First thing I want to note is I actually did a piece this week on the media and what was amazing to me is that the media is just busy, they've just announced waves of layoffs, right?
Yeah, waves of layoffs, right? And this is the most mysterious thing to me because we've got these people you would think eventually self-interest would kick in, you know?
And they would say, wow, what we're doing is not working. What is working? And they would look at Joe Rogan or somebody at Epoch Times and say, oh, they're growing and it's working for them.
Why won't we do that? Even when their own jobs are on the line. So this means that what we're up against, this Goliath, this mind virus, whatever this thing is, is more powerful than self-interest.
It's more powerful than a parent's desire to protect their own children even. It's a really astonishing thing. It's a remarkable time to be alive, as Jeffrey Tucker just pointed out.
So how do we connect all of those dots? Well, look, here's what we've been seeing. Here's the theme, right? We just found out we just can't trust mainstream media. We knew that, right?
We found out we can't trust hospitals, okay? We can't trust a lot of doctors. Where can we trust anymore? And so this is really a post-truth, post-trust environment, and that's why we're here.
And that's what this organization really stands for, is coming together to begin to knit that back and repair because we don't want it to be this way.
So I can't think of anybody better to really bring us in through a landing on this in Peter Bogosian. He is a founding faculty member now of the University of Austin, which you're going to be hearing more about.
It's a freshly founded thing based on, hey, we can do education the way it used to be done, the way it should be done, where people actually learn things that help them.
He's the executive director of the National Progress Alliance in Peter. He has a teaching pedigree spanning more than 25 years. That focuses on the Socratic method, his scientific skepticism, critical thinking.
His most prolific output now is with something called street epistemology. And this is where he and his team, who are here this weekend with us, they take their camera crew out and they take Peter out into the public where they take critical thinking and questioning back out into the public.
And it's just, it's a wonderful thing if you haven't seen it, look it up. Very wonderful. His most recent book is How to Have Impossible Conversations. It sounds particularly germane, right?
And you can find his writing in New York Times, Waltz Returnal, Scientific American, Time Magazine Elsewhere. But you may know him. You may have heard about him.
If you're thinking, wait, have I heard this name? You might know him for being part of a team of people that wrote totally bogus academic research papers, right? In the fields of social sciences, humanities, fields dealing with race and gender and sexuality.
And seven of them were published, completely, totally bogus. Guess what? They were caught by The Wall Street Journal. Is that right? So I'm sure, I hope he'll tell us a little bit about that.
Peter's a warm, he's a wonderful person. He connects easily, unless your philosophy game is weak and illogical. And then, and then he's going to take you apart in a wonderful, warm way.
We're in for a real treat, Peter. Welcome. The stage is all yours. I'm really looking forward to this.
Can everybody hear me okay?
We changed the title of this presentation. In fact, we changed the whole presentation because recently there's been quite an extraordinary academic scandal at Harvard University.
Claudine Gay is the president or was the president of Harvard University until recently. She was paid $900,000 a year. She had 11 peer-reviewed publications, which is how to be politic about it, not very much.
She was caught plagiarizing and plagiarizing in egregious ways. And the fight around whether or not Claudine Gay should be kept at the university or not kept at the university was rather intense.
So just to be clear about what plagiarism is, it's taking ideas that are not your own. It's giving yourself credit for somebody else's intellectual work.
So when Claudine Gay, when it was discovered that she plagiarized, even before it was public, the university conducted an internal investigation on Dr. Gay.
And they found her innocent before they even did the investigation.
So in my talk today, I want to talk about corruption, and I'm going to talk about plagiarism, and then I'm going to tie that to medical journals, the medical industry, and what we're seeing now to save lives.
The corruption, the level of corruption that we are seeing is epidemic. So let's just give a brief chronology.
Claudine Gay is caught for plagiarism, the usual suspects. And unfortunately, if I lived in a sane world, I wouldn't have to say this, but we don't live in a sane world.
We live in a completely insane world that's race-crazed and race-obsessed. Claudine Gay was an African-American woman.
And so people like many African-American commentators said, like Mark Lamont Hill, this is a witch hunt by, I'm paraphrasing here, by mediocre white men to take down an accomplished black woman.
That's not true. It's not true. She obtained her credentials fraudulently. She cheated. She lied.
Well, subsequent to that, Harvard's chief diversity officer, again, if it were a sane world, I wouldn't have to say this, but also an African-American woman.
Sherry Erin Charlson has now been charged with plagiarizing large sections, enormous sections of her husband's work, along with two other people's work.
And people have told me that there are other people that they know at Harvard University, and I've seen those dissertations that are plagiarized.
So I want to talk about, this is an enormous scandal. And my prediction to you is that we are just at the very, very beginning of what I call the plagiarism wars.
So I just want a show of hands. In the humanities, what is your best guess? We'll get to Medicine in a second.
In the humanities, what percentage of dissertations do you think are plagiarized? Just, I want a quick hand. Who thinks it's zero to one percent? Raise your hand.
