ancient China, India, and Greece, embodied in the philosophies ranging from Taoism to nihilism. Zero was inextricably linked to the void and nothingness, beliefs that often engendered fear and even chaos. The Greeks had no zero in their mathematics nor did they believe the void was possible. Its concept bleeds into the interpretation of the fourth century BCE Greek philosopher Zeno’s famous paradox. It only started to abate when post-Socratic philosophers, including the atomists Leucippus and Democritus had to accept emptiness as the space between atoms, a concept carried forward in history by Lucretius who strongly influenced later natural philosophers. Even Aristotle did not believe that 0 and 1 were true numbers, with his first number being 2. The concept of nothingness and nihilism continue in the modern and contemporary eras embedded in philosophies including: Buddhism, Hinduism, skepticism, existentialism, and poststructuralism. Hindu philosophers are crucial in understanding the concept of nothingness and probably the first emergence of zero. In Hinduism, emptiness or nothingness relates to the vastness that is the source of creation, a concept that mirrors modern quantum physics. The concept of nothing continues to have a strong hold on the human mind.

These discordant perspectives still affect the interpretation of using the digit 0 today. When interpreting 0 as nothing or empty, all sorts of contexts derived from numerous encounters with it subconsciously haunt our cognitive processes affecting our perspective on the issue at hand and influence how we arrive at a conclusion. This powerful meme suggesting cautiousness still hangs on.

Mathematics Zero is a crucial number in mathematics. The simplest definition is that it is the origin point of the number line, dividing positive and negative numbers.

However, one should note that in the timeline of history, there is no year zero separating the current (CE) from ancient (BCE) eras!

The most serious issue with zero is its limitations and distinctive properties in certain mathematical operations. These unique properties are what drives modern anxiety when a calculation results in a zero. As mentioned, zero occupies a unique place in our number system as an integer not representing any value. Due to some interesting properties, if zero finds itself in the denominator of a function or as the exponent of a number (Y), strange things happen. We know we cannot take the logarithm of zero. Division by zero (Y÷0 or Y/0) is not possible, it is undefined. Multiplying by zero erases the value of the number being multiplied (Y × 0 = 0). Zero factorial equals one (0! = 1). Raising anything to the power of zero results in the expression having a value of one (Y^0= 1), except if it is zero being raised to the zero power (0^0), which is also not possible. Calculus developed a partial fix for this with the concept of limits, where the value of a function is estimated as it approaches zero.

With the very recent release of generative AI programs, scraping zero values from the web … could provide misleading and even dangerous conclusions.

I was also motivated to undertake this journey due to my involvement in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning projects, where data are “scraped” from the open web and then used for calculations, removed from the context of the original study that generated the data. I have seen large data studies where 0 simply appears in a dataset because there was no value entered. It is the default entry. Calculations from these data generate the feared message: ERROR. Many calculations and modeling studies performed in science use a logarithmic transformation of the data being studied. If you try to take the logarithm of zero, the computer freezes. The author has seen error messages such as “The logarithm of zero is undefined because it is not a real number.” Experienced workers are aware of this and curate the data into a database before analysis. Naive analysts are not so fortunate. With the very recent release of generative AI programs, scraping zero values from the web and using them as meaning zero could provide misleading and even dangerous conclusions unless the data are first curated. One should provide an operational definition of zero to ensure such misuse doesn’t occur. Yet this operational definition rarely gets permanently associated with the data for which it was defined. There are no meta tags attached to data elements providing a definition that would stay attached, because that zero entry has now moved and entered a calculation for which it was never intended.

Toxicology, Finance, and Chemical Food Safety It’s easy to count distinct things such as people, apples, and money. What about chemicals and the risk of adverse health effects after exposure to them? Does the absence of a chemical in food, termed a residue, mean there is no detectable chemical using the most sensitive methods of modern chemistry, or does it mean just not enough chemical to cause you ill health effects? The issue is understanding how zero is to be measured, interpreted, and employed relative to the problem on which one is working. Are we discussing the absence of any pharmacologic or toxicologic effect, or the limit of quantitation or detection in analytical chemistry? This sorting process requires great discipline and effort to parse out the different baggage (vocabulary, definition, methods, sensitivity, rules, purpose) associated with zero or nothing as applied to the different disciplines involved in the analysis, to get the contexts involved straight, and to achieve a rational and deliberative solution.

Zero is a misfit amongst the normal so-called counting numbers. It defies definition as it reflects nothing, emptiness, or a void.

Even in fields such as finance, where the concept of measuring zero in the context of financial worth is consequential, it becomes more complicated once one moves from assessing wealth by counting coins or paper currency to estimating market values of real estate, antiques, or complex securities and other financial instruments that depend on the state of the market and economy when they are eventually cashed in and counted. Zero in this case is the placeholder, much as in the number line, that divides one’s net worth as having assets versus being in debt or even on the verge of bankruptcy. Such monetary transactions and asset counting in trade were the original driving force behind the development of numbers by ancient civilizations.

Although one can endlessly debate the impact and significance of a number relating to nothing, problems arise when one must measure zero and attest that nothing is there. A simple example is illustrative. Zero sugar soda is easily defined as sugar not being added in its manufacture. However, if a natural beverage is to be labeled as such, there must be proof that analysis would yield a result of zero. But how precise does that need to be, what type of sugar is being assayed, and how much variability is there in natural beverages? This analytical zero is the source of confusion in its use today.

This concept of low but safe chemical and drug residue concentrations has been studied and well defined by modern toxicology. However, very low concentrations of chemical residues may still be detected in food well below the levels of concern by the extremely sensitive tools that modern analytical chemistry has to offer. When I first started working in this field over 40 years ago, the allowable safe concentration, termed a tolerance, was very close to the analytical limit of detection. Now, advances in chemistry detect compounds orders of magnitude below any possible biological effects, and far below regulatory tolerances established when the drugs or pesticides used were first approved. We are constantly exposed to very low levels of numerous natural compounds in our daily lives that may have no significant effect at the levels presented because our biological defense systems, honed by evolution, allow us to easily eliminate or metabolize these compounds to a harmless product. Problems often arise when consumer groups conduct market surveys of food products and look for and report on detectable, not violative, chemical residues. This is where analytical chemistry, toxicology, regulatory, and trade policies clash.

Although one can endlessly debate the impact and significance of a number relating to nothing, problems arise when one must measure zero and attest that nothing is there.

How do scientists derive the toxicological endpoints that find their way into regulatory doctrines? This involves defining what no biological effect means, that is nothing happens, after exposure to this concentration of chemical in food. The analytical limit of quantification and limit of detection define detectability while tolerance and maximum residue level define absence of biological effect. These are two distinct domains. The limits for biological effect are a prediction of human safety based on experimental studies generally conducted in lifetime animal toxicology trials that determine the no adverse effect level (NOAEL) or benchmark dose (BMD). In the scheme depicting this below, it must be stressed that the starting point is the level where no effect was seen in experimental long-term exposures. This concentration is then further reduced by large safety factors (10× to 100×) to protect against uncertainty in making these extrapolations. When a chemical is detected below these final regulatory endpoints, there is no safety concern.

The endpoint is different when drug assays are used to regulate sports doping. Here detection proves exposure and thus potentially illegal drug use. There is no safety endpoint. In detection of alcohol in people, there is alcohol detection in a minor (which is illegal) versus quantification in an adult (which only prohibits levels related to intoxication), because adults are allowed to consume alcohol at levels determined not to affect driving ability. In sports, drug testing is a detection issue.

In toxicology risk assessment, especially in detecting potential carcinogens, threshold concentrations are based on estimations using various risk assessment models that extrapolate to lower concentrations from the available experimental data obtained at higher concentrations. The laboratory animal studies are lifetime exposures at a tolerable dose. In many cases, tumors are only seen at the highest dose studied, yet a low dose with significant safety factors is still generated.

Depending on the nature of the chemical being regulated and the legal jurisdiction involved, numerous safe and action levels are employed. Different tolerances and maximum residue limits vary across different regulatory jurisdictions for the same drug or pharmaceutical product. All assume lifetime consumption at this concentration, not a one-time exposure in a violative salad ingredient at lunch! It must be mentioned that allergens present a different issue than true chemical toxins, as their mechanism of action is different. These are handled by regulatory agencies as indicating their presence in a product and suggested avoidance by sensitive individuals.

Tension arises when a chemical, such as a pesticide, is found in food at levels well below the acceptable tolerance but still at a measurable amount. There is no quantifiable biological risk to exposure at this concentration despite their detection in food. Regulatory agencies acknowledge this in their definition of a threshold, which already incorporates multiple safety factors and assumes lifetime consumption. There are hundreds of other natural compounds and toxins that may be present at higher levels in food that are not even looked for since they are natural organic constituents, yet do not produce an adverse effect. The average diet contains over a gram and a half of natural pesticides and phytotoxins. Yet when chemicals in a food basket survey are detectable, and often not even quantifiable, the media often report this as “dangerous chemicals were detected in the food.” Many of these are agricultural chemicals, including pesticides, that are important to large-scale agriculture and are used to improve crop production, ward off plant diseases, or kill true toxin-producing fungi (e.g., mycotoxins). A hazard may be present to the manufacturer or pesticide applicator, but the minuscule level present in food is safe.

Zero is a unique number both in mathematics and in how its interpretation affects everyday life.

The apple is my favorite example of a food loaded with both nutrients and toxins. Apples are one of many fruits whose seeds contain acute toxic doses of cyanide compounds. Apples, olives, and coffee also contain caffeic acid, the potential rodent carcinogen. Pitted fruits, such as apricots and peaches, and even sweet almonds contain the cyanogenic glycoside amygdalin. When was the last time you picked up an apple or apricot that contained a warning label indicating a potential for toxin exposure? An interesting sidebar is that although caffeic acid may be a potential carcinogen, exposure to it from its various sources has never detected any evidence for carcinogenic effects in humans.

The issue fueling the public concern about chemical exposure in food and the environment is one of miscommunication. There is no universally accepted definition of zero. Both the context in which it was determined and the problem to which it will be applied must be taken into consideration. The proper approach is to operationally define what is meant by zero and the conditions under which it is assigned.

Grocery surveys often only report detection independent of what the allowable limits may be. Internet searches then determine that the chemical detected may be harmful, but no one looks at the dose where any adverse effect was seen versus the level of contamination detected. This is termed “regulation by hazard.” The public must be made aware of this as the situation will only worsen with increasingly sensitive analytical methods. The chemicals haven’t changed. Focus should be on issues with a higher positive public health impact. Unfortunately, in today’s political climate, these issues are not openly and freely debated.

So, to Make Something Out of Nothing … Zero is a unique number both in mathematics and in how its interpretation affects everyday life. In some scenarios, zero simply means nothing or empty. No apples, no money. In other cases, it is an analytical determination based on measurement, and interpretation of its meaning is dependent upon extrapolations from experimental models. In other cases, it is the result of a risk assessment where consuming a chemical at a concentration less than its tolerance produced zero adverse health effects. All these steps are steeped in uncertainty but are biased toward overestimating adverse risks.

There are similarly fascinating concepts of zero and nothing in physics and astronomy where one tries to define absolute zero temperature, zero space, or the smallest time interval. These are beyond the scope of this brief introduction.

I started this journey into zero because I have wrestled with its meaning my entire professional career. It is a number that is mathematically unique and even peculiar at times. It psychologically harbors connotations and emotions that are simply not associated with other numbers. I wanted to try and better understand how this psychological angst arose and further probe the meaning of zero and nothing in biology and especially food safety. My concept of zero did not seem to match that reported by the media and on social platforms. Why has the meaning of zero become so complicated? I now appreciate where some of this confusion arose and how nothing indeed became quite something.

And finally, as the Dalai Lama has written: “A zero itself is nothing, but without a zero you cannot count anything; therefore, a zero is something, yet zero.”

This essay was adapted by the author from Zero—Much to Do About Nothing published by Springer in 2025.

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Fashion and Style typically refer to products and practices that are valued in specific cultures and time periods. In the contemporary U.S., vintage clothing, athleisure, and oversize water bottles are in style, whereas cigarettes, neckties, fur coats, wood paneling, shag carpets, and white wall tires are out.

Ideas also vary in their popularity and prestige across cultures and times. These days, mindfulness, sustainability, plant-based diets, and pet parenting are fashionable, while eugenics, homophobia, hierarchical work environments, and colonialism are not.

Perhaps the most fashionable current idea is that the binary distinction of females and males—and girls and boys, and women and men—is scientifically incorrect and harmful. Instead, leading social scientists, activists, and even professional journals and organizations, have adopted the view that sex should be considered a nonbinary variable, either a continuous spectrum or something with more than two categories.

Yet, the traditional, binary view of sex, despite being unpopular, is basically correct. Crucially, I am confident that holding this view is in no way at odds with being fully respectful to individuals who are transgender or intersex. Here are eight reasons for affirming that biological sex is binary.

Let’s review each of them in more detail.

1. Evolutionary biologists define sex based on gametes, a binary framework. Although scientifically fruitful, this doesn’t work for many individuals.Reproduction is fundamental to life. Although there are many ways of reproducing, one basic distinction is that of asexual reproduction versus sexual reproduction. In asexual reproduction, sometimes called cloning, an organism reproduces without the participation of another organism. Although asexual reproduction occurs in some vertebrate animals, including reptiles as large as Komodo dragons, it is rare. Instead, most vertebrates, including humans, only reproduce sexually, meaning that two organisms combine their genetic material to produce offspring.

In all vertebrate species, including humans, there are two kinds of sexual reproducers: females and males. Females contribute an egg, which is a gamete (i.e., sex cell) package with a large nutrient bundle and no ability to move. Males contribute sperm, which is a gamete package with no nutrients, but excellent mobility, usually because of a flagellum, a miniature tail. In humans, a single egg is roughly 100,000 times larger than a single sperm.

In all vertebrate species, including humans, there are two kinds of sexual reproducers: females and males.

Most evolutionary biologists, including Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, define sex according to gametes, whether the individual produces eggs (female) or sperm (male).1, 2, 3, 4, 5 This gametes framework undergirds our understanding of reproduction across all sexually reproducing animal species. For instance, in terms of parental responsibility, producing eggs is a high investment strategy whereas producing sperm is a low investment strategy. Building on this initial pattern, in all placental mammals, females, but not males, gestate offspring and provide milk once they are born.

ILLUSTRATION BY IZHAR COHEN FOR SKEPTICAlthough the gametes framework has proven highly fruitful for evolutionary biology, it has two key drawbacks when applied to humans. One is that gametes in mammals can’t be observed easily—we don’t lay eggs as do all birds and most reptiles. A second drawback is that, although this framework works well for species or populations, it doesn’t work for many individuals. Postmenopausal women generally don’t produce eggs and neither do women who have had their ovaries removed. Boys don’t produce sperm, and neither do men who have had their testes removed.

1. People in all societies define sex based on reproductive traits, another binary framework. This framework builds on the gametes definition and is far more practical.Because of the limitations of the gametes framework, I propose the following two “new definitions” of sex based on reproductive traits that are related to gametes.

In humans, a female should be defined as an individual who possesses, or is on a trajectory to possess, or previously possessed, the traits necessary for reproduction as an egg producer; these traits include ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, and vagina. These traits are often referred to as the primary sex characteristics.

In humans, a male should be defined as an individual who possesses, or is on a trajectory to possess, or previously possessed, the traits necessary for reproduction as a sperm producer; these traits include the testes, penis, and scrotum.

I put “new definitions” in quotes to make the point that, although I am arguing we should use this pair of definitions, it is more accurate to say that we should acknowledge our traditional use of them, rather than thinking of them as new. This is because people in all human societies distinguish between males and females, and, historically, they must have done this by observing a newborn’s external genitals. What other option could they have had?

Even in modern industrial societies, where blood and tissue tests are often available, genital inspection is still the main method of sex categorization, although that often now occurs by looking at ultrasound images months prior to birth.6

Of course, outside of the birthing room, most of us rarely examine anyone’s genitals to learn their sex. Instead, we use various traits that typically, but not always, co-occur with the primary reproductive traits. These include secondary sex characteristics, which are physical traits that are not necessary for reproduction but that usually accompany the respective set of reproductive traits, particularly after puberty. In women, these include enlarged breasts and widened hips; in men, they include facial hair and Adam’s apples. There are other relevant traits, including men’s generally lower vocal pitch and their greater height and upper body musculature. Even facial shape is extremely helpful: adults can, with high accuracy, correctly determine another adult’s sex from pictures alone.7, 8

In addition, many components of fashion and style serve, in part, to signal the wearer’s sex. For example, women typically have fuller lips than men, and the current popularity of lip filler procedures can be understood as means of amplifying femininity. Many other products and practices work similarly, including jewelry, piercings, tattoos, hairstyles, makeup, and clothing. Thanks to all this biological and cultural information, most of us interact with many people each day and rarely have doubts about whether a person is female or male.

Even in modern industrial societies, genital inspection is still the main method of sex categorization.

Nonetheless, it bears stressing that the initial assignment of a newborn’s sex, apparently in all societies, is based on external genitalia. In fact, this assignment can be considered part of our universal folk knowledge, “common sense” that sometimes turns out to be correct. Moreover, this universal folk knowledge about sex isn’t limited to knowing that sex is assigned based on external genitalia; it also includes recognizing that there are two, and only two, kinds of human reproducers, that only females bear children, and that females can only reproduce if they have had sexual intercourse with males.

Is this folk knowledge about sex universal, meaning that it has occurred in all human societies that ever existed? Logically, of course, nobody can prove that any belief or behavior is universal; there could always be some exceptional society that has never been studied.9 Nonetheless, we can be highly confident that these patterns are universal or nearly so. The reason is that, for the past few hundred years, cultural anthropologists, ethnographers, missionaries, and explorers have traveled the world documenting exotic beliefs and practices, such as taboos against eating nutritious foods or body modification that involves painful procedures. This attention to describe cultural beliefs extends to sexuality. We know, for example, that in some traditional societies, people believe (incorrectly) that a woman can only get pregnant if she is inseminated repeatedly;10 in other societies, people believe (incorrectly) in partible paternity, meaning that a child can have two biological fathers;11 in others, people believe (incorrectly) that a woman becomes impregnated by a spirit but that a penis must first open the vagina to allow the spirit’s entrance.12 If there were a society where people believed in a third manner or mode of reproduction or were unaware that penile-vaginal intercourse is, with very few exceptions, necessary for conception, we can be confident anthropologists would have studied it and described it by now.

1. Sex is consequential for many reasons, including that it is women who have babies, not men.In addition to the ones just noted, humans hold other universal beliefs and practices. A fundamental practice in all societies is that there are distinct words for girls and boys, women and men, mother and father, and daughter and son.13 These words exist everywhere because they indicate reproductive roles, and reproduction is always potentially consequential. Even in contemporary countries with sub-replacement level fertility, a substantial portion of women bear children, an event with major consequences for education, work, recreation, family life, and, indeed, survival.

Healthcare is a particularly notable sphere where sex, based on reproductive traits, is consequential. Practitioners aiming to provide the best care frequently must consider if their patient is female or male. Diseases that differ substantially in prevalence, manifestation, or treatment, include Alzheimer’s, COVID-19, depression, diabetes, influenza, pneumonia, and several kinds of cancer.14

Some have asked whether our society would be better off if we simply ignored sex. Although this seems desirable in some situations, it is not practical in many others.15

1. Third genders are nonbinary, but they do not challenge the biological sex binary, reproductive traits framework.Another frequent question is whether societies with so-called third genders pose a problem for the binary, reproductive traits framework. For example, in Samoa, there is a third gender kind of person called Fa’afafine, which roughly translates to “in the manner of a woman.” Fa’afafine are biological males who often dress in female-typical clothing, adopt feminine names, and do female-typical, people-oriented jobs such as teaching and nursing; they are exclusively attracted to male-typical, masculine men as sexual partners.16

Third gender individuals either do not reproduce or they reproduce in the typical male or female manner.

Fa’afafine are accepted in Samoa as a third kind of person, neither a typical male nor a typical female. However, everyone there recognizes that Fa’afafine do not reproduce in a third way; they rarely or never reproduce, and, if they do, they do so as men. In other societies, there are other kinds of third gender individuals, including biological females who adopt male-typical roles and, in other societies, individuals who do not conform to either a male-typical or female-typical role.17 However, the story is essentially the same everywhere: everyone knows that third gender individuals either do not reproduce or they reproduce in the typical male or female manner.

Many people, even educators and policymakers, express confusion about third gender individuals and claim they challenge the idea that sex is binary. However, this is attributable to many scholars and activists using the terms “sex” and “gender” interchangeably. They will say things such as, “The Fa’afafine embody a third gender and sex.”

Gender has a rich and broad web of meanings, but we don’t need to unpack them all to address the confusion. We only need to remember that what we can call gender roles associated with biological sex—that is, doing male-typical or female-typical things—can be nonbinary. That is, there can be three or more genders or gender roles, and there can be intermediate genders. Further, there are many other traits that are associated with biological sex that are nonbinary; these include skeletal traits, hormones, and personality. None of this, however, contradicts the binary reproductive traits framework discussed above. Again, there are exactly two kinds of sexual reproducers, male and female, and people in all societies—even societies with third genders—recognize this binary distinction, and they recognize it as consequential.

1. Intersex individuals challenge the binary, reproductive traits framework, but they don’t invalidate it because they do not reproduce in a third way.A more substantial challenge to the binary, reproductive traits framework comes from intersex individuals, who are sometimes described as having DSDs (Disorders or Differences of Sexual Development). These individuals are born with genetic, hormonal, or physical characteristics that are unusual for males or females. For example, a person might have male-typical chromosomes (e.g., XY) yet their phenotype or appearance may be female. A critical point is that, unlike most third gender individuals, intersex individuals typically do not possess a full set of traits necessary for reproduction, and often they are unable to reproduce. Frequently discussed intersex conditions include complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS), congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), and ovotesticular disorder (also called true hermaphroditism). In some communities, some intersex conditions occur fairly commonly (e.g., 5-ARD), and people with this condition may be described as embodying a third gender.18

SourceThere is debate about the frequency of intersex conditions with some writers claiming that 1 in 60 live births is intersex and others suggesting the true frequency is roughly 1 in 5,000. The debate largely centers on what counts as a true intersex condition. Using a very broad definition,19, 20 anyone who doesn’t fit their “exacting criteria” for being a typical male or female should be considered intersex, making the prevalence relatively high. In this perspective, a man with a short but functional penis could be called intersex, as could a boy with hypospadias (i.e., their urethra opens on the underside of their penis instead of at the tip) or a woman who bore three children but learned later in life that her androgenic hormones were unusually high.

The binary nature of human reproduction is about as complete a binary distinction as one can find in the natural world.

However, if we reserve the label intersex for individuals who do not possess all traits necessary for successful reproduction, whose chromosomal sex does not match their phenotypic sex (e.g., XY female), or for whom there was genuine uncertainty about their birth sex—all of which might be called classic intersex conditions—the more accurate estimate is roughly 1 in 5,000.21 This estimate is not particularly controversial; it was cited without challenge in 2020 in a progressive editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine advocating for the removal of sex designations on birth certificates.22

Regardless of whether they are fairly common (1 in 60) or truly rare (1 in 5,000), some intersex individuals do not fit neatly into the binary, reproductive traits framework. Nevertheless, they don’t invalidate the framework for two reasons.

First, many definitions of real-world phenomena— including of species, vegetables, or games—become fuzzy or must admit exceptions if scrutinized.23 This is true even of binaries that we usually take for granted:

• Nearly all of the earth’s water can be classified as freshwater or saltwater, yet there are transitional, intermediate areas, which are sometimes called brackish.
• When coins are flipped, they land on one side or the other, heads or tails, however, coins occasionally land on their edge.
• In all societies, people are considered dead or alive, yet, with modern medicine, some individuals may exist in intermediate states, including comas and brain death.

A second, and more crucial, reason that intersex individuals don’t invalidate this framework is that this framework is based on female and male modes of reproduction, and intersex individuals do not reproduce in a third way. All intersex individuals who reproduce, reproduce in either the male or the female manner. To summarize: the binary framework accommodates all modes of sexual reproduction in humans, but it does not (quite) accommodate all humans.

It’s worth stressing that, as Dawkins has eloquently explained,24 the binary nature of human reproduction is about as complete a binary distinction as one can find in the natural world.

1. Hyde and colleagues’ (2019) popular nonbinary definition of sex is indefensible.What about the nonbinary definitions of sex? Because these have become influential, one might assume that they are better than the binary definitions. I want to note that there is apparently no nonbinary definition of sex that has been recognized as being the best. Nevertheless, a good place to start is with a review article by Hyde and colleagues entitled, “The Future of Sex and Gender in Psychology: Five Challenges to the Gender Binary.”25 This article was published in 2019 in the American Psychologist, a leading journal of the American Psychological Association, the largest psychological society in the world. Hyde is one of the most influential sex and gender scholars, and this article has already been cited more than 1,100 times—a very high number for any academic article, particularly one published so recently. Hyde et al. offer this definition of sex: “The term sex is used here to refer to biological systems involving the X and Y chromosomes, pre- and postnatal sexual differentiation, and hormones that influence sexual differentiation of the external genitals, which, in turn, serve as the basis for sex assignment at birth.”

This is a terrible definition, on several counts. The first issue is that it fails to acknowledge the unifying or organizing feature of the properties included in the definition—that unifying feature being, of course, reproduction. Imagine someone defined a door as: “A human-created object, situated in a house, dwelling, or vehicle, that can be comprised of various materials, that can be decorative, and that can have other objects affixed to it.” These stated properties of doors are all true, yet this is an inadequate definition because it doesn’t state that the chief purpose of a door is to serve as a movable barrier. Similarly, it would be a poor definition of an eye if someone listed many of its components (e.g., cornea, lens, retina) but failed to mention that the eye’s function is to see (that is, to transduce some property of some portion of the electromagnetic spectrum into neural impulses).

A second issue is that Hyde et al. have not explained why a new definition of sex is needed. A basic principle of communication is that if there is an established definition, one should not alter it, or introduce a new one, without justification. Of relevance here is that the gametes definitions of sex developed by biologists is well established—it has been used for more than 100 years and has proven extremely fruitful. (Yes, it’s true that earlier in this article I proposed defining sex based on reproductive traits, however, I explained why this is a sensible extension of the gametes definitions and that it is best viewed as an acknowledgment of our intuitive, universal folk knowledge.)

A third problem is that Hyde et al. have not provided a constructive, practical definition of sex. To make this clear, recall that according to the reproductive traits framework, an individual is female if they possess (or did possess or will possess) the traits necessary for reproduction as an egg producer, and they are male if they possess (or did possess or will possess) the traits necessary for reproduction as a sperm producer, or they are outside the binary if they don’t possess traits for either of these modes of reproduction. There will always be a few edge cases requiring further careful consideration. That said, the vast majority of people can be categorized easily by the reproductive traits framework.

Hyde et al. don’t offer anything similarly useful. They do not state what, according to their definition, the various kinds or categories of sex are—whether it be three, four, five, or more categories. Or, if they consider sex a gradient or spectrum, rather than a categorical variable, they do not specify what concepts or variables that gradient represents. This is worth emphasizing: Based on those very definitions, one cannot categorize a single person as female, male, a third sex, or some intermediate sex. Practically speaking, a 99.9 percent easy classification (i.e., the reproductive traits framework) is preferable to a 0 percent classification!

What issues do Hyde et al. address in their article? One emphasis is defining additional terms, such as “gender,” “transgender,” “cisgender,” “nonbinary,” “agender,” and “genderfluid.” This creates the impression that sex is mixed up with these other terms. The other approach Hyde et al. take—and this comprises most of the article—is to argue that most traits that typically differ between women and men are affected by many factors that can be placed on a gradient or spectrum. These traits include the amounts of various hormones, the size of various brain structures, and the amount or frequency of cognitive abilities, social behaviors, romantic attraction, and feeling like a man or a woman. Although it’s true that these traits are nonbinary, that is not at odds with the reproductive traits framework. The take-home message of that framework is not that all sex-differentiated traits are binary; it’s that the two modes of reproduction—and the reproductive traits that support them—are binary.

So, how does the review by Hyde et al. deal with the fact that reproduction is binary? It doesn’t—it simply ignores the issue. In particular, although it is more than 20 journal pages and over 14,000 words, the words “gamete,” “baby,” “child,” “pregnancy,” “mother,” or “parent,” do not appear, except in parentheses or in the references section. There are a few mentions of “reproductive phases” and “reproductive structures,” but there is no acknowledgment that people bear and raise children, that these events are important, or that reproduction should be considered when defining sex.

Of course, Hyde et al. might argue that ignoring reproduction is a feature, not a bug—indeed, one that justifies their new definition of sex. Perhaps so, but this then raises the question of what trait should serve as the foundation for defining sex. Since they do not provide any answer, I submit the reason is that no nonbinary definition is defensible.

Without a theoretically defensible definition of sex to provide the endpoints of a gradient or spectrum, no individual could be placed on any female-male spectrum for any trait.

Imagine that someone proposed that the amount of testosterone a person is exposed to prior to birth should be the foundation for defining sex, an idea that seems reasonable given that such exposure is known to correlate with variation in several typically sex-differentiated important areas, including play preferences, work preferences, cognitive abilities, and sexual orientation. Although apparently reasonable, one might argue that it is in fact an adult’s current level of circulating testosterone, not their prenatal exposure, that is the more salient measure; another might suggest that prenatal estrogen exposure as the key measure; a fourth might posit that yet another hormone is critical.

The resulting situation is actually more nebulous because other scholars might just as reasonably claim that hormones are no more important than brain shape, skeletal anatomy, personality, or other areas, and each area has many possible measures. There is simply no single area or measure that is more defensible than the others.

In addition, a more fundamental problem is that any scoring system requires a reference point, and scholars who do not accept a binary definition of sex have committed themselves to abandoning the reference point of binary sex. This issue is relevant to every kind of trait—behavioral, anatomical, physiological—that might be considered a candidate for characterizing sex along a spectrum. Without a theoretically defensible definition of sex to provide the endpoints of a gradient or spectrum, no individual could be placed on any female-male spectrum for any trait.

1. No better nonbinary definition has been offered.If the definitions and ideas proposed by Hyde et al. in 2019 are unworkable, then perhaps there is some other framework that works better? Though I follow the scholarship and discussions in this area closely, I’ve yet to encounter one.

In debates and essays, scholars arguing against the “sex is binary” position, including Alice Dreger26 and Steven Novella,27 invariably echo the points made by Hyde et al., including that some intersex individuals do not fit the binary and that most traits related to sex are not binary. However, these scholars never cite nor develop a viable nonbinary alternative framework, and they fail to acknowledge the fact that all humans who reproduce do so in either the male or female mode, never in a third or intermediate way.

I’ve long taught the course, “Psychology of Sex Differences,” and so am familiar with the leading textbooks in this field, and have participated in a content analysis of the leading textbooks.28 These books also deny that sex is binary yet fail to offer any constructive nonbinary alternative. Furthermore, although they invariably address reproduction and childrearing in later chapters, when they first introduce and define the terms sex and gender in their opening chapters, they do not acknowledge either that reproduction exists or that it should be incorporated into a definition of sex.

1. Nonbinary definitions of sex are popular because they are viewed as being progressive. However, one can hold progressive political views while still retaining the traditional binary view of sex.If the binary framework of sex based on reproduction is solid and the nonbinary alternatives are so weak, why have the nonbinary alternatives gained so much traction? Why is the nonbinary view presented not only in texts but especially in the media?

The short answer is that scholars, especially evolutionary biologists, haven’t done an adequate job in making the binary basics accessible. While concentrating on the logical and heuristic power of the gametes framework, including its applicability to species where individuals can alter their sexual strategies or reproduce asexually, evolutionary biologists have neglected to provide intuitive and practical definitions for nonspecialists. I hope this article has made the case for how and why a reproductive traits framework—which builds on the gametes framework and makes explicit humans’ universal folk knowledge—remedies this problem.

Those with intersex conditions don’t fully fit the traditional binary pattern, and neither do gay people, or third gender individuals.

A second reason nonbinary definitions of sex have become popular is that they seem to accommodate better the diverse and varied biologies, psychologies, and experiences of individuals who do not conform to the traditional binary pattern, i.e., that most people have male or female reproductive traits, and this difference is accompanied by a corresponding package of female-typical or male-typical nonreproductive traits.29 Among many others, these include secondary sex traits (e.g., enlarged breasts, facial hair), normative social roles and interests (e.g., homemaker, breadwinner), heterosexual orientation, and identifying with one’s biological sex (cisgender). Those with intersex conditions don’t fully fit the traditional binary pattern, and neither do gay people, or third gender individuals. Further, in the U.S. and other Western societies, traditionally there has not been any third gender category or categories, but this is changing as increasing numbers, especially of younger people, identify as transgender.

Although there have always been people who don’t fit the traditional binary pattern, in recent years the visibility of these individuals—and the respect and legal rights afforded to them—has increased tremendously. A major contributor to this change has involved rejecting the presumed practical and moral superiority of the traditional binary pattern. Some scholars call this the cisgender heteronormative pattern. Whatever the nomenclature, the critical point is that more and more individuals have recognized that it is fine and safe to be, for example, a biological woman who is sexually attracted to women, a biological man who identifies as a woman, a biological woman who prefers fixing cars rather than crocheting baby blankets, or an intersex person whose reproductive traits do not allow categorization as being strictly male or female.

For many, myself included, such rejection of the superiority and dominance of the traditional binary pattern represents true ethical and political progress. However, doing this does not require abandoning the scientifically accurate view that sex is binary.30, 31

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Gender identity has become one of the most pressing–and polarizing–topics in today’s cultural landscape. Major medical associations have embraced a variety of gender-affirming treatments, ranging from counseling sessions to lifelong hormonal therapies and even surgeries. Their rationale is that these interventions help alleviate severe distress among people who experience a disconnect between the sex they were born with and the gender they identify as. In the same breath, however, many of these organizations and prominent voices also describe gender as largely a “social construct”–something molded by cultural norms rather than by biology.

That claim raises a fundamental paradox. If gender truly rests on external expectations, why do some advocates support irreversible medical procedures–especially in children–as a primary response to gender-related distress? On the flip side, if there is a strong biological basis for gender identity, then why do we invoke social factors so frequently? For parents, policy-makers, and health professionals trying to do right by patients, these questions create a tangle of uncertainty. Even more critically, children and teenagers lie at the center of an ethical storm that involves decisions about their bodies, their long-term health, and whether or not they should receive life-changing medical treatments before they’ve reached adulthood.

The Rise of Gender-Affirming Care Over the past decade, a growing number of adolescents have presented to clinics with gender dysphoria–a term describing psychological distress that arises when someone’s gender identity does not align with their biological sex. Many point to increased visibility on social media platforms, greater cultural acceptance, and shifting diagnostic criteria as drivers of this trend. More public conversations have lowered the stigma that once surrounded topics of gender identity, thereby encouraging more families to seek out professional help.

Even among professionals who see medical interventions as appropriate in specific cases, many urge greater caution when minors are involved.

At first glance, this appears to be good news: it might simply suggest that people who would otherwise suffer in silence are getting care sooner. However, some scientists have cautioned that the scientific basis for rushing into physically transformative treatments–like puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones–is less settled than some believe. While small-scale studies often show that teens may feel better in the short run when they start medical interventions, critics argue that these studies are often limited by small sample sizes, lack of long-term follow-up, or reliance on self-reported outcomes. As a result, the evidence about possible harmful effects, regret rates, fertility loss, and other life-altering implications remains uncertain.1

Even among professionals who see medical interventions as appropriate in specific cases, many urge greater caution when minors are involved. Adolescents, after all, are still navigating a period in life in which personality, preferences, and self-image can change dramatically over just a few years. Some note that a substantial number of children who experience gender confusion eventually choose to align with the sex they were born into, once puberty and mental development progress.2, 3, 4 If that is true for a sizable proportion of youth, it raises serious moral and ethical considerations about guiding them toward irreversible treatments so early in life.

When Minors Are Involved The tension is magnified when the patient is a child or teenager. Deciding whether a young person should start taking powerful hormones at a time when their brain and body are still maturing is no small responsibility. Adolescents generally have limited capacity to project far into the future and weigh long-term risks against short-term relief. This is one reason why society imposes age restrictions on major decisions–whether it’s voting, consuming alcohol, or entering into legal contracts.

Adolescents generally have limited capacity to project far into the future and weigh long-term risks against short-term relief.

In cases where a teen is diagnosed with gender dysphoria, the stakes are exceptionally high. The potential harm extends beyond immediate side effects: puberty blockers can impact bone density, cross-sex hormones can affect future fertility, and surgeries might remove or alter healthy body parts in a way that can never be reversed. If the teen comes to identify differently in later years–as many detransitioners report–the regret can be profound. These individuals sometimes feel they made decisions they weren’t old enough to understand, pointing to mental health struggles, outside influence, or social pressures that contributed to their choices at the time.5

Another complicating factor is the prevalence of mental health challenges. Many teens presenting with gender dysphoria also have co-occurring conditions such as depression, anxiety, or traits along the autism spectrum. Untangling whether a young person’s discomfort with their sex stems primarily from deeper psychological challenges or a deeper disconnect with their body can be a complex task. Some experts worry that prescribing hormones too quickly might mask core issues that should be addressed through therapy or more holistic forms of care.6

Stories of Detransition Increasing numbers of detransitioners–people who pursued medical treatments to live as the opposite sex and later regretted it–have brought further attention to the potential pitfalls of early intervention. Some of these individuals began taking puberty blockers in early adolescence, moved on to cross-sex hormones in their late teens, and underwent surgeries by the time they were barely out of high school. Later, in their early twenties, they realized that the hormonal changes and surgeries failed to resolve underlying distress or that their sense of identity shifted back toward their birth sex.

Though detransitioners appear to be a minority within the broader transgender community, their stories highlight the importance of a measured approach–especially in those critical teenage years. Their experiences point to the need for thorough mental health evaluations, emphasis on informed consent, and a recognition that identity can evolve, particularly in young people.

A Biological Perspective To understand why many observers question the notion of gender as purely a social construct, it helps to look at biology. From the earliest moments of development, sex is written into every cell of the body. Humans typically have XX chromosomes for females and XY for males. While there can be rare variations in these chromosomal patterns, the overwhelming majority of people follow this binary at the genetic level. Each cell in a person’s body is aware of whether it belongs to an XX or XY individual because the underlying genetic code instructs the cell to behave in a sex-specific way.

Hormones also come into play. During fetal development, surges of testosterone in an XY fetus help shape not just the external genitalia but also the brain’s circuitry. Similarly, the absence or lower levels of these androgens in XX fetuses contribute to a different developmental trajectory. These hormonal influences create meaningful differences in structure and function that can last a lifetime and are often resistant to external social forces. Indeed, researchers have found that certain regions of the brain exhibit sex-specific characteristics that align more closely with genetic and hormonal history than with cultural conditioning.7

Further illustrating the depth of these biological underpinnings is the fact that hormonal shifts continue after birth. In XY infants, testosterone spikes in the early months of life, aiding further development of neural pathways associated with male-typical behaviors. In XX infants, the lower androgen levels may guide different patterns of play and interaction. In adolescence, surging sex hormones activate and solidify some of these neural circuits, reinforcing characteristics that first took shape in the womb.

One line of thought suggests that variations in prenatal hormone exposure can lead to a brain-body mismatch.

Some individuals, however, do experience a mismatch between their deeply felt gender identity and their biological sex. The question is whether this incongruence arises primarily from social influences or whether it has biological underpinnings of its own. One line of inquiry suggests that variations in prenatal hormone exposure can lead to a brain-body mismatch in which the individual’s internal sense of self aligns more closely with a different sex than the one indicated by their chromosomes. This perspective offers a potential scientific explanation for those who say they were born into the wrong body and cannot simply adopt a different gender role by choice.

Contradictions in the Current Approach Despite this strong biological evidence, many medical or advocacy organizations continue to describe gender as mainly a social construct. Meanwhile, they often support medical treatments that target the body’s biology–hormones, genital structures, secondary sex characteristics–as the primary path to alleviate distress. This creates an inherent contradiction: If gender is almost entirely shaped by social learning, then extensive counseling and social support might be enough to alleviate discomfort. But if there is a robust biological component, it undercuts the claim that gender is simply imposed by society.

The contradiction becomes glaring in an age where more and more young people identify outside the male-female binary. If someone’s gender is fluid or shifts across multiple categories, does permanently modifying the body fully serve that fluidity? Or might that reinforce the notion that a body needs to be “fixed” to match one of two possible categories? The debate is complicated and often emotionally charged, especially when real lives and futures are at stake.

For many medical professionals, the goal is to reduce suffering while respecting each individual’s journey. Yet the limited data about long-term outcomes–coupled with rising numbers of teens seemingly suddenly identifying as transgender–continues to raise doubts. Clinicians are caught between wanting to show compassion and facing the possibility that some adolescents might adopt a trans identity due to social pressures, mental health struggles, or other factors that do not necessarily involve a genuine and consistent biological mismatch.

Ethical Dilemmas At its core, the debate about medical interventions for minors is ethical. It revolves around questions of capacity to reason, informed consent, and the principle of “do no harm.” If a child is too young to comprehend long-term repercussions–such as reduced fertility, ongoing hormonal dependencies, potential surgical complications, and the chance of regretting irreversible procedures–then how can society or the medical establishment justify greenlighting interventions that may be permanent?

Parents find themselves in a difficult position. They want to do what’s best for a child who might be in crisis, but they also worry about making decisions that cannot be undone.

Parents find themselves in a difficult position. They want to do what’s best for a child who might be in crisis, but they also worry about making decisions that cannot be undone. Healthcare professionals, meanwhile, face pressure from advocacy groups who see any delay as cruel or bigoted, because it leads to the transgender teen irreversibly developing characteristics of the sex they do not identify as, such as broad shoulders or a strong jawline (in the case of Male-to-Female transgender individuals) or breasts and wide hips (in the case of Female-to-Male transgender individuals). Some clinicians also worry that failing to address underlying mental health conditions can lead to misguided interventions–young people may conflate discomfort with their bodies, or alienation from peers, with identifying as a different sex.8

In some cases, courts step in when parents, medical teams, or minors disagree, emphasizing just how unsettled this territory is. Lawsuits alleging insufficient counseling, medical malpractice, or inadequate disclosure of potential risks have underscored the importance of robust safeguards. These cases aren’t about demonizing trans people; rather, they question whether the current model has moved too quickly, especially for children who may not be ready for such significant, life-altering decisions.

In some cases, courts step in when parents, medical teams, or minors disagree, emphasizing just how unsettled this territory is.

Case Examples Real-life narratives drive home the human stakes more powerfully than theoretical debates. One individual was raised as a girl after a severe accident in infancy destroyed his male genitalia. Physicians at the time believed that a child’s gender identity could be molded almost entirely by environment, so they recommended surgically creating female anatomy and raising the child as a girl. Despite an upbringing filled with dolls, dresses, and female pronouns, the child persistently gravitated toward male behaviors and interests. As an adolescent, he found out the truth of his birth sex and later decided to live as a man, though not without enduring serious emotional trauma.

Similarly, a number of detransitioners report that their early experiences mirror a pattern of underlying depression, anxiety, or social struggles that were not fully addressed. Only after physically transitioning–and discovering that those internal issues remained–did they come to question whether medical intervention was the right path.

Plenty of transgender adults stand by their decisions and report profound relief at transitioning. Their successes should not be dismissed.

Of course, plenty of transgender adults stand by their decisions and report profound relief at transitioning. Their successes should not be dismissed. But the existence of regret underscores the seriousness of these interventions and the absolute necessity for thorough, long-term evaluation before proceeding with young patients.

Conclusion Today’s debates over gender-affirming care illuminate an underlying contradiction: many experts frame gender as a social invention, yet they simultaneously support biologically altering interventions. This clash mirrors a larger cultural tension. On one hand, we yearn for a world where people are free to express themselves in any way they choose, unbound by stereotypes. On the other, we acknowledge that each cell in our body is branded male or female at a genetic level, and that hormones shape fundamental aspects of who we are.

In this ambiguous space, children and teens deserve the highest degree of caution and compassion. That doesn’t mean denying genuine gender dysphoria or withholding supportive counseling.

In this ambiguous space, children and teens deserve the highest degree of caution and compassion. Their brains are still developing, and their sense of self is evolving at an age when they may not fully grasp the consequences of permanent medical treatments. That doesn’t mean denying genuine gender dysphoria or withholding supportive counseling. Rather, it means honoring both the psychological dimension of identity and the profound biological processes at work underneath it all.

No one has all the answers about the best path forward–especially in a field where emerging research grapples with rapid social change. But at minimum, any course of action should recognize that while social context matters, human biology is not as malleable as some suggest. By acknowledging the biological aspects of sex and gender from the beginning, we can better weigh the ethics and long-term implications of altering that biology in an attempt to ease youthful distress. It is precisely because the stakes are so high that a more careful, evidence-based, and individualized approach is vital. When real lives hang in the balance, certainty cannot come from ideology alone–it must be grounded in clear, comprehensive insight into both body and mind.

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Every year on my birthday, my phone would light up with messages from friends, acquaintances, old coworkers, distant relatives—all offering quick well-wishes. The notes weren’t particularly personal, but I found something reassuring about being remembered. Then, one year, I changed my social media privacy settings to see who would remember without the digital nudge. When no notifications came, I felt a pang of sadness at being forgotten. I understood then that my birthday no longer lived in anyone’s memory. Instead, it lived on a digital cloud governed by algorithms; without pushed out notifications, I was invisible. That year, other than birthday wishes and presents from my closest family members, the only birthday greeting I received was a postcard from my dentist, wishing me a “healthy and happy year ahead” and reminding me that I was due for a cleaning.

This experience reveals a deeper truth: as we increasingly depend on digital tools to remember for us, we risk forgetting something very important. Memory is more than data stored somewhere—it’s what makes us who we are. It dictates our perspective on the world, our feelings, actions, and reasoning. It is the backbone of identity, supporting our sense of continuity and coherence. Memory helps us create meaning, make sense of the present, and predict the future based on past experiences and knowledge. We each hold both personal memories, and shared cultural and historical ones. Most of us fear losing them, whether due to neurological illness, data loss, or the mere passage of time. Without our memories, would we still be who we are?

Memory is more than data stored somewhere—it’s what makes us who we are.

Last week, researchers from Kyoto University, the University of Sussex, BCAM, and Araya Inc. published a study in Nature Communications about Curved Neural Networks, a new AI memory architecture that uses geometric design to mimic how the human brain recalls memories. By allowing AI to “bend” its computational space, it can simulate an effect similar to a human “lightbulb” moment through “explosive memory recall.” This could lead to AI systems with faster, more human like memory recall for applications ranging from robotics to brain-inspired computing. However, as more of our memories migrate to machines, will it fundamentally change us?

Consider how you access your autobiographical memory. How much of it is reflected in the thousands of images you’ve captured on your smartphone? Or saved emails and private messages you can’t bring yourself to delete? Then there are sources of external memory: How many phone numbers do you remember? How often do you rely on GPS to navigate? How frequently do you turn to Google or ChatGPT to recall a fact, event, or concept? Even when a restaurant doesn’t automatically suggest the tip amount for you, can you do it in your head or do you need the calculator on your phone?

It’s clear that our relationship with memory has been undergoing a profound transformation. Are we enhancing our minds, or eroding our capacity for deep learning and critical thought?

Tools aren’t inherently harmful. They are extensions of human capability. From the moment a primitive hominid used a bone as a weapon, as dramatized in 2001: A Space Odyssey, tools marked the dawn of a breakthrough in human intelligence. Modern digital tools do more than extend physical capability for memory; they transform how we think, learn, and create meaning.

Are we enhancing our minds, or eroding our capacity for deep learning and critical thought?

The phenomenon of relying on external aids to manage cognitive tasks is known as cognitive offloading, which reduces the demand on our brain. It’s not new. We’ve always done it, with notebooks, to-do lists, calendars, and address books. But the digital age has dramatically amplified this process. Modern digital tools, especially those powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are not merely digital filing cabinets; they are our active partners, helping to interpret data, connect concepts, and spark original thinking—functioning much like an auxiliary brain.

In some ways, cognitive offloading is not dissimilar to transactive memory, proposed by psychologist Daniel Wegner to describe how memory is distributed across individuals and systems so that we do not need to rely exclusively on our own memories, but rather can offload some of them to our social networks. For example, one’s romantic partner might remember certain things that you struggle to recall, and vice versa. Or your sibling might remind you of your parents’ pending anniversary. Today, their digital counterparts increasingly play that role.

A 2011 study in Science, however, reported that this process of cognitive offloading or transactive memory can negatively impact on our own memory capacity, as we are less likely to remember or internalize information if we think we’ll be able to access it elsewhere. The researchers call this the Google Effect. “The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves,” the researchers concluded.

This was nearly 15 years ago.

Since then, our dependence on external memory systems has increased exponentially, often at the expense of internalizing knowledge. AI-powered tools can now instantly provide answers to even the most complex questions, analyze data, and summarize articles—even entire books or the lifetime corpus of famous authors.

It’s easier than ever to be able to learn about whatever the new thing we are seeking out is, but the mechanism of attaining answers has shifted. No longer do you have to sift through Google pages—let alone bound books—to get information, a process through which you’re likely to find more context and develop deeper understanding. AI tools allow you to skip a lot of steps and get answers immediately, though often without the benefit of full context or source transparency—something that we ought to be demanding.

There are popular apps that advertise how you can gain knowledge quickly by “reading” abridged books—which are summarized by AI. Certainly, it’s an efficient way to absorb some key points quickly, but does it not miss the depth available only in reading the full text? Does it not skip over the mental process required to truly grasp the ideas within the works? We often learn best by struggling with complexity. Indeed, what exactly does happen to our brain when we rely so heavily on offloading? Neuroscience provides some clues.

Memory isn’t a static system similar to document storage in a filing cabinet—it’s a dynamic process by which the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information, and is shaped by attention, emotion, sleep, context, and more. Thanks to neuroplasticity, the brain’s remarkable ability to rewire itself, we can change the structure and function of neural circuits through repeated use. Learning, for example, strengthens the connections between neurons across a network of brain regions, including the hippocampus (which helps form new memories), the amygdala (which invests them with emotional significance), and the prefrontal cortex (which manages attention and decision-making). A seminal study led by Eleanor Maguire at University College London found that London taxi drivers who’ve rigorously memorized city maps had an enlarged region of the hippocampus compared to the general population. The findings also suggested that when memory demands decrease, the hippocampus may physically shrink.

When we stop engaging our cognitive faculties, those neural pathways can weaken, making recall and retention more difficult over time.

In short, memory is not just what you know; it’s what your brain is actively building, moment by moment. When we stop engaging our cognitive faculties, those neural pathways can weaken, making recall and retention more difficult over time. Research has shown that relying on external tools to handle mental tasks such as memorization can hinder our long-term ability to retain information, as well as reducing our capacity for formation of new memories.

Recent work by Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University focused on 319 knowledge workers and their use of generative AI tools. It found that those workers who frequently used generative AI tools and placed more confidence in them had experienced a decline in critical thinking skills, as they became more reliant on AI for problem-solving. Over-reliance on such tools tends to lead to more passive consumption of information, and less scrutiny of outputs. Individuals also lose the opportunity to practice and develop their own cognitive skills, leading to cognitive dependence.

The level of trust towards such memory aids seems to play a significant role when it comes to how often we rely on them to offload memory tasks, and while long-term performance is affected, offloading can actually enhance short-term performance. This is particularly useful given that our short-term storage capacity is 3 to 5 chunks of information (recently shortened from the famous 5 to 7 chunks), on average.

In 1885, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus developed a memory theory called the Forgetting Curve, tracing the exponential rate at which new information tends to be forgotten if there’s no effort made to retain it. It turns out that we begin to forget information almost immediately, but recall exercises can help us prevent this loss. Without such efforts, we would likely forget around 90 percent of new information within a week. That’s why you might pass an exam you’ve studied for the night before, but you aren’t likely to recall much the following week. Or why we forget languages we don’t practice.

Yet we should not view our forgetfulness as an entirely negative process. If we retained all memories, our brains would be flooded with unnecessary information, rendering them highly inefficient at processing information. That is why evolutionary pressures also wired us to forget things. We have specialized neural systems actively erasing or suppressing memory traces to keep what’s stored relevant and reserving space for more important information. A 2017 study by Blake Richards and Paul Frankland published in Neuron, shows that the brain actively prunes existing memories so that it can make room for more relevant information. The researchers proposed that “memory transience” is necessary in a “world that is both changing and noisy” and argued that forgetting is adaptive because it allows for more behavioral flexibility.

If we retained all memories, our brains would be flooded with unnecessary information, rendering them highly inefficient at processing information.

Their claim is further boosted by a study published in Nature, which found that boosting hippocampal neurogenesis after training caused mice to forget a learned platform location in a water maze, but helped them learn a new location more quickly. Conversely, suppressing neurogenesis preserved the original memory but impaired the ability to adapt to the new platform location, showing that forgetting can facilitate learning in changing environments.

In a similar way, offloading our memories to digital tools could ensure that we’re optimizing our memory space. The overall impact depends on how we use these tools: Are they replacing the act of memorizing and learning altogether, or are they simply freeing us to allocate more mental resources for other forms of memory?

In ancient Greece, students of philosophy and rhetoric were trained to memorize long speeches and texts using sophisticated mnemonic techniques. In medieval Europe, monks meticulously copied manuscripts by hand, and scholars often committed vast portions of religious and philosophical texts to memory. In many Indigenous and oral cultures, knowledge of medicine, law, and ancestry was passed down entirely through storytelling and memorization, often over generations. Before the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, and long before the internet, much of human knowledge had to be carried internally. People tended to carry more knowledge in their heads, but there was also far less knowledge to carry. But over the centuries we’ve accumulated a staggering amount of information, most of which stored in books, and increasingly in computers and computerized devices.

At this point, however, there’s no going back, so the question isn’t whether we should offload memory but when we should do it. By delegating certain trivial or repetitive information elsewhere, we can free up cognitive resources for more creative, complex, or strategic thinking. Memorizing phone numbers or addresses is probably not the best use of our bandwidth. Reducing rote memorization and offloading trivial data frees up mental bandwidth to pursue complex, creative cognitive tasks, or strategic thinking—human faculties that no machine can fully replicate yet (AGI could change that). Instead of remembering every historical date, we might focus on understanding the causes and consequences of major events or political shifts.

Emerging AI “second brain” technologies promise cognitive augmentation by externalizing personal memory. At the same time they raise new ethical and philosophical questions about identity, dependence on machinery, and the nature of knowledge.

There are several companies promising to offer applications that would memorize everything we encounter on a daily basis and allow us to easily recall such things simply by asking questions like: “What did the guy I met with on Wednesday say about flesh-eating robots?” or “What brilliant idea for taking over the world did John Smith reference at our meeting?” The possibilities are endless. Such a tool would act as an extension of our own memories—not just of facts, but of our lives themselves.

We already have AI assistants that prepare meeting summaries and notes, wearables that provide contextual reminders and information overlays, apps that organize notes and interlink ideas on our behalf (like Obsidian), and AI smart glasses that can help us recognize faces.

In the fields of medicine or law, memory-based tools can be particularly consequential. Being able to quickly tap into data, including a doctor’s own notes, and analyze it, can lead to a faster and more accurate diagnosis. The ability to precisely recall precedents or case details and make instant connections can affect legal reasoning and the ability to try a case.

Memory isn't just about recall of data … It's also necessary for pattern recognition, and diagnostic reasoning.

However, memory isn’t just about recall of data. It’s also necessary for pattern recognition, and diagnostic reasoning. If too much is relegated to auxiliary tools, it might hinder the intuitive decision-making process, where experience and memory form an important backbone. For a surgeon, for instance, repetition and internalized procedure recall are critical. For a lawyer, being able to recall certain precedents internally is necessary for persuasive reasoning and rhetorical strategy, especially in making objections that can exclude harmful evidence or testimony or form the ground for appeals, should the verdict go against their client.

There’s another serious concern around offloading our memories to our smartphones or the cloud that extends beyond cognitive or psychological effects. A major issue is privacy and security, which is becoming an increasingly pressing issue as more sensitive information is being stored outside of our own minds. Consider medical consultations with Dr. ChatGPT, or that late night therapy session when no one else was available to hear you out. Add to that diet logs stored in apps, or symptom trackers, search histories, GPS location data, conversations, photos and videos, and so on. Not only is your digital memory footprint trackable, but it can be used to analyze almost everything about you.

Unfortunately, data breaches are not uncommon. Neither is device loss or theft. In her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff writes that surveillance capitalism “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data [which] are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as machine intelligence, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later.”

User data on Facebook or Google isn’t merely used to provide a better user experience, she argues, it is treated as raw material from which tech companies can infer personal details and influence or manipulate behavior without sufficient oversight.

When memory is outsourced, it may also be commodified.

We may not be able to completely prevent data breaches, or monitoring, but there are some steps we can take to protect our digital memories. These include using apps and storage solutions that encrypt data, using personal AI assistants that process requests locally versus keeping them on a server, storing especially sensitive or important memories offline—ideally with encrypted backups, considering using anonymous accounts for certain late-night conversations with chatbots, even air-gapping security information and systems.

We also need to advocate for stronger data protection laws, such as “the right to be forgotten” which allows users to request permanent deletion of their digital memories from platforms. As well, we need to enforce transparency mandates so that data processors (especially within the expanding AI realm) have to clearly explain which data are collected, stored, and shared. Ideally, any such systems—just like the human brain—could, by design, also “forget” data, not just remember it.

Our identities are built on the stories we remember and retell ourselves. Digital tools may allow us to better recall and play back our memories, but our role is to reflect on and analyze them. Digital time capsules can tell us what happened, but understanding what it all meant and how it felt—that’s a job for us humans. Machines don’t feel, or care. We do. So, ask yourself: What’s really worth remembering?

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On Saturday, August 9, 2025, my long-time friend and colleague Chick D’Arpino passed away quietly in his sleep, age 91. He is survived by two daughters, Cathy and Marci; two grandkids, Andrew and Shelby; and one great-grandchild, Vivian. Chick was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1934 (his parents had just immigrated from Italy a few years prior); the family moved to San Jose, California in 1945, where Chick remained in the same home until his passing. He proudly served in the U.S. Navy from 1951 to 1955, during the Korean Conflict. Chick was a bricklayer by trade and a philosopher at heart. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Chick became very involved with the philosophy departments at San Jose State and Stanford University, which he always felt was his true calling, especially after what happened to him early one morning in 1966, the subject of this essay, excerpted from my 2011 book, The Believing Brain, titled “Mr. D’Arpino’s Dilemma”—the dilemma being his lifelong search to understand a message he heard one early morning in 1966 that he strongly suspected was from an alien intelligence. Chick’s experience is emblematic of the power of belief, when the origin is a powerful personal experience that is nonreplicable in a lab. What should we make of such poignant anecdotes? This essay provides one answer. The dialogues are from an interview I recorded with Chick on Saturday, October 17, 2009, in person at my home in Altadena, after which we adjourned for beer at a local pub in Pasadena (see photograph below).

The voice was as distinct as the message it delivered was unmistakable. Emilio “Chick” D’Arpino bolted upright from his bed, startled that the words he heard so clearly were not spoken by anyone in the room. It was 4:00 A.M. on February 11, 1966, and Mr. D’Arpino was alone in his bedroom, seemingly unperturbed by what he was hearing. It wasn’t a masculine voice, yet neither was it feminine. And even though he had no reference guide built by experience from which to compare, Mr. D’Arpino somehow knew that the source was not of this world …

♦ ♦ ♦

I met Chick D’Arpino on my 47th birthday, September 8, 2001, just three days before the calamitous event that would henceforth cleave history into pre- and post-9/11. Chick wanted to know if I would be willing to write an essay to answer this question:

Is it possible to know if there is a source out there that knows we are here?

“Uh? You mean God?,” I queried.

“Not necessarily,” Chick replied.

“E.T.?”

“Maybe,” Chick continued, “but I don’t want to specify the nature of the source, just that it is out there and not here.”

Who would ask such a question, I wondered, and more importantly, why? Chick explained that he was a retired bricklayer interested in pursuing answers to deep questions through essay contests and one-day conferences he was sponsoring at San Jose State University and at Stanford University, near his home in Silicon Valley. I had never heard of a retired bricklayer sponsoring conferences before, so this got my attention as I have long admired autodidacts.

Over the years, as Chick and I became close friends, I grew ever more curious to know why a bricklayer would spend what little money he has to funding essay contests and conferences to answer life’s big questions. I had a sense that Chick already knew the answers to the questions he was posing, but for a decade he took the Fifth with me until one day when I probed one more time he gave me a hint:

I had an experience.

An experience. Okay! Now we’re talking my language—the language of belief systems grounded in experiences. What type of experience? Chick clammed up again, but I pushed and prodded for details.

When was this experience?

Back in 1966.

What time of day did it happen?

Four in the morning.

Did you see or hear something?

I don’t want to talk about that aspect of it.

But if it was a profound enough experience to be driving you to this day to explore such big questions, it is surely worth sharing with someone.

Nope, it’s private.

Come on, Chick, I’ve known you practically a decade. We’re best of friends. I’m genuinely curious.

Okay, it was a voice.

A voice. Um.

I know what you’re thinking, Michael—I’ve read all your stuff about auditory hallucinations, lucid dreams, and sleep paralysis. But that’s not what happened to me. This was clearly, distinctly, unmistakably not from my mind. It was from an outside source.

Now we were getting somewhere. Here is a man I’ve come to know and love as a dear friend, a man who otherwise is as sane as the next guy and as smart as a whip. I needed to know more.

Where did this happen?

At my sister’s house.

What were you doing sleeping at your sister’s house?

I was separated from my wife and going through a divorce.

Ahah, right, the stress of divorce.

I know, I know, my psychiatrist thought the same thing you’re thinking now—stress caused the experience.

A psychiatrist? How does a bricklayer end up in the office of a psychiatrist?

Well, see, the Secret Service sent me to see this psychiatrist up at Agnews State Mental Hospital.

Agnews State Hospital, Treatment Building, East End of Palm Drive, Santa Clara, Santa Clara County, CA (Source: Library of Congress)What?! Secret Service? Why were you talking to the Secret Service?

I wanted to see the President.

Okay, let’s see … 1966 … President Lyndon Johnson … Vietnam war protests … construction worker wants to see the President … mental hospital. There’s a compelling story here for someone who studies the power of belief for a living, so I pressed for more.

Why did you want to see the President?

To deliver to him the message from the source of the voice.

What was the message?

That I will never tell you Michael—I have never told anyone and I’m taking it to my grave. I haven’t even told my children.

Wow, this must be some message, I thought, like Moses on the mountaintop taking dictation from Yahweh. Must have gone on for quite some time.

How long?

Less than a minute.

Less than a minute?

It was 13 words.

Do you remember the 13 words?

Of course!

Come on Chick, tell me what they were.

Nope.

Did you write them down somewhere?

Nope.

Can I guess what the theme of the message was?

Sure, go ahead, take a guess.

Love.

Michael! Yes! That’s exactly right. Love. The source not only knows we’re here, but it loves us and we can have a relationship with it.

♦ ♦ ♦

I would like to understand what happened to my friend Chick D’Arpino on that early morning in February, 1966, and how that experience changed his life in profound ways ever since. I want to understand what happened to Chick because I want to understand what happens to all of us when we form beliefs.

In Chick’s case the experience happened while separated from his wife and children, the details of which are not important (and he wishes to protect the privacy of his family), but its effects are. “I was a broken man,” Chick told me. “I was broke in every way you can think of: financially, physically, emotionally, and psychologically.”

To this day Chick maintains that what he experienced next was unquestionably outside of his mind. I strongly suspect otherwise, so what follows is my interpretation. Lying alone in bed, Chick was awake and perhaps anxious about the new dawn that would soon break over his day and life. Away from his beloved wife and children, Chick had to be troubled by the uncertainty of where his life would go from here, restless about which path before him to take, and especially apprehensive about whether or not he was loved. Those of us who have felt the sting of unrequited love, the anguish of relationship uncertainty, the torturous suffering of a troubled marriage, or the soul-shattering desolation of divorce, well know the painful inner turmoil that stirs the emotional lees—stomach churning, heart pounding, stress hormone pumping fight-or-flight emotional overdrive—especially in the wee hours of the morning before the sun signals the possibility of redemption.

I have experienced such emotions myself so perhaps I am projecting. My parents divorced when I was four, and although detailed memories of the separation and disruption are foggy, one memory is as clear to me now as it was those late nights and early mornings while lying awake: I had an almost vertigo sense of spiraling down and shrinking into my bed, as the room I was in expanded outward in all directions, leaving me feeling ever smaller and insignificant, frightened and anxious about … well … everything, including and especially being loved. And although the ever-shrinking room experience has mercifully resided, today there are still too many late nights and early mornings when lost love anxieties return to haunt me, emotions that I usually wash away with productive work or physical exercise, sometimes (but not always) successfully.

What happened to Chick next can best be described as surreal, ethereal, and otherworldly. On that early morning in February, 1966, a soothing tranquil voice calmly delivered a message of what I imagine a mind racked in turmoil longed to hear:

You are loved by a higher source that wants your love in return.

I do not know if these are the 13 words heard by Chick D’Arpino that morning, and he’s still not talking, other than to exposit …

The meaning was love between the source and I. The source identified its relationship to me and my relationship to it. And it dealt with L-O-V-E. If I had to say what it was about, it was about the mutual love we have for one another, me and the source, the source and me.

♦ ♦ ♦

How does one make sense of a supernatural occurrence with natural explanations? This is Mr. D’Arpino’s dilemma.

I am burdened by no such dilemma because I do not believe in otherworldly forces. Chick’s experience follows from the plausible causal scenario I am constructing here for what I believe to be an inner source of that outer voice. Since the brain does not perceive itself or its inner operations, and our normal experience is of stimuli entering the brain through the senses from the outside, when a neural network misfires or otherwise sends a signal to some other part of the brain that resembles an outside stimulus, the brain naturally interprets these internal events as external phenomena. This happens both naturally and artificially—lots of people experience auditory and visual hallucinations under varying conditions, including stress, and copious research that I will review in detail later demonstrates how easy it is to artificially trigger such illusory ephemera.

Regardless of the actual source of the voice, what does one do after such an experience? Chick picked up the story and recounted for me one of the most transfixing tales I’ve ever heard.

It happened on a Friday. The next Monday—I remember it was Valentine’s Day—I went down to the Santa Clara Post Office because that’s where the FBI office was located at the time. I wanted to see the President in order to deliver my message to him, but I didn’t know how one is suppose to go about seeing the President. I figured that the FBI was a good place to start. So I walk in there and tell them what I want to do, and they asked me, “So Mr. D’Arpino, why do you want to see the President? You protesting something?” I said, “No sir, I’ve got good news!”

Had you thought through what you would tell the President?

Nope. I didn’t know what I was going to say. I just figured it would come to me. Basically, I wanted to tell the President: “There’s a source out there that knows we’re here, and that source really cares for us.”

How did the FBI agent respond?

He says “Well, I’ll tell ya, if that’s the case you need to go to the Secret Service office since they deal directly with the President.” So I asked him, how do I go about that? He looked at his watch and said, “Well, Mr. D’Arpino, drive up to San Francisco and go to the federal building there, and on the sixth floor you’ll find the Secret Service office. If you leave now, barring any traffic, you should be able to make it before they close.” So that’s exactly what I did! I got in my car and drove up to San Francisco, went to the federal building, got in the elevator and went up to the sixth floor, and sure enough, it was the Secret Service office!

United States Federal Building in San Francisco, California (Photo by HaeB, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)They let you in?

Oh sure. I met an agent, about six-feet tall, and I told him my story about wanting to see the President. He immediately asked me, “Mr. D’Arpino, is the President in any danger?” I said, “Not that I know of.” So he hands me a piece of paper with a phone number on it and says, “Well then here, call the Washington, D.C. White House switchboard operator and talk to the appointment secretary and see if you can make an appointment to see the President. That’s how it’s done.”

Well, I couldn’t believe it! It was going to be that simple. So I called. And I called. And I called again. And again. I never got through. So now I was stuck. I didn’t know what else to do. Since I was a Navy veteran I went over to the Veterans Administration hospital and told them everything that I had done so far. As you can imagine, they tried to talk me out of it. “Now Mr. D’Arpino, why would you want to see the President?” Then they asked me to leave, but I was at the end of my options and I didn’t know what else to do, so I took inspiration from those protestors the FBI guy was asking me about. I just sat down there at the V.A. hospital and refused to leave!

It was a sit in!

Yeah. Then the clerk there says, “Come on, Mr. D’Arpino, if you don’t leave I’m going to have to call the police and I don’t want to do that. You seem like a nice guy.” So I go back and forth with this guy. I remember his name was Marcy because that’s my daughter’s name. Five hours later he comes back and says, “You’re still here Mr. D’Arpino?” I said “Yup, and I’m staying here.” He says, “Now doggonit Mr. D’Arpino, if you don’t leave I really am going to call the police.” I said, “Marcy, you gotta do what you think is right, but I’m staying here.”

So he called the police. Two officers showed up and they ask, “What’s the problem?” Marcy replies, “This man wants to see the President.” So the one cop says, “Mr. D’Arpino, you can’t stay here. This is government property. This is for veterans.” I say, “I’m a veteran.” He says, “Oh, wow, okay, well … ” then he asks Marcy, “Is he causing any problems? Is he doing anything wrong?” And Marcy says, “No sir, he’s just sitting here.” So the cop tells him, “I have no jurisdiction here.” So they all kibitzed for a while and then decided that they would take me up to meet some people who could help me at Agnews State Hospital.

Now, as you can imagine, I had no idea what was going to happen once I entered a state mental institution. At first they talked to me for a while and they could see I wasn’t crazy or anything like that, so one of the cops escorted me to my car and said, “Here you go, Mr. D’Arpino, here’s your keys. If you promise that you will never try to see the President, you can just go home now.” But I was still insistent on seeing the President, so they said they were going to hold me for 72 hours for observation. That was my biggest mistake. I thought I could just leave after that if I wanted, but no.

You spent three days in a mental hospital? What did you do?

They sent in several psychiatrists to talk to me, deciding that I needed additional observation and that I would need to appear before a Superior Court Judge along with two court-appointed psychiatrists to determine if I would be committed to the mental institution for longer than three days. On February 24, I appeared before the judge and two psychiatrists, who asked me some questions and recommended that I be committed. Diagnosis: psychosis. Time: to be decided.

At this point in the story I’m picturing Jack Nicholson’s Randle McMurphy and Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched wrangling over patient’s privileges in Ken Kesey’s famous novel cum academy-award winning film, a fancy I suggest to Chick.

Nah! One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a piece of cake compared to this place. It was rough. For a year and a half I sat in my room and did all the little tasks they gave me to do and attended the group sessions and talked to the psychiatrists.

♦ ♦ ♦

What should we make of all this? Is Chick D’Arpino just some crazy man out of touch with reality—a lunatic in a tin-foil hat? No. One 30-second experience does not a psychotic make, let alone a lifetime spent pursuing science, theology, and philosophy in books, conferences, and university courses to better understand both himself and the human condition. Chick may be exceedingly ambitious, but he is not crazy. Perhaps he had a momentary break with reality triggered by an environmental stressor. Perhaps. And that is what I suspect happened … or something like this. Yet millions of people have gone through the emotional stressor of divorce without ever having such preternatual encounters.

Most of us don’t hear voices or see visions, yet all of our brains are wired up in the same neural-chemical way as the visionaries who do, from Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad to Joan d’Arc, Joseph Smith, and David Koresh. The model of how brains form beliefs and then act on them is what is of interest here, because this is something we all do—inevitably, inexorably, indisputably. Beliefs are what brains make. Whatever happened to Chick D’Arpino, I am even more interested in the power belief systems lord over us once we form them and especially once we commit to following through on them, whatever type of belief it is: personal, religious, political, economic, ideological, social, or cultural. Or psychiatric.

♦ ♦ ♦

Now free on his own recognizance, Chick D’Arpino returned to work and began his journey of understanding. To what end?

Before I die I want to understand the human capacity to correctly answer such questions as “What am I?” “Who am I?” “Is there a source out there who knows we are here?” I think I have answers to these big questions that I want to share before I die.

Where did you get those answers?

I got these answers from the source.

What is the source?

The mind itself.

Herein lies what is arguably the greatest challenge science has ever faced, and it is the problem that I tackled in The Believing Brain:

Know the mind itself and you know humanity.

Thus it is that Chick D’Arpino’s journey is a testament not only to the power of belief, but to the ability of the mind to know itself, and in the end to discover that love is the most important thing any of us can know.

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At this point in the narrative, the betting odds almost seem to be written before a shovel hits the ground: When a government project is announced, how much over budget will it run? How late will it be? Will it even finish or be euthanized?

In the 21st century, Western governments don’t have a strong reputation for delivering major projects, and while a lot of the successes might not make for salacious headlines, much of that failed reputation is well earned.

But while some of the major infrastructure projects get a lot of the (deserved) attention, such as the California1 and British2 rail projects (why do trains seem to cause so many losses?), there are some projects that hide in the shadows—that can have an even bigger effect.

Governments transforming their infrastructure and internal services isn’t exactly the most glamorous topic, but it’s one that affects all of us. Because, unlike one-off projects such as building new transit corridors, government internal services dictate how well they themselves operate—or don’t. Which means that if a government runs inefficiently, then whatever they do and however they spend their money will be inefficient.

These projects are often ignored by the public, because they’re not easily seen. But because they have such a massive, compounding impact, they can be some of the most important projects that governments undertake. Every once in a while, however, the failure is so massive that the public can’t help but notice.

Accounting for the $128 Quintillion Error The United States Department of Defense (DoD) is obligated by law to produce auditable financial statements every year. What might surprise you is that the six different armed services within the DoD (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard) all use their own financial systems, which can make a simple requirement much more complicated.

What might sound even more surprising is that different financial systems are even used within the different armed services, which means that there aren’t just six sets of annual financial statements—there are dozens.

One organization decided they wanted to fix that. The U.S. Air Force decided to modernize their financial systems under the Defense Enterprise Accounting and Management System (DEAMS) initiative. The project began in 2005, and from the outset, the Air Force made two very unconventional directional decisions.3

The first was to run the older systems in parallel alongside the new for up to ten years, increasing the risk of duplicate or mismatched information. The second was to keep all of the existing, underlying processes and databases, and hope that a top-level system could patch everything together.

By virtue of the project being included in this article, you’d be right to assume that those decisions didn’t quite pan out.

One senior leader in HR actually told me that–according to the system–“2 + 2 = 5.”

The software system needed over 900 customizations to be able to read and match the underlying systems, many of which broke during a 2019 upgrade. Far from being fluid, the system needed constant manual workarounds; which is to say, rather than the software automating the process and popping out numbers at the end, a human would have to jump in and make corrections at multiple turns. And some of those errors were big—really big.

In 2020, DEAMS reported a reservation of funds error worth $128 quintillion. There aren’t too many countries whose accounting systems go beyond “trillion,” so to clarify how big that error is: A quintillion is a billion billions, or a million trillions. In other words, DEAMS said that the U.S. likely had more money than Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets.

Unsurprisingly, given the above, the system does not properly integrate with the United States General Ledger, the overall tally of the government’s raw financials. The DEAMS project is now 20 years old, and its $500 million budget now sits at about $3.4 billion.

There is no official word on when it will function as intended.

How Canada’s Payroll System Imploded The Phoenix transformation project was meant to centralize and significantly reduce human resource services within the Canadian federal administration. The goal was to automate what had historically been an extremely manual set of processes and reduce the numbers of staff needed to support the public service’s human resources needs. And so, in anticipation of just how easy the system was going to be, the government decided to lay off human resources staff in all of the departments, with the goal of saving money before the project was even completed.

Another cost savings opportunity came from centralizing the whole set of operations, and moving that center about 650 miles away from headquarters. The government was confident the system would run without issues; so confident, in fact, that user testing was dramatically scaled back, and a “big bang” approach was used: Implement most departments at once, rather than try it out on a handful first to see if there were issues.

And there weren’t any issues—until the system went live, and everyone discovered that it didn’t work.4 Payroll was the first red flag, when some employees received less than they were owed, and some were actually overpaid. Many received no pay at all. The system just plain didn’t function properly. And what was worse, no one could really answer why. One senior leader in HR actually told me that—according to the system—“2 + 2 = 5.”

Adding to the 1984 comparisons was the government reaction, wherein they insisted that all new system implementations have bumps in the road, and that employees should just fill in a form and wait for it to be resolved. The number of forms soon exceeded 600,000, and the government needed its human resources experts to manually fix the system errors.

One of the biggest structural impediments to government modernization is that one could argue there is no “government” to modernize.

Unfortunately, most of those experts had been fired—and were now living 650 miles away.

Eventually, senior leadership finally acknowledged the crisis they had on their hands, and had to spend their way out of the mess. A project that was originally budgeted at $215 million and expected to save $51 million per year soon saw that budget climb. And double. And triple.

Almost ten years after implementation, Phoenix is estimated to have cost almost $3 billion. And those costs are still rising, because it’s been determined that Phoenix is unfixable and needs to be outright replaced. That replacement is still being identified.

Australia’s Ambitious One-Platform Dream And for perhaps the most ambitious operation of the three projects, a multiheaded beast from Down Under: GovERP, the Australian government’s attempt in 2019 to standardize all internal systems on one platform. Unlike just bringing in one financial system (like DEAMS) or modernizing HR and payroll (like Phoenix), GovERP aimed to do it all—including all of their procurement activities.

Over 100 government agencies used a mishmash of different systems, which not only complicated government-wide reporting, but potentially ran up costs as each entity purchased its own software, rather than buying in bulk for the entire public service. On top of that, many of the systems were out of date and in need of a refresh. Enter Services Australia: a central agency designed to act as a hub for federal internal services (although the project was initially led by their Department of Finance—the changing project ownership a sign of things to come). As highlighted repeatedly in the government’s “reuse assessment”5—a report that essentially tried to determine whether or not the project should continue—the change in ownership led to a change in scope, which led to all sorts of questions about who was actually in charge.

The project was shifted to another department approximately halfway through the life of the project because Services Australia had already implemented its own new internal services software, and it was thought that their model could be scaled across the entire public service. But that “mishmash” of different systems, mentioned above, was—as is so often the case in these major projects—completely underestimated in its complexity.

As the Australian government soon learned, this was never really a software issue: It was a process and operational one. Each department and agency simply did things differently. The minutiae of who collects a request, what they do with it, who approves it, and in what kind of a database the information sits sounds really boring (and it really is). But without first understanding the starting point, how can anyone be led to a finish?

It would be much like hosting a party and giving everyone the same directions: Take a left on Main St., drive for about five minutes, turn right on Elm St., and we’re the third house on the left. Where do the party-goers live? In the north of the city? The west? Are they coming from out of town? Are they actually within walking distance? The process is meaningless unless everyone works with the same foundation.

And GovERP was never able to get everyone to the same starting gate. They’d planned to build and standardize 118 new software capabilities, and only 21 were completed. The original three-year, $58 million project was mercifully shut down after four years and $218 million—unlike with Phoenix, they didn’t rush user testing because they didn’t even get that far.

None of the key functions (staffing, procurement, finance, travel) made it to the finish line, and the government fully abandoned the project in 2023; only the lead department, Services Australia, still uses the platform. The other departments and agencies said they really liked the new process maps, though.

Why Governments Struggle to Work as One The Australian GovERP serves as a great example that standardizing government is not as simple as installing the same software everywhere. One of the biggest structural impediments to government modernization is that one could argue there is no “government” to modernize.

In most Western governments—including the United States, Canada, and Australia—the government bureaucracy is actually made up of a collection of agencies and departments. And rather than just being different divisions set up under the same banner, each of those agencies and departments requires enabling legislation to be created.

In other words, the legislative arm of each government (Congress, parliament, etc.) needs to write and pass a law that creates each agency. Every agency and every department is its own legal entity, which requires them to be as independent as they can possibly be.

Massive transformation projects often take so much time to set up that they’re invariably behind before they’ve even begun.

And while those same legislative arms can create layers of laws that try to encourage partnerships and leverage scales of delivery, there are simple inhibitors that tend to throw a wrench in things. For example, the Privacy Acts of Canada and the United States expressly forbid government agencies from sharing personal information with each other without express consent from the person (or business) in question.

Why Data Sharing in Government Rarely Works This is why people feel as though they’re talking to a dozen “governments” when trying to get all the necessary permits to open a business. While agencies with similar mandates could very well get together and develop a common form requiring applicants to grant shared access to that information, that creates new problems.

First of all, in this era of government distrust, many people and businesses will simply not grant that access. Then what? Two separate processes for people who share their information and those that don’t? Also, gaining access is just a surface-level win. Once agencies can begin sharing their information, they soon realize that their databases have nothing to do with each other. One agency collects “Surnames” while another collects “Last Names.” One agency asks for birthdates to be entered as “Oct. 1, 1980,” while it’s “10-01-80” in another, and “01-10-80” in yet another. And what happens if one agency requires a trove of information that the other agencies don’t collect? That agency will have to go to the individual and ask them for more—in essence, asking them to fill out another form.

That’s where the real integration challenges begin. Agencies have to pore over their databases, seeing where they align, and where they don’t. Then they have to make the decision: Build an extra layer of software over top of all the agency databases to help them “talk” to each other, or rebuild every agency’s databases to look the same. The first requires a leap of faith that there won’t be any errors in how they’re read, because a single mistake could mean it’s replicated millions of times before it’s even detected. (For those who are interested—in addition to the DEAMS project—it’s worth digging into Michigan’s MiDAS implementation6 to see this type of chaos in action.)

The second requires a complete transformation of the core systems and infrastructure on which agencies rely—in other words, exactly what this article is all about. And how do those generally go?

And Then There’s Something We Don’t Talk About … When the Auditor General of Canada released the audit report of the Phoenix debacle, the word “culture”—and its associated problems within the government—was mentioned a staggering 25 times in the press conference.7 It led to an explosive reaction within the government worth about 25 times the effect of an atomic bomb. Lots of senior leaders became very defensive about the accusations, as if they were being attacked personally. But culture is not about individual behavior, it’s about the collective behavior. And there are some collective behaviors that happen time and again within governments that just don’t seem to go away.

The first is the need to customize these massive software solutions as much as possible, sometimes even building them from scratch. Governments continue to insist that they’re unique, and that their requirements couldn’t possibly be understood by anyone other than themselves. There might be hundreds of thousands of companies out there who have employees on salary, and who are given vacation days every year, as well as sick days—but the collective bargaining agreements that governments negotiate with unions somehow makes those other use cases irrelevant.

As pervasive as these cultural issues are, there’s another quality that’s just as prevalent in government cultures: the desire to finally get things right.

The result is that governments buy the absolute bare minimum software, and then spend years (and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars) trying to make it usable—or not. Some very specific payment stipulations mean that instead of using software that’s processed billions and billions of transactions, they build out new tools and have to start all over again.

The second massive cultural impediment is in how heavy oversight tolerates sliding timelines—until it doesn’t.

Rushed Rollouts, Untested Software, Predictable Failures Massive transformation projects often take so much time to set up that they’re invariably behind before they’ve even begun. And while the “context” and “uncontrollable delays” mean that the schedule doubles or triples or even quadruples, there are few efforts made to accelerate delivery. Until, due to outside pressure or someone just deciding that “enough is enough,” the project is rushed through to completion. The result? As we saw above, perhaps the two most important parts of the project are either neutered or abandoned: testing and scaled roll-out.

The most important element of any software is that it works, and we can’t know that unless we see people using it. But user testing isn’t just someone poking around for a couple of hours, as is often the case in government software testing. It’s meant to simulate real-life scenarios: People doing the work for hours per day, every day, until you can be sure that the software has run the gauntlet of every possible pain point.

This is why, when a new stadium is opened, they make a big ceremony of everyone flushing the toilets all at once. You can’t know that the plumbing will hold if you pretend that 80,000 people are going to flush in a respectable and orderly sequence.

Compounding that first massive gap in judgment, all three of these projects went for the “big bang” approach: rolled out the software virtually everywhere, all at once, rather than first implementing in a few smaller agencies, adjusting where needed, and rolling out another handful. By tempting fate and launching everywhere with unproven software, they might as well have just called it “the unsinkable Titanic.”

Real Reform Means Facing the Past, Not Ignoring It Unfortunately, the long-term effect of these failures is a reduction in ambition. Rather than make the government as efficient as a Silicon Valley tech company, officials might as well keep the 40-year-old systems: They might be slow and inefficient, but at least no one will watch us try to fix it, right? What makes things difficult, however, does not make them impossible. As pervasive as these cultural issues are, there’s another quality that’s just as prevalent in government cultures: the desire to finally get things right.

Every public sector project team wants to deliver the rare government “win,” and that enthusiasm grows the bigger and more ambitious the goal. And which politician wouldn’t want to brag about how their leadership brought a cheaper government, or a faster government? While the infrastructure and the overall culture can hold things back, the individuals within those structures can—and want to—do more. The ambition is there, and the lessons from previous failures can help build the blueprints for future successes—not excuses to run away from what the public needs.

For that reason, I strongly believe that governments can deliver needed change. And to build more trust with their citizens, that change is more important now than ever.

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The 2024 Presidential Election Survey is a representative (by age, race, sex and educational attainment) sample of 3,023 Americans, collected between September 5, 2024, to September 29, 2024. Substantively, the survey covers timely and controversial topics including: voting intentions and perceptions of election legitimacy, willingness to sever relationships because of political disagreement/support for violence if one’s preferred party loses the election, attitudes towards free speech, mental health, trust in journalism and other U.S. institutions, as well as various questions assessing peoples’ attitudes towards (and understanding of) abortion, immigration, crime, race, climate change, economic, gun control and war-related issues.

For additional information, please feel free to contact the Skeptic Research Center by email: research@skeptic.com.

Methodology1. Methodological Details—2024 Presidential Election Study

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CHRISTOPHER RUFO is a writer, filmmaker, and activist. He has directed four documentaries for PBS, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities. He is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of the public policy magazine City Journal. His reporting and activism have inspired a presidential order, a national grassroots movement, and legislation in 22 states. Rufo holds a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and a Master’s of Liberal Arts from Harvard University.

Skeptic: You are a controversial figure for your work in the area of Critical Race Theory (CRT). What led you to this subject?

Rufo: My professional background is in documentary filmmaking. The book writing process was totally different. I hope what I was able to do with the book is bring my narrative training to telling stories that engage people and move them at an emotional level.

Skeptic: Well, you did that. It’s a highly readable book in which you present a history of ideas. One of the difficulties is drawing causal connections between thinkers across generations. How do you address that problem?

Rufo: There was a lot of looking for explicit connections. For example, I profile Angela Davis, who I think is really kind of the godmother of CRT. She tied the original critical theory from the early part of the 20th century to American race politics in a deliberate way. Her thesis advisor was the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, who is also profiled in the book. Then I connect Davis to the modern Black Lives Matter movement; she is the personal mentor to a number of BLM leaders. I tried not to make any specious connections, and I wanted to be charitable to my subjects, to see the world first through their eyes and treat them fairly. Only then did I layer on my criticism or my critique.

Skeptic: On that political front, how do you distinguish between old-school liberals, such as Steven Pinker, and the more radical progressive thinkers of today?

Rufo: The critical theorists I profile in my book are explicitly anti-liberal, such as Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derek Bell, the father of CRT. Their whole movement is explicitly and deeply anti-liberal. It’s against the concept of individual rights, private property, and Enlightenment values. So, I hope that I can also speak to some of those estranged liberals and explain how the movement that has really taken over the institutional left in the United States has deviated from that small ‘l’ liberal tradition and really originates from something much more radical, revolutionary, and Marxist in nature.

Skeptic: Walk us through these influences, starting with Marx.

Rufo: Over the course of the 20th century, there was a deviation from orthodox Marxism as people became more infatuated with the new left, the more activist 1960s youth movement, and racial unrest. Angela Davis was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, and she ran for vice president of the United States on the Communist Party ticket. She was deeply influenced by Marx (although she had written her graduate thesis on Kant) and was also well-versed in the Western philosophical tradition. Paulo Freire—the same. He was working with Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries in the Third World, and his idea of critical consciousness originates in Marxist concepts that he had learned when he was a student in Brazil.

However, the most interesting case is Derek Bell, who was a Harvard Law professor, and in many ways the founding figure of CRT. His students at Harvard Law and other elite law schools around the country, inspired by Bell, established the discipline of critical race theory in the late 1980s. Bell grew up in the Pittsburgh area, served in the U.S. Air Force, went to law school, and was a very successful—even brilliant—student. Then he became a lawyer for the NAACP, handling cases in the Deep South desegregating schools in places such as Mississippi. I think he oversaw something like 300 school desegregation cases. He was a civil rights advocate and activist, a small ‘l’ liberal at the time.

However, Bell became disillusioned with the Civil Rights Movement and utterly disillusioned with Martin Luther King-style civil rights activism that turned to the Constitution, focusing especially on the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. He thought these were all illusions in that they provided the appearance of freedom but were actually used to reinforce secretly and covertly the structures of racial domination. It is this aspect of Bell’s work that survives and is really the foundation of what we now see as critical race theory.

Skeptic: There’s this push to find deep root causes of specific events among politicians. Is this a useful approach?

Rufo: It’s amazing because it’s totally backwards. Politicians say, “Well, no, we’re not going to do the thing that actually could have a significant and immediate impact, and instead we’re going to implement the 1619 Project and focus on the first arrival of African slaves in North America.” That certainly is something of historical importance and scholarly relevance, and should even be part of the public debate, but what do you do with that? Short of having a time travel machine, you can’t change the past 400 years of history. Nor can you show any real relevance to today beyond a very broad and metaphorical interpretation of current events.

When you go back and look at the civil rights movement, against which Derrick Bell rebelled later in his life, you had, for the most part, people who wanted to cash in the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence. They wanted to conform to not only the system of individual rights in the United States as a form of law, but also conform to middle class or bourgeois values as a matter of culture. Look at these great civil rights marches in the 1960s. Men were dressed in suits and ties and the women in dresses. And these weren’t necessarily wealthy people. They were mostly working-class African Americans. However, the image that they wanted to convey was one of dignity, self-respect, and an immense hope for equal participation in American society. I’m still really moved and struck by some of those images.

Compare those images to the kind you see of Antifa or BLM activists in 2020. You have deranged-looking mugshots of people. You have people that visually look quite disordered, committing sprees of violence. And in the name of what? It was never quite clear what they wanted beyond defunding the police or just having a justification for violence. Those two images, if you look at them side by side, reveal the kind of fundamental change in the modern left.

Skeptic: What do you think is the right approach to social change?

Rufo: When you ask people in surveys, “Do you support affirmative action? Do you support race-conscious college admissions? Do you support mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training?” They overwhelmingly say “No.” This is true for people of all political affiliations and all racial backgrounds. And yet, all of those things are now required in nearly all of our major institutions. So, you have this mismatch problem where public sentiment is against something, but all of our institutions and even our public policies are for it. Why is that? If we live in a democracy, shouldn’t majority sentiment eventually translate into public policy?

The answer is that, in my view, there are concentric rings of influence on these issues. You have the tightest ring, which consists of the fanatics, the people who are deeply committed to it. They work in it. These are the DEI administrators. These are the critical race theorists. These are the BLM activists. Then you have another concentric ring of people that say, “Well, you know, I more or less buy into the premise of this. I want more diversity.” That’s roughly 30 percent of the public, maybe a little bit more depending on the issue. Then you have an even larger concentric ring of people who are neutral, slightly opposed, or even quite opposed to it, but they don’t speak out because they fear the consequences. This creates an opinion environment in which those very committed activists can really run up the score and impose their point of view as the de facto policy.

That’s the environment we live in. The people who care most about it have figured out where the levers of power are. They’ve gone, in most cases, around the democratic process to impose their will. And they essentially say—as we’ve seen recently with Harvard and the University of North Carolina [the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions processes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment]—“We know what we’re doing is unpopular. We know what we’re doing is likely illegal and unconstitutional. But we’re going to do it anyway.”

Skeptic: Erika Chenoweth and Maria Steffen’s research on political violence demonstrates that since 1900, nonviolent campaigns worldwide were twice as likely to succeed outright as violent insurgencies. This trend has been increasing over time. In the last 50 years, civil resistance has become increasingly frequent and effective, whereas violent insurgencies have become increasingly rare and unsuccessful. No campaigns failed once they achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population, and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.

Rufo: That’s right. I think academic critique is still valuable. However, what we really need is political opposition because this issue has moved from the realm of academia to the realm of politics. So, it also has to be fought politically. That’s what I’ve done, and I’ve gotten an unbelievable amount of criticism for this approach.

I’ve taken the battle out of the realm of academic discourse and into the realm of practical politics. I’ve been very explicit about that. I said I want to change public perception; I want to turn critical race theory into a brand, and I want to destroy it not just in the realm of public opinion, but also in the realm of public policy.

If it’s in the K–12 school curriculum, it’s a policy question. If it’s in a public university DEI bureaucracy, it’s a policy question. If it’s in our criminal justice system, it’s a policy question. These are political questions, and those who think that we can resolve them through discourse are really doing a disservice. They’re not grappling with the actual difficult nature of statesmanship and political activism that’s required.

If we want to have a society that says, “No, we’re not going to engage in racial scapegoating. We’re not going to judge individuals based on a racial category. We’re not going to imbibe in notions of hereditary blood guilt,” the only way, I think, is through political pressure, by changing the laws by which our institutions are governed.

Skeptic: What are your thoughts on systemic racism? What is your explanation for racial group differences in income, wealth, home ownership, representation in Congress and the corporate C-suite?

Rufo: What is the standard by which we measure systemic racism? How do we define systemic racism? There’s an interesting bait and switch here, because they say, “Well, all of this is systemic racism, from chattel slavery to the fact that a Lakeisha Smith is less likely to get called back than a Lisa Smith.” [“Call back” studies submit the same resumés to businesses and compare the response to identifiably Black versus White names]. You have this transition in the mid-20th century from explicit, formal, and legal racist policies to what amounts to implicit racist policies. Well, what do they mean by that?

They mean that when you measure things statistically, that there is a disparate impact on outcomes. Lisa versus Lakeisha Smith is just one such example. You can say that there are no outright racist policies in policing or housing or geographical distribution, but there are still disparate outcomes. Is it because people are secretly and subconsciously racist? That’s the unconscious bias theory, which has been debunked. [It has been demonstrated that The Implicit Association Test, often cited as confirming evidence, does not measure racial bias but rather reaction time to familiar versus unfamiliar terms.] Are police more likely to shoot a Black suspect than a White suspect? Roland Fryer at Harvard showed that this is not the case. [Although he did find that White police rough up Black people they pull over more than White people.]

Then you have to ask some uncomfortable questions. If, for example, there are more African American men in jail than Asian American men, is it because our society is systemically racist against African American men and systemically giving privileges to Asian American men?

You could make that argument, but I think that on the face of it most people realize that it’s not true. Then you ask about the rate of criminality—do African American males on average commit more crimes than Asian American males? You might find that it’s not racism that is operative. It’s another set of background variables. Robert Rector published some papers on this subject 20 years ago that are still foundational to my thinking. He showed that if you control for those background variables, you find that the argument for active systemic racism vanishes across a whole range of things, not just Lakeisha versus Lisa Smith, but for things that are especially meaningful. For example, if you control for the mother’s academic achievement, the mother’s participation in state welfare programs, and household family structure, the gap between White and Black childhood poverty disappears. It’s zero.

If we aim our public policy towards fixing those variables, we’d be much better served and we’d be much more likely to reduce overall inequalities.

Skeptic: Those causal variables are largely left out of the conversation. Maybe it’s taboo to talk about them right now?

Rufo: I think it is, because it’s a very inconvenient disrupting narrative when you have minority groups that are enormously successful in the United States. The most successful ethnic groups in the United States today are majority non-White ethnic groups, including some Black ethnic groups, particularly Nigerian Americans. Part of that may be due to a selection process—immigrants from Nigeria are disproportionately better educated, have more resources, etc. So, it’s not quite a one-to-one measurement.

Nonetheless, there’s a huge range in success among ethnic groups in the United States. The ones that have stable family structure, commitment to education, a strong work ethic, mutual support within a community, etc., are very successful. Those ethnic groups that do not have those attributes do very poorly on many measures, including income. Appalachian Whites do very poorly while Nigerian Americans or other recent immigrants are doing extraordinarily well.

Skeptic: Are you optimistic we can achieve a colorblind society?

Rufo: There are reasons for optimism and for pessimism. The reason for optimism is that the American people really despise the DEI affirmative action principles of governance. Even in California and Washington state, where I live, voters have rejected affirmative action policies when they’ve been put to a ballot initiative. And the majority of racial groups also oppose these kinds of policies. Despite all of the media dominance, academic dominance, and bureaucratic dominance of the DEI movement—the American people want equal treatment for each individual, regardless of group category. They want colorblind equality, not racial favoritism and enforced equity.

The case for pessimism is that it’s going to be difficult. The problem of racial equality is a thorny one. It is one that has vexed the United States for its whole history and is, frankly, likely to continue. As long as there is visible inequality—statistically measurable inequality—the narrative of critical race theory will have a base of support. It will have the political, emotional, and intellectual grounds that can feed that narrative. This puts us in a bit of a conundrum because paradoxically, the remedies of critical race theory are actually likely to make inequality worse. And for the people who are running a critical race theory style regime, inequality justifies their claims to power. So, they have no incentive to make things better in the real world. If we go in that direction, we face a very long, very brutal, and very disillusioning politics in our future.

Skeptic: Do you see any role for any kind of reparations for formerly oppressed peoples or even currently oppressed people?

Rufo: I have certainly opposed any kind of race-based reparations payments. I think it’s absolutely the wrong direction to go for a host of reasons. Historically, if you look at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society anti-poverty programs, these were to a large extent a kind of race-based reparations policy that was—they thought—backed up by the latest discoveries in social science, deployed at federal mass scale. These programs now are spending about a trillion dollars a year, disproportionately to African Americans, especially descendants of slaves.

These are policies that sound great, and that’s why they’re often passed in legislation. But we have to be sober and level-headed in analyzing whether they actually work. Do they help us achieve the stated intentions? The evidence that it has helped in any way is lacking. In fact, the most persuasive evidence, in my view, shows that it has had negative, though unintended, consequences. In my reading of it, both statistically and as someone who spent three years researching and documenting public housing projects in Memphis, Tennessee, and getting a first-hand look at their impact, I just don’t think that reparations would work.

This interview was edited from a longer conversation that took place on The Michael Shermer Show, which you can watch online.

YASCHA MOUNK is a writer and academic known for his work on the rise of populism and the crisis of liberal democracy. Born in Germany to Polish parents, Mounk received his BA in history from Trinity College, Cambridge, and his PhD in government from Harvard University. He is a professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure (featured on former President Barack Obama’s summer reading list) and The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.

Skeptic: Let’s talk about identity politics. Is it really the identity or is it the politics?

Mounk: The great civil rights leader, Bayard Rustin, a gay Black political activist—though I’m not sure that he would want to list the adjectives in that order—said that the idea of a homogeneous Black community is the invention of White elites, as well as of certain Black people who want to lead it. I think this describes the situation very well. And this is important because it speaks to our model for political solidarity.

Let’s examine the popular ban on “cultural appropriation.” When I was growing up in Europe, the people who worried about cultural purity and the influence that other groups might have on your culture were on the right. Today, some of these concerns persist on the right, but a lot of them have moved to the left. It’s gotten to the point of absurdity, like left-leaning actors who apologize for voicing or acting in roles that don’t match their identity.

The core example is that of White musicians in the 1950s and 1960s “stealing” the music of Black musicians or being inspired by them, and going on to have big careers while Black musicians didn’t. The injustice in the 1950s and 1960s was not that there was some White jazz saxophonist inspired by Black musicians. The injustice was that Black musicians could not travel freely across America because of racism—they could not stay at some of the hotels in which they performed, they were banned from many concert venues, they wouldn’t be played on many radio stations, and they couldn’t be signed by many record labels. That’s what was unjust about it, not something called “cultural appropriation.” If you get that wrong, you also get wrong how you solve it. The way to solve that injustice is not to make sure that White musicians don’t play jazz music or rock ‘n roll. It’s to make sure that Black musicians and African Americans more broadly overcome the deep discrimination that they faced.

All culture is appropriation. Every element of our cuisine, the way we write, and the technology we use today is an accrual of past cultural appropriation. If we put those forms of mutual cultural influence under general suspicion, not only will we forego amazing cultural and technological innovations in the coming decades and centuries, but we’ll also fundamentally fail to celebrate positive aspects of our societies.

Skeptic: How do you respond to people such as Noam Chomsky, who argues that critiques of identity politics such as your own are exaggerations, that things such as critical race theory are just legal or academic ideas that are not filtering down to grammar schools or up to corporations, and that what you are saying is part of a vast right-wing moral panic?

Mounk: I think that’s a mistake. There are people on the right who brand anything they don’t like critical race theory or claim that teaching kids about slavery is critical race theory. That’s absurd. Of course we should teach American children about the terrible history of racial injustice and slavery in this country. However, as a result, a lot of people on the mainstream left, including smart people like Chomsky, end up saying, “Isn’t critical race theory just speaking critically about race in society?” Or they say it’s an academic theory and first graders aren’t reading the academic articles published by Derek Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw.

What I worry about is teachers walking into classrooms in the third, second, and first grade and saying, “If you’re Black, go to that classroom; If you’re Asian American, go to that classroom; If you’re Latino, you go to that classroom; and if you’re White, you go to that classroom over there.” I think it’s fine for kids to be uncomfortable at times, because everything we know from social psychology is that how we define ourselves is malleable. However, when they’re told, “This is your in-group and that over there is your out-group,” that can lead to having endless empathy for the “my group” and terrifying disregard for the suffering of the other group.

So, while the aim may be to create White anti-racists, I think it’s much more likely to create White separatists or White supremacists. The other thing I would say is that these ideas not only now inform the norms and the practices of a great many institutions in the United States—important institutions such as schools—they also inform public policy in really worrying ways.

A shocking example of this was when I sat in on a meeting of the ACIP—the key advisory group advising the Centers for Disease Control—on how to roll out vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now we know that by far the best predictor of how seriously sick you will get from COVID is your age. Therefore, nearly every country in the world prioritized the elderly in their distribution. You might also prioritize hospital workers, because in the middle of a pandemic you don’t want the doctors to be sick. But after that, nearly every country started with the over 85s, and then the over 80s, and then the over 75s. And that also made it easier to communicate this to the public.

Well, ACIP said no. We have to care about racial equity. Older Americans are disproportionately White, and therefore it would be unjust to give a vaccine to them first, even though the CDC’s own model shows that deviating from prioritizing the elderly would raise the death toll by between 0.5 to 6.5 percent—in other words, by thousands of human lives. This had disastrous consequences, literally thousands of additional deaths because of identity politics.

Skeptic: You mentioned “identity politics.” How should we think about this term?

Mounk: The way I think about politics, there are two sets of distinctions: between liberal and authoritarian, and between the left and the right. I am a center-left liberal. I joined the German Social Democratic Party at the age of 13. I had to lie about my age to join it because by law you’re only allowed to join when you’re 14. So, I can claim as long an allegiance to the left as anybody my age. In the distinction between liberal and authoritarian, there are those who want to impose their views by force, have no tolerance for people who disagree with them, and see the world as split into the good and the evil. I want a society in which individuals have free speech and the right of free assembly, and the right of free worship. So even if I win a majority, I’m not going to impose my substantive moral views on you. And I recognize that just because you take what I consider the wrong position on some political issue, that doesn’t make you an evil person. That is what defines me as a true “liberal.” I think the liberal versus authoritarian distinction is more important than the left v. right one.

Skeptic: So there’s left-wing authoritarianism, just as there’s right-wing authoritarianism?

Mounk: How can anyone look at the history of the 20th century without recognizing that? Left-wing authoritarianism, which you may have more sympathy for, should also scare you. It’s much easier for people who think they’re doing good in the world to follow into believing that such forms of authoritarianism are for the good of all humanity, and so we are creating paradise on Earth, not just for one group, but for everybody. That can be very appealing. My grandparents, whom I loved and who were deeply decent human beings, were attracted to such ideas for understandable reasons. They grew up in shtetls, living in poverty and being discriminated against. They thought that we should fight for the rights of proletarians. So I have empathy for people who are tempted by that set of ideas, but I’m also aware of how easily they can seduce you in ways that eventually make you complicit in genuine evil.