Okay, literally nobody. Okay. Who thinks it's, say, two to four percent? Raise your hand.
Okay, one person out of like six hundred. Okay. Who thinks it's, say, seven to ten percent? Okay. Who thinks it's over eleven percent?
Wow, most people. Wow, you are even more cynical than I am.
I estimate that number, and I'm just spitballing here from the dissertations I've looked at. I estimate that number to be seven to nine percent.
However, that seven to nine percent, black and white, like unequivocal plagiarism, like no question whatsoever.
However, I will say if I'm wrong in that, I'm only wrong in one direction. It's not going to be fewer. It's going to be far, far more.
Okay, so you have the problem of plagiarism. People obtaining their degrees by fraud, teaching our kids.
You have the problem of institutional cover-ups of the plagiarism. Let me give you two examples.
So I've been told, I could not independently verify this, but I've been told two things.
One, universities across the board are making it more difficult to find dissertations now.
Two, they're removing names from DEI people, diversity, equity, and inclusion. They're removing those names.
Now, it could certainly be a coincidence. I can't give you any evidence that there's a causal relationship between the fact that they're removing names
and the fact that they know there's fraud, and they're attempting to cover it up.
But I will say that is a rather extraordinary temporal coincidence that within a month of Claudine Gay's plagiarism scandal, that's what we see happening.
I want to give some analogues. I'm 57 years old. Who remembers Rosie Ruiz? Anybody? The person? Yeah, some people remember that.
She ran in the Boston Marathon, and allegedly she won the Boston Marathon. Everyone thought she ran, but she only got in very late in the race.
Clever. She could never do that today with all the ubiquity of video cameras, but clever.
So she's not the winner of the Boston Marathon because she didn't obtain that honor through a process, a fair process.
She cheated, so they took away her award. Who remembers Milly Vanilly?
Oh, wow. Wow. It's a hip audience. Okay.
Milly Vanilly did not do the singing. Someone else did the singing, and they won a Grammy.
When it was found out that fraud was involved, they took away the Grammy.
I would argue to you, it's no different in academia.
And for the record, I have put my dissertation through plagiarism checkers, and it's clean.
So it'd be kind of a great irony if I were up here. Actually, I am a plagiarist.
I plagiarized Adolf Hitler's mind conf, but I'll go into that in a minute.
I should have opened with that line. I was a great opener. Okay.
So I want you to think about it like this. Think about it like a fire department.
Let's say that you were the, let's say that you serve the superintendent of the fire department.
You find out that a certain number of people have cheated on the fire person's exam.
Now, you only need one assumption here. You need to make one single assumption.
And the assumption is there's some kind of a lawful relationship between taking the fire person's exam
and your ability to put out fires. That's the only assumption you need to make.
Now, if that assumption is false, then there's literally no point in giving the fire person's exam at all.
It's a facade. It's a completely ridiculous thing.
So you're the fire marshal or whoever, the Grand Puba, putting out fires in the fire,
some municipality or some state, whatever the local governance is.
You find out that certain number of people have cheated on the fire person's exam.
What do you do? Can I call you out? What do you do? Just say what you do.
Yeah. Okay.
Well, I think what I would first do.
One sentence. What do you do?
Have them repeat a different version of the same exam and if they fail it, their goal.
Fair enough. He said have them repeat a different version of the same exam.
This is a very kind, generous man.
Far more than I assure you, if I were the fire marshal, they would be on the unemployment line the next day.
Okay. So I'm not necessarily saying that there's a right answer to this question.
In the case of academia, one answer could be you revoke their PhDs.
That's my own personal belief, but it's my own belief.
Another possibility is you don't revoke their PhDs, but you revoke their academic appointments.
That seems to me to be the most reasonable compromise.
You do not do what you did to Claudine Gay and give her a $900,000 a year salary.
Truly that's insane.
The next thing that you could do, which we're seeing over and over again,
and I predict we're going to see this over and over again, is absolutely nothing.
Correct. Now let's talk for a second about a legitimacy crisis.
A crisis of legitimacy in our institutions.
Who trusts the mainstream media?
Okay. Not a single hand in this whole room.
If you want institutions that you can trust, you have to make them trustworthy.
If you want institutions you can trust.
If people have obtained their credentials through fraud, they have to be removed from the institution.
It does not matter what color their skin is.
It does not matter what their weight is, what their size is, what disciplines they teach in.
Any attempt to cover that up, and you're furthering the crisis of legitimacy in our institutions.
You're making it so that fewer people trust institutions because they're not worthy of our trust,
because they don't fire people who have lied to obtain their credentials.
Now the current machine, the best mechanism that we currently have is this thing called turn it in.
Now turn it in is, how can I say it?
It's not great, but it's okay.
It gives a lot of false positives and a lot of false negatives.
So you feed papers in and it will kick back, kick it out.
The problem is that you have to have a human to do this.
At this level of technology, there's no other way about it.
So there are people who are working on developing plagiarism checkers to run batches of dissertations by the tens of thousands.
And my prediction to you is, again, that we are at the very beginning of the plagiarism wars.
So in a very short period of time, one of the things that you're going to see if someone has a PhD, particularly in the humanities,
in the sciences, the STEM fields, it's different.
It's more subject to data fabrication and other types of fraud.
But in the humanities, I predict to you, you're going to see thousands and thousands of people who get busted for plagiarism.
And what their institutions do with them is going to be quite an interesting thing in and of itself.
By the way, there have been 221 cases that have gone before courts about plagiarism.
In every single case, the courts have referred that back to the university saying it's out of their jurisdiction.
When Claudine Gaye was in office, she made the restrictions for plagiarism more lax.
Think about that, more lax.
The people we trust, our engines of knowledge production are compromised.
Okay, so the problem, don't think about this in terms of not even a few bad apples, but whole rotten apple trees and a crappy orchard.
That's the bad way to think about this.
The problem is that there are entire fields of literature, entire domains of thought which have been corrupted.
The purpose of those domains of thought is to forward very specific conclusions.
I'm going to speak for a moment about something that Chris mentioned.
My associates James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose and I in 2017 submitted a number of bogus papers that forwarded utterly insane and truly vile ideas.
Seven of those were accepted.
We got caught because we, one of the papers, very well-known papers, if you've heard about this, you've heard about the dog park.
We claim that there was an epidemic of rape at dog parks.
And to cure the epidemic of rape, we needed to leash men like we leash dogs.
And to prove this fact, we put in black feminist criminology, which had literally nothing to do with anything.
And we won an award for the paper.
So there are entire bodies of literature which are fabricated whole cloth that forward particular narratives.
It's extraordinarily difficult to get published in certain fields unless you tow the party line.
I know many people not in academia, so I want to run through something fairly quickly.
In general, there are exceptions to this, but in general, seven papers in seven years get you tenure.
Assuming you've done other things right, you're a reasonable teacher and you go to meetings in a reasonable degree and you comport yourself reasonably.
Okay, seven papers in seven years gets you tenure.
What we see happening is our institutions are becoming ideology mills.
They're subject to a kind of moral orthodoxy, something that's morally fashionable.
Teachers are publishing in journals, the journals in which there are educators in general, professors in general, educational administrators.
The journals in which they're publishing are themselves ideologically captured.
So when we did this, we were at Brett Weinstein's house with my friend Mike Naina and James and Helen.
And Brett said to me, he said, oh, that's like idea laundering.
And it was a major light bulb to me when he said that.
So idea laundering is we're all familiar with money laundering.
Dirty money comes in.
It comes from the washing machine, literally the laundry machine.
They launder it and it goes out as clean money and so then you can spend it.
Idea laundering is very similar.
I published a piece in the Wall Street Journal.
I invite you to look it up.
It's a very short piece.
Idea laundering is this idea that we get a bunch of people who have similar moral impulses together.
She has a moral impulse.
It doesn't matter what it is.
She thinks, you know, no pineapple on your pizza or something.
He thinks something.
I pick something with neutral valence.
That's why I don't want to go race or gender.
He has their buddies and he knows her and she's an academic and she has a journal.
And so then we use the trappings of a journal.
So all three of us have the same beliefs.
We make a journal.
It goes in as a moral impulse and it comes out as knowledge.
And then once it comes out as knowledge, then it's public policy.
Then people use the literature that basically we fabricated, we made up.
They use that literature to inform public policy.
So let that sink in for a second.
This is an epic and utterly intractable scandal.
And I'm not talking predatory journals, you know, journals in which we have to pay.
I'm talking top journals in their fields.
Gender, place and culture.
It's called age index, high ratings.
And you can see these.
You can go to scholar.google.com, scholar.google.com.
And you can put people's names in.
You can go to something called Shimago, S-E-H-M-I-A-G-O.
And you can type in the names of the journals and see their ratings.
We published a journal, a journal article in Hypatia, the top feminist journal in the world.
And that journal article was particularly deranged.
Okay.
So I'm going to give you some facts when I move this to the realm of medicine.
In the first month of 2024,
37 publications affiliated with Harvard Medical were flagged for alleged manipulation of results.
That's extraordinary.
And again, we're not talking about a rinky-dink college and a rinky-dink.
We're talking about Harvard University, arguably one of the top three universities in the world.
Maybe even the top.
And again, I just want to say for the record, please don't believe anything I tell you.
Look it up.
Seek out information yourself.
Find your own information.
Validate.
Trust but verify, so shall we say.
To borrow a phrase from Reagan from Russian.
The Harvard Crimson, which is Harvard University's newspaper,
reported that top Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Khalid Shah allegedly falsified data in plagiarized images across 21 papers.
Okay.
Just like really let that percolate for a second.
Like let that sink in.