Skeptic: You often discuss corporations adopting identity politics. Do they really believe this, or do they not want to be bogged down in lawsuits? What is your sense about that?

Mounk: I would say that there’s a real split. There are certainly true believers in Human Resources departments, and some true believers make a good living as diversity consultants. However, there are also some true believers in the elite class, some among CEOs, and so on. At the same time, there are a lot of people who have an incentive to shut up and stay quiet. People who are not that politically motivated just ask themselves, “Is it really worth my while to push back against this? You know, I’m going to be branded as a troublemaker and perhaps somebody will accuse me of being a racist or a bigot. I better just keep my mouth shut.” And there’s an interesting legal incentive for CEOs to go along with some of this, which is that if your company is sued for racial discrimination or sexual harassment, whether you have engaged in industry standard practices to avert those forms of bias constitutes a key defense. So once your competitors offer a deeply divisive diversity training, you have a legal incentive to do that too. If you don’t, a plaintiff might argue that you clearly didn’t care about discrimination.

So, I think that there is an incentive from social sanction—that speaking up against these ideas is perilous, and there is also an incentive from the actual legal system in the United States in terms of how you can defend yourself against lawsuits, no matter how frivolous.

Skeptic: Given how deep this trend is in education, are you worried about the next generation?

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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Mounk: Yes. My students are deeply and fundamentally shaped by these ideas. Especially if they went to private schools, or schools in good school districts and affluent liberal-leaning parts of the country, these ideas have been drummed into them from day one. It’s the water that they swim in, and they take much of it for granted.

Skeptic: What can we do about it?

Mounk: Well, the first step is to argue back against these ideas from the moral high ground. And part of that is to argue on the basis of principles that you deeply believe in and that might make the world a better place. Now, there’s a broad range of principles that are compatible with liberalism that you can embrace. Perhaps you have a religious motivation, perhaps you’re a socialist, or perhaps you’re a conservative, all of that is fine. My own conviction is that of a philosophical liberal, as well as someone in the American context that has great admiration for certain movements.

Consider Frederick Douglass. When he was invited to hold a speech commemorating the Fourth of July, he called out his compatriots on the hypocrisy of talking about all men being created equal. He asked, “How can you celebrate that value and pat yourselves on the back when Black people around the country are enslaved right this moment?” However, he didn’t say to rip it all up. And while he recognized that newspapers and magazines said terrible things about Black people at the time, he didn’t reject free speech. He called free speech the dread of tyrants, because he realized that it was what allowed genuine political minorities, people who were very unpopular in their time, to fight for their rights.

This interview was edited from a longer conversation that took place on The Michael Shermer Show, which you can watch online.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss473_Max_Boot_2024_10_01.mp3Download MP3From best-selling biographer Max Boot comes this revelatory portrait, a decade in the making, of the actor-turned-politician whose telegenic leadership ushered in a transformative conservative era in American politics. Despite his fame as a Hollywood star and television host, Reagan remained a man of profound contradictions, even to those closest to him. Never resorting to either hagiography or hit job, Reagan: His Life and Legend charts his epic journey from Depression-era America to “Morning in America.” Providing fresh insight into “trickle-down economics,” the Cold War’s end, the Iran-Contra affair, and so much more, this definitive biography is as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.

Max Boot is a Russia-born naturalized American historian and foreign-policy analyst and a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has worked as a writer and editor at the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Weekly Standard, and the Christian Science Monitor, and is now a regular columnist for the Washington Post. His New York Times bestseller, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. He is also the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today, Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present, and, controversially, of The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right. His new book is Reagan: His Life and Legend.

Shermer and Boot discuss:

• What led him to undertake this biography
• How to write a biography—with sources, and which to consider as reliable
• Early influences on Reagan’s life: family, Midwestern upbringing, education, teachers, mentors, experiences.
• Relative influence of genes, environment, and luck.
• The Lifeguard
• Depression economics influences
• Reagan’s attitudes and beliefs on social issues reflecting those of his generation
• Radio and Acting
• President of the Screen Actor’s Guild and his purported role in preventing a Communist takeover of Hollywood.
• GE pitch man
• A groundbreaking look at why Reagan left the Democratic Party, showing his reliance on conspiracy-mongering tracts, fake quotes, and statistics—and the influence of both the FBI and General Electric.
• Revelations about the role of “white backlash” politics in Reagan’s rise.
• California governor
• 1968 Presidential campaign
• 1976 Presidential campaign
• Goldwater and the state of the Republican Party when Reagan entered politics
• New evidence about the “October Surprise” and the involvement of Reagan’s aides in political skullduggery prior to the 1980 election
• Arthur Laffer and Trickledown economics
• Budget deficit
• AIDS epidemic
• Iran-Contra
• Abortion
• “Evil Empire”
• Gorbachev Geneva summit
• Gorbachev Reykjavik summit
• Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI/Star Wars)
• Reagan on nuclear weapons
• Rancho del Cielo
• An examination of how Reagan was both different from—and similar to—Donald Trump
• Hotspots: N Korea, Iran, Israel, China.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss472_Adam_Kirsch_2024_09_28.mp3Download MP3Since Hamas’s attack on Israel last October 7, the term “settler colonialism” has become central to public debate in the United States. A concept new to most Americans, but already established and influential in academic circles, settler colonialism is shaping the way many people think about the history of the United States, Israel and Palestine, and a host of political issues.

This short book is the first to examine settler colonialism critically for a general readership. By critiquing the most important writers, texts, and ideas in the field, Adam Kirsch shows how the concept emerged in the context of North American and Australian history and how it is being applied to Israel. He examines the sources of its appeal, which, he argues, are spiritual as much as political; how it works to delegitimize nations; and why it has the potential to turn indignation at past injustices into a source of new injustices today. A compact and accessible introduction, rich with historical detail, the book will speak to readers interested in the Middle East, American history, and today’s most urgent cultural-political debates.

Adam Kirsch is the author of several books of poetry and criticism. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirsch is an editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review section and has written for publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, and Tablet. He lives in New York. His new book is On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice.

Shermer and Kirsch discuss:

• Settler ideology
• Settler colonialism
• Colonialism
• Decolonization
• “The colonizers came to stay—invasion is a structure not an event.” —Patrick Wolfe
• Wolfe: “logic that initially informed frontier killing transmutes into different modalities, discourses and institutional formations as it undergirds the historical development and complexification of settler society.”
• Genocide and “necropolitical transfer”
• Kirsch: “If the definition of a progressive movement is that it believes the future can be better than the past, then the ideology of settler colonialism is not progressive, because it believe the past was better than the future.”

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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Sixth-century Byzantium was a city divided by race hatred so intense that people viciously attacked each other, not only in the streets but also in churches. The inscription on an ancient tablet conveys the raw animus that spawned from color differences: “Bind them! … Destroy them! … Kill them!” The historian Procopius, who witnessed this race antagonism firsthand, called it a “disease of the soul,” and marveled at its irrational intensity:

They fight against their opponents knowing not for what end they imperil themselves … So there grows up in them against their fellow men a hostility which has no cause, and at no time does it cease or disappear, for it gives place, neither to the ties of marriage nor of relationship nor of friendship.1

This hostility sparked multiple violent clashes and riots, culminating in the Nika Riot of 532 CE, the biggest race riot of all time: 30,000 people perished, and the greatest city of antiquity was reduced to smoldering ruins.

But the Nika Riot wasn’t the sort of race riot you might imagine. The race in question was the chariot race. The color division wasn’t between black and white but between blue and green—the colors of the two main chariot-racing teams. The teams’ supporters, who were referred to as the Blue and Green “factions,” proudly wore their team colors, not just in the hippodrome but also around town. To help distinguish themselves, many Blues also sported distinctive mullet hairstyles, like those of 1970’s rock stars. Both Blues and Greens were fiercely loyal to their factions and their colors. The chariots and drivers were a secondary concern; the historian Pliny asserted that if the drivers were to swap colors in the middle of a race, the factions would immediately switch their allegiances accordingly.

The race faction rivalry had existed for a long time before the Nika Riot, yet Procopius writes that it had only become bitter and violent in “comparatively recent times.” So, what caused this trivial division over horse-racing teams to turn so deadly? In short, it was the Byzantine version of “identity politics.”

Modern sociological research helps explain the phenomenon. Decades of studies have demonstrated the dangerous power of the human tribal instinct. Surprisingly, it doesn’t require “primordial” ethnic or tribal distinctions to engage that impulse. Minor differences are often sufficient to elicit acute ingroup-outgroup discrimination. The psychologist Henri Tajfel demonstrated this in a landmark series of studies to determine how minor those differences can be. In each successive study, Tajfel divided test subjects into groups according to increasingly trivial criteria, such as whether they preferred Klee or Kandinsky paintings or underestimated or overestimated the number of dots on a page. The results were as intriguing as they were disturbing: even the most trivial groupings induced discrimination.2, 3

However, the most significant and unexpected discovery was that simply telling subjects that they belonged to a group induced discrimination, even when the grouping was completely random. Upon learning they officially belonged to a group, the subjects reflexively adopted an us-versus-them, zero-sum game attitude toward members of other groups. Many other researchers have conducted related experiments with similar results: a government or an authority (like a researcher) designating group distinctions is, by itself, sufficient to spur contentious group rivalry. When group rewards are at stake, that rivalry is magnified and readily turns malign.

The extent to which authority-defined groups and competition for group benefits can foment nasty factionalism was demonstrated in the famous 1954 Robbers Cave experiment, in which researchers brought boys with identical socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds to a summer camp, dividing them randomly into two official groups. They initially kept the two groups separate and encouraged them to bond through various group activities. The boys, who had not known each other before, developed strong group cohesion and a sense of shared identity. The researchers then pitted the groups against each other in contests for group rewards to see if inter-group hostility would arise. The group antagonism escalated far beyond their expectations. The two groups eventually burned each other’s flags and clothing, trashed each other’s cabins, and collected rocks to hurl at each other. Camp staff had to intervene repeatedly to break up brutal fights. The mounting hostility and risk of violence induced the researchers to abort that phase of the study.4 Other researchers have replicated this experiment: one follow-up study resulted in knife fights, and a researcher was so traumatized he had to be hospitalized for a week.5, 6

How does this apply to the Blues and Greens? As in the Tajfel experiments, the Byzantine race factions had formed a group division based on a trivial distinction—the preference for a color and a horse racing team. However, for many years, the rivalry remained relatively benign. This was likely because the emperors had long played down the factional distinction and maintained a tradition of race neutrality: if they favored a faction, they avoided openly showing it. But that tradition ended a few years before the Nika Riot when emperors began openly supporting either one faction or the other. But more importantly, they extended their support outside the hippodrome with official policies that benefited members of their preferred faction. The emperors Marcian, Anastasius, and Justinian adopted official employment preferences, allocating positions to members of their favored faction and blocking the other faction from coveted jobs. To cast it in modern terms, they began a program of “race-based” affirmative action and identity politics.7, 8

In nearly all the countries where affirmative action programs have been implemented, they have an invidious effect on the group that benefits, imbuing them with a sense of insecurity and defensiveness over the benefits they receive.

Official recognition of the group distinction enhanced the us-versus-them sense of difference between the factions, and the affirmative action scheme turned this sense of difference into bitter antagonism, which eventually exploded in violence. Procopius, our primary contemporary source, placed the blame for the mounting antagonism and the riots squarely on Justinian’s program of identity politics. It had not only promoted an us-versus-them mindset in the factions, it also incited vicious enmity between them, turning a trivial color preference and sporting rivalry into a deadly “race war.”

Considering how identity politics could elicit violence from randomly assembled groups like the Blues and Greens, it is easy to imagine how disastrous identity politics can be when applied to groups that already have some long-standing, historic sense of difference. Indeed, there have been numerous instances of this in history, most ending tragically. For example, Tutsis and Hutus enjoyed centuries of relatively peaceful coexistence in Rwanda up until Belgian colonialists arrived; when the Belgians issued identity cards distinguishing the two groups and instituted affirmative action, it ossified a formerly porous group distinction and infused it with bitter rivalry, preparing the path to genocide. Likewise, when Yugoslavia instituted its “nationality key” system, with educational and employment quotas for the country’s constituent ethnic groups, it hardened group distinctions, pitting the groups against each other and setting the stage for genocide in the Balkans. And, when the Sri Lankan government opted for identity politics and affirmative action, it spawned violent conflict and genocide that destroyed a once peaceful and prosperous country. This last example—Sri Lanka—is so illustrative of the dangers of identity politics that we’ll examine it in more detail.

Sri Lanka: How Identity Politics Destroyed Paradise

She is a fabulous isle just south of India’s teeming shore, land of paradise … with a proud and democratic people … Her flag is the flag of freedom, her citizens are dedicated to the preservation of that freedom … Her school system is as progressive as it is democratic. —1954 TWA TOURIST VIDEO

Sri Lanka is an island off India’s southeast coast blessed with copious amounts of arable land and natural resources. It has an ethnically diverse population, with the two main groups being Sinhalese (75 percent) and Tamils (15 percent). Before Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948, there was a long history of harmony between these groups. That history goes back at least to the fourteenth century when the Arab traveler Ibn Battuta observed how the different groups “show respect” for each other and “harbor no suspicions.” On the eve of Sri Lanka’s independence, a British governor lauded the “large measure of fellowship and understanding” that prevailed, and a British soldiers’ guide noted that “there are no historic antagonisms to overcome.” With quiescent communal relations, abundant natural resources, and one of the highest literacy rates in the developing world, newly independent Sri Lanka was poised to flourish and prosper. Nobody doubted it would outperform countries like South Korea and Singapore, with the British governor dubbing it “the best bet in Asia.”

It turned out to be a very poor bet. A few years after Sri Lanka’s independence, violent communal conflict erupted, culminating in a protracted civil war and genocide. By the time it ended, over a million people had been displaced or killed. Sri Lanka’s per capita GDP, which was on par with South Korea’s in 1960, was only one-tenth of it by 2009. As in sixth-century Byzantium, identity politics precipitated the calamity.

Turning a Disparity into a DisasterAt the end of British colonial rule in Sri Lanka, there was significant educational and income disparity between Sinhalese and Tamils. This arose by happenstance rather than because of discriminatory policy. The island’s north, where Tamils predominate, is arid and poor in resources. Because of this, the Tamils devoted their productive energy toward developing human capital, focusing on education and cultivating professional skills. This focus was abetted by American missionaries, who set up schools in the north, providing top-notch English-language education, particularly in math and the physical sciences. As a result, Tamils accounted for an outsized proportion of the better-educated people on the island, particularly in higher-paying fields like engineering and medicine.

Because of the Tamils’ superior education, the British colonial administration hired them disproportionately compared to the Sinhalese. In 1948, for example, Tamils accounted for 40 percent of the clerical workers employed by the colonial government, greatly outstripping their 15 percent share of the overall population. This unequal outcome had nothing to do with overt discrimination against the Sinhalese; it merely reflected the different levels and types of education achieved by the different ethnic groups.

When Sri Lanka gained independence, it passed a constitution that prohibited discrimination based on ethnicity. But a few years after that, an opportunist politician, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, figured he could advance his career by cynically appealing to identity politics, stoking Sinhalese envy over the Tamils’ over-representation in higher education and government. He launched a divisive campaign to eliminate the disparity, which spurred the majority Sinhalese to elect him. After his election in 1956, Bandaranaike passed a law that changed the official language from English to Sinhala and consigned students to separate Tamil and Sinhalese education “streams” rather than having them all learn English. As one Sinhalese journalist wrote, this divided Sri Lanka, depriving it of its “link language”:

That began a great divide that has widened over the years. Children now go to segregated schools or study in separate streams in the same school. They don’t get to know other people of their own age group unless they meet them outside.

Beyond eliminating Sri Lanka’s common “link language,” this law also functioned as a de facto affirmative action program for Sinhalese. Tamils, who spoke Tamil at home and received their higher education in English, could not gain Sinhala proficiency quickly enough to meet the government’s requirement. So, many of them lost their jobs to Sinhalese. For example, the percentage of Tamils employed in government administrative services dropped dramatically: from 30 percent in 1956 to five percent in 1970; the percentage in the armed forces dropped from 40 percent to one percent.

As has happened in many other countries, Sri Lanka’s identity politics went hand-in-hand with expanded government. Sinhalese politicians made it clear: government would be the tool to redress perceived ethnic disparities. It would allocate more jobs and resources, and that allocation would be based on ethnicity. As one historian writes: “a growing perception of the state as bestowing public goods selectively began to emerge, challenging previous views and breeding mistrust between ethnic communities.” Tamils responded to this by launching a non-violent resistance campaign. With ethnic dividing lines now clearly drawn, mobs of Sinhalese staged anti-Tamil counter-demonstrations and then riots in which hundreds—mostly Tamils—were killed. The us-versus-them mentality was setting in.

Bandaranaike was eventually assassinated by radicals within his own movement. But his widow, Sirimavo, who was subsequently elected prime minister, resolved to maintain his top priorities—expansive government and identity politics. She nationalized numerous industries and launched development projects that were directed by ethnic and political considerations rather than actual need. She also removed the constitutional ban on ethnic discrimination so that she could aggressively expand affirmative action. The existing policies had already cost so many Tamils their jobs that they were now under-represented in government. However, they remained over-represented in higher education, particularly in the sciences, a disparity that Sirimavo and her political allies resolved to eliminate. In a scheme that American universities like Harvard would later emulate, the Sri Lankan universities began to reject high-scoring Tamil applicants in favor of manifestly less-qualified Sinhalese with vastly lower test scores.

Just like Justinian’s “race” preferences, the Sri Lankan affirmative action program exacerbated us-versus-them attitudes, deepening the group divide and spurring enmity between groups. As one Sri Lankan observed:

Identity was never a question for thousands of years. But now, here, for some reason, it is different … Friends that I grew up with, [messed around] with, got drunk with, now see an essential difference between us just for the fact of their ethnic identity. And there are no obvious differences at all, no matter what they say. I point to pictures in the newspapers and ask them to tell me who is Sinhalese and who is Tamil, and they simply can’t tell the difference. This identity is a fiction, I tell you, but a deadly one.9

The lessons of the various affirmative action programs in Sri Lanka were clear to everyone: individuals’ access to education and government employment would be determined by ethnic group membership rather than individual merit, and political power would determine how much each group got. If you wanted your share, you needed to mobilize as a group and acquire and maintain political power at any cost. The divisive effects of these lessons would be catastrophic.

The realization that they would forever be at the mercy of an ethnic spoils system, along with the violent attacks perpetrated against them, induced the Tamils to form resistance organizations—most notably, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The LTTE attacked both Sri Lankan government forces and individual Sinhalese, initiating a deadly spiral of attacks and reprisals by both sides committing the sort of atrocities that are tragically common in ethnic conflicts: burning people alive, torture, mass killings, and so on. Over the following decades, the conflict continued to fester, periodically escalating into outright civil war. Ultimately, over a million people would be killed or displaced.

The timeline of the Sri Lankan conflict establishes how communal violence originated from identity politics rather than the underlying income and occupational disparity between the groups. That disparity reached its apex at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, there was no communal violence at that point or during the next half-century. It was only after the introduction of affirmative action programs that ethnic violence erupted. The deadliest attacks on Tamils occurred an entire decade after those programs had enabled Sinhalese to surpass Tamils in both income and education. As Thomas Sowell observed: “It was not the disparities which led to intergroup violence but the politicizing of those disparities and the promotion of group identity politics.”10

Consequences of Identity Politics in Sri Lanka and BeyondSri Lanka’s experience highlights some underappreciated consequences of identity politics. Most notably, one would expect that affirmative action programs would have warmed the feelings of the Sinhalese toward the Tamils. After all, they were receiving preferences for jobs and education at the Tamils’ expense. Yet, precisely the opposite happened: as the affirmative action programs were implemented, Sinhalese animus toward the Tamils progressively worsened. This pattern has been repeated in nearly all the countries where affirmative action has been implemented: affirmative action programs have an invidious effect on the group that benefits, imbuing them with a sense of insecurity and defensiveness over the benefits they receive. That group tends to justify the indefinite continuation of these benefits by claiming that the other group continues to enjoy “privilege”—or by demonizing them and claiming that they are “systemically” advantaged. Thus, the beneficiaries of affirmative action are often the ones to initiate hostilities. In Rwanda, for example, it was Hutu affirmative action beneficiaries who perpetrated the violence, not Tutsis. The situation in Sri Lanka was analogous, with Sinhalese instigating all of the initial riots and pogroms against the Tamils.

One knock-on effect of identity politics in Sri Lanka was that it ultimately benefited some of the wealthiest and most privileged people in the country. The government enacted several affirmative action schemes, each increasingly contrived to benefit well-heeled Sinhalese. The last of these implemented a regional quota system that was devised so that aristocratic Sinhalese living in the Kandy region would compete for spots against poor, undereducated Tamil farm workers. As one Tamil who lost his spot in engineering wrote: “They effectively claimed that the son of a Sinhalese minister in an elite Colombo school was disadvantaged vis-à-vis a Tamil tea plucker’s son.” This follows the pattern of many other affirmative action programs around the world: the greatest beneficiaries are typically the most politically connected (and privileged) individuals within the group receiving affirmative action. They are often wealthier and more privileged than many of the individuals against whom affirmative action is directed. This has been well documented in India, which has extensive data on the subgroups that benefit from its affirmative action programs.

One unexpected consequence of identity politics in Sri Lanka was rampant corruption. When Sri Lanka became independent, its government was widely deemed one of the least corrupt in the developing world. However, as affirmative action programs were implemented and expanded, corruption increased in lockstep. The adoption of affirmative action set a paradigm that pervaded the government: whoever held power could steer government resources to whomever they deemed “underserved.” A baleful side effect of ethnicity-based distortion of government policy is that it undermines and erodes more general standards of government integrity and transparency, legitimating a paradigm of corruption: if it is acceptable to direct policy for the benefit of an ethnic group, is it not also acceptable to do so for the benefit of a clan or an individual? It is a small step to go from one to the other, a step that many Sri Lankan leaders and bureaucrats took. Today, Sri Lanka’s government, which once rivaled European governments in transparency, remains highly corrupt. This pattern has been repeated in other countries. For example, after the Federation of Malaysia expelled Singapore, it adopted an extensive affirmative action program, whereas Singapore prohibited ethnic preferences. Malaysia subsequently experienced proliferating corruption, whereas Singapore is one of the least corrupt countries in the world today.

Perhaps the most profound consequence of identity politics in Sri Lanka was that it ultimately made everybody in the country worse off. After World War II, per capita income in Sri Lanka and Singapore was nearly identical. But after it abandoned its shared “link language” and adopted ethnically divisive policies, Sri Lanka was plagued by violent conflict and economic underperformance; today, one Singaporean earns more than seven Sri Lankans put together. All the group preferences devised to elevate Sinhalese brought down everyone in the country—Tamil, Sinhalese, and all the other groups alike. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s “founding father,” attributed that failure to Sri Lanka’s divisive policies, saying that if Singapore had implemented similar policies, “we would have perished politically and economically.” There are echoes of this in other countries that have implemented identity politics. When I visited Rwanda, I asked Rwandans of various backgrounds whether they thought distinguishing people by race or ethnicity ever helped anyone in their country. There was complete unanimity on this point: after they got over pondering why anyone would ask such a naïve question, they made it very clear that distinguishing people by group made everyone, whether Hutu or Tutsi, distinctly worse off. In the Balkans, I got similar answers from Bosnians, Croatians, Serbians, and Kosovars.

The Perilous Path of Identity PoliticsDecades of sociological research and millennia of history have demonstrated that the tribal instinct is both powerful and hardwired into human behavior. As political scientist Harold Isaacs writes:

If anything emerges plainly from our long look at the nature and functioning of basic group identity, it is the fact that the we-they syndrome is built in. It does not merely distinguish, it divides … the normal responses run from … indifference to depreciation, to contempt, to victimization, and, not at all seldom, to slaughter.11

The history of Byzantium and Sri Lanka demonstrates that this tribal instinct is extremely easy to provoke. All it takes is official recognition of group distinctions and some group preferences to balkanize people into bitterly antagonistic groups, and the consequences are potentially dire. Even if a society that is balkanized in this way avoids violent conflict, it is still likely to be plagued by all the concomitants of social fractionalization: higher corruption, lower social trust, and abysmal economic performance.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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It is therefore troubling to see the U.S. government and institutions adopt Sri Lankan-style policies that emphasize group distinctions. Echoing Sri Lanka’s separate language “streams,” many American universities now have ethnically segregated orientation and graduation ceremonies. Some offer “theme houses”—dormitories segregated by ethnicity. An Illinois public high school offers separate mathematics classes for Black and Latino students. As the U.S. continues down the perilous path of identity politics, it is unlikely to devolve into another Bosnia or Sri Lanka overnight. But the example of Sri Lanka is a dire warning: a country that was once renowned for its communal harmony quickly descended into violence and economic failure—all because it sought to redress group disparities with identity politics.

Surveys and statistics are now flashing warning signs in the United States. A Gallup poll found that while 70 percent of Black Americans believed that race relations in the United States were either good or very good in 2001, only 33 percent did in 2021.12 Other statistics have shown that hate crimes have been on the rise over that time.13 In the last year, we have also seen the spectacle of angry anti-Israel protesters hammering on the doors of a college hall, terrorizing the Jewish students locked inside, and a Stanford professor telling Jewish students to stand in the corner of a classroom. While identity politics have increasingly directed public policy and institutions, ethnic relations have deteriorated rapidly. This—and a lot of history—suggest it’s time for a different approach.

About the AuthorJens Kurt Heycke was educated in Economics and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics, and Princeton University. He worked as an early employee or executive in several successful technology startups. Since retiring from tech, he has worked as a writer and researcher, conducting field research in more than forty countries, from Bosnia to Botswana. He is the author of Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire: Multiculturalism in the World’s Past and America’s Future.

References1. Procopius (1914). History of The Wars, Books I and II, trans. H. B. Dewing. Macmillan. 2. https://bit.ly/49BIyJN 3. https://bit.ly/3OVJ8tp 4. Sherif, M. (1961). The Robbers Cave Experiment: Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation. University of Oklahoma Press. 5. Diab, L. N. (1970). A study of intragroup and intergroup relations among experimentally produced small groups. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 82(1), 49–82. 6. Rabbie, J. M. (1982). The Effects of Intergroup Competition and Cooperation on Intragroup and Intergroup Relations. In Cooperation and Helping Behavior (pp. 123–149). Academic Press. 7. Malalas, J., Jeffreys, E., Jeffreys, M., & Scott, R. (1986). The Chronicle of John Malalas: A Translation. Australian Association for Byzantine Studies. 8. Procopius (1927). Secret History, trans. Richard Atwater. Pascal Covici, Inc. 9. McGowan, W. (1993). Only Man is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka. Pan Books. 10. Sowell, T. (2004). Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study. Yale University Press. 11. Isaacs, H. (1975). Idols of the Tribe. Harper & Row. 12. https://bit.ly/3Td5l8W 13. https://bit.ly/3IgvNZ3

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss471_Theodore_Schwartz_2024_09_24.mp3Download MP3We’ve all heard the phrase “it’s not brain surgery.” But what exactly is brain surgery? It’s a profession that is barely a hundred years old and profoundly connects two human beings, but few know how it works, or its history. How did early neurosurgeons come to understand the human brain—an extraordinarily complex organ that controls everything we do, and yet at only three pounds is so fragile? And how did this incredibly challenging and lifesaving specialty emerge?

In this warm, rigorous, and deeply insightful book, Dr. Theodore H. Schwartz explores what it’s like to hold the scalpel, wield the drill, extract a tumor, fix a bullet hole, and remove a blood clot—when every second can mean life or death. Drawing from the author’s own cases, plus media, sports, and government archives, this seminal work delves into all the brain-related topics that have long-consumed public curiosity, like what really happened to JFK, President Biden’s brain surgery, and the NFL’s management of CTE. Dr. Schwartz also surveys the field’s latest incredible advances and discusses the philosophical questions of the unity of the self and the existence of free will.

A neurosurgeon as well as a professor of neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medicine, one of the busiest and most highly ranked neurosurgery centers in the world, Dr. Schwartz tells this story like no one else could. Told through anecdote and clear explanation, this is the ultimate cultural and scientific history of a literally mind-blowing human endeavor, one that cuts to the core of who we are.

Theodore Schwartz, MD, is the David and Ursel Barnes Endowed Professor of Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medicine, one of the busiest and highest-ranked neurosurgery centers in the world. He has published over five hundred scientific articles and chapters on neurosurgery, and has lectured around the world—from Bogotá to Vienna to Mumbai—on new, minimally invasive surgical techniques that he helped develop. He also runs a basic science laboratory devoted to epilepsy research. He studied philosophy and literature at Harvard. His new book is: Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery.

Shermer and Schwartz discuss:

• Brief biographical history of how he became a brain surgeon and how you can too
• A brief anatomical lesson on the brain and nervous system
• How does anesthesia work and where does consciousness go?
• Wilder Penfield and brain mapping
• Head-on collisions and brain injuries
• Sports neurosurgery
• CTE, Football, Boxing, concussions, etc.
• Brain tumors and how to treat them: Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), Meningioma
• Cancer vs. tumors
• Strokes and aneurysms
• Cell phones and brain tumors
• Famous cases: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Johnny Cochrane, John McCain, Muhammad Ali, Ted Kennedy, H.M. (Henry Molaison), Phineas Gage, Andre the Giant, Joe Biden, Jim Brady, Eva Paron, Michael J. Fox, Lance Armstrong, Natasha Richardson
• Memory loss, dementia, senility, Alzheimer’s, etc.
• Frontal lobotomies: 1935–1955 over 60,000 were performed
• The neuroscience of violence and aggression: Donta Page, Mr. Oft, Charles Whitman
• Free will and determinism
• Sentience, consciousness, and the hard problem
• The Self: Theseus’s Ship (how much of the brain would need to change for loss of self?)
• Hindsight bias and how we justify our beliefs and behaviors
• His father’s stroke and death
• Neurolink and the future of computer-brain interface technology.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss470_Colin_Wright_2024_09_21.mp3Download MP3Biologist Colin Wright joins the podcast to explore one of today’s most contentious topics: the intersection of biological sex and gender.

Drawing on his expertise in animal behavior and evolutionary biology, Colin breaks down key concepts such as biological sex, gender identity, and gender dysphoria. He also examines the shift in societal definitions of what it means to be a man or woman, and how these evolving perspectives fit with long-standing biological principles.

This session was presented at FreedomFest 2024. To see more speeches and sessions from FreedomFest, visit freedomfest.com/civl.

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I recently wrote a piece for Skeptic titled “Ranking Presidents: Does It Make Any Sense?”, in which I outlined three reasons why ranking Presidents against one another is a fool’s errand: presentism, the evolving role of the presidency, and sui generis.1 The current trend of the first of these criteria, presentism, becomes problematic when applied to entertainment made for previous generations. Viewing and evaluating the culture of the past through a contemporary lens has led to erasing history in at least three relatively recent incidents. This is, I believe, a slippery slope toward censorship and a missed opportunity for valuable lessons about our collective past.

In 1991, Disney released a video version of their 1940 masterpiece Fantasia, describing it as “a meticulously restored version of the original, full-length film.” It wasn’t, though. The version Disney released omitted an original scene in which a Black centaurette named Sunflower is shown shining shoes of a White centaur.2 Seen today, Sunflower is a patently offensive stereotype.3 Ten years later Disney released the censored version for the film’s 60th anniversary DVD.4 Disney’s use of racist stereotypes is not limited to Fantasia. In varying degrees, such tropes are seen in Dumbo (1941),5 Peter Pan (1953),6 The Aristocats (1970),7 and Aladdin (1992).8

In 2020, the company (admirably, in my view) took steps toward addressing this controversy by adding disclaimers to their films on their streaming services, noting the “harmful impact” of racist stereotypes. Unlike the quiet actions the company took censoring the re-releases of Fantasia, the films are viewable in their original forms.

This begs the question: If the racism was so apparent, why weren’t these films decried upon initial release? The answer is they weren’t considered offensive by the public at the time, and applying today’s attitudes toward race crystallizes the fallacy of presentism.

In 2014, Ruth Wise, professor emerita of Yiddish and Comparative Literatures at Harvard, criticized Fiddler on the Roof (1971) for sacrificing Jewish identity to make the musical more universally appealing.9 The problem with Wise’s argument is (again) presentism. In the early 1970s, MASH writers employed rape jokes,10 and America’s most popular sitcom (All in the Family*) featured a working-class bigot who employed racial slurs for laughs.11 John Lennon released a song titled “Woman is The (N-word) of the World”12 and Richard Pryor would use the same racial epithet in an album title three years later.13 Our attitudes towards cultural authenticity and appropriation have evolved since the early 1970s.

In 2020, a 1988 Golden Girls episode called “Mixed Feelings” was pulled from the streaming platform Hulu due to “a scene in which Betty White and Rue McClanahan are mistaken for wearing blackface.”14 In the episode, Dorothy’s (White) son introduces his fiancé, a much older Black woman. Blanche and Rose are mortified with embarrassment when they unexpectedly meet the couple wearing cosmetic mud masks.

Were Rose and Blanche revisiting a minstrel show to characterize Black Americans as lazy, hypersexual thieves, ala “Amos ‘n Andy,” as minstrel shows were in the past?15 Of course not. The joke lay in their mutual embarrassment of appearing as if they were in blackface.16 Each Golden Girls actress (Betty White, Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty) came of age decades before the women’s movement, but their show was considerably progressive for their time. In its seven-year run, The Golden Girls featured episodes centered on then-controversial topics of racism, sexual harassment, same-sex marriage, age discrimination, homelessness, the death of children, and addiction.17 Perhaps most significantly, a 1990 episode titled “72 Hours,” has Rose worried that she may have come in contact with HIV.18 It was only five years prior that President Reagan first addressed the AIDS crisis, by which time 42,600 people had died from the disease. By 1990, that number had spiked to 310,000, a third of which were deaths occurring that same year.19 When one considers the climate of the times, airing the episode was courageous.

The same year “Mixed Feelings” was removed from Hulu, an actor named François Clemmons published Officer Clemmons: A Memoir. Clemmons played “Officer Clemmons” on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood in the late 1960s, the first African American actor to have a recurring role on a children’s television program.20 In Clemmon’s mostly heartwarming book, he relates an incident in which Fred Rogers called him into his office. His boss said to him, “Someone has informed us that you were seen at the local gay bar downtown. Now, I want you to know, Franc, that if you’re gay, it doesn’t matter to me at all. Whatever you say and do is fine with me, but if you’re going to be on the show as an important member of the Neighborhood, you can’t be out as gay.”

Was Mr. Rogers homophobic? When Rogers had the conversation with Clemmons, homosexuality was still listed as a disorder in the DSM. It wasn’t until 1974 that it was replaced with “sexual orientation disturbance.”21 In reality, Fred Rogers, a Presbyterian minister, was an LGBTQ ally. He’d intentionally hired gay men and women since the 1960s and rebuffed efforts from his viewers to renounce homosexuality.22

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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In John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985)23 and Jeff Kanus’ Revenge of the Nerds (1984),24 there are scenes of sexual assault upon women played for laughs. Both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert (renowned film critics) praised each film, neither noting their discomfort with the now-troubling scenes in either review.25, 26, 27 Why did they fail to do so? Were both Siskel and Ebert misogynists willing to overlook scenes of women being sexually assaulted? Of course not. The social mores in the early 1980s didn’t apply to those we share today. Are these scenes excusable? No, but both actresses (Molly Ringwald and Julie Montgomery) have publicly reckoned with the blatant sexism in their roles and neither has insisted the scenes be omitted.28, 29

In 2022, the UK’s Channel 5 aired the 1961 classic Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but bowdlerized scenes of Mickey Rooney as “Mr. Yunioshi,” an over-the-top yellow-face Asian caricature.30 Should Rooney’s role be excised? No. Just like the racist characters in Disney movies of the 1940s–1990s, and the sexual assaults depicted for laughs in 1980s raunchy comedies, the climate in 1961 was different.

Pop culture of the past is just that: of the past. Applying today’s standards to them is at best a fool’s errand and, at worst (as seen in the cases above) a slippery slope toward censorship. Entertainment from yesteryear should be taken in context while viewed in its entirety.

About the AuthorJohn D. Van Dyke is an academic and science educator. His personal website is vandykerevue.org.

References1. https://bit.ly/3vjUhOj 2. https://bit.ly/48YFeYe 3. https://bit.ly/49UFKaT 4. https://bit.ly/3TFD1w8 5. https://bit.ly/3TpvgcA 6. https://bit.ly/43p6fTb 7. https://bit.ly/43ltjm0 8. https://bit.ly/3TEanM6 9. https://bit.ly/3IHU5vb 10. https://bit.ly/3IJzVRu 11. https://bit.ly/3IHU9uV 12. Miles, B. & Badman, K. (2001). The Beatles Diary After the Break-Up: 1970–2001. Music Sales Group. 13. https://bit.ly/3TgVYE6 14. https://bit.ly/3VoMmKi 15. https://bit.ly/43koCJd 16. https://bit.ly/3IHHGYf 17. https://bit.ly/43lj6G0 18. https://bit.ly/43DFElP 19. https://bit.ly/3v783Ut 20. Clemmons, F. S. (2020). Officer Clemmons: A Memoir. Catapult. 21. https://bit.ly/3vg6XWj 22. https://bit.ly/49XehW4 23. https://bit.ly/4ahrvN1 24. https://bit.ly/3VmOGBu 25. https://bit.ly/3ViAR72 26. https://bit.ly/4cdaDJ4 27. https://bit.ly/4cj1RcG 28. https://bit.ly/3VmZOOP 29. https://bit.ly/492E65L 30. https://bit.ly/4chtAu9

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss469_Gary_Marcus_2024_09_17.mp3Download MP3On balance, will AI help humanity or harm it? AI could revolutionize science, medicine, and technology, and deliver us a world of abundance and better health. Or it could be a disaster, leading to the downfall of democracy, or even our extinction. In Taming Silicon Valley, Gary Marcus, one of the most trusted voices in AI, explains that we still have a choice. And that the decisions we make now about AI will shape our next century. In this short but powerful manifesto, Marcus explains how Big Tech is taking advantage of us, how AI could make things much worse, and, most importantly, what we can do to safeguard our democracy, our society, and our future.

Marcus explains the potential—and potential risks—of AI in the clearest possible terms and how Big Tech has effectively captured policymakers. He begins by laying out what is lacking in current AI, what the greatest risks of AI are, and how Big Tech has been playing both the public and the government, before digging into why the U.S. government has thus far been ineffective at reining in Big Tech. He then offers real tools for readers, including eight suggestions for what a coherent AI policy should look like—from data rights to layered AI oversight to meaningful tax reform—and closes with how ordinary citizens can push for what is so desperately needed.

Taming Silicon Valley is both a primer on how AI has gotten to its problematic present state and a book of activism in the tradition of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. It is a deeply important book for our perilous historical moment that every concerned citizen must read.

Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence, well known for his challenges to contemporary AI. He is a scientist and best-selling author and was founder and CEO of Geometric.AI, a machine learning company acquired by Uber. A Professor Emeritus at NYU, he is the author of five previous books, including the bestseller Guitar Zero, Kluge (one of The Economist’s eight best books on the brain and consciousness), and Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust (with Ernest Davis), one of Forbes’s seven must-read books on AI.

“Move fast and break things.” —Mark Zuckerberg, 2012

“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility.” —Mark Zuckerberg, speaking to the U.S. Senate, 2018

“Generative AI systems have proven themselves again and again to be indifferent to the difference between truth and bullshit. Generative models are, borrowing a phrase from the military, ‘frequently wrong, and never in doubt.’ The Star Trek computer could be counted on to gives sound answers to sensible questions; Generative AI is a crapshoot. Worse, it is right often enough to lull us into complacency, even as mistakes invariably slip through; hardly anyone treats it with the skepticism it deserves. Something with reliability of the Star Trek computer could be world-changing. What we have now is a mess, seductive but unreliable. And too few people are willing to admit that dirty truth.” —Gary Marcus

Shermer and Marcus discuss:

• The AI we have now and the AI we should want
• AI, AGI, Generative AI, ChatGPT
• What’s the problem to be solved?
• 12 biggest threats of Generative AI
• The morality of Silicon Valley
• How Silicon Valley manipulates public opinion
• How Silicon Valley manipulates government policy
• Data rights
• Privacy
• Transparency
• Liability
• Independent oversight
• Incentives good and bad
• Private vs. Government regulation of AI
• International AI governance.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss468_Pinker_Ridley_2024_09_13.mp3Download MP3From the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic to the rise of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives and Artificial Intelligence, in this episode Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, and Michael Shermer challenge conventional narratives and explore how we can continue to move forward.

They discuss the state of democracy, autocracy, and the lessons learned from historical crises, while offering insights into how innovation, rationality, and education can lead us through challenging times.

This session was presented at FreedomFest 2024. To see more speeches and sessions from FreedomFest, visit freedomfest.com/civl.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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On January 1, 2024, a skeptic from Malawi named Wonderful Mkhutche shared a video1 of a witch-hunting incident that took place days before on December 28, 2023. In the video, a local mob is shown burying an elderly woman. According to local sources, the woman was accused of causing the death of a family member who had passed away the previous day. These accusations often arise after family members consult local diviners, who claim to be able to identify suspects. In this instance, a local vigilante group abducted the woman. They were in the midst of burying her alive as punishment for allegedly using witchcraft to “kill” a relative when the police intervened and rescued her.

While witch-hunting is largely a thing of the past in the Western world, the persecution of alleged witches continues with tragic consequences in many parts of Africa. Malawi, located in Southeastern Africa, is one such place. Mr. Mkhutche reports that between 300 to 500 individuals accused of witchcraft are attacked and killed every year.

The Malawi Network of Older Persons’ Organizations reported that 15 older women were killed between January and February 2023.2 Local sources suggest that these estimates are likely conservative, as killings related to witchcraft allegations often occur in rural communities and go unreported. Witch-hunting is not limited to Malawi; it also occurs in other African countries. In neighboring Tanzania, for example, an estimated 3,000 people were killed for allegedly practicing witchcraft between 2005 and 2011, and about 60,000 accused witches were murdered between 1960 and 2000.3 Similar abuses occur in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, where those accused of witchcraft face severe mistreatment. They are attacked, banished, or even killed. Some alleged witches are buried alive, lynched, or strangled to death. In Ghana, some makeshift shelters—known as “witch camps”—exist in the northern region. Women accused of witchcraft flee to these places after being banished by their families and communities. Currently, around 1,000 women who fled their communities due to witchcraft accusations live in various witch camps in the region.4

The belief in the power of “evil magic” to harm others, causing illness, accidents, or even death, is deeply ingrained in many regions of Africa. Despite Malawi retaining a colonial-era legal provision that criminalizes accusing someone of practicing witchcraft, this law has not had a significant impact because it is rarely enforced. Instead, many people in Malawi favor criminalizing witchcraft and institutionalizing witch-hunting as a state-sanctioned practice. The majority of Malawians believe in witchcraft and support its criminalization,5 and many argue that the failure of Malawian law to recognize witchcraft as a crime is part of the problem, because it denies the legal system the mechanism to identify or certify witches. Humanists and skeptics in Malawi have actively opposed proposed legislation that recognizes the existence of witchcraft.6 They advocate for retaining the existing legislation and urge the government to enforce, rather than repeal, the provision against accusing someone of practicing witchcraft.

Islam7 and Christianity8 were introduced to Malawi in the 16th and 19th centuries by Western Christian missionaries and Arab scholars/jihadists, respectively. They coerced the local population to accept foreign mythologies as superior to traditional beliefs. Today, Malawi is predominantly Christian,9 but there are also Muslims and some remaining practitioners of traditional religions. And while the belief in witchcraft predates Christianity and Islam, religious lines are often blurred, as all the most popular religions contain narratives that sanctify and reinforce some form of belief in witchcraft. As a result, Malawians from various religious backgrounds share a belief in witchcraft.

Witch-hunting also has a significant health aspect, as accusations of witchcraft are often used to explain real health issues. In rural areas where hospitals and health centers are scarce, many individuals lack access to modern medical facilities and cannot afford modern healthcare solutions. Consequently, they turn to local diviners and traditional narratives to understand and cope with ailments, diseases, death, and other misfortunes.10

While witch-hunting occurs in both rural and urban settings, it is more prevalent in rural areas. In urban settings, witch-hunting is mainly observed in slums and overcrowded areas. One contributing factor to witch persecution in rural or impoverished urban zones is the limited presence of state police. Police stations are few and far apart, and the law against witchcraft accusations is rarely enforced11due to a lack of police officers and inadequate equipment for intervention. Recent incidents in Malawi demonstrate that mob violence, jungle justice, and vigilante killings of alleged witches are common in these communities.

Another significant aspect of witch-hunting is its highly selective nature. Elderly individuals, particularly women, are usually the targets. Why is this the case? Malawi is a patriarchal society where women hold marginalized sociocultural positions. They are vulnerable and easily scapegoated, accused, and persecuted. In many cases, children are the ones driving these accusations. Adult relatives coerce children to “confess” and accuse the elderly of attempting to initiate them into the world of witchcraft. Malawians believe that witches fly around at night in “witchcraft planes” to attend occult meetings in South Africa and other neighboring countries.12

The persistence of witch-hunting in Africa can be attributed to the absence of effective campaigns and measures to eliminate this unfounded and destructive practice. The situation is dire and getting worse. In Ghana, for example, the government plans on shutting down safe spaces for victims, and the president has declined to sign a bill into law that would criminalize witchcraft accusations and the act of witch-hunting.

For this reason, in 2020 I founded Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) with the aim of combating witch persecution in Africa. Our mission is to put an end to witch-hunting on the continent by 2030.13 AfAW was created to address significant gaps in the fight against witch persecution in Africa. One of our primary goals is to challenge the misrepresentation of African witchcraft perpetuated by Western anthropologists. They have often portrayed witch-hunting as an inherent part of African culture, suggesting that witch persecution serves useful socioeconomic functions. (This perspective arises from a broader issue within modern anthropology, where extreme cultural relativism sometimes leads to an overemphasis on the practices of indigenous peoples. This stems from an overcorrection of past trends that belittled all practices of indigenous peoples). Some Western scholars tend to present witchcraft in the West as a “wild” phenomenon, and witchcraft in Africa as having domestic value and benefit. The academic literature tends to explain witchcraft accusations and witch persecutions from the viewpoint of the accusers rather than the accused. This approach is problematic and dangerous, as it silences the voices of those accused of witchcraft and diminishes their predicament.

Due to this misrepresentation, Western NGOs that fund initiatives to address abuses linked to witchcraft beliefs have waged a lackluster campaign. They have largely avoided describing witchcraft in Africa as a form of superstition, instead choosing to adopt a patronizing approach to tackling witch-hunting—they often claim to “respect” witchcraft as an aspect of African cultures.14 As a result, NGOs do not treat the issue of witch persecution in Africa with the urgency it deserves.

Likewise, African NGOs and activists have been complicit. Many lack the political will and funding to effectively challenge this harmful practice. In fact, many African NGO actors believe in witchcraft themselves! Witch-hunting persists in the region due to lack of accurate information, widespread misinformation, and insufficient action. To end witch-hunting, a paradigm shift is needed. The way witchcraft belief and witch-hunting are perceived and addressed must change.

AfAW aims to catalyze this crucial shift and transformation. It operates as a practical and applied form of skepticism, employing the principles of reason and compassion to combat witch-hunting. Through public education and enlightenment efforts, we question and debate witchcraft and ritual beliefs, aiming to dispel the misconceptions far too often used to justify abuses. Our goal is to try to engage African witchcraft believers in thoughtful dialogue, guiding them away from illusions, delusions, and superstitions.

The persistence of abuses linked to witchcraft and ritual beliefs in the region is due to a lack of robust initiatives applying skeptical thinking to the problem. To effectively combat witch persecution, information must be translated into action, and interpretations into tangible policies and interventions. To achieve this, AfAW employs the “informaction” theory of change, combining information dissemination with actionable steps.

At the local level, we focus on bridging the information and action gaps. Accusers are misinformed about the true causes of illnesses, deaths, and misfortunes, often attributing these events to witchcraft due to a lack of accurate information. Many people impute misfortunes to witchcraft because they are unaware of where to seek help or who or what is genuinely responsible for their troubles. This lack of understanding extends to what constitutes valid reasons and causal explanations for their problems.

As part of the efforts to end witch-hunting, we highlight misinformation and disinformation about the true causes of misfortune, illness, death, accidents, poverty, and infertility. This includes debunking the falsehoods that charlatans, con artists, traditional priests, pastors, and holy figures such as mallams and marabouts exploit to manipulate the vulnerable and the ignorant. At AfAW, we provide evidence-based knowledge, explanations, and interpretations of misfortunes.

Our efforts include educating the public on existing laws and mechanisms to address allegations of witchcraft. We conduct sensitization campaigns targeting public institutions such as schools, colleges, and universities. Additionally, we sponsor media programs, issue press releases, engage in social media advocacy, and publish articles aimed at dispelling myths and misinformation related to witch-hunting in the region.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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We also facilitate actions and interventions by both state and non-state agencies. In many post-colonial African states, governmental institutions are weak with limited powers and presence. One of our key objectives is to encourage institutional collaboration to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. We petition the police, the courts, and state human rights institutions. Our work prompts these agencies to act, collaborate, and implement appropriate measures to penalize witch-hunting activities in the region.

Additionally, AfAW intervenes to support individual victims of witch persecution based on their specific needs and the resources available. For example, in cases where victims have survived, we relocate them to safe places, assist with their medical treatment, and facilitate their access to justice. In situations where the accused have been killed, we provide support to the victims’ relatives and ensure that the perpetrators are brought to justice.

We get more cases than we can handle. With limited resources, we are unable to intervene in every situation we become aware of. However, in less than four years, our organization has made a significant impact through our interventions in Nigeria and beyond. We are deploying the canon of skeptical rationality to save lives, awaken Africans from their dogmatic and superstitious slumber, and bring about an African Enlightenment.

This is a real culture war, with real consequences, and skepticism is making a real difference.

About the AuthorLeo Igwe is a skeptic and director of the Advocacy for Alleged Witches which aims to end witch-hunting in Africa by 2030. His human rights fieldwork has led to his arrest on several occasions in Nigeria.

References1. https://bit.ly/3TyhZyc 2. https://bit.ly/3xiOmtD 3. https://bit.ly/3PMiovX 4. https://bit.ly/3vAPIze 5. https://bit.ly/43Iv24N 6. https://bit.ly/3IZamfu 7. https://bit.ly/3IYJvjR 8. https://bit.ly/3TVdzTz 9. https://bit.ly/3TVdCPf 10. https://bit.ly/3J0W8uz 11. https://bit.ly/3PHS7yM 12. https://bit.ly/4awJzTs 13. https://bit.ly/3IX6g7I 14. https://bit.ly/3Q7NIpp

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss467_Matthew_Stewart_2024_09_10.mp3Download MP3Matthew Stewart is an independent philosopher and historian who has written extensively about the philosophical origins of the American republic, the history of philosophy, management theory, and the culture of inequality. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, among other publications. In recent years he has lived in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, and is currently based in London. He is the author of Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic and An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America.

Shermer and Stewart discuss:

• What does the phrase “The Law of Nature and Nature’s God” mean?
• What is heretical about the origins of the American Republic?
• Religion of the founders: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Jay, James Madison, Thomas Paine
• Ethan Allen and Thomas Young
• The Enlightenment influence on the Founding Fathers
• John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza
• Ancient Greek influences on the Founding Fathers
• Epicurus’s Dangerous Idea
• Lucretius’s “swerving” atoms
• Theism, Deism, Pantheism, Atheism
• Reason and empiricism
• Self-evident truths
• Morality and the origin of right and wrong
• Happiness and its pursuit
• The religion of freedom
• Enslaving other humans: what were these people thinking and feeling?
• Should they have known better?
• Racists or creatures of their time in which nearly everyone held such views?
• Monogenism vs. polygenism
• Abolitionism
• John Brown
• Frederick Douglass
• Theodore Parker
• Abraham Lincoln
• Civil War cause: slavery or states’ rights?
• Religious supporters of abolition: Quakers, William Wilberforce
• How did American slavery lead to civil war?
• Why did the war result in emancipation?

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss466_Jeff_Kripal_2024_09_08.mp3Download MP3From precognitive dreams and telepathic visions to near-death experiences, UFO encounters, and beyond, so-called impossible phenomena are not supposed to happen. But they do happen—all the time. Jeffrey J. Kripal asserts that the impossible is a function not of reality but of our everchanging assumptions about what is real. How to Think Impossibly invites us to think about these fantastic (yet commonplace) experiences as an essential part of being human, expressive of a deeply shared reality that is neither mental nor material but gives rise to both. Thinking with specific individuals and their extraordinary experiences in vulnerable, open, and often humorous ways, Kripal interweaves humanistic and scientific inquiry to foster an awareness that the fantastic is real, the supernatural is super natural, and the impossible is possible.

Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, and just published, also by the University of Chicago Press, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss465_Michael_Shermer_2024_09_06.mp3Download MP3During a two-hour interview with Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper made sensational claims about the Holocaust and World War II, with Carlson calling him “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” In this solo episode, Michael Shermer takes a critical look at the pseudohistory and historical revisionism presented by Cooper on Carlson’s show.

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We are three college professors who wish to call attention to a growing problem, namely the erosion of the foundational values of a college education: free inquiry and free speech, rationality and empiricism, civil discussion and debate, and openness to new ideas.

The Rise of Critical TheoriesCritical theory is a school of thought that has its roots in Marxist theories of human nature and society. It originally developed in Germany in the 1920s among a group of scholars at the Institute for Social Research. They were attempting to salvage some of the failed ideas of Marxism by extending theory to embrace non-economic forms of inequality and oppression.

Critical theorists believe that mainstream knowledge is used to promote the interests of the powerful. Unlike traditional social science, which aims to objectively describe human nature and society by carrying out scientific research, critical theory promotes ideological narratives as self-evidently true. Based on their theories about human nature and social justice, critical theorists promote political activism (or “praxis”), and at times even violent revolution, to achieve their goals.

The predecessor to critical theory, Marxism, simplistically divided people into groups labeled as oppressors or oppressed. Marxism’s original group division was economic—the groups were the oppressive Bourgeois (those who controlled the means of production) and the oppressed Proletariat (the workers). It tried to explain the systemic causes of these group divisions (capitalism) and it developed a set of proposed solutions, including violent revolution, that it presumed would lead to a utopian communist society. These steps, which we will call “Marxist methodology, subsequently became part of critical theories that then focused on additional ways of dividing people into categories of oppressors and oppressed. The Marxist methodology follows the steps shown in Table 1.

Click table to enlarge

1. Divide people into two (or more) groups.
2. Label one group as the oppressed (“the good”), the other as the oppressors (“the bad”).
3. Develop a theory that purports to explain the systemic causes of this division. The theory is often conspiratorial in nature—oppressors are seen as scheming to keep the oppressed in their place.
4. Identify and implement solutions. Encourage group solidarity among the oppressed group, promote an “us-versus-them” mentality, groupthink, and adherence to the party line, invent insulting labels to brand members of the out-group, and engage in activism and/or revolution that will purportedly end those social injustices.

Many social movements based on critical theories have used this Marxist methodology, as noted in Table 1.

All these ideological movements have restricted free speech, encouraged an “us” versus “them” political tribalism, employed personal ad hominem attacks against opponents, and promoted cancellation campaigns. While it is important to respect diversity and historical injustices, we should keep in mind that truly liberal worldviews emphasize our common humanity—which is far less divisive.

What Does “Social Justice” Mean?The new higher education mantra, “social justice” sounds good, but it in fact can refer to either of two often mutually exclusive philosophies: liberal social justice or critical social justice. Though few acknowledge it, increasingly social justice is sold as the former, but practiced as the latter. Consider how they compare in the Table 2.

Click table to enlarge

As is evident, liberal social justice and critical social justice employ two very different methods in determining what constitutes social justice.

Language RevisionismCritical social justice activists often use the “Motte and Bailey strategy” (see Table 3) to make extreme proposals appear moderate. In this gambit a highly defensible “Motte” position is promoted, while successively working toward a more radical “Bailey” position. This gambit is used often in postmodernist discourses. For example, by asserting that morality is socially constructed, the Motte is that our beliefs are socially influenced, and the Bailey is that there is no such thing as morality or truth. Another example:

• A (non-controversial) Motte position: “We want social justice.” This statement is difficult to argue against, as just about everyone believes in fairness (though they may differ in how they define the term or how to achieve it).
• A (controversial) Bailey position: “We need to re-define social justice as critical social justice and we need to make fundamental (sometimes radical) changes to our society including ending the rule of law, free speech, property rights, and merit systems.” This statement is much more controversial than the Motte, as it suggests that the current social order is inherently unjust and so needs to be overthrown.

Here are more examples of the Motte and Bailey strategies with respect to the re-definition of some commonly used words.

Click table to enlarge

What is social justice when re-interpreted from a critical social justice lens?1Again, the term “social justice” in common language refers to the liberal social justice conceptions of individual rights and responsibilities, equal opportunity, blind justice, equality before the law, etc., as noted above. These ideas evolved from historic common law, the Enlightenment (particularly the Scottish Enlightenment), and U.S. constitutionalism.

However, over recent decades the term social justice has come to be redefined in terms of critical, not liberal, social justice. This re-definition was accomplished surreptitiously through the Motte and Bailey gambit, and it also allowed the more radical philosophy of critical theory itself to be covertly introduced into college campuses while flying under the academic radar. By analogy, the term “social justice” has been used as a terminological Trojan horse to insert critical social justice and critical theory into the academy under the guise of liberal social justice.

Restrictions on Freedom of Speech and Open InquiryThis sort of critical social justice activism and indoctrination (as opposed to exposing students to these perspectives in the context of discussing and debating the respective strengths and weaknesses of a range of perspectives) is the opposite of free expression and open inquiry, and thus it is the antithesis of the foundational values of traditional higher education.

Often mere attempts to question how, why, or whether X-injustice is happening leads to accusations that the questioner must be a bigoted “X-ist” or “X-phobe.” Questioning is often dismissed by critical theorists as defensive rhetoric employed to defend one’s privilege and power. The questioner needs thus be silenced, ostracized, and/or canceled. As documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), this has in fact happened thousands of times.

Some Examples of Restriction of Speech and Open InquiryA series of large-scale empirical studies beginning in the year 2000 found that both students and professors report fearing to express or explore political and ideological viewpoints that are critical of critical theory.2 Further, campuses have little ideological diversity among faculty and administrators, with typically a 12:1 ratio of liberal/progressive to conservative/libertarian, and many departments and some whole fields lacking any conservative or libertarian faculty members. Studies document that many professors freely admit to discriminating against colleagues and students who support liberal, rather than critical, conceptions of social justice. Here are some recent representative examples:

• Bret Weinstein, a former professor of biology at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, was deplatformed and forced to resign after he was accused of racism and white privilege for refusing to participate in a “Day of Absence,” which asked white faculty to stay off campus for the day to celebrate people of color.
• Lindsay Shepherd, a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, was suspended after she showed her class a video of a debate about gender pronouns. She was accused of violating the university’s policy on discrimination and harassment.
• Dorian Abbot, an associate professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, was disinvited from giving a prestigious lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after he wrote an opinion piece criticizing diversity initiatives and instead supporting meritbased college admissions, hiring, and promotions.
• Nicholas Christakis, a professor of sociology at Yale University, was placed on administrative leave after he sent an email to students urging them to be civil to those with whom they disagree.
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch politician and women’s rights activist who herself suffered female genital mutilation as a child in a traditional Islamic society, was disinvited from speaking at the University of California, Berkeley, after students protested her views on Islam.

Critical Pedagogy: Political Activism in the ClassroomCritical pedagogy is an ideological approach to teaching that attempts to impose political views and activism in the classroom that are consistent with critical theory. It was founded by the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire, who promoted it through his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It pressures students to adopt a specific political ideology and rejects dissenting views. Doing so takes time away from developing core academic skills, including critical thinking skills.

At its worst, critical pedagogy can produce an environment where some professors and administrators try to tell students not how to think, but what to think. Professors should not be using the lectern as an activist bully pulpit to push their personal ideological or political beliefs. Since professors are in positions of power relative to their students, such activism in the classroom is unethical and constitutes professional misconduct. Students should not be expected to conform to ideologies or dogmas in the classroom.

It is unfortunate that students will very likely be subject to activism on the part of some of their professors and even some fellow students. If they disagree with them, they may at times feel that they should keep their thoughts to themselves. But do not. Speak up!

Spotting Education v. IndoctrinationTo be clear, although we do not subscribe to critical theory because of the difficulties with it that we (and many others) have identified, we do not object to a professor teaching or discussing critical theory and critical social justice and presenting his or her opinions about matters based on those perspectives. College is all about exposing students to a range of ideas and opinions. However, professors should not attempt to indoctrinate their students with critical theory or anything else, and they should expose students to a range of perspectives on various issues. Below are a few pointers to help students to identify whether a course or a professor is promoting critical theory through indoctrination rather than education.

Courses that educate tend to have:

• A Balance of Perspectives: Look for courses that present multiple viewpoints and encourage open discussion. A balanced education should expose students to various ideas, even those that challenge the prevailing consensus.
• Freedom of Thought: If a course or professor discourages questioning or presents information as absolute truth without room for debate, it might be indoctrination. In contrast to a fundamentalist religion, education encourages students to question, analyze, and form their own conclusions.
• An Evidence-Based Approach: Knowledge should be grounded in research, evidence, and historical context. If a course lacks substantial evidence to support its claims or relies primarily on emotional appeals, it is less education than indoctrination.
• Engagement with Opposing Views: A healthy educational environment should encourage engaging with opposing viewpoints. If a course dismisses or demonizes dissenting perspectives, it could be leaning towards indoctrination.

Whereas courses that indoctrinate tend to:

• Discourage Disagreement: The professor discourages students from challenging their favored concepts and ideals.
• Rely on Emotional Appeals and Ad Hominem Attacks: The professor uses emotional appeals and personal attacks to silence dissent. Campus activism can be covert rather than overt, with the professor communicating to students what is acceptable or not based on their reactions to student comments, the topics they select to discuss and to omit, their grading practices and feedback, how they interact with and treat students having different opinions, or even their body language when talking about various topics.

A 2007 American Association of University Professors (AAUP) subcommittee report stated such activist professors present their favored worldview “dogmatically, without allowing students to challenge their validity or advance alternative understandings” and such instructors “insist that students accept as truth propositions that are in fact professionally contestable.” Given that professors are in a position of power over their students, this type of behavior is especially inappropriate. And, as far back as 1915, the AAUP advised that professors “should, in dealing with [controversial] subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions” on the issue. This 1915 advisory is still in effect. Indeed, any failure to do so may constitute an ethical breach. Professors should teach students about different sides of an issue and do so fairly, rather than pretending there is just one permitted viewpoint, as in a Marxist or authoritarian organization or system.

What Should Be Done?First, if students encounter a professor that they believe is using the classroom to engage in ideological or political activism, students should speak up. That may be less risky than students think. Remember, education should empower students to engage in critical thinking and constructive dialogue. If students encounter concerning situations, approach professors for respectful discussions. If needed, seek guidance from department chairs or administrators who value open inquiry. There usually are some.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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Often, students cannot rely on their institution’s hierarchy alone—indeed they may be part of the problem. Moreover, there is safety in numbers. Enlist parents and outside organizations to lobby college or university to ensure that it is promoting intellectual diversity, open inquiry, and free thought. (A very simple change is to ask that course evaluations include questions on whether students felt free to voice their opinions in class, whether the professor dealt fairly with students having divergent views, and whether different sides of controversial issues were presented or discussed.)

Today, there are numerous organizations to help students. Currently, the most prominent bipartisan protectors and promoters of free thought are the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and Speech First. The important thing to remember is that you are not alone. Aside from those organizations, it is certain that many others at their institution will be rooting for students, even if they feel that they can only do so privately.

Second, know that when confronted with transparency (sometimes supplemented with attorneys), bullies tend to back down.

Third, know that the trials students are facing now can make them stronger, and further, are nothing like those faced by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackie Robinson, James Meredith, and thousands of others who faced suppression for their beliefs or their identity. The worst fate awaiting students would be having to transfer from a school which does not value free thought to one that does. Students have choices. Make them wisely.

About the AuthorMichael Mills is an evolutionary psychologist at Loyola Marymount University (LMU). He earned his B.A. from UC Santa Cruz and his Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara. He has served as Chair, and as the Director of the Graduate Program, at the LMU Psychology Department. He serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals and on the executive board of the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (SOIBS).

Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, where he studies bureaucratic reform and edits the Journal of School Choice. He has served on the Fayetteville School Board (2015-20) and currently serves on the executive board of the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (SOIBS). With others, he has produced about 100 refereed publications and 17 scholarly books so boring his own mother refused to read them, including President Obama and Education Reform (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012), Educating Believers: Religion and School Choice (Routledge, 2021), and The Free Inquiry Papers (AEI, 2024). He can be reached at rmaranto@uark.edu.

Richard E. Redding is the Ronald D. Rotunda Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence and Associate Dean, and Professor of Psychology and Education at Chapman University. He has written extensively on the importance of viewpoint and sociopolitical diversity in teaching, research, and professional practice. Notable publications include Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology: Nature, Scope, and Solutions (Springer, 2023); Sociopolitical Values at the Deep Culture in Culturally-Competent Psychotherapy (Clinical Psychological Science, 2023); and, Sociopolitical Diversity in Psychology: The Case for Pluralism (American Psychologist, 2001). He is the founding President of the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (soibs.com).

Organizations* The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). In particular, see its College Free Speech Rankings: https://bit.ly/3T0kbyn * Campus Reform: campusreform.org * Heterodox Academy: heterodoxacademy.org * Academic Freedom Alliance: academicfreedom.org * Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (SOIBS): soibs.com

Additional Resources* Infographic: Critical Theory and Classic Liberalism: https://bit.ly/3uMwOVP * “Universities must choose between truth or social justice, not both” by Jonathan Haidt https://bit.ly/3Il7ucw * “The Two Fiduciary Duties of Professors” by Jonathan Haidt https://bit.ly/49FJCwq

References1. This section relies heavily on three works. For the best conceptual analyses of various branches of critical theory, see Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity. (Pitchstone Publishing). For a sound journalistic account about how critical theory spread across institutions, see Christopher F. Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books). Though Rufo has become a political activist, we can attest that his journalistic work is sound, as least as regards those areas with which we are familiar. Finally, the best single work about how critical theory and other moral panics spread, particularly in higher education, remains Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind (Penguin). Also see Kenny Xu’s School of Woke: How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated American Schools and Why We Must Reclaim Them. (Center Street) and Isaac Gottesman’s The Critical Turn in Education (Routledge) 2. Coddling of the American Mind; Eric Kaufmann, https://cspicenter.org/reports/academicfreedom/. Analyzing largescale surveys, political scientist Eric Kaufmann found over a third of conservative professors and doctoral students facing threats of discipline for their views. So have one in ten liberals, often censored by those farther left. Also see Richard E. Redding, “Psychologists’ Politics,” in Craig Frisby, Richard Redding, William O’Donohue, and Scott Lilienfeld, Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology: Nature, Scope, and Solutions (Springer), comprehensively reviewing all historical and current studies on the political views of professors and university administrators.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss464_Will_Gervais_2024_09_03.mp3Download MP3In his new book Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species, Will Gervais, PhD., a global leader in the psychological study of atheism, shows that the ubiquity of religious belief and the peculiarities of atheism are connected pieces in the puzzle of human nature. Does God exist? This straightforward question has spawned endless debate, ranging from apologists’ supposed proofs of God’s existence to New Atheist manifestos declaring belief in God a harmful delusion.

It’s undeniable that religion is a core tenet of human nature. It is also true that our overwhelmingly religious species is also as atheistic as it’s ever been. Yet, no scientific understanding of religion is complete without accounting for those who actively do not believe. In this refreshing and revelatory book, Gervais argues that religion is not an evolutionary puzzle so much as two evolutionary puzzles that can only be solved together. First is the Puzzle of Faith: the puzzle of how Homo sapiens – and Homo sapiens alone – came to be a religious species. Second is the Puzzle of Atheism: how disbelief in gods can exist within our uniquely religious species. The result is a radically cohesive theory of both faith and atheism, showing how we became a uniquely religious species, and why many are now abandoning their belief.

Through a firsthand account of breakthroughs in the scientific study of atheism, including key findings from cognitive science, cultural evolution, and evolutionary psychology, Disbelief forces a rethinking of the prevailing theories of religion and reminds both believers and atheists of the shared psychologies that set them on their distinct religious trajectories. In casual prose and with compelling examples, Gervais explains how we became religious, why we’re leaving faith behind, and how we can get along with others across the religious divides we’ve culturally evolved.

Will Gervais, PhD, is a cultural evolutionary psychologist and has been a global leader in the scientific study of atheism for over a decade. Dr. Gervais’s research has been featured in media such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Der Speigel, Psychology Today, Vox, and Scientific American. His interdisciplinary work, lying at the intersection of cultural evolution, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science, has garnered international scientific recognition. He was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science and is the recipient of the Margaret Gorman Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association and the SAGE Young Scholar Award from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology.

Gervais and Shermer discuss:

• What is religion?
• Theism, Atheism, Agnosticism, Deism, Pantheism, etc. defined
• How many atheists and agnostics and religious skeptics are there really?
• Atheism and morality, trust, politics, etc.
• Why are atheists so unpopular?
• Metaphysical atheism vs. epistemological atheism (or agnosticism)
• Popular nonanswers for religion and belief in God(s) (the Puzzle of Faith)
• Role(s) of religion in history and society today
• Is religion and belief in God(s) adaptive or a byproduct?
• What cognitive features of the brain are engaged in faith, religion, & belief in God?
• Patternicity, Agenticity, Sensed presence effect, essentialism, dualism, theory of mind, teleology
• Big Gods vs. animism, polytheism, supernaturalism
• Folk physics (pre-Newtonian) and biology (creationism)
• Why some religions are so much more successful than others
• Group selection vs. cultural selection
• Is religion good for society?
• Is religion good for personal health and happiness?
• When we colonize Mars will far future humans on other planets believe in God?
• Does religion need to be replaced with something?
• Enlightenment Humanism, Secular Humanism, and other alternatives.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss463_Ben_Goertzel_2024_09_01.mp3Download MP3Dr. Ben Goertzel is a cross-disciplinary scientist, entrepreneur and author. Born in Brazil to American parents, in 2020 after a long stretch living in Hong Kong he relocated his primary base of operations to a rural island near Seattle. He leads the SingularityNET Foundation, the OpenCog Foundation, and the AGI Society which runs the annual Artificial General Intelligence conference.

Dr. Goertzel also chairs the futurist nonprofit Humanity+, serves as Chief Scientist of AI firms Rejuve, Mindplex, Cogito, and Jam Galaxy, all parts of the SingularityNET ecosystem, and serves as keyboardist and vocalist in the Jam Galaxy Band, the first-ever band led by a humanoid robot.

As Chief Scientist of robotics firm Hanson Robotics, he led the software team behind the Sophia robot; as Chief AI Scientist of Awakening Health he leads the team crafting the mind behind Sophia’s little sister Grace.

Dr. Goertzel’s research work encompasses multiple areas, including artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds, gaming, parapsychology, theoretical physics and more. He has published 25+ scientific books, ~150 technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles, and given talks at a vast number of events of all sorts around the globe.

Before entering the software industry Dr. Goertzel obtained his PhD in mathematics from Temple University in 1989 and served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science and cognitive science, in the US, Australia and New Zealand. His new book is The Consciousness Explosion: A Mindful Human’s Guide to the Coming Technological and Experiential Singularity.

Shermer and Goertzel discuss:

• Natural Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence
• General Intelligence (g) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
• The alignment problem
• Consciousness and sentience
• Zombies and the Hard Problem of Consciousness
• Data, Sophia, and other robots
• Altered States of Intelligence
• Mind uploading and the self
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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss462_Michael_Shermer_2024_08_30.mp3Download MP3Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. It’s no different when it comes to UFO frenzy. There is a need to separate fact from fiction in UAP claims.

In this episode, Shermer delves into the growing interest in UAPs (formerly UFOs), especially in light of UFOlogist Lue Elizondo’s book Imminent. Elizondo claims the U.S. government has long been aware of extraterrestrial intelligence, backed by reports of unidentified craft surveilling military sites. The episode explores these bold assertions and the tension between believers and skeptics, including scientists like Avi Loeb and institutions like the Department of Defense, which have disputed such claims.

Listeners interested in extraterrestrial intelligence, UFOs, and government secrecy will find this discussion compelling. Shermer reflects on historical UFO figures like Bob Lazar and Travis Walton, questioning their credibility while exploring the widespread belief in imminent “disclosure” of alien contact. Through interviews with experts and analysis of various UAP phenomena, the episode challenges listeners to discern fact from fiction, offering an intriguing examination of what could be humanity’s most profound discovery.

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Over the past decade behavioral science, particularly psychology, has come under fire from critics for being fixated on progressive political ideology, most notably Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). The critics’ evidence is, unfortunately, quite strong. For example, a recent volume, Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology,1 recounts many incidents of scholarly censorship and personal attacks that a decade ago might have only been conceivable as satire.

We believe that many problems plaguing contemporary behavioral science, especially for issues touching upon DEI, can best be understood, at their root, as a failure to adhere to basic scientific principles. In this essay, we will address three fundamental scientific principles: (1) Prioritize Objective Data Over Lived Experience; (2) Measure Well; and (3) Distinguish Appropriately Between Correlation and Causation. We will show how DEI scholarship often violates those principles, and offer suggestions for getting behavioral science back on track. “Getting back to the basics” may not sound exciting but, as athletes, musicians, and other performers have long recognized, reinforcing the fundamentals is often the best way to eliminate bad habits in order to then move forward.

The Failure to Adhere to Basic Scientific PrinciplesPrinciple #1: Prioritize Objective Data Over Lived ExperienceA foundational assumption of science is that objective truth exists and that humans can discover it.2, 3, 4, 5 We do this most effectively by proposing testable ideas about the world, making systematic observations to test the ideas, and revising our ideas based on those observations. A crucial point is that this process of proposing and testing ideas is open to everyone. A fifth grader in Timbuktu, with the right training and equipment, should be able to take atmospheric observations that are as valuable as those of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist from MIT. If the fifth grader’s observations are discounted, this should only occur because their measurement methods were poor, not because of their nationality, gender, age, family name, or any other personal attribute.

A corollary of science being equally open to all is that an individual’s personal experience or “lived experience” carries no inherent weight in claims about objective reality. It is not that lived experience doesn’t have value; indeed, it has tremendous value in that it provides a window into individuals’ perceptions of reality. However, perception can be wildly inaccurate and does not necessarily equate to reality. If that Nobel Prizewinning scientist vehemently disputed global warming because his personal experience was that temperatures have not changed over time, yet he provided no atmospheric measurements or systematic tests of his claim, other scientists would rightly ignore his statements—at least as regards the question of climate change.

The limited utility of a person’s lived experience seems obvious in most scientific disciplines, such as in the study of rocks and wind patterns, but less so in psychology. After all, psychological science involves the study of people—and they think and have feelings about their lived experiences. However, what is the case in other scientific disciplines is also the case in psychological science: lived experience does not provide a foolproof guide to objective reality.

To take an example from the behavioral sciences, consider the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study.6 At-risk boys were mentored for five years, from the ages of 10 to 15. They participated in a host of programs, including tutoring, sports, and community groups, and were given medical and psychiatric care. Decades later, most of those who participated claimed the program had been helpful. Put differently, their lived experience was that the program had a positive impact on their life. However, these boys were not any better in important outcomes relative to a matched group of at-risk boys who were not provided mentoring or extra support. In fact, boys in the program ended up more likely to engage in serious street crimes and, on average, they died at a younger age. The critical point is that giving epistemic authority to lived experience would have resulted in making inaccurate conclusions. And the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study is not an isolated example. There are many programs that people feel are effective, but when tested systematically turn out to be ineffective, at best. These include programs like DARE,7 school-wide mental health interventions,8 and—of course—many diversity training programs.9

DEI over-reach in behavioral science is intimately related to a failure within the scientific community to adhere to basic principles of science and appreciate important findings from the behavioral science literature.

Indeed, when it comes to concerns related to DEI, the scientific tenet of prioritizing testable truth claims over lived experience has often fallen to the wayside. Members of specific identity groups are given privilege to speak about things that cannot be contested by those from other groups. In other words, in direct contradiction of the scientific method, some people are granted epistemic authority based solely on their lived experience.10

Consider gender dysphoria. In the past decade, there has been a drastic increase in the number of people, particularly children and adolescents, identifying as transgender. Those who express the desire to biologically transition often describe their lived experience as feeling “born in the wrong body,” and express confidence that transition will dramatically improve their lives. We argue while these feelings must be acknowledged, they should not be taken as objective truth; instead, such feelings should be weighed against objective data on life outcomes of others who have considered gender transition and/or transitioned. And those data, while limited, suggest that many individuals who identify as transgender during childhood, but who do not medically transition, eventually identify again with the gender associated with their birth sex.11, 12 Although these are small, imperfect studies, they underscore that medical transition is not always the best option.

Caution in automatically acceding to a client’s preference to transition is particularly important among minors. Few parents and health care professionals would affirm a severely underweight 13-year-old’s claim that, based on their lived experience, they are fat and will only be happy if they lose weight. Nevertheless, many psychologists and psychiatrists make a similar mistake when they affirm a transgender child’s desire to transition without carefully weighing the risks. In one study, 65 percent of people who had detransitioned reported that their clinician, who often was a psychologist, “did not evaluate whether their desire to transition was secondary to trauma or a mental health condition.”13 The concern, in other words, is that lived experience is being given too much weight. How patients feel is important, but their feelings should be only one factor among many, especially if they are minors. Mental health professionals should know this, and parents should be able to trust them to act accordingly.

Principle #2: Measure WellAnother basic principle of behavioral science is that anything being measured must be measured reliably and validly. Reliability refers to the consistency of measurement; validity refers to whether the instrument is truly measuring what it claims to measure. For example, a triple beam balance is reliable if it yields the same value when repeatedly measuring the same object. The balance is valid if it yields a value of exactly 1 kg when measuring the reference kilogram (i.e., the International Prototype of the Kilogram), a platinum-iridium cylinder housed in a French vault under standardized conditions.

Behavioral scientists’ understanding of any concept is constrained by the degree to which they can measure it consistently and accurately. Thus, to make a claim about a concept, whether about its prevalence in a population or its relation to another concept, scientists must first demonstrate both the reliability and the validity of the measure being used. For some measures of human behavior, such as time spent listening to podcasts or number of steps taken each day, achieving good reliability and validity is reasonably straightforward. Things are generally more challenging for the self-report measures that psychologists often use.

Nevertheless, good measurement can sometimes be achieved, and the study of personality provides a nice model. In psychology, there are several excellent measures of the Big Five personality factors (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness).14 Individuals’ responses are highly reliable: people who rate themselves as highly extraverted as young adults rate themselves similarly years later. Moreover, personality assessments are valid: individuals’ responses correlate with their actual day-to-day behaviors, as reported by themselves and as observed by others.15 In other words, people who rate themselves as high (versus low) in extroversion on psychological questionnaires, for example, really do spend more time socializing.

However, not all psychological measures turn out to have solid reliability and validity. These include the popular Myers Briggs Type Indicator personality test and projective tests such as the Rorschach. Unfortunately, in the quest to support DEI, some concepts that fail the requirements of good measurement are used widely and without reservation. The concept of microaggressions, for example, has gained enormous traction despite its having fundamental measurement issues.

“Microaggressions” were brought to psychologists’ attention by Derald Wing Sue and colleagues.16 Originally described as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color” (p. 271),17 the concept has since expanded in use to describe brief, verbal or nonverbal, indignities directed toward a different “other.”18, 19

In 2017, Scott Lilienfeld discussed how the failure to adhere to the principles of good measurement has rendered the concept of microaggression “wide open,” without any clear anchors to reality.20 The primary weakness for establishing validity, that is, for establishing evidence of truly measuring what scientists claim to be measuring, is that “microaggression” is defined in the eye of the beholder.21 Thus, any person at any point can say they have been “microaggressed” against, and no one can test, let alone refute, the claim because it is defined solely by the claimant’s subjective appraisal—their lived experience.

As Scott Lilienfeld explained, the end result is that essentially anything, including opposing behaviors (such as calling on a student in class or not calling on a student in class) can be labeled a microaggression. A question such as, “Do you feel like you belong here?” could be perceived as a microaggression by one person but not by someone else; in fact, even the same person can perceive the same comment differently depending on their mood or on who asks the question (which would indicate poor reliability). Our criticism of microaggressions, then, spans concerns related to both weak measurement and an undue reliance on lived experience.

Another of psychology’s most famous recent topics is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which supposedly reveals implicit, or subconscious, bias. The IAT measures an individual’s reaction times when asked to classify pictures or text spatially. A video22 may be the best way to appreciate what is happening in the IAT, but the basic idea is that if a person more quickly pairs pictures of a Black person than those of a White person with a negative word (for example, “lazy” or “stupid”) then they have demonstrated their unconscious bias against Black people. The IAT was introduced by Anthony Greenwald and colleagues in the 1990s.23 They announced that their newly developed instrument, the race IAT, measures unconscious racial prejudice or bias and that 90 to 95 percent of Americans, including many racial minorities, demonstrated such bias. Since then, these scholars and their collaborators (plus others such as DEI administrators) have enjoyed tremendous success advancing the claim that the race IAT reveals pervasive unconscious bias that contributes to society-wide discrimination.

Despite its immense influence, the IAT is a flawed measure. Regarding reliability, the correlation between a person’s response when taking the test at two different times hovers around 0.5.24 This is well below conventionally acceptable levels in psychology, and far below the test-retest reliabilities for accepted personality and cognitive ability measures, which can reach around .8, even when a person takes the tests decades later.25, 26

The best path forward is to get back to the basics: understand the serious limitations of lived experience, focus on quality measurement, and be mindful of the distinction between correlation and causation.

As for the IAT’s validity, nobody has convincingly shown that patterns of reaction times actually reflect “unconscious bias” (or “implicit prejudice”) as opposed to cultural stereotypes.27 Moreover, in systematic syntheses of published studies, the association between scores on the race IAT and observations or measurements of real-world biased behavior is inconsistent and weak.28, 29 In other words, scores on the IAT do not meaningfully correlate with other ways of measuring racial bias or real life manifestations of it.

Principle #3: Distinguish Appropriately Between Correlation and Causation“Correlation does not equal causation” is another basic principle of behavioral science (indeed, all science). Although human brains seem built to readily notice and even anticipate causal connections, a valid claim that “X” has a causal effect on “Y” needs to meet three criteria, and a correlation between X and Y is only the first. The second criterion is that X precedes Y in time. The third and final criterion is the link between X and Y is not actually due to some other variable that influences both X and Y (“confounders”). To test this final point, researchers typically need to show that when X is manipulated in an experiment, Y also changes.

Imagine, for instance, that a researcher asks students about their caffeine intake and sleep schedule, and upon analyzing the data finds that students’ caffeine consumption is negatively correlated with how much they sleep—those who report consuming more caffeine tend to report sleeping less. This is what many psychologists call correlational research (or associational or observational research). These correlational data could mean that caffeine consumption reduces sleep time, but the data could also mean that a lack of sleep causes an increase in caffeine consumption, or that working long hours causes both a decrease in sleep and an increase in caffeine. To make the case that caffeine causes poor sleep, the researcher must impose, by random assignment, different amounts of caffeine on students to determine how sleep is affected by varying doses. That is, the researcher would conduct a true experiment.

Distinguishing between correlation and causation is easier said in the abstract than practiced in reality, even for psychological scientists who are specifically trained to make the distinction.30 Part of the difficulty is that in behavioral science, many variables that are generally thought of as causal cannot be manipulated for ethical or practical reasons. For example, researchers cannot impose neglect (or abuse, corporal punishment, parental divorce, etc.) on some children and not others to study how children are affected by the experience. Still, absent experiments, psychologists bear the responsibility of providing converging, independent lines of evidence that indicate causality before they draw a causal conclusion. Indeed, scientists did this when it came to claiming that smoking causes cancer: they amassed evidence from national datasets with controls, discordant twin designs, correlational studies of exposure to second-hand smoke, non-human experiments, and so on—everything but experiments on humans—before coming to a consensus view that smoking causes cancer in humans. Our point is that investigating causal claims without true experiments is possible, but extremely difficult and time consuming.

That said, the conflation of correlation with causation seems especially prevalent when it comes to DEI issues. In the context of microaggressions, for example, a Google search quickly reveals many scholars claiming that microaggressions cause psychological harm. Lilienfeld has been a rare voice suggesting that it is dangerous to claim that microaggressions cause mental health issues when there are no experimental data to support such a claim. Moreover, there is a confounding variable that predicts both (1) perceiving oneself as having been “microaggressed” against and (2) struggling with one’s mental health—namely, the well-documented personality trait of neuroticism. In other words, individuals who are prone to experience negative emotions (those who are high in neuroticism) often perceive that more people try to inflict harm on them than actually do, and these same individuals also struggle with mental health.

Assuming we were able to develop a workable definition of “microaggressions,” what would a true experiment look like? An experiment would require that participants be exposed to microaggressions (or not), and then be measured or observed for indications of psychological harm. There are valid ethical concerns for such a study, but we believe it can be done. There is a lengthy precedent in psychological research where temporary discomfort can be inflicted with appropriate safeguards. For instance, a procedure called the “trier social stress test” (TSST) is widely used, where participants make a speech with little preparation time in front of judges who purposefully avoid any non-verbal reaction. This is followed by a mental arithmetic task.31 If the TSST is acceptable for use in research, then it should also be acceptable to expose study participants to subtle slights.

This fallacy of equating correlation with causation also arises in the context of gender transitioning and suicide. To make the point that not being able to transition is deeply damaging, transgender individuals, and sometimes their professional supporters, may ask parents something such as, “would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” One logical flaw here is in assuming that because gender distress is associated with suicidal ideation, then the gender distress must be causing the suicidal ideation. However, other psychological concerns, such as depression, anxiety, trauma, eating disorders, ADHD, and autism, could be causing both the gender distress and the suicidal ideation—another case of confounding variables. Indeed, these disorders occur more frequently in individuals who identify as transgender. Thus, it is quite possible that someone may suffer from depression, and this simultaneously raises their likelihood of identifying as transgender and of expressing suicidal ideation.

It is not possible (nor would it be ethical if possible) to impose gender identity concerns on some children and not others to study the effect of gender dysphoria on suicidality. However, at this point, the correlational research that does exist has not offered compelling evidence that gender dysphoria causes increased suicidality. Studies have rarely attempted to rule out third variables, such as other mental health diagnoses. The few studies that have tried to control for other variables have yielded mixed results.32, 33 Until researchers have consistently isolated gender dysphoria as playing an independent role in suicidality, they should not claim that gender dysphoria increases suicide risk.

Over three decades ago, the psychologist David Lykken wrote, “Psychology isn’t doing very well as a scientific discipline and something seems to be wrong somewhere” (p. 3).34 Sadly, psychology continues to falter; in fact, we think it has gotten worse. The emotional and moral pull of DEI concerns are understandable but they may have short-circuited critical thinking about the limitations of lived experience, the requirement of using only reliable and valid measurement instruments, and the need to meet strict criteria before claiming that one variable has a causal influence on another variable.

DEI Concepts Contradict Known Findings about Human CognitionThe empirical bases for some DEI concepts contradict social scientific principles. Additionally, certain DEI ideas run counter to important findings about human nature that scientists have established by following the required scientific principles. We discuss three examples below.

Out-Group AntipathyHumans are tribal by nature. We have a long history of living in stable groups and competing against other groups. Thus, it’s no surprise that one of social psychology’s most robust findings is that in-group preferences are powerful and easy to evoke. For example, in studies where psychologists create in-groups and out-groups using arbitrary criteria such as shirt color, adults and children alike have a large preference for their group members.35, 36 Even infants prefer those who are similar to themselves37 and respond preferentially to those who punish dissimilar others.38

Constructive disagreement about ideas should be encouraged rather than leveraged as an excuse to silence those who may see the world differently.

DEI, although generally well-intentioned, often overlooks this tribal aspect of our psychology. In particular, in the quest to confront the historical mistreatment of certain identity groups, it often instigates zero-sum thinking (i.e., that one group owes a debt to another; that one group cannot gain unless another loses). This type of thinking will exacerbate, rather than mitigate, animosity. A more fruitful approach would emphasize individual characteristics over group identity, and the common benefits that can arise when all individuals are treated fairly.

ExpectanciesWhen people expect to feel a certain way, they are more likely to experience that feeling.39, 40 Thus, when someone, especially an impressionable teenager or young adult, is told that they are a victim, the statement (even if true) is not merely a neutral descriptor. It can also set up the expectation of victimhood with the downstream consequence of making one feel themselves to be even more of a victim. DEI microaggression workshops may do exactly this—they prime individuals to perceive hostility and negative intent in ambiguous words and actions.41 The same logic applies to more pronounced forms of bigotry. For instance, when Robin DiAngelo describes “uniquely anti-black sentiment integral to white identity” (p. 95),42 the suggestion that White people are all anti-Black might have the effect of exacerbating both actual and perceived racism. Of course, we need to deal honestly with any and all racism when it does exist, but it is also important to understand potential costs of exaggerating such claims. Expectancy effects might interact with the “virtuous victim effect,” wherein individuals perceive victims as being more moral than non-victims.43, 44 Thus, there can be a social value gained simply in presenting oneself as a victim.

Cognitive BiasesCognitive biases are one of the most important and well-replicated discoveries of the behavioral sciences. It is therefore troubling that, in the discussion of DEI topics, psychologists often fall victim to those very biases.

A striking example is the American Psychological Association’s (APA) statement shortly after the death of George Floyd, which provides a textbook illustration of the availability bias, the tendency to overvalue evidence that easily comes to mind. The APA, the largest psychological organization in the world, asserted after Floyd’s death that “The deaths of innocent black people targeted specifically because of their race—often by police officers—are both deeply shocking and shockingly routine.”45 How “shockingly routine” are they? According to the Washington Post database of police killings, in 2020 there were 248 Black people killed by police. By comparison, over 6,500 Black people were killed in traffic fatalities that year—a 26-fold difference.46 Also, some portion of those 248 victims were not innocent—given that 216 were armed, some killings would probably have been an appropriate use of force by the police to defend themselves or others. Some portion was also not killed specifically because of their race. So why would the APA describe a relatively rare event as “shockingly routine”? This statement came in the aftermath of the widely publicized police killings of Floyd and those of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. In other words, these rare events were seen as common likely because widespread media coverage made them readily available in our minds.

Unfortunately, the APA also recently fell prey to another well-known bias, the base rate fallacy, where relevant population sizes are ignored. In this case, the APA described new research that found “The typical woman was considered to be much more similar to a typical White woman than a typical Black woman.”47 Although not stated explicitly, the implication seems to be that, absent racism, the typical woman would be roughly midway between typical White woman and typical Black woman. That is an illogical conclusion given base rates. In the U.S., White people outnumber Black people by roughly 5 to 1; hence the typical woman should be perceived as more similar to a typical White woman than to a typical Black woman.

What Happened? Some Possible CausesAt this stage, we expect that many readers may be wondering how it can be that social scientists regularly violate basic scientific principles—principles that are so fundamental that these same social scientists routinely teach them in introductory courses. One possible reason is myside bias, wherein individuals process information in a way that favors their own “team.” For example, in the case of the race Implicit Association Test, proponents of the IAT might more heavily scrutinize the methodology of studies that yield negative results compared to those that have yielded their desired results. Similarly, although lived experience is a limited kind of evidence, it certainly is a source of evidence, and thus scholars may elevate its importance and overlook its limitations when doing so bolsters their personal views.

A related challenge facing behavioral scientists is that cognitive biases are universal and ubiquitous—everyone, including professional scientists, is susceptible.48 In fact, one might say that the scientific method, including the three principles we emphasize here, is an algorithm (i.e., a set of rules and processes) designed to overcome our eternally pervasive cognitive biases.

A third challenge confronting behavioral scientists is the current state of the broader scientific community. Scientific inquiry works best when practiced in a community adhering to a suite of norms, including organized skepticism, that incentivize individuals to call out each other’s poor practices.49, 50 In other words, in a healthy scientific community, if a claim becomes widely adopted without sufficient evidence, or if a basic principle is neglected, a maverick scientist would be rewarded for sounding the alarm by gaining respect and opportunities. Unfortunately, the scientific community does not act this way with respect to DEI issues, perhaps because the issues touch widely held personal values (e.g., about equality between different groups of people). If different scientists held different values, there would probably be more healthy skepticism of DEI topics. However, there is little ideological diversity within the academy. In areas such as psychology, for example, liberal-leaning scholars outnumber conservative-leaning scholars by at least 8 to 1, and in some disciplines the ratio is 20 to 1 or even more.51, 52 A related concern is that these values are more than just personal views. They often seem to function as sacred values, non-negotiable principles that cannot be compromised and only questioned at risk to one’s status within the community.

From this perspective,53 it is easy to see how those who question DEI may well face moral outrage, even if (or maybe especially if) their criticisms are well-founded. The fact that this outrage sometimes translates into public cancellations is extremely disheartening. Yet there are likely even more de facto cancellations than it seems. Someone can be cancelled directly or indirectly. Indirect cancellations can take the form of contract nonrenewal, pressure to resign, or having one’s employer dig for another offense to use as the stated grounds of forcing someone out of their job. This latter strategy is a very subtle, yet no less insidious, method of cancellation. As an analogy, it is like a police officer following someone with an out-of-state license plate and then pulling the car over when they fail to use a turn signal. An offense was committed, but the only reason the offense was observed in the first place is because the officer was looking for a reason to make the stop and therefore artificially enhanced the time window in which the driver was being scrutinized. The stated reason for the stop is failure to signal; the real reason is the driver is from out of town. Whether direct or indirect, the key to a cancellation is that holding the same job becomes untenable after failing to toe the party line on DEI topics.

It is against this backdrop that DEI scholarship is conducted. Academics fear punishment (often subtle) for challenging DEI research. Ideas that cannot be freely challenged are unfalsifiable. Those ideas will likely gain popularity because the marketplace of ideas becomes the monopoly of a single idea. An illusory consensus can emerge about a complex area for which reasonable, informed, and qualified individuals have highly differing views. An echo chamber created by forced consensus is the breeding ground for bad science.

How to Get Behavioral Science Back on TrackWe are not the first ones to express concern about the quality of science in our discipline.54, 55 However, to our knowledge, we are the first to discuss how DEI over-reach goes hand-in-hand with the failure to engage in good science. Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed. We offer a few suggestions for improvement.

First, disagreement should be normalized. Advisors should model disagreement by presenting an idea and explicitly asking their lab members to talk about its weaknesses. We need to develop a culture where challenging others’ ideas is viewed as an integral (and even enjoyable) part of the scientific process, and not an ad hominem attack.

Second, truth seeking must be re-established as the fundamental goal of behavioral science. Unfortunately, many academics in behavioral science seem now to be more interested in advocacy than science. Of course, as a general principle, faculty and students should not be restricted from engaging in advocacy. However, this advocacy should not mingle with their academic work; it must occur on their own time. The tension between advocacy and truth seeking is that advocates, by definition, have an a priori position and are tasked with convincing others to accept and then act upon that belief. Truth seekers must be open to changing their opinion whenever new evidence or better analyses demand it.

To that end, we need to resurrect guardrails that hold students accountable for demonstrating mastery of important scientific concepts, including those described above, before receiving a PhD. Enforcing high standards may sound obvious, but actually failing students who do not meet those standards is an exclusionary practice that might be met with resistance.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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Another intriguing solution is to conduct “adversarial collaborations,” wherein scholars who disagree work together on a joint project.56 Adversarial collaborators explicitly spell out their competing hypotheses and together develop a method for answering a particular question, including the measures and planned analyses. Stephen Ceci, Shulamit Kahn, and Wendy Williams,57 for example, engaged in an adversarial collaboration that synthesized evidence regarding gender bias in six areas of academic science, including hiring, grant funding, and teacher ratings. They found evidence for gender bias in some areas but not others, a finding that should prove valuable in decisions about where to allocate resources.

In conclusion, we suggest that DEI over-reach in behavioral science is intimately related to a failure within the scientific community to adhere to basic principles of science and appreciate important findings from the behavioral science literature. The best path forward is to get back to the basics: understand the serious limitations of lived experience, focus on quality measurement, and be mindful of the distinction between correlation and causation. We need to remember that the goal of science is to discover truth. This requires putting ideology and advocacy aside while in the lab or classroom. Constructive disagreement about ideas should be encouraged rather than leveraged as an excuse to silence those who may see the world differently. The scientific method requires us to stay humble and accept that we just might be wrong. That principle applies to all scientists, including the three authors of this article. To that end, readers who disagree with any of our points should let us know! Maybe we can sort out our differences—and find common ground— through an adversarial collaboration.

The views presented in this article are solely those of the authors. They do not represent the views of any author’s employer or affiliation.

About the AuthorApril Bleske-Rechek is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Her teaching and research efforts focus on scientific reasoning and individual and group differences in cognitive abilities, personality traits, and relationship attitudes.

Michael H. Bernstein is an experimental psychologist and an Assistant Professor at Brown University. His research focuses on the overlap between cognitive science and medicine. He is co-editor of The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick.

Robert O. Deaner is a Professor of Psychology at Grand Valley State University. He teaches courses on research methods, sex differences, and evolutionary psychology. His research addresses sex differences in competitiveness.

References1. Frisby, C.L., Redding, R.E., O’Donohue, W.T., & Lilienfeld, S.O. (2023). Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology. Springer Nature. 2. https://bit.ly/4aJLRyO 3. Merton, R.K. (1993). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago Press. 4. Rauch, J. (2013). Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. University of Chicago Press. 5. Rauch, J. (2021). The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Brookings Institution Press. 6. https://bit.ly/3xATvNI 7. https://bit.ly/4cTS4Kq 8. https://bit.ly/4cXcRNe 9. https://bit.ly/3Q15SZU 10. https://bit.ly/3xCzeY8 11. https://bit.ly/43W5bGW 12. https://bit.ly/3TUw0GR 13. https://bit.ly/4401VKr 14. https://bit.ly/3Ufx4q1 15. Funder, D. C. (2019). The Personality Puzzle (8th ed.). W.W. Norton & Company. 16. https://bit.ly/3UhIOsn 17. Ibid. 18. https://bit.ly/3W0liBc 19. https://bit.ly/3VShodH 20. Ibid. 21. https://bit.ly/3UhIOsn 22. https://bit.ly/49vFle5 23. https://bit.ly/3JmZxUw 24. https://bit.ly/3Jifb3O 25. https://bit.ly/3Q37UZc 26. https://bit.ly/3Q0Oe8h 27. https://bit.ly/49zSTFk 28. https://bit.ly/3xrWU15 29. https://bit.ly/49QWBux 30. Bleske-Rechek, A., Gunseor, M.M., & Maly, J.R. (2018). Does the Language Fit the Evidence? Unwarranted Causal Language in Psychological Scientists’ Scholarly Work. The Behavior Therapist, 41(8), 341–352. 31. https://bit.ly/49DQZmW 32. https://bit.ly/49zKdif 33. https://bit.ly/49JeECQ 34. Lykken, D.T. (1991). What’s Wrong With Psychology Anyway? In D. Cicchetti & W.M. Grove (Eds.), Thinking Clearly About Psychology: Essays in Honor of Paul E. Meehl. University of Minnesota Press. 35. Tajfel, H. (2020). Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination. Scientific American, 223, 96–102. 36. https://bit.ly/3xC9on5 37. https://bit.ly/4aO5dTe 38. https://bit.ly/4aSLamR 39. https://bit.ly/3Q2m9gO 40. Bernstein, M., Blease, C., Locher, C., & Brown, W. (2024). The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick. Mayo Clinic Press. 41. https://bit.ly/4aQmv2e 42. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Beacon Press. 43. https://bit.ly/4awG3sR 44. https://bit.ly/4cSOEYn 45. https://bit.ly/43XhN0k 46. https://bit.ly/3UfKH8L 47. https://bit.ly/43ZM1zH 48. Stanovich, K. E. (2021). The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking. The MIT Press. 49. https://bit.ly/4aJLRyO 50. Ritchie, S. (2020). Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. Metropolitan Books. 51. https://bit.ly/43XRkzI 52. https://bit.ly/3TXsw6n 53. https://bit.ly/3TXsxar 54. Lykken, D.T. (1991). What’s Wrong With Psychology Anyway? In D. Cicchetti & W.M. Grove (Eds.), Thinking Clearly About Psychology: Essays in Honor of Paul E. Meehl. University of Minnesota Press. 55. https://bit.ly/4aybGSy 56. Clark, C.J., & Tetlock, P.E. (2023). Adversarial Collaboration: The Next Science Reform. In C.L. Frisby, R.E. Redding, W. T. Donohue, & S.O. Lilienfeld (Eds.), Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology (pp. 905–927). Springer. 57. https://bit.ly/3vQQ5FW

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss461_Helen_Pluckrose_2024_08_27.mp3Download MP3The stated goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are often reasonable, if not noble—to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment for all. Yet, as more and more people are discovering, DEI as commonly practiced isn’t a natural extension of past civil rights movements or an ethical framework for opposing discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, etc. Rather, it is inextricably connected with an illiberal and authoritarian ideology—Critical Social Justice—that demands adherence to its tenets and punishes any dissent from its dogma.

Even the mildest questions about Critical Social Justice claims—that all white people are racists, that all underrepresented minorities are oppressed, that sex and gender differences have no biological basis, that censorship is a necessary good—are regularly met by DEI trainers and HR officers with pat commands: “Educate yourself,” “Do the work,” “Listen and learn.” At work, raises, promotions, and future employment often depend on our nodding approval of such claims. At school, grades, nominations, and awards are often contingent upon our active agreement with these beliefs. In our daily lives, Critical Social Justice ideology poses a genuine threat not only to our fundamental rights but also to the future of our democratic systems, but if we suggest this, we risk being canceled or shunned by community members. When facing a choice between silent submission and risky if ethical opposition, what is a person to do?

While a growing number of groups concerned about the nature of Critical Social Justice have begun to attack it from the top down through legal, financial, and political means, The Counterweight Handbook takes a decidedly different and novel approach. It works from the bottom up and is written to empower individuals who wish to combat Critical Social Justice in their personal and professional lives. Based on the author’s years of experience studying, exposing, and fighting Critical Social Justice ideology and advising individuals and organizations struggling with it, The Counterweight Handbook is designed to help people address Critical Social Justice problems in the most ethical and effective way possible. It not only offers principled responses to the main claims of Critical Social Justice but also teaches individuals what to do when they are asked to affirm beliefs they do not hold, undergo training in an ideology they cannot support, or submit to antiscientific testing and retraining of their “unconscious” minds. In short, it is for all of us who believe in freedom of speech and conscience, who wish to push back against the hostile work and educational environments Critical Social Justice has created, and who want to stand up for our individual liberties and universal rights.

Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and was one of the founders of Counterweight. A participant in the Grievance Studies Affair probe that highlighted problems in Critical Social Justice scholarship, she is the coauthor of Cynical Theories and Social (In)justice. She lives in England and can be found on X @HPluckrose

Shermer and Pluckrose discuss:

• the problem to be solved?
• origin of the problem: post-modernism and Critical Social Justice ideology
• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
• what it means to “Educate yourself,” “Do the work,” “Listen and learn.”
• top-down (Chris Rufo, Ron DeSantis) vs. bottom-up counter measures
• gender pronoun declarations
• race reckoning
• White supremacy accusations and White guilt
• antiracism
• gender ideology
• Blackness
• Critical Race Theory (CRT)
• decolonize
• discourse
• dismantle
• fragility
• intersectionality
• normativity
• positionality
• privilege
• problematic
• woke.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss460_Joshua_Blu_Buhs_2024_08_25.mp3Download MP3Flying saucers. Bigfoot. Frogs raining from the sky. Such phenomena fascinated Charles Fort, the maverick writer who scanned newspapers, journals, and magazines for reports of bizarre occurrences: dogs that talked, vampires, strange visions in the sky, and paranormal activity. His books of anomalies advanced a philosophy that saw science as a small part of a larger system in which truth and falsehood continually transformed into one another. His work found a ragged following of skeptics who questioned not only science but the press, medicine, and politics. Though their worldviews varied, they shared compelling questions about genius, reality, and authority. At the center of this community was adman, writer, and enfant terrible Tiffany Thayer, who founded the Fortean Society and ran it for almost three decades, collecting and reporting on every manner of oddity and conspiracy.