These are people who have cancer.
You're fabricating data for people who are going in for cancer treatment.
You're a monster.
For him, there's no just revocation of the PhD.
He should see jail time.
The Harvard University's teaching hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute,
is retracting dozens of papers from four senior researchers, including Dr. Lori Glimcher.
It goes on.
The list goes on and on.
Here's another thing to think about.
In the social sciences, in psychology specifically, they're in something that's called a replication crisis.
Who's heard of the replication crisis?
Raise their hand.
This alone is worth the price of admission.
This is a mind blow.
50% of papers in psychology cannot be replicated.
Please don't believe me.
I'm literally begging you not to believe me.
Look it up yourself.
The replication crisis psychology.
Think about that.
A clinician goes into a clinical setting to try to help people to alleviate their distress,
and it is a coin flip if the methods and techniques upon which she is basing or she is basing her practice will work.
50%.
Okay.
But here's something that's even more amazing than 50%.
I hope I'm making the case that we're facing an extraordinarily corrupt system at every level of academia,
and I haven't even told you the worst part yet.
It's a very optimistic, cheery conference.
Okay.
When I go around the world with my team, and when I frequently speak at colleges and universities,
and when I do, I'll say, okay, hey, I'm curious, who's a psychology major?
Could you please raise your hand?
Invariably people raise their hand, and I say, what is the replication crisis?
Nobody has any idea.
Okay.
So we now have two problems.
We have a problem that the data can't be replicated, so it's a coin flip.
And we have another problem is that they're not telling anybody that the data can't be replicated.
You mean to tell me you go through a school, and we've been to Dartmouth, we've been to great schools.
You mean to tell me you've sat through classes, you're a psychology major, you're about to graduate?
Nobody told you that it's a coin flip for whether or not the things that you're going to implement in your practice
are actually in alignment with reality?
Like, are you kidding me?
So the other problem is that we're not telling people that there's a crisis.
So we have a crisis, and the fact that we don't tell people that there's a crisis.
So they go in with a level of confidence that's inflated above the warrant for the evidence.
And the reason they do that is because they think they have evidence, but they don't have evidence.
They don't have evidence because the whole thing is corrupt.
Okay.
Okay.
So, I had a rather, I think I saw him here, I had a rather sobering discussion with Dr. Paul Merrick today.
I think I had to pick my jaw up off of the table repeatedly during our conversation.
I know that this problem exists, and I know it's serious.
And I know so far as I say, it's an egregious instance of a violation of trust.
I know that people are using the universities as a kind of ideology mill to replicate the dominant ideology,
to get tenure, to get promoted, to get raises.
I know that.
I've recently become aware of how this is seeped into medicine and what the consequences of this are.
Dr. Merrick is far more qualified to speak about that than I am.
I think it's incredibly important to remember the Feynman's, the physicist Feynman's adage,
the easiest person to fool is yourself.
The easiest person to fool is yourself.
In an age of disinformation, an age of social media where bots control likes and dislikes,
Jonathan Hyde has written extensively about that, what that's done to the social psychologists in NYU,
what that's done to people's mental health, particularly young girls.
It's very difficult to figure out what's true.
It's very difficult to speak across divides.
When I first published the paper prior to the grievance studies, excuse my vulgar language,
but called the conceptual penis as a social construct.
Thank you.
In that paper, James Lindsay and I argued that penises were really social constructs.
Because many of the core arguments among people who are in the orbit of the ideology
will tell you that everything is a social construct.
So I thought, well, if everything is a social construct, then why isn't the penis a social construct?
Well, they thought that was a great idea.
If you do want to laugh at night with a bunch of friends, that paper is archived online,
and you can get that, and you can play, I'm going to suggest a new game.
It's a new drinking game.
And the drinking game is everybody reads until they laugh, then they drink.
Okay.
So I want to go back to this idea that the easiest person to fool is yourself.
And so what prophylactics are there against you falling for nonsense?
And again, it's extraordinarily difficult because we have established bodies of literature,
things that were, and I heard the talk yesterday.
I thought it was fantastic when he said, when he saw something for Harvard Journal of Medicine,
he used to think it came on high from heaven's paraphrase.
I think many of us used to feel like that until quite recently when the reality of the situation has woken us up.
So here's, I'm going to lay out a blueprint of some things you can do as you move forward.
And then I'm going to make some predictions to you.
You can check your guesses.
So one of the most important things is my friend Michael Schermer from the Skeptic Society says,
don't tell me you're smart, make predictions.
Make guesses, make tons and tons of guesses, throw them out there.
But those guesses have to be checked against reality, right?
At the end of the road, at the end of the day, when the rubber hits the road, it's a hypothesis.
It's the hypothesis that you test that you drill.
That's what science is.
It's brutal hypothesis testing over and over again.
And you have to be a slave to the evidence.
You have to agree, you have to agree, even if you don't like the conclusion to what the data is.