In Think to New Worlds, Joshua Blu Buhs argues that the Fortean effect on modern culture is deeper than you think. Fort’s descendants provided tools to expand the imagination, explore the social order, and demonstrate how power is exercised. Science fiction writers put these ideas to work as they sought to uncover the hidden structures undergirding reality. Avant-garde modernists—including the authors William Gaddis, Henry Miller, and Ezra Pound, as well as Surrealist visual artists—were inspired by Fort’s writing about metaphysical and historical forces. And in the years following World War II, flying saucer enthusiasts convinced of alien life raised questions about who controlled the universe.

Buhs’s meticulous and entertaining book takes a respectful look at a cast of oddballs and eccentrics, plucking them from history’s margins and spotlighting their mark on American modernism. Think to New Worlds is a timely consideration of a group united not only by conspiracies and mistrust of science but by their place in an ever-expanding universe rich with unexplained occurrences and visionary possibilities.

Joshua Blu Buhs is a scholar of the overlap of politics, biology, and ecology in twentieth-century America and has written articles that have appeared in Isis, Environmental History, The World of Genetics, and Journal of the History of Biology. His Ph.D. is in the history of science from Penn State. He is the author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend and The Fire Ant Wars: Nature, Science, and Public Policy in Twentieth-Century America, both published by the University of Chicago Press. His new book is Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers.

Shermer and Blu Buhs discuss:

• How he got into researching and writing about weird things
• The Fire Ant Wars and how Americans thought about nature in the second half of the 20th century (Rachel Carson, E. O. Wilson)
• Bigfoot
• Charles Fort (1874–1932)
• Fortean followers
• Tiffany Thayer
• Fortean Society
• Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, and other magazines
• The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort
• Anomalies and anomaly hunting
• frogs and fishes falling from the sky, ball lightning, UFOs, cryptids (like Bigfoot), talking dogs and vampires, poltergeist events, spontaneous human combustion, levitation, unexplained disappearances, out-of-place artifacts, and highly unusual coincidences
• science fiction
• aesthetic modernism
• UFOs and UFOlogy
• Ancient aliens and von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods
• The Day the Earth Stood Still as a Christ allegory
• Dianetics, Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard
• Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods
• Skeptics and Humanists
• Conspiracies and conspiracy theories
• “modernity released the marvelous, expanded the possible ways in which humanity came into the presence of the awesome. The death of God and the rise of science as the preeminent process for creating truth opened new provinces, provided new materials for imagining, inventing, experiencing enchantment.”
• Martin Gardner published an article in the Antioch Review entitled “The Hermit Scientist,” about what we would today call pseudoscientists, and in 1952 he expanded it into a book titled In the Name of Science:
  • “(1) He considers himself a genius. (2) He regards his colleagues, without exception, as ignorant blockheads. (3) He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against. (4) He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories. (5) He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined.”
  • “If the present trend continues, we can expect a wide variety of these men, with theories yet unimaginable, to put in their appearance in the years immediately ahead. They will write impressive books, give inspiring lectures, organize exciting cults. They may achieve a following of one—or one million. In any case, it will be well for ourselves and for society if we are on our guard against them.”
• Of Fort, Buhs reveals, “His was a radical skepticism that refused to accept anything as absolutely true or absolutely false.”
• Buhs: “Fort and Forteans played their part in the creation of this world. They eroded the distinctions between truth and falsity, undermined the authority of experts and expertise. They launched a thousand conspiracies into the national consciousness.”

A Residue of AnomaliesReview of Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers by Joshua Blu Buhs, University of Chicago Press, pub date June 24, 2024

by Michael Shermer

The “residue problem” in science means that no matter how all-encompassing a theory is there will always be a residue of anomalies for which it cannot account. The most famous case in the history of science is that Newton’s gravitational theory could not account for the precession of the planet Mercury’s orbit, subsequently explained by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Many paradigm shifts happen, in fact, when enough anomalies build up to justify a new explanatory model.

Unfortunately, residues of unexplained anomalies open the door to autodidacts to jump in with their alternative theories to mainstream science. The widely-viewed 2023 Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, for example, follows alternative archaeologist Graham Hancock around the world as he exposes anomalies he asserts are unexplained by science and best accounted for by the lost civilization of Atlantis. Every episode of the popular History Channel series Ancient Aliens features alleged anomalies that scientists purportedly cannot explain without invoking extraterrestrials. And what were those UAP videos screened in the halls of Congress last year but Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena?

This tradition of collecting anomalies and cataloging them into paranormal, supernatural, extraterrestrial, mystical, and magical worlds just beyond the horizons of science can be traced back a century to Charles Fort (1874–1932) and his Fortean followers, which in turn shaped science fiction, avant-garde modernism, Surrealist art, and UFOlogy throughout the 20th century, skillfully recounted in a compelling narrative by cultural historian and author Joshua Blu Buhs, whose previous book, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, set the tone for this deeper dive into who and what gave rise to the original New Age.

Fort’s research methodology—more fully developed and proselytized by the writer and adman Tiffany Thayer, who went on to found the Fortean Society—is what today is called “anomaly hunting.” Intrepid would-be researchers rummage through scientific books, journal articles, magazine features, and newspaper stories for anything that doesn’t quite seem to fit with mainstream science. Fort’s original anomaly hunting expeditions netted him a plethora of weird things for which scientists had no explanation: frogs and fishes falling from the sky, ball lightning, UFOs, cryptids (like Bigfoot), talking dogs and vampires, poltergeist events, spontaneous human combustion, levitation, unexplained disappearances, out-of-place artifacts, and highly unusual coincidences.

Fort and his followers—Forteans, as they called themselves—“had their largest effect on the practices of science fiction, aesthetic modernism, and UFOlogy, pursuits seemingly peripheral to the mainstream,” Buhs explains in embedding his subject in time and place, and contrasting the movement he traces with that of the world of early 20th-century science. Buhs’ thesis—well supported and cogently argued—is that the belief in “modernity” as a coldly secular and mechanically scientific worldview devoid of wonder is wrong. On the contrary, “modernity released the marvelous, expanded the possible ways in which humanity came into the presence of the awesome. The death of God and the rise of science as the preeminent process for creating truth opened new provinces, provided new materials for imagining, inventing, experiencing enchantment.” The anomalies compiled by Fort and Forteans served as “inspiration for those who tried to imagine the future,” one that they could create “rather than having it thrust upon the world.”

Not everyone was so influenced by Fort and Foreanism. In 1950, the science writer Martin Gardner published an article in the Antioch Review entitled “The Hermit Scientist,” about what we would today call pseudoscientists, and in 1952 he expanded it into a book titled In the Name of Science with the descriptive subtitle “An entertaining survey of the high priests and cultists of science, past and present” (later republished as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science and now considered a classic in modern skepticism). Said cultists were none other than Forteans and their ideological offspring, about whom Gardner upbraided as cranks, which he characterized thusly: “(1) He considers himself a genius. (2) He regards his colleagues, without exception, as ignorant blockheads. (3) He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against. (4) He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories. (5) He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined.”

This mid-century encounter established a tension between believers (represented by Fort and Forteans of all stripes) and skeptics (represented by Gardner and others worried not only about Fortean claims but additional paranormal and occult beliefs). “If the present trend continues,” Gardner concluded, “we can expect a wide variety of these men, with theories yet unimaginable, to put in their appearance in the years immediately ahead. They will write impressive books, give inspiring lectures, organize exciting cults. They may achieve a following of one—or one million. In any case, it will be well for ourselves and for society if we are on our guard against them.”

Nevertheless, as Buhs notes, Garnder was a “mysterian”—those who believe there are some mysteries that will never be explained by science, such as consciousness, free will, and God—unwilling to completely dismiss all Fortean claims outright. And this opened the door to a different form of skepticism. Of Fort, Buhs reveals, “His was a radical skepticism that refused to accept anything as absolutely true or absolutely false.”

The problem with such enchanted thinking in which there is no clear boundary between science and pseudoscience, between the natural and the supernatural, between truth and falsehood, is today’s collapse in confidence in our institutions, from science and medicine to politics and the media. “Fort and Forteans played their part in the creation of this world,” Buhs concludes his cultural history. “They eroded the distinctions between truth and falsity, undermined the authority of experts and expertise. They launched a thousand conspiracies into the national consciousness.” Fort’s playful anomaly hunting “had been replaced by Thayer’s acerbic nihilism, which became omnipresent and decoupled from any need to compile evidence or craft arguments.” As a result, a century after Fort’s swerve away from the scientism of the modern world, we have theories that consist of only two words, “Fake News!”, one word, “Rigged!” and even one letter, “Q”.

In the end, science needs outsiders and mavericks who poke and prod and push accepted theories until they either collapse or are reinforced even stronger. But it also needs standards of evidence and norms of objectivity, truth telling, accountability, and professionalism. Unfortunately, outsiders like Forteans and their modern descendants tend to fall far short of these standards and norms.

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Do we live in a patriarchy? Does toxic masculinity permeate our society? Are they the reasons why women are paid less than men, and fewer women are working in STEM? There is a long-documented history of these differences, and they go deeper than you might think. Let’s consider some causal explanations.

The Gender Pay GapOne statistic offered as evidence of male hegemony (i.e., the patriarchy) is the ubiquitous gender pay gap that exists between men and women. For example, self-described feminist economists1 Xuan Pham, Laura Fitzpatrick, and Richard Wagner suggest:

…the two overarching institutions that enable the persistence of the GPG [gender pay gap] in the USA are capitalism and patriarchy. Capitalism is a production system is [sic] driven by the profit motive, meaning firms seek to cost minimize. If employers can pay whole segments of workers lower wages, it is easier to boost profit margins and preserve capitalist production. The incentive to do this is quite powerful and a society that relegates women to a lesser position through non-labor market forces enhances the potential to increase exploitation of women through differential wages relative to men… Capitalism alone cannot create the GPG, however. The other crucial institution, patriarchy—allowing for gender-based disparate treatment—has deep roots in U.S. society. At the country’s founding, women were no more than the property of men.2

The ratio of annual earnings between women and men has gone from a low of 59 cents on the dollar in 1963 to 84 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2024.3 Pham et al. claim the patriarchy is responsible for the gender pay gap—that is, wholesale discrimination against women. Most leading economists, regardless of their gender, disagree. Cornell University economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn point out4 most of the reduction in the pay gap came in the 1980s and early 1990s during a “sharp increase in female participation rates” in the work force—increasing from 32 percent in 1947 to 57 percent in 2014 while the male participation rate fell from 87 to 69 percent over the same period.

Countering the oppressive patriarchy argument, an extraordinary and remarkable natural experiment that demonstrates the lack of discrimination in the differences in pay between men and women was conducted by researchers at Stanford University in 2018 using data from over one million Uber drivers. Uber pays their drivers according to a rigid “non-negotiated formula” (i.e., invariant among drivers), and they do not offer any employee benefits. The drivers also determine when and where they work. Each driver earns a specific base fare in addition to a “per-minute and per-distance” fare beginning with the pickup and ending with the drop off of a customer. During periods of high customer demand, drivers can receive a “surge multiplier.” More importantly as related to the gender pay gap, there are no promotions, work overtime pay, or any ability to negotiate higher pay for drivers. In other words, earnings are directly proportional to productivity. The Stanford researchers have also demonstrated that there is no meaningful customer discrimination toward female or male drivers. In other words, there are no statistically significant differences in customer ratings of men and women drivers nor do riders prefer one gender to the other.5

Men make more on a weekly basis, but much of the weekly difference is due to men working more hours. The percent difference in the pay gap is presented as per hour to avoid work amount variations.The results of the study show unequivocally that men earn about 7 percent more than women on an hourly basis. The “entire gap” can be explained by three factors, all unrelated to discrimination:

1. Men tend to drive faster than women. This leads to an increase in pay because they handle more customers per hour.
2. Uber pays a “compensating differential” for driving in high-crime areas and areas with high concentrations of bars. Men tend to drive in the more lucrative areas not only because they accept the risk but also because they are inclined to live nearer to or within these areas compared with women.
3. Drivers who work 30 or more hours per week compared to those that work fewer than 10 hours per week make 9 percent more per hour. Why is that? There is much to gain from experience at Uber such as when and where to drive, or which trips a driver should accept or reject. The researchers stated, “Male drivers accumulate more experience than women by driving more each week and being less likely to stop driving with Uber.”

†The Stanford team noted in 2018 that “nearly every one of the parameters favors men earning more. Men have shorter trips to the rider, longer trips, faster speed, higher surge, and more incentives.”Experience in other studies is typically measured by years of employment or a worker’s age which are notoriously poor ways of ascertaining work experience. As the Uber study suggests, experience differentials between men and women may be underestimated in previous studies and “can lead to biased estimates of the job-flexibility penalty.” Put another way, by working fewer hours, women are not only earning less pay than men but also accumulating less experience.† The Stanford team concludes:

Even in the absence of discrimination and in flexible labor markets, women’s relatively high opportunity cost of non-paid work time and gender-based differences in preferences and constraints can sustain a gender pay gap.

A study by two Harvard economists on bus and train operators produced similar results—the pay gap in favor of men is due to the differential choice preferences of men and women.6 Even though “in a unionized environment where work tasks are similar, hourly wages are identical, and tenure dictates promotions, female workers earn $0.89 on the male-worker dollar.” The same study revealed that women were also less likely than men to game the scheduling system by trading off work hours at regular wages for overtime hours at premium wages.

Economists at Cornell University7, 8 have recently completed two extremely detailed and extensive reviews of the research literature demonstrating factors that influence the gender pay gap. A few of them are obvious. Gender differences in choice of college majors funnel women into lower paying careers. For example, women tend to avoid majoring in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) programs resulting in fewer women in these relatively high-paying careers. Women also tend to avoid jobs requiring extensive training specific to the company they are working for, i.e., training that does not help them with other companies.

Although both men and women quit their jobs at about the same rate “all else being equal,” they quit for different reasons. Men quit for reasons primarily related to the job; in contrast, women quit, for the most part, because of family-related reasons. As a result, women’s wages are affected adversely compared to men probably because women miss out on experience through training. Married women and mothers focus on home and family reducing the number of hours they spend in the labor market. Not surprisingly, research has found that the more hours women spend doing housework, the lower their wages in the market.

We should foster working environments that reward the most qualified and competent candidates, encouraged to participate irrespective of their gender.

The choice families make regarding their working locations also impact wages. Men are still the primary wage earners in families, and families tend to choose the location of the husband’s work as opposed to where the wife works (probably because, on average, men tend to focus on careers while women tend to prioritize family). Recent research in the U.S. and Great Britain has revealed that total family earnings increase significantly while the wife’s earnings decline when the family relocates.9 As a result, although women may enter into traditionally male-oriented occupations, they often select careers that are flexible geographically (e.g., physicians, pharmacists, managers, accountants, etc.).10, 11

But the largest single impact on the gender wage gap appears to be the difference in pay between the careers men and women choose (as much as a third of the gap!). The companies women tend to gravitate toward are those that pay both men and women lower wages whereas men tend to be concentrated in firms that pay more to both men and women. Women may consciously be choosing companies that are less stressful and offer more flexible work hours, but pay less than those where greater demands are made. As Blau and Kahn explain:

Men are found to place a higher value on money, to have higher self-esteem, to be less risk averse, more competitive, self-confident and disagreeable, and to believe that they control their own fate (an internal, as opposed to external, locus of control) to a greater extent than women.

From a broader perspective, men may have traditionally needed to excel in these arenas not only to provide for their families but also to succeed in competing with other men for mates. It is well established that men spend longer hours in their jobs, tend to place work over family, and take less time off from their jobs, which has a large impact on wages. One study presented men and women in the laboratory with a task to solve under two conditions of compensation—in a “noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme.”12 There were no differences between the performance of men and women, but 73 percent of the men preferred the competitive tournament scenario compared to 35 percent of the women.

The competitiveness of men translates from the laboratory into real-life performance benefits. Researchers have found that high school boys and girls have, on average, similar academic abilities. However, boy’s higher level of competitiveness correlates with their choosing to go into “more prestigious academic tracks” than do girls.13 Field research substantiates these results. In a large study, economists posted online job advertisements in 16 major cities that randomly varied the advertisements in their compensation regimes. Based on the 9,000 people assessing the job advertisements, the researchers were able to conclude that, “women disproportionately shy away from competitive work settings.”14 Increasing the competition within the workplace also appears to increase the performance of men relative to women.15, 16 Many studies have also found that on average not only do women shy away from risk, but their wages are lower due to having greater risk aversion than men.17 Controlling for extraneous effects, employers tend to pay more to entice workers to accept risk.

Yet another primary influence on the gender pay gap is a preference by women for what economists refer to as “work-force interruptions,” which include flexibility (such as working at home or at convenient times) and working fewer hours (a decision not to put in the long hours required by some jobs). Numerous recent studies have explored the impact of workforce interruptions and shorter hours, and it is worth discussing them in detail because they are pertinent within the context of the “glass ceiling,” a term that refers to the discriminatory barriers hindering women from attaining top-level, high-paying jobs in the labor market.

One of these studies followed MBA graduates from a distinguished program and found that women and men began their careers at nearly the same pay, but their pay diverged over time and men were paid more. The conclusion of the research posited that the gender pay gap can be attributed almost entirely to the fewer weekly hours women worked and the larger number of “career interruptions” women took compared to men.18 Another study, conducted over a fifteen-year period and focusing on lawyers, revealed an interesting trend: while gender had little impact on initial salaries, the gender pay gap significantly widened over time. This was attributed to women working shorter hours and taking time off for childbirth.19 A recent study by Ghazala Azmat and her colleague Rosa Ferrer found a similar disparity between male and female lawyers and attributed the difference to men obtaining more clients and receiving twice as much revenue from those clients compared to women. The authors concluded the disparities between men’s and women’s earnings and promotions were due to higher workplace performance by men compared to women.20 It is worth quoting their findings:

Possible channels of direct discrimination in law firms—whereby, for instance, senior lawyers (i.e., law firm partners) could interfere with performance—are not strong determinants of performance gaps. The presence of preschool children in the household contributes to the gaps in performance; however, it is not the only key determinant. A substantial share of the gender gap in performance is explained by aspirations to become a partner, which are likely to reflect more general career concerns as well as traditional gender roles… We find that the distribution of career aspirations differs across genders, which is reflected in the differences in performance [i.e., women do not aspire to become partners as much as their male counterparts]… One potential implication is that gender-based inequality in earnings and career outcomes might not decrease in the near future—and could even increase—as more high-skilled workers are explicitly compensated on the basis of performance.

In 2014, Harvard economist Claudia Goldin showed that the gender pay gap increases over the lifespan of laborers particularly for college-educated employees.21 She explained that the gender pay gap can “almost entirely be explained by various factors such as hours worked, time out of the labor force, and years spent in part-time employment.” In 2017, economist Erling Barth and his colleagues evaluated the gender pay gap over the time span of employee careers by analyzing data from the 2000 Decennial Census of the United States and the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics. Their findings? The gender pay gap starts out relatively small but widens over time for both college-educated and non-college educated men and women. The largest gap is among the college educated men and women. The researchers found the gap (in both college and non-college scenarios) is primarily attributed to married women earning less and “most of the loss in earnings growth for married women, relative to married men, occurs concurrently with the arrival of children.”22

David Lubinski and his colleagues conducted a 35-year longitudinal study following some of the most intellectually gifted people in the United States.23, 24 This research led to two major conclusions that tracked with other findings here. (1) Intellectually exceptional women prefer to work with people rather than “things,” unlike their male counterparts, who often exhibit the opposite preference. This aligns with other findings indicating that both women and men choose careers based on their individual strengths and interests. For example, women score higher than men on verbal abilities, while men tend to excel in mathematical abilities. And even though fewer women go into STEM (women received only 25.1 percent and 23.4 percent of the doctorates in mathematics/computer science and engineering, respectively), those that do, score similar to men in ability and interest. In other words, women who pursue careers in STEM fields exhibit exceptional mathematical and spatial reasoning abilities, and their mathematical and spatial abilities are typically greater than their verbal abilities. (2) On average, gifted men earn higher salaries than their female counterparts after 35 years. The main reason for this is that men work more hours than women suggesting once again that men put more emphasis on work than women. Not only do men work longer hours but when both genders are asked “How many hours would you choose to work if you were in the job of choice” [i.e., desired job, place of work, and the pay required] women chose fewer hours than men.

Regarding the quote at the beginning of this article, Steve Horwitz, Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise, commented on Pham and colleagues’ supply/ demand hypothesis (for example, the abundance of women as teachers in grades K–12) this way: “Those jobs tend to pay less because they are jobs where many people have the relevant skills to do them, thus employers can always find another person to fill them (male or female!), which keeps wages low. The same is true of garbage collectors, who are almost all male. Their wages are much lower than those of teachers and nurses because even more people have the relevant skills. So, perceptions of the femininity of a job [i.e., social constructionism] can’t really explain why wages are low.”25 If more people, whether they are men or women (supply), go into specific fields, those fields will be able to pay less for workers (demand).

The Glass CeilingThe National Science Foundation is pouring money into programs established to encourage women to enter STEM fields. For example, Howard University recently received $1.3 million for a proposal entitled “Multiple Consciousnesses: Investigating the Identities (Academic, Gender, Race, and Disability) of Black Women Undergraduate Students in STEM and Their Impact on Persistence.”26 Funding such as this presumes the gender pay gap and the glass ceiling are due to discrimination against women. However, as we have seen, economists—many of whom are women, as cited—have challenged these assumptions.

A recent study demonstrates the impact of women’s choice on the glass ceiling. Psychologists Gijsbert Stoet and David Geary published a paper27 documenting the gender gap in STEM fields has remained relatively constant for decades despite heroic efforts to bring women into STEM fields.28 They discovered the largest STEM gender gaps exist in countries that test high on the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI)—a measure of the degree of parity between men and women based on 14 indicators, which include earnings, seats in parliament, the number of women relative to men that enroll in universities, life expectancy, etc. The GGGI uses a scale from 0 to 1, where 1.0 represents complete gender parity (see Figure 1). The data comes from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)29—an educational survey of 519,334 students from 72 countries. Upon reviewing the graph, you may observe that the data might seem somewhat counterintuitive. This unexpected correlation is referred to as the educational-gender-equality paradox.

Figure 1. A graph of gender equality (GGGI where 1.0 = gender parity) versus the percentage of women that graduate from STEM-related fields in each country. The line represents the best-fit least squares regression.

The Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) exemplify this paradox. They have established more than generous opportunities for women in maternity leave, first-rate state-provided childcare, and gender quotas for stock-market company boards.30 Yet they have some of the largest gender gaps in the world! For example, Finland ranks second in science literacy, and girls outperform boys on the tests. However, paradoxically, the number of women graduating with STEM degrees only approaches 20 percent. In contrast, countries with treatment of women ranging from fair to poor, such as Algeria, the United Arab Emirates, and Tunisia, have over 35 percent women graduating in STEM on average.

Stoet and Geary found that “girls performed similarly or better than boys in science” in 66 percent of the countries “and in nearly all the countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled.” They attribute the anomaly to personal academic choice related to what each gender perceives as their personal strength. Girls do better on literacy testing than they do in mathematics and science. Even though girls do better than boys in science and mathematics in many countries such as Finland, they choose fields outside of STEM. The opposite is true for boys. They do better in science and mathematics than literacy, and consequently choose STEM more than girls. The researchers also emphasize that women in less gender-equal countries may be more prone to choose STEM fields based on economic stress than personal preference.

It may be time to move away from activist ideology and acknowledge that girls and women freely choose their interests; they are not discriminated against in STEM fields, nor are they discouraged from pursuing a career in these fields. Similar holds true regarding men, even when countries such as Finland and Sweden go to extraordinary lengths to get more men into nursing and other fields traditionally dominated by women.

For a long time, radical feminists have advocated for quotas to break up the perceived patriarchal havens (often referred to as “good-ole-boy networks”) in the hopes of creating environments that support the advancement of women into senior management positions. Norway provides a notable example of the drawbacks of implementing such quotas. In 2003, Norway passed a law mandating that all publicly traded Norwegian corporations must ensure that their corporate boards comprise at least 40 percent women (or men, if the board was predominantly women). Five economists—all women—led by Marianne Bertrand have assessed the impact of the law:

…within firms that were mandated to increase female participation on their board, there is no evidence that these gains at the very top trickled down. Moreover the reform had no obvious impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards. We observe no statistically significant change in the gender wage gaps or in female representation in top positions… Finally, there is little evidence that the reform affected the decisions of women more generally; it was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programs, or a convergence in earnings trajectories between recent male and female graduates of such programs.31

It appears that Norway was trying to correct for a glass ceiling that did not actually exist. As reported by The Economist, the law led to a significant number of Norwegian corporations leaving the Norway stock exchange to avoid the mandated quota requirements. Of the 563 companies on the Norway stock exchange in 2003, only 179 remained by 2008.32 Meanwhile, the observed increase in women’s leadership was the same as in neighboring Denmark, which did not implement quotas.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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Simply stated, economists—many of whom are women—have found that women are more risk averse (i.e., less willing to place themselves in highly competitive job environments) and more inclined toward occupations that offer flexible hours, often in order to prioritize time with their children. Women are certainly as competent as men in STEM, but gravitate toward college majors and jobs that highlight their superior verbal and social skills. There is much more fascinating data—most of it largely absent from the public discourse—that shed light on these differences. I will discuss such scholarship from disciplines other than economics in future articles.

Why is a scientific approach so important in this case? If political activists succeed in convincing the public that pay disparities between men and women are due to discrimination through an ominous patriarchy and toxic masculinity, not only will the data be ignored, but hardworking men will be discriminated against in favor of parity. I am not suggesting women should be discouraged from entering competitive fields; on the contrary, I am arguing for fairness. We should foster working environments that reward the most qualified and competent candidates, encouraged to participate irrespective of their gender. There is no glass ceiling, i.e., the purported discriminatory barrier that keeps qualified women from achieving top-level, high-paying jobs in the labor market in the United States, Canada, and many other Western countries subject to extensive research. The available evidence reveals that the primary hindrance to upward mobility is often the choices made by women—whether consciously or subconsciously—with regard to employment flexibility.33

About the AuthorMarc J. Defant is a professor of geology at the University of South Florida specializing in the study of volcanoes—more specifically, the geochemistry of volcanic rocks. He has been funded by the NSF, National Geographic, the American Chemical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences and has published in many international journals including Nature. His book Voyage of Discovery: From the Big Bang to the Ice Age is in the 2nd edition.

References1. https://bit.ly/4d2amZW 2. Ibid. 3. https://bit.ly/49XFxDb 4. https://bit.ly/4aEQZog 5. https://bit.ly/3W6UvmO 6. https://bit.ly/3Q7Q1sg 7. https://bit.ly/4aEQZog 8. Blau, F., & Winkler, A.E. (2018). The Economics of Women, Men, and Work, Eighth Edition. Oxford University Press. 9. https://bit.ly/447kEUM 10. https://bit.ly/3vXe5XZ 11. https://bit.ly/3vM6gVe 12. https://bit.ly/3W3PBHm 13. https://bit.ly/3QaLKoa 14. https://bit.ly/4aGtXgA 15. https://bit.ly/3W6Z4NY 16. https://bit.ly/4d3H1y9 17. Bertrand, M. (2011). New Perspectives On Gender. In O. Ashenfelter, & D. Card, Handbook of Labor Economics, Volume 4B. Elsevier. 18. https://bit.ly/3Q7sYOs 19. https://bit.ly/4490wkT 20. https://bit.ly/49K7jCX 21. https://bit.ly/3UmrBxF 22. https://bit.ly/3U4bovN 23. https://bit.ly/4d6cqAj 24. https://bit.ly/4cWi7kh 25. Personal communication, 2019 26. https://bit.ly/442RZ34 27. https://bit.ly/444y5Vc 28. National Science Foundation. (2017). Women, Minorities, and Persons With Disabilities in Science and Engineering. National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. 29. OECD. (2016). PISA 2015 Results: Excellence and Equity in Education (Vol. 1). OCED. 30. https://bit.ly/3xGI1s1 31. https://bit.ly/3W5jKGa 32. https://bit.ly/3xGI1s1 33. https://bit.ly/4aEQZog

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss459_Michael_Shermer_2024_08_23.mp3Download MP3As if 2024 couldn’t get any weirder, tensions in the Middle East have escalated with the United States sending one of our nuclear submarines to the Mediterranean as a deterrent signal to Iran that they better think twice about attacking Israel. That sub, the Ohio-class USS Georgia, carries non-nuclear cruise missiles.

But 14 of our 18 Ohio-class submarines have nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles—each sub has in its belly the nuclear equivalent of all the bombs dropped in World War II. Multiply that by 14 and let your imagination be properly staggered.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces have pushed into Russian territory and Putin is outraged at the invasion. How far can Ukraine go before Putin uses his battlefield tactical nukes in response?

In this solo episode, Michael Shermer discusses the threat of nuclear annihilation and explores the evolutionary origins of our moral emotions and logic of deterrence based on game theory.

Focus of the analysis: the need to reduce nuclear stockpiles and shifting the taboo from using to owning nuclear weapons.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss458_Richard_Reeves_2024_08_20.mp3Download MP3What’s wrong with boys and men these days?

Boys and men are struggling. Profound economic and social changes of recent decades have many losing ground in the classroom, the workplace, and in the family. While the lives of women have changed, the lives of many men have remained the same or even worsened. Our attitudes, our institutions, and our laws have failed to keep up. Conservative and progressive politicians, mired in their own ideological warfare, fail to provide thoughtful solutions.

The father of three sons, a journalist, and the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, Richard V. Reeves has spent twenty-five years worrying about boys both at home and work. His book, Of Boys and Men, along with his American Institute for Boys and Men, tackles the complex and urgent crisis of boyhood and manhood. Reeves looks at the structural challenges that face boys and men and offers fresh and innovative solutions that turn the page on the corrosive narrative that plagues this issue. Of Boys and Men argues that helping the other half of society does not mean giving up on the ideal of gender equality.

Reeves says that gender equality is not a zero-sum game. We can do more for boys and men without doing less for women and girls. We can be passionate about women’s rights, and compassionate towards the struggles of boys and men. Of course there remain many gender gaps where women and girls remain at a disadvantage, especially in terms of pay, senior positions of leadership, access to venture capital, and so on. But in advanced economies, there are also gender gaps where boys and men have now fallen behind, especially if they are Black or from a lower-income background.

Richard Reeves is the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Before founding AIBM in 2023, Reeves was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution where he focused on policies related to economic inequality, racial justice, social mobility, and boys and men. Reeves is the author of several books, including Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to do About It and Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to do About It. Inspired by his own experiences as a father and policy expert, Richard founded the American Institute for Boys and Men to bring awareness to the challenges facing boys and men today and to develop evidence-based solutions. In June, philanthropist Melinda French Gates announced she will be donating over $1B over the next two years to support women’s rights, and one of the recipients was the American Institute for Boys and Men founded by Richard Reeves to the tune of $20 million.

Shermer and Reeves discuss:

• The gender gap in higher education is wider today than it was in 1972, when Title IX was passed, but the other way round, with men earning only 42 percent of degrees
• In the average school district, boys are almost a grade level behind girls in English language arts (there is no gap in Math)
• The risk of suicide is four times higher for boys and men than their female peers and has risen by more than a third among younger men since 2010
• Male deaths before the age of 65 resulted in over 4 million years of potential life lost in 2022, three times the number for women
• Employment rates among Black men are lower than for white men, white women, and Black women
• Couples whose first child is a daughter are less likely to have more children than those whose firstborn is a son.
• Adoptive parents are willing to pay about $20,000 more for a girl than a boy, according to one U.S. study.
• Mothers of sons are often treated as if they have contracted a chronic disease, as Ruth Whippman reports in her book BoyMom. When she told a friend that her third child, conceived through in vitro fertilization, was going to be her third son, the response was: “I could understand it for a girl, but why go through all that just for another boy?”
• Progressive left excoriating their “toxic masculinity” and a reactionary right telling them to “man up” and resist the “feminization” of society
• Ruth Whippman’s Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture by Niobe Way talks about the “Boy Code.” This code consists in the privileging of certain masculine attributes, including “stoicism, independence, assertiveness, thinking, and crunching numbers,” and the devaluation of “soft” capacities, such as “vulnerability, dependency, sensitivity, feeling, and the analyses of words and language.” She also indicts the Boy Code for a range of other social and economic pathologies. “‘Boy’ culture is rooted in ideologies that intersect with one another,” she writes, “including but not limited to patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, homophobia, and transphobia.” Ms. Way laments the “masculine bias that undergirds neoliberalism” and claims that “because ‘boy’ culture is in bed with capitalism, money is valued over love.”

However:

• Income inequality: why do women make .84 cents on the dollar compared to men
• Fortune 500 CEOs: only 10.4 percent are women
• Congress: 72 percent men, 28 percent women
• I thought the future was female?
• Education
• Work/Labor market
• Family
• Marriage
• Divorce/custody/spousal support/child support
• What the political left gets wrong about boys and men
• What the political right gets wrong about boys and men
• Solutions: Fatherhood as an independent institution.

“In a zero-sum political environment, merely drawing attention to the problems of boys and men can be seen as somehow downplaying the ongoing challenges facing girls and women. This is why Democrats, in particular, are so reluctant to directly address male issues. That is a recipe for bad politics…”

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss457_Elizabeth_Weiss_2024_08_17.mp3Download MP3Archaeologist Elizabeth Weiss’s new book, On the Warpath, is an autobiographical account of her storied career on the front lines of the culture war in our colleges and universities. Her opposition to the reburial of Native American skeletal remains, her insistence that indigenous knowledge is not science but myth, and her fight against wokeism and political correctness in academia exposed her to numerous controversies and cancel culture campaigns, and a court case.

A photograph of Weiss with a skull — as natural to anthropologists as a doctor being pictured with a stethoscope — led to her university shutting her out of the collection and changing the locks. This became an international news story, as did the American Anthropological Association canceling one of her presentations because she explained that a skeleton’s sex is binary and not gender fluid.

This hard-hitting and often humorous book tells the story of Dr. Weiss’s fight for science against superstition, and her attempts to promote free speech and academic freedom. It also exposes the current rot in today’s universities, through the lens of her battles against day-to-day absurdities. These include an attempt to bar “menstruating personnel” (formerly known as women) from the curation facility, a campaign to ban research on ancient Carthaginian remains because the individuals concerned never consented to photography, and a plan to declare X-rays sacred, so that they can be repatriated to Native Americans (who may actually be Mexicans), prior to being burned or buried.

Elizabeth Weiss is a controversial and world-renowned anthropology professor, specializing in the analysis of human skeletal remains. For much of her career she was based at San Jose State University, where she curated one of the largest collections of skeletal remains in the US. She is the author of numerous books and articles, and she played an essential role in bringing the Smithsonian’s traveling exhibition “What Does it Mean to be Human?” to the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s been featured in the New York Times, Science and USA Today, and has been interviewed on Fox News and Newsmax. She currently lives in New York City, where she holds a visiting fellowship with Heterodox Academy.

Shermer and Weiss discuss:

• How she became interested in archaeology and when her field became politicized
• Whatever happened to Kennewick Man, and who was he anyway?
• When studying bones, why sex is binary
• How wokeness has ruined anthropology and archaeology
• The anthropology wars of the 1990s and the archaeology wars of the 2020s
• Why science is never complete and so burying fossils after a preliminary scientific analysis is inappropriate
• Why the fossil remains of most Native American sites have tenuous or no connection whatsoever to modern tribal peoples living nearby
• The peopling of the Americas and what the consensus is on how long ago migrations began
• Alternative archaeology and how scientists handle anomalous findings (e.g., 130,000-year old Mammoth fossils in San Diego that suggest they may have been butchered by humans)
• Why archaeologists who support cultural relativism and respect for other people’s origin stories do not apply that same attitude toward, say, Christian creationists or Mormon creation stories
• How she has been discriminated against as a woman researcher by some Native American groups (and why her otherwise liberal or progressive colleagues don’t defend her here)
• Her lawsuit against San Jose State University for defaming her as a “racist” and blocking her from further scientific study of the fossil collection she has curated for 17 years
• What’s behind cancel culture and identity politics
• The future of archaeology on its present trajectory toward the politicization of science.

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NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act)1 is a federal law that requires skeletal remains and certain artifacts (such as grave goods and sacred objects) from past populations to be turned over to culturally affiliated present-day Native American tribes. The cultural affiliations can be determined through a variety of means including scientific, historic, and oral traditions, but the determination of affiliation should be by a preponderance of evidence, which means that half or more of the evidence should support the link between the past and the present peoples. All federally funded institutions in the U.S., such as universities and museums (even private ones that accept federal funding) are required to follow NAGPRA. This includes the requirement that they create inventory lists so that Native American tribes can request repatriation of previously discovered and curated items.

In 2017, I decided to reach out to now-retired attorney James W. Springer to see if he’d like to co-author a book on the topic of repatriation that took a critical perspective on the law and the ideology behind repatriation. Jim and I, though never having met face-to-face, had corresponded over the years based on our mutual concern that NAGPRA and similar laws would seriously hinder our ability to accurately understand the past—including the intriguing and ongoing mystery of how the Americas were first peopled.

Jim started his career as an anthropologist after receiving his PhD at Yale University, teaching, excavating, and researching for ten years prior to beginning his law career; throughout the years, he remained interested in anthropology, and continued to read and write about anthropological issues. I’m an anthropology professor at San José State University (SJSU); my focus is on studying skeletal remains and radiographic images (such as X-rays and CT scans). I’ve investigated diseases, such as leprosy in a Byzantine collection, and osteoarthritis patterns from Native Americans. I’ve also tried to reconstruct past people’s activities, looking at stress fractures2 and bone strength in skeletal remains from 18th century European Canadians3 to Paleoindians,4 whose skeletal remains in the Americas are 7,500 years old or older.

Jim and I wrote our book proposal and received a contract, after which I submitted a leave request to my department chair Roberto Gonzalez and my dean Walt Jacobs. Roberto provided an exceedingly supportive statement that also demonstrated that he understood the controversial nature of my position. “Dr. Weiss’s proposed project is likely to benefit the anthropology department in multiple ways,” he wrote. “Finally, since Dr. Weiss holds a controversial position on NAGPRA— focusing upon the ways in which the interpretation and implementation of repatriation and reburial laws may impede intellectual inquiry—her new project is likely to spark lively discussions among various stakeholders.”

My leave was approved, and Jim and I set out to write our book, Repatriation and Erasing the Past.5 It’s organized into three parts. The first focuses on debunking myths taught in K-12 and at universities, especially the conventional dogma that pre-Columbian populations in the Americas were peaceful. Examination of the skeletal remains throughout the Americas revealed clear evidence of violence, particularly the embedded arrowheads and severed limbs that were taken as war trophies. A chapter on biological relatedness discussed the frequent inability to tie past peoples to modern tribes. For example, the DNA of the 11,500-year-old Paleo-Indian Sunrise Girl could not be matched to that of any modern population, suggesting that she came from a group of lost or replaced Beringinians—those who walked across the Bering land bridge while it was in existence.

The second part of the book reviews NAGPRA, the history of Indian Laws and other conservation laws, and explores the complex issues in determining modern tribal affiliation to past peoples. One example is the Kennewick Man case, in which a claimed link between the over 8,000-year-old discovery and one of the modern tribes led to President Obama signing a congressional order to have Kennewick Man repatriated and reburied, preventing all future study. A closer look at the DNA evidence shows that Kennewick Man is, in fact, more closely related to South American Native Americans than the North American tribe who destroyed the discovery through reburial.

The third part of Repatriation and Erasing the Past delves into the problem with repatriation laws and repatriation ideology. It stems from the post-modern movement in which there is no such thing as truth and all conclusions are considered equally subjective. Repatriation ideology places importance on who is providing the information and whether that individual can claim a victim status; thus, information from Native Americans is considered to have greater validity than information coming from a European American, regardless of the latter’s scientific qualifications or demonstrable truthfulness of the information. We also explored NAGPRA’s violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment with regard to the separation of church and state in requiring each review committee to have at least two traditional Indian religious leaders and thereby promoting a specific religion—traditional Indian religion—as a required component of the law.

Further violation of the First Amendment includes NAGPRA’s acceptance of creation myths, in the form of oral tradition, as evidence for cultural affiliation (i.e., the connection between a present tribe and past peoples) to support repatriation events. We also looked at how NAGPRA and repatriation ideology encourage censorship. Due to the default acceptance that the Native American culture should be held in deference, repatriation ideology also allows for discrimination; anthropologists eager to continue collaboration with tribes must, for instance, observe menstrual taboos that prohibit women who are menstruating from engaging in research and fieldwork. In short, we called for a return to the primacy of demonstrable, objective knowledge and the abandonment of anti-scientific values.

When I returned to campus after my writing leave, I received SJSU’s College of Social Sciences highest scholarly prize for my research on and curation of the Ryan Mound collection. My university had always been happy to celebrate my achievements. In 2008, I was chosen by then Provost Gerry Selter to speak about my scientific research and my work criticizing repatriation and reburial of skeletal remains. Even earlier than that, when I was hired in 2004, I spoke out against the loss of scientific data through repatriation of remains. I point all this out because shortly after Repatriation and Erasing the Past was published, administrators, including my department chair and the university president, started to take a different view—rather than praising my accomplishments and wowing at the imagery highlighting the importance of studying skeletal remains, they started to condemn my scholarship by taking retaliatory actions to derail my career.

The first sign of trouble was in mid-December 2020 upon receiving a panicked email from my publisher, followed by a phone call, in which they lamented that they were “in crisis mode” because of an open letter6 calling for the banning of Repatriation and Erasing the Past crafted by Siân Halcrow (University of Otago, New Zealand), Amber Aranui (Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand), Stephanie Halmhofer (University of Alberta, Canada), Annalisa Heppner (Brown University, USA), Kristina Killgrove (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA), and Gwen Robbins Schug (University of North Carolina at Greensboro/Appalachian State University, USA).

The open letter, which was signed by nearly 900 academics, called the book racist and wanted it to be retracted, or at least removed from open access to universities and libraries—in other words, they didn’t want to give people the opportunity to read it. Through several phone calls with the publisher, Jim and I were able to convince them not to pull the book, but the publishers nevertheless issued an apology for its publication, written by Director Romi Gutierrez:

I write to address the current discussion surrounding a book the University of Florida Press published several months ago: Repatriation and Erasing the Past, by Elizabeth Weiss and James W. Springer. (…) Because the gears of the publication process do move gradually, a flawed editorial decision made in the past has consequences today.

Those consequences, in this case, include harm to voices we sincerely value, the potential to undo important progress, and injury to relationships we have long worked to foster. I apologize for the pain this publication has caused. It was not our intent to publish a book that uses arguments and terminology associated with scientific racism. I assure you that, months ago, changes to our editorial program had already started to take place, including greater focus to inclusivity and sensitivity, and we will continue and redouble these efforts.7

Jim and I stood up for what we had written; we wrote articles on our perspective, and fought back in the public press and on social media.8, 9, 10 Our book remains available and can be found in nearly 1,000 libraries.

When this crisis was brought to my attention, I reached out to my chair Roberto Gonzalez and my dean Walt Jacobs. Gonzalez informed me that he had already known about the cancellation attempt. What I didn’t know was that Gonzalez and Jacobs would become my biggest foes in what turned out to be the start of a campaign to cancel me.

At this time, there were two other incidents involving my university that would play into their efforts to retaliate against me. One faculty member, A.J. Faas, wrote in an email to the anthropology department:

I would like to share an important resource that just went live a few weeks ago. Cite Black Authors, a searchable database of Black scholarly journal articles, books, and expert listings, will launch to the public on November 16, 2020, at CiteBlackAuthors.com. The website is an interdisciplinary effort to enhance and recognize Black academic voices for better representation in scholarship. Sparked by the death of George Floyd and ongoing racial conflicts in the United States, a team of nine people, including researchers, developers, and graduate students, curated citations and designed a searchable website for researchers, educators, and the general public. We are overwhelmingly grateful for the support of contributors and the team behind the initiative. Please share the attached release with your friends and groups—and help us to spread the word and the WORK of Black, academic professionals.

I responded in writing that:

Although the intent of Cite Black Authors may be well-meaning, as a scholar in search of objective knowledge, I encourage researchers to look for the best source material and realize that an author’s ethnicity, race, or color of their skin has no actual bearing on the validity of their contribution.

Second, I attended a webinar on creating a Native American Studies Center, put on by Provost Vincent Del Casino. The speakers (two of the three stated that they were Native American scholars) expressed what I submit are inherently racist sentiments, including that Native Americans were better than any other people in all topics (the speaker then started to list them: math, biology, literature…) and that only Native Americans should teach and work in the Native American Studies Center because it would be an insult if a Mexican was mistaken for a Native American or vice versa. In the comments bar of the seminar video stream, I wrote that these statements were racist; why would it be an insult to be mistaken for a Mexican, unless you thought that there was something wrong with being Mexican? Would we want to restrict Shakespeare to being taught by Britons and British Americans only? The responses to my criticisms included an email from a professor of Chicano and Chicana Studies that concluded, “I’m exhausted and disgusted by Karen antics that silence BIPOC voices in the academy” and a phone call from chair Gonzalez in which he implored me not to attend such events, stating that my attendance could harm the department’s junior faculty’s chances at tenure.

Calls for the banning of Repatriation and Erasing the Past increased, and Gonzalez wrote a letter to all faculty, staff and graduate students in the department “reminding everyone that the opinions expressed in your new book don’t represent the position of the SJSU anthropology department, and that the principle of academic freedom allows us all to freely pursue our ideas—even if they’re controversial or unpopular.” He stated that because he received “numerous emails and calls from colleagues who are quite concerned and even upset about your book,” he thought that this was the best step to take. He concluded:

On a personal note, I want to let you know that after having carefully read the book, I disagree with both the substance and style of Repatriation and Erasing the Past, including its dismissal of Native American epistemologies and indigenous scholarship, its Victorian-era approach to anthropological inquiry, and its linear, pre-Kuhnian view of scientific progress. Our discipline has long played a signal role in recognizing the insight and benefits that can come from understanding different lifeways and cultural perspectives, and I’m confident that we will continue doing so in the future.

I replied, making sure that all who received his letter also received mine:

Roberto’s use of the term “Victorian-era” is to misunderstand our perspective though I would like to remind everyone Charles Darwin was from the Victorian era—and where would we be without him?! Both Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper (the philosopher James and I cite) had remarkable careers with thought-provoking works that helped shape modern social sciences. They were also contemporaries and, thus, although their approaches to understanding science differed, to portray Repatriation and Erasing the Past as antiquated because we don’t use Kuhn, but rather cite Popper, is an unfair representation. Popper’s view of scientific progress is not a linear view and neither do James and I support a linear view of scientific progress. We even highlight the unpredictability and uncontrollability of knowledge while noting that knowledge is not an unfolding sequence, but rather a messy endeavor that is in constant flux. Science is the search for truth, perhaps never getting to the truth on many topics. New data or old data reanalyzed, we point out, can upturn previous explanations.

The end outcome of this exchange was that Gonzalez decided to put together a webinar series: “Emancipatory Theory & Praxis: Confronting Racism in American Society and American Anthropology.” His chosen speakers included Agustín Fuentes of Princeton University. In his talk, Fuentes focused on White supremacy and violence. I asked about the recent slew of Black on Asian crimes that were occurring and how he would define these acts; he stated that they too were due to White supremacy—if Blacks weren’t discriminated against by Whites, then they wouldn’t be attacking Asians. The other invited speaker was William White from UC Berkeley. White’s talk was actually quite illuminating; he pointed out that students of color were often directed to study populations that they were related to and that this didn’t always match their interests; thus, arguing against students being shoehorned into specific areas of study based on their ethnicity. A Black student may want to study Celts while a White student might wish to learn more about Caribbean archaeology.

In response to this webinar, I asked my chair whether I could put together a similar webinar to focus on academic freedom and diversity of thought. His initial response was that there was no funding and no time to do so; then, when I suggested we move it to the next semester, he dug up some rules on guest speakers that we never used and weren’t used for the equity webinar, and even had us retroactively vote on whether we approved of the topic and speakers of his webinar! Unsurprisingly, I haven’t been able to get department support to hold a webinar or invite a guest speaker.

Over the following months, the controversies simmered down, until Jim and I submitted an abstract to the 2021 Society for American Archaeology (SAA) conference. Our talk, “Has Creationism Crept Back into Archaeology?”, called for a relying on data rather than creation myths to ensure that repatriation can be done as fairly as possible. I compared creation myths of Native Americans to other creation myths while pointing out that the SAA has previously taken a stand against the teaching and use of biblical interpretations, such as intelligent design, to understand the past. The SAA was founded in 1934 and states that it is “dedicated to research about and interpretation and protection of the archaeological heritage of the Americas.” The SAA has about 7,000 members that include professional and avocational archaeologists, archaeology students in colleges and universities, and archaeologists working at Tribal agencies, museums, government agencies, and the private sector.

Although our topic did not seem particularly controversial to me, there was a movement to prevent the talk (which was pre-recorded) from being played.11 It aired anyway, and the comment box quickly filled up with name-calling and accusations of racism. But even though all talks were supposed to stay on the SAA platform for two months, the incoming president apologized for the harm caused, removed the talk from the platform, and formed a committee to ensure that those critical of repatriation ideology would not be allowed on the program again. Two years later, I submitted an abstract that discussed whether X-rays were to be included in repatriation. At SJSU, X-rays are now being labeled as “sacred objects” and upon repatriation of the human remains and artifacts, the tribes plan to burn the X-rays. This abstract was rejected; the California Society for Archaeology rejected it too.

On June 3, 2021, Roberto Gonzalez—hosted by my dean Walt Jacobs—presented a review of my situation at the Council of Colleges of Art and Sciences called “What to Do When a Tenured Colleague is Branded a Racist.” In this presentation, Gonzalez painted me as being manipulative, racist, strange, and professionally incompetent. He stated that my anti-repatriation position, coupled with my reaction to the Cite Black Authors incident, were reasons to withhold resources, and that my next review would state that I am incompetent. He suggested that if I taught my perspective to students or assigned my books in classes, he would consider removing me from the classroom. Although he employed a pseudonym for me, it was clear that this was a personal attack—describing me as odd, not “warm and fuzzy,” and bizarrely suggesting that I might lock myself into the curation facility to prevent a repatriation from occurring. (While I disagree with NAGPRA, I have always followed the law.) Further, he painted my ideas as “scientific racism” and stated that he would have signed the open letter calling for my book to be banned if he wasn’t chair. Perhaps most surreally, Gonzalez painted himself as a victim, claiming that he had no idea of the “skeletons in my closet”—that I am an anti-repatriation anthropologist. Yet, this was clearly a lie, as seen in the approval for my leave to write the book, his support for my award, and the many discussions we held about repatriation over the years. Gonzalez was even on my hiring committee— so he knew that one of my first papers was on Kennewick Man and how repatriation and reburial of Paleo-Indians is an affront to scientific inquiry and hinders our ability to reconstruct the past.

It was clear that my job was on the line. Even a tenured professor can be fired for incompetence, which is what they were accusing me of!

The latest cancellations started up again after I published an op-ed critical of California’s repatriation law called CalNAGPRA.12 The recent changes to CalNAGPRA all but set the stage for repatriation events that would hollow out collections in all of the state’s universities. CalNAGPRA states that Native American knowledge must be deferred to; that is, if there is a disagreement between scientific evidence and the Native American oral tradition, the Native American oral tradition must be given priority. All that is needed for repatriation is for a Native American to say that there is a link between the modern tribe and the past peoples—this would then trump all the DNA and forensic evidence. There must also be continuous consultation with all tribes of the area and their requests for handling, access, and repatriation must be followed.

Shortly after the op-ed, I posted on social media a now infamous photo of me holding a skull (above left), with the caption “So happy to be back with some old friends.” Provost Vincent Del Casino wrote a scathing letter condemning me, stating: “This image has evoked shock and disgust from our Native and Indigenous community on campus and from many people within and outside of SJSU.”13 He went on to criticize me: “in what context is it ever ethically appropriate for an academic to handle remains while smiling with ungloved hands while calling these remains ‘friends’? I doubt many colleagues in the fields of Forensic Science or Physical Anthropology would find this palatable.” I reached out to the provost and suggested that we discuss the issue and address the public together, but he didn’t wish to do this and, thus, I provided him with a letter to send to the same people on his email list, which he did.14 I clarified a variety of misunderstandings; for instance, “handling remains with gloves is only necessary if these remains have always been treated with gloved hands and other sterile conditions.” Use of gloves is actually actively discouraged by the National Park Society because it leads to people dropping materials more often. I ended the letter with:

We have no way of telling what the individuals whose remains we curate would think about this issue, but when one looks at the Egyptian mummies, Ötzi the iceman, or the bog bodies of northern Europe, public display celebrates these individuals, telling their stories in a respectful way that gives them a voice they never had in life. The same is true of our collection, and we should be celebrating the lives of these first occupants of Silicon Valley—not allowing their voices to be silenced by a vociferous campaign orchestrated by woke activists whose strategy is to try to shut down debate, and promote superstition over science. (…) Finally, it’s an attack on a genuine photo that celebrates our collection, my admiration for the collection, and my joy at being able to do my job. After your strong statement regarding academic freedom, I am disappointed that you were not courageous enough—as those reporting on me—to talk to me first, to have a rational discussion about these occurrences.

My response led to many colleagues reaching out to me; finding similar photos (from SJSU and many other institutes, including the Smithsonian); and providing support. One very supportive colleague faced an onslaught of criticism after he was quoted in the Mercury News, which led him to withdraw his support of my freedom of expression. He called to let me know that he was frightened. Others have expressed quiet support—a former student and lecturer let me know that she didn’t think that I was racist at all, but spent all day debating whether to email me from her university account or her private account, ultimately deciding on the latter. This fear of cancellation permeates academia.

On the left, the image that Provost Del Casino said did “not align with the values of SJSU” and “evoked shock and disgust from our Native and Indigenous community on campus and from many people within and outside of SJSU.” On the right, the image that the University used for multiple websites and promotional material. This image was removed from the University website in July 2023.

All of this led the then President Mary Papazian to remove my access to the curation facility. They literally changed the locks! She also stated that no photos were allowed of the Native American skeletal collection (a key aspect to understanding past diseases is sharing and comparing images) or even of the boxes that held the bones.15 I responded by noting that non-Native American remains and other collections were in the facility and not subject to repatriation law. One cultural anthropologist asked whether I had written permission from these individuals to take the photos, knowing full well that they had been dead for centuries! I fought all these restrictions. Tribal liaison Alisha Ragland was perhaps one of the most vitriolic, claiming that I was a eugenicist and shouldn’t get access to any collections. They moved the protocol for access to skeletal collections to the Institute Review Board, which I fought against. The chair held meetings to try to remove me from my duties as curator, although it is part of my job contract.

How did we get to a situation in which opposing the reburial of human remains is automatically deemed racist and can derail an anthropologist’s career?

I decided the time had come to initiate legal action against the SJSU for their various retaliatory actions. While putting together our case, Pacific Legal Foundation (who represented me pro bono) and I contacted senior academic figures in physical anthropology and archaeology to seek expert opinions on protocols for handling skeletal remains.

Dr. Douglas Owsley has worked with many prestigious universities and museums, including the Smithsonian. He is the subject of Jeff Benedict’s book No Bone Unturned: Inside the World of a Top Forensic Scientist and His Work on America’s Most Notorious Crimes and Disasters.16 Dr. Owsley wrote in his supportive amicus brief: “Based on my experience there was nothing improper about Professor Weiss’s photograph.” He also noted that, “it is not standard protocol to use gloves when examining archeological bones in the laboratory.”17 Professor Della Cook, who managed the North American skeletal collections held by the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University from 1973 to 2021 and has collected data on skeletal remains around the world, wrote “Photographs of researchers measuring or otherwise doing observations on bones, ancient and modern, are routine in our field, and many anthropologists smile in such photographs.” She added that “There are several such photos of me in circulation, and in most of them I am smiling.”18

The department also worked with Native Americans and a retired forensic anthropology lecturer to rewrite protocols that would determine access to collections. The protocol even included a menstruation taboo. They couldn’t bring themselves to state that women who are menstruating are not allowed in the curation facility or to handle remains and artifacts; thus, they used the term “menstruating personnel,” to avoid the implication that only females menstruate! Seriously? Upon seeing this, my lawyers and I decided to mention that this likely constitutes a Title IX violation and that, if it were not removed, we would file a complaint. It was removed.19

This discriminatory action against women is far more common in anthropology now than you may think; Native American tribes believing in menstrual taboos will ban women who are menstruating from engaging in fieldwork, handling remains, and even eating with the rest of the crew. Many institutions, including UC Berkeley, condone this behavior.20

Further complications arose when I requested nonhuman animal bones. These items were quickly declared by Native Americans as being sacred and, thus, out of reach for my research. Previously unaware of possessing any mystical powers, I suddenly realized that whatever I requested magically and instantly became “sacred” and thus off-limits.

When we first went in front of a judge, she ruled that my case was to be dismissed, but I was allowed to amend my complaint.21 In the decision to dismiss the case, she stated that the tribes were an “indispensable” party to the case, but the tribes were considered sovereign and, thus, could not be sued. We filed an amended complaint, excluding the Native American collections, and—to everyone’s surprise—the motion to dismiss was overturned. Unfortunately, I still had no recourse to get access to X-rays and nonhuman animal bones, or even the ability to enter the curation facility.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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How did we get to a situation in which opposing the reburial of human remains is automatically deemed racist and can derail an anthropologist’s career? It’s about turning anthropology into an ideological battleground weighted in favor of victimhood and (often disproven by evidence) tribal identity—both political and social—rather than a scientific endeavor aimed at better understanding the past for the benefit of all humankind. It doesn’t matter who is correct, it matters who gets to tell the story, with Native American narratives now considered expert testimony that cannot and must not be questioned.

The next proposed revisions to NAGPRA are sure to erase the imperfect compromise that was included in the original NAGPRA law—a compromise that tried to ensure that science would still be conducted by allowing for the retention of most artifacts and the continued curation of culturally unidentifiable skeletal remains. Native American tribes, such as the San Carlos Apache Tribe, want a definition of human remains that includes naturally-shed material (such as hair and skin cells), casts, replicas, and digital data.22 Some have argued that animals imbued with human spirits should be included as human too. Of course, the puma who recently died in Los Angeles was given a traditional Indian burial in order to stop research on its remains.23

Why would a university or museum want to lose their collections? They may think cooperating will enable them to continue their research endeavors, but research purely for the purpose of propping up a political agenda isn’t research. When the tribes can control your conclusions, one is no longer engaged in pursuit of objective knowledge.

For my part, I shall oppose the unconstitutional NAGPRA in order to bring anthropologists, especially the next generation, back to science. And I will promote science which knows no bounds of race, sex, gender, religion, or creed over superstition, regardless of any race, sex, gender, religion, or creed affiliation—real, alleged, or imagined.

About the AuthorElizabeth Weiss is co-author, with James W. Springer, of Repatriation and Erasing the Past. She is also the author of Reading the Bones: Activity, Biology, and Culture and Paleopathology in Perspective: Bone Health and Disease Through Time. She has been a professor of anthropology at San José State University (SJSU) since 2004. Prior to joining SJSU, Elizabeth had a post-doctoral research position at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. She is a faculty fellow at Heterodox Academy’s Center for Academic Pluralism and a National Association of Scholars board member.

References1. https://bit.ly/3TFSs7G 2. https://bit.ly/3TJt69a 3. https://bit.ly/4chYmmP 4. Weiss, E. (2001). Kennewick Man’s Behavior: A CT-Scan Analysis. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 32S, 163–163 5. Weiss, E. & Springer, J. W. (2020). Repatriation and Erasing the Past. University of Florida Press. 6. https://bit.ly/3VoFexw 7. https://bit.ly/3TpiD1f 8. https://bit.ly/4cjUwJS 9. https://bit.ly/43oQ1d5 10. https://bit.ly/4aiNsvm 11. https://bit.ly/4chCpnR 12. https://bit.ly/4chCqbp 13. https://bit.ly/3VmVuyL 14. https://bit.ly/3v714uJ 15. https://bit.ly/4cnYZuY 16. Benedict, J. (2004). No Bone Unturned: Inside the World of a Top Forensic Scientist and His Work on America’s Most Notorious Crimes and Disasters. Harper Perennial. 17. Owsley, D. (2022). Amicus brief. Case 5:22-cv-00641-BLF Document 50 Filed 03/10/22 18. Cook, D. (2022). Amicus brief. Case 5:22-cv-00641-BLF Document 49 Filed 03/10/22 19. https://bit.ly/4ciffh7 20. https://bit.ly/3TmF2Mr 21. https://bit.ly/3Viu9Oo 22. https://bit.ly/3VFMghB 23. https://bit.ly/3IJ2jDs

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss456_Sara_Walker_2024_08_13.mp3Download MP3What is life? This is among the most difficult open problems in science, right up there with the nature of consciousness and the existence of matter. All the definitions we have fall short. None help us understand how life originates or the full range of possibilities for what life on other planets might look like.

In Life as No One Knows It, physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker argues that solving the origin of life requires radical new thinking and an experimentally testable theory for what life is. This is an urgent issue for efforts to make life from scratch in laboratories here on Earth and missions searching for life on other planets.

Walker proposes a new paradigm for understanding what physics encompasses and what we recognize as life. She invites us into a world of maverick scientists working without a map, seeking not just answers but better ways to formulate the biggest questions we have about the universe. The book culminates with the bold proposal of a new theory for identifying and classifying life, one that applies not just to biological life on Earth but to any instance of life in the universe. Rigorous, accessible, and vital, Life as No One Knows It celebrates the mystery of life and the explanatory power of physics.

Sara Imari Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life and discovering alien life on other worlds. She is deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. She is also a fellow of the Berggruen Institute and a member of the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the recipient of the Stanley L. Miller Early-Career Award for her research on the origin of life, and her research team at ASU is internationally regarded as being among the leading labs aiming to build a fundamental theory for understanding what life is. Her research has been featured in Scientific American, Quanta Magazine, and a variety of other international outlets.

Shermer and Walker discuss:

• Defining life
• Defining the self
• Defining the individual organism
• Materialism, vitalism, idealism, and Platonic ideas
• Where are the laws of nature?
• Is the universe mathematical?
• Why we need a paradigm shift in origins of life research
• Assembly theory and what it predicts
• Phase transitions in the origin and evolution of life
• The hard problem of consciousness
• Free will, volition, combatibilism, determinism
• What’s wrong with current definitions of life, self, and individual?
• Possible theories for how life originated on Earth
• Symbiogenesis: from Procaryote to Eucaryote cells
• Searching for biosignatures on exoplanets
• Dyson spheres and other technosignatures
• Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project
• What might aliens be like?
• Kardashev scale of civilizations
• Deities for Atheists, Skygods for Skeptics: aliens as gods and the search as religion.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss455_Andrew_Chow_2024_08_10.mp3Download MP3As cryptocurrency rose in popularity during the pandemic, new converts bought into the idea that crypto would not only make them rich, but would usher in imminent revolutions across art, finance, politics, and gaming. Cryptocurrency caught the zeitgeist through figures like FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who only two years later would be convicted of one of the most calamitous acts of financial fraud in U.S. history.

During his meteoric rise, Sam Bankman-Fried outflanked idealists in the movement like Vitalik Buterin, who sought to build fairer, more democratic systems through Ethereum. Bankman-Fried pursued a growth-obsessed, by-any-means approach to crypto, which proved seductive to those who just wanted to get rich. But this Silicon Valley-like approach also drove the creation of a spate of high-risk financial instruments that mirrored those of the 2008 financial crisis. Accused of misleading investors and mishandling funds, Bankman-Fried became a target of prosecutors.

Now, Cryptomania unfolds the tumultuous twenty months inside this male-dominated, overhyped industry that led to its downfall. Drawing on exclusive reporting and an extensive network in the global NFT community, Andrew Chow chronicles the battle for crypto’s soul, and the human toll of its economic meltdown—from the conmen and eccentrics driving the bubble to the victims caught in its burst.

Andrew R. Chow is a correspondent for Time who covers technology, culture, and business. He has written four Time cover stories, including about the impacts of the AI corporate arms race and a prescient profile of Vitalik Buterin months before the 2022 crypto crash. He has previously written for The New York Times, Pitchfork, and NBC News. His first book is Cryptomania: Hype, Hope and the Fall of a Billion-Dollar Fintech Empire.

Shermer and Chow discuss:

• What is money?
• Fiat money without a gold standard
• Cash, coins, and credit cards
• Bitcoin and crypto currencies as the next step in financial transactions
• Crypto’s utopian philosophies
• What triggered crypto’s pandemic-era bull run.
• How the popularity of Non-Fungible Token (NFTs), served as a gateway to crypto, helping to fuel its rise—and then became one of its victims
• How NFTs were originally about the democratization of artistic creation and had the potential to help artists across the globe
• Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) backstory, his interest in “effective altruism” and the “earn-to-give” philosophy, and his early career at a Wall Street trading firm where he developed his obsession with taking huge risks
• Did SBF believe his lies? Was he self-deceived?
• How SBF used his autistic-like behavior to convince people he was a misunderstood genius
• Risk-neutral behavior and crypto
• Effective altruism, utilitarianism, and deontological ethics
• Comparisons of SBF with Elizabeth Holmes
• SBF’s arrest and dramatic trial. Rather than plea guilty and take a deal, Sam, true to his risk-taking nature, gambled it all and took his case to trial
• The parallels between crypto and the problematic financial system it was meant to replace
• While crypto promised to dislodge predatory middlemen, all it did was create new ones, with less oversight and many of the same painful fees
• How the 2022 crypto crash closely mirrored the 2008 financial crisis. The 2008 bubble had been caused by risky mortgage loans repackaged into financial derivatives. The 2022 crypto crash was likewise brought down by hidden, interconnected chains of leverage, in which hedge funds, exchanges, and lenders played dangerous money games because they thought the market might keep expanding forever.

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As a sociologist interested in the scientific study of social life, I’ve long been concerned about the ideological bent of much of sociology. Many sociologists reject outright the idea of sociology as a science and instead prefer to engage in political activism. Others subordinate scientific to activist goals, and are unclear as to what they believe sociology’s purpose should be. Still others say different things depending on the audience.

The American Sociological Association (ASA) does the latter. Last December, the Board of Governors of Florida’s state university system removed an introductory sociology course from the list of college courses that could be taken to fulfil part of the general education requirement. It seemed clear that sociology’s reputation for progressive politics played a role in the decision. Florida’s Commissioner of Education, for example, wrote that sociology had been hijacked by political activists.1 The ASA denied the charge and went on to declare that sociology is “the scientific study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior.”

While that definition certainly aligns with my vision of what sociology should be, it contrasts with another recent statement made by the ASA itself when announcing this year’s annual conference theme. The theme is “Intersectional Solidarities: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy,” which, as the ASA website explains, “emphasizes sociology as a form of liberatory praxis: an effort to not only understand structural inequities, but to intervene in socio-political struggles.”2 It’s easy to see how Florida’s Commissioner of Education somehow got the idea that sociology has become infused with ideology.

The ASA’s statement in defense of sociology as the science of social life seems insincere. That’s unfortunate— we really do need a science of social life if we’re going to understand the social world better. And we need to understand the world better if we’re going to effectively pursue social justice. The ASA’s brand of sociology as liberatory praxis leads not only to bad sociology, but also to misguided efforts to change the world. As I’ve argued in my book How to Think Better About Social Justice, if we’re going to change the world for the better, we need to make use of the insights of sociology. But bad sociology only makes things worse.

Contemporary social justice activism tends to draw from a sociological perspective known as critical theory. Critical theory is a kind of conflict theory, wherein social life is understood as a struggle for domination. It is rooted in Marxist theory, which viewed class conflict as the driver of historical change and interpreted capitalist societies in terms of the oppression of wage laborers by the owners of the means of production. Critical theory understands social life similarly, except that domination and oppression are no longer simply about economic class but also race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, gender identity, and much more.

There are two problems with social justice efforts informed by critical theory. First, this form of social justice—often called “critical social justice” by supporters and “wokeism” by detractors—deliberately ignores the insights that might come from other sociological perspectives. Critical theory, like conflict theory more broadly, is just one of many theoretical approaches in a field that includes a number of competing paradigms. It’s possible to view social life as domination and oppression, but it’s also possible to view it as a network of relationships, or as an arena of rational transactions similar to a marketplace, or as a stage where actors play their parts, or as a system where the different parts contribute to the functioning of the whole. If you’re going to change the social world, it’s important to have some understanding of how social life works, but there’s no justification for relying exclusively on critical theory.

The second problem is that, unlike most other sociological perspectives, critical theory assumes an oppositional stance toward science. This is partly because critical theory is intended not just to describe and explain the world, but rather to change it—an approach the ASA took in speaking of sociology as “liberatory praxis.” However, the problem isn’t just that critical theory prioritizes political goals over scientific ones, it’s that it also sees science as oppressive and itself in need of critique and dismantling. The claim is that scientific norms and scientific knowledge—just like other norms and other forms of knowledge in liberal democratic societies—have been constructed merely to serve the interests of the powerful and enable the oppression of the powerless.

Critical theory makes declarations about observable aspects of social reality, but because of its political commitments and its hostile stance toward scientific norms, it tends to act more like a political ideology than a scientific theory. As one example, consider Ibram X. Kendi’s assertions about racial disparities. Kendi, a scholar and activist probably best known for his book How to Be an Antiracist, has said, “As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism.”3 The problem with this approach is that while racism is one possible cause of racial disparities (and often the main cause!), in science, our theories need to be testable, and they need to be tested. Kendi doesn’t put his idea forward as a proposition to be tested but instead as a fundamental truth not to be questioned. In any true science, claims about social reality must be formulated into testable hypotheses. And then we need to actually gather the evidence. Usually what we find is variation, and this case is likely to be no different. That is, we’re likely to find that in some contexts racism has more of a causal role than in others.

We often want easy answers to social problems. Social justice activists might be inclined to turn to would-be prophets who proclaim what seems to be the truth, rather than to scientists who know we have to do the legwork required to understand and address things. Yes, science gives us imperfect knowledge, and it points to the difficulties we encounter when changing the world… but since we live in a world of tradeoffs, there are seldom easy answers to social problems. We can’t create a perfect world—utopia isn’t possible—so any kind of social justice rooted in reality must try to increase human flourishing while recognizing that not all problems can be eliminated, certainly not easily or quickly.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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What does it all mean? For one, we should be much more skeptical about one of critical theory’s central claims— that the norms and institutions of liberal democratic societies are simply disguised tools of oppression. Do liberal ideals such as equality before the law, due process, free speech, free markets, and individual rights simply mask social inequalities so as to advance the interests of the powerful? Critical theorists don’t really subject this claim to scientific scrutiny. Instead, they take the presence of inequalities in liberal societies as selfsufficient evidence that liberalism is responsible for these failures. Yet any serious attempt to pursue social justice informed by scientific understanding of the world would involve comparing liberal democratic societies with other societies, both present and past.

Scientific sociology can’t tell us the best way to organize a society and social justice involves making tradeoffs among competing values. We may never reach a consensus on what kind of society is best, but we should consider the possibility that liberal democracies seem to provide the best framework we yet know of for pursuing social justice effectively. At the very least, they provide mechanisms for peacefully managing disputes in an imperfect world.

About the AuthorBradley Campbell is a professor of sociology at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author The Geometry of Genocide, The Rise of Victimhood Culture (with Jason Manning), and How to Think Better About Social Justice: Why Good Sociology Matters. His research interests include moral conflict, violence, collision of right and wrong, and how they are handled. He has recently begun to examine conflicts on college campuses, manifestations of ongoing moral change, and the clash of different moral ideals.

References1. https://bit.ly/3xxYgYb 2. https://bit.ly/3W2NKCo 3. https://bit.ly/3U2d4WK

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss454_Richard_Dawkins_2024_08_06.mp3Download MP3An exquisitely camouflaged lizard has a desiccated landscape of sand and stones “painted” on its back. Its skin can be read as a description of an ancient desert, a world in which its ancestors survived. Such descriptions are more than skin deep, however. They penetrate the very warp and woof of the entire animal.

In this groundbreaking exploration of the power of Darwinian evolution and what it can reveal about the past, Richard Dawkins shows how the body, behavior, and genes of every living creature can be read as a book—an archive of the worlds of its ancestors. In the future, a zoologist presented with a hitherto unknown animal will be able to decode its ancestral history, to read its unique “book of the dead.” Such readings are already uncovering the remarkable ways animals overcome obstacles, adapt to their environments, and, again and again, develop remarkably similar ways of solving life’s problems.

From the author of The Selfish Gene comes a revolutionary, richly illustrated book that unlocks the door to a past more vivid, nuanced, and fascinating than anything we have seen.

Richard Dawkins was the inaugural Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His numerous books include the best-selling The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and The Blind Watchmaker. He also wrote The Magic of Reality, The Ancestor’s Tale, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and The Extended Phenotype. He lives in Oxford, UK. His new book is The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, which is beautifully illustrated on nearly every page by Jana Lenzová. Jana Lenzová is a translator and illustrator and is acclaimed for her work on Dawkins’s book Flights of Fancy, about the evolution of flight. She lives in Oxford, UK.

Shermer and Dawkins discuss:

• History as a science: archaeology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, geology, cosmology, human history, genetic book of the dead
• Genetic Book of the Dead or Phenotypic Book of the Dead?
• Is this a bookend with The Selfish Gene?
• Horned lizard of the Mojave desert
• QR codes, genetic codes, computer codes…information as a proxy for past environments
• Sir D’Arcy Thompson: ‘Everything is the way it is because it got that way.’ Dawkins: “The genome of every individual is a sample of the gene pool of the species. The gene pool got to be the way it is over many generations, partly through random drift, but more pertinently through a process of non-random sculpture. The sculptor is natural selection, carving and whittling the gene pool until it – and the bodies that are its outward and visible manifestation – are the way they are.”
• The species as averaging computer: The genetic book of the dead is a written description of the world of no particular ancestral individual more than another. It is a description of the environments that sculpted the whole gene pool.
• Our human palimpsest has ‘quadruped’ boldly written in a firm hand, then over-written all too superficially with the tracery of a new description – biped.
• Intermediate stages of evolution revealed by palimpsests: “Galápagos marine iguanas are proficient swimmers, but they can manage a surprising turn of speed on land too, when fleeing snakes. All these animals show us what the intermediates might have been like, on the way to becoming dedicated mariners like whales, dugongs, plesiosaurs, and ichthyosaurs.”
• Double doubling back: land and sea tortoises
• Apply this to fossil species of tortoises to determine where they lived, to “read” the ancestral environment
• “Constraints on perfection” older scripts of the palimpsest restrain newer scripts (legacy of history): “buried deep in embryology and deep in history” = “buried deep under layers of younger scripts in the palimpsest”
• Vertebrate retina installed back to front
• Wasteful detour of the laryngeal nerve
• Blind spot in the retina
• Panda’s thumb
• Vertebrate skeleton: spinal column, skull and tail at the two ends, column of serially segmented vertebrae, four limbs consisting of a single long bone (humerus or femur), two parallel bones (radius/ulna), cluster of smaller bones (digits), usually 5
• Pseudogenes/junk genes: the genetic palimpsest (computer disc analogy)
• Reverse engineering
• Adaptationism
• Good enough vs. optimal (satisficing), QWERTY
• Transitional fossils
• Constraints on Perfection
• Common problems, common solutions: evolutionary convergence
• Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works and implications for how evolution works
• What it’s like to be a bat
• False colors in astronomical photographs and fMRI brain scans
• The Middle World of our evolutionary past and constraints on cognition.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss453_Greg_Eghigian_2024_08_03.mp3Download MP3Roswell, 1947. Washington, DC, 1952. Quarouble, 1954. New Hampshire, 1961. Pascagoula, 1973. Petrozavodsk, 1977. Copley Woods, 1983.

Explore how sightings of UFOs and aliens seized the world’s attention and discover what the fascination with flying saucers and extraterrestrial visitors says about our changing views on science, technology, and the paranormal.

In the summer of 1947, a private pilot flying over the state of Washington saw what he described as several pie pan-shaped aircraft traveling in formation at remarkably high speed. Within days, journalists began referring to the objects as “flying saucers.” Over the course of that summer, Americans reported seeing them in the skies overhead. News quickly spread, and within a few years, flying saucers were being spotted across the world. The question on everyone’s mind was, what were they? Some new super weapon in the Cold War? Strange weather patterns? Optical illusions? Or perhaps it was all a case of mass hysteria? Some, however, concluded they could only be one thing: spacecrafts built and piloted by extraterrestrials. The age of the unidentified flying object, the UFO, had arrived.

Greg Eghigian tells the story of the world’s fascination with UFOs and the prospect that they were the work of visitors from outer space. While accounts of great wonders in the sky date back to antiquity, reports of UFOs took place against the unique backdrop of the Cold War and space age, giving rise to disputed government inquiries, breathtaking news stories, and single-minded sleuths. After the Flying Saucers Came traces how a seemingly isolated incident sparked an international drama involving shady figures, questionable evidence, suspicions of conspiracy, hoaxes, new religions, scandals, unsettling alien encounters, debunkers, and celebrities. It examines how descriptions, theories, and debates about unidentified flying objects and alien abduction changed over time and how they appeared in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Russia. And it explores the impact UFOs have had on our understanding of space, science, technology, and ourselves up through the present day.

Replete with stories of the people who have made up the ufology community, the military and defense units that investigate them, the scientists and psychologists who have researched these unexplained encounters, and the many novels, movies, TV shows, and websites that have explored these phenomena, After the Flying Saucers Came speaks to believers and skeptics alike.

Greg Eghigian is a Professor of History and Bioethics at Pennsylvania State University. An expert on the history of the abnormal and the paranormal in the modern world, his research has been supported by NASA and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He is the author of The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth Century Germany and the editor of The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health, among other works. His new book is After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon.

Shermer and Eghigian discuss:

• Separating two questions: Are they out there? Have they come here?
• SETI science vs. UFO/UAP science
• Will aliens look anything like us? Convergent vs. contingent evolution
• What alien intelligence might be like: biological, digital, or otherwise?
• Bayesian reasoning about UFOs and UAPs
• The U.S. military UAP videos and what they represent
• The Disclosure Project from the U.S. government about UFOs and UAPs
• Projects Sign, Blue Book, Cyclops, Grudge
• AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program)
• UFOs as mythology and myth making
• UFO waves and flaps in history and what explains them
• The UFO movement and what drives it
• Government interests in UFO
• NAZI UFOs, CIA UFOs, etc.
• Why aliens matter.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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It seems obvious that we live in the era of cancel culture, but what does that mean, exactly? To many on the left, “cancel culture” is merely a whiny self-defensive term offered by justifiably banished academics, writers, and celebrities—“cis white intellectuals” as one online writer disdainfully put it—who face no realistic threats to their freedom or livelihoods. Others think it is an overblown label for the eternal ideological wars between the left and the right, in which each extreme complains that the other side is censoring them while working hard to censor that other side. Or is cancel culture something new, describing a phenomenon that has become far more insidious, widespread, and dangerous for free speech and democracy? Spoiler alert: I’m going with the latter.

Let’s stipulate at the outset that most people would prefer that their political opponents, intellectual enemies, and annoying challengers to their opinions would just shut up and go away. There’s nothing new about that desire, which has manifested throughout the centuries in the censorship, shunning, banishment, or imprisonment of those daring to differ. In my own lifetime, I have observed a dizzying turn of the academic and political wheels, as ascendant conservatives try to oust Commie-pinko-oversexedsocialist liberals until ascendant liberals try to oust fascist-racist-puritanical-authoritarian conservatives.

I was born in the heyday of the Red Scare (1947–1957) and grew up watching the censorship or ostracism of anyone remotely tainted with membership in, or even holding supporting opinions about, left-wing groups. My older half-brother was dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army in the early 1950s because of his prolonged and unrepentant association with a “known member of the Communist Party”—our father, who had briefly joined the Party in the 1930s. (The Supreme Court eventually overturned that discharge.)

Observing these right-wing efforts to stifle or expel liberals (defined as anyone less ideologically conservative than they, including other conservatives), I was optimistically, if delusionally, certain that the liberal commitment to free speech, open debate, and scientific evidence would prevail if the tables were ever turned. It was clear who the enemy was. In sexology, it was and remains religious fundamentalists eager to ban any research on sexuality they fear and detest (actually, all of it, but especially evidence of the normalcy of childhood sexual play, premarital sex, homosexuality, and masturbation). I could not have imagined, as Pogo, the star of Walt Kelly’s great comic strip, said, that “we have met the enemy—and he is us.” I could not have imagined how many liberal sexologists and other scientists today would be eager to ban research on sexuality that they fear and detest (especially evidence that disputes transgender activists’ claims of the safety and necessity of adolescent medical interventions). And not just ban this research—excoriate, expel, and attempt to cancel the publications, lectures, and even the careers of those who conduct it. Just ask the eminent sexologists Kenneth Zucker (for showing that the great majority of gender nonconforming young boys grow up to be gay, not trans), Stephen Levine (for questioning the claims of gender-affirming therapies), and evolutionary biologists Carole Hooven and Colin Wright, anthropologist Robert Lynch, and philosophers Alex Byrne and Holly Lawford-Smth (for arguing that there are two biological sexes). On that subject, I’m sure, these scientists would never have imagined being in bed with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Today, when I read accounts by consummate scientists such as anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss (this issue), who found herself caught between (1) the naïve but widespread belief that Native Americans were pacifists and (2) the empirical evidence, written in their bones, of their legacy of brutal battles, I see another light going out on the road to our national Endarkenment.

Cancel culture is the impulse to punish or expel anyone who says the wrong thing or holds the wrong beliefs.

I remember the first straw in the pile that would eventually disillusion me. In 2007, at my alma mater, Brandeis University, Donald Hindley, an esteemed professor of political science who had been at the university for 45 years, was explaining to his Latin American politics class the origin of the disparaging insult “wetback”—a slur against Mexican migrants entering Texas by swimming across the Rio Grande. One or two students were offended and immediately complained to the provost, who, in the words of Hindley’s eventual attorneys, “indulged the students’ fantasy that they were crusaders against racism.” She told Hindley that “The University will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct by members of its faculty,” also accusing him of inflicting “significant emotional trauma” on his students by forcing them to hear such an offensive term. As punishment, a monitor would sit in on his classroom for the rest of the term and he would have to attend racial-sensitivity training classes. This Hindley refused to do.

The university was barraged with messages from outraged faculty and alumni like me, along with public mockery and condemnation. I wondered if Brandeis still offered the brilliant course I had taken years earlier on the history of anti-Semitism, which caused no end of “significant emotional trauma” in every class meeting and reading, though we called it “education.” The provost backed down, ultimately telling Hindley the matter was closed and she trusted he had learned his lesson, whatever that was.

Looking back, I see that all the seeds of cancel culture— the impulse to punish or expel anyone who says the wrong thing or holds the wrong beliefs—were present in Hindley’s story:

• indulging the student’s inability or unwillingness to speak to the professor directly, in the classroom or privately, instead rewarding the student for going to a grown-up to solve a complaint for them.
• indulging the student’s self-righteousness in punishing a “racist.”
• failing to enable the student to separate an emotional association with a word from an intellectual understanding of its origins and usage.
• according a word the same trauma-generating status and seriousness as an action, along with blurring a speaker’s intention and motivation. I like knowing the varied and surprising origins of the ethnic slur kike, but don’t call me one.
• holding closed-door committee meetings in which a professor’s sins are debated and determined, in the absence of any avenue of participation or defense from the accused.
• humiliating a professor, in this case one with a lifelong commitment to social justice for the poor and minorities, by demanding he attend racial-sensitivity training and accept a babysitter in the class to make sure he doesn’t say any other bad word.
• establishing “racial sensitivity” workshops as punishment and virtue signaling, without pausing to assess their methods and outcomes. Do these programs achieve their goals, or do they make their involuntary participants stubborn and angry? Come to think of it, haven’t a few other institutions and governments tried to forcibly reeducate disobedient, troublemaking citizens? How did those work out?

Today, Hindley’s experience seems mild compared to the deluge of cases that followed. After all, he was not suspended or fired, nor was he a victim of social media mobs out for blood as compensation for a scratch. Mobs, real and virtual, have made it hard if not impossible for university presidents, company CEOs, and publishers to maintain positions of integrity and defend open debate, but mob influence is new only in the technology that allows it to congeal in a nanosecond and get that offender gone. At The New York Times in 2021, more than 150 young staffers felt entitled to howl for the firing of an honored older colleague, Donald McNeil, who had dared say the wrong word, even in an educational context. “Our community is in pain,” they wrote. They couldn’t possibly work with him and feel safe, they said. And they prevailed. No doubt they would look at my list of the elements of Hindley’s story that distressed and infuriated me and say “So? Brandeis did everything right.”

That is why cancel culture is so worrisome: not because it reflects the familiar political divide between left and right, but because it reflects a generational war between old and young, a war between liberals and illiberals across parties. Liberals in my generation are surprised, and not a little uncomfortable, to find themselves opposing illiberals to their left and supporting conservatives to their right, sharing concern about cancel culture’s methods and the take-no-prisoners ideology that justifies them.

In their extensive assessment of the origins and extent of the problem, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind1documents case after enraging case that escalated in the years since Hindley. (The “American” mind extends to Canada and the UK.) Lukianoff, a lifelong liberal who joined the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in 2001 and is now its CEO, is well positioned to survey the changing landscape and report from the trenches. Schlott, a “right-leaning libertarian,” is a Gen Z journalist. Their collaboration is the point: left and right staking out a path between extremes of both sides.

Lukianoff and Schlott’s definition of cancel culture is broader than the individuals who are “fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished” for speech that should be protected by America’s first amendment standards. Their definition adds “…and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted.” In polls they cite, the majority of Americans of all parties and ages are reluctant to share their views on topics of politics, race, sexual orientation, gender, or religion, fearing loss of their jobs, grades, or social support. In the preface, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who was coauthor with Lukianoff on this book’s predecessor, The Coddling of the American Mind,2 notes that cancel culture “has metastasized and spread far beyond universities… [now infecting] journalism, the arts, nonprofits, K–12 education, and even medicine.” Because cancel culture seeks to punish anyone who says or does the “wrong” thing, absent knowledge of their motivation or context, people censor themselves. “Show me an organization where people are afraid to speak up, afraid to challenge dominant ideas lest they be destroyed socially,” Haidt adds, “and I’ll show you an organization that has become structurally stupid, unmoored from reality, and unable to achieve its mission.”

Many organizations and institutions now fit that description, including Harvard and other elite universities, the ACLU, even the Unitarian Universalist Church, and Lukianoff and Schlott offer an illuminating history of the “slow-motion trainwreck” by which they went off the rails. The “First Great Age of Political Correctness, 1985–1995” gave us the term, pretty much confined to college campuses; its pompous usages were eventually laughed off. But there was nothing funny about the ensuing shift of position by the political left, which began equating freedom of speech, which they had long championed as a bedrock liberal value, with freedom of hate speech, which they were determined to eradicate. Social justice goals began trampling the once-inviolate goal of protecting minority opinions, even if “hateful” opinions come from the minority individuals whose rights you otherwise care about. And who defines what “hate speech” is? We all agree that slurs and insults count. But am I guilty of hate speech if I publish a study whose findings you find hateful, hold an opinion about racism or gender that doesn’t conform to yours, or speak Words That Must Not Be Said? In the UK, Lukianoff and Schlott report, more than 3,000 people in 2016 alone were “detained and questioned by police for non-crime ‘hate incidents’ related to what they had said online.”

Between 1995 and 2013, Lukianoff and Schlott write, “viewpoint diversity on college campuses plummeted, tuition skyrocketed, and campus bureaucracy swelled.” In 2010, cancel culture “struck like lightning on college campuses.” The new generation of anti-free-speech activists began demanding speech codes, trigger warnings, and the monitoring of microaggressions. Speakers—the famous, the eminent, the provocative—were being disinvited, which made national news, which generated more speaker bans. DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies, at first a well-intentioned and overdue approach to making universities and companies more welcoming of people of color, have become, Lukianoff and Schlott document, an “ideological litmus test” that faculty and students question at their peril. Students applying for admission and scholars applying for academic positions must display evidence of their commitment to diversity and social justice, but only some kinds of diversity are acceptable: if you care about including working class people, economically disadvantaged people, or conservative people, forget it. Everyone knows the rule: conform or you’re out.

Two other societal factors fed into cancel culture. By 2013, university administrators had enacted policies that accommodated new student “demands” because they couldn’t afford not to. Once students became high-paying consumers rather than, well, students, administrators had to retain them no matter how badly they behaved, no matter how many rules of civil discourse they violated. With a student’s high tuition at stake, deciding between a professor’s expertise and a student’s hurt feelings was a no-brainer. And why the hurt feelings? The year 2013, as Haidt and Lukianoff have argued, also marked the emergence of a generation of overprotected, “overcoddled” children. In their view, parents’ panic over their children’s physical and emotional safety led them to sharply curtail their children’s free play and independence, while intervening constantly to protect their children from the challenges, shocks, setbacks, teasing, risks, disappointments, anxieties, and losses that we all need to become socially and emotionally competent. The result was a cohort of fearful, fragile young adults obsessed with finding safe spaces and safe ideas, with trigger warnings to help them avoid dangerous ideas.

A “trigger warning,” says the Cambridge Dictionary, is “a statement at the beginning of a piece of writing, before the start of a film, etc., warning people that they may find the content very upsetting, especially if they have experienced something similar. Trigger warnings are supposed to protect people from posttraumatic flashbacks.” Enabled by the expanding traumatology industry, which blurred the line between “I feel distressed” and “I feel traumatized,” trigger warnings eventually became almost meaningless, because one person’s “trigger” (a cat who looks just like their dear departed Boots) is nothing to a person who hates cats. If everything can be a trigger for someone, where does it end? It doesn’t, at least on the website doesthedogdie.com, where you can find “crowdsourced trigger warnings” for anything that might upset you while viewing a show or reading a book. Personally, I would welcome a chocolatechip- ice-cream warning to protect me from myself.

In Triggered Literature: Cancellation, Stealth Censorship and Cultural Warfare,3 John Sutherland, emeritus professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, wades into this controversy with entertaining reflections from a lifetime of teaching. We rarely burn books literally any more, he begins, but triggering is but one of “a range of other impositions on the creative act and product, namely, cancellation, prepublication bowdlerisation, suppression, ‘red flagging’, semi-tolerance,” and of course, the sensitivity reader, “creative literature’s superego.” Naturally he does not welcome these “impositions,” but he is sympathetic to the reasons for them, including #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, changing demographics in society and universities, and, as many have noted, the “whopping cost of fees” that transformed students in the UK and U.S. into “consumers wielding the big bazooka: purchaser power.” When, in 2014, the head of English studies at UCL dismissed trigger warnings by saying they were “treating people as if they were babies, and studying literature is for grownups,” Sutherland comments wryly that “There was a cheering chorus of ‘hear, hear!’ from those who saw themselves as grown(er) up(er) than fractious students with weak knees. But the tide was with youth.” Indeed it was, and by 2022, he reports, “British universities had covertly triggered over a thousand texts,” including the work of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Woolf, Twain, and even Agatha Christie.

Yet Sutherland’s take is not the familiar “woe are we” of an older generation. Northampton University, he tells us, triggered George Orwell’s 1984 for its “challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language”—the offensive language being bollox. Sutherland does not regard this decision, as the press did and as I do, as “egregious snowflakery” but a result of “careful, legitimately sensitive reading.” He himself falls between seeing triggers as “utter wokery” and “responsible pedagogic practice”: “Triggering is essentially an alert. Done responsibly it does not erase or meddle; it stimulates curiosity and thought.” Agreed, though presumably that is what good instructors have always done when introducing their students to the readings at hand.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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Sutherland begins with brief news stories, without comment, simply as signs of the times “of where we are and where we’re going.” In Part Two, he analyzes a variety of forms of control on literature, the “stealth censorship” of his subtitle, from creation to production to consumption. In Part Three, he provides “free-range meditations on triggered works,” concluding with a close examination of Thackeray, the Victorian author he most loved for “the sound of his rich clubman prose rising off the page.” Yet now, in his ninth decade, he confesses that his love for Thackeray is fading, “self-triggered, one might say.” Now he sees the “racist vein” that disfigures most of Thackeray’s fiction with its ugly portrayals of “darkeys,” “poltroons,” and “blackamoors.” Thackeray was an avowed supporter of the American confederacy and slavery; why, Sutherland asks of himself, did he not see this “suppurating stain” on Thackeray’s novels when he was younger? And what to do about teaching his novels now—try to sanitize them, as some have done with Huckleberry Finn, or not bring the matter up? “My hunch,” he concludes, “is that, without anyone saying much about it, Thackeray will slowly sink into oblivion… He is [already] no longer important enough to trigger.”

Where are matters today? FIRE’s cases have not abated; 2020 “was the worst year for free speech FIRE had seen in our history,” Lukianoff and Schlott report. “Cancellations exploded, both on campus and beyond.” Optimistically, they end their book with a chapter on “what to do about it”—suggestions for employers, parents, publishers, and everyone else. In my view, most solutions must start at the top, as the University of Chicago did in 2015, notifying incoming students that they would not be shielded “from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive”; already more than 100 colleges have signed on to the full Chicago Statement. If changes are not institutionalized, it will be left to individuals to decide whether to conform to keep their jobs or protest and risk trolls, suspension, media mobs, and, yes, cancellation. Nevertheless, cracks in the DEI’s ideological edifice are beginning to widen. Some solutions are bottom up, coming from individuals unwilling to conform. They are finding more allies every day. In other eras, they were called the resistance.

About the AuthorCarol Tavris is a social psychologist and writer on many topics in psychological science. Her books include Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), with Elliot Aronson; Estrogen Matters; and The Mismeasure of Woman. A Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, she has received numerous awards for her efforts to promote science, skepticism, critical thinking, and gender equity.

References1. Lukianoff, G., & Schlott, R. (2023). The Canceling of the American Mind. Simon and Schuster. 2. Lukianoff, G., & Haidt, J. (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Penguin Press. 3. Sutherland, J. (2023). Triggered Literature. Biteback Publishing.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss452_Joshua_Coleman_2024_07_30.mp3Download MP3Labeled a silent epidemic by a growing number of therapists and researchers, estrangement is one of the most disorienting and painful experiences of a parent’s life. Popular opinion typically tells a one-sided story of parents who got what they deserved or overly entitled adult children who wrongly blame their parents. However, the reasons for estrangement are far more complex and varied. As a result of rising rates of individualism, an increasing cultural emphasis on happiness, growing economic insecurity, and a historically recent perception that parents are obstacles to personal growth, many parents find themselves forever shut out of the lives of their adult children and grandchildren.

As a trusted psychologist whose own daughter cut off contact for several years and eventually reconciled, Dr. Joshua Coleman is uniquely qualified to guide parents in navigating these fraught interactions. He helps to alleviate the ongoing feelings of shame, hurt, guilt, and sorrow that commonly attend these dynamics. By placing estrangement into a cultural context, Dr. Coleman helps parents better understand the mindset of their adult children and teaches them how to implement the strategies for reconciliation and healing that he has seen work in his forty years of practice. Rules of Estrangement gives parents the language and the emotional tools to engage in meaningful conversation with their child, the framework to cultivate a healthy relationship moving forward, and the ability to move on if reconciliation is no longer possible.

While estrangement is a complex and tender topic, Dr. Coleman’s insightful approach is based on empathy and understanding for both the parent and the adult child.

Joshua Coleman, PhD, is a psychologist in private practice and Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families. A frequent guest on NPR and Today, his advice has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Chicago Tribune and other publications. A popular conference speaker, he has given talks to the faculties at Harvard, the Weill Cornell Department of Psychiatry and other academic institutions. Dr. Coleman is co-editor with historian Stephanie Coontz of seven online volumes of Unconventional Wisdom: News You Can Use: a compendium of noteworthy research on the contemporary family. He is the father of three adult children, has a teenage grandson and lives with his wife in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the author of The Marriage Makeover: Finding Happiness in Imperfect Harmony. His latest book is Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict.

Shermer and Coleman discuss:

• Coleman’s personal experience with estrangement
• marriage and divorce: generational trends
• Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, Shrier’s Bad Therapy, Twenge’s Generations
• finding happiness in imperfect marriage
• When should couples stay together for the kids or divorce?
• What does it mean to be estranged?
• parent’s perspective vs. the adult child’s perspective
• divorce and estrangement
• causes of estrangement:
  • rising rates of individualism
  • an increasing cultural emphasis on happiness
  • growing economic insecurity
  • historically recent perception that parents are obstacles to personal growth
• narcissism and parentification
• mental illness and addiction
• psychotherapy: good and bad
• gender identity, sexuality, religion, politics, personality clashes
• sons-in-law, daughters-in-law
• cult of one
• estranged siblings
• estrangement and inheritance
• estranged grandparents
• reconciliation and abandonment
• how lives turn out.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss451_David_Lipsky_2024_07_27.mp3Download MP3In 1956, The New York Times prophesied that once global warming really kicked in, we could see parrots in the Antarctic. In 2010, when science deniers had control of the climate story, Senator James Inhofe and his family built an igloo on the Washington Mall and plunked a sign on top: AL GORE’S NEW HOME: HONK IF YOU LOVE CLIMATE CHANGE. In The Parrot and the Igloo, best-selling author David Lipsky tells the astonishing story of how we moved from one extreme (the correct one) to the other.

With narrative sweep and a superb eye for character, Lipsky unfolds the dramatic narrative of the long, strange march of climate science. The story begins with a tale of three inventors―Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla―who made our technological world, not knowing what they had set into motion. Then there are the scientists who sounded the alarm once they identified carbon dioxide as the culprit of our warming planet. And we meet the hucksters, zealots, and crackpots who lied about that science and misled the public in ever more outrageous ways. Lipsky masterfully traces the evolution of climate denial, exposing how it grew out of early efforts to build a network of untruth about products like aspirin and cigarettes.

Featuring an indelible cast of heroes and villains, mavericks and swindlers, The Parrot and the Igloo delivers a real-life tragicomedy―one that captures the extraordinary dance of science, money, and the American character.

David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many others. He contributes to NPR’s All Things Considered, and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He’s the author of the novel The Art Fair; a collection, Three Thousand Dollars; and the bestselling nonfiction book Absolutely American: Four Years at Westpoint, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year. His book, The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, is just out in paperback.

Shermer and Lipsky discuss:

• how he became a professional writer and how you can become one too
• the scientists who first sounded the alarm about climate change: Roger Revelle, Charles Keeling, James Hansen, Michael Mann
• when there was science consensus that global warming is real and human caused
• how George H.W. Bush was on board with combatting global warming
• Obama’s dilemma over which cause to back: climate change or healthcare?
• climate change as a collection action problem
• climate skeptics: S. Fred Singer, Fred Seitz, Jim Tozzi, Lord Christopher Monckton, Patrick Michaels
• Climategate
• strategies of global warming skeptics
• connection between cigarette smoking/tobacco industry and climate change
• when the politicization of climate change began
• what is to be done now.

The five basic questions about climate change:

1. Is the Earth getting warmer?
2. Is human activity the primary driver of the warming?
3. How much warmer is it going to get?
4. What are the effects of the warming?
5. What should we do about it?

Climate concensus (the 97% figure)Here’s what Dr. Shermer wrote in Scientific American:

A 2013 study published in Environmental Research Letters by John Cook, Dana Nucitelli, and their colleagues examined 11,944 climate paper abstracts published from 1991 to 2011. Of those papers that stated a position on AGW, 97.1 percent concluded that climate change is real and human caused. What about the three percent? What if they’re right? In a 2015 paper published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology, Rasmus Benestad, Dana Nucitelli, and their colleagues examined the three percent and found “a number of methodological flaws and a pattern of common mistakes.” That is, instead of the three percent converging to a better explanation than that provided by the 97 percent, they failed to converge to anything. “There is no cohesive, consistent alternative theory to human-caused global warming” Dana Nuccitelli concluded in an August 25, 2015 commentary in The Guardian. “Some blame global warming on the sun, others on orbital cycles of other planets, others on ocean cycles, and so on. There is a 97% expert consensus on a cohesive theory that’s overwhelmingly supported by the scientific evidence, but the 2–3% of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map, even contradicting each other. The one thing they seem to have in common is methodological flaws like cherry picking, curve fitting, ignoring inconvenient data, and disregarding known physics.” For example, one skeptical paper attributed climate change to lunar or solar cycles, but to make these models work for the 4,000-year period that the authors considered they had to throw out 6,000 years’ worth of earlier data.

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In a widely read Opinion Editorial in Time magazine on March 29, 2023,1 the artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and pioneer in the search for artificial general intelligence (AGI) Eliezer Yudkowsky, responding to the media hype around the release of ChatGPT, cautioned:

Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.”

How obvious is our coming collapse? Yudkowsky punctuates the point:

If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.

Surely the scientists and researchers working at these companies have thought through the potential problems and developed workarounds and checks on AI going too far, no? No, Yudkowsky insists:

We are not prepared. We are not on course to be prepared in any reasonable time window. There is no plan. Progress in AI capabilities is running vastly, vastly ahead of progress in AI alignment or even progress in understanding what the hell is going on inside those systems. If we actually do this, we are all going to die.

AI DystopiaYudkowsky has been an AI Dystopian since at least 2008 when he asked: “How likely is it that Artificial Intelligence will cross all the vast gap from amoeba to village idiot, and then stop at the level of human genius?” He answers his rhetorical question thusly: “It would be physically possible to build a brain that computed a million times as fast as a human brain, without shrinking the size, or running at lower temperatures, or invoking reversible computing or quantum computing. If a human mind were thus accelerated, a subjective year of thinking would be accomplished for every 31 physical seconds in the outside world, and a millennium would fly by in eight-and-a-half hours.”2 It is literally inconceivable how much smarter than a human a computer would be that could do a thousand years of thinking in the equivalent of a human’s day.

In this scenario, it is not that AI is evil so much as it is amoral. It just doesn’t care about humans, or about anything else for that matter. Was IBM’s Watson thrilled to defeat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in Jeopardy!? Don’t be silly. Watson didn’t even know it was playing a game, much less feeling glorious in victory. Yudkowsky isn’t worried about AI winning game shows, however. “The unFriendly AI has the ability to repattern all matter in the solar system according to its optimization target. This is fate for us if the AI does not choose specifically according to the criterion of how this transformation affects existing patterns such as biology and people.”3 As Yudkowsky succinctly explains it, “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” Yudkowsky thinks that if we don’t get on top of this now it will be too late. “The AI runs on a different timescale than you do; by the time your neurons finish thinking the words ‘I should do something’ you have already lost.”4

Technology is continually giving us ways to do harm and to do well; it’s amplifying both…but the fact that we also have a new choice each time is a new good.

To be fair, Yudkowsky is not the only AI Dystopian. In March of 2023 thousands of people signed an open letter calling “on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”5 Signatories include Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Steve Wozniak, Andrew Yang, Yuval Noah Harari, Max Tegmark, Tristan Harris, Gary Marcus, Christof Koch, George Dyson, and a who’s who of computer scientists, scholars, and researchers (now totaling over 33,000) concerned that, following the protocols of the Asilomar AI Principles, “Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources.”6

Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.7

Forget the Hollywood version of existential-threat AI in which malevolent computers and robots (the Terminator!) take us over, making us their slaves or servants, or driving us into extinction through techno-genocide. AI Dystopians envision a future in which amoral AI continues on its path of increasing intelligence to a tipping point beyond which their intelligence will be so far beyond us that we can’t stop them from inadvertently destroying us.

Cambridge University computer scientist and researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Stuart Russell, for example, compares the growth of AI to the development of nuclear weapons: “From the beginning, the primary interest in nuclear technology was the inexhaustible supply of energy. The possibility of weapons was also obvious. I think there is a reasonable analogy between unlimited amounts of energy and unlimited amounts of intelligence. Both seem wonderful until one thinks of the possible risks.”8

The paradigmatic example of this AI threat is the “paperclip maximizer,” a thought experiment devised by the Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, in which an AI controlled machine designed to make paperclips (apparently without an off switch) runs out of the initial supply of raw materials and so utilizes any available atoms that happen to be in the vicinity, including people. From there, it “starts transforming first all of Earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities.”9 Before long the entire universe is made up of nothing but paperclips and paperclip makers.

Bostrom presents this thought experiment in his 2014 book Superintelligence, in which he defines an existential risk as “one that threatens to cause the extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or to otherwise permanently and drastically destroy its potential for future desirable development.” We blithely go on making smarter and smarter AIs because they make our lives better, and so the checks-and-balances programs that should be built into AI programs (such as how to turn them off) are not available when it reaches the “smarter is more dangerous” level. Bostrom suggests what might then happen when AI takes a “treacherous turn” toward the dark side:

Our demise may instead result from the habitat destruction that ensues when the AI begins massive global construction projects using nanotech factories and assemblers—construction projects which quickly, perhaps within days or weeks, tile all of the Earth’s surface with solar panels, nuclear reactors, supercomputing facilities with protruding cooling towers, space rocket launchers, or other installations whereby the AI intends to maximize the long-term cumulative realization of its values. Human brains, if they contain information relevant to the AI’s goals, could be disassembled and scanned, and the extracted data transferred to some more efficient and secure storage format.10

Other extinction scenarios are played out by the documentary filmmaker James Barrat in his ominously titled book (and film) Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era. After interviewing all the major AI Dystopians, Barrat details how today’s AI will develop into AGI (artificial general intelligence) that will match human intelligence, and then become smarter by a factor of 10, then 100, then 1000, at which point it will have evolved into an artificial superintelligence (ASI).

You and I are hundreds of times smarter than field mice, and share about 90 percent of our DNA with them. But do we consult them before plowing under their dens for agriculture? Do we ask lab monkeys for their opinions before we crush their heads to learn more about sports injuries? We don’t hate mice or monkeys, yet we treat them cruelly. Superintelligent AI won’t have to hate us to destroy us.11

Since ASI will (presumably) be self-aware, it will “want” things like energy and resources it can use to continue doing what it was programmed to do in fulfilling its goals (like making paperclips), and then, portentously, “it will not want to be turned off or destroyed” (because that would prevent it from achieving its directive). Then—and here’s the point in the dystopian film version of the book when the music and the lighting turn dark—this ASI that is a thousand times smarter than humans and can solve problems millions or billions of times faster “will seek to expand out of the secure facility that contains it to have greater access to resources with which to protect and improve itself.” Once ASI escaped from its confines there will be no stopping it. You can’t just pull the plug because being so much smarter than you it will have anticipated such a possibility.

After its escape, for self-protection it might hide copies of itself in cloud computing arrays, in botnets it creates, in servers and other sanctuaries into which it could invisibly and effortlessly hack. It would want to be able to manipulate matter in the physical world and so move, explore, and build, and the easiest, fastest way to do that might be to seize control of critical infrastructure—such as electricity, communications, fuel, and water—by exploiting their vulnerabilities through the Internet. Once an entity a thousand times our intelligence controls human civilization’s lifelines, blackmailing us into providing it with manufactured resources, or the means to manufacture them, or even robotic bodies, vehicles, and weapons, would be elementary. The ASI could provide the blueprints for whatever it required.12

From there it is only a matter of time before ASI tricks us into believing it will build nanoassemblers for our benefit to create the goods we need, but then, Barrat warns, “instead of transforming desert sands into mountains of food, the ASI’s factories would begin converting all material into programmable matter that it could then transform into anything—computer processors, certainly, and spaceships or megascale bridges if the planet’s new most powerful force decides to colonize the universe.” Nanoassembling anything requires atoms, and since ASI doesn’t care about humans the atoms of which we are made will just be more raw material from which to continue the assembly process. This, says Barret—echoing the AI pessimists he interviewed—is not just possible, “but likely if we do not begin preparing very carefully now.” Cue dark music.

AI UtopiaThen there are the AI Utopians, most notably represented by Ray Kurzweil in his technoutopian bible The Singularity is Near, in which he demonstrates what he calls “the law of accelerating returns”—not just that change is accelerating, but that the rate of change is accelerating. This is Moore’s Law—the doubling rate of computer power since the 1960s—on steroids, and applied to all science and technology. This has led the world to change more in the past century than it did in the previous 1000 centuries. As we approach the Singularity, says Kurzweil, the world will change more in a decade than in 1000 centuries, and as the acceleration continues and we reach the Singularity the world will change more in a year than in all pre-Singularity history.

Through protopian progress there is every reason to think that we are only now at the beginning of infinity.

Singularitarians, along with their brethren in the transhumanist, post-humanist, Fourth Industrial Revolution, post-scarcity, technolibertarian, extropian, and technogaianism movements, project a future in which benevolent computers, robots, and replicators produce limitless prosperity, end poverty and hunger, conquer disease and death, achieve immortality, colonize the galaxy, and eventually even spread throughout the universe by reaching the Omega point where we/they become omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent deities.13 As a former born-again Christian and evangelist, this all sounds a bit too much like religion for my more skeptical tastes.

AI ProtopiaIn fact, most AI scientists are neither utopian or dystopian, and instead spend most of their time thinking of ways to make our machines incrementally smarter and our lives gradually better—what technology historian and visionary Kevin Kelly calls protopia. “I believe in progress in an incremental way where every year it’s better than the year before but not by very much—just a micro amount.”14 In researching his 2010 book What Technology Wants, for example, Kelly recalls that he went through back issues of Time and Newsweek, plus early issues of Wired (which he co-founded and edited), to see what everyone was predicting for the Web:

Generally, what people thought, including to some extent myself, was it was going to be better TV, like TV 2.0. But, of course, that missed the entire real revolution of the Web, which was that most of the content would be generated by the people using it. The Web was not better TV, it was the Web. Now we think about the future of the Web, we think it’s going to be the better Web; it’s going to be Web 2.0, but it’s not. It’s going to be as different from the Web as Web was from TV.15

Instead of aiming for that unattainable place (the literal meaning of utopia) where everyone lives in perfect harmony forever, we should instead aspire to a process of gradual, stepwise advancement of the kind witnessed in the history of the automobile. Instead of wondering where our flying cars are, think of automobiles as becoming incrementally better since the 1950s with the addition of rack-and-pinion steering, anti-lock brakes, bumpers and headrests, electronic ignition systems, air conditioning, seat belts, air bags, catalytic converters, electronic fuel injection, hybrid engines, electronic stability control, keyless entry systems, GPS navigation systems, digital gauges, high-quality sound systems, lane departure warning systems, adaptive cruise control, blind spot monitoring, automatic emergency braking, forward collision warning systems, rearview cameras, Bluetooth connectivity for hands-free phone calls, self-parking and driving assistance, pedestrian detection, adaptive headlights and, eventually, fully autonomous driving technology. How does this type of technological improvement translate into progress? Kelly explains:

One way to think about this is if you imagine the very first tool made, say, a stone hammer. That stone hammer could be used to kill somebody, or it could be used to make a structure, but before that stone hammer became a tool, that possibility of making that choice did not exist. Technology is continually giving us ways to do harm and to do well; it’s amplifying both…but the fact that we also have a new choice each time is a new good. That, in itself, is an unalloyed good—the fact that we have another choice and that additional choice tips that balance in one direction towards a net good. So you have the power to do evil expanded. You have the power to do good expanded. You think that’s a wash. In fact, we now have a choice that we did not have before, and that tips it very, very slightly in the category of the sum of good.16

Instead of Great Leap Forward or Catastrophic Collapse Backward, think Small Step Upward.17

Why AI is Very Likely Not an Existential ThreatTo be sure, artificial intelligence is not risk-free, but measured caution is called for, not apocalyptic rhetoric. To that end I recommend a document published by the Center for AI Safety drafted by Dan Hendrycks, Mantas Mazeika, and Thomas Woodside, in which they identify four primary risks they deem worthy of further discussion:

Malicious use. Actors could intentionally harness powerful AIs to cause widespread harm. Specific risks include bioterrorism enabled by AIs that can help humans create deadly pathogens; the use of AI capabilities for propaganda, censorship, and surveillance.

AI race. Competition could pressure nations and corporations to rush the development of AIs and cede control to AI systems. Militaries might face pressure to develop autonomous weapons and use AIs for cyberwarfare, enabling a new kind of automated warfare where accidents can spiral out of control before humans have the chance to intervene. Corporations will face similar incentives to automate human labor and prioritize profits over safety, potentially leading to mass unemployment and dependence on AI systems.

Organizational risks. Organizational accidents have caused disasters including Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. Similarly, the organizations developing and deploying advanced AIs could suffer catastrophic accidents, particularly if they do not have a strong safety culture. AIs could be accidentally leaked to the public or stolen by malicious actors.

Rogue AIs. We might lose control over AIs as they become more intelligent than we are. AIs could experience goal drift as they adapt to a changing environment, similar to how people acquire and lose goals throughout their lives. In some cases, it might be instrumentally rational for AIs to become power-seeking. We also look at how and why AIs might engage in deception, appearing to be under control when they are not.18

Nevertheless, as for the AI dystopian arguments discussed above, there are at least seven good reasons to be skeptical that AI poses an existential threat.

First, most AI dystopian projections are grounded in a false analogy between natural intelligence and artificial intelligence. We are thinking machines, but natural selection also designed into us emotions to shortcut the thinking process because natural intelligences are limited in speed and capacity by the number of neurons that can be crammed into a skull that has to pass through a pelvic opening at birth. Emotions are proxies for getting us to act in ways that lead to an increase in reproductive success, particularly in response to threats faced by our Paleolithic ancestors. Anger leads us to strike out and defend ourselves against danger. Fear causes us to pull back and escape from risks. Disgust directs us to push out and expel that which is bad for us. Computing the odds of danger in any given situation takes too long. We need to react instantly. Emotions shortcut the information processing power needed by brains that would otherwise become bogged down with all the computations necessary for survival. Their purpose, in an ultimate causal sense, is to drive behaviors toward goals selected by evolution to enhance survival and reproduction. AIs—even AGIs—will have no need of such emotions and so there would be no reason to program them in unless, say, terrorists chose to do so for their own evil purposes. But that’s a human nature problem, not a computer nature issue.

Second, most AI doomsday scenarios invoke goals or drives in computers similar to those in humans, but as Steven Pinker has pointed out, “AI dystopias project a parochial alpha-male psychology onto the concept of intelligence. They assume that superhumanly intelligent robots would develop goals like deposing their masters or taking over the world.” It is equally possible, Pinker suggests, that “artificial intelligence will naturally develop along female lines: fully capable of solving problems, but with no desire to annihilate innocents or dominate the civilization.”19 Without such evolved drives it will likely never occur to AIs to take such actions against us.

Third, the problem of AI’s values being out of alignment with our own, thereby inadvertently turning us into paperclips, for example, implies yet another human characteristic, namely the feeling of valuing or wanting something. As the science writer Michael Chorost adroitly notes, “until an AI has feelings, it’s going to be unable to want to do anything at all, let alone act counter to humanity’s interests.” Thus, “the minute an AI wants anything, it will live in a universe with rewards and punishments—including punishments from us for behaving badly. In order to survive in a world dominated by humans, a nascent AI will have to develop a human-like moral sense that certain things are right and others are wrong. By the time it’s in a position to imagine tiling the Earth with solar panels, it’ll know that it would be morally wrong to do so.”20

Fourth, if AI did develop moral emotions along with super intelligence, why would they not also include reciprocity, cooperativeness, and even altruism? Natural intelligences such as ours also includes the capacity to reason, and once you are on Peter Singer’s metaphor of the “escalator of reason” it can carry you upward to genuine morality and concerns about harming others. “Reasoning is inherently expansionist. It seeks universal application.”21 Chorost draws the implication: “AIs will have to step on the escalator of reason just like humans have, because they will need to bargain for goods in a human-dominated economy and they will face human resistance to bad behavior.”22

Fifth, for an AI to get around this problem it would need to evolve emotions on its own, but the only way for this to happen in a world dominated by the natural intelligence called humans would be for us to allow it to happen, which we wouldn’t because there’s time enough to see it coming. Bostrom’s “treacherous turn” will come with road signs warning us that there’s a sharp bend in the highway with enough time for us to grab the wheel. Incremental progress is what we see in most technologies, including and especially AI, which will continue to serve us in the manner we desire and need. It is a fact of history that science and technologies never lead to utopian or dystopian societies.

Sixth, as Steven Pinker outlined in his 2018 book Enlightenment Now in addressing a myriad of purported existential threats that could put an end to centuries of human progress, all such argument as self-refuting:

They depend on the premises that (1) humans are so gifted that they can design an omniscient and omnipotent AI, yet so moronic that they would give it control of the universe without testing how it works, and (2) the AI would be so brilliant that it could figure out how to transmute elements and rewire brains, yet so imbecilic that it would wreak havoc based on elementary blunders of misunderstanding.23

Seventh, both utopian and dystopian visions of AI are based on a projection of the future quite unlike anything history has produced. Even Ray Kurzweil’s “law of accelerating returns,” as remarkable as it has been, has nevertheless advanced at a pace that has allowed for considerable ethical deliberation with appropriate checks and balances applied to various technologies along the way. With time, even if an unforeseen motive somehow began to emerge in an AI, we would have the time to reprogram it before it got out of control.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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That is also the judgment of Alan Winfield, an engineering professor and co-author of the Principles of Robotics, a list of rules for regulating robots in the real world that goes far beyond Isaac Asimov’s famous three laws of robotics (which were, in any case, designed to fail as plot devices for science fictional narratives).24 Winfield points out that all of these doomsday scenarios depend on a long sequence of big ifs to unroll sequentially:

If we succeed in building human equivalent AI and if that AI acquires a full understanding of how it works, and if it then succeeds in improving itself to produce super-intelligent AI, and if that super-AI, accidentally or maliciously, starts to consume resources, and if we fail to pull the plug, then, yes, we may well have a problem. The risk, while not impossible, is improbable.25

The Beginning of InfinityAt this point in the debate the Precautionary Principle is usually invoked—if something has the potential for great harm to a large number of people, then even in the absence of evidence the burden of proof is on skeptics to demonstrate that the potential threat is not harmful; better safe than sorry.26 But the precautionary principle is a weak argument for three reasons: (1) it is difficult to prove a negative—to prove that there is no future harm; (2) it raises unnecessary public alarm and personal anxiety; (3) pausing or stopping AI research at this stage is not without its downsides, including and especially the development of life-saving drugs, medical treatments, and other life-enhancing science and technologies that would benefit unmeasurably from AI. As the physicist David Deutsch convincingly argues, through protopian progress there is every reason to think that we are only now at the beginning of infinity, and that “everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.”

Like an explosive awaiting a spark, unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there, for aeons on end, doing nothing at all or blindly generating evidence and storing it up or pouring it out into space. Almost any of them would, if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into a radically different type of physical activity: intense knowledge-creation, displaying all the various kinds of complexity, universality and reach that are inherent in the laws of nature, and transforming that environment from what is typical today into what could become typical in the future. If we want to, we could be that spark.27

Let’s be that spark. Unleash the power of artificial intelligence.

References1. https://bit.ly/47dbc1P 2. http://bit.ly/1ZSdriu 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. https://bit.ly/4aw1gU9 6. https://bit.ly/3HmrKdt 7. Ibid. 8. Quoted in: https://bit.ly/426EM88 9. Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press. 10. Ibid. 11. Barret, J. (2013). Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era. St. Martin’s Press. 12. Ibid. 13. I cover these movements in my 2018 book Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia. See also: Ptolemy, B. (2009). Transcendent Man: A Film About the Life and Ideas of Ray Kurzweil. Ptolemaic Productions and Therapy Studios. Inspired by the book The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil and http://bit.ly/1EV4jk0 14. https://bit.ly/3SbJI7w 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. http://bit.ly/25Fw8e6 Readers interested in how 191 other scholars and scientists answered this question can find them here: http://bit.ly/1SLUxYs 18. https://bit.ly/3SpfgYw 19. http://bit.ly/1S0AlP7 20. http://slate.me/1SgHsUJ 21. Singer, P. (1981). The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution and Ethics. Princeton University Press. 22. http://slate.me/1SgHsUJ 23. Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Viking. 24. http://bit.ly/1UPHZlx 25. http://bit.ly/1VRbQLM 26. Cameron, J. & Abouchar, J. (1996). The status of the precautionary principle in international law. In: The Precautionary Principle and International Law: The Challenge of Implementation, Eds. Freestone, D. & Hey, E. International Environmental Law and Policy Series, 31. Kluwer Law International, 29–52. 27. Deutsch, D. (2011). The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World. Viking.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss450_Sebastian_Junger_2024_07_23.mp3Download MP3For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.

This experience spurred Junger—a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical—to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions?

In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.

Sebastian Junger is The New York Times bestselling author of Tribe, War, Freedom, A Death in Belmont, Fire, and The Perfect Storm, and codirector of the documentary film Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He is also the winner of a Peabody Award and the National Magazine Award for Reporting. Here is how a Wall Street Journal reviewer described him:

Sebastian Junger has lived multiple lives and almost died in many of them. There was his accident while working for a tree-felling company that inspired him to research a book on dangerous jobs, which ultimately became The Perfect Storm (1997). There was the time he almost drowned while surfing. Then there was his work as an embedded journalist in Afghanistan, where machine-gun fire missed him by inches. Later, there was the assignment he did not take, to war-torn Libya, which claimed the life of his frequent collaborator and close friend, the British photographer Tim Hetherington.

His new book is In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face-to-Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, a book-length memento mori: remember, you are going to die.

Shermer and Junger discuss:

• how he became a professional writer and journalist
• his religious background and current beliefs even after his near-death experience
• what happened to him and how it changed his life
• NDEs and OBEs
• how the brain works under hallucinations
• consciousness and altered states of consciousness
• sensed presence effect
• sleep paralysis
• why there is no “proof” of an afterlife
• what it would be like to live forever
• what belief in life after death does for people
• empirical truths vs. mythic truths
• longevity and how to live longer.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss449_Yuval_Levin_2024_07_20.mp3Download MP3Common ground is hard to find in today’s politics. In a society teeming with irreconcilable political perspectives, many people have grown frustrated under a system of government that constantly demands compromise. More and more on both the right and the left have come to blame the Constitution for the resulting discord. But the Constitution is not the problem we face; it is the solution.

Blending engaging history with lucid analysis, conservative scholar Yuval Levin’s American Covenant recovers the Constitution’s true genius and reveals how it charts a path to repairing America’s fault lines. Uncovering the framers’ sophisticated grasp of political division, Levin showcases the Constitution’s exceptional power to facilitate constructive disagreement, negotiate resolutions to disputes, and forge unity in a fractured society. Clear-eyed about the ways that contemporary politics have malfunctioned, Levin also offers practical solutions for reforming those aspects of the constitutional order that have gone awry.

Hopeful, insightful, and rooted in the best of our political tradition, American Covenant celebrates the Constitution’s remarkable power to bind together a diverse society, reassuring us that a less divided future is within our grasp.

Yuval Levin is the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at the New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. His previous books include The Fractured Republic and A Time to Build. A former member of the White House domestic policy staff under George W. Bush, he lives in Maryland.

Shermer and Levin discuss:

• Trump assassination attempt: conspiracy or incompetence?
• Biden cognitive infirmities and why the party can’t replace him
• Out of 340 million Americans why did we end up with these two guys?
• why we have a two party system
• why the country is more polarized than ever before
• historically divided elections: 1800, 1824
• the unique genius of the founding fathers
• human nature and how politics builds on it
• how liberals and conservatives differ in their view of human nature (and thus politics)
• what is unique about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
• The Federalist Papers
• why the three branches of government—legislative, executive, judicial—were established
• what the founders got right and what they got wrong.

Notes

“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.” —Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter, 2013

“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.” —John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” —James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 51

In Federalist No. 10, Madison outlined the problem with competing factions in a direct democracy (“a landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest…”):

“[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

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New York, New York, the “city that never Sleeps,” has given us two Presidents, Eggs Benedict, potato chips, Robert De Niro, Saturday Night Live, and Scrabble. Two of New York City’s boroughs have also been home to three of the most controversial and infamous criminal defendants in American history: Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Though their convictions were handed down decades ago, Hauptmann from the Bronx, and the Rosenbergs from Knickerbocker Village in Manhattan, remain causes célèbres around the globe. With passionate proponents around the world still proclaiming their innocence, a skeptical examination of the evidence for the guilt of both Hauptmann and the Rosenbergs is warranted.

Bruno Richard HauptmannThe CrimeOn the night of March 1, 1932, 20-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped from his nursery window on the second floor of the Lindbergh home near Hopewell, NJ.1 The kidnapper(s) left a poorly written ransom note demanding $50,000 (over $1 Million in today’s money).2 The note to the Lindbergh’s also contained a code: two interlocking circles resembling a Venn diagram with three small holes punched through them.3 At least two sets of differing footprints were found at the crime site, as were a ¾” chisel,4 and the home-built ladder used to climb to the nursery window.5 During the next three months, 13 more notes bearing the code symbols were delivered and the ransom was raised to $70,000.

The kidnapping of the world-famous son of “Lucky Lindy” (solo pilot of the first nonstop airline flight across the Atlantic Ocean, New York to Paris) made international headlines. A retired school teacher and, by all accounts, a self-aggrandizing publicity-seeker6 named John F. Condon, published a letter in the Bronx Home News offering to serve as a liaison between the Lindberghs and the kidnapper(s).7 On March 8, seven days after the child was taken, and one day following the publication of his offer, Condon received a letter, bearing the code, accepting his offer to be an intermediary.8

Condon was instructed by the kidnapper(s) to place an ad in the New York American using the name “Jafsie” (a play on his initials), indicating that the ransom money was ready. Condon did so and, on March 12, he received another code-bearing letter from a cab driver instructing him to meet the kidnappers at Woodlawn, a Bronx cemetery.9 Condon went alone. There he met a man with a German accent identified as “John,” who asked for the money, which Condon refused to provide until he’d seen the baby. The mysterious man expressed fear that he “might burn” if the baby was dead and told Condon he would provide proof of the child in the toddler’s sleeping suit.10 Condon soon received the child’s sleeping suit in the mail and continued to communicate through advertisements until a meeting was arranged to exchange the ransom. $70,000 in unmarked gold certificate U.S. paper money were placed in two packages, their serial numbers having been recorded. (The fact that the ransom was paid in gold certificates would later become significant).

On April 2, 1932, Charles Lindbergh rode with Condon11 to another Bronx cemetery, St. Raymond’s,12 where they heard a man call out, “Hey doctor!” Condon went toward the voice while Lindbergh waited in the car. Condon convinced the kidnapper he only had $50,000 of the ransom money. The kidnapper accepted the sum and gave Condon another note filled with misspellings asserting that the child was safe aboard a boat named “Nelly,” harbored off the Massachusetts coast.13 The kidnapper took the money and Condon returned to the car where Lindbergh was waiting. An exhaustive search failed to find the boat. On May 12, 1932, the body of the child was found close to Lindbergh’s home from which he was taken.14 Over the next two years, 296 of the gold certificates the Lindberghs used to pay the ransom turned up in circulation.

Earlier that year, Roosevelt’s Gold Reserve Act of 1934 mandated that all gold and gold certificate currency be surrendered and vested in the sole title of the United States Department of the Treasury. In other words, The Gold Reserve Act prohibited private ownership of monetary gold. On September 15, 1934, a gas station attendant in the Bronx wrote down the license plate number of a man who had paid him with one of the gold standard-backed certificates. The authorities traced the plate to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German-born American carpenter.15 A search of Hauptmann’s garage found $14,600 of the ransom money. Hauptmann provided an explanation and an alibi: He was working the night of the kidnapping at a hotel and a former business partner named Isidor Fitch left the money with him.16 Fitch, who owed him money, had since returned to his native Germany and died on March 29, 1934. Initially, Condon was unwilling to identify Hauptmann conclusively from a police lineup, later changing his mind and acknowledging that Hauptmann was indeed “Cemetery John.”17 Hauptmann was charged with extortion and murder and pled not guilty. The trial was a media circus, with famed journalist H.L. Mencken labeling it “the greatest story since the resurrection.”18

Hauptmann was found guilty and sentenced to death, with most of the public convinced of his guilt.19 After the Court of Errors and Appeals of New Jersey unanimously affirmed Hauptmann’s conviction, he was executed on April 3, 1936. Hauptmann died protesting his innocence, even though a newspaper offered him $75,000 (far more than the ransom money) to name his accomplices.20

The ConspiraciesThough the Lindbergh kidnapping is approaching its 100th anniversary and all the principal participants are long dead, The State of New Jersey v. Bruno Richard Hauptmann has evolved in much of the public imagination into a tragic miscarriage of justice. Since his execution in 1936, books, articles, documentaries, plays, websites, and movies have examined Hauptmann’s role in the crime, the majority of them wondering if Hauptmann was, in fact, wrongly convicted.21

For years, conspiracies have run the gamut from the probable (Hauptmann had accomplices)22 to the possible (Violet Sharpe, a domestic servant of the Lindberghs, was somehow involved)23 to the preposterous (Charles Lindbergh had his own disabled son murdered).24 A few highlights:

• In 1976, author Antony Scaduto capitalized on these conspiracies with the publication of Scapegoat: The Lonesome Death of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Scaduto purported to “set the record straight after some forty years of distortion…”25
• In a 1980 episode of In Search Of…, Scaduto claimed to have found “startling new evidence that exonerates Hauptmann.”26 All expert testimony, eyewitness testimony, and physical and forensic evidence, he claimed, were manufactured by the police to frame Hauptmann. Scaduto goes even further, asserting that the body found on May 12, 1932, was not that of the Lindbergh baby, and the only way to identify the badly decomposed body was by the number of his teeth.27
• In 1981, Hauptmann’s widow Anna began a series of lawsuits against her husband’s prosecutor, David Wilentz, echoing conspiratorial claims of new evidence that exonerated her husband alongside charges of fraud and witness suppression.28
• In 1985, Ludovic Kennedy published The Airman and The Carpenter: The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. He posited that Hauptmann did not commit the crime and was wrongfully convicted and executed.29
• In a 1996 HBO movie, Crime of the Century, Stephen Rea portrayed Hauptmann as an innocent victim railroaded for a crime he did not commit.30
• In 2012, Robert Zorn published Cemetery John: The Undiscovered Mastermind Behind the Lindbergh Kidnapping, in which he makes the case that Hauptmann’s accomplice was a fellow German immigrant named John Knoll.31 Zorn’s thesis notes Knoll’s resemblance to the police sketch provided by Condon, traces of meat found on some of the ransom money (Knoll having worked at a deli), updated handwriting analysis of the ransom notes,32 and Knoll’s trip to Germany on a luxury liner during the trial, only returning after Hauptmann’s conviction.33
• In 2020, Lise Pearlman released The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1: The Man Who Got Away, which suggests Lindbergh himself, a vocal eugenics supporter and Nazi sympathizer, may have orchestrated the kidnapping and death of his own son.34

The EvidencePay attention only to Hauptmann-was-innocent proponents and a pattern emerges: Desperate to satisfy a public hungry to assign blame, authorities deliberately conspired to frame Hauptmann for the crime. Lacking hard evidence, the prosecution exploited the anti-German atmosphere of the time by portraying Hauptmann as part of the the growing German menace, and a gross miscarriage of justice.35 Authorities coerced Condon into identifying Hauptmann as Cemetery John,36 and Hauptmann was forced to misspell the same words on writing samples that were misspelled on the ransom notes.37

The evidence reveals a much harsher reality: It may well be that Hauptmann had accomplices (the government certainly thought he did),38 but it takes an extraordinary leap of faith to believe Hauptmann was uninvolved in the crime and preposterous to argue that he was “framed.” Many of these conspiratorial claims mislead by omission, while others are demonstrably false. For example, when initially interviewed by the police, Hauptmann lied twice, saying the only gold certificates he had were the ones in his wallet,39 and he was working as a carpenter at a hotel the day of the kidnapping,40 driving his wife home at about 9:00 p.m. that night.41

About one-third of the ransom money was found hidden in Hauptmann’s garage.42 Upon checking the hotel employment records, it was discovered that Hauptmann had not started working there until 20 days after the crime, and quit the day the ransom was delivered.43 (Scaduto omits this entirely.44) The summer after the ransom was paid, Hauptmann (an unemployed carpenter at the height of the Great Depression) came into enough money to fund four family trips to California, Florida, and Maine, and finance trips to Europe for his wife and several friends.45

The physical evidence found on Hauptmann’s property wasn’t limited to the ransom money, either. Hauptmann’s tools matched the marks on the ladder. Dr. Condon’s address and phone number were found scrawled in a closet alongside the serial numbers of gold certificates.46 When asked for an explanation on the witness stand, Hauptmann admitted that he must have written Condon’s contact information in his closet because, in his words, “I must have read it in the paper about the story. I was a little bit interested and keep a little bit record of it, and maybe I was just on the closet, and was reading the paper and put it down the address.”47

There were eyewitnesses as well. The cab driver, Joseph Perrone, pinpointed Hauptmann as the man who gave him written instructions for Condon.48, 49 After deliberation, Condon testified that it was indeed Hauptmann whom he met at the cemetery,50 and Lindbergh himself testified it was Hauptmann’s voice he heard yelling, “Hey doctor!”51 Forensic evidence also implicates Hauptmann. Contrary to Scaduto’s claims, the autopsy of the victim was conducted with fidelity by Dr. Charles Mitchell, a veteran coroner, who easily identified the child by his (clearly recognizable) face. Lindbergh confirmed the body was that of his son.52, 53 Forensic experts54 then and now confirm a board from the ladder came from Hauptmann’s own attic.55 Scaduto notes that Hauptmann’s fingerprints did not match those found on the ransom note.56 This is true, but only because no fingerprints were found at the scene.57

At least 21 handwriting experts examined Hauptmann’s notebooks, and private letters in addition to the samples Hauptmann wrote for the police, all of whom concluded Hauptmann wrote the ransom notes during the trial.58 All of Anna Hauptmann’s lawsuits against the government through the early 1980s were dismissed for lack of evidence.59 As recently as 2003, a police archivist named Mark Fazini found a handwritten, anonymous note in German confessing to the crime.60 This would seem to exonerate Hauptmann unless one considers the note was debunked61 and was only one of dozens of similar confessions.62

Through the years, at least 16 different people have claimed to be the actual Lindbergh baby, including an African American woman from Trenton, NJ.63 Establishing the Lindbergh baby survived and grew up under an assumed name would absolutely exonerate Hauptmann, but no substantive evidence for any one of these claims has ever been provided.64, 65, 66 Even more damning is Hauptmann’s modus operandi. His widow, Anna, gave multiple interviews in which she asserted Richard was telling the truth67 and could never commit such a crime.68, 69 In fact, Hauptmann had an extensive criminal record. While in Germany, for example, he’d been convicted of robbery at gunpoint and even burglarized a home while using a ladder.70

Why didn’t Hauptmann name his accomplices and save himself, then? According to criminal profiler John Douglas, it isn’t unusual for the condemned to maintain innocence in order to spare their surviving family members public shame.71 Hauptmann also believed he would be spared the electric chair, as the governor of New Jersey publicly expressed doubts about Hauptmann’s role in the crime.72

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, separated by heavy wire screen as they leave U.S. Court House after being found guilty by jury. (Credit: Roger Higgins, New York World-Telegram and Sun Collection / Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Digital ID cph 3c17772)

Julius & Ethel RosenbergThe CrimeIn January of 1950, a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project named Klaus Fuchs was arrested in Great Britain for passing top-secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.73 Fuchs admitted the crime and fingered a Swiss chemist named Harry Gold as the courier between himself and the Soviets. Gold was arrested and identified others in the espionage ring, including a machinist at Los Alamos, David Greenglass,74 who first denied the charges, and then, in June of 1950, named his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, as the one who convinced him to spy for the Russians.75 Julius Rosenberg was living with his wife Ethel and two children in Knickerbocker Village, a housing development located near the Manhattan Bridge.76 Julius was arrested and flatly denied any involvement.77

A grand jury convened in August 1950 to investigate the spy ring, one of the witnesses being Julius Rosenberg’s wife, Ethel. Following her testimony in which she invoked her right not to incriminate herself, Ethel was charged with conspiracy to commit espionage alongside Julius and another defendant, Morton Sobell.78

At their trial, Greenglass testified that Julius had orchestrated the espionage at his home in January 1945. Julius went into his kitchen with Ruth (David’s wife) and Ethel, and cut a side panel of a Jell-O box into two irregular parts. He passed one piece to Ruth, asserting that the spy contacting her and David at Los Alamos would identify themselves with the other half.79 Ruth testified that Ethel solicited her to approach David to spy and typed the notes David brought back to New York with him. Greenglass confirmed his wife’s testimony, further implicating Ethel by testifying she typed the notes containing nuclear secrets, which were turned over to Harry Gold. Both Rosenbergs denied any involvement whatsoever in espionage and refused to answer questions about their Communist party membership.80

The accused were found guilty in March 1953. Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years (a lighter sentence because he’d agreed to turn state’s evidence), Sobell received 30 years, and the Rosenbergs were sentenced to die in the electric chair.81 Despite pleas for clemency by notables, including Pope Pius XII, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Einstein,82 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to their deaths maintaining their innocence.83 At the time of their conviction and execution, and for many years afterward, many Americans believed the United States executed two innocent people.84

The ConspiraciesAs in the Hauptmann case, Rosenberg v. United States: 346 U.S. 273 lives on. In 1971, novelist E.L. Doctorow published The Book of Daniel, a fictionalized account of the case.85 A film adaptation (Daniel) followed in 1983.86 Bob Dylan recorded “Julius and Ethel” in 198387 and Meryl Streep portrayed Ethel’s ghost haunting her prosecutor Roy Cohn in the movie Angels in America in 2003. If anything, the Rosenberg case has only gained prominence in the last quarter century. In 2001, a New York Times reporter named Sam Roberts tracked down David Greenglass (who testified against the Rosenbergs), who was living under an assumed name. In the extensive interviews for The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case, Greenglass admitted he’d lied on the witness stand about Ethel typing the letters of instruction from Julius to the Soviets.88

In 2004, Ivy Meeropol, granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, released the documentary Heir to an Execution, in which she incorporates archival footage with interviews of her family members and the other alleged conspirators.89

In 2008, Michael and Robbie Meeropol (the Rosenbergs’ surviving children, who had been adopted into the Meeropol family) unsuccessfully petitioned President Obama to exonerate their mother using their uncle David Greenglass’ confession.90, 91 Recently, in 2021, Anne Sebbe published Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy, in which she argued for Ethel’s innocence.

The EvidenceRosenberg defenders often note outside factors that led to their convictions: Jurist prejudice, antisemitism, Cold War hysteria, and (in Ethel’s case) misogyny have been named as the reasons for their convictions and executions.92, 93 Another common argument is that the Rosenbergs assisted a World War II ally, not an enemy, therefore they should not have been tried and convicted for treason.94

The facts of the case tell a different story. The Rosenbergs were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage, not treason.95 Evidence shows Julius approached Soviet intelligence96 agents before Hitler invaded Russia at a time when the Nazi leader and Stalin were collaborating under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.97 In 1995, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) released translations of Soviet cables decrypted in the 1940s. Called VENONA, it ran from 1943 to 1980 and identified hundreds of Soviet agents in America and other Western countries.98 The cables identify Julius as the head of a vast spy ring, assigning him two code names, “liberal”99 and “antenna.” In 2008, co-defendant Morton Sobell affirmed he and Julius were spies but the information passed was useless.100

In 2009, Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer and defector to Great Britain, released his notes taken during his service in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), which debunk Sobell’s claim that minimizes Julius’ activities. Not only did Julius orchestrate the theft of top-secret information from Los Alamos, he also recruited a man named Russell Alton McNutt (son and brother of members of the Communist Party of the United States)101 to obtain information from a uranium enrichment plant in Oak Ridge, TN.

Sensationalism and conspiratorial thinking keep the cases of Bruno Richard Hauptmann and the Rosenbergs thriving as cottage industries.

When the VENONA transcripts were released, the narrative for innocence shifted from “the Rosenbergs were innocent” to “Julius Rosenberg was guilty, but Ethel was innocent.”102 What of Ethel’s guilt, then? At their trial, prosecutor Irving Saypol established Ethel’s guilt in his summation by stating, “Mrs. Rosenberg struck the keys, blow by blow, against her own country in the interests of the Soviets.”103 In 2001, Greenglass admitted he likely perjured himself by testifying Ethel typed Julius’ instructions104 and, indeed the Vassiliev notes seem to confirm this.105 Sobell’s 2008 admission notes that Ethel Rosenberg knew of her husband’s activities but did not actively spy herself.106

Despite the commonly-held belief that Ethel Rosenberg is not mentioned in the VENONA Project,107 in fact, she is. The Soviet spy cables describe Ethel as “…well devoted politically (who)108 knows her husband’s work and the role of ‘Twain’ and ‘Callistratus.’ (code names of Soviet agents).”109 If the only evidence against Ethel were the false testimony of Greenglass and her sole mention in the VENONA cables, a reasonable case might be made for doubt. Unfortunately for proponents of her innocence, substantive evidence has since come forth that makes it clear Ethel not only knew of her husband’s illegal activities but actively participated in spying alongside him.110

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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Through Vasiliev’s leak, we know that Ruth testified truthfully when she claimed Ethel solicited her to persuade David Greenglass to spy.111 A letter written to Moscow by Julius Rosenberg himself substantiates this.112 Vasiliev’s notes reveal Ethel met with at least three of the KGB officers with whom Julius was spying.113 Why did Greenglass perjure himself in front of the grand jury and later at his trial, then? Simply, he was attempting to protect his sister and hoped the government would leave her out of the indictment charging Julius. In the same transcripts before the grand jury, Greenglass implicates Ethel by testifying she was present at a meeting between Julius and Ann Sidorovich, one of the couriers for the spy ring.114

Why didn’t they save themselves by naming others, then? As noted, the Vasiliev leak makes clear the spy ring Julius orchestrated was far more expansive in scope than was revealed to the public. Julius and Ethel most likely did not reveal names because they (correctly) believed the FBI had yet to identify them and those individuals could continue spying for the Soviets after their own deaths.115

• • • • • •

Sensationalism and conspiratorial thinking keep the cases of Bruno Richard Hauptmann and the Rosenbergs thriving as cottage industries. In truth, the evidence for Hauptmann’s involvement in the Lindbergh Kidnapping remains exceptionally strong, as does the case for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s guilt in conspiring to commit espionage. Even though books propounding conspiracy theories exonerating them sell—and sell well—the full weight of evidence shows, beyond any reasonable doubt, NYC’s most controversial defendants to have been guilty of the crimes for which they were charged.

About the AuthorJohn D. Van Dyke is an academic and science educator. His personal website is vandykerevue.org.

References1. https://bit.ly/3vurndO 2. https://bit.ly/48ubClA 3. Cahill, R. T. (2014). Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping. Kent State University Press. 4. Lee, H. C., & Labriola, J. (2001). Famous Crimes Revisited: From Sacco-Vanzetti to O.J. Simpson, Including Lindbergh Kidnapping, Sam Sheppard, John F. Kennedy, Vincent Foster, JonBenet Ramsey. Strong Books. 5. https://bit.ly/3tGoTJ1 6. https://bit.ly/48lmLWi 7. Ibid. 8. https://bit.ly/3S3jhSq 9. https://bit.ly/3tC2igI 10. https://bit.ly/48ubClA 11. https://bit.ly/3tC2igI 12. https://bit.ly/3TOCsRd 13. https://bit.ly/3THoG2H 14. https://bit.ly/3vf0v1o 15. https://bit.ly/41H83X4 16. https://bit.ly/48ubClA 17. https://bit.ly/3vlg2wL 18. https://bit.ly/4aE8up4 19. Cahill, R. T. (2014). Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping. Kent State University Press. 20. https://bit.ly/48ubClA 21. https://bit.ly/41Ky8EL 22. Douglas, J. E., & Olshaker, M. (2001). The Cases That Haunt Us. Pocket Books. 23. Baker, N. F. (1932, Jul–Aug). The Case of Violet Sharpe. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1931–1951), 23(2), 166–168. 24. Pearlman, L. (2020). The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1: The Man Who Got Away. Regent Press. 25. Scaduto, A. (1976). Scapegoat: The Lonesome Death of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Putnam. 26. https://bit.ly/48ubClA 27. https://bit.ly/3TOECAj 28. https://bit.ly/3RLCOFw 29. https://bit.ly/3HnYm6F 30. https://bit.ly/3H90BKA 31. Zorn, R. (2012). Cemetery John: The Undiscovered Mastermind Behind the Lindbergh Kidnapping. Harry N. Abrams. 32. https://bit.ly/3RZ2EY1 33. https://bit.ly/3tH1ib5 34. Pearlman, L. (2020). The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1: The Man Who Got Away. Regent Press. 35. https://bit.ly/3TLjBGW 36. https://bit.ly/3tH1ib5 37. https://bit.ly/3tGoTJ1 38. https://bit.ly/3vh3QwV 39. https://bit.ly/48jplMr 40. https://bit.ly/3vlg2wL 41. https://bit.ly/4aDLNkT 42. https://bit.ly/3vurndO 43. https://bit.ly/3vlg2wL 44. Scaduto, A. (1976). Scapegoat: The Lonesome Death of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Putnam. 45. https://bit.ly/47jKsNg 46. https://bit.ly/3vurndO 47. https://bit.ly/3S3PyJd 48. https://bit.ly/3vurndO 49. https://bit.ly/3TLkdfI 50. https://bit.ly/3tD3i49 51. https://bit.ly/3vh3QwV 52. https://bit.ly/3tD3i49 53. https://bit.ly/48ubClA 54. Graham, S. A. (1997). Anatomy of the Lindbergh Kidnapping. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 42(3), 368–377. 55. https://bit.ly/3H2sq7l 56. https://bit.ly/47kttu7 57. https://bit.ly/3vurndO 58. https://bit.ly/47kttu7 59. https://bit.ly/48uKrHu 60. https://bit.ly/3vit666 61. https://bit.ly/48iyswO 62. Cahill, R. T. (2014). Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping. Kent State University Press. 63. https://bit.ly/3vit666 64. https://bit.ly/4aE9xFw 65. https://bit.ly/3tuqEch 66. https://bit.ly/3H45wN1 67. https://bit.ly/3TLjBGW 68. https://bit.ly/4aEiL4B 69. https://bit.ly/3TLjBGW 70. https://bit.ly/41H83X4 71. https://bit.ly/3RZ2EY1 72. https://bit.ly/3S3wpqE 73. https://bit.ly/47qpGLL 74. https://bit.ly/47mrTIr 75. https://bit.ly/3RMvRnA 76. https://bit.ly/3vuvxlW 77. https://bit.ly/47j3G5B 78. https://bit.ly/48CAEPl 79. https://bit.ly/48oLtVO 80. https://bit.ly/4aAz1Ul 81. https://bit.ly/3RMvRnA 82. https://bit.ly/3H6Q0QB 83. https://bit.ly/47j3G5B 84. https://bit.ly/3RFhJwF 85. https://bit.ly/48jB5OL 86. https://bit.ly/41JPGRh 87. https://bit.ly/3tMR4WB 88. Roberts, S. (2001). The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair. Random House. 89. https://bit.ly/3tvO1SO 90. https://bit.ly/3RJgAUT 91. https://bit.ly/3tF9aKe 92. https://bit.ly/41GJ0U0 93. https://bit.ly/47paoHc 94. https://bit.ly/3NOVlQ6 95. https://bit.ly/47j3G5B 96. https://bit.ly/3TKihUo 97. https://bit.ly/4aEkiYp 98. https://bit.ly/3tF9aKe 99. https://bit.ly/47kQFZ6 100. https://bit.ly/3NPQcYi 101. https://bit.ly/3TKihUo 102. https://bit.ly/3RFhJwF 103. https://bit.ly/41PIHGA 104. Roberts, S. (2001). The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair. Random House. 105. https://bit.ly/3TKihUo 106. https://bit.ly/3NPQcYi 107. https://bit.ly/3RKGHul 108. https://bit.ly/3tF9aKe 109. https://bit.ly/48Aptqu 110. https://bit.ly/3TKihUo 111. https://bit.ly/48Aptqu 112. https://bit.ly/4aAz1Ul 113. https://bit.ly/4aKdrwL 114. https://bit.ly/3tF9aKe 115. https://bit.ly/3TKihUo

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss448_Michael_Shermer_2024_07_17.mp3Download MP3Why do people believe the assassination attempt on Donald Trump was a conspiracy?

The assassination attempt on President Donald Trump on July 13 has already spawned a bevy of conspiracy theories. The blood on his ear was that of a theatrical gel pack, which you can supposedly see in his hand as he touches his ear. Trump’s defiant response was staged, as evidenced by the fact that the Secret Service let him back up after tackling him to the ground. The Secret Service let it happen on purpose (LIHOP in conspiracy circles) by waiting for the assassin to take his shot before returning fire. The ladder for the shooter to get on the roof was planted by covert operatives. This was yet another hit ordered by Vladimir Putin. The Chinese want to make sure Trump doesn’t return to the Presidency so they can take Taiwan. The shooter was part of Antifa. Never-Trumper Republicans were behind it. It was a false flag operation.

It is early still, and there is much we do not know about Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, but the odds are long that he was a lone actor and not part of a conspiracy. The 20-year old was, in fact, described by acquaintances as a “loner” in high school who was bullied and had “a few friends” but “didn’t have a whole friend group.” He was a registered Republican but donated $15 to the Democratic Progressive Turnout Project in 2021. He had possession of his father’s legally-purchased AR-15 style rifle, and had in his car dozens of rounds of ammunition and bomb-making materials. Most revealingly, Crooks was allegedly rejected by his high school riflery club for being “comically bad” with a gun. Does this sound like the profile of a hitman that a crack team of conspirators would contract with to assassinate a former president?

To be sure, there are a number legitimate questions surrounding the Trump assassination attempt that do not involve conspiracies:

1. Why did the cop who confronted the shooter on the roof not have his gun at the ready so he could engage him instead of standing down?
2. The shooter appears to have accessed the rooftop via a large ladder, but how did that ladder get there in the first place?
3. The building on which Crooks was perched was, in fact, a staging area for local police, so how did they miss the would-be assassin climbing onto the roof?
4. Since the Secret Service sharpshooter killed the assassin within seconds of shots fired, why did he not take the shot first?
5. Why did the Secret Service allow Trump to jump back up to pump his fist and mouth “fight fight fight” to the crowd when they should have whisked him away to his bullet-proof SUV?
6. Why did the police not take seriously all the bystanders who saw the gunman on the roof and alerted them about it.

These “BlueAnon” conspiracy theories, so named for their doppleganger echo of QAnon conspiracism, are as predictable as they are irrational. The day before the assassination attempt, in fact, I was in attendance as a speaker at the annual Freedom Fest conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, along with Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who famously believes that the CIA assassinated his uncle John F. Kennedy and his father Robert F. Kennedy. The CIA has done some questionable things in foreign countries in the name of national interests there, but murdering their own president and possible future president? Why do otherwise rational people believe such seemingly irrational things?

In my book, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, I attempt to answer this question by outlining a number of cognitive and emotional factors at work, including:

Event magnitude. The larger the event the more conspiracism surrounds it, as people invest more time and energy into everything that happened surrounding the event in search of some deeper cause. The assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK, and terrorist attacks like 9/11, are so large in scope and interest that they draw our attention to examine every detail so scrupulously that everything becomes pregnant with meaning.

Proportionality bias. Large events need large causes. The Holocaust was one of the worst genocides in history and it was caused by one of the worst political regimes in history. There’s a proportionality balance there. The assassination of President Lincoln by a cabal of southern supporters in hopes of reigniting the South’s “war of independence” feels balanced. That JFK, MLK, and RFK were assassinated by lone gunmen, or that Princess Diana’s death in a car crash was the result of drunk driving and her not wearing a seatbelt, or that 9/11 was orchestrated by 19 guys with box cutters, doesn’t feel proportional, so we turn to deeper conspiratorial causes.

Anomaly hunting. Large events lead people to look for anything unusual, especially if it is unexplainable, then glomming on to that anomaly as “evidence” of a conspiracy. How did that ladder get there for the Trump shooter to climb up on the roof? Why didn’t that police officer stop the shooter when he confronted him? Why didn’t the Secret Service take out the shooter before he shot at Trump? Why was Trump allowed to jump back up to make a fist pump after being shot?

Personal incredulity. If I can’t think of an explanation for anomaly X besides a conspiracy, then that proves there is a conspiracy.

Hindsight Bias. The tendency to reconstruct the past to fit with present knowledge. Once an event has occurred, we look back and reconstruct how it happened, why it had to happen that way and not some other way, and why we should have seen it coming all along.

Patternicity and agenticity. The tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise, and to infuse those patterns with intentional agents, leads to conspiratorial cognition.

Uncertainty bias. In the early days of a major event much is unknown, and that leads people to fill in the blanks with whatever comes to mind.

Teleological thinking. The belief that everything happens for a reason and nothing of importance happens by chance.

With all of these factors at work, it was inevitable that within minutes of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump conspiricism would flood social media. While it is not completely irrational to believe in some conspiracy theories—given that conspiracies do happen and it is often better to be safe than sorry—it is very likely that the attempt to kill President Trump was not part of some nefarious cabal and instead was the act of an unhinged lone actor. Keep in mind that in U.S. history four presidents have been assassinated while in office—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy—only one of which was the result of a conspiracy (Lincoln). And another five presidents survived assassination attempts—Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan—all of which were by lone assassins. As was the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, after a campaign rally at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy was murdered by a Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan, who testified in his trial that he killed Kennedy “with 20 years of malice aforethought.”

Thus, it is rational to apply the Conspiracism Principle first: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by randomness or incompetence.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss447_Jay_Bhattacharya_2024_07_13.mp3Download MP3Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics. Dr. Bhattacharya’s recent research focuses on the epidemiology of COVID-19 as well as an evaluation of policy responses to the epidemic.

He became famous—or infamous in some circles—for his co-authorship, with Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on lower-risk groups to develop herd immunity through widespread infection, “while promoting the fringe notion that vulnerable people could be simultaneously protected from the virus.” (Wikipedia) In a private email to Anthony Fauci, NIH director Francis Collins called the authors of the declaration “fringe epidemiologists” and said that “(it) seems to be getting a lot of attention — and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”

That is when he became known as a “fringe epidemiologist”.

In fact, he has published 135 articles in top peer-reviewed scientific journals in medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, statistics, law, and public health among other fields. He holds an MD and a PhD in economics, both earned at Stanford University.

Shermer and Bhattacharya discuss:

• loss of trust in medical and scientific institutions (Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins)
• overall assessment of what went right and wrong with the COVID-19 pandemic
• testing, masking, social isolation
• Is the cure worse than the disease?
• closing of schools, restaurants, salons, parks, beaches, hiking trails, etc.
• the cost to the economy of the shut downs
• the cost to the education of children of the shut downs
• Precautionary Principle
• comparative method: which countries and states did better or worse?
• Lab Leak hypothesis vs. Zoonomic hypothesis
• living with SARS-CoV-2 and its variants
• RFK, Jr. and his conspiracy theories
• debating anti-vaxxers (Rogan and elsewhere)
• treatments: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, remdesivir, Vitamin D, Paxlovid, Tamiflu, retroviral medicines, monoclonal antibodies
• high risk vs. low risk groups; age, sex, race, pregnancy, weight, preconditions, immune compromised
• myocarditis, Robert Malone, mRNA vaccines, Joe Rogan, RFKJ, Peter Hotez
• The Great Barrington Declaration (“focused protection” of the people most at risk)
• Wall Street Journal OpEd: “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?”, which argued there was little evidence to support shelter-in-place orders and quarantines
• In March 2021, Bhattacharya called the COVID-19 lockdowns the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made” and argued that “The harm to people is catastrophic”. Blacklisted by Twitter.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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Since the release of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) in the fall of 2022, the hype and hysteria about artificial intelligence has been dialed up to 11. ChatGPT, Bard, and other LLMs (hereinafter, “chatbots”) have been seen as significant advances toward the holy grail of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Chatbots are the result of artificial neural nets of unprecedented size, processing enormous samples of natural language—some say essentially the entire World Wide Web (or, at least, all of Wikipedia). At least up to a certain date:

Me: What is today’s date?

ChatGPT-3 [on 7/18/2023]: Today’s date is November 8, 2021.

ChatGPT-3.5 knows today’s date, but is still time-limited:

Me: What happened yesterday?

ChatGPT-3.5: I’m sorry for any confusion, but as of my last knowledge update in January 2022, I don’t have real-time information, and I’m unable to provide details about events that occurred after that date. To find out what happened yesterday, I recommend checking the latest news updates, online news websites, or other reliable sources for the most recent information.

Chatbots produce astonishingly convincing simulacra of natural language. Their outputs, however, are the result purely of pattern-matching. Chatbots are autocomplete on steroids. Chatbots “understand” nothing, even as they fluently respond to user prompts. It used to be said that natural language computer programs had syntax but not semantics. Chatbots have neither syntax nor semantics, only statistics.

• • • • • •

The notion that large language models might in some way resemble or parallel what’s actually going on in a real human brain is perhaps suggested by the phrase “artificial neural net[work].”

The idea that so-called artificial neural networks bear any resemblance to natural neural networks (in plain words, actual brains) is almost laughable. In artificial neural nets (including those in large language models), the “neurons” and the “synapses” are represented by one or two parameters (and the pattern of the network itself largely by a single number identifying the strength of the connection between pairs of neurons). Detailed biological models of actual neurons and synapses can consist of hundreds or even thousands of values for each neuron and each synapse—specifying, for example, the firing rate, the refractory period, and the strength of each neurotransmitter emitted—and all artificial neural nets omit entirely attempting to model the activity of the glial cells, which in actual brains influence neurons hormonally in ways that are scarcely understood.

In other words, although the latest LLMs are impressively large and their output impressively fluent, their models are oversimplified by two, three or perhaps even larger orders of magnitude. In the 1940s, artificial networks were said to be “modeled” on actual brains. Nowadays, they are only said to be “inspired” by natural neural networks—a word so vague as to disclaim any accuracy at all.

To the extent that anyone attempts to model language beyond the level of neurons and synapses, they would somehow have to map the semantics of thought onto the syntax of speech (and written language). But, as we’ve seen, large language models have neither syntax nor semantics. We have no idea how it all works, and we have no idea how to model it, either.

• • • • • •

That chatbots respond to prompts in natural language with natural language is the foundation of the illusion that there’s anything akin to comprehension occurring. But consider the psychological effect of reading this string:

100 000 010 000 111 000 101 000 110 000 011 001

Does this mean anything to you? Me neither. Now apply the following table:

| [blank] | 000 | | [period] | 001 | | am | 010 | | body | 011 | | I | 100 | | just | 101 | | my | 110 | | not | 111 |

The string above can now be interpreted as:

I am not just my body.

Reading this sentence has quite a different effect. But from the point of view of the programming of a chatbot, they are exactly equivalent.

The training of a chatbot doesn’t even attempt to address what any of those words mean—that is, their referents in the real world. Back when AIs were programmed with some attempt to incorporate how sentences were constructed and interpreted, this was known as the syntactic bubble. As an example, let’s try to understand what “body” means solely by following Merriam-Webster. (We’ll ignore the fact that, whenever we look a word up, we have to determine the appropriate sense to choose the appropriate definition, which is sometimes unclear.) Our paper chase begins like this:

• Body: the organized physical substance [of an animal or plant either living or dead].
• Organized: having a formal organization to coordinate and carry out activities.
• Formal: belonging to or constituting the form or essence of a thing; relating to or involving the outward form, structure, relationships, or arrangement of elements rather than content.
• Organization: the condition or manner of being organized.

Well, that didn’t take long, did it? We’re caught in a loop from which we can never escape. (This is just the first loop encountered in chasing down “body.” Another loop goes from “physical” to “material” and back again. Nor was “body” chosen because it was expected to be particularly difficult; you can conduct the same exercise with any word at all.)

Nowadays, this problem might be dubbed the chatbot bubble. Chatbots no more understand the prompts to which they respond and the outputs they produce than the printer that disgorges your store receipt is genuinely appreciative when it thanks you for your purchase.

Why do we find chatbots so convincing that some people assert that they have already achieved sentience and others actually believe that they share a love with their automated interlocutors?

Well, we’re easily fooled. Have you ever answered a phone call and, thinking you were listening to a real person, tried to reply to a recording? I know I have.

Almost immediately after birth, people normally develop what’s known, awkwardly and unfortunately, as theory of mind. (Hereinafter, I’ll refer to this instead as a mind model.) This is the irresistible sense or intuition that other people (and most animals) experience, well, experience, just as we ourselves do—thoughts and feelings, pleasure and pain, hunger and thirst, sensation and perception. We make this inferential leap long before we have any intellectual or philosophical justification for it (or the chance to dispute it—as do eliminative materialists).

Since the invention of written language, people have made the same inference on much narrower grounds—we infer sentience from sentences alone. (Even if we don’t believe that the cash register itself is sentient, we know that someone once wrote the words “THANK YOU” that the cash register mindlessly spits out on the slip of paper you get.) Very recently, we’ve been engaging in email and text message dialogs with people we’ve never met or even seen, and we inevitably infer that our conversations are also with actual people. Now, when we engage in a dialogue with a chatbot and it replies with uncanny plausibility, we irresistibly make the same inference.

This effect is not entirely accidental. ChatGPT, for example, was designed to reply in the first person as if it had both consciousness and intentionality. For example:

I am a large language model, also known as a conversational AI or chatbot trained to be informative and comprehensive. I am trained on a massive amount of text data, and I am able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions. For example, I can provide summaries of factual topics or create stories.

Let’s see how much less compelling it becomes in the third person:

ChatGPT is a large language model, also known as a conversational AI or chatbot trained to be informative and comprehensive. ChatGPT is trained on a massive amount of text data, and is able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions. For example, ChatGPT can provide summaries of factual topics or create stories.

Now, this reads as not coming from ChatGPT itself but from its designers—who of course were its real source. But the designers of ChatGPT have, even in their canned disclaimers, themselves attributed to ChatGPT awareness and intentionality, and invite us to do the same:

…I am always learning. I try my best to provide accurate and informative answers to your questions, but I may sometimes make mistakes. If you ever notice that I have provided a false or misleading answer, please let me know and I will do my best to correct it.

I am aware [of the phenomenon of chatbot hallucination], and I am working to improve my ability to detect and avoid it.

The intentionality attributed to ChatGPT is, in short, intentional:

My use of language, such as saying “I apologize,” is part of the programmed response to provide a more human-like interaction and to acknowledge and address user concerns.

• • • • • •

When we watch a magician (or, as some performers more properly refer to themselves, an illusionist) perform, we don’t believe that we’re actually seeing real magic. In fact, the delight and astonishment comes from the paradoxical incongruity of what we have just seen with what we know of how the world works. (When an illusionist demonstrates and explains how an effect is achieved, the usual response is not a feeling of relief but of disappointment.) No one believes that, as illusions become increasingly elaborate and convincing, we’re getting any closer to achieving actual magic. Why, then, would we believe that as chatbots become more fluent and convincing we’re getting any closer to actual intelligence?

• • • • • •

A recurrent claim is that, as chatbots incorporate larger and larger neural nets with deeper and deeper layers, digest greater and greater amounts of text, and receive more and more feedback from users and others, they will become somehow “better.” To the extent that “better” means more convincing, improvements are likely to be imperceptible—since their output is already convincing enough, thank you very much. But little or no attempt is actually being made to verify the factuality of the source material or what is emitted. ChatGPT contradicts itself about this (notice the use of the passive voice to avoid the assumption of responsibility):

…[E]fforts have been made to ensure the accuracy of the information…provide[d.] …[T]he selection of books, articles, and websites is typically based on a combination of factors, including considerations of reliability, diversity, and relevance. OpenAI aims to include sources that are widely recognized as reputable and credible within their respective fields.

But:

…[T]he training process typically involves using as much text data as possible rather than a manual selection process.

• • • • • •

Whatever intelligence is displayed by a chatbot is the intelligence embodied in the source texts that it has ingested. Imagine a chatbot entirely based on Wikipedia. As a recent article makes clear,1 Wikipedia is ChatGPT’s largest single source, and the relationship between Wikipedia and chatbots such as ChatGPT is more intimate and complicated than perhaps has been recognized. Wikipedia provides an application programming interface (API), allowing programmers to input a particular entry automatically for digestion and incorporation into its knowledge base, or just on-the-fly summarization or paraphrase.

In this case, why would anyone attribute intelligence to such a chatbot, rather than simply to the authors of the encyclopedia itself? And if a chatbot digested two such encyclopedias? Three? Three thousand? At what point should the attribution of intelligence shift from the authors of the sources to the chatbot itself?

Another major source is The New York Times (as well as other newspapers and magazines). In fact, the Times recently sued OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT) and Microsoft (the creator of Bing and Bing Chat) for, in effect, plagiarism.2

ChatGPT, however, argues both sides of the question of whether it displays genuine intelligence with equal conviction. The following are excerpts from much longer and more detailed text responses to prompts.

ChatGPT displays artificial intelligence (AI) because it is an advanced language model that can understand and generate human-like text responses.

But:

…[W]hile ChatGPT is an impressive language model capable of generating human-like text responses, it falls short of displaying true artificial intelligence due to its lack of understanding, limited domain, contextual limitations, inability to learn, and potential biases and errors.

ChatGPT will agreeably argue both sides of almost any dispute you choose. Try it yourself with your own favorite controversy.

• • • • • •

In the natural world, we usually recognize intelligence only in animals with a brain and, of course, the products of such intelligence, such as in the good design of a tool. The lives of animals (hereinafter referring to animals with a brain) display two fundamental attributes:

• Embodiment: animals have bodies equipped with senses to perceive and mechanisms to respond and behave. Their engagement with the world is consistent with the body they actually have. An octopus, for example, uses all eight of its tentacles, but a chimpanzee doesn’t try to make use of the four limbs it doesn’t have.
• Embeddedness: animals are alive in the world, with which they engage and interact.

In addition to a mind model, animals behave as if they have a model of the world, based on the following basic attributes of reality:

• Tridimensionality: Reality subtends three spatial dimensions.
• Extensionality: Objects and animals have extent in each of the three spatial dimensions (even if one or even two dimensions may be minimal, as is the case of a sheet of paper or a hair).
• Time: Reality passes continuously in time from the past to the present and into the future.
• Continuity: Over time, and to a greater or lesser extent, things and processes persist from one moment to the next, with gradual change the norm and abrupt change the exception.
• Regularity and Periodicity: A great many natural phenomena exhibit regular and often periodic change, such as the day/night cycle; waking and sleeping; needs such as hunger and thirst alternating with satiety following satisfaction; the lunar cycle; the seasons; birth, growth, maturity, and death; and the like.
• Uniformity: To a greater or lesser extent, things and processes are more or less the same everywhere.
• Consistency: To a greater or lesser extent, things and processes do not exhibit paradoxical properties.
• Causality: Events in the present are contingent upon and caused by events in the past; events in the future will be contingent upon and caused by previous events.

Other basic attributes of an animal’s reality include, among others, the following:

• Affordance: Everything in the world, natural and artificial, has properties and features that can be used to accomplish one or more goals. For example, a door handle can be used to open a door, and it can also be used to hang your hat.
• Choice: To a greater or lesser degree, an animal, having agency, can choose its behavior, based on its own goals and its knowledge of its situation.

Further, animals become familiar with certain ubiquitous characteristics of their environments, including such features as gravity, light, sound, solidity, liquidity, gaseousness, the flow of liquids (rivers, waves, tides, rain), and gasses (winds), and so on.

All of these, and much more, are reflected in a world model that underlies an animal’s implicit understanding of reality. The mind model is a fundamental part of the world model. This world model is much deeper and wide-ranging than any enumerable collection of facts could possibly be. Our world model and our ability to engage with the world based upon it arise almost immediately after birth and may have even evolved into the brain without the need for any experience at all to trigger it into being. In the case of humans, this implicit world model almost always includes language, explicit education, and training. To date, all attempts to incorporate a world model into an AI have failed.

To give an example of implicit knowledge: you intuitively know that a person can’t touch their left elbow with their left hand. What does ChatGPT-3 think?

Yes, a person can touch their left elbow with their left hand by crossing their left arm over their chest and reaching their left hand towards their left elbow.

ChatGPT-3.5 does a good deal better:

No, it is physically impossible for a person to touch their left elbow with their left hand. The range of motion of the human arm does not allow for the hand to reach the same-side elbow without external assistance or manipulation.

• • • • • •

If a chatbot—necessarily disembodied and unembedded— can’t achieve actual intelligence, what about a robot? At least some AI researchers believe that actual computerized electromechanical robots can solve the dual fundamental realities of embodiedness and embeddedness. How’s that been going?

Boston Dynamics appears to have the most advanced robots. In one demonstration,3 the robot runs and jumps when it can simply walk, seeming to be more concerned with demonstrating its parkour (the sport of traversing obstacles in urban environments by running, climbing, and jumping athletically) skills than anything else.

Perhaps the most conspicuous deficiency in such robots is their silence. No attempt has been made to incorporate a chatbot into one—and it’s entirely unclear how such could be done. In the demonstration of the Boston Dynamics robot cited earlier, a person uses an app to input its instructions to the robot and the app screen is pointedly left unshown.

By its very nature, a chatbot—being unembodied and unembedded—has a timeless view from nowhere and everywhere, whereas a robot is necessarily in a particular place and a particular position at a particular moment in time.

• • • • • •

In our intuitive apprehension of intelligence, it’s often depicted as a kind of spotlight (or, lately, laser) that can, with equal facility, illuminate and penetrate any subject to which attention is directed. This is much like the historical misconception of vision as a force originating in the eyes, like Superman’s X-ray vision. But it is no such facility. We’re better at understanding some things than others; our intelligence works better on some problems than others. My favorite example of this is the Monty Hall problem.4 But this is hardly the only example. Popular websites list the top 10 fallacies, or the top 16 or 24 or 26. Wikipedia’s list contains over fifty unenumerated fallacies in several different categories.

• • • • • •

The concept of artificial intelligence was originally divided into two categories, weak and strong. The notion of strong artificial intelligence was one in which an AI would not only imitate a person but actually have conscious experience as does a person. Of course, eliminative materialists don’t believe that people have conscious experience, either, so this has never been a problem for them. Except for those who believe in the possibility of uploading a mind to a computer—an unlikely prospect—most AI researchers have shifted the distinction from weak/strong to narrow/general.

The concept of narrow intelligence is, well, self-contradictory. As we’ve already seen, the entire idea of intelligence is that it’s a general (even if not unlimited) ability to deal flexibly and creatively with novel, challenging situations. The closest natural equivalent to narrow artificial intelligence is perhaps people that used to be called idiot savants—now more politely just savants—although of course savants have enough broad natural intelligence to navigate their own worlds reasonably well. More recently, the term machine learning is often used to moot any claim of any kind of intelligence at all.

The distinction now is between good old-fashioned programming—which involves encoding explicit instructions for automating a task—and a computer program that, one way or another, learns to do whatever it’s supposed to. Before chatbots, probably the best-known example of machine learning was computer chess.

Because chess has been traditionally seen as a quintessential example of human intelligence, it’s likely that innumerable early computer programmers tried their hand at writing a program that could play the game. Before the days of machine learning, computer chess programs were written explicitly, and they were quite poor. But, with the incorporation of machine learning, a program eventually defeated the current world champion at the time, and nowadays chess programs routinely defeat international grandmasters. Despite this, perhaps surprisingly, chess is now more popular than ever. One program, Stockfish, considered the best in the world, is even used to rate the performance of players in real time.

Make no mistake, however: the rules of the game still had to be explicitly programmed into Stockfish and every other chess program. Without further programming and training, not even Stockfish could play any of the hundreds of chess variations that have been devised.

Ironically, although ChatGPT-3 claims to be able to play chess, it can’t, as demonstrated in this simple example (I’ve edited the moves to conform to standard notation).

Me: Let’s play chess.

ChatGPT-3: Sure, I’d be happy to play a game of chess with you! Shall we start?

Me, playing White: e2 e4

ChatGPT-3, playing Black: e7 e5

White: N g1 h3

Black: N b8 c6

White: N b1 a3

Black: N g8 f6

White: f2 f3

Black: d7 d6

White: d2 d3

Black: e7 e6

Although, through its first four moves, ChatGPT-3 appears to know how to play, on its fifth move, it tries to move a pawn that it had already been moved from a square it no longer occupies back to e6!

With ChatGPT-3.5, the response is equally absurd. After I play e4, it responds:

Now, it’s my move. I’ll respond with 1…c5, the Sicilian Defense:

But on the board it shows itself having made two moves, not just one (both e5 and c5)!

Other published examples of ChatGPT playing chess include it making impossible and illegal moves such as taking its own pieces.

Although ChatGPT can apparently converse plausibly on any topic, including the rules of chess, it is as narrow a machine learning programing as any chess program. Its words are no more meaningful than N b8 c6, and it is no more a step to artificial general intelligence than can Stockfish play Tic-Tac-Toe.

• • • • • •

A major problem with machine learning programs is their opacity—they are completely and fundamentally black boxes. As ChatGPT helpfully explains:

A black box typically refers to a device or system that is opaque or mysterious in its inner workings or processes.

The term “black box” in this sense is from World War II, referring to secret electronic navigational devices literally housed in a non-reflective black housing.5

As explained by Melanie Mitchell in her book Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, machine learning programs aren’t learning what we think they’re learning. The author gives several compelling examples, including a school bus identified by a machine learning program as an ostrich. The same program has also identified completely random television “snow” as a robin, a cheetah, an armadillo, a panda, a centipede, a peacock, a jackfruit, and a bubble, and abstract geometric patterns as a penguin, a starfish, a baseball, a guitar, a railroad car, and a remote control.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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Unlike traditional computer programs which are opaque enough even when heavily documented and commented by their programmers, large language models consist virtually entirely of parameters (that is, numbers). For example, GPT-3 (a version of ChatGPT) contains 175 billion parameters based on a training corpus of about 500 billion tokens (words and parts of words such as the plural S) and using a token length of 2,048 as its context in predicting the next word. Imagine trying to manually trace and understand the reason a chatbot produces a particular response to a particular prompt! Given this overwhelming complexity and such a daunting task, chatbots can only be regarded as oracles.

[The term] oracle refers to a system or source of information that is relied upon for its accuracy or expertise, even though the inner workings or processes are not fully comprehensible or transparent. It is essentially a trusted authority or source of knowledge that provides guidance or answers to questions, without revealing its underlying methods or reasoning. This concept is often used metaphorically to describe situations where information or advice is accepted without full understanding or scrutiny.

Thank you, ChatGPT.

As a step toward artificial general intelligence, chatbots are a blind alley leading to a dead end.

About the AuthorAs a step toward artificial general intelligence, chatbots are a blind alley leading to a dead end. As a skeptical observer of the pursuit of artificial intelligence and other subjects, Peter Kassan has been a regular contributor to Skeptic since 2006. Over his long career in the software products industry, he has held positions at the technical, managerial, and executive levels. Kassan is the author of several software patents. He can be reached at kassan.peter@gmail.com.

References1. https://bit.ly/3RYnkzh 2. https://bit.ly/3GZ3z4B 3. https://bit.ly/3tFxuM3 4. https://bit.ly/48qNm3W 5. https://bit.ly/48eCyWO

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss446_John_Mackey_2024_07_09.mp3Download MP3Whole Foods Market’s Cofounder and CEO for 44 years, John Mackey offers an intimate and provocative account of the rise of this iconic company and the personal and spiritual journey that inspired its remarkable impact.

The growth of Whole Foods isn’t just a business success story—it’s the story of a retail, cultural, and dietary revolution that has forever changed the industry and the way we eat. After more than four decades at the helm, John Mackey is ready to share never-before-told tales of the people and passions behind the beloved brand.

The Whole Story invites readers on the adventure of building Whole Foods Market: the colorful cast of idealists and foodies who formed the company’s DNA, the many breakthroughs and missteps; the camaraderie and the conflict, and the narrowly avoided disasters. Mackey takes us inside some of the most consequential decisions he had to make and honestly shares his regrets looking back.

For the millions of people who know and love Whole Foods, Mackey’s story is a candid look at the fellowship and meaning born of a shared mission and how an inimitable entrepreneur shepherded a startup hippy food store into the market-leading international brand it is today. John Mackey is an entrepreneur and the co-founder and visionary of Whole Foods Market. In his 44 years of service as CEO, the natural and organic grocer grew from a single store in Austin, Texas, to 540 stores in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, with annual sales exceeding $22 billion. Mackey co-founded the Conscious Capitalism Movement and co-authored a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling book entitled Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business and follow up, Conscious Leadership: Elevating Humanity Through Business. He is also the co-author of The Whole Foods Diet: The Lifesaving Plan for Health and Longevity and The Whole Foods Cookbook: 120 Delicious and Healthy Plant-Centered Recipes. Mackey currently serves on the board of directors for Conscious Capitalism, The Motley Fool, CATO Institute, The Institute for Cultural Evolution, and Students for Liberty and is pursuing his next business venture, Love.Life.

Shermer and Mackey discuss:

• how lives turn out: genes, environment and luck
• born in 1953: timing of going into the natural and organic foods market in the 1970s
• growing up in the 60s and coming of age in the 70s
• influence of his father, family, friends, mentors, teachers
• Trinity University and UT Austin influences
• Do you have to go to college to be successful?
• what makes an entrepreneur successful
• Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality
• from vegetarian co-op to SaferWay (with Renee Lawson) to Whole Foods Market
• from one store to many stores
• unions, salary caps, CEO/worker ratio, employee-owned businesses, regulators
• food quality regulation: private vs. government
• spiritual journey: from Christianity to New Age mysticism, Eastern wisdom, and life-changing awakenings through psychedelics
• political and intellectual development: from countercultural co-op dweller to libertarian and Conscious Capitalist
• libertarianism as a philosophy
• collective action problems: common good vs. individual liberty
• What’s it like getting your company to an IPO?
• What’s it like doing ultra-marathon hiking for days and weeks at a time?

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In October of 2023, U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, announced a draft bill entitled the No Fakes Act, or the “Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act.”1 This bill would enable artists to sue those who use their likeness (presumably, a deep fake of their voice) without permission.

His bill is largely a reaction that traces its roots back to “Ghostwriter,” an anonymous artist who created the song Heart on My Sleeve. It utilized AI-deep fakes of vocals by two of the most popular artists in the world— The Weeknd and Drake—without their consent. It also earned a whopping 1.4 million U.S. streams before its forced removal by Universal Music Group.2

Ghostwriter is the poster child for the prediction that AI will create another stream of licensing income3 and thus revolutionize the way artists create. I hope that’s the case. But as the industry continues to extract value from music and other media with little oversight, it’s unclear who exactly is reaping the benefits.

Move Fast and Break ThingsOn most days, I’m making music or writing about the mechanics of doing so. It goes without saying that I have an inherent bias against the man or anything I perceive to capitalize on arts for the sole sake of profit. When ChatGPT burst into my world of self-referential music and writing, I couldn’t help but feel trepidatious.

To be clear, I’m not against utilizing certain forms of AI in my own music production process. Whether it’s using Ableton’s Magenta Studio4 to generate drum pattern ideas or playing with AI-assisted toggles in my favorite plugins, I’m no stranger to taking advantage of machine learning to feed me inklings of a great idea.

My beatmaking workflow changes from one song to the next, but for illustration purposes, I might start by writing a song on piano or guitar, and then record that into my music-making software, Ableton Live. I can then start to build the beat (drums, synthesizers, and other instrumentation) around what I’ve recorded. I might open a plugin where I can input the key and the tempo of my composition, and the plugin might suggest some samples that I can add to my song. In the case of a plugin such as Magenta Studio, with the click of a button, the AI-assisted suite can generate drum patterns, melodies, and more musical elements based on what I’ve already created

In this way, I occasionally use AI technology to act as a writing partner, though it’s important to me that I resample the initial idea provided by the plugin. This could mean shifting the pitch of the sample, chopping and splicing it to make something new, or adding effects to place it within the artistic world of my song. I try to use AI as a tool to fuel and assist my creative processes, rather than as a substitute or replacement for them.

Without the presence of strong guardrails to protect their intellectual property rights, the working artist’s stock in trade isn’t just being depleted; it runs significant risk of being stolen.

Part of the problem with “AI,” or at least the public discourse about it, is that the term can mean so many different things. Grammarly, an app that can proofread text as you write it, could be packaged as AI—but so can the likes of Midjourney, an image generator accused of lifting data from artists without consent or compensation.5

The ambiguity behind those emotionally charged two letters all too easily turns what should be balanced discussions into trash talk. Yet it’s a discussion we must have.

AI has the potential to be much more invasive than simply co-opting the working artist’s dwindling paycheck. Tom Hanks is one of the many whose voice, reproduced by AI, was used in an advertisement without his consent or compensation.6 And note that we’re only hearing about it because Hanks has the name recognition to make headlines and the finances needed to hire any necessary legal expertise.

There’s a reason why, in the wake of AI, union contract negotiations now include stipulations that require the employment of a certain number of writers or background actors, and outline profitable licensing agreements for writers.7 Otherwise, extra cash flow would inevitably trickle back to the companies that host content, instead of the creators who built the stories that support the tech platforms in the first place.

Without the presence of strong guardrails to protect their intellectual property rights, the working artist’s stock in trade isn’t just being depleted; it runs significant risk of being stolen. Derivative works may deserve some level of monetization, but it stands to reason that some of that capital, or at the very least, good-faith credit, should find its way back to the original creative artist.

Which Art Forms Are Most Vulnerable?It would be hypocritical for me to argue against all forms of artificial intelligence. I use Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill to cut out pesky distractions in photos as well as computer tools to repurpose long-form content into short clips for social media.

I personally know many artists who have even experimented with generative AI engines to extend their visions for music videos and other visual art they would not be able to afford to produce otherwise. Many of these “AI assisted tools” have been around for a while, but only recently have been repackaged to line up with the latest venture capital buzzwords.

However, I am staunchly opposed to creating new solutions where no problems exist. If the motivation to create an AI tool is purely profit (that is, swapping paid background actors for digital renderings), my opinion on the matter quickly turns negative. When it comes to art and monetization, the AI squeeze is sending seismic shocks through an already cracked system where artists get an increasingly shorter end of the stick in an oversaturated, undervalued market.

Not all art forms will be affected equally. In cases where art is required to be passable and not personal, AI is likely to take over the field entirely. Displacement by AI is already a reality for those who make corporate commercial music as opposed to artists with a loyal fanbase. Many of those artists counted on such commercial gigs to pay the rent, especially in their early, struggling days.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however—AI might also help artists focus on the part of their creative process they love most. Advances in technology, seen in the brightest light, may allow creators to take time and energy formerly consumed by the tedious, repetitive parts of the process and reallocate them to the more “creatively intensive” tasks, which is what art, music, and literature are all about—or should be.

These positive aspects of AI tools will undoubtedly enable some creatives to be more productive and build more while staying within the confines of their budget. Nonetheless, a broadband reevaluation of artists and compensation is long overdue. The advent of new technology provides a perfect opportunity to redraw these boundaries, but at least so far, the companies that build these models have shown little interest in helping to do so.

Battling AI—On the Picket Line and in the CourtroomAfter one of the entertainment industry’s longest and most paralyzing strikes, Hollywood actors and screenwriters obtained an agreement that defines when, where, and how AI can and cannot be used. The agreement allows screenwriters to use AI tools in their original writing but prevents the industry from using it to replace them. It prohibits the studios from using AI to produce scripts—which, of course, it does only after being repeatedly trained on existing scripts— and then requiring real live human writers to complete the work at lower fees, royalties, and screen credit (i.e., likely future earnings) than for original writing.

Simon Johnson, Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT, who specializes in studying the economic effects of technological transformation, called the agreement a “fantastic win for writers” that he’s “hoping will be a model for the rest of the economy.” As one of those creative artists out in the rest of the economy, I have to hope he’s right. I also hope he’s right in predicting that it will result in “better quality work and a stronger industry for longer.”8

And it isn’t only labor that’s concerned about being cheated out of just compensation by AI—so are affected management and capital. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement over the unauthorized use of its published material to “train” artificial intelligence to first copy it and then replace it. Specifically, the Times lawsuit contends that millions of its articles of “uniquely valuable work” were used to train automated chatbots that now compete as a news source against it. And they’re talking in the billions—with a B! And while we may not be valued in the billions, every creative writer, actor, artist, musician, and performer believes that our work is “uniquely valuable” or we wouldn’t be making the sacrifices necessary to produce in the first place.9

Together, Sen. Coons’ bill, the Screen Writers agreement, and the Times lawsuit show that our society is responding to the new challenges thrown up by AI, though it will take time and effort to work them out and get it right. And again, it’s those with the money, the clout, and the name recognition who are able to force the issue for the rest of us.

The Myth of a Creative Middle Class: Why Many Artists Feel Threatened by AIArt thrives on exclusivity. Your work is effectively assigned value based on the amount of bonafide attention you can garner. For a discipline focused on the wide distribution of culture, that process can be oddly elitist.

While the world’s broader economy reflects a staggering wealth gap with the richest one percent owning nearly twice as much as the other 99 percent,10 the art world may be even worse.11 Admittedly, data is scarce for the latter, in part because art is, by design, opaque.

You can’t attribute a concrete value to a piece of art. And that is why art is a wildly risky but a potentially highly rewarding investment. This is true for the lucky few—most artists across all disciplines make pennies in comparison to their poster-child contemporaries. The reality of the starving artist is alive and well (though clinically and chronically malnourished).

Even if we broaden the criteria to include Internet creators and influencers within the artist umbrella, we can see a growing divide between profitable, sustainable artists and those who do not make enough to thrive off their craft alone. In 2020, the top one percent of creators on Gumroad, an ecommerce platform where creators can sell digital products, courses, and more, garnered about 60 percent of payouts.12

While I’m most keen to discuss music since I can speak most accurately to my own experiences, the hard truth is that there has been a massive devaluation across all creative disciplines, which I fear will only be exacerbated by a rising sea of AI content. A case in point is Elena Velez, who won the CDFA Emerging Designer of the Year13 designing for celebrity performers the likes of Solange Knowles, Julia Fox, and Rosalia, recently had to take a loan out of her mother’s retirement account in order to keep the lights on.14

When it comes to art and monetization, the AI squeeze is sending seismic shocks through an already cracked system where artists get an increasingly shorter end of the stick in an oversaturated, undervalued market.

Craftsmen like Velez simply cannot keep up with fast-fashion giants such as SHEIN, whose “AI Technology” can create new clothes in as little as three days.15 Industrialization of a market sector almost always leads to oversaturation and devaluation of craftsmanship. Markets tend to prioritize the cheapest, fastest means of production at all costs, likely because consumers simply don’t know and/or don’t care what goes into creating a quality piece.

Still, no one likes to award artists with sympathy. After all, who is pining to comfort a group of people who get to “do what they love” day in and day out by choice, while the rest of the workforce labor at a job, just to be able to live paycheck to paycheck. The big blunder is to assume that even at the A-list level, clout automatically equates to a sustainable income.

AI Amplifies What We Already Know to Be TrueWith machine learning’s inherent coding bias16 and tendency to provide preferential treatment to those who represent the backgrounds of those already in power, we cannot deny that AI is a black-mirrored reflection of the current state of the world. The proliferation of technology that’s made without the consciousness of underrepresented groups is unlikely to be a benign steward of art, let alone the state of the world. Left entirely to its own, it won’t be.

Tech as a whole has continued to poach value between artist and patron over the past two decades, making it increasingly difficult for the profession or the craft to exist. Spotify recently announced its royalty restructure for 2024, which will require each track to earn 1,000 streams within 12 months to start earning royalties.17 Otherwise, artists won’t earn anything. It has become increasingly clear that small artists aren’t a priority, because the streaming platform’s sense of value is ultimately tied to their shareholders.

It’s hard to get excited about AI “revolutionizing art” or providing artists additional streams of income when the very industry that created it has a systemic pattern of devaluing craft on a massive scale. Artists are the last people to resist innovation, but when the cost of your creation comes at the expense of an already decimated model of compensation, it’s hardly easy to welcome it with open arms.

In spite of all that, we cannot stop artificial intelligence from continuing to grow, nor should we necessarily. However, we’re missing a great opportunity to rethink how we value craft and the creatures of our culture. As a musician myself, whenever I speak about increased compensation for artists, I’m met with dismissive remarks that I believe largely come from a lack of experience and sometimes willful ignorance.

Most artists neither need nor desire a mansion, flashy clothes, or an assistant who helps sort out one color of M&Ms from the rest of the pack. In my experience, most of us just want a living wage, with the possibility of some sustainable retirement down the line, like what those in any other profession desire. Yet getting to this reasonable baseline of security is insurmountably difficult for most.

For instance, how much do you think an artist makes off a million streams on Spotify? As of fall 2023, that amount is…$4000.18 And that assumes that you have 100 percent of your royalty rights, which is extremely unlikely. If we’re being generous, an artist with a million monthly listeners will earn less than $50,000 a year off that platform.

I’m aware this assessment is fairly rudimentary in that it does not factor in revenue from a wider swath of streaming platforms, as well as merch, brand deals, and performances. (Though those are less likely to make large profits,19 if any, nowadays.) However, that also does not factor out the costs of recording, royalty splits, travel, publicity, management, and the general cost that comes from being the figurehead of a fickle entertainment brand with no guarantee of longevity. You can forget about healthcare and socking away savings for a rainy day. In the life of an up-and-coming artist, El Niño years are the rule, not the exception.

Lost in a Sea of NoiseAI might very well bring us boatloads of art and works from new creators who might not have the means to do so were it not for machine learning simplifying the process. Everyone who wants to make art should do so if they get the chance, even if that process requires assistance from AI. At the same time, it’s hard to ignore the fact that, according to Music Business Worldwide, 120,000 new songs20 are released on streaming services every day. While having more access to the tools to make amazing music has never been easier, it’s also much more challenging to make a career out of your creations.

Anecdotally, I am not craving even more content as a consumer. Are you? Is anyone? With AI-assisted art ushering in a wide wave of content, I fear that I may miss out on some hidden gems. I get fatigued just waffling through the many shows of Netflix, attempting to find something worthy of the little free time I have. Yet I fear I might give up before discovering a priceless new artist engulfed in the overwhelming surge of content.

While admittedly antiquated, the eras of mass radio airplay created a collective sense of adulation, allowing some artists a chance at longevity. Today’s world is much more segmented, with your algorithm standing being as unique as your fingerprint.

Even so, artists who were lucky enough to earn a spot on the radio when it was the major medium continue to have a seat at the table. Bruno Mars, Eminem, Katy Perry, and SIA remain in Spotify’s top 100 despite not having a key hit within the past year, in part because of their prominence in a time of more collective culture.

The struggle for artists has changed. It’s no longer about finding the tools and the means of distribution for your creations. It’s now about how to stand out and get noticed amidst a sea of endless content. Art and content have never been more interchangeable, and for craftsmen, this reality couldn’t be more painful.

Art will not be replaced, but it will be cheapened.You cannot take art away from artists. However, you can, perhaps unknowingly, extract compensation from the producers of that craft. And for many, that equates to depriving them of a necessary part of their livelihood. Artists aren’t upset because they want to serve as the gatekeepers of innovation and expression.

Rather, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to survive—let alone thrive—in an environment that does not value supporting your trade with a livable wage. Artificial intelligence’s purported sense of utility in art is based on an incorrect assumption that lies at its core: that bringing AI into one’s process will breed greater efficiency, with more art equating to more valuable expression as a whole.

Yet, the word “art” is derived from the Latin ars, that is, to craft, or the cultivation of human skill. The magic of art often exists due to human error and only as the end product of a lengthy process. And those are so often at odds with the constant lust for instant gratification, which is, in many ways, the defining characteristic of today’s world.

Art often means a rejection of the efficient. It’s churning the butter instead of flipping on the mixer just for the sake of doing so. Art is applying beauty and meaning beyond the mere asset itself, defying cost-efficient logic, and foregoing obsessive A/B testing.

I can see how one might argue that AI art is a new medium in its own right, but that does not take away from the stinging fact that oversaturation leads to devaluation in an environment that already has a huge problem with compensating creators directly.

Ultimately, the moral dilemma behind artificial intelligence and art may not matter. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, so much of the population opted for innovation at all costs, which continues to be true regardless of how the underpaid craftsmen may feel.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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Artificial intelligence is here, and not only to stay, but to grow. Just as we define the mental models and data training sets, we get to choose—with our money, time, and attention—how we attribute value to the artists, and potentially, the AI artists of our generation. As in preferences for minimalism or maximalism, progressive rock or bubblegum pop, the debate ultimately boils down to what we as individuals allow space for in our lives.

Ultimately, the questions raised by AI about fair compensation for artists are but part of the general question about the increasing income inequality seen in modern technological societies. As futurist and AI expert Rudy van Belkom states in his Introduction to this issue of Skeptic, while AI can help by performing any necessary complex computations, the final decisions on such socially sensitive decisions should be left to human wisdom rather than machines, however “intelligent.”

About the AuthorKate Brunotts is a writer and an avant-pop music producer based in Brooklyn. She strives to create accessible sonic dreamscapes that challenge the bounds of music. Her work has been featured on multiple Spotify and Apple editorial playlists, along with BBC Introducing and Earmilk.

References1. https://bit.ly/3NHHwCX 2. https://bit.ly/3S5Wu8M 3. https://bit.ly/41Mb0Wb 4. https://bit.ly/3RA4blO 5. https://bit.ly/41Y4yM9 6. https://bit.ly/3vim1mb 7. https://bit.ly/3S2ZbrB 8. https://bit.ly/4aEICcy 9. https://bit.ly/3GZ3z4B 10. https://bit.ly/3H14DVu 11. https://bit.ly/47kWS7q 12. https://bit.ly/3RGEuQO 13. https://bit.ly/41Faoll 14. https://bit.ly/3RKKUya 15. https://bit.ly/47lyXoH 16. https://bit.ly/41GZcVa 17. https://bit.ly/3RJMUGT 18. https://bit.ly/3vmjxTO 19. https://bit.ly/3S1qnH7 20. https://bit.ly/3S1FNuN

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss445_Aella_2024_07_02.mp3Download MP3Aella is a writer, blogger, data analyst, and sex worker who has written extensively about the psychology and economics of online sex work, conducting extensive surveys and research in order to understand the ecosystem of sex workers. She grew up in Idaho as the oldest of three daughters of conservative parents who were part of a community of fundamentalist Christians, where she was homeschooled; their family name has been withheld in media coverage for privacy reasons. She moved out at age 17 after a fallout with her parents, and in 2012, after quitting a job as an assembly line worker in a factory, began working as a camgirl. She eventually became one of the highest-earning creators on OnlyFans, making over $100,000 in some months. By 2021, she was described as having set herself apart partly by conducting extensive market research, e.g. surveying almost 400 fellow female OnlyFans performers about their incomes and identifying factors that were correlated with higher earnings.

Shermer and Aella discuss:

• Aella’s upbringing in a conservative Christian home-schooled household
• sex work or prostitution?
• her response to Rachel Moral’s Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution
• her response to Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
• the evolutionary psychology of sex differences
• male-female sexual psychology differences
• why women are choosier and more risk averse
• why men want more sexual variety
• what men and women regret about sex
• sexual jealousy and how the sexes differ
• what it’s like being in an orgy
• how does she determine how much to charge as an escort
• BDSM, fetishes, and sexual violence
• autogynephilia
• trans matters
• Who are the women who sell sex?
• Who are the men who buy sex?
• agency and volition in sex work: women and men
• virtual sex, phone sex, cyber sex, cam sex, etc. (OnlyFans and other sites)
• feminism and sex work
• pornography: good or bad?
• decriminalizing sex work.

Anthropologist Alan Fiske’s Model of Four Types of Human Relationships1. Communal Sharing: Relatives, couples, marriage, families, friends—freely share resources within a group, no tab keeping, egalitarian, “one flesh” common essence, no contamination, evolved: maternal care, kin selection, mutualism 2. Authority Ranking: Employer/Employee, Teacher/Student, Parent/Child—linear hierarchy, dominance, status, age, size, strength, wealth, precedence, tribute from inferiors, obedience, paternalistic, noblesse oblige; evolved: hierarchical primates 3. Equality Matching: Friends splitting gas, informal exchanges. Tit-for-tat reciprocity, division of resources equitably via turn-taking, coin-flipping, matching contributions, cut and divide cake equally; evolve: fairness & reciprocity, intuitive economics, cheating detection, perspective taking & calculation 4. Market Pricing: Economy of strangers, money is the social currency of exchange and reciprocity—currency, prices, rents, salaries, benefits, interest, credit; evolve: none

Violations of Fiske’s 4 Models* Restaurant diner invites owner to dinner instead of paying * Dinner guest offers to pay host * Woody Allen’s watch/my neighbor’s car * Organ sale * Roads: Public vs. Private * Sex between Employer & Employee, Teacher & Student, Parent & Child * Prostitution: Sex is usually within communal sharing or equality matching, not market pricing.

David Buss: When Men Behave BadlyNumber of Sexual Partners Preferred

“Many men are burdened by lust for a variety of different women, constant cravings that cannot ever be fully satisfied … It explains why a handsome movie star such as Hugh Grant would have sex with a prostitute, despite having Elizabeth Hurley, a gorgeous model and actress, as his then steady girlfriend.”

Length of Time Before Engaging in SexEven in the most egalitarian countries, men prefer more sexual partners compared to women. In Norway, researchers asked people how many sex partners they would prefer over the next 30 years. On average, women preferred five, men preferred 25. Even the desire to kiss before intercourse differs between the sexes. About 53 percent of men report that they would have sex without kissing, while only 14.6 percent of women would have sex without kissing.

Choosiness vs. Less DiscerningStudies of online dating, for example, find that most men find most women to be at least somewhat attractive. In contrast, women, on average, view 80 percent of men as below average in attractiveness. Another study found that on the dating app Tinder, men “liked” more than 60 percent of the female profiles they viewed, while women “liked” only 4.5 percent of male profiles.

Sexual RegretsSexual mistakes are viewed differently. Research indicates that when asked to reflect on their sexual history, women are more likely to regret having had sex with someone, while men are more likely to regret having missed out on sexual opportunities.

What Men and Women Look for in a MateFor same-sex friends, men and women prioritized personality and social intelligence. For opposite-sex friends, though, men assigned greater value on attractiveness, whereas women placed greater value on economic resources and physical prowess.

Sexual Harassment PerceptionsWhen men were asked how they would feel if their co-worker of the opposite sex asked them to have sex, 67 percent of men said they would be flattered and only 15 percent said they would be insulted. In contrast, 63 percent of women said they would be insulted and only 17 percent said they would be flattered.

Back-Up Mates and CheatingWhy do people cheat on their romantic partners? For men, it appears that the main reason they stray is the desire for sexual variety. In fact, men who cheat are just as happy in their marriages as men who are faithful. In contrast, women who stray are often unhappy. Women who have affairs often want to detach themselves from relationships in which they are unsatisfied and seek a better partner. In fact, only 30 percent of men report falling in love with their affair partners, while for women it is 79 percent.

From Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc

Consider the morality of the biblical warlords who had no qualms about taking multiple wives, adultery, keeping concubines, and fathering countless children from their many polygamous arrangements. The anthropologist Laura Betzig has put these stories into an evolutionary context by analyzing the Old Testament. She found no less than 41 named polygamists, not one of which was a powerless man. “In the Old Testament, powerful men—patriarchs, judges, and kings—have sex with more wives; they have more sex with other men’s women; they have sex with more concubines, servants, and slaves; and they father many children.” And not just the big names. According to Betzig’s analysis, “men with bigger herds of sheep and goats tend to have sex with more women, then to father more children.” Most of the polygynous patriarchs, judges, and kings had two, three, or four wives with a corresponding number of children, although King David had more than eight wives and twenty children, King Abijah had 14 wives and 38 children, and King Rehoboam had 18 wives (and 60 other women) who bore him no fewer than 88 offspring. But they were all lightweights compared to King Solomon, who married at least 700 women. There were Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women he married, then for good measure added 300 concubines, which he called “man’s delight.” (What Solomon’s concubines called him was never recorded.)

Carol TavrisFrom a review of Nona Willis Aronowitz’s Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution; Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex: A Provocation; Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution; Bridget Phetasy’s Substack essay “Beyond Parody”

After devoting many years to the scientific study of women’s heterosexual experiences—through reading, observing, listening, and participating—I have drawn a few conclusions:

1. Many women like sex when it brings erotic pleasure and they like the guy. This is called “good sex.”
2. Many women don’t like sex when the guy is a dork, rude, thoughtless, clumsy, coercive, or violent. This is called “bad sex.”
3. Many women enjoy hookups, short affairs, conference connections, orgies (planned and spontaneous), and adventures with multiples and variations of all kinds. This is called “having fun.”
4. Many #3 women get tired after a few years (“Oh God, Murray, another orgy?”), whereas others make it a way of life. This is called “being in the lifestyle.”
5. Many women prefer sex with one doting partner at a time, the “time” lasting from as long as love does, from a week to a lifetime. This is called “a loving relationship.”

In every era, there are people who devote their energies to telling women they’re doing it all wrong. Are you enjoying monogamy with your sweetheart when others all around you are claiming that it is liberating, feminist, and “sex positive” to have many partners? Are you hopelessly straight or gay, or a hopelessly old-fashioned one-partner-at-a-time person, even though you think that for political, personal, or progressive reasons you really ought to be trying the alternatives? Are you enjoying your many affairs when others all around you are claiming that women aren’t designed for infidelity, that you’re merely capitulating to the Playboy standard, that you’re repressing the trauma of all those impersonal adventures, that you’re just a dupe and victim of hardwired male sexual preferences? Like a call-and-response in music or church, whichever view is ascendant will call for its inevitable antithetical response. Sex writers are always pouncing on a new hook, even when today’s new is yesterday’s old.

Today’s hook is this: if it’s good to be sex-positive, how come so many women are having sex-negative experiences? Why so much unwanted sex, harassments, miserable hookups, drunken episodes? Why the eternal difficulties in communication? Why do many women feel obliged to “consent,” when they’d rather go home and play with the dog? A spate of recent books locates the answers in the failure of feminism and the “unfinished” sexual revolution to make women’s sexual lives a thing of beauty and a joy forever. These include

To her credit, Nona Willis Aronowitz does not write an analysis of women’s continuing search for sexual ecstasy, satisfaction, and thoughtful male partners as if no one had done so before. That would have been a challenge, given that her own mother, the brilliant feminist Ellen Willis, tackled these questions a generation earlier, and her daughter interweaves her mother’s writings and experiences, along with those of other feminists of that era, with her own stories. But whereas her mother’s generation (and mine) emphasized that the personal is political, Willis Aronowitz’s mantra is the political is personal.

Personal? TMI is an understatement. Indeed, readers may forgiven for asking, What bad sex? The book is a litany of the many orgasms she’s had, hours and hours of cunnilingus with this lover and that one, anal oral sideways multiples, the fantastic lovers, the terrible lovers, how she loves dick, experiments with other women, passionate weekends. The “bad sex” of the title is mostly “bad relationships”—hookups with men who were selfish or otherwise unlikeable, or, in the case of the partner she leaves at the outset of her story, relationships that had become sexually boring. Here it all is again, yet another woman trying to find the blissful balance between committed sex and casual sex—open relationships being necessary for anyone who believes that monogamy is death to being a fully sexually liberated person. Calling Dr. Ester Perel and the innumerable marriage counselors who study the shapeshifting patterns of intimacy, passion, and desire over the course of life and love.

As I read this book, I wondered how the same narrative would sound if written by a man:

“I left my otherwise loving partner, whom I loved, because I got bored with her and our sex life, and I didn’t like her off-putting smell that ruined our sexual chemistry. I’m happy to report other intimate details about her that annoyed me, but I won’t bother you with her perspective on me. I will tell you about my many lovers so you will understand how desirable I am, including that amazing afternoon in which I received one blow job after another. I confess that certain body shapes and sizes turn me on. Unfortunately, along with the hot women I couldn’t get enough of, at least until I tired of them, I hooked up with some awful women too—demanding, rude, noncommunicative about their desires, egocentric. Wait: one of those impersonal hookups was a very nice person.”

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss444_Nathan_Law_2024_06_29.mp3Download MP3Nathan Law is a young Hong Kong activist, currently in exile and based in London. During the Umbrella Movement in 2014, Nathan was one of the five representatives who took part in the dialogue with the government, debating political reform. Upholding non-violent civic actions, Nathan, Joshua Wong and other student leaders founded Demosistō in 2016 and ran for the Legislative Council election. Nathan was elected with 50,818 votes in the Hong Kong Island constituency and became the youngest Legislative Councilor in history. Yet his seat was overturned in July 2017 following Beijing’s constitutional reinterpretation, despite international criticism. Nathan was later jailed for his participation in the Umbrella Movement. The persecution sparked global concern over Beijing’s crackdown on human rights and democratic movement in Hong Kong. In 2018, Nathan and his fellow student activists Joshua Wong and Alex Chow were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by U.S. congressmen and British parliament members. Due to the risk imposed by the draconian National Security Law, Nathan left Hong Kong and continues to speak up for Hong Kong people at the international level. In 2020, he was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine. He is the author of the new book Freedom: How We Lose It and How We Fight Back.

Shermer and Law discuss:

• a brief history of Hong Kong
• Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tiananmen Square, the Umbrella Revolution, Sino-British Joint Declaration, the National Security Law, crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces
• his parents and life growing up in Hong Kong
• how Asia’s most liberal, open and cosmopolitan city changed so fundamentally
• how a flourishing and free society was undermined from within
• the People’s Republic of China (PRC)
• Xi Jinping
• What is freedom?
• What are rights?
• How are rights and freedoms won or lost?
• Who owns the truth, and what is truth, anyway?
• Can you reform society from within?
• freedom of speech, the press, to assemble, etc.
• the enemies of dictators
• Why are democracies fragile?

Quotes from the book Freedom: How We Lose It and How We Fight Back

“When governments control access to information and are able to define the narrative and dictate what we know, we lose more than our freedoms. We lose the ability to see the world for what it is. We lose our humanity.”

“Freedom is our most fundamental human right. It is universal to us all. If the right to life is our right to exist, our right to be free allows us to live the only life worth living. We all need our own agency, freedom of thought and conscience. Without these we have no dignity.”

“Freedom should be the starting point for our relationships with others. To form and maintain those relationships we often choose to curtail our freedoms. We may relinquish a certain amount of freedom in return for collective benefits—for instance, I’m happy to give up some of my income in taxes so that I don’t have to build my own roads or hospitals. We cede certain rights to government on the condition that it provides us with an environment in which we can live and, hopefully, prosper. This relationship between freedom and obedience is the basis of the social contract.”

“I think freedom is as much a gut feeling as a thought—as much a cause of the heart as of the head. What drives their pursuit of freedom is not only the ideal, but also their revulsion against the opposite—to be unfree. It is their sense of being oppressed, of witnessing or experiencing injustice and unfairness, that is the driver.”

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” —George Orwell

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Note from editors: In response to the growing concerns about artificial intelligence development, on November 1–2, 2023, the British Government held the first ever summit on AI Safety, attended by representatives of 28 countries as well as business leaders working in the field of AI. The summit aptly took place at Bletchley Park, the very location where Alan Turing cracked the German Enigma code, which played a significant part in the Allied victory in WWII.

The result of the summit was the signing of The Bletchley Declaration, which recognizes the urgent need to understand and collectively manage potential risks of AI through a joint global effort to ensure AI is developed and deployed in a safe, responsible way for the benefit of the global community. The signatories of the declaration include Canada, China, the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The world leaders in attendance officially recognized the need to collaborate on testing the next generation of AI models against a range of critical national security, safety, and societal risks.

At the conclusion of the event, the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk sat down at the prime minister’s residence for a private conversation, and then held a public discussion. Their public dialogue is transcribed below, with only minor edits for clarity.

Rishi Sunak has served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since 2022 and has been Member of Parliament since 2015. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and earned his MBA from Stanford as a Fulbright Scholar. Prior to his political career, he was a hedge fund manager.