It's a little bit easier in medicine than it is with moral things like abortion or gay marriage or what have you.
So that's, there's one benefit to that.
Another possibility is we need to build alternative institutions.
So there are two schools of thought on this.
And I will admit I've been somewhat wrong on one and I think it's important when you're wrong about something
and you've made a mistake, you express that publicly.
So Christopher Ruffo has done some wonderful work.
Any people familiar with Christopher Ruffo's work?
There's some people.
So he was one of the people who exposed Claudine Gay.
He's one of the people who's working with Ron DeSantis to expose the DEI bureaucracy and return merit-based education.
I didn't think he would be as successful as he was, but he's been extraordinarily successful.
So one avenue is to take and reform existing institutions.
If that's how someone wants to spend their time, that's fine with me.
That's not the path I've chosen.
Another path that you can take, and I'm not going to be Pollyanna about this.
I'm going to tell you like it is, is it expensive?
Yes.
Is it time consuming?
Yes.
Do you have to fight off and obscene enemies within and without and accreditation bureaus?
Yes.
It's building new things.
It's building new things.
Fortunately, both of these things can coexist.
You can have an existing academic infrastructure and build alternative universities.
So I'm a founding faculty fellow with the University of Austin.
We're working to build a university in Austin.
Stephen Blackwood, thank you.
Thank you.
It's a truth-based university, and it's neither a conservative nor a liberal university.
I'll offer this to you at the President of the University of Austin says.
The solution to left-wing ideological capture of our institutions is not another right-wing institution.
It's not Hamilton.
It's not a Liberty University.
It's a new university based on free thought, open discourse, debate even.
That's my own personal view.
That I think is a way forward.
Okay.
I'm going to give you a little plan.
I'm going to lay out from my book a summary of how to have impossible conversations with people,
how to deal with people who either think you're a lunatic or you're a conspiracy theorist,
or you're just plain wrong about facts and data.
The template that I'm going to run you through is very easy to do.
Once you know it, it's like clockwork.
The difficult thing in this is to keep your cool,
and I can tell you some tricks about how to do that.
So when you're having a conversation across a divide,
the deeper the divide, particularly a political divide, a moral divide, psychological divide, a sexual divide,
whatever the issue would be,
the most important thing is that you start from the posture of listening.
Your first order of business is always to figure out what someone believes.
What does someone believe?
When you think you've figured out what they believe, then you repeat it back to them.
Oh, and you put the burden of clarity on yourself.
Oh, that's really interesting.
Let me see if I have this right.
Did you see the framing?
Not what do you mean?
That will invoke a defensive posture in someone else.
Oh, let me see if I have this right.
Did I get that right?
And then you repeat it back to them.
Ideally, what you're looking for is what Haas's negotiators and Chris Voss talks about.
That's right.
People have written an entire book or one whole book.
I think it's called That's Right.
Other books about that's right.
That's what you're looking for.
When someone says that's right to you, then you know you've understood them.
So the first thing you've done is you've learned someone's opinion.
You've figured out what someone's belief is.
Then I like to do something that I find extraordinarily effective.
It's ask them to put it on a scale.
That's if you've seen us do or you've participated in the street epistemology out back,
that's what we do.
It's like a Likert scale.
Strongly agree, agree, slightly agree, neutral and on the other side.
So you ask them how confident are you in that?
It doesn't matter what it is.
Spike protein doesn't matter what it is.
Trust in the legacy institutions, it's irrelevant.
How confident are you in that belief?
Then you ask them to put it on a scale.
On a scale from 1 to 10, how sure are you of that?
One being I'm not sure at all, which wouldn't be a belief.
Five being maybe.
Seven being I think it's probably true.
Ten being it's unequivocally true.
I'm absolutely positive this is true.
So now you know what they believe.
You know the level of how strong the belief is,
kind of the level of commitment if you will in the belief.
At no point up to this have you offered facts and information.
As a general rule, facts and information do not change people's minds.
I'm seeing a lot of heads nod.
That's even more true in the moral realm.
If you talk about moral things, that's even more true.
The older I get at 57, I can tell you people make decisions
not for epistemological reasons.
In other words, not because they're justified in knowing what they think they know.
They have sufficient evidence to warrant belief.
But people make decisions and people come to their beliefs
for non-epistemological reasons,
specifically for moral reasons, for community reasons.
The only thing that people want more,
one of the few things that people want more than to not be wrong,
is to belong, is to be loved, is to have a community, is to have friends.
And so often when you're talking to someone about something they believe,
when they inflate their belief beyond the confidence of the evidence,
when you're talking to someone who says, oh I'm 9 or I'm 10,
usually that's not because they're experts in the subject.
It's because their friends believe it.
It's because they have a little, here's a little syllogism.
Good people believe this, I'm a good person, I believe this.
So you're not really talking about the issue.
That's one of the reasons you can't intervene in someone's cognitions
with facts and evidence.
It doesn't work.
It's not about facts and evidence.