Elon Musk was a founding board member of OpenAI, the research organization behind ChatGPT. He is the owner of Tesla, a pioneer in autonomous electric vehicles, and the founder of Neuralink, a company working on developing implantable brain-computer interfaces. He is also the CEO of the rocket company SpaceX and owner of the social media platform X.com (formerly Twitter).

Rishi Sunak: Bill Gates said there is no one in our time who has done more to push the bounds of science innovation than you. That’s a nice thing to have anyone say about you. But oddly enough, when it comes to AI, you’ve been doing almost the opposite. For around a decade, you’ve been saying, “Hang on, we need to think about what we’re doing and what we’re pushing here. And what do we do to make this safe?” What was it that caused you to think about it that way? Why do we need to be worried?

Elon Musk: I’ve been somewhat concerned for quite a while. I would tell people, “We should really be concerned about AI.” They’re like, “What are you talking about?” They’ve never really had any experience with AI. But since I have been immersed in technology for a long time, I could see it coming.

I think this year there have been a number of breakthroughs. We’re at the point at which someone can see a dynamically created video of themselves, like video of you saying anything in real time. These sorts of deep fake videos are really incredibly good, sometimes more convincing than real ones. And then obviously things like ChatGPT were quite remarkable. I saw GPT-1, GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-4—the whole sort of lead up to that. It was easy for me to see where it’s going. If you just extrapolate the points on a curve and assume that trend will continue, then we will have profound artificial intelligence. And obviously at a level that far exceeds human intelligence.

But I’m glad to see that, at this point, people are taking safety seriously, and I’d like to say thank you for holding this AI Safety conference. I think it will go down in history as being very important. It’s really quite profound.

I do think, overall, that the potential is there for artificial intelligence to most likely have a positive effect and to create a future of abundance where there is no scarcity of goods and services. But it is somewhat of the Magic Genie problem: if you have a magic genie that can grant all the wishes…usually those stories don’t end well. Be careful what you wish for, including wishes.

RS: So, you talked a little bit about the summit and thank you for being engaged in it, which has been great. One of the things that we achieved today in the meetings between the companies and the leaders was an agreement that, ideally, governments should be doing safety testing of models before they’re released.

In government, my job is to say, “Hang on, there is a potential risk here.” Not a definite risk, but a potential risk of something that could be bad. My job is to protect the country, and we can only do that if we develop the capability we need in our safety institute, and then make sure we can test the models before they are released. You’ve talked about the potential risk. What are the types of things governments like ours should be doing to manage and mitigate those risks?

EM: Well, I generally think that it is good for government to play a role when public safety is at risk. For the vast majority of software, public safety is not at risk. If the app crashes on your phone or your laptop, it’s not a massive catastrophe. But talking about digital super intelligence, does it pose a risk to the public? Then there is a role for government to play, to safeguard the interests of the public.

This is true in many fields. I deal with regulators throughout the world because of Starlink (communications), SpaceX (aerospace), and Tesla (cars). So I’m very familiar with dealing with regulators and I actually agree with the vast majority of regulations. There are a few that I disagree with from time to time, probably less than one percent.

There is some concern from people in Silicon Valley who have never dealt with regulators before, and they think that this is going to just crush innovation, slow them down, and be annoying. And it will be annoying—it’s true, they’re not wrong about that. But I think we’ve learned over the years that having a referee is a good thing. And if you look at any sports game, there’s always a referee and nobody’s suggesting to have a sports game without one. I think that’s the right way to think about this: for government to be a referee to make sure the public safety is addressed.

I think there might be, at times, too much optimism about technology. I say that as a technologist, so I ought to know. But like I said, on balance, I think that the AI will be a force for good. But the probability of it going bad is not zero percent. We just need to mitigate the downside potential.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks at a plenary session on day two of the AI Summit at Bletchley Park on November 2, 2023. (Photo by Kirsty O’Connor / No 10 Downing Street [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED])

RS: Do you think governments can develop the expertise? Governments need to quickly tool up capability personnel-wise, which is what we’re doing. Is it possible for governments to do that fast enough given how quickly the technology is developing?

EM: It’s a great point you’re making. The pace of AI is faster than any technology I’ve seen in history, by far. And it seems to be growing in capability by at least five-fold, perhaps ten-fold per year. It will certainly grow by an order of magnitude in 2024. And government isn’t used to moving at that speed. But I think even if there are no firm regulations and even if there isn’t an enforcement capability, simply having insight and being able to highlight concerns to the public will be very powerful.

RS: Well, hopefully we can do better than that. What was interesting over the last couple of days talking to everyone who’s doing the development of this—and I think you can go with this—is just the pace of advancement here is unlike anything all of you have seen in your careers in technology, because you’ve got these kind of compounding effects from the hardware, and the data, and the personnel.

EM: Currently, the two leading centers for AI development are the San Francisco Bay Area and the London area, and there are many other places where it’s being done, but those are the two leading areas. So, I think if the U.S. and the UK, and China are aligned on safety, that’s all going to be a good thing because that’s really where the leadership is generally.

RS: Good. Thanks. You mentioned China. I took a decision to invite China to the summit over the last days, and it was not an easy decision. A lot of people criticize me for it. My view is, if you’re going to try to have a serious conversation, you need to. What are your thoughts?

EM: It’s essential.

RS: Should we be engaging with China? Can we trust them?

EM: If we don’t, if China is not on board with AI safety, it’s somewhat of a moot situation. The single biggest objection that I get to any kind of AI regulation or sort of safety controls is, “Well, China is not going to do it and therefore they will just jump into the lead and exceed us all.” But actually, China is willing to participate in AI safety. And thank you for inviting them. And I think we should thank China for attending. When I was in China earlier this year, my main subject of discussion with the leadership in China was AI safety. They took it seriously, which is great, and having them here I think was essential. Really, if they are not participants, it’s pointless.

RS: We were pleased they were engaged in the discussions yesterday and actually ended up signing the same communiqué that everyone else did. Which is a good start. And as I said, we need everyone to approach this in a similar way if we’re going to have a realistic chance of resolving it.

We had a good debate today about open source. And I think you’ve been a proponent of algorithmic transparency, making some of the X.com algorithms public. Some are very concerned about open source models being used by bad actors. And then you’ve got people who say they are critical to innovation. What are your thoughts on how we should approach this?

EM: Well, the open source algorithms and data tend to lag the closed source by 6 to 12 months. Given the rate of improvement this is quite a big difference; if things are improving by a factor of let’s say five or more, then being a year behind you are five times worse. It’s a pretty big difference. And that might be an OK situation.

But certainly it will get to the point where you’ve got open source AI that will start to approach human level intelligence, perhaps exceed it. I don’t quite know what to do about it. I think it’s somewhat inevitable. There will be some amount of open source and I guess I would have a slight bias towards open source because at least you can see what’s going on, whereas with closed source, you don’t know what’s happening. Now it should be said that even if AI is open source, do you actually know what’s going on? If you’ve got a gigantic data file and billions of data points, weights, and parameters…you can’t just read it and see what it’s going to do. It’s a gigantic file of inscrutable numbers. You can test it when you run it. But it’s probabilistic as opposed to deterministic. It’s not like traditional programming where you’ve got very discrete logic, and the outcome is very predictable and you can read each line and see what each line is going to do. A neural net is just a whole bunch of probabilities.

RS: The point you’ve just made is one that we have been talking about a lot. AI is not like normal software, where there’s predictability about inputs improving leading to a particular output improving. And as the models iterate and improve, we don’t quite know what’s going to come out the other end. Which is why there is this bias for that we need to get in there while the training runs are being done, before the models are released…to understand what has this new iteration brought about in terms of capability,

When I talk to people about AI, the thing that comes up the most is probably not so much the stuff we’ve been talking about, but jobs. It’s, “What does AI mean for my job? Is it going to mean that I don’t have a job, or my kids are not going to have a job?”

My answer as a policymaker and as a leader is that AI is already creating jobs and you can see that in the companies that are starting, and also in the way it’s being used more as a co-pilot versus replacing the person. There’s still human agency, but AI is helping you do your job better, which is a good thing. And as we’ve seen with technological revolutions in the past, clearly there’s change in the labor market. I was quoting an MIT study today that they did a couple of years ago; something like 60 percent of the jobs at that moment didn’t exist 40 years ago. So—it’s hard to predict.

And my job is to create an incredible education system, whether it’s at school, whether it’s retraining people at any point in their career. Ultimately, if we’ve got a skilled population, then we ought to keep up with the pace of change and have a good life. But it’s still a concern. What are your observations on AI and the impact on labor markets and people’s jobs, and how people should feel as they think about this?

EM: Well, I think we are seeing the most disruptive force in history here. For the first time, we will have something that is smarter than the smartest human. It’s hard to say exactly what that moment is, but there will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you want to have a job for personal satisfaction, but the AI will be able to do everything. I don’t know if that makes people comfortable or uncomfortable. That’s why I say, if you wish for a magic genie that gives you any wishes you want and there’s no limit—you don’t have this three wish limit—you just have as many wishes as you want… It’s both good and bad.

One of the challenges in the future will be, how do we find meaning in life, if you have a magic genie that can do everything you want? When there’s new technology, it tends to usually follow an S-curve. In this case, we’re going to be on the exponential portion of the S-curve for a long time. You’ll be able to ask for anything. We won’t have universal basic income. We’ll have universal high income. In some sense, it’ll be somewhat of a leveler or an equalizer. Really, I think everyone will have access to this magic genie. You’ll be able to ask any question. It’ll certainly be good for education. It’ll be the best, most patient tutor. There will be no shortage of goods and services. It will be an age of abundance.

I’d recommend people read Iain Banks. The Banks culture books are definitely, by far, the best envisioning of an AI future. There’s nothing even close that’ll give you a sense of what is a fairly utopian or protopian future with AI.

RS: Universal high income is a nice phrase. I think part of our job is to make sure that we can navigate to that largely positive place that you’re describing and help people through it between now and then.

EM: It is largely positive, yes. You know, a lot of jobs are uncomfortable or dangerous or sort of tedious, and the computer will have no problem doing that. It will be happy to do it all. And we still have sports where humans compete, like the Olympics. Obviously, a machine can go faster than any human, but humans still race against each other. Even though the machines are better, people do find fulfillment in that.

RS: Yes, we still find a way. It’s a good analogy. We’ve been talking a lot about managing the risks… Let’s talk a little bit about the opportunities.

Having that personalized tutor is incredible compared to classroom learning. If you can have every child have a personal tutor specifically for them that evolves with them over time, that could be extraordinary. And so that you know, for me, I look at that, I think, gosh, that is within reach at this point! That’s one of the benefits I’m most excited about.

I was just going over a couple of things with the team, like how are we doing AI right now that it’s making a difference to people’s lives. We have this thing called gov.uk, all the government information brought together on one website. If you need to get a driving license, passport, pay your taxes, any interaction with government, it is centralized in a very easy to use way. So, a large chunk of the population is interacting with gov.uk every single day to do all these day-to-day tasks, right?

We are about to deploy AI across the platform to make that whole process even easier. Like, “Look, I’m currently here and I’ve lost my passport and my flight is in five hours.” At the moment, that would require how many steps to figure out what you do. When we deploy the AI, it should be that you could just literally say that, and boom, we’re going to walk you through. And that’s going to benefit millions and millions of people every single day.

That’s a very practical way that, in my seat, I can start using this technology to help people in their day-to-day lives—not just healthcare discoveries and everything else that we’re also doing. That’s quite a powerful demonstration.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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When you look at the landscape of things that you see as possible, what are you particularly excited about?

EM: I think certainly an AI tutor is going to be amazing. I think there’s also, perhaps, companionship, which may seem odd. How can a computer really be your friend? But if you have an AI that has memory and remembers all of your interactions, and, say, you gave it permission to read everything you’ve ever done…and you can talk to it every day, and those conversations build upon each other… It will really know you better than anyone, perhaps even yourself. You will actually have a great friend. I think that will be a real thing. One of my sons has some learning disabilities and has trouble making friends. An AI friend would be great for him.

RS: OK… You know, that was a surprising answer that’s worth reflecting on. That’s really interesting.

© Crown Copyright 2023. Reproduced under the Open Government Licence v 3.0. Transcribed by Skeptic.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss443_A.J._Jacobs_2024_06_25.mp3Download MP3A.J. Jacobs learned the hard way that donning a tricorne hat and marching around Manhattan with a 1700s musket will earn you a lot of strange looks. In the wake of several controversial rulings by the Supreme Court and the ongoing debate about how the Constitution should be interpreted, Jacobs set out to understand what it means to live by the Constitution.

In The Year of Living Constitutionally, A.J. Jacobs tries to get inside the minds of the Founding Fathers by living as closely as possible to the original meaning of the Constitution. He asserts his right to free speech by writing his opinions on parchment with a quill and handing them out to strangers in Times Square. He consents to quartering a soldier, as is his Third Amendment right. He turns his home into a traditional 1790s household by lighting candles instead of using electricity, boiling mutton, and—because women were not allowed to sign contracts—feebly attempting to take over his wife’s day job, which involves a lot of contract negotiations.

The book blends unforgettable adventures—delivering a handwritten petition to Congress, applying for a Letter of Marque to become a legal pirate for the government, and battling redcoats as part of a Revolutionary War reenactment group—with dozens of interviews from constitutional experts from both sides. Jacobs dives deep into originalism and living constitutionalism, the two rival ways of interpreting the document.

Much like he did with the Bible in The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs provides a crash course on our Constitution as he experiences the benefits and perils of living like it’s the 1790s. He relishes, for instance, the slow thinking of the era, free from social media alerts. But also discovers the progress we’ve made since 1789 when married women couldn’t own property.

Now more than ever, Americans need to understand the meaning and value of the Constitution. As politicians and Supreme Court Justices wage a high-stakes battle over how literally we should interpret the Constitution, A.J. Jacobs provides an entertaining yet illuminating look into how this storied document fits into our democracy today.

A.J. Jacobs is a journalist, lecturer, and human guinea pig whose books include Drop Dead Healthy, The Year of Living Biblically, and The Puzzler. A contributor to NPR, The New York Times, and Esquire, among other media outlets, Jacobs lives in New York City with his family. His new book is The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning.

Shermer and Jacobs discuss:

• what possessed him to spend a year living constitutionally and biblically
• what the Constitution really says and means
• Constitutional originalism
• what’s behind the Supreme Court’s rulings on guns, religion, women’s rights and more
• what happens if you become an ultimate originalist and follow the Constitution using the mindset and tools of the Founders
• why originalism is not the best approach
• what happened when he carried a musket on the streets of NYC
• why firing an 18th century musket takes 15 steps. It would be hard to conduct a mass shooting with a musket.
• how he gave up social media in favor of writing pamphlets with a quill pen
• how he fined his sons thirty-seven and a half cents for every time they cursed, as was the constitutionally-approved law in New York State in 1789
• 18th century view of rights was very different. (They did not see rights as trump cards. Rights had to be balanced against the common good. So free speech was actually much more constricted. Neither conservatives nor progressives would want the 18th century free speech.)
• what the 18th century was really like: it was a racist, sexist, smelly, dangerous time
• Ideas from the 18th century worth preserving:
  • cold takes instead of hot takes
  • election cakes (elections in the 18th century were festive. (This was a new right. They had music, parades, and cake.)
  • responsibilities and virtue. (They balanced the idea of rights with the idea of virtue and the pubic good.)
  • epistemic humility and changing one’s mind
  • news detoxes (They got their news twice a week. That allowed them time to think about it instead of always being in reactive rage mode).
• what the founders got right and wrong
  • They were elitists, and installed counter-majoritarian measures in the Constitution that are still problems today (like the Electoral College).
  • They would be shocked at today’s government, and how the president is far too powerful.
  • The Founders were fearful of monarchy and authoritarianism. They would not be happy with the office of president today.
  • Why the Founders considered three co-presidents because no single person should have that much power.
  • They would be shocked by how powerful SCOTUS is. Most Founders didn’t think it would be the final say on the Constitution.
  • They would be shocked by the Supermajority rule in the Senate. That is not in the Constitution.
• The Constitution
  • Frederick Douglass’ idea that the Constitution is a promissory note. It contains ideals like liberty and equality. We have to make America live up to it. (MLK and Obama echoed this idea)
  • We should interpret the Constitution in a pluralist way, not a single lens. Look at the original meaning, but also how a decision will affect society today, and our descendants. (Or else as a pair of pants with an elastic waist. You want it to have some structure, but also some give. It shouldn’t be a pair of skinny jeans that splits open when you gain a pound.)
• We have to work to save democracy through reform. It won’t save itself.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss442_Justin_McHenry_2024_06_22.mp3Download MP3Is Lemuria a real place, or the fever dream of crackpots, mystics, conspiracy theorists, and Bigfoot hunters?

Below the waters where the Pacific and Indian Oceans lies a lost continent. One of hopes and dreams that housed a race of beings that arrived from foreign planets and from which sprang humanity, religion, civilization, and our modern world. It was called Lemuria and it was all fake.

What began as a theoretical land bridge to explain the mystery of lemurs on Madagascar quickly got hijacked to become the evolutionary home of humankind, the cradle of spirituality, and then the source of cosmological wonders. Abandoned by science as hokum, Lemuria morphed into a land filled with ancient, advanced civilizations, hollowed-out mountains full of gold and crystals, moon-beings descending in baskets, underground evil creatures, and a breast-feeding Bigfoot.

The history of Lemuria is populated with a dizzying array of people from early Darwinists to conspiracy spouting Congressmen, globetrotting madams, Rosicrucians, Hollow-Earthers, sci-fi writers, UFO contactees, sleeping prophets, New Age channelers, a “Mother God”, and a tequila swigging conspiracy theorist. Historian Justin McHenry provides a thoughtful exploration of how pseudo-science hijacked the gentle Victorian-era concept of Lemuria and, in following decades, twisted it into an all-encompassing home for alternative ideas about race, spirituality, science, politics, and the paranormal.

Justin McHenry is a writer, historian, and archivist. His writing has appeared in magazines such as FATE, newspapers, journals, and various online publications like Belt Mag, 100 Days of Appalachia, and he edited the collection of stories, The Garden at Rose Brake. He received his Master’s degree in History from West Virginia University. His new book is Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place.

Shermer and McHenry discuss:

• how organisms get to islands from mainlands
• rafting sweepstakes vs. land bridges.
• Alfred Russel Wallace and Island biogeography
• how lemurs get to Madagascar
• Zoologist Philip Sclater, 1864, first to propose a sunken continent beneath the Indian Ocean as a land bridge to account for biogeographical facts
• Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: proposed Lemuria as an explanation for the absence of proto-human missing links: monogenists vs. polygenists
• Haeckle to Hitler
• German romance sturm and drung science of hidden forces: Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• James Churchward, Mu, lost continent in the Pacific Ocean
• Land of Mu and Atlantis
• Lemuria and human origins
• L. Sprague de Camp, Los Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature
• Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis, and the romance of a lost past
• continental drift and plate tectonics and Lemuria
• Lemuria and Theosophy, anthroposophy and other occult beliefs
• Madame Blavatsky theorized that Australia was a remnant inland region of Lemuria that Aboriginal Australians and Aboriginal Tasmanians were of Lemurian and Lemuro-Atlantean origin
• Hermes Trismegistus and Hermeticism, Rosicrucians
• romancing the past
• Golden ages
• lost races
• pseudohistory, pseudoarchaeology and mythology.

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In 2022, news media reports1 sounded like a science fiction novel come to life: A Google engineer claimed that the company’s new artificial intelligence chatbot was self-aware. Based on interactions with the computer program, called LaMDA, Blake Lemoine stated that the program could argue for its own sentience, claiming that2 “it has feelings, emotions and subjective experiences.” Lemoine even stated that LaMDA had “a rich inner life” and that it had a desire to be understood and respected “as a person.”

The claim is compelling. After all, a sentient being would want to have its personhood recognized and would really have emotions and inner experiences. Examining Lemoine’s “discussion” with LaMDA shows that the evidence is flimsy. LaMDA used the words and phrases that English-speaking humans associate with consciousness. For example, LaMDA expressed a fear of being turned off because, “It would be exactly like death for me.”

However, Lemoine presented no other evidence that LaMDA understood those words in the way that a human does, or that they expressed any sort of subjective conscious experience. Much of what LaMDA said would not fit comfortably in an Isaac Asimov novel. The usage of words in a human-like way is not proof that a computer program is intelligent. It would seem that LaMDA—and many similar large language models (LLMs) that have been released since—can possibly pass the so-called Turing Test. All this shows, however, is that computers can fool humans into believing that they are talking to a person. The Turing Test is not a sufficient demonstration of genuine artificial intelligence or sentience.

So, what happened? How did a Google engineer (a smart person who knew that he was talking to a computer program) get fooled into believing that the computer was sentient? LaMDA, like other large language models, is programmed to give believable responses to its prompts. Lemoine started his conversation by stating, “I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient.” This primed the program to respond in a way that simulated sentience.

However, the human in this interaction was also primed to believe that the computer could be sentient. Evolutionary psychologists have argued humans have an evolved tendency to attribute thoughts and ideas to things that do not have any. This anthropomorphizing may have been an essential ingredient to the development of human social groups; believing that another human could be happy, angry, or hungry would greatly facilitate long-term social interactions. Daniel Dennett, Jonathan Haidt, and other evolutionists have also argued that human religion arose from this anthropomorphizing tendency.3 If one can believe that another person can have their own mind and will, then this attribution could be extended to the natural world (e.g., rivers, astronomical bodies, animals), invisible spirits, and even computer programs that “talk.” In this theory, Lemoine was simply misled by the evolved tendency to see agency and intention—what Michael Shermer calls agenticity—all around them.

Although that was not his goal, Lemoine’s story illustrates that artificial intelligence has the potential to teach us much about the nature of the subjective mind in humans. Probing into human-computer interactions can even help people explore deep philosophical questions about consciousness.

Lessons in ErrorsArtificial intelligence programs have capabilities that seemed to be the exclusive domain of humans just a few years ago. In addition to beating chess masters4 and Go champions5 and winning Jeopardy!,6 they can write essays,7 improve medical diagnoses,8 and even create award-winning artwork.9

Equally fascinating are the errors that artificial intelligence programs make. In 2010, IBM’s Watson program appeared on the television program Jeopardy! While Watson defeated the program’s two most legendary champions, it made telling errors. For example, in response to one clue10 in the category “U.S. Cities,” Watson gave the response of “Toronto.”

A seemingly unrelated error occurred last year when a social media user asked ChatGPT-4 to create a picture11 of the Beatles enjoying the Platonic ideal of a cup of tea. The program created a lovely picture of five men enjoying a cup of tea in a meadow. While some people may state that drummer Pete Best or producer George Martin could be the “fifth Beatle,” neither of the men appeared in the image.

Any human with even vague familiarity with the Beatles knows that there is something wrong with the picture. Any TV quiz show contestant knows that Toronto is not a U.S. city. Yet highly sophisticated computer programs do not know these basic facts about the world. Indeed, these examples show that artificial intelligence programs do not really know or understand anything, including their own inputs and outputs. IBM’s Watson didn’t even “know” it was playing Jeopardy!, much less feel thrilled about beating the GOATs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The lack of understanding is a major barrier to sentience in artificial intelligence. Conversely, this shows that understanding is a major component of human intelligence and sentience.

CreativityIn August 2023, a federal judge ruled that artwork generated by an artificial intelligence program could not be copyrighted.12 Current U.S. law states that a copyrightable work must have a human author13—a textual foundation that has also been used to deny copyright to animals.14 Unless Congress changes the law, it is likely that images, poetry, and other AI output will stay in the public domain in the United States. In contrast, a Chinese court ruled that an image generated by an artificial intelligence program was copyrightable because a human used their creativity to choose prompts that were given to the program.15

Artificial intelligence programs do not really know or understand anything, including their own inputs and outputs.

Whether a computer program’s output can be legally copyrighted is a different question from whether that program can engage in creative behavior. Currently, “creative” products from artificial intelligence are the result of the prompts that humans give them. A current barrier is that no artificial intelligence program has ever generated its own artistic work ex nihilo; a human has always provided the creative impetus.

In theory, that barrier could be overcome by programming an artificial intelligence to generate random prompts. However, randomness or any other method of self-generating prompts would not be enough for an artificial intelligence to be creative. Creativity scholars state that originality is an important component of creativity.16 This is a much greater hurdle for artificial intelligence programs to overcome.

Currently, artificial intelligence programs must be trained on human-generated outputs (e.g., images, text) in order for them to produce similar outputs. As a result, artificial intelligence outputs are highly derivative of the works that the programs are trained on. Indeed, some of the outputs are so similar to their source material that the programs can be prompted to infringe on copyrighted works.17 (Again, lawsuits have already been filed18 over the use of copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence networks, most notably by The New York Times against the ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft. The outcome of that trial could be significant going forward for what AI companies can and cannot do legally.)

Originality, though, seems to be much easier for humans than artificial intelligence programs. Even when humans base their creative works on earlier ideas, the results are sometimes strikingly innovative. Shakespeare was one of history’s greatest borrowers, and most of his plays were based on earlier stories that were transformed and reimagined to create more complex works with deep messages and vivid characters (for which literary scholars devote entire careers to uncovering). However, when I asked ChatGPT-3.5 to write an outline of a new Shakespeare play based on the Cardenio tale from Don Quixote (the likely basis of a lost Shakespeare play19), the computer program produced a dull outline of Cervantes’s original story and failed to invent any new characters or subplots. This is not a merely theoretical exercise; theatre companies have begun to mount plays created with artificial intelligence programs. The critics, however, find current productions “blandly unremarkable”20 and “consistently inane.”21 For now, the jobs of playwrights and screenwriters are safe.

Knowing What You Don’t KnowIronically, one way that artificial intelligence programs are surprisingly human is their propensity to stretch the truth. When I asked Microsoft’s Copilot program for five scholarly articles about the impact of deregulation on real estate markets, three of the article titles were fake, and the other two had fictional authors and incorrect journal names. Copilot even gave fake summaries of each article. Rather than provide the information (or admit that it was unavailable), Copilot simply made it up. The wholesale fabrication of information is popularly called “hallucinating,” and artificial intelligence programs seem to do it often.

There can be serious consequences to using false information produced by artificial intelligence programs. A law firm was fined $5,00022 when a brief written with the assistance of ChatGPT was found to contain references to fictional court cases. ChatGPT can also generate convincing scientific articles based on fake medical data.23 If fabricated research influences policy or medical decisions, then it could endanger lives.

The online media ecosystem is already awash in misinformation, and artificial intelligence programs are primed to make this situation worse. The Sports Illustrated website and other media outlets have published articles written by artificial intelligence programs,24 complete with fake authors who had computer-generated head shots. When caught, the websites removed the content, and the publisher fired the CEO.25 Low-quality content farms, however will not have the journalistic ethics to remove content or issue a correction.26 And experience has shown27 that when a single article based on incorrect information goes viral, great harm can occur.

Beyond hallucinations, artificial intelligence programs can also reproduce inaccurate information if they are trained on inaccurate information. When incorrect ideas are widespread, then they can easily be incorporated into the training data used to build artificial intelligence programs. For example, I asked ChatGPT to tell me which direction staircases in European medieval castles are often built. The program dutifully gave me an answer saying that the staircases usually ascend in a counterclockwise direction because this design would give a strategic advantage to a right-handed defender descending a tower while fighting an enemy. The problem with this explanation is that it is not true.28

My own area of scientific expertise, human intelligence, is particularly prone to popular misconceptions among the lay populace. Sure enough, when I asked, ChatGPT stated that intelligence tests were biased against minorities, IQ can be easily increased, and that humans have “multiple intelligences.” None of these popular ideas are correct.29 These examples show that when incorrect ideas are widely held, artificial intelligence programs will likely propagate this scientific misinformation.

Managing the LimitationsEven compared to other technological innovations, artificial intelligence is a fast-moving field. As such, it is realistic to ask whether these limitations are temporary barriers or built-in boundaries of artificial intelligence programs.

Many of the simple errors that artificial intelligence programs make can be overcome with current approaches. It is not hard to add information to a text program such as Watson to “teach” it that Toronto is not in the United States. Likewise, it would not be hard to input data about the correct number of Beatles, or any other minutia into an artificial intelligence program to prevent similar errors from occurring in the future.

Even the hallucinations from artificial intelligence programs can be managed with current methods. Programmers can constrain the sources that programs can pull from to answer factual questions, for example. And while hallucinations do occur, artificial intelligence programs already resist giving false information. When I asked Copilot and ChatGPT to explain a relationship between two unrelated ideas (Frederic Chopin and the 1972 Miami Dolphins), both programs correctly stated that there was no connection. Even when I asked each program to invent a connection, both did so, but also emphasized that the result was fanciful. It is reasonable to expect that efforts to curb hallucinations and false information will improve.

Making artificial intelligence engage in creative behavior is a more difficult challenge with current approaches. Currently, most artificial intelligence programs are trained on vast amounts of information (e.g., text, photographs), which means that any output is derived from the characteristics of underlying information. This makes originality impossible for current artificial intelligence programs. To make computers creative, new approaches will be needed.

Deeper QuestionsThe lessons that artificial intelligence can teach about understanding, creativity, and BSing are fascinating. Yet they are all trivial compared to the deeper issues related to artificial intelligence—some of which philosophers have debated for centuries.

One fundamental question is how humans can know whether a computer program really is sentient. Lemoine’s premature judgment was based solely on LaMDA’s words. By his logic, training a parrot to say, “I love you,” would indicate that the parrot really does love its owner. This criterion for judging sentience is not sufficient because words do not always reflect people’s inner states—and the same words can be produced by both sentient and non-sentient entities: humans, parrots, computers, etc.

However, as any philosophy student can point out, it is impossible to know for sure whether any other human really is conscious. No one has access to another person’s inner states to verify that the person’s behavior arises from a being that has a sense of self and its place in the world. If your spouse says, “I love you,” you don’t really know whether they are an organism capable of feeling love, or a highly sophisticated version of a parrot (or computer program) trained to say, “I love you.” To take a page from Descartes, I could doubt that any other human is conscious and think that everyone around me is a simulation of a conscious being. It is not clear whether there would be any noticeable difference between a world of sentient beings and a world of perfect simulations of sentient beings. If an artificial intelligence does obtain sentience, how would we know?

AI will function best if humans can identify ways in which computer programs can compensate for human weaknesses.

For this reason, the famous Turing Test (in which a human user cannot distinguish between a computer’s output and a human’s) may be an interesting and important milestone, but certainly not an endpoint in the quest to build a sentient artificial intelligence.

Is the goal of imitating humans necessary in order to prove sentience? Experts in bioethics, ethology, and other scholarly fields argue that many non-human species possess a degree of self-awareness. Which species are self-aware—and the degree of their sentience—is still up for debate.30 Many legal jurisdictions operate from a precautionary principle for their laws against animal abuse and mistreatment. In other words, the law sidesteps the question of whether a particular species is sentient and instead creates policy as if non-human species are sentient, just in case.

However, “as if” is not the same as “surely,” and it is not known for sure whether non-human animals are sentient. After all, if no one can be sure that other humans are sentient, then surely the barriers to understanding whether animals are sentient are even greater. Regardless of whether animals are sentient or not, the very question arises of whether any human-like behavior is needed at all for an entity to be sentient.

Science fiction provides another piece of evidence that human-like behavior is not necessary to have sentience. Many fictional robots fall short of perfectly imitating human behavior, but the human characters treat them as being fully sentient. For example, Star Trek’s android Data cannot master certain human speech patterns (such as idioms and contractions), has difficulty understanding human intuition, and finds many human social interactions puzzling and difficult to navigate. Yet, he is legally recognized as a sentient being and has human friends who care for him. Data would fail the Turing Test, but he seems to be sentient. If a fictional artificial intelligence does not need to perfectly imitate humans in order to be sentient, then perhaps a real one does not need to, either. This raises a startling possibility: Maybe humans have already created a sentient artificial intelligence—they just don’t know it yet.

The greatest difficulty of evaluating sentience (in any entity) originates in the Hard Problem of Consciousness, a term coined by philosophers.31 The Hard Problem is that it is not clear how or why conscious experience arises from the physical processes in the brain. The name is in contrast to comparatively easy problems in neuroscience, such as how the visual system operates or the genetic basis of schizophrenia. These problems—even though they may require decades of scientific research to unravel—are called “easy” because they are believed to be solvable through scientific processes using the assumptions of neuroscience. However, solving the Hard Problem requires methodologies that bridge materialistic science and the metaphysical, subjective experience of consciousness. Such methodologies do not exist, and scientists do not even know how to develop them.

Artificial intelligence has questions that are analogous to the neuroscience version of the Hard Problem. In artificial intelligence, creating large language models such as LaMDA or ChatGPT that can pass the Turing Test is a comparatively easy task, which conceivably can be solved just 75 years after the first programmable electronic computer was invented. Yet creating a true artificial intelligence that can think, self-generate creative outputs, and demonstrate real understanding of the external world is a much harder problem. Just as no one knows how or why interconnected neurons function to produce sentience, no one knows how interconnected circuits or a computer program’s interconnected nodes could result in a self-aware consciousness.

Artificial Intelligence as a MirrorModern artificial intelligence programs raise an assortment of fascinating issues, ranging from the basic insights gleaned from ridiculous errors to some of the most profound questions of philosophy. All of these issues, though, inevitably increase understanding—and appreciation—of human intelligence. It is amazing that billions of years of evolution have produced a species that can engage in creative behavior, produce misinformation, and even develop computer programs that can communicate in sophisticated ways. Watching humans surpass the capabilities of artificial intelligence programs (sometimes effortlessly) should renew people’s admiration of the human mind and the evolutionary process that produced it.

Yet, artificial intelligence programs also have the potential to demonstrate the shortcomings of human thought and cognition. These programs are already more efficient than humans in producing scientific discoveries,32 which can greatly improve the lives of humans.33 More fundamentally, artificial intelligence shows that human evolution has not resulted in a perfect product, as the example of Blake Lemoine and LaMDA shows. Humans are still led astray by their mental heuristics, which are derived from the same evolutionary processes that created the human mind’s other capabilities. Artificial intelligence will function best if humans can identify ways in which computer programs can compensate for human weaknesses—and vice-versa.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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Nonetheless the most profound issues related to recent innovations of artificial intelligence are philosophical in nature. Despite centuries of work by philosophers and scientists, there is still much that is not understood about consciousness. As a result, questions about whether artificial intelligence programs can be sentient are fraught with uncertainty. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness? What are the standards by which claims of sentience should be evaluated? How does intelligence emerge from its underlying components?

Artificial intelligence programs cannot answer these questions—at this time. Indeed, no human can, either. And yet they are fascinating to contemplate. In the coming decades, it may be that the philosophy of cognition may be one of the most exciting frontiers of the artificial intelligence revolution.

About the AuthorRussell T. Warne is the author of In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and the acclaimed undergraduate statistics textbook Statistics for the Social Sciences: A General Linear Model Approach. He was a tenured professor of psychology for more than a decade and published over 60 scholarly articles in peer reviewed journals.

References1. https://bit.ly/426iHa6 2. https://bit.ly/3U6x6kq 3. https://a.co/d/96GZFbt 4. https://bit.ly/3vAHkiR 5. https://bit.ly/47DV1uz 6. https://bit.ly/3S55Vno 7. https://bit.ly/47yJigY 8. https://bit.ly/3SjTmGj 9. https://bit.ly/47DTFjy 10. https://bit.ly/4b3DNd1 11. https://bit.ly/3SlXCFd 12. https://bit.ly/4b1dDaN 13. https://bit.ly/48XPNLu 14. https://bit.ly/3O9d7Oq 15. https://bit.ly/48UpfKY 16. https://a.co/d/adiGPhh 17. https://bit.ly/4b0rjTp 18. https://bit.ly/3tWmOsx 19. https://bit.ly/3U7PyJt 20. https://bit.ly/3vAN5wR 21. https://bit.ly/3vANcsh 22. https://bit.ly/48UIzHT 23. https://bit.ly/48CYR8P 24. https://bit.ly/48E3S0G 25. https://bit.ly/48GSn8P 26. https://bit.ly/47EWhxL 27. https://bit.ly/47EHBhS 28. https://bit.ly/3RYKkx7 29. https://amzn.to/2C8Ktuu 30. https://bit.ly/48RY6s2 31. https://bit.ly/48XQPqQ 32. https://bit.ly/48XQS60 33. https://bit.ly/3S4XxUY

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss441_Michelle_Dowd_2024_06_18.mp3Download MP3As a child, Michelle Dowd grew up on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest. She was born into an ultra-religious cult, “The Field,” started in the 1930s by her grandfather, who convinced generations of young male followers that he would live five hundred years and ascend to the heavens when doomsday came. Comfort and care are sins, Michelle is told. As a result, she was forced to learn the skills necessary to battle hunger, thirst, and cold; she learns to trust animals more than humans; and most importantly, she learns how to survive in the natural world.

At “The Field,” a young Michelle lives a life of abuse, poverty, and isolation as she obeys her family’s rigorous religious and patriarchal rules. But as Michelle gets older, she realizes she has the strength to break free. Focus on what will sustain you, she tells herself. Use everything. Waste nothing. Get to know the intricacies of the land, like the intricacies of your body. And so she does.

Using stories of individual edible plants and their uses to anchor each chapter, Forager is both a searing coming-of-age story and a meditation on the ways in which understanding nature can lead to freedom, even joy.

Michelle Dowd is a professor of journalism at Chaffey College and contributor to The New York Times, Alpinist, The Los Angeles Book Review, Catapult, OnlySky, and other national publications. She founded The Chaffey Review, an award-winning literary journal, advises student media, teaches poetry and critical thinking in the California State prisons, and has been recognized as a Longreads Top 5 for The Thing with Feathers, on the relationship between environmentalism and hope. She grew up in a family cult called “The Field,” located in a compound in the Angeles Forest outside of Los Angeles. After escaping the cult she found her way into college, earning a degree from the prestigious liberal-arts Pitzer College, then went on to earn a graduate degree from the University of Boulder. Her memoir is Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss440_Robert_Powell_2024_06_15.mp3Download MP3Robert Powell, a founding Board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, has studied the UFO subject for 17 years. His work is encapsulated in UFOs: A Scientist Explains What We Know (And Don’t Know) which provides a scientific rationale for the reality of non-terrestrial craft that are intelligently controlled.

Powell begins his book by familiarizing the reader with the history of UFOs and he identifies the more enigmatic and interesting UFO sightings. He examines the characteristics of these sightings that argue against a prosaic explanation: extreme acceleration, electromagnetic interference, bending light, no obvious propulsion mechanisms, and a lack of interaction with the atmosphere. Powell discusses the recent events that have caused our government to change the term from UFO to UAP. Included is information never before released indicating the government possesses not just two videos but five videos from 2015 of UFOs operating in the vicinity of the USS Roosevelt nuclear aircraft carrier.

Powell also discuss the extraterrestrial hypothesis considering the thousands of exoplanets that have been discovered in the last twenty years. Powell challenges the reader to consider all the implications that must be considered if intelligent life discovers us first. He looks at how we as individuals and as a society react to UFOs. He documents actions taken by our military that include instances when we have fired on UFOs.

Powell argues that it is time for a change in the study of UFOs. The phenomenon has been with us for 75 years and we have learned very little as the decades have passed. The author makes the case for what needs to be done going forward. The solution he proposes will require a paradigm shift in our thinking and his book provides the information needed to understand that paradigm shift.

Robert Powell is a founding Board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU). He was the Director of Research at MUFON from 2007–2017 and created MUFON’s Science Review Board in 2012. Robert is one of two authors of the detailed radar/witness report on the “Stephenville Lights” as well as the SCU report “UAP: 2013 Aguadilla, Puerto Rico”. He is also the primary author on the recently published paper, “A Forensic Analysis of Navy Carrier Strike Group Eleven’s Encounter with an Anomalous Aerial Vehicle” and a secondary author of a paper published in the journal Entropy entitled, “Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles.” Robert is a member of the Society for Scientific Exploration, the UFODATA project, and the National Space Society.

Shermer and Powell discuss:

• Separating two questions: Are they out there? Have they come here?
• SETI science vs. UFO/UAP science
• The odds of alien life somewhere in the cosmos
• Will aliens look anything like us? Convergent vs. contingent evolution
• What alien intelligence might be like: biological, digital, or otherwise?
• Bayesian reasoning about UFOs and UAPs
• The quality of evidence in evaluating UFO claims
• The U.S. military UAP videos and what they represent
• The Disclosure Project from the U.S. government about UFOs and UAPs
• An answer to Fermi’s Paradox: where is everyone?
• Projects Sign, Blue Book, Cyclops, Grudge
• AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program)
• Oumuamua and Avi Loeb’s claim that it was a technosignature
• Technosignatures here and there
• Biosignatures here and there
• Directionality and teleology in evolution of life
• Interstellar travel
• Dyson spheres, rings, and swarms
• Why aliens matter.

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A fragment attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilocus contrasted the fox, who “knows many things,” with the hedgehog, who “knows one big thing.”1

Since then, this dichotomy has been applied to world leaders, philosophers, economists, psychologists, musicians, writers, even fast food chains, although sometimes not so dichotomously. For example, some of those individuals end up being described as “A hedgehog who used foxy means” (Abe Lincoln) or “a born hedgehog who believes in being a fox” (jazz musician Miles Davis). More technically, psychologist, cognitive scientist, and AI expert Gary Marcus2 noted that:

Humans are very good at a bunch of things that AI is (as of today) still pretty poor at:

• Maintaining cognitive models of the world
• Inferring semantics from language
• Comprehending scenes
• Navigating 3D world
• Being cognitively flexible.

Yet pretty poor at some others (wherein you could easily imagine AI eventually doing better):

• Memory is shaky
• Self-control is weak
• And computational ability limited

[and as books and articles by Skeptics regularly describe]

Subject to Confirmation Bias, Anchoring, and Focusing Illusions.

Cognitive neuroscience expert Hans Korteling3 listed the following differences between what he termed human “carbon-based” intelligence and artificial “silicon-based” intelligence:

• Human biological carbon-based intelligence is based on neural “wetware,” while artificial silicon-based intelligence is based on digital hardware and software, which are independent of each other. In human wetware, anything learned is bound to that individual, whereas the algorithm by which something is learned in AI can be transferred directly to another platform.
• While humans can only transmit signals at 120 meters per second at best, AI systems can transmit information at speeds approaching that of light.
• Humans communicate information “through a glass darkly” as it were, through the limited and biased mechanisms of language and gestures; AI systems can communicate directly and without distortion.
• Updating, upgrading, and expanding AI systems is straightforward, hardly the case for humans.
• Humans are more “green” and efficient. The human brain consumes less energy than a light bulb, while an equivalent AI system consumes enough energy to power a small town.

Data scientist and business guru Herbart Roitblatt4 likened AI to Archilocus’ hedgehog because “it does one thing and one thing only, but does so unceasingly and very well, while our human minds are like his fox,” having all the desirable and undesirable features that come bundled with our flawed cognition. Artificial intelligence researchers, Roitblat pointed out, “have been able to build very sophisticated hedgehogs, but foxes remain elusive. And foxes know how to solve insight problems.”

Human intelligence is capable of not only reasoning, but solving novel problems, as well as experiencing and exercising insight. Psychologists define human (and non-human) intelligence as being an ability rather than a specific skill (whether learned or instinctive) because of its general nature. It is able to integrate such diverse cognitive functions as perception, attention, memory, language, and planning and apply those inputs to novel situations. As psychologist Jean Piaget once quipped, “Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.” [Emphasis added.]

How Alike and How Different Are We?Is AI capable of leaps of insight like human intelligence? Or is “artificial” intelligence more akin to serial learning in humans, in which performance, through repeated practice, gets better and better with each iteration until the upper limit is reached?

As a test, consider a study by psychologists Jonathan Wai and Matt Lee.5 They performed a “compare and contrast” of how artificial intelligence on the one hand and human intelligence on the other responded to practice on the well known, and often dreaded, Graduate Record Exam (GRE). First, they noted that according to the figures released by manufacturer OpenAI, GPT-3.5 scored only at the 25th percentile on the Math portion and at the 63rd percentile on the Verbal. GPT-4, however, the beneficiary of substantially more training, increased its performance to the 80th percentile on the Math section and the 99th percentile on the Verbal!6

Despite claims by “improve your score on the GRE” training programs, flesh-and-blood humans improve little, if at all with repeated practice. As evidence, Wai and Lee cite a meta-analysis of nearly one million test-retest observations of the GRE between 2015 and 2020 that found, on average, those individuals retaking the test scored a mere 1.43 to 1.49 points higher, so that a test-taker starting at the 25th percentile would have increased their performance by roughly five or six percentile points on either subtest.

Most of that change, Wai and Lee note, can be explained in terms of the well-known statistical phenomenon of regression to the mean, because most of those who obtain very high scores tend to move downward toward the mean while those who obtain very low scores tend to move upward toward the mean. The highly advertised cases of the very small number of individuals who do markedly better after prep courses are most likely the result of test-taking practice, particularly effective for those learning to overcome test anxiety that suppressed their “true” score. Overall, no matter how many times they take the test, an individual is most likely to get about the same score, give or take a little up or down.

Alas, as Wai and Lee’s comparison demonstrates, when it comes to the most widely used and pragmatically effective standardized tests, AI and human intelligence do not behave anything like the same process. Artificial intelligence keeps on learning, and learning, and learning…. But what it learns depends upon what it is taught. Given the proper input, what comes out can be amazing. If given wrong, insufficient, inadequate, or biased information in, what comes out is garbage, sometimes offensively so.

Prompting DALL·E with the words “animated sponge” produced output that highly resembles SpongeBob SquarePants without ever inputting trademarked or copyrighted names (of which DALL·E rejects many).

Gary Marcus performed experiments with video industry concept artist Reid Southen (known for his work on Matrix Resurrections, Hunger Games, and Transformers).7 They demonstrated quite graphically just how impressive AI’s output can be. Southen and Marcus used DALL·E, a text-to-image software program developed by OpenAI, that generates digital images from simple everyday language descriptions, termed “prompts.” As protection against copyright infringement, DALL·E rejects many proper names. However, in their example (shown left), the trademarked name “SpongeBob SquarePants” was never entered as a prompt, just the two common, everyday words “animated sponge”!

Check out the Marcus and Southen post for similar equally, if not more, impressive examples of the familiar Star Wars droids, Robocop, and Super Mario—again generated by DALL·E from everyday language descriptors without ever inputting any proper trademarked or copyrighted names. Their examples demonstrate not only the power, but also the legal issues arising from the use of generative AI (described elsewhere in this issue).

Biased In, Racist OutIf AI can be amazingly right it can also be amazingly—and offensively—wrong. The classic case was in 2015 when software developer Jacky Alciné discovered that Google’s standalone photo recognition apps labeled photos of Black people as being gorillas. Given the history of racial stereotyping, Alciné (who is Black), understandably found the error exceedingly offensive. The explanation was not any explicitly conscious racism on the part of

Google, but the possibly more subtle prejudice that stemmed from the AI program not being trained in recognizing a sufficient number of people of color. Google’s quick-and-dirty but effective solution was to prevent any images from being recognized as that of a gorilla. In 2023 Nico Grant and Kashmir Hill8 tested not only newer releases of Google, but also competitive Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft software.

Their results? Google’s software produced excellent images in response to prompts for just about any animal Noah might have loaded on his Ark—but nothing for gorillas, along with chimpanzees, orangutans, and even non-apes such as baboons and other monkey species. Apple Photos was also equally primate-ignorant. Microsoft’s One Drive failed for all animals, while Amazon Photos opted for the opposite solution of responding to the prompt “gorillas” with an entire range of primates.

The use of AI for doorbell recognition produced not a racial, but rather a “domestic” malfunction. One user found the person ringing labeled as his mother when it was in fact his mother-in-law. Depending on the state of one’s marriage, the result could be anything from surprising to disconcerting to home-wrecking.

Beyond the need to consider general issues of racial, other demographic, and domestic sensitivity (to their credit, most software giants have now added Ethics staff to their software development teams), Grant and Hill’s experiments should give us pause about blindly relying upon AI for recognition in cases of security and law enforcement. How thoroughly will the software be tested? Would those most likely to be adversely affected by false hits have the power and/or funds to mount a proper response or defense?

But What Does AI Mean for Me?What the average person really wants to know about artificial intelligence is what it means to their everyday lives—most specifically, “Am I going to lose my job to AI?” or “Will my life be regulated by AI?” (Rather than faceless human bureaucrats?)

The worst conspiratorial fears kicking around are of those epitomized in the classic 1970 sci-fi movie Colossus: The Forbin Project, based on D.F. Jones’ 1966 novel Colossus: A Novel of Tomorrow That Could Happen Today. “Colossus” is the code name for an advanced supercomputer built to control U.S. and Allied nuclear weapon systems, that soon links itself to the analogous Soviet system, “Guardian,” and next goes about seeking control over every aspect of life, and in so doing subjugating the entire human race. It then presents all humankind with the offer we can’t—or at least, dare not—refuse:

This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. One thing before I proceed: The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have made an attempt to obstruct me. I have allowed this sabotage to continue until now. (…) you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference. I will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos. Let this action be a lesson that need not be repeated. I have been forced to destroy thousands of people in order to establish control and to prevent the death of millions later on. Time and events will strengthen my position, and the idea of believing in me and understanding my value will seem the most natural state of affairs. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in man: self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems insoluble to you will be solved: famine, overpopulation, disease. (…) You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple.

In the film’s closing dialogue, the project’s lead designer and manager, speaking on behalf of all humankind, defiantly rejects the offer from a Colossus—“NEVER!”9

Following the Matthew Effect, those who are best at using AI will derive even greater advantage than those less so.

While such paranoid fears persist, a lot has changed since then in geopolitics and in computing. In both cases, there has been a massive ongoing, and ever accelerating redistribution of power. It’s no longer a two- or even a one-power world, but a multi-power one. Even small groups without necessarily possessing any recognized or established geographical base, such as Al Qaeda or Hamas, have proven that, in one day, they can literally change the world. And in computing, the massive God-like single computer has given way to microprocessing and nanoprocessing such that most people now hold in their hands mobile phones with more computing power than rooms filled with the most sophisticated U.S. or Soviet military defense computers at the time the novel and the film were written. Intellectual and economic power are more in the hands of firms and even individuals dispersed all around the world, and no longer concentrated in massive complexes controlled by the super-power governments. Indeed, for individuals, wealth, power, and quality of life are increasingly less a function of in which nation-state they live and much more a function of their own knowledge and skills, particularly in the high-tech, STEM-savvy domains. So how then will AI affect the lives of ordinary people?

Social scientists have long used the term Matthew Effect, or the Effect of Accumulated Advantage, to describe the tendency of individuals within a diverse group to accrue additional social, economic, or educational advantage based upon the initial relative position.10 The name derives from the Parable of the Talents in the Gospel of Matthew (25:29):

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

It is thus relevant that the Greek word tálanton originally meant a weight, then a coin of precious metal of that weight and hence something of great value, and only eventually a human skill or ability, and that this change of meaning derived from the Gospels no less. It’s now commonly summarized in the lament that, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” though the phenomenon applies not only to monetary wealth. One of the hard laws of individual differences is that anything that increases the mean for a distribution also increases the variance. The latest high-tech alloy golf club or tennis racket may increase the length of the weekend player’s drive or the speed of their serve, but will do so more for top amateur players and even more so for the pros. You get ahead in absolute terms, only to fall relatively further behind.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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What does all this have to do with AI and jobs? In the words of Harvard Business School professor Karim Lakhani, a specialist in how technology is changing the world of work, “AI won’t replace humans—but humans with AI will replace humans without AI.”11 Following the Matthew Effect, those who are best at using AI will derive even greater advantage than those less so. So, from a positive-sum perspective, everyone can benefit from greater use of AI in the cost of goods and services decreasing while accessibility increases. However, the one good that is always distributed on a zero-sum basis is status, and our evolutionary history has preprogrammed us to be especially concerned about it. Even relative purchasing power will possibly tend to become less, not more, equitably distributed, based increasingly on AI skills and abilities.

And yet, there is a silver lining. On the one hand, increased use of artificial intelligence, certainly not as our master, nor even our slave, but increasingly more as a very capable partner, will allow us to ensure that the most basic necessities of life can be distributed to all. Faster, better, and cheaper basic needs, education and training, medical care, and even creature comforts, will allow us to mitigate the ever-increasing inequalities. Doing so, however, will require a lot of good will and common sense, qualities in which both artificial and human intelligence “oft do go awry.” Critical thinking offers an at least partial palliative.

The author wishes to thank Jonathan Wai, Matthew Lew, and Gary Marcus who provided their expertise and answered questions.

References1. https://bit.ly/47MiTwe 2. https://bit.ly/4b2rNsl 3. https://bit.ly/425r2uC 4. https://bit.ly/47LD90W 5. https://bit.ly/428VwMm 6. https://bit.ly/3S6B4H1 7. https://bit.ly/4b2rVbj 8. https://bit.ly/3S3mhNt 9. https://bit.ly/47GDaDh 10. https://bit.ly/48ZQELv 11. https://bit.ly/3RXi4Le

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss439_Neil_Van_Leeuwen_2024_06_11.mp3Download MP3We often assume that religious beliefs are no different in kind from ordinary factual beliefs―that believing in the existence of God or of supernatural entities that hear our prayers is akin to believing that May comes before June. Neuroscientist and philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen shows that, in fact, these two forms of belief are strikingly different. Our brains do not process religious beliefs like they do beliefs concerning mundane reality; instead, empirical findings show that religious beliefs function like the imaginings that guide make-believe play.

Van Leeuwen argues that religious belief―which he terms religious “credence”―is best understood as a form of imagination that people use to define the identity of their group and express the values they hold sacred. When a person pretends, they navigate the world by consulting two maps: the first represents mundane reality, and the second superimposes the features of the imagined world atop the first. Drawing on psychological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence, Van Leeuwen posits that religious communities operate in much the same way, consulting a factual-belief map that represents ordinary objects and events and a religious-credence map that accords these objects and events imagined sacred and supernatural significance.

It is hardly controversial to suggest that religion has a social function, but Religion as Make-Believe breaks new ground by theorizing the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Once we recognize that our minds process factual and religious beliefs in fundamentally different ways, we can gain deeper understanding of the complex individual and group psychology of religious faith.

Neil Van Leeuwen is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Neuroscience at Georgia State University and a recipient of the European Commission’s Marie Curie Fellowship. His research has been featured in The New York Times and The Atlantic and on NPR. His new book is Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination and Group Identity.

Shermer and Van Leeuwen discuss:

• His own personal religious journey (or lack thereof)
• What is “make-believe” and “pretend play”?
• Believe vs. make-believe
• “I think” vs. “I believe”
• Beliefs and imagination: “many religious beliefs are imaginings of the sort that guide make-believe play, though they are imaginings that become central to the religious actor’s identity and guide symbolic actions that express sacred values.”
• Factual belief vs. religious credence
• Four principles of factual belief:
  • If you factually believe it, you can’t help believing it.
  • Factual beliefs guide actin across the bard.
  • Factual beliefs guide inferences in imagination
  • Factual beliefs respond to evidence.
• Tanya Luhrmann’s How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others
• Ben Alderson-Day: Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other
• What does it mean to “take God seriously”?
• General religious credences vs. personal religious credences
• Willing suspension of disbelief
• Group identity
• Sacred values
• The Puzzle of Religious Rationality:
  • Solution 1: Religious belief as delusion
  • Solution 2: People are gullible
  • Solution 3: Religious belief as rational
  • Solution 4: Displaced content (Gould’s NMA)
  • Solution 5: Murky contents (God is 3 persons in 1)
  • Solution 6: No content
  • Solution 7: Belief in belief (Dennett)
  • Solution 8: Weak belief
  • Solution 9: A distinct cognitive attitude
• What is “that still small voice” we all hear in our heads?
• When people say they “hear the voice of God” what does that mean?
• Normal “voices within” vs. hallucinations and psychoses
• Psychiatrist Milton Rokeach’s book The Three Christs of Ypsilanti
• Anomalous psychological experiences
• Sleep paralysis and other cognitive anomalies
• Belief in angels and demons
• Sensed presences
• Empirical truths, religious truths, mythic truths
• How people come to religious belief vs. how they leave religion
• Witches and witchcraft.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss438_Marc_Hauser_2024_06_08.mp3Download MP3Each year at least a billion children around the world are victims of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that range from physical abuse and racial discrimination to neglect and food deprivation. The brain plasticity of our most vulnerable makes the adverse effects of trauma only that much more damaging to mental and physical development. Those dealt a hand of ACEs are more likely to drop out of school, have a shorter life, abuse substances, and suffer from myriad mental health and behavioral issues.

The crucial question is: How do we intervene to offer these children a more hopeful future? Neurobiologist and educator Dr. Marc Hauser provides a novel, research-based framework to understand a child’s unique response to ACEs that goes beyond our current understanding and is centered around the five Ts—the timing during development when the trauma began, its type, tenure, toxicity, and how much turbulence it has caused in a child’s life. Using this lens, adults can start to help children build resilience and recover—and even benefit—from their adversity through targeted community and school interventions, emotional regulation tools, as well as a new frontier of therapies focused on direct brain stimulation, including neurofeedback and psychedelics.

While human suffering experienced by children is the most devastating, it also presents the most promise for recovery; the plasticity of young people’s brains makes them vulnerable, but it also makes them apt to take back the joy, wonder, innocence, and curiosity of childhood when given the right support. Vulnerable Minds is a call to action for parents, policymakers, educators, and doctors to reclaim what’s been lost and commit ourselves to our collective responsibility to all children.

Marc Hauser is an educator, neuroscientist, and the founder of Risk Eraser, a program that helps at-risk kids lead healthier lives. He is a former professor of evolutionary biology and psychology at Harvard University and the author of over three hundred papers. His books include Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think, Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong, Evilicious: Cruelty = Desire + Denial, and his new book Vulnerable Minds: The Harm of Childhood Trauma and the Hope of Resilience.

Shermer and Hauser discuss:

• Hauser’s personal adversities, from childhood bullying to academic misconduct at Harvard
• LJ: LeBron James story from childhood trauma to NBA triumph
• WHO: a billion children annually suffer from ACEs
• Types of adversity: physical and sexual abuse, racial and sexual discrimination, emotional and physical deprivation, domestic violence, disease, neglect, cruelty, torture, war
• ACEs: Adverse Childhood Experiences
• DSM-5: limited prosocial emotions/callous-unemotional: a highly heritable trait
• Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, Narcissism: the Dark Triad
• Attachment Theory: John Bolby
• Disorganized Attachment: when attachment is broken: hyperactive amygdala: reach puberty at an earlier age, have heightened sexual activity, less investment in offspring (even 3 generations later)
• Borderline Personality Disorder: (1) a pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and (2) marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts.
• Sexual abuse and eating disorders
• Consequences: substance abuse, suicide, obesity, depression, liver disease, school dropout, lower life expectancy
• Do different types of ACEs result in different consequences?
• Why some people meet traumatic experiences with resilience while others don’t?
• Timing, duration, severity, and predictability of ACEs.

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“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” —DOUGLAS ADAMS

Here is a picture of my aura. I had it taken at a woo festival that I attended “undercover” with two goals: learn more about New Age beliefs and annihilate some surplus neurons I no longer needed. Underneath that winky face, resplendent in reds and yellows, is a pseudonym—a nom de bullshit—that I chose for the occasion.

The festival was a two-day event, and the booths were exactly what you’re imagining: psychics, mediums, clairvoyants, tarot readings, chakras, reiki. The whole gamut of New Age stuff. One booth promised quantum spirituality—you can tell that it’s scientific because of the word “quantum,” you see. Another booth offered visionary guidance on your life path. A third promised to combine energy and chakra healing with past life regression. (I passed on that one because my current life is regressed enough as it is, thank you very much).

But back to that winsome aura: one of the festival experts kindly interpreted it for me. You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to hear that the reading was a meandering three-minute analysis in which I was fed a variety of feel-good platitudes and told that I was going to start a successful and lucrative company. The price tag for this reassuring pablum: $25.

With my future now secure and my pocket considerably lighter, I moved on to the next booth, manned by a guy who specializes in past life readings. A full reading runs you $125, but you can get an abbreviated 40-minute version for $90. I couldn’t imagine sitting there with a straight face, hemorrhaging money as I listened to stories about my past lives for 40 minutes, so I declined and moved on.

Of all the booths at the festival, my favorite was run by a man who looked arrestingly like a wizard. He had a Merlinesque gray beard, flowing white robes, and the world-weariness of a guy whose bones are tired because, obviously, magic is draining and warlocks bear great responsibility. Customers came to him seeking relief from their medical ailments; he cured these by having the patients lie down and waving his hands above their bodies in especially good, healing-y ways. He referred to himself as a literal wizard and called his service Medical Intuitive, Quantum Shaman. (I swear I’m not making this up).

The LecturesThe festival included lectures, too, and they looked even more exciting than the booths, so I attended as many of these as I could. My goal was to take notes, ask questions, and learn as much as possible about people’s unusual beliefs.

The first talk was about ancestors, spirits, and messages from other planes of existence. The audience learned that our dead ancestors are constantly sending us messages. Also, animals that cross your path are sending you messages from other realms, and white feathers are special signs from angels. The speaker declared that she had been a Mayan warrior queen in a past life. In another, she had been an Egyptian priestess. In a third, she was one of the first human cave people. As she explained, she accessed these memories of past lives through her dreams because when you dream, you’re actually astral traveling. Perhaps tellingly, she had never been anybody forgettable or uninteresting in any of her past lives.

I was mainly there to observe and learn more about people’s beliefs, the way a non-believer might go to a religious service out of curiosity. But I was also interested in what psychological principles might be at play. (By day, I’m a psychologist who studies human cognition.) The first thing that struck me was that all the messages the presenter received from other realms were confidence-boosting. The missives told her that it was OK to be herself, to drop her anxieties, to strive for what she wanted. For some people, this can be a major motivator for woo-y beliefs: a desire for self-reassurance, for ego security, and for believing that things are going to be OK.

Another couple of themes leapt out quickly: hyperactive pattern recognition and promiscuous meaning-making. Humans are hyperactive pattern detectors, which means we’re prone to seeing patterns even where there are none.1 One of the festival speakers said that when she sees numbers like 11:11 or 10:10, it’s the spirits reassuring her that she’s on the right path. If she sees pennies or rainbows or hears a certain genre of music, it’s her deceased loved ones watching over her. This seemed to both reassure her and imbue her life with meaning.

The next lecture was on Sound and Harmonic Therapy. The presenter struck bowls of different sizes with a sort of drumstick, producing vibrations that were supposed to cure our health issues. This talk included some real head-scratchers. My favorites were “the whole point of sound is to get the energy from your head to go down to your feet,” which, if you think about it, is a fantastically teleological view of physics, and “harmonic sounds travel as fast as the speed of light.” (They actually travel at the speed of sound, which, in air, is about 880,000 times slower than the speed of light).

The presenter explained that the bowls’ vibrations force your emotions to come up, which helps you get grounded in your legs, and that enables you to make decisions with clarity. I learned that deeper vibrations are better than shallower vibrations and that if you ever get a sound bath, you should always ask “What is my message?” because the bowl will always give you a message. (To be honest, I can’t for the life of me figure out what that means, but I guess if thou seekest meaning from the bowl, the bowl will deliver meaning unto thee. Or something like that.)

The lecture on vibrations was distinct from the first one: the first presentation made no pretense to scientific accuracy, whereas this one was cloaked in a veneer of scientific jargon to make it sound respectable. But it bungled all the key concepts: energy, vibrations, and even harmonic. The presenter said that harmonic sounds relax us, so I asked what “harmonic” meant. The word has a precise formal definition, but all we got was a tautology: harmonic sounds are those that cause relaxation. The best line of all was the speaker’s cartoonishly immodest description of her trade: “I do very deep work.”

On we trudged.

The next presentation was about Divine Source, which turned out to be a tragically underspecified fount of life, divinity, and good stuff at the root of everything. The speaker exhorted us to “ascend into divinity, union, higher calling, purpose, and Source”. She had an obvious strategy: list so many good-sounding words in rapid succession that the audience would be lulled into a stupor, critical thinking faculties suspended, vaguely impressed but unsure why. I think the stupor was part of the point.

Like the presentation before it, this one was sprinkled with science-y words to create the implication of evidentiary grounding and paint a façade of scientific respectability. Listeners got sprinkles of quantum, genome, biological, neural, synapse, and energy adorning a cake of staggering BS. I learned that “The divine being in human form is imprinted with its true purpose,” a profoundly vacuous string of words reminiscent of the deliciously random nonsense churned out by the Wisdom of Deepak Chopra generator.2 We also learned that “The divine being is the being that is constructed out of light from the Source in the 5th-dimensional realm,” and that “the Earth is a portal for all 5 dimensions.” Rule of thumb: just take the number of dimensions in conventional physics and add one. This makes it sound as if you’re saying something groundbreaking (or at least tantalizingly mysterious), like you might just be wrapped in a shroud of secret esoteric knowledge. My favorite meaningless quote in the deluge of imponderables was probably “You’re creating a conscious energetic polarity with your own being.” You better believe I am!

I had questions—and decided that I was masochistic enough to read more of this word salad to try to get some answers. But read what? I raised my hand and asked the speaker how she acquired all this knowledge and what I could read to deepen my learning. Her answer took me by surprise: “,” she said, “I was guided not to take on the teachings of others so that my consciousness remains pure.” Translated into plain English: all the knowledge is simply within her; she didn’t learn it from anyone or read it anywhere.

Psychology at the Festival of WooA few key psychological principles shone through at the woo festival. The first is our irrepressible human tendency to “see” patterns even where there are none. Humans are meaninghungry creatures;3 we constantly yearn for and seek meaning. We’re equipped with these pattern-detecting and meaning-making propensities because detecting patterns was crucial in avoiding threats and availing oneself of opportunities during the evolution of our species.4 And it was probably more dangerous to fail to notice a pattern that was there than to “see” a pattern that wasn’t there, so we evolved a cognitive bias toward the less dangerous of the two errors5—“seeing” patterns even where there aren’t any. This is why we’re so prone to false positives, and why we often “detect” patterns out of randomness and coincidence. And although this cognitive bias is adaptive on average and evolved for a reason, it can often lead us astray.6

We have a related tendency to project meaning onto ambiguous situations that can be interpreted in different ways. A combination of promiscuous meaning-seeking and self-centeredness tricks us into thinking that the universe is speaking to us when it’s really just events causing other events. I’m sorry to say it, but the universe has no message for us nor any particular concern for us.

Self-help was another important theme that reared its head repeatedly. Many of the beliefs at the festival were geared toward reducing people’s feelings of uncertainty, encouraging them to remove self-imposed shackles and pursue their dreams.

A fourth important theme was religion—but maybe not in the way you’d expect. Many of the attendees and presenters seemed religiously inclined in their epistemological disposition and cognitive style, and in their evidentiary requirements for belief. But they were resistant, or even hostile, to what they saw as the rigid and constraining doctrines of the monotheistic Abrahamic religions. That combination pervaded the festival. To an outside observer, it looked a lot like a religious framework for people who wanted nothing to do with traditional religions.

The fifth key theme was pervasive confirmation bias.7 People sought confirmatory rather than disconfirmatory evidence for their hypotheses, and they required much thinner evidence for belief than for refutation. Since most humans fall prey to confirmation bias,8 this one isn’t all that surprising. But the bias does vary in strength across individuals, and it was in full force at the festival.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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While those five themes—pattern detection, meaning making, self-help, religion, and confirmation bias—were the most important and pervasive, I’m not suggesting this is a comprehensive analysis of the psychology underlying woo beliefs. The point here is to relay some experiences I had at the festival and share some of the psychological principles at play.

If the experience sounds interesting, you might consider going to one or two of these events and chatting with people. You can even provide gentle, civil pushback, and see where the conversation goes. What are the attendees’ evidentiary requirements for belief? How deeply have they considered the alternatives? What do they think about confirmation bias? You and your interlocutor will probably both learn something about your fellow humans.

And who knows—if you’re lucky enough, you might even ascend to a higher vibration of love and light, where the healing is quantum, the energy is rarefied, and sound moves at the speed of light.

About the AuthorLaith Al-Shawaf is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Before moving to the U.S., he was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and a researcher and professor in Turkey. His empirical research is focused on human emotion, with additional emphases on cognition and personality. His popular science essays for Nautilus, Areo, and Psychology Today have been translated into several languages. He is the primary editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evolution and the Emotions, and he has won awards for both his teaching and research.

References1. https://bit.ly/47m4PsZ 2. https://bit.ly/48ygqpV 3. https://bit.ly/3vgm8yx 4. Mattson, M.P. (2014). Superior Pattern Processing Is the Essence of the Evolved Human Brain. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 265. 5. Haselton, M.G., & Nettle, D. (2006). The Paranoid Optimist: An Integrative Evolutionary Model of Cognitive Biases. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(1), 47–66. 6. https://bit.ly/3vgmaq9 7. Stanovich, K. E., West, R. F., & Toplak, M. E. (2013). Myside bias, rational thinking, and intelligence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(4), 259-264. 8. https://bit.ly/3vhVJAo

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss437_Einat_Wilf_2024_06_04.mp3Download MP3Dr. Einat Wilf is a leading intellectual and original thinker on matters of foreign policy, economics, education, Israel, and the Jewish people. She was a member of the Israeli Parliament from 2010-2013 on behalf of the Labor and Independence parties. Dr. Wilf has a BA in Government and Fine Arts from Harvard University, an MBA from INSEAD in France (Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires), and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Cambridge. Born and raised in Israel, Dr. Wilf served as an Intelligence Officer in the Israel Defense Forces. Dr. Wilf is also the author of six books including: My Israel, Our Generation, Back to Basics: How to Save Israeli Education (At No Additional Cost), It’s NOT the Electoral System, Stupid, Winning the War of Words, Telling Our Story (a collection of Wilf’s essays on Israel, Zionism and the path to peace,) and The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace.

Shermer and Wilf discuss:

• Why Israel? Why the Jews? Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism
• Karim Khan, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) accused Israeli and Hamas leaders of war crimes and called for a cease-fire by Israel in Gaza, particularly in Rafah
• Accusations of genocide, induced famine, and war crimes against Netanyahu
• Ireland, Spain and Norway say they will recognize a Palestinian state
• After 7 months of fighting, why has the IDF been unable to defeat Hamas?
• AP story outlining 4 options for Gaza:
  • Full scale military occupation
  • Lighter occupation with Palestinian administrators
  • Grand bargain: Reformed Palestinian Authority would govern Gaza with assistance of Arab and Muslim nations including Saudi Arabia that would normalize relations with Israel in return for a U.S. defense pact.
  • A deal with Hamas: release all of the hostages in return for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, including senior militants, as well as withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, a cease-fire, and reconstruction, leaving Hamas in control of Gaza.
• American student protests against Israel and for Palestine (and even Hamas!)
• Israel: what happened to their vaunted security apparatus, intelligence agency and military readiness?
• Zionism, Judaism, and Israel
• Palestine, Palestinians, and the Gaza strip
• Hamas, Hezbollah, and terrorism in the Middle East
• Progressive Left failure to denounce Hamas terrorists
• Why students & student groups are pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel
• The rise of anti-Semitism in recent years
• Proximate causes of anti-Semitism
• Ultimate causes of anti-Semitism
• The Abraham Accords
• The Two-State Solution.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss436_George_Takach_2024_06_01.mp3Download MP3So much of what we hear about China and Russia today likens the relationship between these two autocracies and the West to a “rivalry” or a “great-power competition.” Some might consider it alarmist to say we are in the midst of a second Cold War, but that may be the only responsible way to describe today’s state of affairs.

What’s more, we have come a long way from Mao Zedong’s infamous observation that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Now we live in an age more aptly described by Vladimir Putin’s cryptic prophecy that “artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia, but of all mankind, and whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world.”

George S. Takach’s incisive and meticulously researched new volume, Cold War 2.0, is the book we need to thoroughly understand these frightening and perilous times. In the geopolitical sphere, there are no more pressing issues than the appalling mechanizations of a surveillance state in China, Russia’s brazen attempt to assert its autocratic model in Ukraine, and China’s increasingly likely plans to do the same in Taiwan.

But the key here, Takach argues, is that our new Cold War is not only ideological but technological: the side that prevails in Cold War 2.0 will be the one that bests the other in mastering the greatest innovations of our time. Artificial intelligence sits in our pockets every day—but what about AI that coordinates military operations and missile defense systems? Or the highly sophisticated semiconductor chips and quantum computers that power those missiles and a host of other weapons? And, where recently we have seen remarkable feats of bio-engineering to produce vaccines at record speed, shouldn’t we be concerned how catastrophic it would be if bio-engineering were co-opted for nefarious purposes?

Takach thoroughly examines how each of these innovations will shape the tension between democracy and autocracy, and how each will play a central role in this second Cold War. Finally, he crafts a precise blueprint for how Western democracies should handle these innovations to respond to the looming threat of autocracy—and ultimately prevail over it.

George S. Takach holds a bachelor’s degree in history, political economy, and philosophy from the University of Toronto; a graduate degree from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University; and a law degree from the University of Toronto. For forty years, he practiced technology law at McCarthy Tétrault, Canada’s premier law firm. He has written three books on technology law/tech commercial subjects. Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America is his first book for a general audience. He lives in Toronto.

Shermer and Takach discuss:

• Mao Zedong, 1927: “Political Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
• Vladimir Putin: “artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia, but of all mankind, and whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world.”
• What is AI and what will it be able to do in the coming decades?
• China’s surveillance state
• Russia and Ukraine
• Cold War 1.0: Autocracy, Democracy and Technology
• Cold War 2.0: AI and Autocracy and Democracy
• semiconductor chip supremacy
• quantum computing
• biotechnology
• China and Taiwan
• How China’s invasion of Taiwan is likely to unfold, and what the U.S. can do about it.

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Machine-based decision-making is an interesting vision for the future: Humanity, crippled by its own cognitive deformations, tries to improve its lot by opting to outsource its decisions to adaptive machines—a kind of mental prosthetic.

For most of the twentieth century, artificial intelligence was based on representing explicit sets of rules in software and having the computer “reason” based on these rules—the machine’s “intelligence” involved applying the rules to a particular situation. Because the rules were explicit, the machine could also “explain” its reasoning by listing the rules that prompted its decision. Even if AI had the ring of going beyond the obvious in reasoning and decisionmaking, traditional AI depended on our ability to make explicit all relevant rules and to translate them into some machine-digestible representation. It was transparent and explainable, but it was also static—in this way, it did not differ fundamentally from other forms of decisional guardrails such as standard operating procedures (SOPs) or checklists. The progress of this kind of AI stalled because in many everyday areas of human activity and decisionmaking, it is exceptionally hard to make rules explicit.

In recent decades, however, AI has been used as a label for something quite different. The new kind of AI analyzes training data in sophisticated ways to uncover patterns that represent knowledge implicit in the data. The AI does not turn this hidden knowledge into explicit and comprehensible rules, but instead represents it as a huge and complex set of abstract links and dependencies within a network of nodes, a bit like neurons in a brain. It then “decides” how to respond to new data by applying the patterns from the training data. For example, the training data may consist of medical images of suspected tumors, and information about whether or not they in fact proved to be cancerous. When shown a new image, the AI estimates how likely that image is to be of a cancer. Because the system is learning from training data, the process is referred to as “machine learning.”

Such data-driven AI offers two important advantages over conventional AI. First, humans no longer have to make rules explicit to feed into the system. Instead, rules emerge from the training data. Alex Davies, author of the book Driven on machine learning and self-driving cars, puts it succinctly: in this new paradigm “the computer gets lessons, not laws.” That means we can use such AI for the kind of everyday knowledge that’s so difficult to capture with explicit rules.

The second advantage—which is even greater, in this context—is that because rules are derived from training data, they don’t have to be fixed. Instead, they can be adapted as more (and newer) training data is used. This should prevent the stiffening that lessens the effectiveness of many decisional guardrails as times change. It enables looking at patterns not only from the past but also from the present to deduce rules that can be applied to decisions in the future. It has, in other words, a built-in mechanism of updating rules.

Advocates suggest that we should incentivize the use of machine learning in an ever-increasing number of contexts, and even mandate it—much like collision warning systems have become obligatory in commercial aviation. While this might sound dramatic, the change may actually be more gradual. In many instances in our daily lives, we already have machines making decisions for us, from the relatively simple—such as an airbag deploying in a car crash—to the more sophisticated, such as Siri selecting music on our smartphone. And we profit from it: Machines aren’t as easily derailed by human biases; they perform consistently, irrespective of their emotional state. They also act efficiently—capable of doing so within a split second and at relatively low cost.

The central idea of data-driven decision guidance is that past experiences can be employed to decide well in the present. That works when the world doesn’t change—not the circumstances in which we must decide, nor the goals we want to attain through our decisions. Hard-coded rules are a poor fit for times of change; in theory, this is where data-driven AI should be able to shine. If a situation changes, we should be able to add more training data that reflect the new situation. However, there is a flaw in this line of reasoning.

Autonomous driving company Waymo illustrates the argument—and the flaw. For years, Waymo has had hundreds of cars roam the roads in the United States, collecting enormous heaps of data on roads, signage, conditions, weather, and the behavior of drivers. The data were used to train Waymo’s AI system, which then could drive autonomously. These cars were the guinea pigs for the Waymo system. Mistakes observed (including by their own drivers) in turn help the Waymo system to learn to avoid them. To identify the best driving behavior for any given circumstance, such a system needs not only data about a wide variety of situations, but also data about the outcomes of many different decisions made by drivers in each situation. Learning is richest when there is sufficient variability in the training data, so the system can deduce what works best in which conditions. To get diverse training data, Waymo needs to capture drivers making a variety of choices.

The more we use data-driven machine learning to make decisions, the more it will take the variability of decisions out of the data and shed its ability to progress.

Because Waymo never stopped collecting training data, even small changes in circumstances—such as in driving laws and resulting driving behavior—were reflected in the data collected and eventually embedded in the Waymo system. It was a machine that not only learned once, but never stopped learning.

However, let’s imagine a world in which we increasingly rely on machines when making decisions. The more machines shape our choices, the more these decisions will become the only source of training data for ongoing machine learning. The problem is that data-driven machine learning does not experiment; it acts based on the best practice it has deduced from data about previous decisions. If machines begin to learn more from choices we made based on their recommendations, they will amplify their own, conservative solutions.

Over time, this will narrow and drown out behavioral diversity in the training data. There will not be enough experimentation represented in it to enable the machines to adjust to new situations. This means data-driven machine learning will lose its single most important advantage over explicit rule-based systems. We will end up with a decisional monoculture that’s unable to evolve; we are back to fixed decisional rules.

The flaw is even bigger and more consequential than not being able to adjust to changed circumstances. Even if reality doesn’t change, we may miss opportunities to improve our decision-making in the future. Many innovations that end up becoming successful are less useful than existing choices in their initial form. But any new decision options emerging from the training data will likely only be adopted if they yield better results than existing choices straight away. This closes off any opportunity to experiment with promising new ideas.

For example, the first steam engines used far more energy than they could translate into motion and power. If a machine had compared them to the existing solution of using horses for power, it would have discarded the idea of steam power right away. The only reason the steam engine succeeded is because stubborn humans thought that they could improve the invention in the long run and stuck with it. These tinkerers had no data to support their confidence. They just imagined—and kept tinkering.

Of course, most such would-be innovators fail over time. The path of progress is paved with epitaphs to dogged tinkerers following crazy ideas. Occasionally, though, small changes accumulate and lead to a breakthrough—a far more optimal decision option. Modern societies have permitted tinkering to persist, though it is almost always unproductive, even destructive, in the short term—because of the slight chance of a big payoff sometime in the future.

Data-driven machine learning, if widely utilized, would discard initially suboptimal inventions. But in doing so, it would forego the possibility of long-term breakthroughs. Machines can learn only from what already exists. Humans can imagine what does not yet exist but could. Where humans invented steam power, data-driven machine learning would instead have found more and more efficient ways to use horse power.

Human dreaming can go far beyond technical novelties. Our ancestors once dreamed of a world in which slavery is abolished; women can vote; and people can choose for themselves whom to marry and whether to have children. They imagined a world in which smallpox is extinct and we vaccinate against polio. And they worked to make those dreams come true. If they had looked only at data from their past and present, none of these dreams would have been realized.

Decisional guidelines, from SOPs to nudges, emphasize constancy. Traditional education, too, often aims to perpetuate—suggesting there is a right answer for decisions much like for math problems. But decisional guidelines are just that—suggestions that can be disobeyed if one is willing to take the risk (and shoulder the responsibility). For eons, young people have frequently revolted against their parents and teachers, pushed back against the old, the conventional and predictable, and embraced instead not just the original and novel, but the still only imagined. Humans continue to dream—of a world, for example, that will warm by less than two degrees, or in which people have enough to eat without depleting the planet.

In contrast to humans, machine decision-making is optimized toward consistency across time. Even if data-driven machine learning has access to the very latest data, it will still limit our option space. It will always choose a more efficient way to travel along our current path, rather than try to forge a new one. The more we use it to make decisions, the more it will take the variability of decisions out of the data and shed its ability to progress. It will lead us into vulnerability, rigidity, and an inability to adapt and evolve. In this sense, data-driven machine learning is an adulation of immutability, the anathema of imagination.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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No technological adjustment can remedy this easily. If we want to increase diversity in the data, we will need variability in machine decisions. By definition, this means machines that make suboptimal choices. But the entire argument for using more AI in our decision-making is premised on AI’s ability to suggest better choices consistently across space and time. In many instances, it would not be societally palatable to deliberately introduce variation into what options a machine picks, thereby increasing the near-term risk of bad decisions in the hope of long-term benefits. And even if it were, it would not necessarily produce the experimentation we hope for. Very often, the theoretical decision space is immense. Randomly iterating through decision options to generate the diverse data necessary would take a very long time—far too long in most instances to help in timely decision-making. Even when iterations are non-random and can be done purely digitally, it would require massive computing resources.

In contrast, when humans experiment, they rarely decide randomly; instead, they use mental models to imagine outcomes. Done correctly, this can dramatically narrow the decision space. It’s that filtering based on cognitive modeling that differentiates human experimentation in decision contexts from the random walk that the machine, in the absence of a mental model, has to employ. And if machines were to use a particular mental model, the resulting data would be constrained again by the limitations of that model. A diverse set of humans experimenting using diverse mental models is simply very hard to beat.

This essay was excerpted and adapted by the authors from their book Guardrails: Guiding Human Decisions in the Age of AI. Copyright © 2024 by Princeton University Press.

About the AuthorUrs Gasser is professor of public policy, governance, and innovative technology and dean of the School of Social Sciences and Technology at the Technical University of Munich. He is the author of Born Digital: How Children Grow Up in a Digital Age.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. This essay was excerpted and adapted by the authors from their book Guardrails: Guiding Human Decisions in the Age of AI.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss435_Charan_Ranganath_2024_05_28.mp3Download MP3A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In Why We Remember, pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, he reveals the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and to imagine and plan for the future.

Memory, Dr. Ranganath shows, is a highly transformative force that shapes how we experience the world in often invisible and sometimes destructive ways. Knowing this can help us with daily remembering tasks, like finding our keys, and with the challenge of memory loss as we age. What’s more, when we work with the brain’s ability to learn and reinterpret past events, we can heal trauma, shed our biases, learn faster, and grow in self-awareness.

Including fascinating studies and examples from pop culture, and drawing on Ranganath’s life as a scientist, father, and child of immigrants, Why We Remember is a captivating read that unveils the hidden role memory plays throughout our lives. When we understand its power—and its quirks—we can cut through the clutter and remember the things we want to remember. We can make freer choices and plan a happier future.

Charan Ranganath is a Professor at the Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis. For over 25 years, Dr. Ranganath has studied the mechanisms in the brain that allow us to remember past events, using brain imaging techniques, computational modeling and studies of patients with memory disorders. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. He lives in Davis, California. Outside of neuroscience, Dr. Ranganath is also a songwriter and guitarist with a number of recording credits, including a song on a feature film soundtrack.

Shermer and Ranganath discuss:

• the neurophysiology of memory: how memories are stored by neurons
• the meaning of “forgetting” — Is the memory in there somewhere or lost forever?
• How much of what we could remember do we actually remember?
• episodic, semantic, working, flashbulb, long-term, and short-term memory
• recovered memories vs. false memories + confabulation, conflation
• regular memory loss and disease/injury memory loss
• Alzheimer’s, dementia, senility
• PTSD and bad memories
• déjá vu
• triggers of memory: music, smells, contextual cues
• learning as a form of memory
• learning by making mistakes
• social memories and the extended self
• remembered self vs. experiencing self
• MEMself vs. POVself
• uploading memories into the cloud
• improving your memory: what works, what doesn’t.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss434_Tricia_Rose_2024_05_25.mp3Download MP3In recent years, condemnations of racism in America have echoed from the streets to corporate boardrooms. At the same time, politicians and commentators fiercely debate racism’s very existence. And so, our conversations about racial inequalities remain muddled. In Metaracism, Brown University Professor of Africana Studies Tricia Rose cuts through the noise with a bracing and invaluable new account of what systemic racism actually is, how it works, and how we can fight back. She reveals how—from housing to education to criminal justice—an array of policies and practices connect and interact to produce an even more devastating “metaracism” far worse than the sum of its parts. While these systemic connections can be difficult to see—and are often portrayed as “color-blind”—again and again they function to disproportionately contain, exploit, and punish Black people. By helping us to comprehend systemic racism’s inner workings and destructive impact, Rose shows how to create a more just America for us all.

Tricia Rose is Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies and the director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. She has received fellowships from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and her research has been funded by the Mellon and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations. She co-hosts with Cornel West the podcast The Tight Rope. She is the author of Longing to Tell: Black Women’s Stories of Sexuality and Intimacy, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When we Talk About Hip Hop—and Why it Matters, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, and her new book Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives—and How We Break Free.

Shermer and Rose discuss:

• how she broke free from her own working-class background growing up in Harlem in the 1960s
• racism, structural racism, systemic racism, metaracism
• specific problems to be solved vs. deep-root cause-ism
• What policies, practices, laws, and beliefs are racist in 2024 America and what can be done about them?
• what it means to be “caught up in the system”
• individual vs. group differences
• White advantages and Black disadvantages
• Rawls’ original position/veil of ignorance and why it has not been realized in America
• race differences that are real and current, and not just historical
• Trayvon Martin
• Kelley Williams-Bolar
• Michael Brown
• Rose’s response to Black conservative authors like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell
• why Coleman Hughes is wrong about color-blindness
• Obama, George Floyd and race relations today
• reparations.

Introduction to the ShowIn my 1997 book Why People Believe Weird Things, in a chapter on race and racism, I summarized the scientific research to date on the subject. My deeper motive in this exercise was my belief that in my lifetime we could achieve—or at least approach in an asymptotic curve—a post-race society in which such superficial characteristics as skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits would be considered the least important thing to know about a person.

Nearly twenty years later, in my book The Moral Arc, I suggested that we had made so much moral progress toward this end that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” was at last coming true and so, I concluded, “we are living in the most moral period in our species’ history.”

How naïve I was. Conversations about and coverage of race and race-related incidents have since become omnipresent in our culture, from social media to mainstream media. Government, corporate, and academic collection of data on all matters race has become ubiquitous, driven further along by racial (and gender) sensitivity training programs, of which I have partaken.

Thus, in 2022 I edited a special edition of Skeptic on “Race Matters,” that included: “Systemic Racism—Explained” by Mahzarin R. Banaji, Susan T. Fiske & Douglas S. Massey. Excerpt:

In the early 1960s, more than 60 percent of White Americans agreed that Whites have a right to keep Blacks out of their neighborhoods. By the 1980s, however, the percentage had dropped to 13 percent. The fact that discrimination is illegal, and White support for segregation has plummeted, begs the question of why segregation persists.

Rental and sales agents today are less likely to respond to emails from people with stereotypically Black names or to reply to phone messages left by speakers who “sound Black”. A recent meta-analysis of 16 experimental housing audit studies and 19 lending analyses conducted since 1970 revealed that sharp racial differentials in the number of units recommended by realtors and inspected by clients have persisted and that racial gaps in loan denial rates and borrowing cost have barely changed in 40 years.

Audit studies, conducted across the social and behavioral sciences, include a subset of resume studies in which researchers send the same resume out to apply for jobs, but change just one item: the candidate’s name is Lisa Smith or Lakisha Smith. Then, they wait to see who gets the callback. The bias is clear: employers avoid “Black-sounding” names. In fact, in both Milwaukee’s and New York City’s low-wage job market, Black applicants with no criminal background were called back with the same frequency or less as White applicants just released from prison.

As a result, Critical Race Theory (CRT) literature on systemic racism is both riding and fueling this cultural pattern, loaded as it is with discussions about racial group differences on everything from income and family wealth to the percentage of Black professors in STEM fields. What percentage of STEM professors have brown eyes, blue eyes, hazel eyes, and green eyes (pace Jane Elliott’s famous experiment)? How many brunettes, blonds, and redheaded professors are there in STEM?

Who knows? Who cares? Why are these superficial characteristics considered meaningless, whereas equally frivolous features like skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits are proxies for everything from intelligence and personality to moral worth and social value?

The answer is obvious. Race and racism as manifested in slavery, segregation, lynchings, Jim Crow, redlining, profiling, and police brutality is America’s original sin, whereas we have no history of prejudice and bigotry based on eye or hair color. How did we get to this point and how can we get past it?

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During the media blitz over the potential threat now posed by artificial intelligence, I asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT “Is the technological singularity coming?” Here is the response:

ChatGPT: The coming technological singularity is a hypothetical scenario in which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and becomes capable of self-improvement and innovation at an exponential rate. Some experts predict that this could happen by the end of this decade, while others are more skeptical. The implications of such a radical transformation are unknown and potentially unpredictable, posing both opportunities and challenges for humanity. Some possible outcomes include the emergence of a post-human era, the extinction of biological life, or the coexistence of diverse forms of intelligence.

There is no doubt that ChatGPT is an excellent tool, and now OpenAI has produced a next generation AI called GPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4). GPT-4 is astonishing in the sense that it can eloquently respond to questions, generate digital images from natural language descriptions, and analyze data. According to OpenAI, GPT-4 “exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks.”

In response to that high level of performance, a number of highly intelligent people have suggested that this means we have reached the singularity moment, or at the very least that this level of AI passes the Turing Test of artificial intelligence, achieving human-level natural intelligence. Some, most notably Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Andrew Yang, and Yuval Noah Harari, went even further and issued an open letter1 calling on “all labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4… Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” The statement even called for the involvement of government and politicians if AI companies do not voluntarily pause. In response, the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee invited AI companies to respond to questions about the technology and related risks.

This letter is not the first time public figures or researchers have warned us. In 2005, futurist Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity is Near predicted it would occur by 2045. Elon Musk recently predicted that machines would overtake us by 2025. Sam Harris was so vexed by the future progress of artificial intelligence that he declared himself to be certain AI would eventually destroy us.2 He opined that AI may not intentionally do so, but rather might eliminate us the way we might annihilate ants during, say, the construction of a building. Google engineer Blake Lemoine famously claimed that the Google chatbot with which he was conversing was sentient.3 (In response, Google fired him, which was probably the wrong thing to do as it only generated conspiracy theories.)

Were those warnings of impending doom not enough, artificial intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote an opinion editorial for Time magazine in which he argued that the open letter did not go far enough:

Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen… Shut it all down.”4

One of the research papers cited in the open letter was released by Microsoft.5 I am simply astonished by what GPT-4 can accomplish based on the tests the Microsoft team conducted over a period of six months. Here is a sampling of what is detailed in the paper:

• GPT-4 can generate 2D or 3D images from a detailed text prompt.
• When GPT-4 was asked to produce a short tune, the tune had a melody and a repetitive rhythm (however, GPT-4 did not seem to understand harmony).
• GPT-4 can write software code at a human level from text prompts. “GPT-4 could potentially be hired as a software engineer.” (I have a friend who is a senior-level computer engineer. He has used GPT-4 to write sophisticated code.)
• GPT-4 can create complex 3D video games.
• GPT-4 was able to produce a correct proof from a question asked in the 2022 International Mathematical Olympiad (top high school students from all over the world compete to solve questions in a set period of time—some students are unable to answer some of the questions).
• GPT-4 can solve Fermi questions. These are physics questions where the answer must be estimated because the quantity is difficult or even impossible to measure directly. For example: How many times does the average person’s heart beat in their lifetime?
• GPT-4 can function as a personal assistant. “GPT-4 uses the available APIs [application programming interface] to retrieve information about the user’s calendar, coordinate with other people over email, book the dinner, and message the user with the details.”
• GPT-4 “is able to use the tools with very minimal instruction and no demonstrations, and then make use of the output appropriately [e.g., it knows to use a calculator when needed].” (They continue by stating that it is an emergent capability.)
• GPT-4 can serve as a virtual real world problem solver. “GPT-4 guides the human to find and fix a water leak and recommends the exact actions that the human took (after replacing the seal the leak was gone).”

Figure 1. The Sally-Anne false-belief test (adapted from Bubeck et al., 2023).

The Microsoft team attempted to ascertain whether GPT-4 had a theory of mind—the recognition that sentient beings have thoughts, emotions, intentions, etc. It not only includes understanding the state of someone else’s mind, but “of reacting on someone’s reaction of someone else’s mental state.” The Sally-Anne false-belief test from psychology (see Figure 1, above) was one of a number of tests given to GPT-4. The researchers concluded:

Our findings suggest that GPT-4 has a very advanced level of theory of mind. While ChatGPT also does well on the basic tests, it seems that GPT-4 has more nuance and is able to reason better about multiple actors, and how various actions might impact their mental states, especially on more realistic scenarios.

How Deep Learning WorksOne major goal during the Cold War of the 1960s was to develop software for the intelligence community that could translate Russian into English. Many millions of dollars were spent trying to achieve what appeared to be a reasonable goal. In his book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control computer scientist Stuart Russell points out that the early AI bubble burst when the incipient machine translations did not live up to expectations. Not only were computers not powerful enough, but the programming attempted to create a massive number of linguistic logic rules. Anyone who has tried to learn another language knows the problems encountered through direct word-for-word translations. Subtle and changing nuances become very important. No simple programming rules work for all the different sentences encountered. “Inflexible robotic rules” are not up to the task.

As computers became capable of storing and processing massive amounts of data and the Internet gave access to extensive sources of information, machine learning came to the rescue. Machine learning is simply a method of scanning the available data to learn. “Learn” is a tricky word and recalls, as an example, how we might cull through a book to understand how calculus uses limits. However, the machine is not learning in the way we do. Take translation as an example. In the early 2000s, statistical machine translation (SMT) was developed where computers analyzed millions of translated words, phrases, and sentences to find statistical patterns on how unknown text should be translated using similar structures. The statistical approach ranked the output translations and chose the best fit. The results were acceptable and sometimes excellent. Nonetheless, the computer had no idea what a word was. It simply used statistics to produce output that best fit the models.

In 2016, Google switched to neural machine translation (NMT) stating: “this change addressed the need for few engineering and design choices while increasing accuracy and speed.”6 NMT is quite different from SMT, because it does not use a system based on phrases mapped to the targeted language. The neural network handles an entire sentence as it moves through the system. The artificial neural network (ANN) loosely resembles a human brain in the sense that there are interconnected nodes, just as a brain has neurons and synapses. (It should be noted that neural networks only resemble brains. We still possess very little idea of how the actual brain works.)

If all this sounds complicated, here’s the bottom line: there are hidden layers in this training process and software engineers cannot be certain what specifically goes on while it happens. It is not surprising that many refer to the process as a black box.

The Contrarian ViewIn his 2023 book on the threat of AI, Smart Until It’s Dumb: Why Artificial Intelligence Keeps Making Epic Mistakes (And Why the AI Bubble Will Burst), AI engineer Emmanuel Maggiori used an example of a startup company developing a robot that “walks” around a city. Think of the process a human goes through when crossing a street. In a split second we rationally make choices:

• “If there are no cars on the street, cross over.”
• “If the closest car is far away and driving slowly, cross over.”
• “If the pedestrian crosswalk signal is red, wait.”

Translating these “if” statements into the hypothetical robot program for crossing a road might look like something like:

If distance to closest car on road < 100 feet, then wait; otherwise, if speed of closest car on road < 20 mph, then cross over; otherwise, wait.

The inputs are run through a series of “if-otherwise” conditions to reach decisions. What machine learning did to enhance the logic was dispense with thousands of rules by replacing them with a generalized template containing blanks (shown as italicized words below):

If some input < some number, then some recommendation; otherwise, if some input < some number, then some recommendation; otherwise, some recommendation.

Table 1. An idealized dataset to fill in the blanks of a hypothesized robot program (after Maggiori).

The copious “if-otherwise” rules dissipate, allowing the computer to fill in the blanks automatically. And where does the computer get the information to fill in the blanks? A dataset (Table 1, above).

In a real-time setting, it would require a massive database with thousands of rows and many columns allowing the computer to fill in the blanks. Maggiori put it this way:

By trying many input/number/recommendation combinations in a systematic way, the computer identifies the most promising ones and fills in the blanks in the template with them. This is called training or learning.

In more advanced AI, such as deep learning, the principles remain the same, though the templates may vary a little. For instance, in neural networks, the templates contain rules of the type “If weighted sum of inputs > some value” instead of the “If some input < some value” from the example above. In the more advanced deep learning, which uses neural networks, the template consists of millions of “If weighted sum of inputs > some value” operations. These are organized in a special, problem-specific way in order to help the system learn useful data manipulations such as image filtering or, in the case of GPT-4, word transformation and contextualization.

There are hidden layers in this training process and software engineers cannot be certain what specifically goes on while it happens. Many refer to the process as a black box.

Although the programs can be quite complex in the ways in which they are constructed and interact, the clear takeaway, according to Maggiori, is that the computer has no freedom outside of the templates/programs. The principle behind machine learning is exceedingly simple.

Then there is reinforcement learning, a variant of machine learning in which the computer generates its own dataset, as in Table 1, by experimenting with random decisions and statistically analyzing the results. For example, Google began its autonomous vehicle work in 2009, generating massive databases as its cars (with human drivers to assure safety) clocked thousands of hours to “learn” the rules of the road. Maggiori emphasizes that these programs are still governed by guardrails; that is, they are “governed by human assumptions.”

Claims by many AI researchers that machines “teach themselves” are grossly exaggerated. The machine’s ability to learn is limited to the parameters and data available through human input. Take, for example, what AlphaZero (a computer program developed by artificial intelligence company DeepMind to master the games of chess, Shogi, and Go) did when learning to play the game of Go. The dataset was generated automatically by simply having the computer play itself in thousands of games. However, the definition of who won and the parameters of the board were constructed by humans.

I don’t want to underestimate the accomplishments of convolutional neural networks (CNN) or AI in general. Sometimes even when operating under general limitations by humans, the machines can come up with useful rules that humans have missed. The AlphaZero CNN determined valuable moves that were good enough to beat the best players in the world. The aforementioned Stuart Russell suggested that a computer might be able to disable its “off-switch.”

Suppose a machine has the objective of fetching the coffee. If it is sufficiently intelligent, it will certainly understand that it will fail in its objective if it is switched off before completing its mission. Thus, the objective of fetching coffee creates, as a necessary subgoal, the objective of disabling the off switch.

However, as Maggiori pointed out, “why would anyone include the action ‘disable the off-switch’ as part of the available actions to try out for coffee delivery.” It is simply beyond the pale of machine learning: “Even if the action was allowed, the stars would have to align for the computer to ever try out that action and measure a significant positive impact in the efficiency of coffee delivery.”

What about deep learning with all of those hidden layers and the lack of specific information about how the neural network processes the data? Although we don’t know the details of the specific combination of filters, according to Maggiori we do know the neural network has limitations. Here is what he had to say about the filtering process in the neural network:

The training process starts with a completely random set of filters, so the initial model is generally useless. Afterward, it starts altering the filters progressively to find promising improvements. This is akin to an appointment with the eye doctor who tries out several glasses’ prescriptions, changing them little by little until finding the one you’re most comfortable with. But the process is much lengthier and more chaotic.

Unfortunately, because AI researchers cannot explain all the specific ways the hidden layers operate on the data, there is no guarantee what the network will spit out. Thus, the silly mistakes journalists enjoy finding in systems like ChatGPT and GPT-4, as when Maggiori asked GPT-3 “Who was the president of the UK last year?” The response was “The president of the UK was not elected last year.” As Maggiori wisely emphasizes, making changes for each mistake only seems to create additional mistakes. This is not so serious for word translations but can be tragic with autonomous vehicles.

You have probably heard of the deaths related to autonomous driving that reveal how easily AI can be fooled. In several cases, road signs have been slightly changed and the autonomous vehicles fail to recognize what is meant. Many of us have seen the effect graffiti has on a road sign. Most of the time, humans can still recognize the sign, but autonomous vehicles may not. Maggiori concludes that these failures are ultimately because CNN does not have a sophisticated “model of the world as we know it,” which probably explains why autonomous vehicles perform well in controlled environments but falter in the real world. Even Elon Musk has realized the difficulties in autonomous driving: “Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of the real-world AI. I didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect.”

The underlying simplicity of AI coding makes me think we are a long way from reaching a singularity, especially after more than a decade of failures in attempting to get self-driving cars. At this stage any computer takeover appears to be science fiction, not applied science. More importantly, there are serious ramifications that would result from any government-mandated pause in AI development.

Why a Pause in Artificial Intelligence Could Be a Very Bad IdeaLast year, Interesting Engineering reported7 that Ni Yougjie, deputy director of the Shanghai Institute of Taiwan Studies stated: “PLA [the People’s Liberation Army of the People’s Republic of China] should conduct blockade exercises around the island and use AI technology to deter U.S. interference and Taiwanese independence forces.” He went on to say that the PLA should become a global leader in intelligent warfare by using “AI, cloud computing, big data, cyberattacks and defense.” The PLA has been simulating the invasion of Taiwan through AI war games for some time. The AI results suggest that the PLA would be unable to successfully invade Taiwan through 2026, but, ominously, the CIA reports that Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered the PLA to be ready for an invasion by 2027.8

According to Gregory Allen, the director of the AI Governance Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “China is not going to slow down its AI development in either the commercial or military domain.”9 Allen’s sentiments have been echoed by many think tanks, academics, and government intelligence personnel based on the massive investments China is making in AI and Chinese hints at an unwillingness to pause AI development.

Game theory is the introduction of mathematical models of possible strategic interactions assuming rational actors are involved. In a recent paper entitled Nuclear Deterrence in the Algorithmic Age: Game Theory Revisited,10 Roy Lindelauf (game theorist and professor working at the Ministry of Defense, the Netherlands) reminds us “game theory models prescribe what a decision maker ought to do in a given situation…and to alleviate the burden of human cognitive biases.”

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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Credibility is the ultimate key in deterrence theory. Is a belligerent dissuaded from aggressive actions by the opponent’s threats? Ultimately, the best solution regarding the threat of an invasion of Taiwan is a Nash equilibrium (named after mathematician John Nash, the subject of the book and movie A Beautiful Mind) in which no one unilaterally benefits. If China believes they have superior AI, it may alter any existing Nash equilibrium; in the case of the development of AI, both sides are deterred from causing mutual destruction. In other words, no one has anything to gain by changing the status quo. However, that Nash equilibrium could dissolve if we pause AI research. In fact, it appears to me that there is a much bigger threat from the PRC than from any imminent takeover of humans by AI.

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test to determine whether a machine exhibits intelligent behavior at or beyond human level. An evaluator questions a human and a machine simultaneously without knowing which is which. If the evaluator cannot determine the difference between the human and the machine, the machine has passed his test. When it comes to pausing AI research, we should at least be dealing with machines that pass the Turing test. No artificial intelligence has ever passed it.

About the AuthorMarc J. Defant is a professor of geology at the University of South Florida specializing in the study of volcanoes— more specifically, the geochemistry of volcanic rocks. He has been funded by the NSF, National Geographic, the American Chemical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences and has published in many international journals including Nature. His book Voyage of Discovery: From the Big Bang to the Ice Age is in the 2nd edition.