It's about morality.
It's a hard pill to swallow.
Okay.
Once you've done that, I recommend the following question.
I think this is one of the most important questions anybody can ever ask anybody else,
and certainly anybody can ever ask themselves.
Here it is, one sentence.
Under what conditions would you be willing to change your mind?
Under what conditions would you be willing to change your mind?
This is not usually what we do in our conversations.
Usually what we do in our conversations is either we deliver messages,
so I'll deliver my message, and that message will be laden with facts and evidence,
or at least what I think are facts and evidence.
She will deliver her message to me, which will be laden with facts and evidence,
and then nobody will ever get anywhere.
Usually, not always.
There are exceptions to that.
Okay.
So under what conditions would you be willing to change your mind?
There are only a few things that people can say to that.
They can say nothing.
Okay.
We'll go over that.
They can say, oh, well, this is what it would take, double-blind, placebo, control groups.
They could tell you whatever their evidence is.
They can say to you something fantastical, something absolutely well,
something that they know that you could not possibly produce,
but they give the reason to make themselves look, frankly, more reasonable.
And the fourth thing they can do, and any time anyone does this,
I always say, thank you very much.
That's a great answer, is they can say, I don't know.
I don't know is always a great answer.
We need to start creating cultures where people say, I don't know,
because every time you say, I don't know, you're not pretending to know something you don't know.
And we got a lot of people pretending to know things they don't know.
Interestingly, by the way, in the last few years, maybe five, six years now,
we have a new phenomenon that's arisen,
in which we have a lot of people pretending to not know things that literally everybody knows.
Okay.
So now you're set with the rudiments of having a conversation.
So if you follow those guidelines, independently of whether or not someone's been indoctrinated
into an educational system, independently of whether or not they read Mother Jones regularly
or they view Fox News regularly, it's a method to cut through the noise.
It's a method to help you think through ideas and question your own beliefs
as well as helping someone facilitate them through different ideas, through the belief journey.
When I did that with prison inmates in prisons, I did my dissertation in prisons.
One of the things I found was that, and I'm going to be going in my new things,
I want to go into prisons in the third world and do the street epistemology stuff.
One of the things that you find is you find a kind of conversation
that's unmediated by what people think they should say.
The moment you tether, you cut the tether between what you think you should say
and how you act sincerely because what you believe is true,
then you can have real conversations with people.
And that's one of the moments of this cultural madness that's been particularly difficult.
The moment that's been particularly difficult that no one talks about
is how damaging this has been not only to our institutions and trust in our institutions
and the fact that it's really given people a backward roadmap,
but it's compromised our friendships, it's compromised our relationships.
I personally have lost very, very good friends on some of my stances.
One stance in particular, I'll tell you what it is.
One stance in particular, I don't want to derail the talk by talking about this,
but I have argued repeatedly and in public that I do not think
that anybody who's under the age of 18 should be allowed to medically transition.
Well, thank you.
I was genuine, I was not expecting that.
And for that I have lost friends, for that people have doxxed me,
they've bombed my phone, they've assaulted me, spit on me.
Anyway, so, okay, so let's go back, let's resend to the conversation.
Okay, so this is the situation which we find ourselves.
We find ourselves in the situation of our academies being incredibly corrupt.
We know they're corrupt, they know they're corrupt,
we know they know that we know that they're corrupt.
Everybody knows they're corrupt, yet nobody does anything about it.
Why does no one do anything about it?
Well, again, we have financial incentives, we have a preexisting infrastructure
that supports that kind of corruption.
So plagiarism is the tip of the iceberg.
Entire fields of study are being corrupted, people protecting those fields,
people absolutely terrified of looking like they're bigots or homophobes or racists.
And as a consequence, not making the best decision for their patients,
not making the best decision to think about United Airlines diversity initiatives.
So what do we do?
Okay, so we have a problem, we have a crisis, we can build new institutions,
we can try to rectify their own, we can try to salvage their own institutions.
But what you can do is pretty clear.
What you can do as an individual is the how to have impossible conversations piece.
As you can speak civilly to people across divides, you can start with a posture of listening.
When you do that, and you can always be blunt and honest.
And as a general rule, I never offer evidence in a conversation unless someone asks me to.
And even if they ask me to, I will say, what would you consider evidence?
Because sometime I'll offer them evidence, but they won't consider it to be evidence.
So we know that better conversations are possible,
and we know that better conversations across divides are possible.
I'm going to offer one more solution to wholesale ideological capture of our institutions.
You're not going to like it because it's a pain in the ass.
But I'm going to tell you what it is.
You have to show up.
You have to physically go to the places where people are making decisions.
Town halls, meetings, etc.
If you watch videos, Benjamin Boyce has a wonderful video series about a group of far-left lunatics going around to meetings,
making it seem like their voice is disproportionately represented as it influences public policy.
You have to go to meetings.
You have to participate civilly in the democratic process.