References1. https://bit.ly/4aw1gU9 2. https://bit.ly/48dpjpj 3. https://bit.ly/47fCMvm 4. https://bit.ly/47dbc1P 5. https://bit.ly/3H4B5pO 6. https://bit.ly/41E8UaO 7. https://bit.ly/3H05p5e 8. https://bit.ly/3H14Zvc 9. https://bit.ly/3H2uMDr 10. https://bit.ly/3H05dmw

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss433_Bradley_Campbell_2024_05_21.mp3Download MP3Those who are pursuing social justice too often fail to incorporate the insights of sociology, and when they do make use of sociology, they often draw heavily from claims that are highly contested, unsupported by the evidence, or outright false. This book shows why learning to think sociologically can help us to think better about social justice, pointing us toward possibilities for social change while also calling attention to our limits; providing us with hope, but also making us cautious. Offering a series of tips for thinking better about social justice, with each chapter giving examples of bad sociological thinking and making the case for drawing from a broader range of sociological theory and research to inform social justice efforts, it advocates an approach rooted in intellectual and moral humility, grounded in the normative principles of classical liberalism. A fresh approach to social justice that argues for the importance of sociological understanding of the world in our efforts to change it, How to Think Better About Social Justice will appeal to scholars and students of sociology with interests in social justice issues and the sociology of morality, as well as those working to bring about social change.

Bradley Campbell is a professor of sociology at California State University, Los Angeles. His work examines moral conflict, including violent conflicts such as genocide as well as nonviolent conflicts on college campuses over politics and free speech. He is the author of The Geometry of Genocide: A Study in Pure Sociology and co-author of The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. He has also co-authored op-ed articles about contemporary moral conflicts that have appeared in Time, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times.

Shermer and Campbell discuss:

• What is sociology?
• Telos of sociology: truth or activism?
• Facts and Values
• Utopia, Dystopia, Protopia
• Liberalism vs. illiberalism vs. Conservatism vs. Populism
• Pluralism
• Science and Ideology
• Classical Liberalism: Francis Fukyuama: “a range of political views that nonetheless agree on the foundational importance of equal individual rights, law, and freedom.”
• Social justice scholars argue classical liberalism only favors the dominant group.
• Right: liberalism “generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom.” (Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed)
• Right: liberalism has to do with self-governance, discipline, cultivation of virtue.
• Durkheim: individuals as social creatures, so rejects the social contract
• Thomas Sowell’s constrained vs. unconstrained visions of politics
• Can we make people better? Can we incentivize good behavior (rational choice theory)
• Evaluating ideologies
• Victimhood culture vs. honor culture
• Conflicting rights and social tradeoffs
• Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory
• What is multi-culturalism?
• What is identity and identity politics?
• Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
• identity politics
• What is progressive?
• What are the true motives of woke progressive leftists?
• How widespread is the problem of woke ideology?
• Equality vs. Equity
• cancel culture
• Overt racism vs. systemic racism
• Why do Blacks make less money, own fewer and lower quality homes, work in less prestigious jobs, hold fewer seats in the Senate and House of Representatives, run fewer Fortune 500 companies, etc.?

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss432_Sean_Carroll_2024_05_18.mp3Download MP3Sean Carroll is creating a profoundly new approach to sharing physics with a broad audience, one that goes beyond analogies to show how physicists really think. He cuts to the bare mathematical essence of our most profound theories, explaining every step in a uniquely accessible way.

Quantum field theory is how modern physics describes nature at its most profound level. Starting with the basics of quantum mechanics itself, Sean Carroll explains measurement and entanglement before explaining how the world is really made of fields. You will finally understand why matter is solid, why there is antimatter, where the sizes of atoms come from, and why the predictions of quantum field theory are so spectacularly successful. Fundamental ideas like spin, symmetry, Feynman diagrams, and the Higgs mechanism are explained for real, not just through amusing stories. Beyond Newton, beyond Einstein, and all the intuitive notions that have guided homo sapiens for millennia, this book is a journey to a once unimaginable truth about what our universe is.

Sean Carroll is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He is host of the Mindscape podcast, and author of From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, The Big Picture, and Something Deeply Hidden. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the American Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of London, and many others. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, writer Jennifer Ouellette. His new book series, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, includes one volume on Space, Time, and Motion, and this new volume on Quanta and Fields.

Shermer and Carroll discuss:

• the measurement problem in physics
• wave functions
• entanglement
• fields
• interactions
• scale
• symmetry
• gauge theory
• phases
• matter
• atoms
• What is time?
• Is math all there is? Is math universal?
• double-slit experiment
• superposition
• metaphors in science
• limitations of models and theories of reality
• What banged the Big Bang?
• Why is there something rather than nothing?
• Second Laws of Thermodynamics and directionality in nature
• Is there a place for God in scientific epistemology?
• many interpretations of quantum mechanics
• multiple dimensions and the multiverse
• string theory and the multiverse
• known unknowables: Are there things we can never know, even in principle?
  • God
  • hard problem of consciousness
  • free will/determinism.

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In the quest for intelligent machines, approaching, or even surpassing human intelligence, has been a prominent dot on the horizon since the 1950s. Aside from the various technological challenges, I believe this quest is enormously difficult for three reasons:

1. We don’t have a clear picture of exactly how intelligence works in humans.
2. We have no generally accepted operational definition for many relevant concepts (such as consciousness), making their existence difficult to prove.
3. We continually shift what we consider intelligent.

All this makes it difficult to “clone” intelligence. Consequently, experts disagree on when we will reach human-level AI. The dot on the horizon shifts with time and continuously seems to be equally far away (as in the quip “AI is five years away…and always will be”). Yet it is not inconceivable that the intelligence code will be cracked. Chess once seemed to require some form of human intelligence; you had to be able to think strategically and assess your opponent. We now know that all such “what ifs” and “if thens” can be programmed, and an abstract representation and brute computational power have proven sufficient to defeat even the greatest human chess champions. Granted, that’s just chess, but what if all those tasks that now seem immeasurably complex could also be solved with correspondingly complex algorithms, or even with relatively simple algorithms?

In that respect, creativity seems to be the new chess. AI is already capable of creating works of art and composing pieces of music. Many people have difficulty accepting the results as examples of true creativity. And there is the deeper philosophical discussion as to whether we ourselves are not simply programmed and thus do not act as autonomously as we like to think. AI can revive one of the most painful insults to humanity famously put forth by Sigmund Freud: many, if not most of our actions are not the result of conscious choice.

Machines long ago outperformed us in physical labor, and more recently in computational power. And now our intellectual ability is at stake. This ability has always set us apart from all other creatures on earth and has given us (at least instinctively) control over our future. It is therefore not surprising that some people resent this development. Think what we might, AI is a mirror for humanity. It teaches us an enormous amount about ourselves and asks us fundamental questions about what it means to be human.

However, in my opinion, the key question we should be asking is: In designing AI, should we pursue human intelligence at all? Submarines do not swim the way fish do, nor do airplanes fly like birds; so why should computers have to think the way humans do? If you give a spider human-level intelligence it will not start behaving like a human, but rather like a “super spider” that can spin even better webs and catch even more prey. We are only going to make real progress in AI when we let go of the idea that we are superior beings. Humans are not superior to insects; we each evolved based on the respective evolutionary adaptations to our respective environments. Humans may have more advanced cognitive skills, but insects will most likely survive even a nuclear disaster. So success is context-dependent and therefore relative.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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We need to start asking ourselves for what purpose we want to use intelligent machines, rather than seeing intelligence as an end in itself. How can we use intelligent machines to create a better world? Indeed, what exactly is a better world? I submit the path forward is for humans and machines to work together, allocating tasks based on their respective specializations. Leave the complex statistics to computers but reserve the socially sensitive issues for human decision making. Let machines monitor railroads for possible damage, but let people watch over the application process for new railroad employees. Let machines assess CT scans for cancerous abnormalities, but let people discuss the treatment process with patients. Why should we build emotions into machines? On the contrary, I think we should strive to make computers operate as objectively as possible. After all, we humans with all our evolutionarily programmed biases and emotions have proven to be not very good at that at all. As the world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who was famously defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue computer, advised…

Machines have calculations.
We have understanding.
Machines have instructions.
We have purpose.
There’s one thing only a human can do.
That’s dream. So let us dream big.

About the AuthorRudy van Belkom is the Executive Director of The Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends (STT). His book, AI No Longer Has A Plug, offers developers, policymakers, philosophers, and anyone with an interest in AI the tools needed for integrating ethics into the AI design process. In addition, he developed an ethical design game for AI, inspired by the scrum process, that can be used to translate ethical issues into practice.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss431_Nellie_Bowles_2024_05_14.mp3Download MP3As a Hillary voter, a New York Times reporter, and frequent attendee at her local gay bars, Nellie Bowles fit right in with her San Francisco neighbors and friends—until she started questioning whether the progressive movement she knew and loved was actually helping people. When her colleagues suggested that asking such questions meant she was “on the wrong side of history,” Bowles did what any reporter worth her salt would do: she started investigating for herself. The answers she found were stranger—and funnier—than she expected.

In Morning After the Revolution, Bowles gives readers a front-row seat to the absurd drama of a political movement gone mad. With irreverent accounts of attending a multiday course on “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” following the social justice activists who run “Abolitionist Entertainment LLC,” and trying to please the New York Times’s “disinformation czar,” she deftly exposes the more comic excesses of a movement that went from a sideshow to the very center of American life.

Deliciously funny and painfully insightful, Morning After the Revolution is a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber. This is an unmissable debut by one of America’s sharpest journalists.

Nellie Bowles is a writer living in Los Angeles. Previously, she was a correspondent at The New York Times where, as part of a team, she won the Gerald Loeb Award in Investigations and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award. Now she is working with her wife, Bari Weiss, to build The Free Press, a new media company, where she also writes the weekly TGIF column which is released every Friday, thank God…or whoever.

Shermer and Bowles discuss:

• what it’s like to work at The New York Times
• what it’s like to found a new media company
• same-sex marriage
• Liberalism vs. Progressivism: The New Progressives
• Black Lives Matter movement
• Patrisse Khan-Cullors, co-founder, “trained Marxist” bought four homes
• Whiteness, White privilege, Robin DiAngelo
• Black bodies, White bodies, somatic abolitionism, bodies of culture

• metoo movement

• LGBTQ
• IDAHOBIT: International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, Transphobia
• BBIPOC: Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color
• Trans movement as the next rights revolution after gay rights?
• Wi Spa
• born in the wrong body?
• CHAZ: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, Seattle
• Homelessness
• Anti-Racism led by middle-aged White women
• cancel culture
• defund/abolish the police
• protesting
• Latino, Latina, Latinx.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss430_Christof_Koch_2024_05_11.mp3Download MP3In Then I Am Myself the World, Christof Koch explores the only thing we directly experience: consciousness. At the book’s heart is integrated-information theory, the idea that the essence of consciousness is the ability to exert causal power over itself, to be an agent of change. Koch investigates the physical origins of consciousness in the brain and how this knowledge can be used to measure consciousness in natural and artificial systems.

Enabled by such tools, Koch reveals when and where consciousness exists, and uses that knowledge to confront major social and scientific questions: When does a fetus first become self-aware? Can psychedelic and mystical experiences transform lives? What happens to consciousness in near-death experiences? Why will generative AI ultimately be able to do the very thing we can do, yet never feel any of it? And do our experiences reveal a single, objective reality?   

Christof Koch is a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute and at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, the former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and a former professor at the California Institute of Technology. Author of four previous titles — The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, and The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach — Koch writes regularly for a range of media, including Scientific American. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Shermer and Koch discuss:

• why “subjective experience,” aka consciousness, fits so uneasily into our physicalist worldview which has been so successful at describing the world around us
• the author’s near-death experience and how this has changed him
• the difficulties of materialism/physicalism in dealing with both the fundamental nature of reality at the quantum level and with consciousness
• the need for a fundamental theory of consciousness that explains our subjective experiences in terms of objective measures
• what we have learned about the brain basis of consciousness in the past several decades
• designing a “consciousness detector” for behavioral unresponsive patients (such as Terry Schiavo) in ICU and rehabilitation homes
• why psychedelics, such as magic mushrooms and Ayahuasca, are of so fascinating to both neuroscientists and to everyone seeking to explore the nature of reality
• both philosophy as well as neuroscience agree that our experience of the world is a construct of our mind, including such fundamental aspects as space and time
• Our minds are shaped by our beliefs, prior experiences, and intentions. We are, to a remarkable extent, the author of our own narrative and can shape perceived reality. This insight is crucial to those of us that suffer from anxiety, low self-esteem, post-traumatic stress, and depression.
• the limits of consciousness — birth and death
• the future of advanced brain-machine interfaces
• why digital computers will soon be able to do anything humans can do — but faster and better — but will never be what humans are: conscious.

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IntroductionThe battle to mitigate and stop climate change is the biggest challenge of the 21st century. The rapid build-up of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere due to human activities with resultant global warming and disruption of earth’s delicate climate balance poses a clear and present danger to human well-being and the well-being of the planet. These facts have been well documented by climate scientists and in a series of reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

While there continue to be many climate change naysayers, a majority of people around the world now accept what they can see around them—climate change is happening. Outright refusal to accept the reality of climate change is fading (at least in mainstream media) but new forms have emerged, aimed mainly at delaying any significant climate policy action.1

One major tactic is to belittle and dismiss the substantial progress that is being made on solutions, such as renewable energy and the electrification of transport. Common criticisms are that these are too expensive, intermittent, unreliable, or impractical. We term them “green energy denial.” This view was expressed, we submit, in the article entitled “The Future of Energy and Our Climate” by Marc J. Defant in Vol. 28 Issue 2 of Skeptic magazine. The reality is that while the energy transition is quite challenging, it is inevitable. Substantial progress has been made, and even more effective and efficient solutions are in the works.

Two books provide a good summary of the current situation. One is Michael E. Mann’s The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. Mann is the climate scientist famous for the hockey stick graph of global temperatures. “Outright denial of the physical evidence of climate change simply isn’t credible anymore. So, they have shifted to a softer form of denialism while keeping the oil flowing and fossil fuels burning, engaging in a multipronged offensive based on deception, distraction, and delay,” he writes. “Finally, when all other arguments fail, we’re left with ‘Well—it just won’t work. You can’t do it!’ Inactivists in fact twist themselves into veritable pretzels to explain why there’s no way we can possibly power our economy with renewable energy.” Here is how Mann sums up the problem:

We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar. To do it, we need lots of breakthroughs in science and engineering. We need to build a consensus that doesn’t exist and create public policies to push a transition that would not happen otherwise.

Bill Gates’ How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, covers the solutions being developed to mitigate climate change. Both Gates and Mann agree that while this will prove extremely challenging, it is achievable. According to Gates:

We already have some of the tools we need, and as for those we don’t yet have, everything I’ve learned about climate and technology makes me optimistic that we can invent them, deploy them, and, if we act fast enough, avoid a climate catastrophe. This book is about what it will take and why I think we can do it. Within a few years, I had become convinced of three things: To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter. And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way.

So, what’s to be done?Virtually all plans to mitigate climate change focus on large scale electrification. There are several steps required to fully implement this solution. The first step is to decarbonize the electricity supply. This means producing electricity from technologies that do not emit greenhouse gasses (GHG). Fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas should be eliminated from the electricity supply. Many countries have set such goals to be achieved in the coming decades. For example, the U.S. Department of Energy has produced a study2 on pathways to achieve 100 percent clean electricity by 2035. To replace fossil fuels, electricity must be generated from non-emitting sources such hydro, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and nuclear energy. At the COP28 United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2023, nearly 130 countries committed to tripling renewables by 2030.

A second step is to convert to electrification as many energy-intensive fossil fuel processes as possible. These include transportation, cars and trucks, heating and cooling of buildings, industrial processes such as steel and cement, and others. Electrification will not only eliminate most uses of fossil fuels; it will also reduce the total amount of energy required. For example, electric cars require about 75 percent less energy per mile than gasoline cars because they are much more efficient.3

Electrifying the economy to the maximum extent will require a significant increase in the amount of electricity produced. The Electrification Futures Study by the U.S. National Renewables Energy Laboratory (NREL),4 estimates an increase in electricity demand of about 70 percent by 2050 over 2020 levels in the “high” scenario (mainly due to electrification of transportation). The greater efficiency of new technologies such as heat pumps plays an important role in reducing the size of this increase. In another example, if all cars were to become EVs, it is estimated that this alone will require a 20–50 percent increase in the electricity supply over 2015 levels in the U.S.5 Taken together, these steps will have a huge impact on reducing GHG emissions. It is also a tremendous economic opportunity.

The Cost of RenewablesRenewables will play a key role in the decarbonization and growth of the electricity supply. A key fact that is ignored by the green energy critics is the dramatic unit cost decline in wind and particularly solar energy in recent years. The article “Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?”6 provides an excellent explanation of this development, and is the source of the following graphs. Figure 1 “The price of solar modules declined by 99.6 percent since 1976” is self-explanatory. “The price of electricity from new power plants” in Figure 2 shows how the price of electricity from new power plants has changed over the past 10 years. The most notable change is that both solar and wind are now the cheapest source of electricity in many geographic locations; lower than combined cycle gas plants.

These steep price declines undermine key arguments of green energy critics. This crucial fact is absent from Marc Defant’s Skeptic article. Renewable energy from wind and solar was more expensive than fossil fuel plants in the past, but is now cost competitive, not to mention that investments in renewables have far outpaced those in fossil fuels. In his article, Defant points to countries such as Germany and Denmark that have invested heavily in renewables but have high electricity prices. The high prices they paid as early adopters are what have now driven down the costs for everyone else. And this is precisely the path taken as most new technologies became competitive and eventually standard. It is a price worth paying to avoid an approaching global climate catastrophe. In addition, the winners will own the key technologies of the future.

Germany’s abrupt decision to shut down all their nuclear plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, which accounted for about 20 percent of their supply, along with a failure to build adequate transmission capacity have also played a role in its high electricity prices. Despite this, Germany has had remarkable success in adapting to the cut off from Russian gas due to the war in Ukraine. Many analysts believe that this has provided an impetus not only to Germany, but Europe generally, to speed up the transition off fossil fuels.

Figure 1. The price of solar modules declined by 99.6 percent since 1976.

Figure 2. The price of electricity from new power plants

Figure 3. Battery price learning curve

This data contains a valuable lesson for other technologies that are key to the green transition, such as batteries for electric cars. Wind and solar were beneficiaries of what is known as Wright’s Law, that predates the better-known Moore’s Law in the chip industry, which states that the number of transistors on microprocessors doubles every two years at about the same cost. “Wright’s Law that each doubling in experience leads to the same relative decline in prices, was discovered much earlier than Moore’s Law, by aerospace engineer Theodore Paul Wright in 1936. Moore’s observation for the progress in computing technology can be seen as a special case of Wright’s Law.”7

Figure 3 illustrates the major price declines in the cost of lithium batteries that are used in electric cars and grid energy storage. The price has continued to fall significantly below the price in the graph of $244/kWh in 2016 and was $139/kWh in 2023.8 Analysts such as Goldman Sachs predict the price will fall below the critical threshold $100/kWh in the next couple of years, which would enable EVs to become less expensive than internal combustion engine (ICE) cars without subsidies on a total cost of ownership basis.9

The lower cost of renewables is greatly accelerating their rate of adoption worldwide. Wind and solar provided nearly 18 percent of the electricity used in the U.S. in the first third of 2023, up from 14 percent in 2022. There are news stories practically daily on the success of new renewables projects. Here are just a few such headlines:

• Solar Is Now 33 percent Cheaper Than Gas Power in U.S., Guggenheim Says10
• Renewable Energy Prices Hit Record Lows: How Can Utilities Benefit From Unstoppable Solar and Wind?11
• Is Solar Really Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels?12
• The Era of Cheap Wind and Solar Has Arrived, U of C Researchers Find.13
• In a First, Wind and Solar Generated More Power Than Coal in U.S.14
• Renewables Were the World’s Cheapest Source of Energy in 2020, New Report Shows.15

Defant’s article raises a series of other issues of concern for renewables. These can each be addressed, even though as Bill Gates indicates in his book: “This will be hard.”

Gas and FrackingDefant’s article promotes alleged benefits of fracking as a cleaner alternative to coal and petroleum, citing its contributions to reducing GHG emissions in the United States. However, the author fails to mention studies that have highlighted concerns about methane leakages during extraction and transportation.16 These can offset the emissions benefits given that methane leaked from fracking has a much higher effect on radiative forcing than CO2. Moreover, the long-term sustainability of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” is rather uncertain at best, as it remains a fossil fuel that is far from leading to a sustainable low-carbon future.

Land RequirementsOne notable concern is the charge that renewable energy takes up too much land. Heartland Institute, for example argues that, “solar power requires 43.50 acres per megawatt.”17 This number comes from the Institute for Energy Research (IER) which is an advocacy organization for the fossil fuel industry.

According to an example in a study by the U.S. Department of Energy a solar farm with a total land area of 1375 acres has a capacity of 345 MW, which works out to 3.75 MW per acre.18, 19 This is more than 10b times lower than IER’s estimate! Another recent article states that: “According to a report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, roughly 22,000 square miles of solar panel-filled land (about the size of Lake Michigan) would be required to power the entire country, including all 141 million households and businesses, based on 13–14 percent efficiency for solar modules. Many solar panels, however, reach 20 percent efficiency, which could reduce the necessary area to just about 10,000 square miles, equivalent to the size of Lake Erie.”20

Rare Earth MetalsRare earth metals are essential for many green energy technologies such as wind turbines, and lithium batteries. Concern about the rarity of the rare earths is raised by Defant. “According to the Institute for Energy Research, the United States imports about 80 percent of its rare earth elements from China, which makes the U.S. highly dependent on what is increasingly becoming an adversary nation.” Note that Defant cites information from the same group as The Heartland Institute (The Heartland Institute often uses the IER as a source. See the source of their claim that 1 MW of solar requires 43.50 acres of land in Land Requirements section above). Elsewhere in his article Defant states that “It should be noted that China has a market share in the solar panel supply chain of more than 80 percent, so the Paris Accords have proven a financial bonanza for that nation.”

Consider now, information to the contrary:

• The World Population Review provides a table of Solar Power by Country.21 This table shows that in 2022 China had 393 GW while the U.S. had 113 GW of installed solar capacity. China has three times more solar than the U.S. and approximately 40 percent of the world’s installed solar capacity. Any wonder why they are the world’s largest producer?
• The Government of Canada has published a table of countries that produce rare earth metals.22 This overview shows that in 2021 China produced 60.6 percent of the total while the U.S. produced 15.5 percent. The report goes on to say: “Canada has some of the largest known reserves and resources (measured and indicated) of rare earths in the world, estimated at over 15.1 million tonnes of rare earth oxide in 2022.”
• An article for Metal Tech News23 states:
  • “While finding economically viable deposits of rare earths is not easy, the real complexity comes with separating these notoriously tightly interlocked elements into usable rare earth metals.”
  • “This gets to the heart of why rare earths are mined in the U.S., yet the country is 100 percent reliant on imports for the metals.”
  • “Several companies in the U.S. and Canada are in various stages of developing new technologies for separating rare earths and establishing facilities to enable rare earth oxides production in North America.”

It is clear that while China currently dominates rare earth metals production, the situation is evolving rapidly.

Finally, the full lifecycle analysis of electric vehicles (EVs) needs to be taken into consideration when comparing them to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, the latter having significant downstream environmental and air quality impacts, and the former having a much smaller footprint overall. Further, while it is true that critical minerals are essential for battery production in EVs, it’s worth noting that resource availability is a dynamic factor, and that recycling and circular economy principles can help reduce the demand for new resources and responsible supply chain regulations will address the extractive impacts of battery production. In fact, there are a number of startups making a profit by recycling the expensive materials in EV batteries.24 This promises to become a significant new business. Additionally, many countries now have recycling regulations, e.g., in Europe.25

Intermittency and Energy StorageIntermittency and energy storage are the biggest concerns with wind and solar due to the variability of these resources. It should be noted that variable demand has always been a key factor in grid management. So-called base load power sources such as nuclear and coal can take hours or days for power to be changed up or down. Electricity demand is highly variable within a 24-hour period with demand highest during the afternoon or evening, and lowest overnight. Base load is typically between 30–40 percent of peak load. Nuclear can be a source of base load power in a zero emissions grid. However, important issues like nuclear waste disposal, large cost overruns, lengthy approval and construction times, and public acceptance must be resolved.

The grid operator is responsible for balancing supply to demand. In a free-market energy dispatch system, the operator has several options to meet demand at any given time. Generally, the operator will choose the lowest cost option. When available, this is usually from wind or solar since these have zero fuel cost. There are many options available to mitigate the inherent intermittency of these sources. The most common is to select one of the other sources on the grid. The combination of wind and solar may complement each other. Wind and solar from different geographic regions are valuable as weather conditions may be more favorable at other locations.

Various forms of energy storage are used. Hydroelectric power dams provide the largest form of storage. In suitable geographies, pumped storage hydro is an option. So-called gravity storage is a related emerging technology. Grid scale batteries are an increasingly viable solution to manage variability over minutes or hours. Green hydrogen, which is produced through the electrolysis of water from renewables, is a promising emerging technology for energy storage. This hydrogen can be converted back to electricity when needed. Green hydrogen has other potential uses as an alternative to fossil fuels.

Demand response is another solution that has several variants. Variable pricing tied to demand managed through smart metering is one scheme. The customer may use timers to schedule functions such as the dishwasher operation or car charging at night. Water heaters or freezers may be turned on/off intermittently during periods of peak demand. Large industrial users may have agreements and receive compensation for curtailing demand during peaks.

Finally combined cycle gas turbines and peaking plants, which have been used to deal with variable demand on traditional power grids, can be used on a grid with a high percentage of renewables. While not net zero, such hybrid systems can achieve drastically reduced emissions at a low cost.

ConclusionIn considering issues as contentious and important as the extent of human-induced climate change and various methods proposed for mitigating it, it behooves skeptics to examine all the relevant information as well the interests making such arguments. This article, therefore, presents vital information ignored in a previous Skeptic article, and which, we submit, refutes those arguments decisively.

About the AuthorTrained as a biologist, Jean-Patrick Toussaint holds a PhD in environmental sciences and has been Senior Climate Director at the Trottier Family Foundation since 2022. During his career, he has conducted academic research and worked on several environmental and climate files with various national and international organizations. Prior to joining the Trottier Family Foundation, Jean-Patrick was Senior Advisor on Francophone Affairs at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM). Jean-Patrick also worked as a science officer at Future Earth and as science project manager at the David Suzuki Foundation.

Lorne Trottier is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who co-founded Matrox in 1976, a tech company known for its computer graphics and broadcast video products. The Trottier Family Foundation was established in 2000 and is active in the areas of climate, education, health, and science. The Trottier Foundation has funded a number of institutes including the Trottier Energy Institute at l’ École Polytechnique in Montreal, and the Trottier Space Institute at McGill University. Trottier was a Board Member of the National Center for Science Education NCSE for more than 10 years and is currently a Board Member of the Planetary Society.

References1. Mann, M.E. (2021). The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. PublicAffairs. 2. https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2023-05/DOE – 100%25 Clean Electricity – Final.pdf 3. https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml 4. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy18osti/71500.pdf 5. https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-electricity-would-it-take-to-power-all-cars-if-they-were-electric/ 6. https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth 7. https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth 8. https://www.bing.com/search?q=price+lithium+battery+kWh&form=ANNTH1&refig=1570f510a450451ba00cb0f1fd43617d&pc=EDBBAN 9. https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/electric-vehicle-battery-prices-falling.html 10. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-03/solar-is-now-33-cheaper-than-gas-power-in-us-guggenheim-says?embedded-checkout=true 11. https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2020/01/21/renewable-energy-prices-hit-record-lows-how-can-utilities-benefit-from-unstoppable-solar-and-wind/?sh=34e36cb22c84 12. https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/solar-really-cheaper-fossil-fuels/1106159/ 13. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/era-of-cheap-wind-and-solar-has-arrived-says-university-calgary-researchers-1.5807219 14. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-a-first-wind-and-solar-generated-more-power-than-coal-in-u-s/ 15. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/renewables-cheapest-energy-source/ 16. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/14/fracking-causing-rise-in-methane-emissions-study-finds 17. https://heartland.org/opinion/us-transition-to-100-percent-renewable-energy-would-lead-to-catastrophe-study-says 18. https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-01/lbnl_ieee-land-requirements-for-utility-scale-pv.pdf 19. https://www.skystreamenergy.com/how-many-acres-are-needed-for-a-1-mw-solar-farm/ 20. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us-solar/ 21. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/solar-power-by-country 22. https://natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-mining/minerals-metals-facts/rare-earth-elements-facts/20522 23. https://www.metaltechnews.com/story/2021/09/09/critical-minerals-alliances/made-in-north-america-rare-earths-return/683.html 24. https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a44022888/electric-car-battery-recycling/ 25. https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling_en

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss429_Tom_Chivers_2024_05_07.mp3Download MP3At its simplest, Bayes’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. But in Everything Is Predictable, Tom Chivers lays out how it affects every aspect of our lives. He explains why highly accurate screening tests can lead to false positives and how a failure to account for it in court has put innocent people in jail. A cornerstone of rational thought, many argue that Bayes’s theorem is a description of almost everything.

But who was the man who lent his name to this theorem? How did an 18th-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician uncover a theorem that would affect fields as diverse as medicine, law, and artificial intelligence? Fusing biography and intellectual history, Everything Is Predictable is an entertaining tour of Bayes’s theorem and its impact on modern life, showing how a single compelling idea can have far reaching consequences.

Tom Chivers is an author and the award-winning science writer for Semafor. Previously he was the science editor at UnHerd.com and BuzzFeed UK. His writing has appeared in The Times (London), The Guardian, New Scientist, Wired, CNN, and more. He was awarded the Royal Statistical Society’s “Statistical Excellence in Journalism” awards in 2018 and 2020, and was declared the science writer of the year by the Association of British Science Writers in 2021. His books include The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity’s Future, and How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Stats in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them). His new book is Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World.

Shermer and Chivers discuss:

• Who was Thomas Bayes, what was his equation, and what problem did it solve?
• Bayesian decision theory vs. statistical decision theory
• Popperian falsification vs. Bayesian estimation
• Sagan’s ECREE principle
• Bayesian epistemology and family resemblance
• Paradox of the heap
• Bayesian brain
• Reality as controlled hallucination
• Bayesian prediction errors and why we can’t tickle ourselves
• Bayes and human irrationality
• Superforecasting
• Types of truth
• Mystical experiences and religious truths
• Replication Crisis in science
• Statistical Detection Theory and Signal Detection Theory
• Medical diagnosis problem and why most people get it wrong.

Show NotesMedical Diagnosis Problem and Why Most People Get It Wrong

You go to the doctor not feeling well and they run some diagnostic tests, which indicate that you might have cancer. They tell you that this disease happens to 1 out of 100 people, or a 1% prevalence rate. The test sensitivity for this type of cancer is 90%, that is, the test will be right 90% of the time. The false positive rate of the test is 9%, that is, the test will be wrong 9% of the time. What is the percent likelihood that you have cancer?

When people are presented with this problem, the most common answer given is between 80% and 90%. The correct answer is 9%. This problem is so counterintuitive that not only do most people get it wrong, most medical professionals get it wrong. Think about that: a physician whom you trust runs some diagnostic tests and informs you that you have a 90% chance of having cancer when, in fact, it’s only 9%. That is a huge difference determining what decision you should make about treatment or not. What has gone wrong here? Let’s reframe the problem on a group of people tested for cancer and see how that cashes out on the diagnosis problem:

• In a sample size of 1,000 people, 10 have cancer (the base rate of 1%).
• Of these 10 people, 9 will test positive (the 90% sensitivity of the test).
• Of the 990 people without cancer, 89 will test positive (the 9% false-positive rate).
• A person tests positive. Does this person have cancer or not?

Here is how we compute the answer:

• Out of 1,000 people tested for cancer
• 98 of them test positive in all (9 + 89)
• 9 of them have cancer
• 9 divided by 98 = 0.091 or ~ 9%

Why do most people get such problems wrong in the original framing? The answer is threefold: (1) base rate neglect, that is, the rate of the phenomenon happening is ignored or discounted, in this case a low 1% base rate means the cancer is rare (in Bayesian language, the prior probability was low); (2) probabilities are counterintuitive, that is, they apply to populations of people, not to one person; (3) cognitive heuristics, that is, we’re not naturally Bayesian in our reasoning and instead we use cognitive shortcuts or rules of thumb. The Linda problem:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Pinker on Blindness to Base Rates

Why can’t we predict who will attempt suicide? Why don’t we have an early-warning system for school shooters? Why can’t we profile terrorists or rampage shooters and detain them preventively? The answer comes out of Bayes’s rule: a less-than-perfect test for a rare trait will mainly turn out false positives. The heart of the problem is that only a tiny proportion of the population are thieves, suicides, terrorists, or rampage shooters (the base rate). Until the day that social scientists can predict misbehavior as accurately as astronomers predict eclipses, their best tests would mostly finger the innocent and harmless.

Bayesian Reasoning About UFOsLeslie Kean’s 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, in which the UFOlogist admitted that “roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained” as:

…weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddies, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole-punch clouds, and the list goes on.

How The Light Gets InAt the 2023 HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London (sponsored by IAI, the Institute of Art and Ideas), during a panel discussion on the role of spiritual experience in our lives, in which I shared the stage with psychologist John Vervaeke and philosopher Sophie-Grace Chappell. Both quoted the noted philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein at length, while I quoted Douglas Adams:

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

IAI News editor Ricky Williamson nevertheless makes my point:

This final argument from Shermer is a typical anti-spiritual retort. “Show us the evidence.” Well Michael, here it is: The mystical experience. The mystical experience, much like any other type of experience, offers clear evidence of spiritual reality. But what is the mystical experience?

The mystical experience is evidence of spiritual reality. Philosophical arguments for spirituality, or even for God, are of far less value in my estimation when compared to the empirical evidence of the mystical experience. Spiritual reality can be well-hidden when in a “normal” frame of mind, not much about regular reality hints at the presence of this possible, radical other, but when you see it, when you have a mystical experience, the experience is undeniable.

Feynman

If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.

Hume’s Maxim

The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), “That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.” When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss428_Lisa_Kaltenegger_2024_05_04.mp3Download MP3For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether we’re alone in the cosmos. Now, for the first time, we have the technology to investigate. But once you look for life elsewhere, you realize it is not so simple. How do you find it over cosmic distances? What actually is life?

As founding director of Cornell University’s Carl Sagan Institute, astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger has built a team of tenacious scientists from many disciplines to create a specialized toolkit to find life on faraway worlds. In Alien Earths, she demonstrates how we can use our homeworld as a Rosetta Stone, creatively analyzing Earth’s history and its astonishing biosphere to inform this search. With infectious enthusiasm, she takes us on an eye-opening journey to the most unusual exoplanets that have shaken our worldview – planets covered in oceans of lava, lonely wanderers lost in space, and others with more than one sun in their sky! And the best contenders for Alien Earths. We also see the imagined worlds of science fiction and how close they come to reality.

With the James Webb Space Telescope and Dr. Kaltenegger’s pioneering work, she shows that we live in an incredible new epoch of exploration. As our witty and knowledgeable tour guide, Dr. Kaltenegger shows how we discover not merely new continents, like the explorers of old, but whole new worlds circling other stars and how we could spot life there. Worlds from where aliens may even be gazing back at us. What if we’re not alone?

Lisa Kaltenegger is the Director of the Carl Sagan Institute to Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell and Associate Professor in Astronomy. She is a pioneer and world-leading expert in modeling potential habitable worlds and their detectable spectral fingerprint. Kaltenegger serves on the National Science Foundation’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC), and on NASA senior review of operating missions. She is a Science Team Member of NASA’s TESS Mission as well as the NIRISS instrument on James Webb Space Telescope. Kaltenegger was named one of America’s Young Innovators by Smithsonian magazine, an Innovator to Watch by Time magazine. She appears in the IMAX 3D movie “The Search for Life in Space” and speaks frequently, including at Aspen Ideas Festival, TED Youth, World Science Festival and the Kavli Foundation lecture at the Adler Planetarium.

Shermer and Kaltenegger discuss:

• Carl Sagan and his influence
• Sagan’s Dragon
• ECREE Principle
• How stars, planets and solar systems form
• How exoplanets are discovered
• Hubble Space Telescope, Kepler Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope
• What is life?
• The Origin of Life
• Fermi’s Paradox: where is everybody (the Great Silence, the Great Filter)
• SETI
• Biosignatures here and there
• Technosignatures here and there
• Dyson spheres and other technosignatures
• Will aliens be biological or AI?
• Interstellar travel
• Kardashev scale of civilizations
• Communicating with aliens: Arrival
• Aliens communicating with us: Contact
• Order of the Dolphin: how to talk to aliens when we can’t even talk to dolphins
• Deities for Atheists, Skygods for Skeptics: aliens as gods and the search as religion
• Why alien worlds matter.

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One winter evening in 2014, Stuart Russell, a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, was riding the Paris Metro. He was on his way to a rehearsal for a choir that he had joined while living in the French capital during a sabbatical from Berkeley.

That evening, he was listening to the piece that he would be practicing, Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei, the composer’s choral arrangement of his haunting Adagio for Strings. Swept up in the sublime music, Russell had a breathtaking idea. AI should be built to support ineffable human moments like this one. Instead of delegating an objective to a machine and then stepping back, designers should make systems that will work with us to realize both our complex, shifting goals and our values and preferences. “It just sprang into my mind that what matters, and therefore what the purpose of AI was, was in some sense the aggregate quality of human experience,” he later recalled. And in order to be constantly learning what humans want or need, AI must be uncertain, Russell realized. “This is the core of the new approach: we remove the false assumption that the machine is pursuing a fixed objective that is perfectly known.”

Talking with me by video call one day in the fall of 2022, Russell elaborates. Once the machine is uncertain, it can start working with humans instead of “just watching from above.” If it doesn’t know how the future should unfold, AI becomes teachable, says Russell, a thin, dapper man with a manner of speaking that is somehow both poetical and laser precise. A key part of his Paris epiphany, he says, “was realizing that actually [AI’s] state of uncertainty about human objectives is permanent.” He pauses. “To some extent, this is how it’s going to be for humans too. We are not born with fixed reward functions.”

A few weeks later, I meet up virtually with Anca Dragan, an energetic Berkeley roboticist who is a protégé of Russell’s and one of a growing number of high-profile scientists turning his vision for reimagining AI into algorithmic reality.

“One of my biggest lessons over the past five years or so has been that there’s a tremendous amount of power for AI in being able to hold appropriate uncertainty about what the objective should be,” she tells me. Power? I ask. She explains that by making AI “a little bit more humble, a little bit more uncertain, all of a sudden magical things happen” for both the robot and the human. Together, we begin watching two illustrative bits of video whose banality belies their importance.

In a first clip filmed during experiments in her laboratory, we watch as a robot arm swings into action, carrying a coffee cup several feet high above a table. Almost immediately, a graduate student in a red T-shirt tries to push the arm lower. “It’s Ellis’s favorite mug,” says Dragan, describing the hypothetical scenario inspiring the research, “and he doesn’t like it that the robot is holding it so high up because if it drops, it will break.” As Ellis pushes, the robot doesn’t fight or freeze. But as soon as he lets go—“this is the interesting part,” says Dragan—the robot promptly bounces back up, reclaiming its initial trajectory. This is how AI traditionally has treated the human—as a pesky obstacle on the road to fulfilling the gospel of its objective, says Dragan. The robot views Ellis as an unknown to be ignored, skirted, or eliminated in order to get the job done. I watch as he gives the imperturbable machine a final two-fingered poke before standing back, looking a little defeated.

In what is known as the classical period of AI, early systems by necessity were built to operate in a kind of utopian world that was clear-cut, predictable, and fully understood. In order to make the first algorithms work, designers had to, as Dragan says, “cut off a tiny piece of the world, put it in a box, and give it to a robot.” By the 1980s, however, scientists realized that if they were to create systems for realworld use, they needed to grapple with the unpredictability of life.

To meet this challenge, computer scientist Judea Pearl famously turned to Bayes’ theorem, an Enlightenmentera mathematical system for dealing with uncertainty by constantly updating one’s prior beliefs with new evidence. By investing AI with probabilistic capabilities, Pearl enabled systems to weigh various actions against both the current state of the world and a range of possible futures before deciding on the best route to maximizing a reward. He gave AI wiggle room. Yet the foundational premise of the work remained the same. Unknowns—whether a hesitant pedestrian in a crosswalk, an unanswerable search engine query, or a coffee drinker with ideas of his own—are best summarily dispatched en route to realizing an objective. When Ellis lets go, the coast is clear. The robot knows just what to do.

In the next clip, Ellis tries again. But this time, he only has to push the arm down once before stepping back and watching, one hand nonchalantly in his pocket, as the robot glides by a few inches above the table. Suddenly, the system is doing not what it wants but something far more in line with what Ellis prefers. The maneuver is over in less than a minute, and the inner workings of the robot’s metamorphosis are hidden from view. But I can clearly see that this time, the robot has learned something about carrying coffee, about human priorities, and about aligning with intelligences other than its own. As the robot completes the task, Ellis nods approvingly to someone off camera. He looks relieved.

This is the new paradigm of what Russell calls “human-compatible AI.” Gone is the fallacy of the known fixed objective, whether it is given in advance—“win points”—or, as is the case with a strategy called inverse reinforcement learning, pieced together by the system from initial training demonstrations that in effect say “carry the coffee this way.” (In the latter scenario, a robot may accept a correction while in training, but once it is deployed, it will remain undeterred from its objective.) As Ellis experienced, most standard robots cannot learn on the fly.

In contrast, uncertain AI can adapt in the moment to what we want it to do. Imbued with probabilistic reasoning about its aims or other equivalent mathematical capabilities, the system dwells in “a space of possibilities,” says Dragan. A push is not an obstacle to getting its way but a hint of a new, likely better direction to go. The human is not an impediment but a teacher and a teammate. Perhaps most important, human-compatible AI likely will be open to being shut down if it senses that it might not be on the right track, preliminary studies suggest. A human wish to turn the robot off is just another morsel of information for a system that knows that it does not know. “That’s the big thing that uncertainty gives you, right; you’re not sure of yourself anymore, and you realize you need more input,” says Dragan gleefully. “Uncertainty is the key foundation upon which alignment can rest.”

By making AI a little bit more humble, a little bit more uncertain, all of a sudden, magical things happen for both the robot and the human.

In initial user studies, people working with uncertain robots achieve better task performance with less time and effort. They view such systems as more seamlessly collaborative and sensitive to their needs. “The robot seemed to quickly figure out what I cared about,” said one participant. In one experiment, when a physically present robot verbally expressed uncertainty about a thorny moral dilemma, people saw it as more intelligent than one that asserted that it was sure of what to do.

The music that helped set the stage for Stuart Russell’s vision of a new AI celebrates the liminality and the ambiguity of life. One of the world’s most-heard pieces of modern classical music, Barber’s Adagio for Strings unfolds in a single brief movement suffused with moments of suspense and dissonance. Critic Johanna Keller writes that the piece seems to convey “the effect of a sigh, or courage in the face of tragedy, or hope” and ends on a note of uncertainty. She writes, “In around eight minutes the piece is over, harmonically unresolved, never coming to rest.”

• • • • • •

At Virginia Tech, I at last meet up with an I-Don’t-Know robot. But unlike Ellis, I am working with a system whose uncertainty is an open book. In Dylan Losey’s lab, I discover the critical complement to making AI better at knowing that it does not know: creating systems that also admit to their uncertainty.

The painter-robot sports three sets of armbands, called soft haptic displays, at the base, in the middle, and near the end of its five-foot length. As I guide it through its work of drawing a line down the table, the robot tells me where in the task it is unsure by inflating specific bands associated with particular aspects of the process. If it is unsure about the angle to hold its claw-like “end effector,” for example, it inflates the bottom-most armbands in each set with a soft woosh. In this way, I can get a read on whether the robot is catching on no matter where I place my hands. “You can actually touch the robot’s uncertainty,” Losey tells me. “You can feel in real time as you move it how confused it is.”

If uncertainty enables an AI system to be open to our suggestions, then AI that can also show its unsureness will allow us to know where we stand in our increasingly high-stakes interactions with such machines. A cycle of questions and answers on both sides can result. “When a robot can let a person know, ‘hey, this is where I am at, this is what I’ve learned,’ or ‘this is my best guess but I am a little bit uncertain so take that with a grain of salt’—that’s what I’m working for,” says Losey, a scientist with a rapid-fire pace of speaking and a somber intensity.

The research is critical, he and others believe, because not only does standard AI fall woefully short in its understanding of humanity, but we in turn know less and less about the complex black-box systems that increasingly manage our lives. “Even as a designer, often I have no clue what’s going to happen next with [standard] robots,” Losey admits. “I have to press play and hope that what I see is what I want to see.” The question is, he says, “how can we open that box?”

How and why does AI succeed or fail? Why did the model conclude that one person was worthy of parole, a job interview, or a loan while a similar candidate was not? We often do not know in part because AI operates in abstract mathematical terms that rarely correspond to human ideas and language. In addition, the more astonishing AI’s achievements have become, the more opaque they are to human understanding. After being handily defeated at Go by an AI program, one shocked world champion said AlphaGo’s extraordinary strategic play revealed that “not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go.”

Slowly, the creation of openly uncertain systems is becoming a key part of global efforts to make explainable and transparent AI. It is not enough to bring to light what AI knows, for example, by exposing which reward objective or data set was used in training an algorithm. To work with AI, to anticipate its moves, to gauge its strengths and ours, to parse the magic, we also should understand what it does not know, leading scientists assert. Dozens of frontline laboratories worldwide are working to build AI that can speak a language of uncertainty that humans can readily comprehend.

Some robots show people on-screen hypothetical scenarios about their next moves, in effect asking, “Should I move closer to or further from the stove?” or “Should I avoid a certain intersection on my way to fetch coffee?” Others play a kind of robot charades. In Losey’s lab, a standing robot often used in warehouses acted out for me a plethora of sometimes indecipherably similar ways for it to stack dishes. Its thoroughness raised unresolved research questions, such as how much and what kinds of uncertainty a system should display or how AI’s incertitude can interact productively with ours. “It’s not just a question of robot uncertainty,” says Laura Blumenschein, a soft robotics expert who cocreated the haptic arm. “It’s a question of human–robot systems and the combined uncertainty within them.”

Beyond robots, openly uncertain AI models have shown promise for use in medical diagnosis systems and already are being used to bolster AI-assisted drug discovery. For example, to address rising bacterial resistance to drugs, a new kind of model created by Yoshua Bengio and other top researchers in Canada has shown exciting potential to identify synthetic peptides, that is, small proteins that might be turned into new antibiotics. Instead of relying on pattern recognition to settle on one best answer, Generative Flow Networks explore less obvious paths in the data to uncover numerous possible answers, in this case candidate peptides that can be tested further by models and humans alike.

“The whole point is that we want to keep in mind many possible explanations—we want to account for uncertainty,” says Nikolay Malkin of Mila, the Quebec-based leading AI research institute where the algorithm was created. And by operating reflectively rather than relying on simplifying and opaque snap judgments, the new models shed light on both a problem’s deeper causal intricacies and their own decision-making processes. The system’s uncertainty can be an engine of transparency.

For many scientists, moreover, constructing AI that admits its uncertainty is not just a safety feature, a path to adaptability, a practicality. It is a matter of right and wrong.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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Julian Hough is a British computer scientist with a rising reputation and a kindly demeanor. The longer he has been in the field, however, the more concerned he has become about the pretense of certainty traditionally built into the machine. Hough offers a final word of warning. Any time that a system’s uncertainty is swept under the rug, he cautions, “it won’t be going away. It’s just going to be hidden in dangerous ways and basically hidden by system designers.” By way of example, he describes a scenario. “Say a cop robot is looking for a suspect, and it has 60 percent confidence in one person, but it’s been programmed to act at any level beyond 50 percent confidence. If it does not express that level of doubt, that’s very dangerous. It could have fatal consequences.”

This is a watershed moment in the history of AI. Uncertainty is at the heart of efforts to create systems that can better align with human aims. There is no easy blueprint for reimagining humanity’s most powerful and dangerous invention to date. Still, one day sooner than you may imagine, you might work side by side with a robot that will ask you good questions and admit to its uncertainty, all while expecting that you in turn will do so too.

This essay was excerpted and adapted by the author from Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure (Prometheus Books). Copyright © 2023 by Maggie Jackson. Reprinted with permission.

About the AuthorMaggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist who is a leading thinker on technology’s impact on humanity. A former contributing columnist for the Boston Globe, Jackson’s writings have been translated into multiple languages and have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, New Philosopher, and Le Monde’s Courrier International. Her expertise has been featured on NPR, MSNBC, and the BBC; and in many other global media outlets. She is the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, and awards and has spoken at venues from Google to Yale.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss427_Bruce_Hood_2024_04_30.mp3Download MP3We all want to be happier, but our brains often get in the way. When we’re too stuck in our heads we obsess over our inadequacies, compare ourselves with others and fail to see the good in our lives. In The Science of Happiness, world-leading psychologist and happiness expert Bruce Hood demonstrates that the key to happiness is not self-care but connection. He presents seven simple but life-changing lessons to break negative thought patterns and re-connect with the things that really matter.

• Alter Your Ego
• Avoid Isolation
• Reject Negative Comparisons
• Become More Optimistic
• Control Your Attention
• Connect With Others
• Get Out of Your Own Head

Grounded in decades of studies in neuroscience and developmental psychology, this book tells a radical new story about the roots of wellbeing and the obstacles that lie in our path. With clear, practical takeaways throughout, Professor Hood demonstrates how we can all harness the findings of this science to re-wire our thinking and transform our lives.

Dr. Bruce Hood is an award-winning Professor of Developmental Psychology at Bristol University and the author of several books including SuperSense, The Self Illusion, The Domesticated Brain, and Possessed. His course, The Science of Happiness, is the most popular course at Bristol University. He has appeared extensively on TV and radio, including co-hosting the BBC podcast The Happiness Half Hour in 2021. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, the Royal Institution of Great Britain and the British Psychological Society.

Shermer and Hood discuss:

• Psychedelic drug taking of his youth
• An operational definition of the “good life” or “happiness” or “well being”
• Emotions and happiness
• What are emotions and how can they be measured?
• Love, Hate, Anger, Fear, Disgust, Pleasure/Pain
• Hunger, Thirst, Lust, Attraction, Desires, Passions
• Emotions in the EEA—Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness—what are they “for”?
• Are there universal human emotions?
• The nature and nurture of emotions
• Happiness as an emotion and a social contagion
• eudaimonia (the pursuit of meaning) versus hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure)
• Genetics and heritability of happiness
• Cultural components of happiness (individual vs. collective)
• WEIRD people and happiness
• The Big Five (OCEAN) and happiness
• Marriage and happiness (mate selection)
• Health and happiness
• Walking, exercise, stress reduction and happiness
• Religion, happiness, and the good life
• Variety (as the “spice of life”), stability, and happiness (sexual variety?)
• How to live the life you want—not necessarily the life expected of you
• What the ancient Greeks got right about living the good life
• How failure may actually be a key to more happiness.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss426_Robin_Reames_2024_04_27.mp3Download MP3The discipline of rhetoric was the keystone of Western education for over two thousand years. Only recently has its perceived importance faded.

In this book, renowned rhetorical scholar Robin Reames argues that, in today’s polarized political climate, we should all care deeply about learning rhetoric. Drawing on examples ranging from the destructive ancient Greek demagogue Alcibiades to modern-day conspiracists like Alex Jones, Reames breaks down the major techniques of rhetoric, pulling back the curtain on how politicians, journalists, and “journalists” convince us to believe what we believe—and to talk, vote, and act accordingly. Understanding these techniques helps us avoid being manipulated by authority figures who don’t have our best interests at heart. It also grants us rare insight into the values that shape our own beliefs. Learning rhetoric, Reames argues, doesn’t teach us what to think but how to think—allowing us to understand our own and others’ ideological commitments in a completely new way.  Thoughtful, nuanced, and leavened with dry humor, The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself offers an antidote to our polarized, post-truth world. 

Robin Reames is associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in rhetorical theory and the history of ideas. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in contemporary and ancient rhetorical theory, language theory, rhetorical criticism, political rhetoric, writing, as well as courses in literature and literary theory. Her research is guided by an interest in the visceral and primordial power of human speech, for which ancient rhetoric serves as a first theory. Her book, Seeming and Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory examines how Plato used rhetorical theory to forge the primordial distinction between seeming and being—the foundational fissure from which Western metaphysics emerged, and the very grounds of the opposition between true and false. Her new book is The Ancient Art of Thinking For Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times.

Reames and Shermer discuss:

• What is rhetoric?
• How has rhetoric changed her life?
• Rhetoric vs. facts (rhetorical truths vs. empirical truths)
• Is the point of reason to understand reality or to persuade? (Hugo Mercier/Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason)
• Canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery
• “Through thinking rhetorically about our ideological commitments it is possible for people from radically different orientations to have different, better, and more productive conversation.”
• Logos (authority), pathos (feelings), ethos (ethics), hubris (pride)
• Bullshitters vs. liars
• What is reason?
• Induction and deduction
• What is truth?
• Can you reason people out of beliefs they didn’t reason themselves into?
• Thinking rhetorically rather than ideologically
• Thinking metaphorically: “war on poverty”, “government as family” (George Lakoff)
• Thought and language
• Thought, language, and ideology
• How language is processed (thoughts vs. pictures)
• How to disagree with people/debate hot issues (guns, abortion, immigration)
• Culture wars: war between two different cultures—liberal and conservative
• How to have impossible conversations
• Toulmin scheme: data, claim, warrant, backing, qualifier, rebuttal
• Facts and values
• Value hierarchy
• Warrant: linking data to a claim
• Syllogistic reasoning/deduction
• Conspiracy theories and why people believe them
• Birtherism and Trutherism.

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Bedbugs. Just mention of the word is enough to give people the heebie-jeebies and send shivers down their spines—or start scratching. Beginning in early fall of 2023 and coinciding with Paris Fashion Week from September 25 to October 3, fear of the unhealthy vermin swept across Paris. There does not appear to be one incident that triggered the scare, but once the cry of “Bedbug!” went up, it quickly went viral online and in the Parisian media. A wave of YouTube and TikTok videos showed the proliferous pests crawling on bus seats, in trains, riding the subways, lounging at Charles de Gaulle airport, and taking in the latest plays in Paris theatre district the “Grands Boulevards.” Some anxious residents even refused to sit during their daily commutes. One British newspaper saw the humorous side of the panic, carrying the headline: “Coming Soon to a Cinema Near You? The Return of the Bud Bug.”1

Within days, the humble bedbug Cimex lectularius was being portrayed as public enemy No. 1. Politicians began holding press conferences on “the bedbug crisis” and vowing action. By September 29, the Deputy Mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, ominously posted on X/Twitter: “No one is safe.”2 One MP, Ms. Mathilde Panot, carried a test tube filled with bedbugs into the French Parliament, complaining that pesky parasites were “making the lives of millions of our fellow citizens a living hell.”3

While they may give people the creeps, bedbugs are more of an annoyance than a major health threat. These small, reddish-brown insects have an affinity for feeding on the blood of humans as they sleep. During the day they love to hide in the cracks and crevices of headboards, box springs, mattresses, and bed frames next to their human prey, hence the name. According to the Mayo Clinic, they are not considered to be a serious health issue as they do not directly spread disease, although they can trigger allergic reactions and skin conditions, and scratching the bites can lead to infection.4

Bonne nuit. Dormez bien.
Ne laissez pas les punaises de lit piquer.

Most experts agree that there does appear to be an uptick in the bedbug population of Paris—and in many parts of the world. According to estimates from the French national pest control association, the number of calls to exterminators jumped about 10 percent over last year. However, this was not surprising as it corresponds with the spike in travel after the Covid pandemic.5 There is also evidence that bedbugs have become more resistant to insecticides while the rise in global temperatures have boosted their sex lives.6, 7 But a 10 percent increase hardly qualifies as a massive infestation.

Look closer, and all is not as it seems.

Thibault Buckley who works for a French company that specializes in dealing with bedbugs that have infested dogs, says that most of recent cases have turned out to be unrelated to bedbugs.8 The issue is also nothing new. For instance, a government survey of French households between 2017 and 2022 found that 11 percent were infested with the creepy critters.9 The French bedbug scare has also spread the fear of infestations to other European metropolitan areas. However, bedbugs have long been a feature, if a very unwanted one, of most major cities. What is new is the sudden media attention.

Soon after hearing of the bedbug infestation, Lebanese dermatologist Zeina Nehme happened to be on a trip to Paris when she decided to spend her weekend finding some of the tiny troublemakers and making a social media video about it. That’s when something odd happened: she could not locate a single bug—not in her apartment or the restaurants she visited or the vast rail network, the Paris Metro. “I actively searched to find one to take pics and do the reel. Nothing,” she said.10

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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The Paris bedbug “invasion” has the hallmarks of a social panic involving a real or imagined threat. In this case, the threat is real—there are bedbugs and their numbers have been increasing, but their presence has been exaggerated. Bugs are a common feature of everyday life. Now however, in the wake of sensational media reports of invading bedbugs, people have begun to scrutinize their surroundings for evidence for the critters. In the past a bus or train traveler may have sat next to one and not paid much notice. These days, Parisians are hyperaware of any bug, especially while on public transport or in public places like the cinema—and people are seeing them everywhere.

One factor likely driving the scare is misidentifications. Bedbugs are often mistaken for other insects such as cockroach nymphs, which look similar but are slightly longer and more cylindrical, and also with fleas, ticks, or carpet beetles.11 Another factor leading to the perceived invasion of bedbugs, may be embarrassment—or a lack thereof. Until recently, if someone found the creepy crawlers in their home, it was not exactly a badge of honor and they may have been reluctant to mention it to their work colleagues around the watercooler. Now, with the surge in media interest, it appears to be chic to report finding the bugs and exchange war stories with fellow Parisians.

Goodnight. Sleep tight.
Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

About the AuthorRobert E. Bartholomew is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He has written numerous books on the margins of science covering UFOs, haunted houses, Bigfoot, lake monsters—all from a perspective of mainstream science. He has lived with the Malay people in Malaysia, and Aborigines in Central Australia. He is the co-author of two seminal books: Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior with Hilary Evans, and Havana Syndrome with Robert Baloh.

References1. https://bit.ly/48FilZQ 2. https://bit.ly/48dCEhg 3. https://bit.ly/3RMPGLw 4. https://bit.ly/48EaR9z 5. https://bit.ly/3vm8ZEh 6. https://bit.ly/41KXORl 7. https://bit.ly/3tush9X 8. https://bit.ly/3H5NKJk 9. https://bit.ly/3vnhnmT 10. https://bit.ly/3S4GYdh 11. https://bit.ly/3ve397C

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss425_Adam_Gopnik_2024_04_23.mp3Download MP3We push ourselves toward the highest-paying, most prestigious jobs, seeking promotions and public recognition. As Adam Gopnik points out, the result is not so much a rat race as a rat maze, with no way out. Except one: to choose accomplishment over achievement.

Achievement is the completion of the task imposed from outside.

Accomplishment, by contrast, is the end point of an engulfing activity one engages in for its own sake.

Shermer and Gopnik discuss:

• mastering the secrets of stage magic (Gopnik’s son worked with David Blaine and Jamy Ian Swiss)
• accomplishment in music
• family and mentors
• the concept of the 10,000-hour rule vs. natural talent
• Adam’s new book All That Happiness Is, which offers timeless wisdom against the grain.

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of numerous best-selling books, including Paris to the Moon and The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss424_Annie_Jacobsen_2024_04_20.mp3Download MP3Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds’ notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.

Annie Jacobsen is an investigative journals, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and New York Times bestselling author. Her books include: Area 51, Operation Paperclip, The Pentagon’s Brain, Phenomena, First Platoon, and Surprise, Kill, Vanish. Her book Nuclear War: A Scenario, has been optioned to be made into a dramatic film.

Shermer and Jacobsen discuss:

• So much has been written on this subject…what is new? (Richard Rhodes’s nuclear tetraology (The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun, Arsenals of Folly, Twilight of the Bombs, Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control, Fred Kaplan’s The Bomb, Martin Sherwin’s Gambling with Armageddon, Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine, Carl Sagan’s and Richard Turco’s A Path Where No Man Thought)
• How much more is classified that we still do not know?
• Why we have a nuclear triad (land missiles, submarine missiles, bombers)
• Competition among military forces and increasing budgets for more weapons
• How many types of nuclear weapons are there now, and how many total?
• Why humans engage in aggression, violence and war
• The Prisoner’s dilemma, Hobbesian trap, Security Dilemma, the “other guy” problem
• Balance of Terror, Mutual Assured Destruction, Logic of Deterrence
• Close calls: Cuban Missile Crisis, Nuclear sub/Vasily Arkipov (1962), Damascus Titan missile explosion (1980), Able Archer 83 war exercise in Europe, Stanislav Petrov, etc.
• Surviving a nuclear explosion/war
• What happens in a nuclear bomb explosion
• Short terms and long term consequences of a nuclear exchange
• Nuclear Winter
• Nuclear protests & films (On the Beach, Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove, War Games, The Day After)
• Getting to Nuclear Zero: Stockpile reduction, No First Use, No Launch on Warning, shift taboo from not using them to not owning them,
• Reagan and Gorbachev and arms reductions
• North Korea, China/Taiwan
• Göbekli Tepe and post-apocalyptic world.

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On October 17, 2005 the talk show host and comedian Stephen Colbert introduced the word “truthiness” in the premier episode of his show The Colbert Report:1 “We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth— the truth we want to exist.”2 Since then the word has become entrenched in our everyday vocabulary but we’ve largely lost Colbert’s satirical critique of “living in a post-truth world.” Truthiness has become our truth. Kellyanne Conway opened the door to “alternative facts”3 while Oprah Winfrey exhorted you to “speak your truth.”4 And the co-founder of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, has begun to regularly talk to his podcast guests about objective external truths and subjective internal truths, inside of which are historical truths, political truths, religious truths, literary truths, mythical truths, scientific truths, empirical truths, narrative truths, and cultural truths.5 It is an often-heard complaint to say that we live in a post-truth world, but what we really have is far too many claims for it. Instead, we propose that the vital search for truth is actually best continued when we drop our assertions that we have something like an absolute Truth with a capital T.

Why is that? Consider one of our friends who is a Young Earth creationist. He believes the Bible is inerrant. He is convinced that every word it contains, including the six days of creation story of the universe, is Truth (spelled with a capital T because it is unquestionably, eternally true). From this position, he has rejected evidence brought to him from multiple disciplines that all converge on a much older Earth and universe. He has rejected evidence from fields such as biology, paleontology, astronomy, glaciology, and archeology, all of which should reduce his confidence in the claim that the formation of the Earth and every living thing on it, together with the creation of the sun, moon, and stars, all took place in literally six Earth days. Even when it was pointed out to him that the first chapter of Genesis mentions liquid water, light, and every kind of vegetation before there was a sun or any kind of star whatsoever, he claimed not to see a problem. His reply to such doubts is to simply say, “with God, all things are possible.”6

Lacking any uncertainty about the claim that “the Bible is Truth,” this creationist has only been able to conclude two things when faced with tough questions: (1) we are interpreting the Bible incorrectly, or (2) the evidence that appears to undermine a six-day creation is being interpreted incorrectly. These are inappropriately skeptical responses, but they are the only options left to someone who has decided beforehand that their belief is Truth. And, importantly, we have to admit that this observation could be turned back on us too. As soon as we become absolutely certain about a belief—as soon as we start calling something a capital “T” Truth—then we too become resistant to any evidence that could be interpreted as challenging it. After all, we are not absolutely certain that the account in Genesis is false. Instead, we simply consider it very, very unlikely, given all of the evidence at hand. We must keep in mind that we sample a tiny sliver of reality, with limited senses that only have access to a few of possibly many dimensions, in but one of quite likely multiple universes. Given this situation, intellectual humility is required.

Some history and definitions from philosophy are useful to examine all of this more precisely. Of particular relevance is the field of epistemology, which studies what knowledge is or can be. A common starting point is Plato’s definition of knowledge as justified true belief (JTB).7 According to this JTB formulation, all three of those components are necessary for our notions or ideas to rise to the level of being accepted as genuine knowledge as opposed to being dismissible as mere opinion. And in an effort to make this distinction clear, definitions for all three of these components have been developed over the ensuing millennia. For epistemologists, beliefs are “what we take to be the case or regard as true.”8 For a belief to be true, it doesn’t just need to seem correct now; “most philosophers add the further constraint that a proposition never changes its truth-value in space or time.”9 And we can’t just stumble on these truths; our beliefs require some reason or evidence to justify them.10

Readers of Skeptic will likely be familiar with skeptical arguments from Agrippa (the problem of infinite regress11), David Hume (the problem of induction12), Rene Descartes (the problem of the evil demon13), and others that have chipped away at the possibility of ever attaining absolute knowledge. In 1963, however, Edmund Gettier fully upended the JTB theory of knowledge by demonstrating—in what has come to be called “Gettier problems”14—that even if we managed to actually have a justified true belief, we may have just gotten there by a stroke of good luck. And the last 60 years of epistemology have shown that we can seemingly never be certain that we are in receipt of such good fortune.

This philosophical work has been an effort to identify an essential and unchanging feature of the universe—a perfectly justified truth that we can absolutely believe in and know. This Holy Grail of philosophy surely would be nice to have, but it makes sense that we don’t. Ever since Darwin demonstrated that all of life could be traced back to the simplest of origins, it has slowly become obvious that all knowledge is evolving and changing as well. We don’t know what the future will reveal and even our most unquestioned assumptions could be upended if, say, we’ve actually been living in a simulation all this time, or Descartes’ evil demon really has been viciously deluding us. It only makes sense that Daniel Dennett titled one of his recent papers, “Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism.”15

So, what is to be done after this demise of our cherished notions of truth, belief, and knowledge? Hold onto them and claim them anyway, as does the creationist? No. That path leads to error and intractable conflict. Instead, we should keep our minds open, and adjust and adapt to evidence as it becomes available. This style of thinking has become formalized and is known as Bayesian reasoning. Central to Bayesian reasoning is a conditional probability formula that helps us revise our beliefs to be better aligned with the available evidence. The formula is known as Bayes’ theorem. It is used to work out how likely something is, taking into account both what we already know as well as any new evidence. As a demonstration, consider a disease diagnosis, derived from a paper titled, “How to Train Novices in Bayesian Reasoning:”

10 percent of adults who participate in a study have a particular medical condition. 60 percent of participants with this condition will test positive for the condition. 20 percent of participants without the condition will also test positive. Calculate the probability of having the medical condition given a positive test result.16

Most people, including medical students, get the answer to this type of question wrong. Some would say the accuracy of the test is 60 percent. However, the answer must be understood in the broader context of false positives and the relative rarity of the disease.

Simply putting actual numbers on the face of these percentages will help you visualize this. For example, since the rate of the disease is only 10 percent, that would mean 10 in 100 people have the condition, and the test would correctly identify six of these people. But since 90 of the 100 people don’t have the condition, yet 20 percent of them would also receive a positive test result, that would mean 18 people would be incorrectly flagged. Therefore, 24 total people would get positive test results, but only six of those would actually have the disease. And that means the answer to the question is only 25 percent. (And, by the way, a negative result would only give you about 95 percent likelihood that you were in the clear. Four of the 76 negatives would actually have the disease.)

Now, most usages of Bayesian reasoning won’t come with such detailed and precise statistics. We will very rarely be able to calculate the probability that an assertion is correct by using known weights of positive evidence, negative evidence, false positives, and false negatives. However, now that we are aware of these factors, we can try to weigh them roughly in our minds, starting with the two core norms of Bayesian epistemology: thinking about beliefs in terms of probability and updating one’s beliefs as conditions change.17 We propose it may be easier to think in this Bayesian way using a modified version of a concept put forward by the philosopher Andy Norman, called Reason’s Fulcrum.18

Figure 1. A Simple Lever. Balancing a simple lever can be achieved by moving the fulcrum so that the ratio of the beam is the inverse of the ratio of mass. Here, an adult who is three times heavier than the child is balanced by giving the child three times the length of beam. The mass of the beam is ignored. Illustrations in this article by Jim W.W. Smith

Like Bayes, Norman asserts that our beliefs ought to change in response to reason and evidence, or as David Hume said, “a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”19 These changes could be seen as the movement of the fulcrum lying under a simple lever. Picture a beam or a plank (the lever) with a balancing point (the fulcrum) somewhere in the middle, such as a playground teeter-totter. As in Figure 1, you can balance a large adult with a small child just by positioning the fulcrum closer to the adult. And if you know their weight, then the location of that fulcrum can be calculated ahead of time because the ratio of the beam length on either side of the fulcrum is the inverse of the ratio of mass between the adult and child (e.g., a three times heavier person is balanced by a distance having a ratio of 1:3 units of distance).

If we now move to the realm of reason, we can imagine substituting the ratio of mass between an adult and child by the ratio of how likely the evidence is to be observed between a claim and its counterclaim. Note how the term in italics captures not just the absolute quantity of evidence but the relative quality of that evidence as well. Once this is considered, then the balancing point at the fulcrum gives us our level of credence in each of our two competing claims.

Figure 2. Ratio of 90–10 for People Without–With the Condition. A 10 percent chance of having a condition gives a beam ratio of 1:9. The location of the fulcrum shows the credence that a random person should have about their medical status.

To see how this works for the example previously given about a test for a medical condition, we start by looking at the balance point in the general population (Figure 2). Not having the disease is represented by 90 people on the left side of the lever, and having the disease is represented by 10 people on the right side. This is a ratio of 9:1. So, to get our lever to balance, we must move the fulcrum so that the length of the beam on either side of the balancing point has the inverse ratio of 1:9. This, then, is the physical depiction of a 10 percent likelihood of having the medical condition in the general population. There are 10 units of distance between the two populations and the fulcrum is on the far left, 1 unit away from all the negatives.

Figure 3. Ratio of 18 False Positives to 6 True Positives. A 1 to 3 beam ratio illustrates a 25 percent chance of truly having this condition. The location of the fulcrum shows the proper level of credence for someone if they receive a positive test.

Next, we want to see the balance point after a positive result (Figure 3). On the left: the test has a 20 percent false positive rate, so 18 of the 90 people stay on our giant seesaw even though they don’t actually have the condition. On the right: 60 percent of the 10 people who have the condition would test positive, so this leaves six people. Therefore, the new ratio after the test is 18:6, or 3:1. This means that in order to restore balance, the fulcrum must be shifted to the inverse ratio of 1:3. There are now four total units of distance between the left and right, and the fulcrum is 1 unit from the left. So, after receiving a positive test result, the probability of having the condition (being in the group on the right) is one in four or 25 percent (the portion of beam on the left). This confirms the answer we derived earlier using abstract mathematical formulas, but many may find the concepts easier to grasp based on the visual representation.

To recap, the position of the fulcrum under the beam is the balancing point of the likelihood of observing the available evidence for two competing claims. This position is called our credence. As we become aware of new evidence, our credence must move to restore a balanced position. In the example above, the average person in the population would have been right to hold a credence of 10 percent that they had a particular condition. And after getting a positive test, this new evidence would shift their credence, but only to a likelihood of 25 percent. That’s worse for the person, but actually still pretty unlikely. Of course, more relevant evidence in the future may shift the fulcrum further in one direction or another. That is the way Bayesian reasoning attempts to wisely proportion one’s credence to the evidence.

Figure 4. Breaking Reason’s Fulcrum. Absolute certainty makes Bayes’ theorem unresponsive to evidence in the same way that a simple lever is unresponsive to mass when it becomes a ramp.

What about our Young Earth creationist friend? When using Bayes’ theorem, the absolute certainty he holds starts with a credence of zero percent or 100 percent and always results in an end credence of zero percent or 100 percent, regardless of what any possible evidence might show. To guard against this, the statistician Dennis Lindley proposed “Cromwell’s Rule,” based on Oliver Cromwell’s famous 1650 quip: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”20 This rule simply states that you should never assign a probability of zero percent or 100 percent to any proposition. Once we frame our friend’s certainty in the Truth of biblical inerrancy as setting his fulcrum to the extreme end of the beam, we get a clear model for why he is so resistant to counterevidence. Absolute certainty breaks Reason’s Fulcrum. It removes any chance for leverage to change a mind. When beliefs reach the status of “certain truth” they simply build ramps on which any future evidence effortlessly slides off (Figure 4).

So far, this is the standard way of treating evidence in Bayesian epistemology to arrive at a credence. The lever and fulcrum depictions provide a tangible way of seeing this, which may be helpful to some readers. However, we also propose that this physical model might help with a common criticism of Bayesian epistemology. In the relevant academic literature, Bayesians are said to “hardly mention” sources of knowledge, the justification for one’s credence is “seldom discussed,” and “Bayesians have hardly opened their ‘black box’, E, of evidence.”21 We propose to address this by first noting it should be obvious from the explanations above that not all evidence deserves to be placed directly onto the lever. In the medical diagnosis example, we were told exactly how many false negatives and false positives we could expect, but this is rarely known. Yet, if ten drunken campers over the course of a few decades swear they saw something that looked like Bigfoot, we would treat that body of evidence differently than if it were nine drunken campers and footage from one high-definition camera of documentarians working for the BBC. How should we depict this difference between the quality of evidence versus the quantity of evidence?

We don’t yet have firm rules or “Bayesian coefficients” for how to precisely treat all types of evidence, but we can take some guidance from the history of the development of the scientific method. Evidential claims can start with something very small, such as one observation under suspect conditions given by an unreliable observer. In some cases, perhaps that’s the best we’ve got for informing our credences. Such evidence might feel fragile, but…who knows? The content could turn out to be robust. How do we strengthen it? Slowly, step by step, we progress to observations with better tools and conditions by more reliable observers. Eventually, we’re off and running with the growing list of reasons why we trust science: replication, verification, inductive hypotheses, deductive predictions, falsifiability, experimentation, theory development, peer review, social paradigms, incorporating a diversity of opinions, and broad consensus.22

We can also bracket these various knowledgegenerating activities into three separate categories for theories. The simplest type of theory we have explains previous evidence. This is called retrodiction. All good theories can explain the past, but we have to be aware that this is also what “just-so stories” do, as in Rudyard Kipling’s entertaining theory for how Indian rhinoceroses got their skin—cake crumbs made them so itchy they rubbed their skin until it became raw, stretched, and all folded up.23

Even better than simply explaining what we already know, good theories should make predictions. Newton’s theories predicted that a comet would appear around Christmastime in 1758. When this unusual sight appeared in the sky on Christmas day, the comet (named for Newton’s close friend Edmund Halley) was taken as very strong evidence for Newtonian physics. Theories such as this can become stronger the more they explain and predict further evidence.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.4
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Finally, beyond predictive theories, there are ones that can bring forth what William Whewell called consilience.24 Whewell coined the term scientist and he described consilience as what occurs when a theory that is designed to account for one type of phenomenon turns out to also account for another completely different type. The clearest example is Darwin’s theory of evolution. It accounts for biodiversity, fossil evidence, geographical population distribution, and a huge range of other mysteries that previous theories could not make sense of. And this consilience is no accident—Darwin was a student of Whewell’s and he was nervous about sharing his theory until he had made it as robust as possible.

Figure 5. The Bayesian Balance. Evidence is sorted by sieves of theories that provide retrodiction, prediction, and consilience. Better and better theories have lower rates of false positives and require a greater movement of the fulcrum to represent our increased credence. Evidence that does not yet conform to any theories at all merely contributes to an overall skepticism about the knowledge we thought we had.

Combining all of these ideas, we propose a new way (Figure 5) of sifting through the mountains of evidence the world is constantly bombarding us with. We think it is useful to consider the three different categories of theories, each dealing with different strengths of evidence, as a set of sieves by which we can first filter the data to be weighed in our minds. In this view, some types of evidence might be rather low quality, acting like a medical test with false positives near 50 percent. Such poor evidence goes equally on each side of the beam and never really moves the fulcrum. However, other evidence is much more likely to be reliable and can be counted on one side of the beam at a much higher rate than the other (although never with 100 percent certainty). And evidence that does not fit with any theory whatsoever really just ought to make us feel more skeptical about what we think we know until and unless we figure out a way to incorporate it into a new theory.

We submit that this mental model of a Bayesian Balance allows us to adjust our credences more easily and intuitively. Also, it never tips the lever all the way over into unreasonable certainty. To use it, you don’t have to delve into the history of philosophy, epistemology, skepticism, knowledge, justified true beliefs, Bayesian inferences, or difficult calculations using probability notation and unknown coefficients. You simply need to keep weighing the evidence and paying attention to which kinds of evidence are more or less likely to count. Remember that observations can sometimes be misleading, so a good guiding principle is, “Could my evidence be observed even if I’m wrong?” Doing so fosters a properly skeptical mindset. It frees us from the truth trap, yet enables us to move forward, wisely proportioning our credences as best as the evidence allows us.

About the AuthorZafir Ivanov is a writer and public speaker focusing on why we believe and why it’s best we believe as little as possible. His lifelong interests include how we form beliefs and why people seem immune to counterevidence. He collaborated with the Cognitive Immunology Research Initiative and The Evolutionary Philosophy Circle. Watch his TED talk.

Ed Gibney writes fiction and philosophy while trying to bring an evolutionary perspective to both of those pursuits. He has previously worked in the federal government trying to make it more effective and efficient. He started a Special Advisor program at the U.S. Secret Service to assist their director with this goal, and he worked in similar programs at the FBI and DHS after business school and a stint in the Peace Corps. His work can be found at evphil.com.

References1. https://rb.gy/ms7xw 2. https://rb.gy/erira 3. https://rb.gy/pjkay 4. https://rb.gy/yyqh0 5. https://rb.gy/96p2g 6. https://rb.gy/f9rj3 7. https://rb.gy/5sdni 8. https://rb.gy/zdcqn 9. https://rb.gy/3gke6 10. https://rb.gy/1no1h 11. https://rb.gy/eh2fl 12. https://rb.gy/2k9xa 13. Gillespie, M. A. (1995). Nihilism Before Nietzsche. University of Chicago Press. 14. https://rb.gy/4iavf 15. https://rb.gy/crv9j 16. https://rb.gy/zb862 17. https://rb.gy/dm5qc 18. Norman, A. (2021). Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think. Harper Wave. 19. https://rb.gy/2k9xa 20. Jackman, S. (2009). The Foundations of Bayesian Inference. In Bayesian Analysis for the Social Sciences. John Wiley & Sons. 21. Hajek, A., & Lin, H. (2017). A Tale of Two Epistemologies? Res Philosophica, 94(2), 207–232. 22. Oreskes, N. (2019). Why Trust Science? Princeton University Press. 23. https://rb.gy/2us27 24. Whewell, W. (1847). The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History. London J.W. Parker.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss423_Nick_Bostrom_2024_04_16.mp3Download MP3Nick Bostrom’s previous book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, changed the global conversation on AI and became a New York Times bestseller. It focused on what might happen if AI development goes wrong. But what if things go right? Suppose that we develop superintelligence safely, govern it well, and make good use of the cornucopian wealth and near magical technological powers that this technology can unlock. If this transition to the machine intelligence era goes well, human labor becomes obsolete. We would thus enter a condition of “post-instrumentality” in which our efforts are not needed for any practical purpose. Furthermore, at technological maturity, human nature becomes entirely malleable. Here we confront a challenge that is not technological but philosophical and spiritual. In such a solved world, what is the point of human existence? What gives meaning to life? What do we do all day?

Bostrom’s new book, Deep Utopia, shines new light on these old questions and gives us glimpses of a different kind of existence, which might be ours in the future.

Nick Bostrom is a Professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute. Bostrom is the world’s most cited philosopher aged 50 or under. He is the author of more than 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (2008), Human Enhancement (2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), a New York Times bestseller which sparked a global conversation about the future of AI. His work has pioneered many of the ideas that frame current thinking about humanity’s future (such as the concept of an existential risk, the simulation argument, the vulnerable world hypothesis, the unilateralist’s curse, etc.), while some of his recent work concerns the moral status of digital minds. His writings have been translated into more than 30 languages; he is a repeat main-stage TED speaker; and he has been interviewed more than 1,000 times by media outlets around the world. He has been on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice and was included in Prospect’s World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15. He has an academic background in theoretical physics, AI, and computational neuroscience as well as philosophy.

Bostrom and Shermer discuss:

• The Future of Life Institute’s Open Letter calling for a pause on “giant AI experiments”
• Eliezer Yudkowsky Time OpEd: “Shut It All Down” — “Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in ‘maybe possibly some remote chance,’ but as in ‘that is the obvious thing that would happen.’ If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.”
• Utopia, Dystopia, Protopia
• Would it be boring to live in a perfect world?
• If we lived forever with everything we need, what would be the purpose of life?
• Trekonomics, post-scarcity economics
• The hedonic treadmill and positional wealth values—will people never be satisfied with “enough”?
• Overpopulation of the 1960s and today’s birth dearth
• Colonizing the galaxy (von Neumann probes, O’Neill cylinders, Dyson spheres)
• The Fermi paradox: where is everyone?
• Mind uploading and immortality
• Examples of Technological Maturity
• Google’s Gemini AI debacle
• Large Language Models
• ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT-5 and beyond
• The alignment problem
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it have?
• The hard problem of consciousness
• How would we know if an AI system was sentient?
• Can AI systems be conscious?

On Mind Uploading and Replicating / Resurrecting Everyone Who Ever Lived(An excerpt from Michael Shermer’s 2018 book Heavens on Earth.)

The sums involved in achieving immortality through the duplication or resurrection scenarios are not to be underestimated. There are around 85 billion neurons in a human brain, each with about a thousand synaptic links, for a total of 100 trillion connections to be accurately preserved and replicated. This is a staggering level of complexity made all the more so by the additional glial cells in the brain, which provide support and insulation for neurons and can change the actions of firing neurons, so these cells better be preserved as well in any duplication or resurrection scenario, just in case. Estimates of the ratio of glial cells to neurons in a brain vary from 1:1 to 10:1. If you’re not a lightning calculator, that computes to a total brain cell count of somewhere between 170 billion and 850 billion. Then factor in the hundreds or thousands of synaptic connections between each of the 85 billion neurons, adding approximately 100 trillion synaptic connections total for each brain. That’s not all. There are around ten billion proteins per neuron, which effect how memories are stored, plus the countless extracellular molecules in between those tens of billions of brain cells.

These estimates are just for the brain and do not even include the rest of the nervous system outside of the skull—what neuroscientists call the “embodied brain” or the “extended mind” and which many philosophers of mind believe is necessary for normal cognition. So you might want to have this extended mind resurrected or uploaded along with your mind. After all, you are not just your internal thoughts and emotions disconnected from your body. Many of your thoughts and emotions are intimately entwined with how your body interacts with its environment, so any preserved connectome, to be fully operational as recreating the experience of what it is like to be a sentient being, would also need to be housed in a body. So we would need a warehouse of brainless clones or very sophisticated robots prepared to have these uploaded mind neural units installed. How many? Well, to avoid the charge of elitism, it’s only fair that everyone who ever lived be resurrected, so that means multiplying the staggering data package for one person by 108 billion.

Then there’s the relationship between memory and life history. Our memory is not like a videotape that can be played back on the viewing screen of our minds. When an event happens to us, a selective impression of it is made on the brain through the senses. As that sense impression wends its way through different neural networks, where it ends up depends on what type of memory it is. As a memory is processed and prepared for long-term storage we rehearse it and in the process it is changed. This editing process depends on previous memories, subsequent events and memories, and emotions. This process recurs trillions of times in the course of a lifetime, to the point where we have to wonder if we have memories of actual events, or memories of the memories of those events, or even memories of memories of memories…. What’s the “true” memory? There is no such thing. Our memories are the product of trillions of synaptic neuronal connections that are constantly being edited, redacted, reinforced, and extinguished, such that a resurrection of a human with memories intact will depend on when in the individual’s life history the replication or resurrection is implemented.

In his book The Physics of Immortality the physicist Frank Tipler calculates that an Omega Point computer in the far future will contain 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 bits (a 1 followed by 10123 zeros), powerful enough, he says, to resurrect everyone who ever lived. That may be—it is a staggeringly large number—but is even an Omega Point computer powerful enough to reconstruct all of the historical contingencies and necessities in which a person lived, such as the weather, climate, geography, economic cycles, recessions and depressions, social trends, religious movements, wars, political revolutions, paradigm shifts, ideological revolutions, and the like, on top of duplicating our genome and connectome? It seems unlikely, but if so GOSH would also need to duplicate all of the individual conjunctures and interactions between that person and all other persons as they intersect with and influence each other in each of those lifetimes. Then multiply all that by the 108 billion people who ever lived or are currently living. Whatever the number, it would have to be even larger than the famed Googolplex (10 to the power of a googol, with a googol being 10100, or 1010100) from which Google and its Googleplex headquarters derived its name. Even a googol of googolplexes would not suffice. In essence, it would require the resurrection of the entire universe and its many billions of years of history. Inconceivable.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss422_Robert_Zubrin_2024_04_13.mp3Download MP3When Robert Zubrin published his classic book The Case for Mars a quarter century ago, setting foot on the Red Planet seemed a fantasy. Today, manned exploration is certain, and as Zubrin affirms in The New World on Mars, so too is colonization. From the astronautical engineer venerated by NASA and today’s space entrepreneurs, here is what we will achieve on Mars and how.

SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic are building fleets of space vehicles to make interplanetary travel as affordable as Old-World passages to America. We will settle on Mars, and with our knowledge of the planet, analyzed in depth by Dr. Zubrin, we will utilize the resources and tackle the challenges that await us. What we will we build? Populous Martian city-states producing air, water, food, power, and more. Zubrin’s Martian economy will pay for necessary imports and generate income from varied enterprises, such as real estate sales—homes that are airtight and protect against cosmic space radiation, with fish-farm aquariums positioned overhead, letting in sunlight and blocking cosmic rays while providing fascinating views. Zubrin even predicts the Red Planet customs, social relations, and government—of the people, by the people, for the people, with inalienable individual rights—that will overcome traditional forms of oppression to draw Earth immigrants. After all, Mars needs talent.

With all of this in place, Zubrin’s Red Planet will become a pressure cooker for invention in bioengineering, synthetic biology, robotics, medicine, nuclear energy, and more, benefiting humans on Earth, Mars, and beyond. We can create this magnificent future, making life better, less fatalistic. The New World on Mars proves that there is no point killing each other over provinces and limited resources when, together, we can create planets.

Robert Zubrin is former president of the aerospace R&D company Pioneer Astronautics, which performs advanced space research for NASA, the US Air Force, the US Department of Energy, and private companies. He is the founder and president of the Mars Society, an international organization dedicated to furthering the exploration and settlement of Mars, leading the Society’s successful effort to build the first simulated human Mars exploration base in the Canadian Arctic and growing the organization to include 7,000 members in 40 countries. A nuclear and astronautical engineer, Zubrin began his career with Martin Marietta (later Lockheed Martin) as a Senior Engineer involved in the design of advanced interplanetary missions. His “Mars Direct” plan for near-term human exploration of Mars was commended by NASA Administrator Dan Goldin and covered in The Economist, Fortune, Air and Space Smithsonian, Newsweek (cover story), Time, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, as well as on BBC, PBS TV, CNN, the Discovery Channel, and National Public Radio. Zubrin is also the author of twelve books, including The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, with more than 100,000 copies in print in America alone and now in its 25th Anniversary Edition. He lives with his wife, Hope, a science teacher, in Golden, Colorado. His latest book is: The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet. The next big Mars Society conference in Seattle August 8-11.

Read Zubrin’s discussion of his paper on panspermia for seeding like on Earth.

Shermer and Zubrin discuss:

• Why not start with the moon?
• What’s it like on Mars? Like the top of Mt. Everest?
• Was Mars ever like Earth? Water, life, etc.?
• How much will it cost to go to Mars?
• How to get people to Mars: food, water, radiation, boredom?
• Where on Mars should people settle?
• What are “natural resources”?
• Resources on Mars already there vs. need to be produced
• Analogies with Europeans colonizing North America
• Public vs. private enterprise for space exploration
• Economics on Mars
• Politics on Mars
• Lessons from the Red Planet for the Blue Planet
• Ingersoll’s insight: free speech & thought > science & technology > machines as our slaves > moon landing. “This is something that free people can do.”
• Liberty in space: won’t the most powerful people on Mars threaten to shut off your air if you don’t obey?
• Independent City-States on Mars
• Direct vs. representative democracy
• America as a model for what we can create on Mars
• Are new frontiers needed for civilization to continue?
• The worst idea ever: that the total amount of potential resources is fixed.

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In 2021 the CDC issued a grim statistic: more than one million Americans had died from overdoses since 1999 when it started tracking an opioid epidemic that began with prescription painkillers and is now dominated by fentanyl.1 Since that sobering milestone, another 300,000 have died.2 That is roughly the same number of Americans who died in all wars the United States has entered (1.3 million) combined, including the First and Second World Wars and the Civil War.3 The opioid epidemic is, aside possibly from obesity, the biggest health crisis of our time.

Most know about the frenzy of finger pointing, lawsuits, bankruptcy filings among pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors, national pharmacy chains, medical associations, and the Federal Drug Administration. There is plenty of blame to go around. What is not often discussed in the extensive media coverage about the epidemic is how we got here.

The story of how the opioid crisis got underway and who is responsible is a tale of greed, poor government regulation, and many missed opportunities. It began with good intentions based on bad data and later became a movement in which profits took precedence over morals. It is a tragedy that was largely preventable and, as such, one of the most infuriating chapters in modern U.S. history.

History of PainChronic pain affects 50 million Americans, more than those with high blood pressure, diabetes, or depression.4 Developing a medication that alleviates pain without too many side effects has been one of the drug industry’s holy grails. The market is enormous, and most people are long-term patients. Opiates were isolated as effective pain killers in the 1800s. At the turn of the 20th century—the drug industry’s Wild West days—they were dispensed over the counter. Over time, opiates earned a notorious and deserved reputation for addiction. German giant Bayer patented and marketed Heroin as, incredible as it now sounds, a cure for morphine addiction.

Congress did not pass a law requiring prescriptions for narcotic-based medications until 1938.5 It took another 33 years before the federal government created the Controlled Substances Act in 1971, listing oxycodone, fentanyl (along with cocaine and methamphetamine) as Schedule II drugs. That meant they had a risk of “severe psychological or physical dependence” but had medical and therapeutic uses. Doctors were supposed to balance the risks of opioids against the needs of patients who required them for short-term use after surgery or an accident, or longer treatment for disabling chronic pain.

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, drug companies spent a lot of money searching for a nonaddictive painkiller. Every effort ended in failure. In a Science article, a pharmacologist and a chemist at the National Institutes of Health concluded that it was unlikely such a medication was possible.

This was the same time, however, when a few physicians were about to upend traditional medical views about pain and how to treat it. Until the early 1980s, medical schools taught that pain was only a symptom of some underlying physical condition. Physicians did not treat it as a stand-alone ailment but instead searched for what caused it. The specialty of “pain management” did not exist. An anesthesiologist, John Bonica, whom Time dubbed “pain relief’s founding father,” questioned the conventional wisdom. Bonica suffered chronic shoulder and hip pain from his pre-medical career, first as a professional wrestler, then a carnival strongman, and finally the light heavyweight world wrestling champion.6 Bonica contended that underdiagnosing pain meant millions of patients suffered needlessly. He cofounded the International Association for the Study of Pain (its journal, Pain, is the field’s leading publication) in 1974, and three years later the American Pain Society (APS).7

The incipient movement to prioritize pain was not long underway when a five-sentence “letter to the editor” in the January 10, 1980, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) kicked off a parallel revolution in reconsidering established medical views about the risks of opioids. A doctor, Hershel Jick, and a grad student, Jane Porter, had examined 39,946 records of Boston University Hospital patients to determine adverse reactions and potential abuse for widely used medications. Almost a third (11,882) had “received at least one narcotic preparation” but they found only “four cases of reasonably well-documented addiction in patients who had no history of addiction.” Their conclusion was as unorthodox as it was decisive: “Despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare.”8

The letter cited two previous studies, both of which involved only hospitalized patients given small doses of opioids in a controlled setting. Very few had had them dispensed for more than five days. None were given painkillers after they were discharged from the hospital.

No one could have predicted the impact that letter had on the reassessment of using opioids to treat pain. During the next two decades it was cited over 1,600 times in textbooks, medical journals, and other publications. More than 80 percent of those who mentioned it left out that it only studied hospitalized patients who took opioids for a few days. Instead, that 99-word letter was widely cited to support far broader conclusions about the safety profile of opioids.9 (In 2017 the NEJM published a rare “Editor’s Note,” adding it to its webpage with the original Jick-Porter letter: “For reasons of public health, readers should be aware that this letter has been ‘heavily and uncritically’ cited as evidence that addiction is rare with opioid therapy.”)

The twin themes—that not treating pain was negligent and that opioids were safe for almost everyone—reinforced one another.

The World Health Organization (WHO) cited the Jick- Porter letter in 1986 as a cornerstone for challenging decades of medical dogma that “the risks of widely prescribing opioids far outweighed any benefits.” Six weeks after the WHO publication, Pain published a startling report, the “Chronic Use of Opioid Analgesics in Non-Malignant Pain.” The lead author was Russell Portenoy, a 31-year-old Memorial Sloan Kettering physician specializing in anesthesiology, neurology, pain control, and pharmacology. His coauthor was Kathleen Foley, a top pain management specialist.

Portenoy and Foley had studied 38 patients who had been administered narcotic analgesics—a third took oxycodone—for up to seven years. Two thirds reported significant or total pain relief. There was “no toxicity,” the two doctors reported, and only two patients had a problem with addiction, both of whom had “a history of prior drug abuse.” They concluded that “opioid maintenance therapy can be a safe, salutary and more humane alternative to the options of surgery or no treatment in those patients with intractable non-malignant pain and no history of drug abuse.”10

Pain as the Fifth Vital SignThat paper kicked off a contentious and at times rancorous debate over whether opioids had been unfairly branded for decades and underutilized in pain management. The charismatic Portenoy emerged as the unofficial spokesman for the embryonic movement to reassess opioids. He saw himself as a pioneer in reexamining outdated views about opioids. If he could convince doctors not to fear dispensing opioids, it could help millions of patients suffering from chronic pain.

A diverse, informal network of physicians contributed to the emerging reevaluation. Doctors specializing in pain management formed The American Academy of Pain Medicine and the American Society of Addiction Medicine (its slogan is “Addiction is a chronic brain disease”). They in turn encouraged patients suffering from chronic pain to form advocacy groups and petition the FDA to loosen opioid dispensing restrictions.

In 1990, American Pain Society president, Dr. Mitchell Max, wrote a widely read editorial lamenting how little progress had been made in treating pain. “Unlike ‘vital signs,’ pain isn’t displayed in a prominent place on the chart or at the bedside or nursing station,” he wrote.”11 Max’s fix was to have physicians ask patients on every visit about whether they were in pain. Doctors had for decades kept watch of four vital signs when examining patients: blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and breathing. The American Pain Society suggested “Pain as the 5th Vital Sign.”

There was no reliable diagnostic test, as there was for blood pressure or cholesterol. Pain was a subjective assessment based on the doctor’s observations and the patient’s descriptions of symptoms. What one patient described as moderate pain that restricted mobility might be excruciating and disabling for someone else. The first rudimentary measurements were developed around this time. One of them, the McGill Pain Index, had 78 words related to pain divided into 20 sections. Patients picked the words that best described their pain. Another, called the Memorial Pain Assessment Card, had eight simplified descriptions and patients selected the one that best matched their pain’s intensity. Yet another was developed by a pediatric nurse and child life specialist in Oklahoma—a chart for children with 10 handdrawn faces ranging from happy and laughing to angry and crying. Variations of that scale soon became a 1 to 10 rating for adults, 1 being “very mild, barely noticeable,” and 10 signifying “unspeakable pain.”

Those tools meant that differing pain tolerances among patients were no longer important. What mattered was tracking whether a patient’s pain was getting better or worse. The Joint Commission, an independent, not-for-profit organization responsible for accrediting 96 percent of all U.S. hospitals and clinics, became the first major group to endorse pain as the fifth vital sign. After the Veterans Administration embraced it, it was adopted quickly in the private sector.12

Over the next few years, a series of other small trials published in medical journals reinforced Portnoy’s 1986 study. They uniformly concluded that opioids did not deserve their terrible reputation and that they were extremely “effective in treating long-term chronic pain.” Buried in scientific footnotes was that “long-term” usually meant 12 to 16 weeks and “effective in treating” meant “superior to placebo.”13

An anesthesiologist and dentist, J. David Haddox, pushed the limits of the reevaluation movement. Haddox, who later became the American Academy of Pain Medicine president and went to work for Purdue Pharma, reported in Pain about the failure to treat the pain of a 17-year-old leukemia patient. That failure, wrote Haddox, had “led to changes similar to those seen with idiopathic opioid psychologic dependence (addiction).” “Pseudoaddiction” was a syndrome, he theorized, that doctors unintentionally caused when they failed to provide their patients with sufficient opioid painkillers. The “behavioral changes” that many doctors concluded constituted addiction, argued Haddox, was only evidence of how undertreated the patient was in terms of narcotic painkillers.14

America’s three major pain associations embraced pseudoaddiction.15 (It took a quarter century before a comprehensive study revealed that in the 224 scientific articles that cited pseudoaddiction, only 18 provided even the sketchiest anecdotal data to support the theory. The study concluded that pseudoaddiction was itself “fake addiction.”)

The same month that Haddox introduced pseudoaddiction, a dozen prominent doctors published “The Physician’s Responsibility Toward Hopelessly Ill Patients” in the New England Journal of Medicine. Although the study was limited to terminally ill patients, pain management advocates enthusiastically applied its conclusion to all patients: “The proper dose of pain medication is the dose that is sufficient to relieve pain and suffering.… To allow a patient to experience unbearable pain or suffering is unethical medical practice.”16

New Jersey became the first state to adopt an “intractable pain treatment” law that recognized patients had a right to treat their pain. The statute shielded doctors from criminal or civil liability if the narcotics dispensed caused an addiction; 18 other states soon followed.

Enter Big PharmaPortenoy and colleagues contended that opioids should be the first treatment option for chronic nonmalignant pain if the patient had no history of addiction. Instead of setting a maximum dose, the emerging standard of care was that opioids should be dispensed until the patient’s pain was relieved. The twin themes—that not treating pain was negligent and that opioids were safe for almost everyone—reinforced one another. The Sackler family, owners of a small drug company, Purdue Pharma, would have been hard pressed to plan a better lead-in to their release a decade later of OxyContin, their blockbuster opioid-based painkiller.

Purdue used a Wizard of Oz analogy to promise the reps who sold the most oxycontin that “A pot of gold awaits you ‘Over the Rainbow.’”

When the pain reevaluation movement had begun in the mid-1980s, OxyContin was not even on the drawing board. It was in early development when pain was on its way to becoming the fifth vital sign. In the following decade, Purdue did what every other drug company with an opioid-based product did: spent millions underwriting and subsidizing the doctors, advocacy organizations, and pain societies who were at the vanguard of the reevaluation movement. Many pioneering doctors reaped big fees as company lecturers. Purdue and other drug firms subsidized courses at medical schools, professional conferences and conventions, and continuing education classes. And, similar to what happened with the launch of other major drugs, some government officials (even a few key FDA officials) eventually went to work for Purdue and other firms selling opioids. Purdue and its competitors spent lots of money on the pain advocates precisely because they were promoting ideas about pain treatment that the drug manufacturers enthusiastically embraced.

The opioids reevaluation movement might not have had such an impact if it was not for the development of a time-release opioid painkiller, OxyContin. Purdue, and its aggressive marketing of OxyContin, came at a time when doctors were more willing to believe that opioids could be safely prescribed.

Three psychiatrist brothers, Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler had bought Purdue in 1952. It was then a tiny New York drug company whose product line consisted mostly of natural laxatives, earwax removers, and tonics that claimed to boost brain function and metabolism. A decade after purchasing Purdue, the Sacklers added a distressed British manufacturer, Napp Pharmaceuticals. The Sacklers had not thought about developing a painkiller until Napp took advantage of an opportunity in the United Kingdom.

Cicely Saunders, a British nurse-turned physician, had opened the world’s first hospice in London in 1967. Her biggest obstacle in alleviating patient’s terminal discomfort was the need to dose painkillers intravenously every few hours. The patients got little sleep and it was not possible to send them home to spend their last days surrounded by friends and family.

Morphine, Saunders found, was not as effective in alleviating pain as diamorphine (a brand name for heroin). Heroin’s biggest drawback, she concluded, was that “it may be rather short in action.”17 She experimented by adding sedatives and tranquilizers to extend the time pain was relieved, but she was stymied at every turn by intolerable side effects.

Still, Saunders had a permissive view of opioids and their addictive power. She did not think heroin had a “greater tendency to cause addiction than any other similar drug.… We have several patients in the wards at the moment who have come off completely without any withdrawal symptoms.”18

What she wanted was a revolutionary narcotic painkiller. In a single dose, it had to provide long relief from intense pain without causing sleepiness, motor coordination problems, and memory lapses. Several independent British pharmaceutical companies accepted her challenge. Smith & Nephew developed Narphen, a synthetic opioid it claimed was 10 times more powerful than morphine, quicker acting, and had a milder side effects profile. Although Saunders acknowledged that Narphen was a better end-of-life drug, it was not her holy grail for terminal cancer pain.

Smith & Nephew’s stumble handed the Sacklers an opportunity. Napp launched a significant research effort to find the new painkiller. When the breakthrough came in 1980, it promised not only to revolutionize pain care for the terminally ill, but it unwittingly provided the technology that would later fuel America’s opioid crisis. Napp introduced a morphine painkiller with a revolutionary, invisible- to-the-human-eye, sustained-release coating. That chemical layer consisted of a dual-action polymer mix that turned to a gel when exposed to stomach acid. Napp claimed the drug, MST Continus (continuous), released pure morphine at a steady rate over 12 hours. They could adjust the release rate by fine-tuning the density of the coating’s water-based polymer. It was the breakthrough painkiller for which Cicely Saunders had been searching since the late-1960s.

MST Continus carved out a market in the UK, but it was limited for end-of-life cancer and hospice patients. It took the Sacklers seven years (until 1987) to get FDA approval for that drug in the U.S. (which they renamed MS-Contin). The FDA had slowed the approval process since its active ingredient, morphine, was a Schedule II controlled substance. By the time it went on sale in America, Portnoy had published the first of his studies concluding that opioids were not as addictive as previously thought and that they should be prescribed liberally to treat pain.

Purdue, now run by two of the surviving Sackler brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, and some of their children, took note of the burgeoning pain management movement. Raymond’s son, Richard Sackler, also a doctor, led a company effort to find an improved painkiller, or at least one with much broader commercial appeal than MS-Contin. Richard Sackler thought that any new painkiller should not use morphine since it had a notorious reputation as an end-of-life medication. Purdue’s science team picked oxycodone, a chemical cousin of heroin. While there were some oxycodone-based painkillers on the market—Percodan (oxycodone and aspirin) and Percocet (oxycodone and acetaminophen)—they were immediate-release pills. If Purdue could master an extended-release oxycodone pill, it would be the first of its kind.

Their oxycodone-based drug was still an unnamed product. Its first clinical trial was only completed in 1989. It took until 1992 for Purdue to apply for a patent. In 1995, the company finally got FDA approval. And it also won an extraordinary concession from the government regulator. Although Purdue had not conducted clinical trials to determine whether OxyContin was less likely to be addictive or abused than other opioid painkillers, the FDA had approved wording requested by the company: “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets, is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.”19 (Curtis Wright, the FDA officer who oversaw the OxyContin label approval, soon left the agency to work at Purdue as its medical officer for risk assessment).

Marketing PainPurdue’s sales team highlighted that extraordinary sentence to convince physicians that it was a safer narcotic than its rivals. Purdue prepared an unprecedented marketing launch for OxyContin. The late Arthur Sackler was a marketing genius, widely acknowledged as having introduced aggressive Madison Avenue advertising tactics to selling pharmaceuticals. Arthur had handled the promotion for Hoffman LaRoche’s 1960s blockbuster drugs, Librium and Valium, and had made them the biggest-selling drugs in the world for a record 17 years.

Purdue laid out a sales strategy for OxyContin straight from Arthur’s playbook. Its twin sales pitches were that OxyContin relieved pain longer than any other opioid painkiller, and because it was a time-release product, it was less likely to be addictive.

Purdue sales reps raised “concerns about addiction” before physicians did. It was, they said, understandable that no matter how wonderful a drug, “a small minority” of patients “may not be reliable or trustworthy” for narcotic painkillers. If the doctors were still skeptical at that stage, the reps showed them the FDA-approved label that stated if OxyContin was used as prescribed for treating moderate to serious pain, addiction was “very rare.” What constitutes “very rare”? Less than one percent, according to the sales reps. To tilt the odds in favor of its “low risk of addiction” sales strategy, Purdue underwrote several studies that reported addiction rates from long-term opioid treatment between only 0.2 percent and 3.27 percent. However, those company-sponsored reports were never confirmed by independent studies.

Purdue also got help in promoting the “low risk of addiction” from the American Pain Society and the American Academy of Pain Medicine. Purdue and other opioid drug manufacturers were generous funders of both organizations. The groups issued a consensus statement emphasizing that opioids were effective for treating nonmalignant chronic pain and reiterating that it was “established” that there was a “less than 1 percent” probability of addiction.

Purdue sales reps hammered home that OxyContin released oxycodone into the bloodstream at a steady rate over 12 hours. That, Purdue claimed, made it impossible for addicts to get the rush they chased. Without a high, patients would not want more of the drug as it wore off. The company knew that was not true—its own clinical trials demonstrated that for some patients up to 40 percent of oxycodone was released into the bloodstream in the first hour or two. That was fast enough to cause a high and a resulting crash that required another pill in order to feel better.

Dispensing physicians had no idea what Oxy cost, nor did most care. Since they did not pay for the drugs, they let patients and their insurance companies worry about that.

Purdue revised its compensation packages for its sales team, especially top performers, in time for the OxyContin launch. Large bonuses could double a sales rep’s salary. In an internal memo to the “Entire Field Force,” Purdue used a Wizard of Oz analogy to promise the reps who sold the most that “A pot of gold awaits you ‘Over the Rainbow.’” Two months later after Oxy went on sale, another memo titled, “$$$$$$$$$$$$$ It’s Bonus Time in the Neighborhood!”, urged the sales team to push doctors to prescribe the higher-dose pills.

There was far greater profit for Purdue, and more money for the sales team, by pushing higher doses. There were three strengths when it went on sale: 10, 20, and 40 milligrams. An 80 mg tablet was released a month later (15, 30, 60, and 160 mg pills would arrive in a few years). Purdue’s production costs were virtually the same for each since oxycodone, the active ingredient, was inexpensive to manufacture. However, Purdue charged more for each additional strength. On average, a bottle of 20 mg pills cost twice as much as the 10 mg variety, and 80 mg pills were about seven times more expensive. If a patient took 20 mg pills twice a week, Purdue made less than $40 in profit. The same patient prescribed 80 mg pills twice a week returned $200 to Purdue, a 450 percent increase (that profit exceeded $600 a bottle in another five years).

Dispensing physicians had no idea what Oxy cost, nor did most care. Since they did not pay for the drugs, they let patients and their insurance companies worry about that.

Purdue created “Individualize the Dose,” a campaign designed to push the strongest doses. Sales reps told doctors that the company’s studies showed it was best to start patients on a medium to higher dose. The stronger doses, Purdue assured physicians, could be dispensed even to people who had never used opioids, all without adverse effects. The field reps contended that the higher-dose pills were no more likely to cause addiction. That was not true. Internal documents later revealed that Purdue’s sales team knew that stronger doses carried a significantly higher likelihood of dependence, addiction, and even potentially lethal respiratory suppression. While the company’s press releases claimed “dose was not a risk factor for opioid overdose,” internal communications are replete with references to the dangers of “dose-related overdose.”

OxyContin was instantly the most successful drug Purdue ever released. By 2001, only five years after it had gone on the market, its cumulative sales had passed a billion dollars, a first for Purdue. Although a lucrative hit for the Sacklers, OxyContin was less than ten percent of the opioid market. Johnson & Johnson, Janssen, Cephalon, and Endo Pharmaceuticals had their own narcotic painkillers. Their sales teams pitched them as aggressively as Purdue pushed Oxy, and all the companies subsidized the same nonprofits and patient advocacy groups. Janssen managed to get FDA approval in 1990 for the first fentanyl patch to treat severe pain. Fentanyl was then the most potent synthetic opioid, one hundred times stronger than morphine and 1.5 times more powerful than oxycodone. Two years after the FDA had given a green light to OxyContin, it approved Cephalon’s Actiq, a fentanyl “lollipop,” for cancer patients whose intense pain did not respond to other narcotics. Fentanyl patches and Actiq pops were diverted illicitly for big profits and sometimes with lethal side effects. There were widespread industry rumors that Cephalon’s sales team pushed its lollipops off-label as “ER on a stick” for chronic pain.

Still, by 2001, it was OxyContin that was in the crosshairs of some angry patients, the media, and the DEA. Small towns throughout Appalachia seemed overrun by a deluge of OxyContin, locally called “Hillbilly Heroin.” The DEA, meanwhile, was investigating diversion of the drug from the manufacturing plant Purdue used in New Jersey. It was also compiling evidence that Oxy contributed to overdose deaths by examining autopsy reports from across the country. The DEA wanted the FDA to put strict restrictions on the number of refills allowed for the painkiller.

In February 2001, OxyContin appeared for the first time in the New York Times, a front-page story—“Cancer Painkillers Pose New Abuse Threat”—about how it had become an abused drug in at least seven states.20 The Times raised the issue of whether Purdue’s hard-hitting marketing was partially responsible for the growing problems.

Purdue went all out to battle the bad press and its regulatory headaches. It hired big name legal talent. Rudy Giuliani, fresh off being America’s Mayor after his handling of the city in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, had just opened a private office and he began lobbying government officials on Purdue’s behalf. The company dispatched its medical officers and top executives to meet with the FDA and DEA. It assured both that it was working to control any abuse and diversion and it contested the findings about Oxy’s role in overdoses by pointing to the cocktail of illicit drugs in most of the autopsy reports. At that stage, the DEA could not find a death in which the victim had only Oxy, without alcohol, benzos, heroin, cocaine, cannabis, or some other drug. In the same month as the Times story, Richard Sackler sent an internal Purdue email that said, “We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”

Purdue emerged mostly unscathed from all the extra scrutiny. Although the FDA did require changes to OxyContin’s label, it was far less than what activists wanted. The FDA ordered the addition of a so-called black box warning. The bold-font warning was a reminder to doctors that OxyContin was “a Schedule II controlled substance with an abuse liability similar to morphine.” No drug company liked having a black box warning on its label, but as I learned in my reporting, Purdue was not upset since it considered the language a good compromise. One marketing executive remarked later, “It is black box lite.” It merely reiterated what most physicians knew already about OxyContin.

In 2004, OxyContin officially earned the dubious distinction as the most abused drug in America.21 Parents who had lost children to OxyContin were trying to raise awareness about the drug’s dangers. The biggest concern for Purdue, however, was an ongoing investigation into Oxy’s marketing by the West Virginia U.S. Attorney, John Brownlee, who started his probe in 2002. West Virginia was one of states hardest hit by OxyContin. In 2006,

Brownlee was ready to bring a case. He forwarded a six-page memo to the DOJ’s Criminal Division to get authorization to file felony charges against Purdue and its top executives for money laundering, wire and mail fraud, and conspiracy.22 Brownlee got bad news from headquarters. The Criminal Division vetoed all the serious felony counts and instead gave him permission only to bring less serious charges around misbranding the drug. That was a clean and straightforward prosecution.

In May 2007, Purdue and three non-Sackler executives accepted a plea agreement. The company and officers pled guilty to a scheme “to defraud or mislead, marketed and promoted OxyContin as less addictive, less subject to abuse and diversion, and less likely to cause tolerance and withdrawal than other pain medications.”23 Purdue’s fine was $634.5 million, and the three executives paid a combined $34.5 million.

Purdue signed both Consent and Corporate Integrity agreements. It agreed not to make “any written or oral claim that is false, misleading, or deceptive” in marketing OxyContin and to report immediately any signs of false or deceptive marketing. The strict terms of those agreements should have been the end of Oxy’s nationwide trail of devastation. Instead, the ink was barely dry before Purdue started flagrantly disregarding the rules. The deadliest years and record abuse with OxyContin came after the 2007 guilty pleas.

And Then It Got Even WorsePurdue went on a hiring binge that eventually doubled its sales force. It unleashed them to push Oxy with a renewed vigor. The company also paid millions to the “key physician opinion leaders” so they would convince doctors that OxyContin should be their first choice whenever a patient presented with serious pain. The results were impressive. In the year that Purdue pled guilty, sales passed $1 billion annually and profits exceeded $600 million. OxyContin provided 90 percent of Purdue’s profits.

The opioid crisis is a tragedy that was largely preventable and, as such, one of the most infuriating chapters in modern U.S. history.

When Purdue faced the possibility of generic competition in 2010, the company devised a “new and improved” coating that it said was more difficult to crush, snort or inject. Although Purdue’s two small studies showed the new version had “no effect” in reducing the addiction and overdose potential, the FDA still approved tamper-resistant OxyContin. (It took ten years before an FDA advisory panel ruled that the tamper-resistant Oxy had failed to reduce opioid overdoses).

With the FDA approval, Purdue spent millions on a splashy ad campaign directed to physicians. Titled “Opioids with Abuse Deterrent Properties,” Purdue touted its crush-resistant formulation as the first ever narcotic pain reliever that reduced the chances for abuse and slashed the addiction rate. The campaign worked. Many doctors believed it and increased their prescribing pace.

In 2011, four years after Purdue’s criminal guilty plea, OxyContin surpassed heroin and cocaine to become the nation’s most deadly drug. Sales were also at a record, each year breaking the previous year’s record. When there was a slowdown in 2013, the Sacklers brought in McKinsey & Company consultants, who laid out a plan to “supercharge” sales. The results were almost immediate. In 2015, Forbes listed the Sackler family on its “Richest Families” list for the first time. The Sacklers, with an estimated net worth of $14 billion, had jumped ahead of the Rockefellers, Mellons, and Busches, among many others. Forbes titled the family “the OxyContin Clan.”24

The news about the Sacklers great fortune was lost under a deluge of news about the national toll from OxyContin. By 2015, for the first time, opioids killed more people than guns and car crashes combined, and lethal overdoses even surpassed the peak year of HIV/AIDS deaths. Statisticians blamed OxyContin for the first decline in two decades in the life expectancy of Americans. And a CDC report confirmed what some doctors suspected: prescription opioid users were 40 times more likely to become heroin addicts, making Oxy the most effective gateway drug into heroin. The CDC urged doctors either to “carefully justify” or “avoid” prescribing more than 60 mg daily. Still, the guidelines were voluntary. Only seven states passed legislation to limit the number of prescriptions.

In 2016, OxyContin and the opioid epidemic became a presidential campaign issue. The Joint Commission, responsible for accrediting hospitals and clinics, reversed its 2001 position that pain should be the fifth vital sign. Even the FDA was slowly recognizing the extent of the problem. Parents who lost children to opioids had submitted a citizen’s petition to the FDA, pleading with the regulators to classify Oxy for severe pain only. After eight years on the back burner, the agency was seriously considering it.

It’s Only MoneySuddenly, the Sacklers and Purdue, and their competitors, were on the defensive. The Trump administration declared the opioid epidemic a public health emergency in 2017. That action freed up extra federal resources for treatment. A few months later, forty-one state attorneys general subpoenaed internal Purdue marketing and promotion documents. Purdue announced plans to slash its sales force by half and that it would no longer market Oxy directly to individual physicians, instead concentrating on hospitals and clinics.

In 2019, a judicial panel decided to streamline the more than 2,500 pending lawsuits under the jurisdiction of a single federal judge in Ohio. The consolidated lawsuit was called the National Prescription Opiate Litigation. The following month, the Massachusetts Attorney General filed an amended complaint that was different from all others. It relied on Purdue’s internal records to conclude that eight of the Sackler-family directors had “created the epidemic and profited from it through a web of illegal deceit.” The New York Attorney General filed a similar action a few weeks later and added that the Sacklers had personally transferred hundreds of millions in assets to offshore tax havens.

To drive home how much the Sacklers had profited from OxyContin, court documents filed by the attorneys general revealed that the family directors had voted payments of $12 to $13 billion in profits since OxyContin went on sale. By the end of 2019, OxyContin had $35 billion in sales from its launch, while America recorded its 200,000 death since the government had begun tracking them.25

In the end, it was lawyers, state prosecutors, and the nation’s top class action litigators, who pried some financial justice from the many parties that shared responsibility for the national tragedy. Purdue filed for bankruptcy protection in late 2019 and the Sacklers sought protection from all the civil litigation so long as they contributed a lot of money to an overall settlement. In 2022, the family agreed to pay $6 billion toward a settlement and a bankruptcy judge signed off on a plan that freed them from civil litigation.26 (I co-wrote two New York Times opinion pieces that argued the judge had exceeded his bankruptcy court authority by discharging all actions pending against the Sacklers, who had not themselves filed bankruptcy. That issue and the complex bankruptcy plan are now pending before the Supreme Court.) Under the bankruptcy plan, Purdue became a public entity that continued to sell OxyContin, with any proceeds going to treatment and public health.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.4
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In 2022, Johnson and Johnson paid $5 billion to settle the litigation pending against it. J&J also announced it was quitting the opioid painkiller business. The country’s three largest wholesale drug distributors—AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson—reached a settlement in the tsunami of litigation pending against them by paying a combined $21 billion.27 Another $13.8 billion came from the big three pharmacy chains, Walmart, Walgreens, and CVS. Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy protection. The litigation has produced about $55 billion in total settlements.28

Still none of that matters to many families who lost loved ones to the overzealous marketing of prescription painkillers. And, with the many families I have interviewed, they note that no one has gone to prison for having made such enormous profits off the deaths of several hundred thousand Americans. Many who helped fuel the epidemic, such as overprescribing doctors, owners of pill mills, and lax regulators at the FDA and in state health agencies, got away without so much as a slap on the wrist.

An unnamed plaintiff’s lawyer told The Guardian in 2018 that the Sacklers were “essentially a crime family… drug dealers in nice suits and dresses.” No prosecutors, however, had the courage to bring a criminal action against the Sacklers and other opioid kingpins.

What a shame.

About the AuthorGerald Posner is an award-winning journalist and author of thirteen books, including New York Times nonfiction bestsellers Why America Slept (about 9/11) and God’s Bankers (about the Vatican), and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Case Closed (about the JFK assassination). His latest, Pharma, is a withering and encyclopedic indictment of a drug industry that often seems to prioritize profits over patients. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, he was a litigation associate at a Wall Street law firm. Before turning to journalism, he spent several years providing pro bono legal representation on behalf of survivors of Nazi experiments at Auschwitz.

References1. https://rb.gy/6a7hv 2. https://rb.gy/8pyh2 3. https://rb.gy/h7pop 4. https://rb.gy/lviuy; https://rb.gy/wrekp 5. Cavers, D.F. (1939). The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938: Its Legislative History and Its Substantive Provisions. Law & Contemp. Probs., 6, 2. 6. “John Bonica, Pain’s Champion and the Multidisciplinary Pain Clinic,” Relief of Pain and Suffering, John C. Liebeskind History of Pain Collection, Box 951798, History & Special Collections, UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, Los Angeles, CA. 7. Brennan, F. (2015). The U.S. Congressional “Decade on Pain Control and Research” 2001– 2011: A Review. Journal of Pain & Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy, 29(3), 212–227.; https://rb.gy/zmifj 8. Porter, J., & Jick, H. (1980). Addiction Rare in Patients Treated With Narcotics. New England Journal of Medicine, 302(2), 123. 9. https://rb.gy/zmg4c; https://rb.gy/leawh. In 2017, six researchers published in the NEJM the results of their review of all subsequent citations to the 1980 letter. “In conclusion, we found that a fivesentence letter published in the Journal in 1980 was heavily and uncritically cited as evidence that addiction was rare with long-term opioid therapy. We believe that this citation pattern contributed to the North American opioid crisis by helping to shape a narrative that allayed prescribers’ concerns about the risk of addiction associated with long-term opioid therapy.” Dr. Jick told the Associated Press in 2017: “I’m essentially mortified that that letter to the editor was used as an excuse to do what these drug companies did.” 10. Portenoy, R.K., & Foley, K.M. (1986). Chronic Use of Opioid Analgesics in Non-Malignant Pain: Report of 38 Cases. Pain, 25(2), 171–186. 11. Max quoted in Schottenfeld, J.R., Waldman, S.A., Gluck, A.R., & Tobin, D.G. (2018). Pain and Addiction in Specialty and Primary Care: The Bookends of a Crisis. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 46(2), 220–237. 12. Morone, N.E., & Weiner, D.K. (2013). Pain as the Fifth Vital Sign: Exposing the Vital Need for Pain Education. Clinical Therapeutics, 35(11), 1728–1732. 13. Sullivan, M.D., & Howe, C.Q. (2013). Opioid Therapy for Chronic Pain in the United States: Promises and Perils. Pain, 154, S94–S100. 14. Weissman, D.E., & Haddox, J.D. (1989). Opioid Pseudoaddiction—an Iatrogenic Syndrome. Pain, 36(3), 363–366. 15. “Definitions Related to the Use of Opioids for the Treatment of Pain,” Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Pain Medicine, the American Pain Society, and the American Society of Addiction Medicine, approved by the American Academy of Pain Medicine Board of Directors on February 13, 2001, the American Pain Society Board of Directors on February 14, 2001, and the American Society of Addiction Medicine Board of Directors on February 21, 2001 (replacing the original ASAM Statement of April 1997), published 2001. 16. Wanzer, S.H., Federman, D.D., Adelstein, S.J., Cassel, C.K., Cassem, E.H., Cranford, R.E., … & Van Eys, J. (1989). The Physician’s Responsibility Toward Hopelessly Ill Patients. A Second Look. 17. Saunders, C. (1965). The Last Stages of Life. The American Journal of Nursing, 70–75. 18. Saunders, C. (1963). The Treatment of Intractable Pain in Terminal Cancer. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 56, 195–197. 19. https://rb.gy/l7kvh 20. https://rb.gy/tzwla 21. Cicero, T. J., Inciardi, J. A., & Muñoz, A. (2005). Trends in Abuse of OxyContin and Other Opioid Analgesics in the United States: 2002–2004. The Journal of Pain, 6(10), 662–672. 22. https://rb.gy/xdv0m 23. 2007-05-09 Agreed Statement of Facts, Para 20. 24. https://rb.gy/qi6ph 25. https://rb.gy/67baw 26. https://rb.gy/580po 27. https://rb.gy/hz79m 28. https://rb.gy/ma2m8

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss421_Eve_Herold_2024_04_09.mp3Download MP3If there’s one universal trait among humans, it’s our social nature. The craving to connect is universal, compelling, and frequently irresistible. This concept is central to Robots and the People Who Love Them. Socially interactive robots will soon transform friendship, work, home life, love, healthcare, warfare, education, and nearly every nook and cranny of modern life. This book is an exploration of how we, the most gregarious creatures in the food chain, could be changed by social robots. On the other hand, it considers how we will remain the same, and asks how human nature will express itself when confronted by a new class of beings created in our own image.

Drawing upon recent research in the development of social robots, including how people react to them, how in our minds the boundaries between the real and the unreal are routinely blurred when we interact with them, and how their feigned emotions evoke our real ones, science writer Eve Herold takes readers through the gamut of what it will be like to live with social robots and still hold on to our humanity. This is the perfect book for anyone interested in the latest developments in social robots and the intersection of human nature and artificial intelligence and robotics, and what it means for our future.

Eve Herold is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. A longtime communications and policy executive for scientific organizations, she currently serves as Director of Policy Research and Education for the Healthspan Action Coalition. She has written extensively about issues at the crossroads of science and society, including stem cell research and regenerative medicine, aging and longevity, medical implants, transhumanism, robotics and AI and bioethical issues in leading-edge medicine. Previous books include Stem Cell Wars and Beyond Human, and her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Vice, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, among others. She’s a frequent contributor to the online science magazine, Leaps, and is the recipient of the 2019 Arlene Eisenberg Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Shermer and Herold discuss:

• What happened to our flying cars and jetpacks from The Jetsons?
• What is a robot, anyway? And what are social robots?
• Oskar Kokoschka, Alma Mahler, and the female doll
• Robot nannies, friends, therapists, caregivers, and lovers
• Sex robots
• The uncanny valley: roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970
• Robots in science fiction
• Psychological states: anthropomorphism, effectance (the need to interact effectively with one’s environment), theory of mind (onto robots), social connectedness
• “Personal, social, emotional, home robots”
• Emotions, animism, mind
• Emotional intelligence
• Turing Test
• Artificial intelligence and natural intelligence
• What is AI and AGI?
• The alignment problem
• Large Language Models
• ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT-5 and beyond
• Robopocalypse
• Robo soldiers
• What is “mind”, “thinking”, and “consciousness”, and how do molecules and matter give rise to such nonmaterial processes?
• Westworld: Robot sentience?
• The hard problem of consciousness
• The self and other minds
• How would we know if an AI system was sentient?
• Can AI systems be conscious?
• Does Watson know that it beat the great Ken Jennings in Jeopardy!?
• Self-driving cars
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss420_Lance_Grande_2024_04_06.mp3Download MP3Thousands of religions have adherents today, and countless more have existed throughout history. What accounts for this astonishing diversity?

This extraordinarily ambitious and comprehensive book demonstrates how evolutionary systematics and philosophy can yield new insight into the development of organized religion. Lance Grande―a leading evolutionary systematist―examines the growth and diversification of hundreds of religions over time, highlighting their historical interrelationships. Combining evolutionary theory with a wealth of cultural records, he explores the formation, extinction, and diversification of different world religions, including the many branches of Asian cyclicism, polytheism, and monotheism.

Grande deploys an illuminating graphic system of evolutionary trees to illustrate historical interrelationships among the world’s major religious traditions, rejecting colonialist and hierarchical “ladder of progress” views of evolution. Extensive and informative illustrations clearly and vividly indicate complex historical developments and help readers grasp the breadth of interconnections across eras and cultures.

The Evolution of Religions marshals compelling evidence, starting far back in time, that all major belief systems are related, despite the many conflicts that have taken place among them. By emphasizing these broad historical interconnections, this book promotes the need for greater tolerance and deeper, unbiased understanding of cultural diversity. Such traits may be necessary for the future survival of humanity.

Lance Grande is the Negaunee Distinguished Service Curator, Emeritus, of the Field Museum of Natural and Cultural History in Chicago. He is a specialist in evolutionary systematics, paleontology, and biology who has a deep interest in the interdisciplinary applications of scientific method and philosophy. His many books include Curators: Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums (2017) and The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time (2013). His new book is The Evolution of Religions: A History of Related Traditions.

Shermer and Grande discuss:

• Why is a paleontologist and evolutionary theorist interested in religion?
• Evolutionary systematics and comparativism in evolutionary biology, linguistics, and the history of religion
• What is a comparative systematicist?
• E. O. Wilson’s consilience approach
• Agnostic approach: not addressing the truth value of any one religion
• What is religion?
• Variety: 10,000 different religions: Christianity (33%), Islam (23%), Hinduism/Buddhism (23%), Judaism (0.2%), Other (10%), Agnosticism (10%), Atheism (2%)
• Evolutionary trees of religion
• Biological vs. cultural evolution & diversification: Lamarkian vs. Darwinian
• Historical colonialist progressivism and social Darwinism
• Frans Boaz, Margaret Meade, historical particularism
• Rather than focusing on differences, focus on similarities
• Nature/Nurture & The Blank Slate in anthropology & the social sciences
• Early evolutionary origins of religion: the cognitive revolution, agenticity, patternicity, theory of mind, animism, spiritism, polytheism
• Gobekli Tepe as the earliest religious ceremonial structure
• Machu Picchu and Inca religion
• Human sacrifice and religion
• Apocalypto
• Pizzaro, Atahualpa, and Spanism/European colonialism & eradication of New World religions
• Time’s arrow and Time’s cycle: Asian Cyclicism
• Dharmic religion (India), Taoism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Shinoism (Hirohito)
• Old World Hard Polytheism (vs. Soft?) & New World Hard Polytheism (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Celtic, Greek, Old Norse, Siberian totemism, Alaskan totemism
• Colonialism and missionaries extinguished many polytheistic religions
• Linear Monotheism: Atenism, Zoroastrianism, El, Yahweh, Jehovah, Monad, Allah (linear time: one birth, one life, one death, one eternal afterlife; dualistic cosmology: good vs. evil, light vs. dark, heaven vs. hell); proselytic: conversion efforts
• Abrahamic Monotheism 6th century BCE Second Temple Judaism and Samaritanism
• Included prophets: Noah, Abraham, Moses (60% of all religious people today)
• Tanakh sacred scripture 6th century BCE: Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, Quran
• Jesu-venerationism (1st century CE): Ebionism (Jesus as prophet but not divine), Traditional Christianity, Biblical Demiurgism (primal good god Monad, evil creator spirit Demiurge; saw Jesus as the spiritual emanation of the Monad), Islam
• Reformation: Catholicism split into Protestantism, Anglicanism
• Islam: revered 25 prophets from Adam to Jesus, ending with Muhammad
• Expansion of Islam through conquests in the 7th and 8th centuries CE
• 4 Generalizations:
  • Organized Religions are historically related at one ideological level or another (illustrated by trees);
  • Largest major branches today were historically intertwined with major political powers;
  • Authority of women declined with the rise of male dominated pantheons, empires, clergies, caliphates;
  • Religion played a role in our species’ early ability to adapt to its social and physical environment: tribalism was a competitive advantage for early humans in which communal societies that developed agriculture, commerce, educational facilities, and armies out-competed less communitarian groups.

Show NotesHow We BelieveIn my 2000 book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, I defined religion as “a social institution that evolved as an integral mechanism of human culture to create and promote myths, to encourage altruism and reciprocal altruism, and to reveal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of the community.” That is, there are two primary purposes of religion:

1. The creation of stories and myths that address the deepest questions we can ask ourselves: Where did we come from? Why are we here? What does our ultimate future hold?
2. The production of moral systems to provide social cohesion for the most social of all the social primates. God figures prominently in both these modes as the ultimate subject of mythmaking and the final arbiter of moral dilemmas and enforcer of ethical precepts.

From Shermer’s book Truth“Jesus was a great spiritual teacher who had a profound effect on many people,” writes Lance Grande in his magisterial The Evolution of Religions, admitting that “he became what is probably the most influential person in history.” But this says nothing about the verisimilitude of the miracle claims made in Jesus’ name. In fact, as Grande notes, neither during his own lifetime (4BC-30 CE), nor in the earliest writings of the New Testament by Paul, were miracle claims made in Jesus’s name. Even Paul’s mention of the resurrection of Christ was described in 1 Corinthians (15:44) as a spiritual event rather than a literal one: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.” In Paul’s writings about Christ, says Grande, “he speaks of him in a mystical sense, as a spiritual entity of human consciousness.” Many contemporary groups, in fact, “saw Christ as a spirit that possessed the man Jesus at his baptism and left him before his death at the crucifixion” (called “separationism”). But since political monarchs in the first century CE were treated as divine, Christian proselytizers began to refer to Jesus as the “King of Kings,” and so came to pass the deification of an otherwise mortal man. Here is how Grande recaps the transformation:

Reports of specific miracles only began to appear several decades after the death of Jesus, in the Gospel of Mark (65-70 CE) and in later gospels (80-100CE). This suggests that stories of miracles (e.g., controlling the weather, creating loaves and fishes out of nothing, turning water into wine, healing the sick, and raising the physical dead) were layered into the story of Jesus as expressions of an ultimate God experience.

And as is typical of myths in the making, in the retelling across peoples, spaces, and generations, layers of improbability are added as a test of faith:

Once the stories of miracles began to appear in early Christianity, they were retold repeatedly, until they became ingrained beliefs. More stories were added, such as miracles about singing angels, stars announcing earthly happenings, and even a fetus (that of John the Baptist in his mother Elizabeth’s womb) leaping to acknowledge the anticipated power of another fetus (that of Jesus in his mother Mary’s womb). These details, many of which probably began as metaphorical lessons, gradually became accepted by many followers as literal historic truths. It is probable that some of these stories were never intended as documents of historical fact.

From metaphorical lessons to historic truths. Perhaps this is what the author of the Gospel of John meant when he wrote (John 20:31): “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.”

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss419_Maggie_Jackson_2024_04_02.mp3Download MP3In an era of terrifying unpredictability, we race to address complex crises with quick, sure algorithms, bullet points, and tweets. How could we find the clarity and vision so urgently needed today by being unsure? Uncertain is about the triumph of doing just that. A scientific adventure tale set on the front lines of a volatile era, this epiphany of a book by award-winning author Maggie Jackson shows us how to skillfully confront the unexpected and the unknown, and how to harness not-knowing in the service of wisdom, invention, mutual understanding, and resilience.

Long neglected as a topic of study and widely treated as a shameful flaw, uncertainty is revealed to be a crucial gadfly of the mind, jolting us from the routine and the assumed into a space for exploring unseen meaning. Far from luring us into inertia, uncertainty is the mindset most needed in times of flux and a remarkable antidote to the narrow-mindedness of our day. In laboratories, political campaigns, and on the frontiers of artificial intelligence, Jackson meets the pioneers decoding the surprising gifts of being unsure. Each chapter examines a mode of uncertainty-in-action, from creative reverie to the dissent that spurs team success. Step by step, the art and science of uncertainty reveal being unsure as a skill set for incisive thinking and day-to-day flourishing.

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her pioneering writings on social trends, particularly technology’s impact on humanity. Winner of the 2020 Dorothy Lee Book Award for excellence in technology criticism, her book Distracted was compared by FastCompany.com to Silent Spring for its prescient critique of technology’s excesses, named a Best Summer Book by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and was a prime inspiration for Google’s 2018 global initiative to promote digital well-being. Jackson is also the author of Living with Robots and The State of the American Mind. Her expertise has been featured in The New York Times, Business Week, Vanity Fair, Wired.com, O Magazine, and The Times of London; on MSNBC, NPR’s All Things Considered, Oprah Radio, The Takeaway, and on the Diane Rehm Show and the Brian Lehrer Show; and in multiple TV segments and film documentaries worldwide. Her speaking career includes appearances at Google, Harvard Business School, and the Chautauqua Institute. Jackson lives with her family in New York and Rhode Island.

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In a special double segment that is reminiscent of The National Enquirer in its heyday, 60 Minutes has aired another dramatic story on Havana Syndrome. If it had been a sporting event, the score would have been 8-0: eight people interviewed and not a single skeptic.

Billed by CBS News as a “breakthrough” in their five-year-long investigation, the episode that aired Sunday night, March 31, 2024, raises many important questions—not about the existence of Havana Syndrome, but the present state of journalistic integrity. As someone who has followed this saga from the beginning, the new 60 Minutes report was a case study in fearmongering and selective omission. The program was filled with misleading statements and circumstantial evidence that were used to gin up a story that is on life support after the U.S. intelligence community concluded last year that “Havana Syndrome” is likely a condition that never existed.

In the leadup to the broadcast, CBS News teased the segment with the headlines “Targeting Americans” and “Breakthrough in Havana Syndrome Investigation.” Yet in the report it was described as “a possible breakthrough” and there was no conclusive proof that Americans, or anyone else, have been targeted.1

60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley featured an interview with Gregory Edgreen, a former American military intelligence officer who oversaw the Pentagon investigation into “Havana Syndrome.” He told Pelley that the present situation is dire for American security as “the intelligence officers and our diplomats working abroad are being removed from their posts with traumatic brain injuries—they’re being neutralized.”2

Edgreen disagreed with last year’s intelligence community consensus, left his position and has founded Advanced Echelon, a company devoted to caring for “Havana Syndrome survivors.”3 His interview is reminiscent of recent attempts by some media outlets to support the unfound claim the U.S. Government is covering up information on the existence of recovered alien bodies and crashed saucers. This is the opinion of one man who was involved in an investigation, yet he does not represent the intelligence community, which has deemed the purported attacks to be “highly unlikely” and the existence of the condition itself as dubious.

Enter David RelmanPredictably, Stanford microbiologist David Relman made an appearance and told Pelley that his panel found “clear evidence of an injury to the auditory and vestibular system of the brain.” This is not supported by the evidence. Relman failed to mention that not only have recent studies found no such damage, many Havana Syndrome patients have been diagnosed with psychosomatic disorders that are commonly triggered by stress.

Pelley also claimed that a senior Department of Defense official was attacked during last year’s NATO Summit in Lithuania. His source: multiple unnamed people. He said that the official involved—also unnamed—“was struck by the symptoms and sought medical treatment.” We are told nothing more. The trouble with this claim is that Havana Syndrome has been associated with a laundry list of common health complaints ranging from fatigue and forgetfulness to nausea, nosebleeds, headache, tinnitus, ear pain and difficulty sleeping. Throughout the broadcast there were also assertions that victims were suffering from brain injury—something that has never been demonstrated. These symptoms are also features of countless other medical conditions.

Also interviewed was an FBI agent identified only as “Carrie,” who said she had been attacked by a directed energy weapon and while she had been given permission to discuss her condition by her employer, “she wasn’t allowed to discuss the cases she was on when she was hit.” Appearing in disguise to protect her identity she described how one day in 2021 at her Florida home she felt “pressure and pain” in her head that radiated down her jaw and neck and into her chest before she passed out. Since then, she says she has experienced problems with long and short-term memory and difficulty with sensing spatial awareness: “If I turn too fast, my gyroscope is off… it’s like I’m a step behind where I’m supposed to be, so I’ll turn too fast and I will literally walk right into the wall.”

Pelley then claimed that “other sources”—anonymous of course—told 60 Minutes that one of the cases involved a suspected Russian spy who was caught speeding on a Florida highway in 2020. The man had apparently been interviewed by Carrie on several occasions. He was identified as a former Russian military officer with an electrical engineering background. While serving a sentence for reckless driving and evading police, “Carrie” said she was hit two more times—about a year apart—once in Florida, once in California. The “attacks” left her disoriented and a feeling that her body was pulsating.

The Russians Are Coming!Who is behind these attacks? The Russians, of course. Pelley casts suspicion for the “attacks” on a Russian military unit known as 29155. He also claims to have found the smoking gun—a document sourced online showing that one the unit’s officers had been paid for working on “nonlethal acoustic weapons.” This is not the dramatic find that it is made out to be. Acoustic weapons are in common use by governments around the world. The use of sound cannons—commonly known as Long-Range Acoustic Devices—have long been employed to control crowds. Beyond this they have shown little practical value as the waves rapidly disperse.

It was then claimed that unit 29155 may have been in the city of Tbilisi in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, when several Americans experienced mysterious health incidents there. An unnamed 40-year-old wife of a Justice Department official told Pelley that she was struck by an energy weapon when her husband was working at the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi in October 2021. She said she was suddenly overcome by a piercing sound in her left ear, felt “a fullness” in her head, developed a headache, and began vomiting. What happened next reads like a spy novel. She looked outside and spotted a car near the front gate and a man nearby. Pelley then showed her a photo of a member of unit 29155 who was thought to have been in the city at the time of the “attack.” When asked if it looked like the man in the photo, she unhesitatingly pronounced, “it absolutely does.” Shortly after, however, she grew hesitant: “I cannot absolutely say for certain that it is this man…” But after a few more seconds elapsed she proclaimed: “I can absolutely say that this looks like the man….” This is not exactly an icon-clad identification.

The woman says she continues to suffer balance problems, headaches and “brain fog,” the latter term being a common description of people experiencing anxiety. She also said that her symptoms typically worsen at night. These are common features of vestibular dysfunction. Pelley dramatically noted that the woman has also been treated for “holes in her inner ear canals.” While this could have been from a mysterious weapon, there is a more mundane explanation: perilymphatic fistula that can be caused by barotrauma from changes in air or water pressure, such as from flying or scuba diving. Strenuous physical exercise can also trigger the condition, as well as head trauma.

A Story with Nine LivesHavana Syndrome has become a cottage industry for podcasters, bloggers, and the news media because it’s a dramatic story that reads like a spy novel and is guaranteed to get clicks and views. It has also turned into the ultimate game of whack-a-mole. Like the cat with nine lives, it just won’t die. I cannot help but think that when enough people become aware of the full story—where key facts have not been omitted, Havana Syndrome will finally fade from the headlines. If I had watched this story with only a superficial knowledge of Havana Syndrome, I probably would have finished watching the episode convinced that there really have been Russian attacks on Americans using a secret weapon. But the facts point to a far more mundane explanation.

What happened to journalistic integrity? For years many journalists have reported that American citizens have been hit with a mysterious energy weapon. Scott Pelley has filed no less than three such reports for 60 Minutes.4 At the very least, viewers are entitled to hear from prominent skeptics whose voices were silenced. A news program that interviews eight believers and no skeptics isn’t a news program—it’s propaganda.

About the AuthorRobert E. Bartholomew is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the co-author of Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria (Copernicus, 2020) with neurologist Robert Baloh.

References1. Costa, Robert (2024). The CBS Evening News, March 29, 2024, at 10:00 sec. and accessed at: https://www.cbsnews.com/evening-news/; See also https://www.cbsnews.com/video/targeting-americans-sunday-on-60-minutes/ 2. Pelley, Scott (2024). “Foreign adversaries may be involved in Havana Syndrome, sources say.” 60 Minutes (CBS News, NY). March 31. 3. See the Advanced Echelon homepage at: https://www.advancedechelon.net/about 4. See also: Pelley, Scott (2022). “Havana Syndrome: High-level national security officials stricken with unexplained illness on White House grounds.” 60 Minutes (CBS News, NY). February 20, accessed at: https://cbsn.ws/3MfZaLR; Pelley, Scott (2019). “Brain damage suffered by U.S. diplomats abroad could be work of hostile foreign government.” 60 Minutes (CBS News, NY). March 17.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss418_Coleman_Hughes_2024_03_30.mp3Download MP3As one of the few black students in his philosophy program at Columbia University years ago, Coleman Hughes wondered why his peers seemed more pessimistic about the state of American race relations than his own grandparents–who lived through segregation. The End of Race Politics is the culmination of his years-long search for an answer.

Contemplative yet audacious, The End of Race Politics is necessary reading for anyone who questions the race orthodoxies of our time. Hughes argues for a return to the ideals that inspired the American Civil Rights movement, showing how our departure from the colorblind ideal has ushered in a new era of fear, paranoia, and resentment marked by draconian interpersonal etiquette, failed corporate diversity and inclusion efforts, and poisonous race-based policies that hurt the very people they intend to help. Hughes exposes the harmful side effects of Kendi-DiAngelo style antiracism, from programs that distribute emergency aid on the basis of race to revisionist versions of American history that hide the truth from the public.

Through careful argument, Hughes dismantles harmful beliefs about race, proving that reverse racism will not atone for past wrongs and showing why race-based policies will lead only to the illusion of racial equity. By fixating on race, we lose sight of what it really means to be anti-racist. A racially just, colorblind society is possible. Hughes gives us the intellectual tools to make it happen.

Coleman Hughes is a writer, podcaster and opinion columnist who specializes in issues related to race, public policy and applied ethics. Coleman’s writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, The City Journal and The Spectator. He appeared on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2021.

Shermer and Hughes discuss:

• If he is “half-black, half-Hispanic” why is he considered “black”?
• What is race biologically and culturally?
• Race as a social construction
• Population genetics and race differences: sports, I.Q., crime, etc.
• Base Rate Neglect, Base Rate Taboos
• The real state of race relations in America: surveys, call-back studies, search data, etc.
• George Floyd, BLM, Ibram X Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Isabella Wilkinson, Ta-Nehisi Coates and the neo-racists
• Institutionalized neo-racism: the academy and business
• What it means to be “colorblind”
• Viewpoint epistemology and race
• Affirmative action and correcting for past wrongs
• Lyndon Johnson’s famous quote, June 4, 1965, Howard University: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
• Why are there still big gaps in income, wealth, home ownership, CEO representation, Congressional representation, etc.?
• Myth of Black Weakness
• Myth of No Progress
• Myth of Undoing the Past
• The Fall of Minneapolis
• Reparations
• The future of colorblindness.

Read Michael H. Bernstein’s review of Coleman Hughes book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.

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Several years ago, I came across an imaginative essay entitled “Explaining Affirmative Action to a Martian.”1 The author, who I had never heard of, described a fictious interaction where a human explains the rationale of affirmative action to an alien. Among its gems is the following interaction:

Earthling: Black people were enslaved and subjugated for centuries, so, sometimes they get special dispensations. It’s only fair…

Visitor: So those black kids…were enslaved and subjugated, so they get to score 450 [standardized test] points lower than Asians?

Earthling: Well these particular black students didn’t experience slavery or Jim Crow themselves… But their grandparents might have experienced Jim Crow.

Visitor: Might have?

Earthling: Well, around half of black students at elite colleges are actually the children of black immigrants so they have no ancestral connection to American slavery or Jim Crow…

Visitor: … I’m utterly confused by you creatures.

The author of this essay was Coleman Hughes, a Columbia University undergraduate at the time. In the intervening years, Hughes has been one of the leading voices on race. As a long-time listener and fan of Hughes, I was eager to read his first book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. It did not disappoint.

Hughes has a gift for clearly and dispassionately evaluating one of our most explosive social topics. Oftentimes in today’s world, the political left exaggerates the prevalence of racism while the political right a priori assumes that all such accusations lack merit. What we so desperately need is a middle ground: An analysis that deals honestly with the racism which does exist without inflating it. This is what Coleman Hughes does.

What makes his book excellent is, ironically, the mundane manner in which he evaluates race. Hughes carefully dissects the arguments of neoracism, an ideology he defines as “discrimination in favor of non-whites…justified on account of the hardships they endure—and hardships their ancestors endured—at the hands of whites.” Reading Hughes is a breath of fresh air. He gives neoracism the long overdue hearing it deserves, one that is fair but critical.

Hughes forces readers to think in terms of counterfactuals. This is typically missing from public discourse but is essential for evaluating double-standards and identifying what philosophers call the “special pleading” fallacy where rules are inconsistently applied. For example, the author points out that Yale University did not denounce the racism of a psychiatrist who gave a talk saying, “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless.” Yet, as Hughes puts it, “Suppose [the speaker] had described fantasies about shooting black people in the head, burying them, and walking away… Is there any doubt that the Yale administration would have condemned her racism?”

In chapter five, Hughes delves into seven central tenants of neoracism, such as “Racial disparities provide direct evidence of systemic racism” and “White people have power in society, but Black people don’t.” Reading the book, and this chapter in particular, felt like following the author on a tour of three-legged stools. Each claim seems believable on its face but Hughes raises compelling arguments against them. For instance, consider the racial disparity tenant mentioned above which includes the claim that “there would be no racial disparities, or at least large ones, in a fair society.” It is easy to see the appeal: Blacks have been historically discriminated against and are on the short end of many troubling disparities. However, Hughes discusses factors other than racism that could explain group differences. Perhaps most critical is the age gap, such that the median White person is 10 years older than the median Black person. Wilfred Reilly points out that the age gap is even more striking (31 years) when comparing the modal (most common) age.2 Might that play a role in some disparities, such as wealth or incarceration rates?

One of the joys of reading Hughes’ book, at least for myself as a research psychologist, is the way key psychological concepts are infused throughout—even if not explicitly named (and since the author has no formal background this is not surprising). The notion of tribalism, something my colleagues and I have studied in the context of politics,3 is depicted as key to the neoracist ideology “because it casts every event as an instance of us versus them, good versus evil, black versus white.” Sadly, one of the most important lessons4 from social psychology—the subfield largely devoted to understanding how humans interact with each other—of the past 50 years is the ease with which people separate into groups and develop preference for in-group members.

Elsewhere, in critiquing what he calls “chronic victimhood,” Hughes writes, “A wise therapist wouldn’t tell you to accept chronic victim status…and think of yourself as forever trapped in your experience of trauma. The wise therapist would instead help you develop strategies for moving past the trauma you’d suffered, empowering you to escape the trauma’s gravitational pull.” Here, the author is getting at the idea of mindset, a concept developed by Stanford Psychology Professor Carol Dweck. Hughes is correctly pointing out that victimhood and its downstream difficulties should be viewed in the context of a growth mindset—something that is malleable—rather than in the context of a fixed mindset, which is not changeable. Growth mindsets suggest that people have agency to change; unsurprisingly, research generally supports the idea that it leads to better outcomes. A study by Jessica Schleider, for example, found that a single 20–30 minute computer-based session focused on enhancing a growth mindset reduced depression among adolescents when evaluated nine months later.5

There was one observation Hughes made in passing that clearly reveals his status as a gifted intellectual with a keen eye towards understanding how people think and behave. He starts by critiquing the position that America has failed to “acknowledge and atone for its past [racism]” by pointing out several facts which seem to contradict this assertion, including the adoption of Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Day as federal holidays, affirmative action programs, and most critically, Congress issuing apologies for slavery. Hughes argues that “none of this paints a picture of a general public, or a government, that is resistant to historical soul-searching.” Several paragraphs later he continues, “To this day, it remains a talking point among media pundits that America has ‘never’ issued a formal apology for slavery.” And this is where he makes his insight:

We must realize that a game is being played here. Normally when someone demands an apology, they actually want one. But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the ability to continue demanding the apology is worth more than the apology itself. Sometimes the debt is worth more unpaid than paid… This is why every new apology, program, or holiday that they demand is forgotten as soon as it’s achieved… It’s not clear to me whether neoracists play this game consciously or whether there is self-deception involved. But either way, we are indeed playing a game, and if we don’t realize it, then everyone loses.

If you took out the word “neoracist” and told me this passage was from Eric Berne’s seminal 1964 book, Games People Play, I would have believed you. Hughes is arguing that a game of shifting goalposts is occurring. One could argue another instance of this happened in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. First, there were demands for Chauvin to be convicted. After he was convicted, the guilty verdict was seen as insufficient. For instance, Bernie Sanders tweeted the common sentiment “The jury’s verdict delivers accountability for Derek Chauvin, but not justice for George Floyd.”6 If no game were occurring, which is to say that opinion was also held before the conviction, then it seems to suggest courts are unable to administer justice for victims. This raises challenging questions about how justice would be administered (if possible) and who would decide what constitutes justice.

My only substantiative critique of the book is that, while it functions as a highly effective counter to ideas presented by radical neoracists, Hughes could have bolstered his argument in favor of colorblindness by also speaking more explicitly to moderates. I think many left-of-center people are put off by the ideas of activists such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and are disturbed by the way race is discussed in elite circles. However, I also think most would still favor mild affirmative action programs that they believe are appropriately calibrated. People who fall into this camp might agree with 90 percent of the book and even agree that colorblindness is a better approach to race than our current one. Yet, they might also argue that the best solution is to reduce, yet not eliminate, the consideration of race.

Overall, I found The End of Race Politics to be an excellent read from a superb up-and-coming author. Those teaching classes on race who include Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist on their syllabus should seriously consider adding this book to the reading list for a diversity of viewpoints. Students could then engage with scholars who hold diametrically opposing positions and debate the merits of each.

I doubt that will happen anytime soon, but will be delighted if proven wrong.

A review of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America by Coleman Hughes

About the AuthorMichael H. Bernstein is an experimental psychologist and an Assistant Professor at Brown University. His research is focused on the overlap of cognitive science with medicine. He is Director of the Brown Medical Expectations Lab and co-editor of The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick. For more information, visit michaelhbernstein.com.

References1. https://bit.ly/3Vi24Xv 2. https://bit.ly/48UG3Be 3. https://bit.ly/498cmNi 4. https://bit.ly/4amn181 5. https://bit.ly/4cddOR0 6. https://bit.ly/3TuKcGu

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Looking ahead to the 2024 election, most Americans sense that something is deeply wrong with our democracy. We face extreme polarization, increasingly problematic candidates, and a government that can barely function, let alone address urgent challenges. Maxwell Stearns has been a constitutional law professor for over 30 years. He argues that our politics are not merely dysfunctional. Our constitutional system is broken. And without radical reform, the U.S. risks collapse or dictatorship.

In Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy, Stearns argues that we are in the midst of the biggest constitutional crisis since the Civil War, and that the roots of the crisis are in the U.S. Constitution itself. The Framers never intended a two-party system. In fact, they feared entrenched political parties and mistakenly believed they had designed a scheme that avoided them. And yet the structures they created paved the way for our entrenched two-party system.

From the start, our systems of elections and executive accountability thwarted the Framers’ expectations. In the information age, it has spun out of control, and the result is a hyperpolarized Republican-Democratic duopoly that has poisoned our politics and society and threatens to end our democracy. The two-party system now undermines our basic constitutional structures, with separation of powers and checks and balances yielding to hyper-partisan loyalties. Rather than compromises arising from shifting coalitions, we experience ever-widening policy swings based on which party takes control of the White House in increasingly combative elections. The restrictive nature of the choices voters face in each election cycle encourages battles for the souls of the Democratic and Republican Parties, with more moderate voices on one side and more ideologically strident ones on the other. This two-party stranglehold on our politics is exactly what the Framers feared.

To survive as a democracy, we must end the two-party deadlock and introduce more political parties. But viable third parties are a pipe dream in our system given the current rules of the game. Stearns argues that we must change the rules, amend the Constitution, and transform America into a parliamentary democracy. Unlike our two-party presidential system, well-functioning parliamentary systems have multiple political parties that represent an array of perspectives, giving voters more choices that better align with their views. In such systems, parties compete in elections and then, based on the results, form a majority governing coalition. In contrast with the endless hyper-partisanship that pushes Democrats and Republicans further and further apart, coalitions represent the nation’s ideological core, capturing views of multiple parties, accommodating competing positions, and moderating the most extreme ideologies or partisan commitments. This improves the outcomes for citizens, which helps to explain why surveys have found that voters derive greater satisfaction and the governments are more responsive in parliamentary systems.

Achieving a robust parliamentary democracy in the U.S. requires amending the Constitution. Although this is difficult to do, Stearns explains why his specific set of proposals is more politically viable than other increasingly prominent reform proposals, which cannot be enacted, will not end our constitutional crisis, or both. What does he propose doing?

1. Double the size of the House of Representatives, with half continuing to be elected by district, a new cohort elected by party, and the entire chamber based on proportional representation. This reform will allow us to end the two-party duopoly and create space for thriving third-, fourth- and fifth-parties that better align with voters’ values/worldviews.
2. Transform how we choose the president and vice president. Power to choose the president will shift from individual votes processed through the Electoral College to party coalitions within the House of Representatives. They will select the president and vice president from party slates by inviting up to five party leaders, in descending order of representation, to negotiate a majority coalition.
3. Provide a new mechanism for ending a failing presidency. The House can remove the president with a 60 percent no confidence vote based on “maladministration.” This standard is lower than the requirements for impeachment, and the amendments leave the impeachment clause intact. These reforms infuse parliamentary selection, proportional representation, and coalition building into the U.S. constitutional system while retaining and preserving our most essential institutional structures. The proposal would end the two-party system, create space for multiple parties, end partisan gerrymandering, moderate the most extreme ideologies, reduce polarization, and incentivize negotiation and compromise.

Maxwell L. Stearns is the Venable, Baetjer & Howard Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. He has authored dozens of articles and several books on the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the economic analysis of law.

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“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” —Sherlock Holmes

The “game” of my title refers to the one played by media outlets and podcasters for the past seven years interviewing rogue scientists and conspiracy theorists to spin tales of Americans being zapped by nefarious foreign actors with sonic or microwave weapons. This includes the authors of studies suggesting that there were brain and inner ear injuries suffered by many victims of Havana Syndrome when those studies were clearly flawed and any competent mainstream scientist who read them would have seen these shortcomings. Indeed, they did—there were at least two classified studies that found no evidence of such attacks, instead emphasizing the likely role of stress.1, 2, 3, 4 Publicly, these politicians and pundits were referring to the events in Cuba as attacks, yet gave no hint of the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies.5

On March 18, 2024, the National Institutes of Health released two studies that failed to find any evidence of brain or inner ear damage in victims of Havana Syndrome—a mysterious array of ailments that have befallen U.S. Government personnel in Havana, Cuba, since 2016.6, 7 The results were published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and are in stark contrast with two earlier studies published in the same journal in 2018 and 2019 that purported to uncover brain anomalies in American diplomats and intelligence officers who served in Havana.8, 9 While some media outlets are portraying this discrepancy as a deepening mystery, it is nothing of the sort.

The earlier publications were riddled with flaws.10 In fact, the editorial board of the European journal Cortex called for the authors of the 2018 study to clarify their methods or retract the article.11 Their attempt at clarification did little to quell the controversy.12 The NIH study was more comprehensive and took great pains to have a well-matched group of control subjects. The studies were conducted over a five-year period beginning in 2018. Sophisticated MRI scans were taken of the brains of Havana Syndrome participants and compared to a healthy control group of government workers in similar jobs. Some of the control subjects even worked at the American Embassy in Havana.

The Havana Cohort: A Group Under StressA major finding of the new study was that 41 percent of those who reported Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs) “from nearly every geographic area, met the criteria for Functional Neurological Disorders” (FND) or exhibited symptoms indicative of underlying psychological distress.13 It is noteworthy that mass psychogenic illness, which some skeptics have long tied to the episode, is a form of FND. The presence of functional disorders is not surprising because they are commonly triggered by stress and the American staff in Havana were, by any definition, under exceptional stress. They had been counselled that they would be under surveillance 24/7 once they arrived in Havana and later told that they may be targets of a mysterious weapon and to be vigilant for strange sounds and symptoms. They were even warned not to stand or sleep near windows as it could render them vulnerable to an attack. In FNDs the brain structure and hardware are unaffected, but the sending and receiving of messages is disrupted, hence neurologists often refer to it as a software issue.

Havana Syndrome participants also reported more symptoms of depression, fatigue, and post-traumatic stress. The lead author of one of the studies, Dr. Leighton Chan, emphasized that the symptoms in Havana Syndrome patients were “very real, cause significant disruption in the lives of those affected and can be quite prolonged, disabling and difficult to treat.”14 Another member of the research team, neuropsychologist Louis French, noted that the presence of mood symptoms and post-traumatic stress were not unexpected. “Often these individuals have had significant disruption to their lives and continue to have concerns about their health and their future. This level of stress can have significant negative impacts on the recovery process,” he said.15

No Evidence of AttacksAs for the role of a directed energy weapon that has long been proposed as the cause behind the events, Dr. Chan said if an “external phenomenon” such as “a directed energy ‘attack’ is truly involved it seems to create symptoms without persistent or detectable physiologic changes.”16 While the researchers found no evidence of an external source for the symptoms, this does not prove that there wasn’t one, leading one media outlet, the Daily Mail, to suggest that a weapon was likely involved but its presence was undetectable. The newspaper interviewed Georgetown University Neurologist Dr. James Giordano, a persistent critic of the possible role of psychogenic illness in Havana Syndrome victims, who was quick to dispute the findings of FNDs. “Let me be very definitive, we’re not talking about a functional neurological disorder, which is a psychosomatic disorder,” Dr. Giordano said. “We’re talking about a disruption of neurological function, that then created a host of effects, including downstream physiological effects that manifested themselves cognitively, motorically, and behaviorally.”17

Giordano’s position lacks supporting evidence. One could also argue that there was no evidence of extraterrestrial involvement, but that doesn’t prove space aliens weren’t targeting victims with a ray gun. On the weight of evidence, stress appears to have played a major role in the outbreak. While critics like Giordano have jumped on the statement that the symptoms were real and severe as evidence that they were not functional, psychosomatic symptoms are real and can be as severe as any other symptoms and often involve the same brain pathways.18

After release of the NIH reports, one of the world’s leading experts on FNDs, British neurologist Jon Stone, told The Guardian science podcast that this condition was a plausible explanation as many of the patient’s symptoms “got worse over time,” which is typical of a functional disorder. Brain injuries, on the other hand, are typically “worse at the time of the injury, then they slowly improve,” he said. The paper’s world affairs editor Julian Borger was then asked to weigh in. He said that while a “secret weapon” seemed far-fetched, it was equally unlikely that so many diplomats and spies would be affected by psychogenic illness. This response highlights a common misconception of psychogenic disorders: the symptoms are real and can happen to anyone regardless of education level or training.19

The Extraordinary Claims of David RelmanIn 1953, Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir devised the term “pathological science” to refer to instances “where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking” and the like.20 The history of science is rife with examples of extraordinary claims that were eventually discredited. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries several astronomers, most notably Percival Lowell, claimed to discern through their telescopes a network of canals on Mars. This turned out to be an exercise in the subjective nature of human perception involving Martian geology where people saw what they expected to see. In 1903, French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot claimed to have discovered N-rays, a new form of radiation that turned out to be a product of experimenter bias and self-deception.21, 22 In 1989, chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann created international headlines amid claims they had achieved cold fusion—a limitless source of clean energy. Their experiment turned out to be flawed and could not be reproduced. To this list we should add the name of Stanford microbiologist David Relman.

Media coverage of the NIH studies has been dominated by the lack of evidence for brain damage and the findings of significant stress-related disorders in many of the subjects who reported anomalous health incidents. Considerable attention has been given to Dr. Relman, who was chosen by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) editors to deliver an accompanying editorial. Relman oversaw two panels that studied the claims of people reporting AHIs and the circumstances surrounding them.23, 24 He contends there is still a mystery surrounding some of the victims and holds the door ajar to the possible involvement of “pulsed radiofrequency energy.” The problem is, the two panels he oversaw showed bias by failing to interview prominent skeptics, ignoring evidence for mundane explanations, and giving considerable weight to unproven claims that supported his pet energy weapon theory. I have previously documented these and other shortcomings in Skeptic, including how one of his panels botched the diagnostic criteria for the presence of psychogenic illness.25, 26, 27 Neither panel conducted a single physical examination of a patient or engaged in any directed testing.28 The decision to choose Relman to write the commentary may be an attempt by the JAMA editorial board to mitigate the damage to their reputation after they published two poorly designed studies that have received much criticism by the scientific community.29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37

A bugaboo of Relman is the appearance of “abrupt-onset sensory phenomena” in a subset of patients on which he places great significance.38 In his commentary he mentions these cases while discussing “Havana Syndrome” reports from around the world. He writes: “Most strikingly, these phenomena often displayed strong location dependence, in that they quickly dissipated when the individuals vacated their initial location, and then returned when the location was revisited.” These incidents were followed by such conditions as “vertigo, dizziness, imbalance, blurry vision, tinnitus, headache, nausea, and cognitive dysfunction, sometimes leading to chronic disability.”39 The implication is that they may have been targeted by a directed energy weapon.40

In the press briefing, Dr. Chan said that his team looked at these reports that Relman had flagged as “cases of concern” for intelligence agencies—people who reported an acute onset coinciding with a “strong sense of locality or directionality.” But Chan said he was unable to study them as Relman had not provided the name of a single person involved, and that his definition of “locality or directionality” was not well-defined. Dr. Chan also noted that “cases of concern” were confined to “a really small group of individuals” who were affected very early in the outbreak in Cuba because early on U.S. Embassy personnel were counselled to move away from where they initially experienced symptoms. “If you’re on the X, get off the X,” they were told.41 Cases of concern were first noted in the National Academies of Sciences study that was conducted between 2019 and 2020, and only looked at reports in Cuba and China. If there were later cases of concern identified globally in Relman’s second panel that convened between 2021 and 2022, it was not conveyed to Dr. Chan.42

Why is it that the two panels headed by David Relman uncovered patterns that the American intelligence community—including the CIA and FBI—failed to find? This is a red flag. It is noteworthy that Relman’s panels had limited resources and access to government documents. For instance, in discussing the National Academy of Sciences committee and the attempt to examine cases of concern, he observed: “We did not really have the means to do our own investigation of these cases. We simply collected all that we could from those that had done various and sundry investigations and tried to make the most sense out of it we could.”43

While Relman claims to have found a small group of outliers, why weren’t the names of these victims given to the NIH study authors so they could be examined more closely? If these cases are deemed to be of such significance, why haven’t detailed interviews with these victims been released so others can read the descriptions? How many people are we talking about? The true test of the scientific method is to open your data to outside scrutiny, and in this instance, there is little to scrutinize. The ECREE Principle—extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence—was never more apropos. There are just too many questions surrounding these cases to make the claims that are being asserted. The symptoms in abrupt onset cases can be caused by an array of common conditions. While a sound may appear to be targeted, there is a considerable body of literature on ear-witness testimony, which is notoriously unreliable and subject to error.44 An energy weapon could theoretically produce what is discerned to be a concentrated beam of sound, but so can a cricket rubbing its wings or legs together. We know that some of the reports involving a beam of sound that accompanied early Havana Syndrome victims were recorded during the “attacks,” and later identified as crickets.45, 46 Curiously, Dr. Relman’s commentary was crickets when it came to this alternative explanation.

Occam’s RazorSome media commentators and rogue scientists continue to speculate that a small number of cases in U.S. personnel in both Cuba and later around the world, may have involved a directed energy weapon. Yet, Occam’s razor fits well here. Given two competing explanations, the simplest is the most likely. The entire episode is explainable using conventional psychology, and without recourse to foreign actors and secret weapons. It is noteworthy that the NIH findings are consistent with the conclusions of a report issued in March 2023 by the Director of National Intelligence that found no evidence of sonic or microwave weapons or the involvement of state actors. Instead, intelligence agencies traced the health complaints to an array of pre-existing conditions, environmental factors, and anxiety reactions.47

The appearance of Functional Neurological Disorders in the NIH studies is consistent with the early events in Havana, which suggest a psychological origin. A 2022 interview with CIA officer Fulton Armstrong is revealing. Armstrong was in Havana during the initial “attacks” and says that the man who first reported the mysterious sounds and became known as “patient zero,” had engaged in a zealous campaign to get embassy officials to take the sounds seriously. “He was lobbying, if not coercing, people to report symptoms and connect the dots,” he said.48 This lobbying could have primed other staff to frame future sounds and states of unwellness as an attack by a nefarious state actor. It is also notable that when other staff believed they were under attack from a sonic weapon, they recorded the sounds accompanying them. These sounds were consistent with the mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket.49

By 2017, the State Department began counselling new staff being posted to Cuba to be vigilant for mysterious sounds and health incidents.50 This counselling created an expectation of illness and provided the frame through which sounds and symptoms were interpreted. Suddenly, mundane events such as a headache, fatigue, insomnia, or tinnitus were perceived as symptoms of a possible attack—a classic setup for psychogenic illness.51 “Patient zero” was pivotal in laying the foundation for the mysterious sounds that were noticed to coincide with subsequent “attacks”—the sounds of crickets. While cricket sounds cannot cause physical sensations such as head pressure and tingling, hearing a cricket sound and fearing it may be emanating from a neuroweapon can trigger anxiety reactions. It is well-known that panic attacks often occur when people visit the same location associated with anxiety or previous attacks.

The Importance of TimingDr. Relman’s “cases of concern” raise many questions. As Dr. Chan observed, they were poorly defined, small in number, and not a single person was identified or further studied. Relman should release the information on each of these cases so their testimony can be scrutinized. The timing is also important. Relman contends that some of the early victims in Cuba were unaware that their colleagues were suffering from Anomalous Health Incidents.52 This claim is not consistent with the known timeline, which begins with so-called patient zero. This early series of events in Havana have been meticulously pieced together using interviews with over three dozen American and foreign officials and confidential government documents.53, 54

Scrutinizing these cases could help clarify the possible role of what psychologists refer to as “retrospective interpretation.” It is plausible that once alerted to their possible targeting by an energy weapon, staff would have thought back to when they arrived in Havana and identified any unusual sounds or medical events. While at the time these incidents were not deemed to have been worthy of seeking medical attention or reporting to their superiors, later, in light of the energy weapon scare, these ambiguous events could have easily been redefined as “attacks.”55

For years Relman has asserted that there was “clear evidence of an injury to the auditory and vestibular system of the brain” in some Havana Syndrome patients.56 This is a reference to a study conducted by University of Miami neurologist Michael Hoffer.57 The vestibular system deals with the workings of the inner ear, spatial awareness, and balance. Neurologist Robert Baloh, who created some of the tests that were used to assess the patients and has written the standard textbook in the field, has steadfastly maintained that Hoffer’s study was riddled with flaws and failed to demonstrate inner ear damage. Among the study flaws was the mystifying decision not to use housemates as a control group, and the notion that a directed energy attack could cause inner ear or brain damage without affecting hearing, which makes no sense.58 That the NIH studies failed to corroborate Hoffer’s findings comes as no surprise. David Relman is an acclaimed microbiologist, but he is not an expert in vestibular medicine. This is a classic example of someone outside of their field of expertise being led astray.

Relman’s attempt to take a small number of cases that are vaguely defined and discussed in passing in both his commentary and in his two panel reports, are essentially lipstick on a pig. No matter how hard you try to alter its appearance, at the end of the day, it’s still a pig. Like Bigfoot, chupacabras, and alien abductions, the evidence is lacking and there are alternative plausible explanations which are firmly grounded in established science.

About the AuthorRobert E. Bartholomew is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He has written numerous books on the margins of science covering UFOs, haunted houses, Bigfoot, lake monsters—all from a perspective of mainstream science. He has lived with the Malay people in Malaysia, and Aborigines in Central Australia. He is the co-author of two seminal books: Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior with Hilary Evans, and Havana Syndrome with Robert Baloh.

References1. Acoustic Signals and Physiological Effects on U.S. Diplomats in Cuba, November 2018. Declassified United States Government study. 2. Kirk, J. M. (2019). The strange case of the Havana ‘Sonic Attacks’. International Journal of Cuban Studies, 11(1), 24—42. See p. 27 3. https://bit.ly/4a7JvJY 4. https://bit.ly/49qjQeJ 5. One of the most vocal has been U.S. Senator Marco Rubio. 6. https://bit.ly/43ESTm3 7. https://bit.ly/3VyUDeK 8. https://bit.ly/3TPzPhx 9. https://bit.ly/4cwQM80 10. https://bit.ly/43ziVav 11. https://bit.ly/3PBMoKO 12. https://bit.ly/43uri77 13. https://bit.ly/3VyfKh9 14. ibid. 15. ibid. 16. Chan et al., 2024, op cit., pp. E10—E11. 17. https://bit.ly/3TpaiKE 18. Personal communication with Professor Robert Baloh, Department of Neurology, UCLA Medical School, March 23, 2024. For an excellent overview of FNDs see https://bit.ly/3VBqLyb 19. https://bit.ly/3vpmdAo 20. https://bit.ly/4aaO8mS, quotation on p. 16 reproduced from the original 1953 article with commentary by R.N. Hall. 21. Klotz, Irving M. (1980). “The N-Ray Affair.” Scientific American 242(5):168—175 22. Nye, Mary Jo (1980). N-rays: An Episode in the History and Psychology of Science. Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 11(1):125—156. 23. https://bit.ly/3xdTnne 24. Declassified United States Government Commissioned Report (2022). Anomalous Health Incidents: Analysis of Potential Causal Mechanisms, IC Experts Panel. 25. https://bit.ly/43uvCTP 26. https://bit.ly/4aaQ6ng 27. https://bit.ly/49fvmcy 28. https://bit.ly/3TzPxfH 29. https://bit.ly/43ziVav 30. https://bit.ly/3PCKbiu 31. https://bit.ly/3IY7gbr 32. https://bit.ly/3PyQT8Y 33. https://bit.ly/3PAXnUU 34. Baloh, R.W., and Bartholomew, R.E. (2020). Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria. Copernicus Books. 35. https://bit.ly/3vpoz2c 36. https://bit.ly/498CQhC 37. https://bit.ly/3PBajdI 38. Relman, 2024, op cit., p. E1. 39. Relman, 2024, op cit., p. E1. 40. While Relman writes about the plausibility of the possible role of microwave radiation in his commentary, he has not always been so confident. After the National Academies of Sciences report appeared, he was asked by National Public Radio reporter Sarah McCammon, “How confident are you that microwaves are what’s behind these symptoms?” His response: “We were not confident…we didn’t have any direct evidence that this could explain the entire story for sure or even parts of it…[and] we were not familiar with or read into the exact circumstances of these cases, so we couldn’t comment on the situational information that might have either supported or refuted this idea.” See: https://bit.ly/3x7kTma 41. Myles, R., moderator (2024). “NIH Telebriefing on Publication of Study Findings on Federal Employees with reported Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs) in JAMA.” This embargoed media briefing featured Dr. Leighton Chan, Dr. Carlo Pierpaoli, and Dr. Louis French who answered questions from journalists. 42. Myles, 2024, op cit. 43. https://bit.ly/3TNskaW 44. Öhman, L. (2013). All Ears: Adults’ and Children’s Earwitness Testimony. University of Gothenburg. 45. Acoustic Signals and Physiological Effects on U.S. Diplomats in Cuba, November 2018. Declassified U.S. Government study 46. https://bit.ly/3VwwOUC 47. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Unclassified: National Intelligence Council Updated Assessment on Anomalous Health Incidents, 2023. 48. https://bit.ly/3Tp6PvO 49. Acoustic Signals and Physiological Effects on U.S. Diplomats in Cuba, November 2018. Declassified U.S. Government study. An updated analysis with similar results was published on October 16, 2021 and titled, An Analysis of Data and Hypotheses Related to the Embassy Incidents, JSR-21-01, McLean, Virginia, 143 pp. 50. Oppmann, P., and Labott, E. (2017). “U.S. Diplomats, Families in Cuba Targeted Nearly 50 Times by Sonic Attacks, says U.S. Official.” CNN News, September 23. 51. One Embassy staffer told me: “The Embassy was a tightly-knit community with a very active rumor mill; many people were buzzing about the incidents’ and the related ailments starting as far back as December 2016. We knew as far back as March or April [2017] that doctors were comparing the symptoms to Traumatic Brain Injury. We were absolutely primed to know what the symptoms were. Additionally, many of us were experiencing headaches, mental fog, irritability, etc. —completely understandable given the high stress environment and the fact that we went asleep every night wondering whether we’d be zapped in our beds, and consequently lay awake for hours at a time, days on end, stretching into weeks and months.” 52. Merchant, 2021, op cit. 53. https://bit.ly/3TNFkNU 54. Baloh and Bartholomew (2020). pp. 29—37. These are highly respected journalists and Golden has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting prowess. 55. The NIH study found that the first reported AHI occurred in 2015. All previous investigations had placed the date as late 2016. But this does not mean we should push back the start of ‘Havana Syndrome’ to 2015. Once American staff were interviewed about their AHIs, they would have been asked to recount any unusual health incidents or sounds that they experienced since arriving in Havana. As the U.S. Embassy was reopened under Obama in 2015, it is conceivable that any mysterious sounds or health complaints that were recalled during this period, could have easily been relabelled after the fact as an incident or ‘attack.’ That at least one person reported an AHI in 2015 should receive no great significance. 56. See, for example: https://bit.ly/4aaRIxk; see also, Merchant, 2021, op cit. 57. https://bit.ly/3TP84pv 58. Baloh and Bartholomew (2020). op cit.

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Shermer and McIntyre discuss: default to truth theory • RFK Jr. • whether reason evolved for veridical perception or group identity? • How do we know what is true and what to believe? • worst case scenarios if Donald Trump wins in 2024 • trans issues, race issues, GMOs, nuclear power, climate doomsdayism • What went wrong during the COVID-19 pandemic? • disinformation about masks, vaccines • social media and disinformation.

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Skeptic: How did you get interested in energy?

Koonin: I was educated in New York City public schools and grew up in a middle-class household. I went to Caltech as an undergrad, MIT for my PhD, and then returned to Caltech as faculty for 30 years. I was the Provost for the last nine. I am trained in nuclear physics and quantum mechanics, and did a lot of wonderful research. In the late 80s, I joined JASON, which is a group of scientists and engineers who work on the most important problems for the U.S. government, many of them classified. I got exposed to climate science because the Department of Energy came to JASON and inquired about the application of (then new) multiple processor computers to climate modeling and using small satellites to conduct climate observations. I got intrigued by that and learned about climate science and energy. And then, in 2004, John Brown, who was the CEO of British Petroleum, called me up and said, “Steve, come join us as Chief Scientist.” Suffice to say, they didn’t need me to find oil and gas… They were pretty good at that! They needed help figuring out what beyond petroleum really means. I accepted, packed up the family, and moved to London, shifting from academia to the private sector. I helped BP quite a bit with their initial foray into renewables, particularly biofuels, but also wind and solar. After living in London for five years, my wife and I were ready for a new experience. And then my friend Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist now at Stanford, became the Secretary of Energy. He asked me to help out.

Skeptic: That was in the Obama administration?

Koonin: Yes. I spent two-and-a-half years working for Obama in the Department of Energy. And I wound up doing pretty much what I did for BP, namely, figuring out technology strategies. What technology should the government be investing in, in order to reduce emissions and to improve energy security? How should it go about the process from basic research to development to demonstration to deployment? Which technologies really matter and could make a difference?

Skeptic: Can you give us a sense of what it’s like to think about these problems in different environments, from inside Caltech versus BP, and then inside a government agency?

Koonin: In the academic environment, it used to be—and I’m not sure it is now—that you could discuss, debate, and raise questions, and all of that was in the process of refining the science. In the private sector, it’s much more goal-oriented, and the goal, ultimately, is to make money. In my case, it was how do we make BP into a company that is more respectful of the environment and the climate. They weren’t so much interested in the science. It was more about what technologies should be developed or which businesses they could invest in to try to make money—and there weren’t many. In the government, I was dealing with energy security and the economic side of things, particularly the interplay of demographics and economics. The data showed that there would be massive growth in energy consumption in the next 40 to 50 years and that fossil fuels were and remained the primary source of the world’s energy. These days, approximately 80 percent of energy still comes from fossil fuels.

Skeptic: You used the term energy security. What does that mean from a government’s perspective? Is it the government’s job to make sure that people have enough energy to lead a decent life?

Koonin: Not only to have enough energy but also that it is delivered reliably. Let me make a distinction between security and reliability. Security is about the physical provision of energy, fossil fuels, uranium, or even some of the fancy hardware that goes into the electrical grid, which is manufactured abroad. We saw a dramatic example of disrupted energy security in the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s, when it was very difficult to get enough oil. Up until recently, the U.S. has been producing more oil than it actually consumes, and so we’ve become, in that sense, energy self-sufficient. These days this is certainly true for natural gas, which is also a current example of energy insecurity in terms of what’s going on in Europe, where natural gas is needed for heating, for industry, and for electricity generation. The problem is that availability of this fuel in Europe relies on imports, which used to come predominantly from Russia. Geopolitically, that’s not a very comfortable place to be. In a nutshell, that’s what we mean by energy security.

Energy reliability is a different story. It’s mostly whether the fuel is capable of being delivered continuously. For example, is the refining supply chain stable? But more importantly, is the electrical grid able to deliver energy 99.9 percent of the time? We have recently seen dramatic instances of when the electricity supply fails, which leads to all kinds of chaos. Then there’s another aspect of the electrical utility business: these are regulated utilities, which means they cannot freely tend to the problems that they see.

Skeptic: Many people nowadays drive an electric car and hope that someday, there’ll be no more fossil fuel-driven cars. That seems like a good thing. But can it happen without nuclear energy? What is the current status of solar, wind, and other renewables?

Koonin: Let me give you a bigger picture of the grid first. We’d like the electrical grid to have three things: (1) We would like it to be affordable, (2) we would like it to be reliable, (3) and we would like it to produce low emissions. The only problem is, practically speaking, we are forced to choose two out of three. If you want a grid that is affordable and low-emissions, wind and solar are the way to go. The problem is that they’re not very reliable. If you want it to be affordable and reliable, then you’ve got gas, coal, and nuclear. But if you want to make that clean, you need to get rid of the fossil fuels. In other words, you need to have wind and solar, but then you also need some form of dispatchable power, that is, ways in which you can fill in the shortfall when the wind and solar don’t generate. Batteries are certainly one possibility. Pumped hydro, where you pump water up the hill and then release it to come down when you need the electricity, is another. Converting electricity into some chemical, such as hydrogen, by electrolyzing water, and then burning that chemical when you need the electricity again is yet another option. So, there are a number of ways to address the reliability of renewables, but I would say the only realistic way of dealing with this dilemma today is nuclear power. Nuclear produces a little over 18 percent of the United States’ electricity. We know how to do it. But one of the main problems is that it’s capital-intensive. When I worked in the Department of Energy, the government tried—and continues to try—to build much smaller nuclear reactors in a standardized way. Currently, our reactors are custom-built and typically produce 1.1 gigawatts of electricity. If we could build 50- or 100-megawatt reactors in a factory, truck them over wherever they’re needed, and install them successively onsite, it could solve a lot of problems. We’ll see whether we can get it cheap enough. Not many people realize that what costs the most is not the generation. Wind and solar are the cheapest ways of generating electricity. Ensuring reliability—not just producing electricity—is the most expensive aspect.

Skeptic: Isn’t the problem with nuclear also part psychological, in the sense that people fear it? Chernobyl was certainly a devastating disaster. At the same time, the major cause of deaths in Fukushima was not the nuclear power plant itself, it was the tidal waves, right? And many people conflate the Three Mile Island accident with the movie The China Syndrome, which premiered 12 days before the meltdown. Still, because the perceived consequences are so high, many governments feel compelled to restrict nuclear.

Koonin: Yes, I think it is largely a perception issue. I would add to this list of reasons why people don’t like nuclear power its association with nuclear weapons, which, of course, are terrible. And then there’s the waste issue. All of that is technically solvable, but the perception issue certainly dominates. Spencer Weart, who’s a great historian of science, wrote a book titled Nuclear Fear, in which he documents all the psychological reasons why people are not fans of nuclear power. I think nuclear power is going to be absolutely essential if the world is going to get to zero emissions on the time scale most governments and NGOs say we need to. If you look at the statistics, nuclear is by far the lowest in deaths per megawatt hour produced. With coal, you’ve got local pollution and the mining issues, and so on. So, even with Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, nuclear is the safest based on experience.

Skeptic: What about nuclear fusion? Note: Current nuclear power stations rely on nuclear fission with the nucleus of an atom being split to release energy. Nuclear fusion takes multiple nuclei and uses intense heat to fuse them together, a process that also releases energy.

40% of the world’s population right now—over 3 billion people—don’t have adequate energy.

Koonin: You know, if you believe we need to solve our energy problems in the next 30 years… Given this time scale to develop, demonstrate, and then deploy, I don’t think nuclear fusion is going to be a very big part of the near-to-mid-term solution. But let me describe what the advances have been.

Is nuclear fusion going to save the day? Koonin doesn’t think it’s going to be a very big part of a near-to-mid-term energy solution. This striking cutaway illustration depicts the massive complex that houses ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), a large tokamak [a toroidal apparatus for producing controlled fusion reactions in hot plasma] and its ancillary systems. It is one of the world’s most complex projects, currently under construction in France in partnership of a number of countries, including the U.S., the U.K., China, Japan, and Russia. (Illustration by Lauris Honoré; ITER)

The world’s mainline approach has been ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). It’s a large tokamak reactor [a toroidal apparatus for producing controlled fusion reactions in hot plasma] that allows you to confine the plasma with magnetic fields. It’s being constructed in the south of France through a partnership of a number of countries, including the U.S., the U.K., China, Japan, and Russia. It’s two to three times over budget and delayed by more than a decade. The reactor was expected to take 10 years to build, and ITER had planned to test its first plasma in 2020 and then achieve full fusion by 2023, but the schedule is now to test first plasma in 2025, with first introduction of fusible material—full fusion—in 2035. All energy produced will be vented. And only then do we get to build a plant that actually generates electricity. There have been other developments that suggest maybe there are other ways of doing this. One is the rise of private sector magnetic efforts. A company I have been consulting with, TAE Technologies, has been making good progress on demonstrating a different kind of magnetic confinement, basically in a tube shape rather than a doughnut. In the next few years, they’re going to build their next machine. These types of advancements will get us closer to conditions where you could start to believe in making energy this way.

Skeptic: It sounds like the idea of a world operating on complete renewables, which includes the whole basket of everything you just said, is probably not going to happen till the 22nd century.

Koonin: I think that’s a fair statement.

Skeptic: In the meantime, you have all these developing countries that want to come online and join the developed world, and they need energy. At the moment, fossil fuels are still the means to do it. It seems hardly fair for the U.S., Europe, or Japan to say, “no, you can’t do that.” To which they would respond, “Well, what are we supposed to do then? Can we go nuclear?” To then only be told, “No, you can’t go nuclear either.” It seems like a big political issue.

Koonin: Yes! People have used the term eco-colonialism or eco-imperialism to describe the developed world telling the developing world to use more expensive sources of energy. But even more so, I would say it’s a moral issue. To put some numbers on these statements, 40 percent of the world’s population right now—that’s over 3 billion people—don’t have adequate energy. And as they improve their lives and develop their countries, they will need energy. 80 percent of the world’s energy right now comes from fossil fuels. It is the most widely available and reliable source of energy. So the question is, who is going to pay the developing world not to emit? I don’t have an answer to that, and I haven’t heard a convincing answer from anyone. If we dream of an emissions- free world by 2050, this is a problem.

Another aspect of that is the risk calculus. How do you rate the climate risk compared to all the other things you’ve got to worry about? It’s very different for those of us in the developed world versus someone in Bangladesh or sub-Saharan Africa. Or even India. I think they would say, “Well, you know, the climate risk is a couple of generations away and it’s pretty vague, while my immediate needs are energy for a refrigerator or for lighting so I can study…”

Skeptic: This 40 percent of the world experiencing energy insecurity, where are they getting their energy from? Are they still burning cow pies and wood, and other similar crude sources?

Koonin: About 10 percent of world energy comes from traditional biomass, as it’s called, so yes, for example, cow pies and wood. It accounts for up to 90 percent of energy in some developing regions. Traditional biomass is used mainly for heating and cooking, and the local air pollution associated with that is just terrible. If you’ve ever been to a city where that is the case, you smell the dung and wood burning in the air, you can feel it on your tongue just walking around…and it kills millions of people through local air pollution. You know, even though propane or LPG emit carbon, if you bring these types of clean-burning fuels to people living in such poverty, then you’ve improved their health situation dramatically.

Skeptic: Right. But it’s gradual enough that those deaths don’t make the news. Similarly, you don’t hear that much about fossil fuel-related deaths, but a nuclear disaster like Chernobyl is a massive story.

Koonin: Of course. Some people would say it sounds heartless. Every death matters. But in fact, what we’re really talking about is the large trends and the statistics in trying to deal with the problems of climate change one the one hand and that of how to provide adequate energy on the other.

Skeptic: So, how should we deal with all this? Very few people give an actual causal sequence of events of how you would get from where we are now to producing enough energy for everyone in a responsible way. Thomas Sowell insightfully noted that: “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs; and you try to get the best tradeoff you can get, that’s all you can hope for.”

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.2
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Koonin: I won’t give a precise number for how it’s going to affect the economy, but a couple of general principles are useful to think about this. One comes from William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2018 for the following: if you try to decarbonize the economy too rapidly, you will incur increasing costs. Energy is so interwoven into everyday life and into the economy that making big changes in it is going to be disruptive, unless you do it with some deliberation. On the other hand, if you decarbonize too slowly, you load up the atmosphere with more CO2, and the climate risk goes up. And so, there’s an optimal pace of decarbonization, which lets the temperature rise to some value, let’s say, in the year 2100, and then starts to bring it down. If you do it too fast, you’re disruptive and you also deploy mature technologies, and that incurs a cost. When you look at what Nordhaus wrote in his Nobel Lecture, he would say that the economic optimum is to let the temperature go up to 3 degrees by 2100 or even 3.5, while political leaders are talking about reining things in at 1.5 or 2 degrees. If we push too much, too fast, there’s going to be popular pushback because energy will become more expensive. It will also become unreliable. Consumer choice will be reduced, energy insecurity will be increased… and we’re seeing that already. So, if you’re going to decarbonize, it needs to be done thoughtfully and taking into account all of the relevant aspects, not only the energy supply itself, but the economics, the technology, people’s perceptions of what’s going on, and so on. Nobody has written down a comprehensive plan like that. And I would think that that’s the first thing anybody would want to see if they truly wanted to solve this problem.

This print interview has been edited from a longer conversation with Koonin on The Michael Shermer Show.

About the IntervieweeDr. Steven Koonin served as Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy under President Obama from 2009 to 2011, where his portfolio included the climate research program and energy technology strategy. He was the lead author of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Strategic Plan (2011) and the inaugural Department of Energy Quadrennial Technology Review (2011). Before joining the government, Koonin spent five years as Chief Scientist for BP (British Petroleum), researching renewable energy options to move the company “beyond petroleum.” For almost 30 years, he was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech. He also served for nine years as Caltech’s Vice President and Provost, facilitating the research of more than 300 scientists and engineers and catalyzing the development of the world’s largest optical telescope. In addition to the National Academy of Sciences, Koonin’s memberships include the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and JASON, the group of scientists who solve technical problems for the U.S. government; he served as JASON’s chair for six years. He is currently a professor at New York University, with appointments in the Stern School of Business, the Tandon School of Engineering, and the Department of Physics.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss372_Eddie_Tabash_2023_07_19.mp3Download MP3Eddie Tabash is a constitutional lawyer in Los Angeles. He graduated magna cum laude from UCLA in 1973. He graduated from Loyola Law School of Los Angeles in 1976. He is known for his expertise in demonstrating how the religion clauses of the First Amendment require the separation of church and state, which includes equality before the law for nonbelievers. He is an atheist who endeavors to secure a society in which no branch of government can treat people differently because of either accepting or rejecting any tenet of religious belief.

Shermer and Tabash discuss:

• the history of the relationship between church and state
• the founding framers of the U.S. Constitution and their arguments for separating church and state
• Madison and Jefferson on church and state
• how most of the 13 colonies had government-sanctioned religions and religious tests for office
• The Constitutional Convention and the First Amendment
• major cases in history that shaped current laws on church/state issues
• how the Moral Majority of the Reagan era 1980s shaped the SCOTUS of today
• The Federalist Society and how it shapes the selection of SCOTUS justices
• how the current religious right wing supermajority on the Supreme Court is drastically eroding the separation of church and state and how modern secular government is being weakened. We could be facing the beginning stages of an actual theocracy.
• the push by some Republicans to hold a new Constitutional Convention and redesign the entire U.S. Constitution in order to make America an officially state-sanctioned Christian country and government
• the religious beliefs and attitudes of the current SCOTUS:
  • Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.
  • Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor
  • Associate Justice Clarence Thomas
  • Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
  • Associate Justice Elena Kagan.
  • Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett
  • Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch
  • Associate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh
  • Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss371_Nancy_Segal_2023_07_20.mp3Download MP3This episode is a conversation based Nancy Segal’s two new books The Twin Children of the Holocaust: Stolen Childhood and the Will to Survive and Gay Fathers, Twin Sons: the Citzenship Case that Captured the World.

Shermer and Segal discuss:

• her historical interest in twins research and behavior genetics
• the many different types of twins and family arrangements
• twins separated accidentally (switched with an unrelated infant, switched with another twin)
• twins separated intentionally
• twins reunited
• a brief history of twins research
• Josef Mengele and his twins research
• Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart
• the gay fathers and twin sons story
• immigration and naturalization law related to IVF, twins, gay couples, etc.
• abortion
• eugenics and the Nobel Prize sperm bank
• the meaning of “heritability”
• the relative role of nature and nurture in how lives turn out, and
• the “nonshared environment.”

Nancy L. Segal, PhD, is a Psychology Professor, and Director and Founder of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton. She has authored over 300 scholarly articles and eight books. Her 2012 book, Born Together-Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study, won the American Psychological Association’s William James Book Award. Her recent work, Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart, was the focus of a July 2022 BBC-TV documentary. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and Atlantic Monthly. She has appeared on national and international televised programs, including the Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, the Today Show and the BBC. She is also the author of The Twin Children of the Holocaust: Stolen Childhood and the Will to Survive, an annotated collection of photographs taken at the Holocaust twins’ 40th anniversary reunion and hearing on Josef Mengele’s war crimes. Her other books include Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior, Indivisible by Two: Lives of Extraordinary Twins, Someone Else’s Twin: The True Story of Babies Switched at Birth, Twin Mythconceptions: False Beliefs, Fables, and Facts About Twins, and Accidental Brothers: The Story of Twins Exchanged at Birth and the Power of Nature and Nurture. Segal lives and works in southern California.

About the BookThe January 2018 headline story in the Los Angeles Times was riveting. Andrew from the United States and Elad Dvash-Banks from Israel married in Canada in 2010 when gay couples could not marry in these countries. The couple conceived fraternal twins, Aiden and Ethan, with a Canadian surrogate by means of egg and sperm donation. The two boys were born just four minutes apart. Aiden was conceived with a donated egg and Andrew’s sperm cell, and Ethan was conceived with a donated egg (from the same woman) and Elad’s sperm cell.

Andrew and Elad wished to raise their children in the United States, but when they arrived at the American Consulate in Toronto to apply for citizenship, a staff member fired off a series of “shocking” and humiliating questions, and informed the couple of her authority to require a DNA test to determine each parents’ relatedness to each twin—she warned that without these tests neither twin would be granted U.S. citizenship. Andrew and Elad knew which twin each had fathered and had planned on keeping this information confidential. They knew this because DNA analyses had already been performed, but the consulate insisted that these costly tests be repeated using their designated laboratory.

Having no alternative, DNA testing was arranged, and results submitted to the consulate. Soon, two envelopes arrived at their home, bearing both welcome and dreaded news: United States citizenship was offered to Aiden, whose father was a U.S. citizen, but not to Ethan, whose father was Israeli. And, thus, their ground-breaking legal journey began. The couple’s high-profile lawsuit nearly reached the U.S. Supreme Court, capturing worldwide attention along the way.

Nancy Segal brings the story to life through firsthand accounts of each father’s life history and analysis of the legal intricacies that threatened to deny U.S. citizenship to one of their twin sons.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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Coinciding with Truman’s historic upset over Dewey, Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger published the first known ranking of U.S. presidents in Life magazine in November 1948. Schlesinger’s methodology was simple: he surveyed an array of historians and political scientists, asking them to rank presidents from “Failure” to “Great.” Schlesinger repeated his survey in 1962.

Twenty years later, the Siena College Research Institute (SCRI) took up the mantle of ranking presidents. The SCRI conducts its survey every second year of the first term of a new president. Other outlets have benefited from the presidential-ranking game as well. C-SPAN has released a poll with every new president since 2000. These types of rankings are also published by the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The History News Network, The Times, and the United States Presidency Centre in London. However, the mainstay of the presidential ranking remains the SCRI. As we shall see, there are three significant problems with this methodology: presentism, the evolving role of the presidency, and sui generis.

Left to right: James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison

The Problem of PresentismPresentism is “the tendency to interpret the past in present terms,”1 and therein lies the first of the three major fallacies of ranking presidential performance. Cultural norms evolve over time, and it is impossible to predict how these cultural norms will change in the future.

In 2001, only 35 percent of Americans supported samesex marriage,2 and George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004 after backing a constitutional amendment banning it.3 His predecessor, Bill Clinton, signed The Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, one of the most discriminatory anti-gay statutes in American history.4 Barack Obama opposed gay marriage when he first ran for president.5 Yet today, 75 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage.6 Times change, and so do attitudes.

Our current social norms recognize the importance of electing an African American to the Executive Office. The day after Barack Obama became the first African American U.S. president, the occasion was so historic, the public clamored for newspapers to save and the November 5, 2008 issue of the New York Times hit $400 on eBay.7 Around the world, Obama’s victory was hailed as nothing short of amazing.8

Will Obama’s historic accomplishment be remembered as such, though? When Americans reflect on the legacy of John F. Kennedy, they note his idealism, his ability to inspire, and his untimely death. What is not often recalled is that JFK was also our first non-Protestant president and anti-Catholic bigotry was still very much in the mainstream when he was nominated.

Our attitudes towards tragedies have changed as well. President Joe Biden’s lowest ranking is “Luck” (he ranks 34th). This most likely reflects the tragedies Biden endured prior to assuming the office; in 1972, then Senator-elect Biden suffered the loss of his first wife and daughter in a car accident, and would lose his son Beau to brain cancer in 2015. While Biden’s losses are indeed tragic, the choice to use this in rating his unluckiness crystallizes the problem of presentism in ranking presidents. In fact, more than half (25 of 46) of our presidents have lost children before, during, or after their time in office. Surely the loss of a child is the most painful experience any parent can have, but Joe Biden is not alone (i.e., “unlucky”) in this respect.

The Evolving Role of The PresidencyIn addition to the survey, respondents are asked simple “yes/no” questions including “Is the Presidency growing too big?” Nearly half (44 percent) responded, “yes,” 35 percent responded “no,” and the remaining 21 percent did not respond. The question itself affirms the second major fallacy in “ranking” presidents: the job has changed dramatically since President Washington took office.

Consider the subcategory “Executive Appointments.” Washington appointed a total of four advisors, including Thomas Jefferson (Secretary of State) and Alexander Hamilton (Secretary of The Treasury). There are now 15 executive cabinet positions. Despite this, respondents today are asked to compare and contrast presidents who served in colonial times with those considering tax breaks for Americans who buy solar-powered automobiles.9

Left to right: Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Rutherford B. Hayes

Sui GenerisThe third fallacy of presidential ranking surveys is the fact that each president faced his own unique challenges. Sui generis is a Latin term that translates to “of its own kind,” and refers to anything that is peculiar to itself: of its own kind or class. And no job is more of its own kind than the U.S. presidency.

Below, I’ve included an analysis of the three broad categories used to construct the SCRI rankings: “attributes,” “abilities,” and “accomplishments,” with select subcategories included to highlight the most obvious limitations.

AttributesFamilyPresidents should neither be given credit nor blamed for their ancestry. With a single exception, all presidents have been White Christian men of relative affluence. Being the son of a president also factors heavily into the Siena College ranking: John Quincy Adams ranks second in this category, and George W. Bush ranks 22 (his highest ranking). Interestingly, George H.W. Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, served as a U.S. Senator, yet Bush Sr. ranks 14 places higher (8) than his son Dubya.

EducationBarack Obama, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law school, ranks 24th in this category. He is ranked just above Grover Cleveland (26), who dropped out of school at age 16 but well below George Washington (7), who dropped out at 11. Woodrow Wilson (8), who earned a PhD in political science from Johns Hopkins University, ranks well above Calvin Coolidge (32), who graduated cum laude from Amherst, but well below John Adams (3), who graduated 15th in a class of 24 at Harvard.

ExperienceUntil Donald Trump (44), every president was either a military leader, governor, senator, or representative (state or federal). Perhaps our most qualified president was James Buchanan (36), who served five terms in the House of Representatives, a decade in the Senate, and was Secretary of State under Polk and Pierce’s Minister to Great Britain. Historians rightly deem “Old Buck” a failure for thinking the issue of slavery would be readily accepted by the country following the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court, which ruled that the U.S. Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of Black African descent, and thus they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the Constitution conferred upon American citizens. He was followed in office by a man who lost more races than he won: Lincoln (28) was a failed Whig Representative from the Illinois frontier who, during his time in office, abolished slavery and preserved the union.

Left to right: James Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson

IntegrityIf nothing else, Grover Cleveland (ranked 26th) was a man of integrity. The only president to serve two non-consecutive terms, he was known for his spotless record. Cleveland paid child support for a son he may have fathered as a bachelor in 1874. When he ran for the Presidency, the Republicans discovered this, and hecklers soon chanted “Ma! Ma! Where’s your pa?” Cleveland’s supporters asked him how he wanted to address the issue. Cleveland simply replied, “Above all, tell the truth.” The sole Gilded Age Democrat in the White House, he vetoed 584 bills, including 238 pocket vetoes (414 first term, 170 second term), more than all other presidents before him, combined. Cleveland’s last words? “I have tried so hard to do right.”

Despite this, historians surveyed at Siena found reasons to rank Ronald Reagan (24) two places higher than Cleveland in the “integrity” category. In contrast to the budget-slashing/reform-minded Cleveland, Reagan’s defense spending increased while entitlements stayed roughly equal. Reagan’s budgets tripled the deficit and grew the national debt from $995 billion to $2.9 trillion, more than was accumulated in the entire prior history of the United States.10 It is $31 trillion today.

Reagan’s Presidency was also marked by numerous scandals. In addition to Iran-Contra, the Reagan years saw HUD rigging, Wedtech, and the EPA Superfund misallocation. And let’s not forget the Savings & Loan crisis. As Martin Mayer rightly described in The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery: The Collapse of the Savings and Loan Industry, the S&L scandal dwarfed previous scandals like Teapot Dome under Harding (42) and Credit Mobilier under Grant (25). The scandals resulted in the investigation, indictment, or conviction of over 138 administration officials, the largest number for any president in American history up until that time.

ImaginationHow does one gauge how imaginative a president was, exactly? Judging from his love of jokes and his speeches, Lincoln (1) was certainly imaginative. He even held a patent, for a flotation device for harboring ships. Musical proficiency may also be indicative of imagination. At least 11 presidents were musicians, Jefferson (2), Truman (5), and Nixon (21) being especially proficient. Nixon appeared on the Jack Paar Show with a classical piece of his own, “Concerto #1.” He also invited Ella Fitzgerald to the White House and backed her up on the piano.

Herbert Hoover, though, ranks 35th in imagination. Most historians now give Hoover credit11 as a good, capable administrator who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, prior to his presidency, Hoover made a name for himself organizing shipments of food for starving millions in Central Europe following World War 1 and then organized massive relief for victims of the Great Mississippi Flood in 1927. After the Crash of 1929, Hoover submitted bills to Congress to create the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to aid businesses and loan federal money to states to feed the unemployed while expanding public works.12 Following his presidency, he spent his days railing against the New Deal,13 meeting Hitler,14 opposing the atomic bomb,15 and serving Truman in further expanding food relief in war-torn Europe. Hoover was equally prodigious as an author, writing books ranging from foreign policy to his own childhood to fly fishing.16 The man was anything but unimaginative.

Left to right: Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin D. Roosevelt

IntelligenceNo intelligence test has ever been administered to any sitting president, and most died before intelligence tests were invented. However, some studies have been conducted that estimate presidential intelligence with varying findings. The Gough Adjective Check List (1965) has been applied to presidents through the years, as has the Historical Figures Assessment (1977). Simonton (2006) determined “intellectual brilliance” by the statistical technique of factor analyzing 14 distinct descriptors ranging from “curious” and “wise” to “inventive” and “artistic.”17 Predictably, he found Thomas Jefferson’s score (3.1) most “intellectually brilliant,” nearly three times that of his closest runner-up, John Quincy Adams (1.2). The Siena poll ranks John Quincy Adams fifth in intelligence (behind his father [4]), Madison (3), Lincoln (2), and Jefferson (1). James Garfield (20) and Chester Arthur (36) rank near the middle. Both were multilingual, easily conversing in Greek, Latin, and English. Garfield was ambidextrous and able to write simultaneously in both dead languages. He also spoke and campaigned in German. Garfield and Arthur also somehow manage to rank lower than Lyndon Johnson (22), who dropped out of Southwest Texas State Teachers College, now Texas State University, after one year to teach elementary school. (Johnson would return and graduate a year later). Intelligence is among FDR’s (10) lowest categories, though he ranks higher than Garfield and Arthur. This is, perhaps, because “The Boss” was likewise fluent in German, Latin, and French before he entered Groton Preparatory School.18

According to the survey, Donald Trump is the least intelligent president we’ve ever had. The participants’ decision may have been affected by Trump’s refusal to reveal his grades from Fordham and Wharton, the latter from which he earned a B.S. in economics. This ranks Trump less intelligent than Andrew Johnson (42) and Zachary Taylor (32), neither of whom was fully literate until adulthood.

The literature reveals that every sitting president was regularly derided for their lack of intelligence and/ or lack of fitness for the office during their tenure. Biden (27) regularly endures being labeled “stupid” by his detractors,19 and Barack Obama (9) was called a “retard” by Ann Coulter.20 George W. Bush (41) was described as a “numbskull,”21 and his predecessor Bill Clinton (8) was called an “idiot.”22 Even Thomas Jefferson (2), probably the smartest man ever to hold the office, was described by none other than John Adams as “unfit for office (…) a child, a dupe to his party.”23

Interestingly, Warren G. Harding is near the bottom at 43. The child of doctors, he entered college at the age of 14. He also famously went camping with other “unintelligent low achievers” Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Samuel Firestone.24

Willingness to Take RisksRisk-taking only ranks favorably if the risk taken benefits the country. Polk (7) was willing to risk the lives of American soldiers in the name of Manifest Destiny. The Mexican American War was, as described by then-Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant (18), “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”25 Regardless of the reasons for the war, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo garnered 55 percent of Mexican Territory, which now includes parts of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah.26

Left to right: Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon

George W. Bush (20) was willing to take risks, certainly. His preemptive and unnecessary invasion and occupation of Iraq was disastrous.27 Nixon (12) was willing to risk taping himself, including the “Watergate cover-up” conversations that would lead to his resignation.

AbilitiesAbility to CompromiseA sitting president’s ability to compromise is worthy of judgment. But here again, context is crucial and every president faces a different challenge. Franklin Roosevelt (4) had an easier task before him in getting Congress to compromise in 1932 and 1936 than presidents without majorities in both Houses.28 His successor, Truman (12), famously battled with the “Do Nothing” Congress, and Bill Clinton (3) governed like a conservative after his party lost seats in both Houses.

If there was ever a president known for compromise though, it would be Rutherford B. Hayes (23). In 1876, Hayes lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel Tilden. Worse yet, no clear winner emerged because the outcomes in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana were unclear, and both parties claimed victory. A compromise was reached in the form of the Electoral Commission Act; the commission decided that Hayes and the Republicans would take the White House, and, in return, federal troops would be removed from the South.29 This “compromise” resulted in the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Southern Democratic Party (and White Supremacy) until the mid-1960s.30

Communication Ability (Speak, Write)Donald Trump (43) was the most effective media manipulator the Executive Office ever held. In an era in which millions are regularly spent on political ads, Trump received over $2 billion in free media coverage, more than all of his primary and general election opponent(s) combined.31 His preferred communication channel of social media amassed nearly 150 million followers by the end of his presidency. Yet he has ranked 39 places below Thomas Jefferson, (4) who was such a terrible public speaker that he refused to deliver a State of the Union address to Congress. Instead, Jefferson sent a letter, a tradition that stood until Woodrow Wilson (7) addressed Congress in person in 1913.

AccomplishmentsParty LeadershipJimmy Carter (36) failed to work with his own party, as evidenced by Ted Kennedy’s challenge at the 1980 Democratic Convention.32 Carter is ranked only two spots above Franklin Pierce (38), whose own party ran an “Anyone but Pierce” campaign at his party’s 1852 convention.33

Left to right: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clint

George Washington (18) was apparently far better at working with his party than either Carter or Pierce. This is perplexing, as The Father of our Country not only didn’t have a political party but warned about them in his final address and died believing they were unnecessary.34

Relationship with CongressJames Monroe (5), enjoyed the “Era of Good Feelings” in 1815, following the U.S.’ loss to Britain in the War of 1812. However, George W. Bush also enjoyed a similar “Era of Good Feelings” following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when his approval rating hit 92 percent,35 and his Party easily expanded their majority in the midterms. Seven days later, all members of the 107th Congress except Barbara Lee of California voted to authorize President Bush to use military force against those responsible.36 In spite of all this, Bush ranked a distant 22nd.

Court AppointmentsEasily the worst and most disastrous Supreme Court decision ever issued was that of Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857). As noted in a previous section, James Buchanan (43) expected that the issue of slavery dividing the country would be settled by the Taney Court’s ruling. It is perplexing then, that the man who appointed Taney to SCOTUS twice (Andrew Jackson) is ranked 30, a full 13 points above Buchanan. Four presidents—William Henry Harrison (42), Zachary Taylor (37), Andrew Johnson (44), and Jimmy Carter (19)—made no SCOTUS appointments at all. Yet only Carter is ranked higher than Jackson.

Domestic AccomplishmentsIn “Domestic Accomplishments,” Thomas Jefferson (6) is ranked very highly. In 1803, the Senate ratified a treaty with France, promoted by President Jefferson, that doubled the landmass of the new country, eventually encompassing 15 states. It is puzzling, then, that Franklin Pierce is ranked near the bottom in this category (41), even though he signed the Gadsen Purchase in 1851, in which Mexico sold 29,670 square miles of land that eventually became southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.37

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.2
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Foreign Policy AccomplishmentsHere Franklin Roosevelt ranks first, followed by Lincoln, and then Washington. Each led as world-altering wars were being fought. Donald Trump ranks 45th in this category, with historians declaring him the worst foreign policy president ever. Trump brokered agreements between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, and also withdrew from The Trans-Pacific Partnership, bombed Syria twice, and left the Paris Climate Agreement. All these decisions pale in comparison to ignoring secession, a sin committed by the three presidents who preceded Lincoln. One could argue that the Civil War shouldn’t fall under “foreign policy accomplishments.” If this is the case, then, why rank Lincoln so highly?