Because if you don't do that, then people who consider you their ideological enemies, they are doing it.
So you're left with very little choice in the matter if you want to institute positive change.
So in spite of the wide-scale corruption, hello.
Hey, I'm listening to this great talk by Peter Bogosian.
So in spite of all of this, you can still be that change that you want to be.
Yes, it's a problem.
Yes, I'm not going to...
If anybody is aware of the problem, I'm not going to demean the problem.
But that doesn't mean that you have to be impotent in the face of the problem.
That's even... In fact, the more corrupt the system is, the more incumbent upon you it is to be forthright in your speech,
but civil, to be willing to change your mind when evidence comes in, to show up at meetings.
Meaning, yeah, you're going to have to get in your car and you're going to have to drive somewhere.
Okay, well, you know, that's a champagne problem.
I want to end with this.
The fact that there are people in this room who are listening to facts and reason and evidence is a sign of hope.
And reason is worth fighting for.
And science is worth fighting for.
And rigorous epistemology is worth fighting for.
And institutions that don't lie to us are worth fighting for.
And not having our engines of knowledge production compromised by a very small number of people that hold everybody else hostage.
That's worth fighting for.
So the fact that you're in this room now and you're doing something, you're part of the solution to the problem.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
You lost your job at Portland State. No, that's not accurate.
You resigned with a letter that I hesitate to say that.
But when I was reading it, I was fist pumping because that was a great resignation letter.
Thank you.
Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, so I felt I couldn't do what I was hard to do, which is teach philosophy.
And the entire organization, the entire institution had been overcome.
You know, when you read or you watch a history documentary and you say to yourself, like, wow, how could all those people fall for something so just demonstrably insane?
That's how I felt.
And so I felt I was doing a disservice to the students.
I felt I was compromising my integrity.
So I resigned from the institution after truly, you know, I'm not going to say like I'm the victim here because I'm a pugilist and I went out swinging.
But I resigned from the institution because I couldn't do what they hired me to do.
It was doing a disservice to the students.
It was compromising my integrity and to be very blunt, they were mercilessly harassing me.
And I just couldn't take it anymore.
What were they harassing you over?
The complaints were constant.
Title IX violations, which are very serious.
Anything people would complain about things people would just, I mean, I give you, I'll give you just, I think I could.
So, okay, I will say this because this is in the back of my head.
My friends have told me I should never speak about any of this stuff publicly because it's so fucking crazy.
Nobody is going to believe that this stuff happened to you.
So I always have that in the back of my head every time I want to tell a story in public.
Like, you know, don't tell it.
So I'll tell you, I'll tell you a more benign story.
So, you know, nobody wants the more bizarre thing.
Turn the cameras off for this, no, I'm just kidding.
So, like, here's an example of, so I was teaching an ethics class and I was making the argument that sexual preference is a matter of taste.
And things that fall, you don't have to agree with us or disagree with us, this is the argument I was making.
Things that fall under matter of tastes aren't moral in the same way that, like, you know, the taste of music,
you could have a really weird taste in something, but that's not a moral activity unless you act on it.
And so someone in class said, well, that's not true.
And I said, well, because you're trying to help people make arguments.
And I said, well, everybody has a kind of something they like and something they don't like.
She said, no, that's not true.
Oh, and I said that everybody would, everybody has a kind of dating pool of which they would discriminate against.
But, you know, the big thing now is discrimination is just de facto bad.
I said, well, that's really, she said, yeah, and I said, well, would you date someone who's 400 pounds?
And she said, no.
And I said, okay, well, then that's your pool, the pool of all people who aren't 400 pounds.
And so she went and complained and filed a harassment charge against me.
I mean, again, this is not a STEM class.
This is an ethics class, right?
This is a philosophy class, an ethics class.
So people would complain.
I mean, I could literally sit here for 20 minutes and tell you insane stories.
You know, the pronoun thing was hot when I went in.
Here's a quick story that's easy to tell.
So I was asking why I think this is, you know, around 2017 or maybe 2016.
I was really trying to figure out, like, you want to institute these policies about microaggressions and trigger warnings and safe spaces.
Great.
What's the evidence for these things?
Like, what evidence do you have that this does anything?
I mean, that's all I asked.
And I wasn't taking that tone.
I had a really nice tone.
Hey, I'm curious what your evidence was.
And then I was accused of a microaggression.
I was accused for a microaggression for asking somebody evidence for what's the evidence for microaggressions.
I mean, I'm telling you, it's like an insane asylum.
And did you see that?
Like, how did that change over the years?
Oh, it got worse.
Was there a cliff?
Was there a cliff?
It feels like it changed suddenly to me, but I wasn't in it.
Yeah, it did.
And, you know, people would say to me, like, well, how did you see this stuff coming?
Do you like some kind of Nostradamus?
No, I lived in Portland and I taught at Portland State University.
I mean, I taught at Woke Central.
But I would see this creeping in over time.
And I would see the attitudes of my colleagues and the attitudes of the students.