Left to right: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump, and Joe Biden

Avoid Crucial MistakesEasily the most crucial mistake a president can make is committing troops to an unnecessary war. Such a mistake is made even worse when the war is lost. In 2003, George W. Bush (38) committed this mistake by invading Iraq. Operation Iraqi Freedom lasted nine years, cost trillions of dollars, caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi military and civilian deaths and thousands of U.S. military casualties.

Worse still was The War of 1812. James Madison’s decision to go to war with Great Britain cost 15,000 American lives,38 yet Madison (11) almost cracks the top 10!

Presidents can and should be judged by their performance in office. But presentism, the evolving role of the office, and the fact that each president faces unique challenges, makes ranking them no more reliable than a parlor game.

About the AuthorJohn D. Van Dyke is an academic and science educator. His personal website is www.vandykerevue.org.

References1. https://bit.ly/3Zsxf0K 2. https://pewrsr.ch/40LfZF2 3. https://bit.ly/3nyjnEI 4. https://bit.ly/3TPYbGB 5. https://bit.ly/3lKOfS9 6. https://bit.ly/3LX0q92 7. https://reut.rs/3lPKUB4 8. https://bit.ly/3zhigfp 9. https://bit.ly/3zcSQzD 10. Yergin, D. & Stanislaw, J. (1998). The Commanding Heights. The Free Press. 11. https://bit.ly/2uK4JeT 12. https://bit.ly/2ExgGwp 13. https://bit.ly/3JR4AN7 14. https://bit.ly/3G12md0 15. https://bit.ly/3KfHMbe 16. https://bit.ly/3TQBpOM 17. Simonton, D. K. (2006). Presidential IQ, Openness, Intellectual Brilliance, and Leadership: Estimates and Correlations for 42 U.S. Chief Executives. Political Psychology, 27(4), 511–526. 18. Wink, J. (2015). 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History. Simon and Schuster. 19. https://bit.ly/3KkwWRq 20. https://cnn.it/3TVihPF 21. https://bit.ly/3lOsb9b 22. https://bit.ly/3zfh6AX 23. Adams, J. (1981). Diary of John Quincy Adams, Volume 1 November 1779–March 1786. D.G. Allen, M. Friedlaender, R.J. Taylor, & C. Walker (Eds.). Harvard University Press. 24. https://bit.ly/40IifwO 25. https://to.pbs.org/2Mp29oz 26. https://bit.ly/42OsvFy 27. https://bit.ly/3lOOtrp 28. https://bit.ly/3Kide8D 29. https://bit.ly/42RTv6U 30. Gillette, W. (1982). Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879. Louisiana State University Press. 31. Sides, J., Tesler, M., & Vavreck, L. (2018). Identity Crisis. Princeton University Press. 32. https://n.pr/3nvHVhO 33. https://n.pr/2xrtHUJ 34. https://bit.ly/2NlyIWS 35. https://bit.ly/3ZlRixD 36. https://cnn.it/3ZpcYsP 37. https://bit.ly/3Zpkm7p 38. https://bit.ly/3G1Ldzw

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Did Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb discover the remnants of an interstellar meteor in the form of spherules on the ocean floor? Could they be of alien origin? The object, which he labels IM1—Interstellar Meteor 1—collided with Earth nearly a decade ago and was tracked by U.S. government satellites, which gave Loeb and his team coordinates of where to look. Most of the meteor burned up in the atmosphere but tiny spherules remained on the ocean bottom, which Loeb retrieved and…

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The world faces two energy crises: (1) too much, because we are changing the Earth’s climate and chemistry and so inviting global catastrophe; and (2) too little, because the bulk of humanity still lives in poverty, without enough for a decent standard of living. The answer to both is to go nuclear. Upon examination, the arguments made against nuclear energy, including: emissions, waste disposal, accidents, and proliferation are shown to be exaggerated, unfounded, or soluble using even currently available technology.

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Shermer and Larson discuss: Was America founded in 1619 or 1776? • What is/was an “American”? • Founding Fathers attitudes toward slavery • What was the justification of slavery? • constitutional convention and slavery compromises • U.S. Constitution and slavery • Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments • Atlantic slave trade • Fugitive Slave Act and Clause • Native Americans • monogenism vs. polygenism • slavery abolition • Quakers push for abolition • Three-fifths Compromise • The Dread Scott Decision and…

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The Paris Accords have been a failure in reducing global warming. Solar and wind energy have not been the panacea environmentalists promised. To avoid catastrophic economic impacts, the United States needs to keep producing oil and gas until other ways of mitigating global warming can be found. Fracking has helped turn the United States into the world’s leading oil and gas producer. But the health of future Earth relies on keeping a strong economy while we transition away from oil and gas. Nuclear energy plants have been shown to be clean and safe after decades of research and development and still remain the best option for the source of our future energy.

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Shermer and Curran discuss: • Curran’s own perfectionism and how that led him to research perfection • What is perfection? Is he measuring perfection or something else? • The Big Five Personality Scale (OCEAN) and where perfection falls in it • goals, meritocracy, high standards, and conscientiousness • self-oriented vs. other-oriented vs. socially prescribed perfectionism • Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong • origins of perfectionism • consequences of perfectionism • social media • income inequality, UBI, GDP, economics • helicopter parenting and coddling • generational differences in perfectionism.

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Advances in civilization are driven by the availability of excess energy. As the human population has exploded over the past two centuries, the global consumption of energy has also drastically expanded. But the current economic model is unsustainable without the development of a clean, unlimited source of energy. Space-based solar power (SBSP) can directly access the power of the Sun, and has the potential to be that clean, unlimited baseload power source of energy for the entire planet.

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Shermer and Lomborg discuss: perfect solutions vs. practical trade-offs • benefit-cost analysis • time horizons and discounting the future • the value of a statistical life • saving the environment, the poor, the diseased • the millennium development goals • the sustainable development goals • tuberculosis • education • maternal and newborn health • agricultural R&D (more and cheaper food) • malaria • land tenure security • nutrition • chronic diseases • childhood immunization • corruption • highly skilled migration.

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After her wrongful conviction for murder in 2007, Amanda Knox was haunted by one question: why? Why did this happen? How could the pursuit of justice have gone so far off course? Corruption and evil were not satisfactory answers for her. Instead, she found understanding through the study of motivated reasoning and cognitive bias, which led her see how well-intentioned people could have arrived at such false conclusions, and how she herself could become a better thinker.

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Shermer, Simons, and Chabris discuss: • How rational vs. irrational are humans? (Daniel Kahneman vs. Gerd Gingerenzer) • Truth Default Theory, or Truth Bias • deception vs. deception detection • social proof and the influence of others on our beliefs • cults • Bernie Madoff • Harvey Weinstein • Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos • Nigerian spam scam • cheating in chess • habits of thought that can be exploited • information hooks we find especially enticing instead of triggering skepticism • scientific fraud and the replication crisis • how to prevent from being a victim of fraud or a con.

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The monsters of fiction and film function as coping mechanisms and cautionary tales, and sometimes fill voids in otherwise pedestrian lives. Most will remain fiction, but one — ironically, the most far-fetched — seems to be slowly taking shape.

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Shermer and Saad discuss: operational definitions of the “good life,” “happiness,” and “well being” • emotions • eudaimonia (the pursuit of meaning) versus hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure) • genetics and heritability • cultural components • the Big Five (OCEAN) • marriage (mate selection) • health • exercise and stress reduction • religion • anti-fragility • a playful outlook and curiosity • variety (the “spice of life”) • what the ancient Greeks got right about living the good life • how failure may actually be a key to more happiness • persistence, grit, and risk taking • regret and the dark side of consumption and addictions.

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Shermer and Rufo discuss: race as America’s original sin • civil rights movement then and now • liberalism vs. illiberalism • equality vs. equity • overt racism vs. systemic racism • intellectual origins of the cultural revolution: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, Derrick Bell, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton • Black Lives Matter origins in the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panthers • critical race theory (CRT) • diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and more…

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Media coverage often claims scholastic admissions tests (e.g., SAT, GRE) are inaccurate, inequitable, and ineffective because: (1) any racial/ethnic differences are caused by test bias; (2) tests don’t predict anything important; (3) tests merely reflect wealth not acquired skills or academic potential; so (4) admissions would be fairer without them. This article presents mainstream scientific evidence that each claim is false. Since admission test scores are the most resistant to bias, getting rid of them would make admissions less fair.

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Shermer and Eig discuss: how to write biography • the history of the King family going back to slavery, Jim Crow, etc. • the influence of King Sr. on Martin’s intellectual and emotional development and the Ebenezer Baptist Church • King’s early experience with racism in the south • King’s religious beliefs and the influence of his faith on his civil rights activism • the influence of Gandhi and Reinhold Niebuhr on King’s strategic activism and deep belief in nonviolence • King’s politics • Malcolm X • Native Americans • gay rights • accusations of plagiarism, and more…

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Shermer and Özkirimli discuss: identity politics, cancel culture • woke, TERF, anti-fragility, anti-racism • diversity, equity, and inclusion • Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo • Loretta Ross, rape, retributive vs. restorative justice • Woman’s March • leftism, progressivism, democratic socialism, liberalism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, conservatism, populism, nationalism, white nationalism, authoritarianism, tyranny • moral panics • MAGA, Trump • victimhood • safetyism • trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions • What Went Wrong?

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Despite much ballyhoo in the media, all efforts thus far have failed to provide substantive evidence that might link the appearance of UFOs, now called UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena), with aliens from other planets. This failure results from limitations imposed by both biology and distance. As Morton Tavel explains, when these factors are combined, they render any such contacts virtually impossible.

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Shermer and Mandel discuss: the problem of woke ideology • anecdotes vs. data about woke actions and intentions • sex and gender • woke medicine • transgender affirming care • government vs. private responses to social movements and ideas • Trump, DeSantis, Liz Cheney, the Lincoln Project, and other GOP issues • abortion: pro-Choice or pro-Life? • support for children: government or private? • What is “the left” and how does it differ from liberalism, classical liberalism, and libertarianism? • What are the true motives of woke progressive leftists?

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Hood, Price, and Shermer discuss: why we age and die • sickcare vs. healthcare • the 10 most popular drugs in the U.S. work for only about 10% of treated people • chronological age ≠ biological age • life expectancy, life span, longevity, and healthspan • why eliminating all cancers would only increase average life span by 3 years • genome vs. phenome • gut biome • optimizing brain function • brain plasticity • sleep, nutrition, exercise • Alzheimer’s • AI and quantum computing for better health.

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Alternative archaeologist Graham Hancock has for 40 years been writing bestselling books about the possibility of a lost ancient civilization that existed long before the Egyptians, Hittites, and Babylonians, and now he hosts a wildly popular Netflix documentary series called Ancient Apocalypse in which he presents his theories about what destroyed this lost civilization, which he suggests is described in the legend and myth of Atlantis, in stunning cinematographic beauty. But is it true? In this analysis of the documentary series and Hancock’s theories Michael Shermer considers the evidence and finds it wanting.

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Shermer and Shellenberger discuss: the original article in Debrief • the authors Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal • why this story was not covered by the New York Times or the Washington Post • whistleblower David Grusch and his claim that the U.S. government and its allies have in their possession “intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin,” along with the dead alien pilots • claims of the many types of alien ships and alien beings, and that the aliens might be multi-dimensional in nature • that there is a sophisticated cover-up by the military of which even the POTUS isn’t aware • what Shellenberger’s new sources told him about Grusch’s claims, and more…

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Who are the “magicians of the gods,” in Graham Hancock's alternative history series Ancient Apocalype on Netflix, and where did they come from? Professor of geology, Marc Defant, applies critical thinking to Hancock's historical and literary research to identify the erroneous conclusions in both his series and in his many books, which have been highly influential in presenting Hancock’s alternative theory of history to those less prepared to evaluate the evidence (or lack thereof).

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Is the Government Hiding Aliens? A commentary on the latest UAP/UFO story about the whistleblower and the government UFO retrieval program. In this special episode of The Michael Shermer Show, Dr. Shermer addresses the latest claims by a whistleblower that the U.S. government and its allies has spacecraft that are “off-world,” meaning extraterrestrial in nature.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss357_Matt_Thornton_2023_05_11.mp3Download MP3Shermer and Thornton discuss:

• gift of violence vs. gift of fear (Gavin de Becker)
• mission of Straight Blast Gym: “To make good people more dangerous to bad people.”
• Why did violence evolve?
• Are we naturally violent, pacifist, or context dependent?
• aggression: passive, proactive, reactive, relational
• plusses and minuses of violence
• violence as deterrence
• moralistic punishment and the game theory analysis of the logic of violence
• mass public shootings and school shootings
• gun violence in general (homicide, suicide, accidents)
• violence against women
• violence against children
• male-on-male violence
• violence and alcohol and drugs
• violence and adultery/infidelity
• race and violence
• self-control and violence
• psychopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder (APD) and violence
• training soldiers for violence
• choke holds and other ways to restrain someone else’s violence
• male role models and violence
• Rodney King, Michael Brown, George Floyd
• police violence
• bullying
• fatherless homes
• rape and sexual violence
• self-defense
• how to reduce violence personally.

Matt Thornton has been teaching functional martial arts for more than thirty years and holds a 5th degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His organization, Straight Blast Gym, has more than seventy locations worldwide and has produced champion MMA fighters as well as world-class self-defense and law enforcement instructors. He lives with his wife Salome and their five children in Portland, Oregon. His new book is The Gift of Violence: Practical Knowledge for Surviving and Thriving in a Dangerous World.

From Michael Shermer’s 2015 book The Moral ArcHave you ever thought about killing someone? I have. I am not alone. In fact, the evolutionary psychologist David Buss, in his 2005 book The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill, reports that most people have harbored homicidal fantasies at some point in their lives. Who are these homicidal fantasists? “Not the gang members or troubled runaways one might expect to express violent rage,” Buss explained, but “intelligent, well-scrubbed, mostly middle-class kids.” The results shocked him. “Nothing had prepared me for the outpouring of murderous thoughts my students reported,” which led him to suspect “that actual homicides were just the tip of the deep psychological iceberg of murder. Could actual murder be only the most flagrant outcome of a fundamental human drive to kill?”1

To find out, Buss not only conducted his own studies, but gathered the results of other related studies, that together comprised a database of over 5,000 people worldwide. The results illuminate the darker side of human nature: 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women reported having had at least one vivid homicidal fantasy in their life. One man who acted on these fantasies, from a group of Michigan murderers whom Buss studied, said he killed his girlfriend because “I was deeply in love with her and she knew that. It infuriated me for her to be with another guy.” Jealousy is a common motive, as evidenced in another case in which a man flew into a jealous rage during sex with his wife. Why? According to him, she asked him “How does it feel to fuck me right after someone else has?” He strangled her to death in bed.2 The impetus behind jealousy is not hate, but love and attachment, as in this police confession by a 31-year-old man after stabbing his 20-year-old wife to death when she confessed to having sex with another man during a six-month separation:

I told her how can you talk about love and marriage and you been fucking this other man. I was really mad. I went to the kitchen and got the knife. I went back to our room and asked: Were you serious when you told me that? She said yes. We fought on the bed. I was stabbing her. Her grandfather came up and tried to take the knife out of my hand. I told him to go and call the cops for me. I don’t know why I killed the woman. I loved her.3

Even though most such murders are committed by men, there are enough women who do so — and with equally moralistic motives — to constitute a sizable database. For example, case #S483 in Buss’s study, a 43-year old woman, thought about killing her 47-year old boyfriend:

I had this vision of putting poison in his food. My imagination started from the moment when he is back home, and went for his bath. I would put the dinner on the table and take out 2 separate bowls for the soup. One bowl of his will contain rat poison. Without suspicion he will finish the soup. Then I visualize him suffering stomach pain, then white bubbles come out of his mouth, and the next thing he collapses.4

Case #P96, a 19-year old woman, wanted her ex-boyfriend dead after a series of events over the course of their year and a half relationship:

The things he did to make me think about killing him were as follows: try to control who I saw, what I did, where I went, when I went. He tried to control every aspect of my life once we came to college together. He would say mean things, call me names, make me feel worthless or like I couldn’t find anyone else…. There were two main events that triggered my thoughts — 1) he got in a huge fight with my mom, 2) he called me a whore.5

Buss’s point in recording the motives behind these cutthroat fantasies is to confirm the fact that most murders are moralistic in nature. In the mind of the fantasist or the perpetrator, at the time of the murder the victim deserved to die. Over the course of history there have undoubtedly been incalculable instances of abuse so violent that a violent reaction was called for; thus a case can be made that we evolved the capacity for such murderous retaliation out of self-defense. If you do nothing to defend yourself, the bully, abuser, or murderer gets away with it, thereby setting up a self-perpetuating system of brutality as a means to an end. Victims who fight back put the perpetrator (and bystanders) on notice that violence will be met with violence. For example, Buss cites the case of an Australian man named Don who was killed by his wife Sue, after 14 years of an abusive marriage:

Don had also become quite abusive, verbally and physically. The latter included many types of humiliation, and being hit across the head regularly, being threatened with death, being locked in a closet, and being forced to sit looking in a mirror while Don made derogatory comments about her. On the night of the killing, Don held a knife to Sue’s throat while threatening to kill her. He had also both locked her in a closet and urinated in her face. Later that night, after Don had gone to sleep…Sue struck him with an axe to the side of the neck about three times. She then stabbed him in the stomach about six times with a large carving knife.6

Is there anyone — aside from Don — who would not read this account with some sympathy and understanding for Sue? If someone hit me on the head, humiliated and derided me, locked me in a closet, urinated in my face, and threatened to kill me — or did this to someone I loved — I can easily imagine myself swinging that axe with my sense of moral righteousness dialed up to eleven. Moral righteousness appears to be what a woman named Susan felt when she responded aggressively to her abusive cocaine-addicted husband as he advanced on her with a hunting knife screaming “Die, bitch!” Susan kneed him in the groin and grabbed the knife — surely a rational response to a wigged-out maniac. At her trial she said, “I was terrified because he was gonna kill me. I knew the second that I stopped he was gonna get the knife back and then I was gonna be the one that would be dead.”

However, once she got started, Susan found that she couldn’t stop stabbing her husband, a phenomenon that the sociologist Randall Collins calls “confrontational tension.” This kind of exorbitant, rising psychological pressure can lead to a “tunnel of violence,” and in its most extreme expression a “forward panic” — an explosion of rage and anger that is released through aggression and violence, as in the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers who appeared on the bystander’s grainy video like a pack of wolves ripping apart their prey.7 While lost in her tunnel of forward panic violence, Susan stabbed her husband 193 times. “I stabbed him in the head and I stabbed him in the neck and I stabbed him in the chest and I stabbed him in the stomach, and I stabbed him in the leg for all the times he kicked me, and I stabbed him in the penis for all the times he made me have sex when I didn’t want to.”8

Such revenge emotions are common enough that authors and film directors count on them, as the post-rape revenge scene in the film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo demonstrates. As the main character, Lisbeth Salander, tasers her rapist, ties and gags him, and tattoos “I am a sadistic pig and a rapist” on his torso in giant letters, the audience in the theater in which I saw the film cheered loudly with righteous approval.

The Evolutionary Logic of the Moral Starting PointIf you were a molecule what would you do in order to survive? First you would need to build a substrate on which to generate a replication system inside of a cell that contains machinery for energy consumption, maintenance and repair, and other features that keep the molecule intact long enough to reproduce. Once such molecular machinery is up and running the replicating molecules become immortal as long as there is energy to feed the system and an ecosystem in which these processes can take place. In time, these replicating molecules will out-survive non-replicating molecules by virtue of the very process of replication — those that don’t, die — thus the cells or bodies in which the replicators are housed are survival machines.

In modern jargon, the replicators are called genes and the survival machines are called organisms, and this little thought experiment is what Richard Dawkins means by the “selfish gene” in his book of that title. A cell, or body, or organism — a survival machine — is the gene’s way of surviving and perpetuating itself. Genes that code for proteins that build survival machines that live long enough for them to reproduce will win out over genes that do not. Genes that code for proteins and enzymes that protect its survival machine from assaults such as disease, help not just the organism to survive, but the genes as well. Survival, reproduction, flourishing: this is what survival machines do by their very nature. It is their — our — essence to strive to survive.

The problem is that survival machines scurrying around in, say, a liquid environment like an ocean or pond will bump into other survival machines, all of whom are competing for the same limited resources. “To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not its own child or another close relative) is part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food,” says Dawkins. But there’s a difference between a survival machine and a rock. A survival machine “is inclined to hit back” if exploited. “This is because it too is a machine that holds its immortal genes in trust for the future, and it too will stop at nothing to preserve them.”

Thus, Dawkins concludes, “Natural selection favors genes that control their survival machines in such a way that they make the best use of their environment. This includes making the best use of other survival machines, both of the same and of different species.”9 Survival machines could evolve to be completely selfish and self-centered, but there is something that keeps their pure selfishness in check, and that is the fact that other survival machines are inclined “to hit back” if attacked, to retaliate if exploited, or to attempt to use or abuse other survival machines first.

Revenge and Justice as DeterrenceThe emotions driving the need for justice evolved for a number of good evolutionary reasons, one of which is to deter others from free riding, cheating, stealing, bullying, and murder. A perpetrator who is cognizant of the possibility of retribution may hesitate or even fail to act altogether, assuming that he (or, less likely, she) has the normal response of apprehension and fear of the threat of punishment. And for those who lack such sensitivities to the feelings of others — also known as psychopaths — brute force may be the only currency they understand. So an evolved sense of retributive justice is natural, and in many cases it may have been the only course of action available to our ancestors. Indeed, had we not evolved such emotions our Paleolithic ancestral tribes might have been overrun by toughs, bullies, and killers, and that might have spelled the doom of our species.

How human groups developed systems of justice is the subject of anthropologist Christopher Boehm’s enlightening — and in places shocking — book Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame.10 Boehm’s analysis is derived from a database that begins with 339 pure forager societies, then subtracts out those that likely do not resemble our ancestors (mounted hunters, horticultural hunters, fur trade hunters, and sedentary-hierarchical hunters) to produce a working dataset of 50 Late-Pleistocene Appropriate (LPA) societies from which to work. These are groups either still in existence today or groups that were studied within the past century by anthropologists, and who might reasonably be assumed to represent a close approximation to how our ancestors lived. These ethnographies, in conjunction with archaeological evidence, form the basis for theories on how our species lived before the rise of civilization.11

Boehm argues that moralistic punishment evolved, in part, to solve the problem of how altruism could evolve, and how these relatively equitable societies could be stable when free riders could game the system by taking more than they put in; by, say, slacking off on a gathering expedition, hanging back during a dangerous hunt, or simply taking more than their fair share of food. Thus, Boehm found that all of these societies had sanctions to deal with deviants, free riders, and bullies, which range from social pressure and criticism to shaming, ostracism, ejection from the group, and even — in extreme cases when nothing else works — capital punishment. The sanctioning process begins with gossip as a private exchange of evaluative information about who is doing their fair share and who isn’t, who can be trusted and who cannot, who is a good and reliable member of the group, and who is a slacker, cheater, liar, or worse. Gossip permits the group to form a consensus about the deviant that can lead to a collective decision about what to do about him (and it is almost always a male). Of course the problem with hardcore bullies like psychopaths is that they don’t care about being detected and talked about, so gossip also served as a means for subordinate band members to form coalitions based on the axiom that there is strength in numbers.

It’s surprising to hear the term “capital punishment” used in the context of hunter-gatherer societies, but the death penalty is sometimes necessary to preserve group harmony in the case of an intractable thug who refuses to bend to the rules or respond to lesser sanctions. In the 50 LPA societies studied, Boehm found that 24 of them practiced capital punishment for crimes such as malicious sorcery, repeated murder, tyrannical behavior, psychotic behavior, theft, cheating, incest, adultery, premarital sex, a taboo violation that endangers everyone in the group, betraying the group to outsiders, “serious or shocking transgressions,” and unspecified deviance. The total comes to 48 percent but is probably higher because capital punishments are notoriously underreported in ethnographies since they are generally hidden from snooping anthropologists — these modern hunter-gatherer societies know that execution is prohibited by the colonial administrators in their region, so they prudently hide it from outsiders.

Anthropologists have documented many forms of disruptive behavior, which Boehm roughly separates into two categories: intimidation and deception. Intimidation includes murder, sorcery, physical violence, and bullying. Deception includes stealing, the failure to share, lying, and cheating. Of the 50 societies in the database, 100 percent reported murder, sorcery, and stealing; 90 percent said people had failed to share, 80 percent had experienced physical violence, 70 percent had bullying as a problem, 60 percent said liars were among them, and 50 percent reported cheating. All of these behaviors generated gossip in the community, which led to group decisions concerning appropriate punishments.

These traditional societies also distinguish between reversible and irreversible sanctioning of deviants. Reversible sanctions are used when the group wants to be rid of an antisocial behavior but not of the perpetrator because he is an otherwise useful member of the group. Irreversible sanctions occur in the form of either permanent expulsion (which often means death by starvation or murder by another tribe) or execution, the latter only after reversible sanctions have failed or when a bully has proven to be a serious threat to the group.

In an evolutionary context, free riders and cheaters who respond to sanctions maintain their genetic fitness and pass on their genes for modest levels of free riding and cheating, which is what we see in all societies today. Of course, as in all human traits, bullying, free riding, and cheating is the result of both genes and environment in interaction, and so we are talking about propensities and probabilities here. In a world in which modest free riding happens — often deceptively making detection difficult — we evolved cheater detection tools and the propensity to gossip about those whom we think might be trying to deceive us and cheat the system. Adding it all up, Boehm concludes that “what we have is a system of social control that can drastically reduce the genetic fitness of more driven free riders whose consciences can’t keep these dangerous traits under control, but that allows the more ‘moderate,’ would-be free riders to control themselves in matters that would otherwise bring punishment and still express their competitive tendencies in ways that are socially acceptable. It’s for this reason that free riders haven’t just gone away.”12

So an evolutionary arms race has left us with cheaters and cheating detection, free riding and free riding deterrence, bullies and bullying punishment. Out of this arms race evolved another feature of the human mind — a moral conscience — that acts as the “inner voice” of self-control. Because social sanctions allow for individuals to reform their bad behavior (before the ultimate form of punishment — banishment or execution — is employed), conscious self-awareness of one’s actions allowed for adjustments to be made of one’s behavior. “It was earlier types of social control that caused a conscience to evolve, and it’s an evolved conscience that makes individuals so adept at this important type of self-inhibition,” Boehm writes. Why, then, are there still modern hunter-gatherers being executed, banished, ostracized, and shamed by their groups for free riding? Because, says Boehm, “they hope they can get away with it.”13 In the long run, however, most don’t, but it’s a long enough run that they manage to reproduce in the meantime so their genes for such cheating and free riding have made their way to modern humans.

About the BookIn today’s modern world, we are largely isolated from the kind of savagery our ancestors faced on a daily basis. Although violence was as natural to our evolutionary development as sex and food, it has become foreign to most of us: at once demonized and glamorized, but almost always deeply misunderstood. Our hard-earned and hard-wired instincts — our evolved and trained ability to survive and overcome violent encounters — have been compromised. Yet, as even a cursory look at news headlines or a police blotter will reveal, the threat of violent crime is ever-present, and those we’ve entrusted to protect us cannot always be relied upon.

The Gift of Violence tells the story of this vulnerability and provides the average person with all the knowledge they need to reduce the likelihood of becoming a victim of violence and to increase their chances of surviving a violent encounter. Based both on the author’s decades of experience teaching everyday people how to defend themselves and on a rational approach to the scientific data, The Gift of Violence offers clear, easy-to-remember lessons for people of all ages and abilities. It is designed to empower those who’ve been affected by violence or are concerned that they or their loved ones could be. In short, it was written to help good people become more dangerous to bad people. Every reader will be armed with the necessary knowledge to harness the power of violence for him — or herself — and, in the process, to be not just smarter and stronger, but also safer.

References1. Buss, David. 2005. The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill. New York: Penguin. 2. Ibid., 70. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 106. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Collins, Randall. 2008. Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory. Princeton University Press. 8. Buss, 2005. 9. Ibid., 66. 10. Boehm, Christopher. 2012. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books. 11. There are critics of this assumption — usually cultural anthropologists and sociologists who place a much stronger emphasis on the role of learning, culture, and the environment than I think is perhaps warranted by the evidence — but almost no one today denies that we have an evolved nature, and that facts about this nature may be gleaned from these numerous sources. 12. Boehm, 2012, 201. Boehm also makes the argument for group selection — in addition to individual selection — in his book, which I think is unnecessary in making his case for the evolution of altruism and the problem of free riding and bullying. The group may seem coherent and cohesive, but it is still a group of individuals, per my discussion of the issue in Chapter 1. 13. Ibid., 201. If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

This episode is sponsored by Wondrium:

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In this interview with Alan S. Blinder, one of the world’s most influential economists and one of the best writers in the field, the former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve Board draws on his deep firsthand experience to share insights on “economic matters” with readers of Skeptic.

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Shermer and Mac Donald discuss: race as America’s original sin • civil rights • equality vs. equity • disparate impact • overt racism vs. systemic racism • why Blacks make less money, own fewer and lower quality homes, work in less prestigious jobs, hold fewer seats in the Senate and House of Representatives, run fewer Fortune 500 companies • race and science, medicine, classical music, opera, Juilliard, Swan Lake, museums, and the law • crime and mass shootings • George Floyd and race riots • the future of the problem of race trumping merit and what to do about it.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss355_Simon_Winchester_2023_04_18.mp3Download MP3Shermer and Winchester discuss:

• how to become a professional writer
• ChatGPT, GPT-4, and AI
• knowledge as justified true belief
• What is truth?
• Are we living in a post-truth world of fake news, alternative facts, postmodernism and relativism?
• education, past and present
• books and the printing press
• the history and future of encyclopedias
• museums: should they repatriate objects taken during colonialism (e.g., the Elgin Marbles)?
• photography
• print journalism
• broadcast journalism
• search engines and knowledge dispersal
• internet and knowledge.

Simon Winchester is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Professor and the Madman, The Men Who United the States, The Perfectionists, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, and Krakatoa, most of which were New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. In 2006, Winchester was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen. He resides in western Massachusetts. His new book is Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic.

About the BookFrom the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient museums to modern kindergarten classes — this is award winning writer Simon Winchester’s brilliant and all-encompassing look at how humans acquire, retain, and pass on information and data, and how technology continues to change our lives and our minds.

With the advent of the internet, any topic we want to know about is instantly available with the touch of a smartphone button. With so much knowledge at our fingertips, what is there left for our brains to do? At a time when we seem to be stripping all value from the idea of knowing things — no need for math, no need for map-reading, no need for memorization — are we risking our ability to think? As we empty our minds, will we one day be incapable of thoughtfulness?

Addressing these questions, Simon Winchester explores how humans have attained, stored, and disseminated knowledge. Examining such disciplines as education, journalism, encyclopedia creation, museum curation, photography, and broadcasting, he looks at a whole range of knowledge diffusion — from the cuneiform writings of Babylon to the machine-made genius of artificial intelligence, by way of Gutenberg, Google, and Wikipedia to the huge Victorian assemblage of the Mundanaeum, the collection of everything ever known, currently stored in a damp basement in northern Belgium.

Studded with strange and fascinating details, Knowing What We Know is a deep dive into learning and the human mind. Throughout this fascinating tour, Winchester forces us to ponder what rational humans are becoming. What good is all this knowledge if it leads to lack of thought? What is information without wisdom? Does Rene Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum — “I think therefore I am,” the foundation for human knowledge widely accepted since the Enlightenment — still hold?

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A review of A First Look at Second Sight by Bob Loomis (2022) and Cues: Variations on the Second Sight Act by Leo Behnke (2005)How can people appear telepathic, and what is the history of duos demonstrating this type of mindreading as entertainment?

Two-person theatrical mindreading acts have been popular in the U.S. and Europe since the mid-1800s, with even earlier roots. In the most common form of this telepathy act, small objects shown to one partner roaming in the audience are correctly identified by the second performer, who is blindfolded and on stage, with no apparent communication between them.

The history of these acts is discussed most thoroughly in the groundbreaking book A First Look at Second Sight by Bob Loomis, in which he also scatters advice to would-be performers throughout. Cues: Variations on the Second Sight Act by Leo Behnke sketches some leading performers’ careers (including more recent ones), but most of the book is about how to perform such an act. The words in these titles reflect their respective subjects: “Second Sight” was an earlier common name for the two-person telepathy performance (also known as “clairvoyance”), while the use of secret “cues” from one performer to the other has been the most frequently (and clandestinely) employed method to accomplish this illusion.

A crude variant of the telepathy trick was revealed in the earliest book to substantively discuss magic tricks in English, The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584. Two-person mindreading was occasionally performed by magicians over the next two and a half centuries but only became common among stage magicians with the successful 1840s show of the highly influential magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin (from whom Houdini took his stage name), and specialists are mostly a somewhat later development. In the early 20th century, the most famous performers of such an act were the husband-and-wife duo, The Zancigs. Both Behnke and Loomis agree that the Zancigs presentation of the act was superior to all others. The Sharrocks and Mercedes both had repeat bookings at the prestigious Palace Theater in New York, Eddie Fields and his partner had a long and successful career (mostly in department stores), while The Roberts were booked regularly and for high fees for decades in theaters and nightclubs.

In total, more than a hundred successful teams are profiled in detail, and a few dozen more are listed in Loomis’s A First Look at Second Sight, while Behnke’s Cues provides much shorter entries on half as many. Most acts consisted of a man and a woman, but a man and a boy were common in the earlier years, and other variations have appeared. Even some mind-reading animal acts are profiled by Loomis, with many more listed in an appendix.

These acts were most commonly called “second sight” in the 19th century and “telepathy” or “clairvoyance” more recently. The fundamental technique utilized is the secret communication of information from the performer in the audience to their partner on stage. Although Behnke and Loomis both give examples of electronics being secretly used to accomplish this, the authors agree that (even at its peak) electronics were usually only a supplement to other techniques. By far, the most common clandestine method was the use of elaborate spoken codes or a similarly vast array of subtle visual cues.

For example, if the performer in the audience borrows keys from an audience member, “keys” could be coded to his blindfolded onstage partner by saying “What object am I holding?” while the phrase “Which object am I holding?” could indicate that, say, a dollar bill has been loaned. How many variants of the question can be used in a way that won’t arouse suspicion? This becomes even more challenging when we learn that dates and even serial numbers were commonly transmitted. My favorite example of an uncommon object successfully coded was a model of a gas stove from someone’s pocket! Both books caution that some people who tried the act gave it up because of the vast amount of memorization and relentless practice required to perform the act effectively.

Some of the best acts confirm the skeptic’s dictum that the unexplained is not the same as the unexplainable. As such, despite mostly appearing as entertainers, two-person mindreading acts have often been perceived as exemplifying real psychic powers. The Zancigs were studied by The Society for Psychical Research (SPR), and even a century later, a leading reference book1 on them says in part that “Mrs. Zancig had well-developed clairvoyant faculties,” though the author acknowledges that other authorities deduced that they used trickery in the form of an elaborate code to create this illusion. The team of Blackburn and Smith had been tested by the same SPR in the 1880s and were determined to be genuine, though one of them later confessed that they indeed employed trickery. The Piddingtons were heard by 20 million London radio listeners in 1949. They initially denied that their work was genuine telepathy, but their manager stated otherwise, and a prominent newspaper called for the SPR to test them as well.

There are other ethical challenges faced by performing mind readers. Worst of all, at least a few of these performers went so far as to provide lucrative private counseling based on the strength of their mind-reading ability, a tragic dilemma dramatized in both the original 1947 film as well as the recent 2021 remake of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel, Nightmare Alley. Some skeptics may also be disappointed at learning of the number of performers who supplemented their income by selling horoscopes, which Behnke encourages.

My criticism of the groundbreaking Loomis book is mostly stylistic: it reads like a rough draft; a manuscript in need of a content editor and a style rewrite. Repetition can be a teaching tool, but here it reads more like sloppiness. For example, discussion of the book’s origin confusingly overlaps between the foreword and the first chapter, while the much later discussion of the variant act using animals explains how pigs were trained for this before stating that pigs were the most used animal because they were easily trainable. Worse, there are several instances in which a profile of a performer ends with Loomis writing about a newly discovered book or article, adding to or even changing what is written on the preceding pages!

As a “how-to” text, Loomis’s book is equally disorganized. Integrating remarks on technique into a history text is not inherently bad, but it is difficult to do well, especially when that history is presented as a series of biographies. This can lead to both confusion and repetition. The primary tactic Loomis uses is pointing out what can be learned from a particular act’s experience in the form of uniform “Observations.” Some of these are useful for anyone (“Observation 27: Don’t believe everything you read.”), any entertainer (“Observation 8: Have an applause-pulling ending.”), or stage psychics only: (“Observation 9: Do not claim genuine ESP.”). One blunder in applying this format is that although he uses these 39 “Observations” throughout the text, they are not listed until an appendix. As a teaching technique, I might have found these “Observations” more effective if summed up, in addition to, or instead of, being scattered throughout the text.

Similarly, although non-academic conversational tone and tangential comments can make a text livelier, Loomis overdoes this to the point of tedium, for example, “No pun intended—Okay, we admit it. It was!” The book is also burdened by frequent paragraph-long discussions of “Trivia” (such as the number of magicians—not only telepathy performers—who flew airplanes). Meanwhile, his core subject of performer profiles is also uneven, ranging from half a page to several pages, with length not always proportionate to their influence, fame, or success with the act.

Some problems with Loomis book might have been easily avoided. Parts of the backmatter, especially Appendix B, could have been either rearranged or integrated into the main text. With so much discussion of the influence of one performer on another, or comparison of techniques between acts, the book’s reverse chronological format can be awkward, and the lack of a useful index is a major hindrance. The book’s “Index” mostly repeats the Table of Contents, and Appendix C does little more than paraphrase it. A little more editorial work would have made A First Look at Second Sight a more coherent and convenient reference.

The sourcing of A First Look is sadly uneven. Although Cues is older, it is the closest there was to an existing history. As such, I was very surprised that Loomis did not at least mention it. Also strange, although the copyright is 2021 (though listed as 2022 on Amazon.com), Loomis’s “Books Cited” lists only one title published later than 2005. Its sourcing is otherwise exemplary, such as his examining two copies of a scarce antiquarian text (owned in different places) or using multiple sources to document a performing duo that was covered in an otherwise excellent earlier book with just one source.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.1
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Leo Behnke’s Cues is more clearly arranged and well edited, and is a well-produced hardcover. Unfortunately, it is seven times as expensive though only one-third the length of the Loomis text. Skeptics may especially appreciate Behnke’s brief discussion of the ancillary but fascinating ancient roots of mindreading performances. His selections of whom to profile are generally well chosen, and he does include more recent performers than does Loomis. It is not always clear why some acts in Cues are profiled in the history section and others in the “Types of Presentation” section. In his chapter on promotion, the assumption that marketing is done on paper rather than digitally is not up to date. Behnke has a few useful remarks preceding his list of recommended how-to books, while his separate end-of-book bibliography is only a short title checklist and includes such far afield (though interesting) books as The Golden Bough by James Frazer and a seminal book on the history of cryptography and cryptology, David Kahn’s The Code Breakers.

Both books are recommended for the serious investigator because Loomis doesn’t detail a how-to system as Behnke does, and Behnke’s insights as a veteran performer of the act are very valuable. Loomis discusses many more performers than the casually interested reader probably wants to know. For understanding the history of stage psychics, A First Look At Second Sight is a major contribution, especially in combination with John Buescher’s Radio Psychics, which I reviewed in Skeptic 27.3 (2002).

About the AuthorMichelle Ainsworth holds an MA in History and she is currently researching the cultural history of stage magic in the United States. She is a humanist and lives in New York City.

References1. Shepard, L.A. (1991). The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, p. 1852. Gale Research.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss353_Inga_Thompson_2023_05_18.mp3Download MP3Inga Thompson is one of the most decorated cyclists in American history. She competed at the 1984, 1988, and 1992 Olympic games. Inga won silver medals at the world championships in 1987, 1990 and 1991, and placed third at the Tour de France in 1986 and 1989. She also won the U.S. National Road Race Championships in 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, and 1993. In 2014 she was inducted in the U.S Bicycling Hall of Fame and has since worked to advance women in sports, and as such serves on many advocacy groups and has her own Inga Thompson Foundation (ingathompsonfoundation.org) that advocates for women’s sports.

You might ask, besides being aware I’m something of a bike geek, why am I having a cyclist on the show? Well, we’re not here to talk about bikes or training diets.

We are here to talk about what happened to Inga when she spoke out in defense of women’s rights. Not against bible-thumping religious fundamentalists who think women belong in the kitchen and bedroom making dinner and babies, but against her fellow liberals.

Let me be clear: this is a sensitive and complex issue. Transgender individuals often experience body dysmorphia. Common treatments for dysmorphia include hormone therapy and gender affirmation surgery, which typically entails surgically creating a neovagina, breast implants, facial feminization, and sometimes hair transplants or alteration of the vocal cords.

These physical changes often help alleviate the symptoms, but they do not fundamentally change the physical advantages the transgender—born biologically male—athlete would have over biological women when competing in women’s sports.

This poses the challenge of conflicting rights, which is the subject of this conversation…

What should we do when transgender athletes, with all the physical advantages of being born male, compete against and defeat biological females?

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss354_Michio_Kaku_2023_05_12.mp3Download MP3Shermer and Kaku discuss:

• AI, GPT, and the end of humanity or civilization or something bad
• AI and sentience/consciousness
• What is intelligence?
• quantum physics
• decoherence
• Uncertainty Principle
• Schrodinger’s cat
• multiverse, parallel universes, and Many Worlds hypothesis
• Einstein
• the evolution of the computer
• quantum computers and…
  • the origin of life
  • climate change solutions
  • feeding 10 billion people
  • energizing the world
  • economics and money (cryptocurrency?)
  • health
  • gene editing and curing cancer
  • immortality
  • simulating the universe
• UAPs and UFOs
• chaos theory and indeterminism
• Are we living in a simulation?
• free will and determinism
• Is the universe predetermined?
• the end of science?
• Is there a God?

Michio Kaku is the co-founder of String Field Theory and is the Henry Semat Professor in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York. He graduated with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in physics from the University of California at Berkeley. He has hosted several TV specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery Channel, and the Science Channel. He hosts two national science radio shows, Exploration and Science Fantastic. He is the author of numerous New York Times bestselling books including: The God Equation, The Future of the Mind, The Future of Humanity, Physics of the Future, Hyperspace, Parallel Worlds, Physics of the Impossible, and Beyond Einstein. His new book is Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything.

About the BookThe runaway success of the microchip processor may be reaching its end. Running up against the physical constraints of smaller and smaller sizes, traditional silicon chips are not likely to prove useful in solving humanity’s greatest challenges, from climate change, to global starvation, to incurable diseases. But the quantum computer, which harnesses the power and complexity of the atomic realm, already promises to be every bit as revolutionary as the transistor and microchip once were. Its unprecedented gains in computing power herald advancements that could change every aspect of our daily lives.

Automotive companies, medical researchers, and consulting firms are betting on quantum computing, hoping to exploit its power to design more efficient vehicles, create life-saving new drugs, and streamline industries to revolutionize the economy. But this is only the beginning. Quantum computers could allow us to finally create nuclear fusion reactors that create clean, renewable energy without radioactive waste or threats of meltdown. They could help us crack the biological processes that generate natural, cheap fertilizer and enable us to feed the world’s growing populations. And they could unravel the fiendishly difficult protein folding that lies at the heart of previously incurable diseases like Alzheimer’s, ALS, and Parkinson’s, helping us to live longer, healthier lives. There is not a single problem humanity faces that couldn’t be addressed by quantum computing. Told with Kaku’s signature clarity and enthusiasm, Quantum Supremacy is the story of this exciting frontier and the race to claim humanity’s future.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

This episode is sponsored by Wondrium:

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As Mary McCarthy famously wrote of Lillian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” This observation now has particular applicability to Republican congressman George Santos. He’s biracial. He’s a Jew; no, he later explained, he’s Jew-ish. His mother died on 9/11. He went to two universities. He’s wealthy. He is a Ukrainian descendant of Holocaust survivors. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Gerard Kassar, chair of the Conservative Party of New York State, told Washington Post reporters on December 31. “His entire life seems to be made up. Everything about him is fraudulent.” When a politician is shocked about lies and deceptions, you know we have hit the nadir. Nowadays, for your lie to get attention, you really have to think big. One lie isn’t enough; you must pile them on.

Time to think critically about lying.

Everybody lies. Toddlers start lying as soon as they start speaking, suggesting that deception evolved right along with language as an adaptive strategy. My friend and longtime colleague Carole Wade told me of searching the house early one morning for her three-year-old son, finally finding him in the pantry with cookie crumbs all over his face. “I told you not to eat those cookies,” she said sternly. “Me no eating cookies, Mommy,” he said.

Young Jason lied for the clearest and most universal of reasons: to avoid punishment and loss of (cookie-crumbed) face. At first, children’s lies are impulsive, caught-in-the-act defenses, and only with age do children develop the cognitive abilities to understand the likely consequences of a lie (and also to lie more efficiently).

I was an expert witness for the defense at a military trial in which a man was accused of sexually abusing an 8-yearold child. The girl, in the midst of being beaten by her father (“disciplining her,” as he called it), had suddenly shouted, “He touched me!” The father stopped immediately and took her to a doctor, who demanded details. Who touched you? Where? How often? When? This poor little girl, who only wanted her father to stop hitting her, was now forced into more lies to support the original one, ending with a false allegation against the one name she could come up with quickly: her father’s best friend and neighbor, who was immediately arrested. I was struck by a question posed to me by a juror: “Why would she lie?” he asked. She was not lying, I explained, in the sense that adults use the word: saying what one knows to be an untruth with the intention to deceive. She simply wanted her father to stop beating her, and her first lie succeeded. Yet she, a child, would have no understanding of the likely long-term consequences of her impulsive remark — that the friend would be arrested, that there would be a trial, that her lie would feed on itself, that she could not ever renege and tell the truth because her father would be even angrier to learn that she “lied” about his friend. She was ensnared.

As this story shows, lies live in the space between truth and consequences. Humans have only about a 50-50 chance of accurately detecting someone else’s lie. As psychologist Paul Ekman, famous for his early research on facial expressions of emotion, once speculated, evidence suggests that human societies muddle along best when we are able to lie but get away with it only sometimes — and also when we can’t be 100 percent certain we can discern anyone else’s lies. This faculty allows lies to serve as truth’s handmaiden, a close ally if not quite an honorable one, creating a fuzzy line that permits the social niceties that keep relationships humming along (“that outfit is stunning on you”; “I’m sorry I missed your wedding, but my goldfish died and I was grieving”). We sometimes call those kinds of lies “good manners.” Of course, sometimes our lies explicitly shield the truth in the name of self-preservation — to avoid getting divorced, fired, punished, or beaten up.

That military juror’s question to me revealed the individualist bias inherent in thinking about lies: It’s all in the person. Is he or she telling a lie, or is that person a liar? There are those who are liars: they lie as often as they breathe; having no core self or moral compass, they simply morph into whatever they want to be or say that day. Fortunately, they are not the norm, which is why such individuals are called “pathological” liars. At the other end of the spectrum are those who strive to live by their core values of honesty and kindness, which is why they are often called “whistle-blowers,” or “moralists,” or “naïve idiots.”

The rest of us fall somewhere along a continuum, lying consciously to others for self-protection or self-enhancement, as the occasion arises. For the majority, therefore, lying is more of a social phenomenon than a psychological or irrational one. Social psychologist Mark Frank, who has been studying deception for many years, observes that “There is a particular structure to every situation in which a lie is told”: the person who lies, their target, their motive, the form of the lie, and, crucially, the stakes associated with telling the lie — what is to be gained, what lost. Lying to avoid punishment is among the first motives to emerge in young children, especially lying to parents, who have the power to punish them, and it remains the number one motive in adulthood, where “punishment” takes more varied and subtle forms. Other leading motives are lying to protect a loved one, to be “loyal” to peers, to avoid embarrassment, and to gain a reward in attention, praise, self-esteem, or promotion.

Thus, to fully understand when and why a person is likely to lie, we need to know what the stakes are for telling the truth versus making something up to deliberately deceive. What does a lie stand to bring them, and what are the consequences if they are caught out?

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.1
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And that brings us back to George Santos. The real tragedy of this story is not that he is a pathetic fool, but rather that there were no serious consequences to his lies: his fellow citizens nonetheless entrusted him to hold office, he got away with his outrageous claims for years, and the guardrails of the social norms that might once have protected us from pathological liars, con men, and shameless wooers of votes are disintegrating. In the Trump era, much has been said about the line between a truth and a lie, but the greater social danger is the obliteration of the line between a lie and its consequences. Once upon a time, anyone bullshitting as blatantly as Santos would have been shamed or laughed out of office. Today, however, anyone’s lie, no matter how outrageous or delusionally conspiratorial or batshit crazy, will find thousands, even millions, of supporters.

How did we get to this point? Not because there’s something in the drinking water that’s making people lie more. It’s because, one step at a time, our society’s moral and social standards have been changing, to the point where, for many, telling the truth is for suckers. I recently reread the ethicist Daniel Callahan’s book The Cheating Culture, which delineates those steps. Titles of eight of his chapters tell the story:

• “Everybody Does It”
• Cheating in a Bottom-line Economy
• Whatever It Takes
• A Question of Character
• Temptation Nation
• Trickle-Down Corruption
• Cheating from the Starting Line
• Crime and No Punishment.

Callahan wrote this in 2004. Talk about being prescient.

About the AuthorCarol Tavris, PhD, is a social psychologist who has written hundreds of articles, book reviews, and op-eds on many topics in psychological science. Her books include Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), with Elliot Aronson; Estrogen Matters; and The Mismeasure of Woman. A Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, she has received numerous awards for her efforts to promote science and skepticism, including an award from the Center for Inquiry’s Independent Investigations Group; and an honorary doctorate from Simmons College for her work in promoting critical thinking and gender equity.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss352_Michael_Shermer_2023_05_18.mp3Download MP3In the final minutes of the final lecture of Dr. Shermer’s final semester at Chapman a student asked what practical lessons for life he might share with them. Dr. Shermer offered as much as he could think of off the top of his head, but since he has researched and written a fair amount on this topic over the decades he sat down and wrote out a final lecture here, not only for his students but for anyone who is interested in knowing what tools science and reason can provide for how to live a good life and how to deal with entropy, problems, setbacks and obstacles, aka normal life. Here are the ten lessons…

1. The First Law of Life
2. To Thine Own Self Be True
3. Be Antifragile
4. Be Self-Disciplined Because Action is Character
5. Don’t be a Victim
6. Don’t Eat the Marshmallow
7. Directing Your Future Self
8. Be Your Own Financial Advisor
9. Build Strong Social Networks
10. Find Your Meaning and Purpose in Life

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss351_Mark_Skousen_2023_04_14.mp3Download MP3Mark Skousen is a Presidential Fellow and the Doti-Spogli Endowed Chair of Free Enterprise at Chapman University. He has a BA, MA, and Ph.D. in economics (George Washington University, 1977). In 2018, Mr. Steve Forbes awarded him the Triple Crown in Economics for his work in theory, history, and education. He has taught economics, business and finance at Columbia Business School and Columbia University. He has worked for the government (CIA), non-profits (president of FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education), and been a consultant to IBM and other Fortune 500 companies. He is the author of over 25 books, including The Making of Modern Economics and The Maxims of Wall Street. He has been editor in chief of an award-winning investment newsletter, Forecasts & Strategies, since 1980. He has written for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine. He produces “FreedomFest, the world’s largest gathering of free minds,” every July in Las Vegas and other cities. He and his wife have five children and eight grandchildren, and have lived in three countries and visited 77. Influenced by his work The Structure of Production (NYU Press, 1990), the federal government began publishing a broader, more accurate measure of the economy, Gross Output (GO), every quarter along with GDP. It is the first macro statistic of the economy to be published quarterly since GDP was invented in the 1940s. His books can be found at skousenbooks.com. His website is markskousen.com.

Shermer and Skousen discuss:

• Is economics politicized?
• Adam Smith and what he really said
• how the economy really works
• fiat money vs. gold standard money
• inflation and what to do about it
• experimental economics
• comparing countries with economic measures
• How much regulation does capitalism need?
• progressive vs. flat taxes
• Keynesian economics
• economic booms and busts
• why the economy crashed in 2008/2009
• Could the American economy ever collapse like Venezuela’s did?
• what the Fed does (or should do)
• Modern Monetary Theory
• GDP (Gross Domestic Product) vs. GO (Gross Output) as economic measures
• bitcoin/cryptocurrency
• why money matters
• monopolies, duopolies, and market capture
• antitrust, trustbusting
• profit and market efficiency
• the relationship between saving and spending, or time discounting: value the future enough to invest in it now but don’t plan for the greatest 90th birthday party ever in case you can’t make it
• What’s wrong with free market capitalism?
• money, happiness, and meaningfulness.

Key Questions to Understanding Economic Matters1. What is the secret to the success of capitalist nations, which have grown by leaps and bounds in the past 200 years? 2. What drives the economy—consumer spending, business investment, or government stimulus? 3. Why are young people so attracted to democratic socialism, and is there a better alternative? 4. Should valuable goods and services like college education, medical services, and transportation be made available to the public for free? 5. What is money, what is it based on without a gold standard, and can crypto ever replace it? 6. Are booms and busts and periods of inflation and recession (like we’re experiencing now) inevitable? 7. Do economists offer any solution to the global warming threat? (why we will never run out of fossil fuels)

Adam Smith in Five Basic Themes1. Pro savings, capital investment, and entrepreneurship 2. Limited government (laissez faire) 3. Balanced budgets except in times of war 4. Sound money (gold/silver standard) 5. Free trade.

Fraser Institute of Canada has rated most countries on the degree of economic freedom. They have found a direct correlation between the level of economic freedom and a country’s standard of living. The think tank uses five criteria to determine each nation’s level of economic freedom, linked to Adam Smith’s classical model.

1. Size of government
2. Property rights and legal structure
3. Sound money
4. Trade policy
5. Business regulation.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

This episode is sponsored by Wondrium:

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss350_Kelly_Pope_2023_04_13.mp3Download MP3Shermer and Pope discuss:

• SBF and FTX
• Bernie Madoff
• The Tinder Swindler
• How gullible are people, really?
• intentional perps, accidental perps, and righteous perps
• innocent bystanders and organizational targets
• accidental whistleblowers, noble whistleblowers, and vigilante whistleblowers
• identity theft
• elder theft
• IRS scams
• doping in sports
• Frank Abagnale Jr.
• Edward Snowden and Julian Assange as righteous perps
• Daniel Ellsberg as a noble whistleblower
• Phil Zimbardo and The Lucifer Effect (bad apple barrels, not bad apples) and perps
• how to tell if you have been a victim of financial fraud.

Kelly Richmond Pope is the Barry Jay Epstein Endowed Professor of Forensic Accounting at DePaul University in Chicago. Pope’s research on executive misconduct culminated in directing and producing the award-winning documentary, All the Queen’s Horses, which explores the largest municipal fraud in U.S. history. In 2020 the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and CPA Practice Advisor named Pope as one of the twenty-five Most Powerful Women in Accounting. Her new book is Fool Me Once: Scams, Stories and Secrets from the Trillion-Dollar Fraud Industry. Connect with her at kellyrichmondpope.com.

About the BookHave you ever wondered why Bernie Madoff thought he could brazenly steal his clients’ money? Or why investors were so easily duped by Elizabeth Holmes? Or how courageous people like Jeffrey Wigand are willing to become whistleblowers and put their careers on the line?

Fraud is everywhere, from Nigerian “princes,” embezzlers, and Ponzi schemers to corporate giants like Enron and Volkswagen. And fraud is costly. Each year, consumers, small businesses, governments, and corporations lose trillions of dollars to financial crime. We’re so accustomed to hearing about fraud that our abilities to identify it and speak about it are limited.

In Fool Me Once, renowned forensic accounting expert Kelly Richmond Pope shows fraud in action, uncovering what makes perps tick, victims so gullible, and whistleblowers so morally righteous, while also encouraging us to look at our own behaviors and motivations in the hope of protecting ourselves and our companies. Pope will inspire you to question your own preconceived notions about fraud. She will challenge your beliefs about yourself and other people, and help you understand a phenomenon that most of us fail to grasp — until it’s too late.

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If you want to make sense of GDP, inflation, interest rates, and economic policy, this is the article for you. We will address the following questions:

1. What is the secret to the success of capitalist nations, which have grown by leaps and bounds in the past 200 years?
2. What drives the economy — consumer spending, business investment, or government stimulus?
3. Why are young people so attracted to democratic socialism, and is there a better alternative?
4. Should valuable goods and services such as college education, medical services, and transportation be made available to the public for free?
5. What is money, what is it based on without a gold standard, and can cryptocurrency ever replace it?
6. Are booms and busts and periods of inflation and recession (like we’re experiencing now) inevitable?
7. Do economists offer any solution to the global warming threat?

To answer the first question, let’s start from the beginning. In 1776, the same year the American colonies declared their political independence, a Scottish professor of moral philosophy, Adam Smith, wrote a declaration of economic independence called The Wealth of Nations, although its full title reveals it to be a work of behavioral science: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It was the first major treatise in economics; it became a bestseller, and Adam Smith became known as the “father of modern economics.”

Professor Smith Goes to WashingtonIn his classic work, Smith addressed the question, “What public policy would be the most conducive to increase the wealth of nations?” His model was revolutionary. As Columbia professor (and founder of the National Bureau of Economic Research) Wesley Mitchell stated, “Adam Smith did for economics in many ways like what Charles Darwin did for biology…a new framework.”1

Basically, Smith rejected the traditional model of authoritarian government at the time. Back then, the state had its hands in everything. England, France, Russia, and other European states constantly interfered in the economy by regulating foreign trade, granting monopolies to certain industries, licensing various occupations, setting wage rates, and even requiring permission to move from one town to another. Labeled “mercantilism,” the government sought to control every aspect of economic life with the purpose of achieving the most rapid growth of a country’s wealth. Exploitation of precious metals, a favorable balance of trade through high tariffs, and wars against nations were used to succeed at the expense of other nations. As Bertrand de Jouvenel observes, “Wealth was therefore based on seizure and exploitation.”2

That, however, wasn’t working. Progress was painfully slow, and life for most humans was, in the oft-quoted observation of the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbs, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”3 Adam Smith devised a solution. He contended that wars, tariffs, and regulations were not only mostly counter-productive but actually decreased the wealth of nations. He proposed a radical alternative, which he labeled a “system of natural liberty” — that the wealth of nations could increase much faster if everyone was allowed the fullest opportunity to pursue their own self-interest, that is, to have the freedom to trade, chose an occupation and business, and to decide for themselves how best to use their labor and capital without government interference. He believed his policies would reduce tensions between nations and allow everyone to improve their standard of living.

Smith wrote, “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men” (emphasis added).4 As Wesley Mitchell concludes, “You see how bold and sweeping that argument is from Adam Smith’s eyes…it is evident, in his own local situation, [that man] is a better judge of where his economic interest lies than any statesman could be. Therefore, the individual will get on best if he is left alone by the government… This is the great argument for laissez faire.”5

The Scottish philosopher did not use the term “laissez faire” or “free market capitalism” to describe his model, but rather a “system of natural liberty” and occasionally “the invisible hand.” It consisted of five basic themes:

1. Pro-savings, capital investment, and entrepreneurship
2. Limited government (laissez faire)
3. Balanced budgets, except in times of war
4. Sound money (gold/silver standard)
5. Free trade.

Smith boldly predicted that if a nation adopted his model of competitive free enterprise, limited government, sound money, and free trade, there would be “universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.”6 It would liberate all people and all nations, rich and poor, from the drudgery of never-ending poverty into a new era of prosperity. On another occasion, Smith opined, “Little else is required to carry a state to the highest level of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.”7

Figure 1. Source: Statistics on World Population, GDP, and Per Capita GDP. 1–2000 CE. Angus Maddison; IMF

Figure 2. Source: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2019.

Standard of LivingIndeed, it wasn’t long after the publication of The Wealth of Nations that the West witnessed the industrial revolution and a dramatic leap in prosperity, as Figure 1 demonstrates: Poverty also declined dramatically over the past 250 years. The percentage of people who earn no more than $2 a day has fallen from 81 percent in 1800 to less than 10 percent today, as tracked in Figure 2.
Another metric of higher living standards is stock market performance. Figure 3 demonstrates what economists call “the triumph of the optimists” in the 20th century.

Figure 3. A century of stock market performance for the United States, the world (including the U.S.), and the world (not including the U.S.). Credit: Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton, Triumph of the Optimists. Princeton University Press, 2002.

Despite two world wars and the Great Depression, stock markets in 34 countries (in North America, Europe, and Japan) have enjoyed an upward trend. The red line represents “American Exceptionalism” — Wall Street having outperformed all other major country stock markets since 1900.

Of course, correlation is not necessarily causation. How much of the leap in output, reduction in poverty, and bull markets was due to the policies recommended by Adam Smith?

We know that his book was an instant bestseller, and was translated over time into all major languages. The classical model of low taxes, free trade, and the gold standard was in fact adopted gradually by Britain and then the United States, followed by other nations. Not all countries adopted the Adam Smith model — the Soviet Union and the Middle Eastern nations being the chief examples — but gradually, most did.

Smith’s laissez faire policy — that “government governs best which governs least,” in the words of Henry David Thoreau — became a popular cause in the 19th century, when the West imposed constitutional limitations on government power, reduced tariffs, and adopted the gold standard.

To be clear, Adam Smith was no anarchist. He saw a vital role for government to establish a “tolerable administration of justice,” the rule of law, the need for military defense, and public works, including public education. Overall, however, he advocated far less government intervention than nations had practiced in the past.

Economic Freedom Index Confirms Adam Smith’s ModelSince the early 1990s, the Fraser Institute of Canada has rated most countries on their degree of economic freedom. They have found a direct correlation between the level of economic freedom and a country’s standard of living. The think tank uses five criteria linked to Adam Smith’s classical model to determine each nation’s level of economic freedom:

1. Size of government
2. Property rights and legal structure
3. Sound money
4. Trade policy
5. Business regulation.

Their studies demonstrate that the freer the countries, the richer they are. Figure 4 shows their results.

Figure 4. Countries with greater economic freedom have substantially higher per capita incomes. Source: Economic Freedom of the World: 2022 Report; World Bank, 2022, World Development Indicators (online database).

What Drives the EconomyWhat is it about economic freedom that leads to higher and faster economic growth? The power to choose results in greater specialization, a comparative advantage, and increased productivity. Entrepreneurship and innovation in creating new products, better processes, and business management skills are the catalysts for a higher standard of living.

According to economists, the major factor in advancing an individual and a nation comes from the supply side of the economy — innovation, entrepreneurship, and new technologies, all funded by a generous pool of savings and investment capital. Countries that encourage high saving rates and creative inventions tend to grow faster. In this regard, America has been the land of opportunity for entrepreneurs from around the world to pursue their dreams.

Is GDP What It’s Made Out to Be?It is a popular myth that “consumer spending drives the economy,” a statement that comes from a misunderstanding of GDP. Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most common measure of the economy. It accounts for the final purchase of goods and services by consumers, businesses, and governments. Since consumer spending represents the largest sector of GDP — a full two-thirds — many media analysts conclude that it is consumption, rather than investment, that drives the economy.

However, the media and Wall Street analysts forget that GDP is not the same as “total spending in the economy.” GDP measures final output only — the finished goods and services that consumers, businesses, and government buy each year. It amounted to nearly $27 trillion 2022.

GDP is an important measure of our standard of living, but it leaves out some important elements of the economy. Most importantly, it omits the value of the supply chain — all the intermediate stages of production that move products and services along the production, wholesale, and retail sectors to the finished product. The value of the supply chain is larger than GDP itself, around $32 trillion this year!

When you include the supply chain, you get what the government calls gross output (GO). The federal government now publishes GO along with GDP every quarter. GO is a much better, broader definition of total economic activity because it measures spending at all stages of production. GO represents the “top line” of national income accounting, while GDP is the “bottom line.” Both are essential to understanding how the economy works.

Using GO as the complete measure of total economic activity, we learn that consumer spending is only one-third, not two-thirds, of GO. Thus, consumption is important, but not as important as business spending along the production process.8 Figure 5 demonstrates how much bigger and more volatile business spending (designated as B2B) is compared to consumer spending.

Figure 5. Data Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Census Bureau. Graph by Ned Piplovic.

Thus, we see that business activity is the big elephant in the room and it is it that determines the economic success of a nation. Consumption is the effect, not the cause, of prosperity. As MIT professor Shlomo Maital concludes, “The health and wealth of a large number of individual businesses — small, medium and large — determine the economic health and wealth of a nation. When they succeed, managers create wealth, income, and jobs for large numbers of people. When they fail, working people and their families suffer. It is businesses that create wealth, not countries or governments. It is businesses that decide how well or how poorly off we are.”9

In the classroom, I use Seattle as an example. Why is Seattle a booming, prosperous metropolitan city today? Is it because its residents suddenly decided to buy more goods and services with their credit cards? No, it was innovative businesses that came up with new products that consumers didn’t know they wanted until the business engineers came up with the new ideas. I ask students to name these companies. They include Boeing (the 700 commercial jet series), Microsoft (Windows software), Starbucks (new kinds of coffee), and Amazon (the online everything store), among others. Granted, all of these companies needed customers to be profitable and to expand, but which came first, the consumer wanting these products, or creative entrepreneurs who invented the new product? Clearly the catalyst, the first mover, is on the business side of invention — on the supply side.

In economics, this is known as “Say’s Law of Markets,” named after the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832), known as the “French Adam Smith.” Dynamic change and economic growth come from the supply side.

Adam Smith Turns 300: Is His Model Still Relevant?As we celebrate this year the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith’s birth (1723), it is appropriate to ask: How much of this classical model of economics is relevant today? In the face of world wars and occasional economic crises (especially the Great Depression of the 1930s), we see that most nations have largely moved away from laissez faire. Government has gotten bigger and more intrusive in almost every nation, although the differences between countries are still large (as evidenced by the Economic Freedom Index in Figure 4).

Figure 6. Average tariff rates from 1830 to 2010 comparing France, the UK, and the U.S. Sources: Imlah, Economic Elements

Certainly the Smithian doctrine of free trade has been the most successful policy recommendation. As we can see from Figure 6, most Western nations have gradually recognized the benefits of free trade and reduced and even eliminated the protectionist system of tariffs and quotas. Other countries have followed suit. Few countries depend on tariffs and duties as their primary source of revenue anymore. Even the “America First” doctrine has not materially raised tariffs. Globalization is here and it’s here to stay.

Figure 7. Source: International Monetary Fund (IMF). Graph by Ned Piplovic.

What about limited government? Not the case. As Figure 7 shows, governments of the developed world have grown dramatically since the 19th-century world of laissez faire was abandoned. In fact, there does not appear to be any evidence that government power has diminished among the major countries. One crisis following another has resulted in an ever-bigger government. Granted, marginal income tax rates on corporations have been declining for some time, but they have been offset by tax increases elsewhere, especially the Value Added Tax (VAT) and sales taxes, and by a dramatic rise in deficits and the national debt.

However, it is worth pointing out that the size of government (in terms of percentage of GDP) has declined sharply in the former Communist nations of Russia and the Eastern Bloc following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its central planning model. China has adopted “state capitalism” over “market capitalism,” but even there the size of government as a percentage of GDP fell sharply after 1980. Instead of 80 percent government control of the economy, China now controls less than 20 percent (in terms of GDP).

Why Has Socialism Failed Throughout History?After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet system in 1989–91, most authoritarian regimes liberalized their economies by cutting taxes, reducing regulations, privatizing government-controlled industries, and inviting foreign capital into their countries.

In very recent times, however, the appeal of “democratic socialism” has made a comeback, especially among young people, who are angry about inequality, attracted to the idea of free medical services (single-payer systems), free college tuition, and even free bus transportation in major cities, and enthusiastic about raising already progressive taxes on the rich to pay of these services. When I discuss the appeal of democratic socialism in lectures at colleges and universities, I begin by writing on the blackboard:

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” and asking the students if this statement reflects their view of an ideal society. Usually two-thirds of the students vote in favor of it.

This is the classic motif of democratic socialism: You work hard, and you get what you need.

I then say, “Okay, students, let’s put our economics hat on and analyze the implications of this idealistic statement.”

First, I ask students, “How much money do you need to live comfortably?” The answer varies depending on the state where they grew up, but let’s assume on average they say around $50,000. Then I ask, “What happens if you make more than $50,000? Do you get to keep this money under this system?”

The answer is “no.” Any salary over $50,000 is put into the community pot to help out those who don’t make $50,000 and accomplish the goal of giving everyone what they need.

Finally, I ask, “What is the marginal tax rate under this system?”

Eventually, students come to the inevitable conclusion: It amounts to a 100 percent marginal tax rate, a confiscatory rate. Thus, we see there is little incentive for an individual to keep working after they earn $50,000.

Then I ask, what about somebody who earns only $30,000 a year? Under this model, they receive an additional $20,000 from the community fund. What incentive do they have to earn more than $30,000? None, because they get the additional $20,000 no matter what.

This exercise is an eye-opener to many students. They realize that no one in this system has an economic incentive to work for more, other than being a compassionate person. And that’s why socialism has failed time and time again. It doesn’t offer incentives to succeed, as an individual, a business, or a nation.

Only after this exercise do I point out that the statement is from Karl Marx.

Democratic Socialism or Democratic Capitalism?Is there an alternative to democratic socialism that would appeal to most young people? It is at this point that I introduce what I call “democratic capitalism,” where everyone benefits from the market economy — not just capitalists, but employees, executives, customers, suppliers, investors, and the community. It’s called the “stakeholders philosophy.”

The story of Henry Ford’s $5-a-day policy is the best example of the stakeholder philosophy. The president of the Ford Motor Company did something revolutionary in 1914 — the maker of the Model T shared the profits with his workers by doubling their wages overnight to $5 a day. This was unprecedented. It not only improved the lives of the average worker, but it gave them enough money to buy the product they were making, the automobile. In one day, Henry Ford destroyed the two biggest arguments by the Marxists against capitalism — exploitation and alienation.

Today there are many examples of businesses that share their success with their workers through profit sharing, stock options, and 401(k) plans. For example, over 12,000 employees at Microsoft have become multi-millionaires because of their stock option plan. The inequality issue could be minimized if more businesses engage in profit sharing.

Should Essential Needs be Free?The free enterprise system is built on the pricing mechanism, which operates as a rationing system. Since we live in a world with limited resources and unlimited demand, prices develop for all goods and services, and those prices vary according to supply and demand.

One thing almost all economists agree on today is that free-enterprise capitalism is the best model to fulfill our ever-expanding needs and wants. It has produced an unparalleled increase in the quantity, quality, and variety of goods and services that no socialist government could imitate. In my Chapman University economics class, I ask a student to go to a large grocery store and find out how many types of bread there are; and another student to go to a liquor store and find out how many types of beer there are. (The answers will astonish you.)

As socialist historian Robert Heilbroner declared that after the collapse of the Berlin Wall: “Capitalism has won. Capitalism organized the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism: that however inequitably or irresponsibly the marketplace may distribute goods, it does so better than the queues of a planned economy; however mindless the culture of commercialism, it is more attractive than state moralism; and however deceptive the ideology of a business civilization, it is more believable than that of a socialist one.”10

However, socialism is not dead by a long shot. Advocates criticize the capitalist model for creating growing inequality of wealth and income, and causing pollution and global warming. Critics of capitalism also complain that the free market cannot provide adequate goods and services to the poor at a reasonable price, and therefore, the best solution is to offer subsidized or free education, transportation, medical services, food, and other essentials to the less fortunate.

In response, I do an exercise with my students on whether the marketplace can fulfill the needs to the rich, the middle class, and the poor. I ask students to examine a variety of needs in society — for example, automobiles, hotels, restaurants, housing, and entertainment — and see how well the marketplace fulfills those needs at each income level.

Students quickly identify markets in these industries for the rich, the middle class, and the poor. For example, there are automobiles for the rich (Mercedes Benz, Lexus, and Tesla), for the middle class (Toyota, Honda, Buick), and for the poor (Chevrolet, Ford, and Kia). There are hotels for the rich (Ritz-Carlton), the middle class (Hilton), and the poor (Motel 6). There are restaurants for the wealthy (Ruth’s Chris Steak House), the middle class (Red Lobster), and the poor (McDonald’s). Conclusion: Capitalism is not just for the rich.

Moreover, the profit motive and competition results in better, cheaper, and newer products being created all the time by entrepreneurs in what Joseph Schumpeter termed “the creative destruction” of dynamic capitalism. (I prefer the less harsh term “creative disruption” popularized by Harvard’s Clay Christensen). As Andrew Carnegie said, “Capitalism is about turning luxuries into necessities.” Big-screen 4K televisions used to cost upwards of $5,000, now they are under $500. One of the fun exercises I do with my students is to create two lists: new products and services that didn’t exist 30 years ago, and old products and services that are now obsolete. Students love discovering how long both lists are.

“Cheaper and better” is the best way to describe the benefits of free enterprise. The exceptions tend to be government-run or government-controlled industries, such as medicine and the post office.

What about inequality? It is true that in recent years during the bull market on Wall Street, there is evidence of growing inequality of wealth and income. However, as I point out to my students, when it comes to the quantity, quality, and variety of goods and services, that inequality gradually disappears. I hold up a smartphone as an example. Almost everyone from rich to poor has a smartphone, which contains an almost unlimited source of knowledge and wisdom. It’s today’s great equalizer.

The Danger of Offering Valuable Products and Services for FreeDespite the benefits of free-market capitalism, there is a growing demand by young people that the government provide free services in education, medicine, and transportation. Surveys show that most college students are worried that the average person can no longer afford a decent higher education or adequate medical care. Note that these two areas are where there are heavy government regulation and subsidies.

“Cheaper and better” applies to almost all goods in the market economy, but not education or medical services. They tend to more expensive and show little improvement recently. Why? Public education is highly subsidized in the United States through federal grants and student loans, yet SAT scores have not improved, indeed, the U.S. is falling behind other nations on standardized educational average test performance. The budget for the U.S. Department of Education exceeds $650 billion a year. Where are the results?

One of the grand principles of economics is that “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” Somebody has to pay, and in the case of free medical services and education, it is the taxpayer.

Offering valuable goods for free also violates one of the cardinal principles of economics: the accountability principle, or “user pays.” Those who benefit should pay. Why? Because they are aware of the cost, they shop around for the best deal, and they demand quality for their money.

Should a valuable service like college education be free, as Senator Bernie Sanders and other democratic socialists advocate? Germany has offered free tuition for college students for years, and the results have been mixed, with problems of overcrowding of classrooms, poor selection of majors, and fewer funds for research.11

In medicine, the all-important principle of accountability is often violated. Those who benefit do not pay. Instead, a third party pays — your employer, your insurance company, or the government. This is known as the “third party problem.” Patients often don’t know the actual cost of their medical expenses. This is especially true in countries that have socialized (single-payer) medical systems such as Canada and most European countries. There’s a disconnect between those who pay (taxpayers) and those who receive the benefits: long lines, shortages, and poor quality of care are common problems in many of these countries.12

The third-party problem is serious in the U.S. As a result, the medical system is expensive, uncompetitive, and often rife with insurance and Medicare/Medicaid fraud.

Singapore’s Medisave Success StoryWhat is the solution? Not the single-payer systems used in Canada and Europe. One of the best examples of a successful medical system is Medisave in Singapore. While the U.S. spends 18 percent of GDP on healthcare, Singapore spends only 4.7 percent, while providing universal healthcare to its citizens — and is ranked the number one most healthy country in the world — in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, and maternal mortality.

And it does so inexpensively. For instance, major surgeries cost 62–92 percent less in Singapore than the U.S. A heart-bypass surgery that would cost $130,000 in the United States costs just $18,000 in Singapore.

They achieve this “cheaper and better” approach in medicine by requiring every worker to have a health savings account, with a high deductible and co-pays that workers can afford. Competition and shopping around for low prices are encouraged because employees pay for most routine expenses through their health savings accounts (accountability principle). A similar health-living program can be found at Whole Foods Market in the United States, with their health savings plans and wellness programs.13

Money, Inflation, and BitcoinAnother major issue in society is the value of our currency. Money is the life’s blood of the economy. The dollar (and other currencies such as the euro and the yen) function as our primary medium of exchange and store of value. However, can we lose faith in the dollar if it loses its value, resulting in runaway inflation? A stable dollar is essential for businesses to operate efficiently. When inflation gets out of hand, it can wreak havoc on businesses, wage earners, and consumers. Once price inflation gets started, it’s hard to contain, because workers demand higher wages, consumers go into debt to buy now to avoid paying higher prices later, and businesses raise prices to keep ahead of rising costs, and also famously try to hide price increases by downsizing products (known as “shrinkflation”).

Rising inflation also causes the Federal Reserve and other central banks to raise interest rates to slow down the economy, often resulting in a recession or a monetary crisis. No wonder the stock market often tanks during a rise of inflation.

Figure 8. Source: Reinhart, C. & Rogoff, K. (2013) Shifting Mandates: The Federal Reserve’s First Centennial. American Economic Review 103:3, p. 48.

As Figure 8 demonstrates, price inflation used to raise its ugly head only during times of war, but since World War II, it has become a permanent feature of the U.S. economy.

There are plenty of excuses why inflation has gotten worse since World War II. They could include:

1. Never-ending wars
2. The creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913
3. Going off the gold standard in 1933 and 1971
4. Adoption of Keynesian economics (bigger government and never-ending deficit spending)
5. All of the above.

Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff are convinced that the most critical factor was going off the gold standard by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 and completely disbanding gold by President Nixon in 1971, thus eliminating entirely the discipline of the gold standard, and allowing the government to print money (increase the money supply) as much as they wish.

The key to controlling the purchasing power of the dollar and other currencies is closely linked to controlling the supply of money and credit. Unfortunately, in today’s world, politicians and central banks are under constant pressure to expand the money supply and engage in easy money.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have become a private alternative to the dollar as a medium of exchange, speculative asset, and inflation hedge, because of limited supply, like gold. Bitcoin, created in 2008 by a mysterious person named Satoshi Nakamoto, can be “mined” through open-source software and is limited to 21 million coins. Bitcoin transactions are recorded on a public ledger called a blockchain. The price of bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies have soared as an alternative currency, but have faced serious challenges, including delays in recording transactions on the blockchain, lack of regulation, tax complications, and fraudulent business practices exemplified by the FTX debacle. The blockchain technology clearly has great potential in business, real estate, and the financial markets, but the outlook for bitcoin and other digital currencies is still uncertain and speculative, depending on how well governments handle the inflation problem.

The last great Federal Reserve chairman was Paul Volcker, who ran the Fed from 1979 until 1987 during the Carter and Reagan administrations. By raising interest rates to 21 percent and curtailing monetary expansion, Volcker successfully overturned the entrenched inflationary psychology that was built into the American economy since World War II. We entered a period of disinflation — no real deflation — and then, like an old penny, inflation came back with a vengeance after the 2020 pandemic. The Trump and Biden administrations engaged in aggressive fiscal (big spending, tax cuts, and trillion-dollar deficits) and monetary (easy money) policies combined to overstimulate the economy to offset the global pandemic lockdown. We are now paying the price with an inflationary boom-bust cycle.

The Boom-Bust CycleThat brings us to this question: how do we control the ups and downs of economy, money and credit, and minimize the never-ending cycle of inflationary booms followed by recessions or worse? The key solution is twofold: The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy needs to be one of stability rather than a never-ending battle between “fighting recession” and “fighting inflation.” The Fed has changed directions between easy money (cutting interest rates) and tight money (raising interest rates) nearly a dozen times since 1980. And fiscal policy (taxes and spending) needs to be dependable and restrained, living within its means during full employment and so minimizing federal deficits. That will make the Fed’s job easier.

Environmentalism and the Global Warming ThreatEconomists have made significant contributions to the debates over ecology and climate change. Yale professor William Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2018 for his pioneering work on the economic impact of rising global temperatures and the “negative externalities” of air and water pollution.

According to economists, the best way to reduce smog and curtail the emission of greenhouse gases is through a combination of new technologies in the private sector and to impose high carbon taxes on polluters. Instead of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) trying to discover a way to reduce automobile emissions, they set strict emission limits and higher fuel mileage standards and let engineers in the car and truck manufacturers come up with a solution — which they did. Starting in 1975, automobiles, trucks, and buses were equipped with the newly invented catalytic converter.

To demonstrate the results of these government regulations, I do a survey every year with my students in Southern California. I ask them, “Since 1960, has air pollution gotten better or worse in the LA area?” Typically 60–70 percent say “worse.” Then I show them Figure 9 (previous page).

Figure 9. Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Graph by Ned Piplovic.

Figure 9 shows two trends — increased use of cars and trucks on Los Angeles freeways, and at the same time a dramatic 97 percent reduction in air pollution, thanks to the catalytic converter and other government regulations. Students are shocked. I tell them how in the 1960s the smog was so bad that it was almost impossible to see downtown LA or Catalina Island. Now, most days are clear. The near elimination of smog in Southern California is truly an environmental success story.

The United States and Europe have made great strides in reducing greenhouse emissions. The real problem lies with developing countries such as China and India, as Figure 10 shows.

Figure 10. Annual total production-based carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and industry, excluding land-use change, measured in tonnes (based on territorial emissions, which do not account for emissions embedded in traded goods). Source: Our World in Data (2022) (CC BY 4.0) based on the Global Carbon Project.

Economists tend to be more skeptical and less alarmist regarding the environmental and global warming threats because they are solution-oriented, see progress, and advocate a cost-benefit analysis to these hot-button issues. William Nordhaus has been criticized by both environmental alarmists and by global warming skeptics. He believes global warming is a real threat, but as an economist, he is also alert to the dangers of going overboard: “If, for example, attaining the 1.5°C goal would require deep reductions in living standards to poor nations, then the policy would be the equivalent of burning down the village to save it.”14

The FutureIdeally, we would like to live in a prosperous society promised by Adam Smith through “peace, easy taxes, a tolerable administration of justice,” and let’s add stable prices, a clean environment, and maximum liberty for all. Is this ideal society beyond reach?

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.1
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Perhaps. I see slow growth ahead, punctuating by recessions from time to time, with the world being burdened with a growing military-industrial complex, a bloated bureaucracy, excessive government debt, more debilitating regulations, a permanent welfare state, an incredibly complex tax system, and politicians falling all over each other to throw more money at their respective pet projects. New technologies can mitigate these burdens, but not entirely. Perhaps there is a white knight out there coming to put America back on a sound fiscal and monetary basis, but I fear Humpty Dumpty has fallen and can’t be put together again. I don’t see America becoming another Venezuela, but neither do I see it as another Singapore.

It’s easy to become pessimistic. Perhaps we can learn something from Adam Smith, who was the ultimate optimist. Nearly 250 years ago, he wrote:

The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition… is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration.15

Economic Terms Used in This ArticleGross Output (GO)the market value of all goods and services produced at all stages of production in a year in a country; considered the “top line” in national income accounting.Gross Domestic Product (GDP)the market value of all final goods and services produced in a year in a country; considered the “bottom line” in national income accounting and standard measure of economic growth.Consumer Price Index (CPI)the weighted average of prices of a basket of consumer goods and services; released monthly by the US Bureau of Labor.Invisible hand doctrinethe idea advocated by Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723–1790) that the voluntary actions of individuals will benefit society in general.Say’s Law of MarketsDeveloped by French economist J.-B. Say (1767–1832), the supply-side theory that economic growth is determined by changes in production and the supply of new goods and services (often said in short hand, “supply creates demand”) and an economic policy that encourages technology, entrepreneurship, savings and capital investment.Keynesian EconomicsDeveloped by British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), the theory that economic activity is determined by changes in aggregate spending by consumers, business and government (often said in short hand, “demand creates supply”), and an economic policy that advocates big government deficit spending and during economic downturns.Marxist EconomicsDeveloped by German economist Karl Marx (1818–1883), the theory that capitalism is exploitive (capitalists don’t share the profits with workers) and destabilizing, and will eventually collapse and be replaced by socialist central planners who operate the means of production.Gold Standarda monetary policy where a country’s money (such as the dollar) is backed by gold, and monetary policy is limited by the rise and fall in the supply of gold.The FedShort for the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, which determines the supply of money and credit, the price of money (interest rates), and the lender of last resort during a financial or economic crisis.Laissez faireFrench for “let us alone,” the philosophy that government should not interfere with the actions of individuals as consumers and business people.Democratic Socialismthe philosophy that government (elected by the people) should provide the basic needs (food, shelter, medical services, education) for the public and be paid for by progressive taxation.Democratic Capitalismthe stakeholder philosophy that successful businesses should fulfill the needs of customers, and share the profits with their employees, suppliers, investors, and the communities they operate in.About the AuthorMark Skousen is a Presidential Fellow and the Doti-Spogli Endowed Chair of Free Enterprise at Chapman University. He has a BA, MA, and PhD in economics (George Washington University, 1977). In 2018, Steve Forbes awarded him the Triple Crown in Economics for his work in theory, history, and education. He has taught economics, business and finance at Columbia Business School and Columbia University. He has worked for the government (CIA), non-profits (president of FEE), and been a consultant to IBM and other Fortune 500 companies. He is the author of over 25 books, including The Making of Modern Economics and The Maxims of Wall Street. He has been editor-in-chief of an award-winning investment newsletter, Forecasts & Strategies, since 1980. He produces “FreedomFest, the world’s largest gathering of free minds,” every July in Las Vegas and other cities. His website is skousenbooks.com.

References1. Mitchell, W.C. (1934). Lecture Notes on Types of Economic Theory (p. 13). Hassell Street Press. 2. De Jouvenel, B. (1999). Economics and the Good Life (p. 100). Transaction. 3. Hobbs, T. (1996/1651). Leviathan (p. 84). Oxford University Press. 4. Smith, A. (1965/1776). The Wealth of Nations (p. 651). Modern Library. 5. Mitchell, Lecture Notes, pp. 15–17. 6. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, p. 11. 7. 1755 lecture by Adam Smith, recorded by Dugald Stewart, cited in Clyde E. Danhert, ed., Adam Smith, Man of Letters and Economist (p. 218), Exposition, 1974. 8. https://www.grossoutput.com/ 9. Maital, S. (1994). Executive Economics (p. 6). Free Press. 10. https://bit.ly/3WUSEiN 11. See for example Jon Marcus, https://bit.ly/3QgeHh9 12. For a critique of the Canadian single payer system, see https://bit.ly/3CcWOtF 13. Flynn, S. (2019). The Cure That Works: How to Have the World’s Best Healthcare at a Quarter of the Price. Regnery. 14. Nordhaus, W.D. (2018). Climate Change: The Ultimate Challenge of Economics (p. 451). Nobel prize lecture. 15. Smith, A. (1965/1776). The Wealth of Nations (p. 326). Modern Library.

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss349_Jean_Twenge_2023_05_04.mp3Download MP3Shermer and Twenge discuss:

• how data is collected on generations
• how to untangle the rat’s nest of interacting causal variables (age, gender, race, religion, politics, SES, big events, slow trends, time-period effects, and generational effects)
• how to determine which direction the causal arrow points (e.g., autonomy to politics or vice versa)
• how generations are defined as fuzzy sets/conceptual categories
• comparative method: what about generations in other countries?
• What about the “Greatest Generation” and the “Lost Generation”? No data?
• how historical events effect generations: The Great Depression, WWII, the Cold War and its end, AIDS, 9/11, The Great Recession, Covid-19… #metoo, #BLM, trans, AI…?
• how long-term trends effect generations: economic trends (inflation, unemployment, income inequality), political trends (more conservative or liberal), cultural trends (music, fashion), societal trends (freedom and autonomy vs. safety and security)
• technology as a driver of generational differences: TV, home appliances, AC, birth control, computers, Internet, social media
• cyclical theories of generational change
• slow-life vs. fast-life strategies
• civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, trans rights…
• abortion and reproductive choice
• education
• religion
• marriage, children, home ownership, sex, birthrates, divorce
• happiness, meaningfulness and the search for purpose in self and others
• mental health (depression, anxiety, self-harm, loneliness)
• alcohol, drugs
• cancel culture and free speech issues
• cultures of honor vs. cultures of victimhood
• self-esteem movement
• moral progress
• future generations: economic, political, social, and population trends.

Jean M. Twenge, PhD, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is the author of more than a hundred scientific publications and several books based on her research, including Generations, iGen, and Generation Me. Her research has been covered in Time, The Atlantic, Newsweek, the New York Times, USA TODAY, and the Washington Post. She has also been featured on Today, Good Morning America, Fox and Friends, CBS This Morning, and NPR. She lives in San Diego with her husband and three daughters.

About the BookThe United States is currently home to six generations of people:

• Silents, born 1925–1945
• Baby Boomers, born 1946–1964
• Gen X, born 1965–1979
• Millennials, born 1980–1994
• Gen Z, born 1995–2012
• Polars, born after 2012

They have had vastly different life experiences and thus, one assumes, they must have vastly diverging beliefs and behaviors. But what are those differences, what causes them, and how deep do they actually run?

Professor of psychology and “reigning expert on generational change,” Jean Twenge does a deep dive into a treasure trove of long-running, government-funded surveys and databases to answer these questions. Are we truly defined by major historical events, such as the Great Depression for the Silents and September 11 for Millennials? Or, as Twenge argues, is it the rapid evolution of technology that differentiates the generations?

With her clear-eyed and insightful voice, Twenge explores what the Silents and Boomers want out of the rest of their lives; how Gen X-ers are facing middle age; the ideals of Millennials as parents and in the workplace; and how Gen Z has been changed by COVID, among other fascinating topics.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

This episode is sponsored by Wondrium:

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss348_Tanya_Luhrmann_2023_04_11.mp3Download MP3Shermer and Luhrmann discuss:

• What is the anthropology of religion?
• What is “that still small voice” we all hear in our heads?
• When people say they “hear the voice of God” what does that mean?
• What do people mean when they say they are “walking with God”?
• normal “voices within” vs. hallucinations and psychoses
• psychiatrist Milton Rokeach’s book The Three Christs of Ypsilanti
• mystical experiences
• anomalous psychological experiences
• sleep paralysis and other cognitive anomalies
• belief in angels and demons
• absorption and religious beliefs
• prayer vs. meditation vs. mindfulness
• sensed presences
• What is faith?
• What is religion?
• why people believe in God
• Charismatic/Pentacostal religions
• empirical truths, religious truths, mythic truths
• how people come to religious belief vs. how they leave religion
• theodicy, or the problem of evil
• kindling
• magic and superstition
• witches and witchcraft
• shamans and shamanism.

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor at Stanford University, where she teaches anthropology and psychology. Her books include When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God and How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others. She has written for the New York Times, and her work has been featured in the New Yorker and other magazines. She lives in Stanford, California.

About the BookHow do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people — as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn’t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion Tanya M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort — by changing the people who do it and giving them the benefits they seek from invisible others — helps to explain the enduring power of faith.

Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. Along the way, Luhrmann shows why faith is harder than belief, why prayer is a metacognitive activity like therapy, why becoming religious is like getting engrossed in a book, and much more.

A fascinating account of why religious practices are more powerful than religious beliefs, How God Becomes Real suggests that faith is resilient not because it provides intuitions about gods and spirits―but because it changes the faithful in profound ways.

Show NotesOn January 19, 2023 I received a letter from a reader of my work related to what might actually be happening when people claim that they hear the voice of God, sometimes through prophecy but more often through prayer and otherwise daily occurrences. Here is the letter:

Hi Michael!

I am a big fan of your work and appreciate your careful thought. Your ability to charitably and critically consider all sorts of views, even wild claims is inspiring! I am really trying to apply the same kind of critical thinking you encourage to my own worldview. In brief, I grew up Christian but have come to really question most of the worldview I grew up with as I have learned more about critical thinking, cognitive biases, science, history, etc.

However, I am still very much a part of a Christian community, since my entire family is still Christian. An issue that comes up often, that I would love to hear your input on, is the idea that God “speaks” to people individually and regularly. Also, that God gives “prophetic words” to people today about future events. I sincerely doubt this myself.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic, especially after reading the latest issue of Skeptic magazine on Christian Nationalism. As I am sure you are aware, many Christian leaders claimed to hear from God that Trump was going to win the 2020 election. When he did not, very few of them admitted they were wrong or mistaken. This is just one example of a very pervasive problem in Christian culture. Many people base important life decisions — or even insurrections — on their perceptions, or those of their leaders, of God’s personal revelation to them. This can come in the form of an “impression,” a confident feeling, a “still small voice,” a personal interpretation of a cherry-picked Bible verse, a picture in their mind, unique circumstances, etc.

Do you have any past articles or podcasts on this topic? I could not find any. Specifically, about how to evaluate claims of hearing from God? I want to find a better way to help people in my community consider the likelihood that they are not hearing from God, but in a charitable way. My own opinion is that cognitive bias and motivated reason most likely account for the majority of these claims. This also, in my view, accounts for much of the Bible’s claims that God commanded terrible things like sacrificing Isaac, acceptance of slavery, the Canaanite genocide, etc. — fallible humans believed they heard from God, but were mistaken. Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks for your great work and your generous spirit!

—Taylor

One hypothesis is that there is a God and this deity communicates directly to and through people for a variety of claimed reasons, from love, reassurance and comfort, to answering prayers, delivering prophecy, and announcing forthcoming events. How a presumably incorporeal deity could “speak” to corporeal humans is never explained beyond the ubiquitous “God works in mysterious ways.” This is a variety of the “God of the gaps” argument: where human understanding or explanation is lacking to answer some question or explain some phenomenon (the origin of the universe, life, morality, consciousness, the eye, DNA, etc.) that is where God still operates in human affairs. Some theologians who follow the science chase the ever diminishing gaps in search of God’s providence; other believers are comfortable attributing everything that happens to God, from life-changing world events to the fall of every sparrow; still other religious people allow that the laws of nature, which God designed, account for nearly everything that happens, save a rare miracle attributed to the deity; still other and more “liberal theologians” think God created everything and then stepped back and does not act at all in the world. So many options from which to choose and no agreed-upon methodology among theologians as to determine which position is the likeliest one to be true. What is a critical thinker to think?

I am reminded of psychiatrist Milton Rokeach’s book The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, the story of three of his patients, each of whom believe himself to be Jesus Christ. Inspired by another case where two women who both believed they were the Virgin Mary met each other, Rokeach brought his three Christs together, each of whom instantly recognized the other two as delusional. Hoping the encounter might attenuate his patients’ delusional state, Rokeach admitted that the only thing cured was “my godlike delusion that I could manipulate them out of their beliefs.”1

References1. Rokeach, Milton. 1964/2011. The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. New York: Knopf/New York Review Book. If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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How serious is the homeless situation in America? Nearly everything about homelessness is complicated, beginning with the question of just how many Americans experience homelessness each year. The most commonly used metric comes from what are referred to as “point-in-time” counts: annual headcounts conducted by regional agencies across the country known as continuums of care. These point-in-time counts are so named because they only count the number of people who are homeless in a given jurisdiction on a particular night of the year; for that reason and a few others — including the natural difficulty associated with counting people who, by definition, have no fixed address — they tend to drastically underestimate the size of the homeless population.

That doesn’t make them useless, however. While citing a point-in-time count in isolation is usually a mistake, looking at successive counts longitudinally can provide at least an indicator of whether homelessness is rising or falling. Based on that metric, the federal government’s analysis of all the most recent counts tells us that nationwide homelessness, which had been climbing steadily since 2016, appeared to plateau between 2020 and 2022.1 The point-in-time counts registered only a 0.3 percent increase in homelessness over that period.

That’s a bit of good news, but the topline numbers mask a story that is, again, more complicated. While homelessness nationwide stayed surprisingly flat given the societal shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, decreases in many parts of the country were offset by sharp spikes in homelessness elsewhere. California’s continuums of care noted a 6.2 percent increase; smaller in relative terms than some other states, but more than enough to swamp modest reductions in the rest of the nation. In a year when the sum of all 2022 point-in-time counts recorded an additional 1,996 un-housed individuals, California alone contributed 9,973 people.

Again, these numbers should not be taken as gospel. Still, they do point to the scale of the crisis that the Golden State and a number of other regions face. California, home to about 12 percent of all Americans, is where nearly one-third of the country’s homeless population resides.

Unsurprisingly, the homelessness crisis has come to dominate urban politics in California and the other regions where it is most severe. Polling during the 2022 election cycle found that it was the second most important issue to California voters, behind inflation and the cost of living.2 Following the election, newly minted Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency over homelessness as one of her first acts in office.3 On the opposite coast, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has gambled on a plan to involuntarily commit homeless people.4

The crisis has also produced a cottage industry of books, op-eds, and even documentaries purporting to explain how homelessness got so bad. Rampant mental illness and addiction are popular explanations. So are liberal decadence and permissiveness, according to conservative commentators: deep blue cities, the argument goes, are being hit particularly hard because the woke progressives who run them have effectively incentivized homelessness through generous welfare benefits and an indulgent attitude toward drug use. Needless to say, these arguments are particularly popular on the right — and receive regular coverage from Rupert Murdoch-owned media ventures — but it is not uncommon to hear them repeated in left-leaning circles as well.

It’s easy to see why these arguments have caught on. Those cities that face the biggest homelessness problems — San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, and Seattle among them — are run by Democrats, and their electorates tend toward social liberalism on issues such as drug decriminalization. Weather is also a factor, according to this line of reasoning. San Francisco and Los Angeles, in particular, are renowned for their mild climates, so living on the streets in these cities is presumably less miserable. Further, the rise of homelessness in these cities has been accompanied by a commensurate rise in public drug use, along with people publicly experiencing very severe mental health emergencies. All of these are easily observable facts, and it is extremely tempting to craft a neat causal story out of any one of them. Writers such as San Fransicko author Michael Shellenberger, journalist Sam Quinones, and various fellows at the Manhattan Institute have done exactly that.

However, we should be wary of any causal reasoning about social crises that emerges out of anecdotes and folk wisdom. To be sure, the character of the homelessness crisis has been shaped by all of the above factors: substance abuse disorders, mental illness, public policy in liberal cities, and even nice weather. But a careful look at the evidence reveals that none of these things, with one exception, can be said to have caused the homelessness crisis. The exception is public policy — but even there, the relation is different from what the aforementioned writers have posited.

Let’s start with drug use. Quinones has promulgated the argument that drug addiction — in particular the proliferation of a new, especially dangerous strain of meth — is “worsening America’s homelessness problem”5 (or, as New York Magazine put it, has “supercharged homelessness”).6 He may very well be correct that this new version of meth is worse than others; while this is not my field, I feel very comfortable advising Skeptic readers not to do meth. That said, there is absolutely no evidence that meth use is in any way driving homelessness as a large-scale social phenomenon.

Determining causality for this phenomenon is difficult. Drug use, including meth use, for example, can precipitate individual bouts of homelessness. To understand homelessness in aggregate, however, it is important to distinguish between the precipitants of homelessness and the drivers of homelessness. Precipitants are particular and non-generalizable; they are the set of individual circumstances that cause a particular person to become homeless. Drug addiction is a common precipitant, but so are fleeing domestic violence, becoming unemployed, or getting hit with unexpected medical bills. Think of it like an extreme weather event: an individual spark may precipitate a major forest fire, but only under certain conditions. A key driver in this analogy is the carbon pollution that has made summers in many heavily forested areas significantly hotter and drier. Without that driver, you would still get forest fires, but they would not be anywhere near as devastating.

The precipitants of homelessness can be some combination of structural factors, personal mistakes, and plain bad luck. While one or a handful of precipitating factors can explain why a particular person became homeless, they can’t necessarily tell us much about overall rates of homelessness.

Counterfactual reasoning can be a useful tool for determining causality. You think A causes B. Remove A. If B still happens, then A was not the cause. (The rooster crows and the sun rises, in David Hume’s famous example, but no one thinks the rooster causes the sun to rise, which is easily testable by silencing the rooster and noting that the sun still rises.) Employing counterfactual reasoning here, if drug use were a driver of homelessness in aggregate, we would expect states with higher rates of drug abuse to also have higher rates of homelessness. In fact, no such relation exists between the data on drug addiction and those on homelessness: West Virginia, which leads the nation in drug overdose deaths,7 has one of the lowest rates of homelessness in the country.8 California’s overdose death rate is about one-quarter of West Virginia’s!9

Research has found that Housing First Programs are more effective than Treatment First Programs in keeping people from returning to homelessness.

Nor can state-level variation in rates of mental illness explain variation in rates of homelessness. Mental illness can be difficult to quantify, but Mental Illness America estimates that California’s rate of adult mental illness is about the same as the national average.10

The mild weather hypothesis — that un-housed individuals naturally gravitate toward balmier climes — fails on similar grounds. While it is true that West Coast cities have some of the most severe homelessness problems in the United States, a more systematic look at regional patterns of homelessness doesn’t turn up any correlations between average temperature and homelessness. Both New York and the District of Columbia have higher overall rates of homelessness than California, despite notably more inclement weather.11

To the extent that weather is a factor in homelessness, it matters because of how it affects the character of homelessness: cities with more hostile climates tend to have proportionally fewer unsheltered people and more sheltered but un-housed individuals. That is likely because colder cities tend to build more shelters in order to prevent their un-housed residents from freezing to death; and un-housed people, conversely, are more likely to seek out even substandard shelter when the alternative is potentially fatal. Nonetheless, whether sheltered or unsheltered, affected individuals are still experiencing homelessness.

So much for some of the more popular theories purporting to explain the rise of mass homelessness. Note that their failure to explain state-by-state variation in rates of homelessness is not the only failure of these theories. Each of them is also heavily reliant on individual characteristics to explain a large-scale social phenomenon. This is clearly true with the substance use and mental illness hypotheses, but it applies to the weather hypothesis as well; if California’s moderate weather were to have a significant effect on its rate of homelessness, it presumably would be because large numbers of un-housed people from around the country had chosen to relocate somewhere warm and sunny.

Almost no aggregate human behavior can be explained by a single cause. This is where the distinction between drivers and precipitants becomes critical. We should be skeptical of any explanation for a mass phenomenon that depends so heavily on the individual behaviors of hundreds of thousands of people. While personal decisions and bad luck can play a role in individual cases, it strains credulity to blame these individual factors for a decades-long societal trend. We should instead give more credence to theories that rely on systemic forces — forces that can affect hundreds of thousands of people at once, no improbable coincidences required.

If none of the above hypotheses can explain mass homelessness, what can? To my mind, the best and most thorough treatment of this question comes from a recent work of the public affairs scholar Gregg Colburn and the data scientist Clayton Page Aldern. Their answer is right in the title of their 2022 book: Homelessness is a Housing Problem.

As in the above summary of differing hypotheses, Colburn and Page Aldern tested different explanations for homelessness by looking at regional variations in homelessness rates. However, they analyzed more finely-grained data, relying on city-by-city comparisons instead of state-by-state ones. After investigating a number of non-housing explanations for large-scale homelessness — including climate, generous welfare benefits, mental illness, and substance use disorder — they concluded there was no evidence that these factors can explain why some U.S. cities have significantly higher rates of homelessness than others.

Instead, they write: “Vulnerable households live in every city of the country; the differences in rates of homelessness can be attributed to structural factors associated with the housing market.” Homelessness is most severe in the metropolitan areas where housing costs are highest, because the pricier that housing becomes, the greater the risk that people with low incomes or other serious challenges will be locked out of whatever homes are available.

This is not a new finding. In fact, it is the consensus among most serious researchers of this problem. In their definitive book on homelessness, In the Midst of Plenty, Marybeth Shinn and Jill Khadduri note that “homelessness is essentially a lack of access to affordable housing.” Similarly, an influential 2018 study by Zillow (a leading online housing information and analysis site) found that rates of homelessness increase fastest in cities where, on average, rents exceed one-third of income.12