And boy, were they pissed when I published the conceptual penis.
Oh, boy.
They were not happy about that.
Wow.
So, but we all know this from the gym, right?
If you want your muscles to grow, no pain, no gain, right?
So to me, when I try and learn something new, right, and I do this all the time, it's uncomfortable.
It's actually, there's a mental uncomfortable, like you don't just learn calculus, right?
You don't just figure out what Paul Merrick does, like, oh, you know, let's totally reimagine cancer, right?
So how do you...
He does it, but how did they in that sphere of education say, we're doing the best we can for these students
and we've determined that this is the right way without microaggressions and without any pain,
without any discomfort, to hone their minds?
Excellent question.
To really understand the ideology, you have to understand that it's not a truth-seeking mechanism.
So James Lindsay and Helen Pluck-Rose have a... Helen Pluck-Rose is the first author.
They have a wonderful book, Cynical Theories.
It's really the defining book to understand how this came to be.
The purpose is not to find truth or to give students the tools to be less wrong more often.
The purpose is, comes from something, when you understand this, this is a huge light bulb moment, I think it should be.
The purpose is not to take the institution to help students to seek truth.
The purpose is to use the institution to help students develop a critical consciousness.
That's Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
And when you have a critical consciousness, you can then remediate oppression.
So it's teaching you that oppression is everywhere.
So for example, racism is the ordinary in everyday state of affairs.
Every disparity in outcome has to be due to systems.
There are certain chivalrous or certain apodict truths that you start out with.
Once you understand that, the purpose is not to hone the mind.
The purpose is to create activists that then go out and forward the narrative and make changes.
I mean, look, you can think about it like this.
Aubrey Lord, the black feminist, has a little piece.
The master's tools cannot disable or dismantle the master's house.
The master's tools, reason, logic, science, epistemic adequacy, those cannot disable the structures of patriarchy,
cisnormativity, heteronormativity, etc.
So you need new tools.
So those tools are, so before, for example, in the, you could call them the atheist Christian wars,
you had very distinct differences about evolution, whether or not evolution should be taught.
And so what you would do is people would want to debate Richard Dawkins or Jerry Coyne,
or they would hold, you know, counter panels or what have you.
But now they don't play by those rules of engagement because the master's tools cannot disable the master's house.
Now they bring bull horns in.
Now they accuse you of rape.
Now they weaponize offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion, because it's not a true-seeking institution.
It's to help people develop the consciousness to recognize oppression.
Like, you have a lot of physicians in here.
Just think about this.
Find somebody who's, you know, 18, I don't know, with the lower limit would be like 10 to maybe 21,
and ask them about sex.
Is sex a sign at birth?
No.
No.
That's insane.
What are you talking about?
But that's what we teach our kids.
That's in the suite of propositions from which the ideology coheres.
That's like an epistemic chowder.
That's one of the propositions that brought in and pumped out to develop a critical consciousness,
so that the whole institution becomes an ideology mill to replicate the orthodoxy.
The same thing in medicine with COVID, the same thing with everything.
It sounds very familiar.
Very similar.
Right.
Question here.
Whose mind have you changed about something significant using what you've just taught us?
Let me see.
Let me think.
Whose mind have I changed?
Well, I've actually changed my own mind about a lot of things.
I've changed my own mind from conversations I've had with people.
Let's see about specific things.
I've changed my mind about geopolitical things.
I've changed my mind about, I've become much, much, I was never a neocon,
but I've become much more internal as a result of conversations in the world.
I've become much more fiscally conservative in terms of thinking about debt as a result of conversations with people.
I've changed my mind about some things with COVID that I have.
In fact, some of the, much of the conference today has really made me rethink some things, and I think that's good.
When you find somebody who is a nine or a 10.
Yeah.
My instinct is just asking about the Red Sox and walk away slowly.
Yeah.
A lot of people do that.
Here's a quick, I don't want to say trick, but here's something you can do if someone says they're a 10.
You can say to them, there's two, give you two things you can say.
If someone says they're a 10, you can say, oh, what would you say about someone who held the opposite position if I asked them how confident they were and they said 10?
And I asked them, what would it take to change your mind?
And they said nothing.
Most people would, would, would say that, oh, that's terrible.
It's a problem.
But what you're really asking them is about themselves.
Right.
So that, that's one way to do it.
The other thing is if someone says that they're a 10 and there's no evidence that, that you can give them to change their mind.
I would say something, not glibly, but I would say something like, oh, that's interesting.
So that belief wasn't formulated on the basis of evidence.
And let's say, well, what do you mean?
And I'll say, well, by definition, to formulate a belief in the basis of evidence means there must be some evidence that would come in to change the belief.
And if you're not willing to change the belief, then it's not formulated the basis of evidence.
So why are you holding it like on the base?
What is the basis?
Why is the belief held?
And that's a wake up call for a lot of people.
Well, the question here is, is it ever okay to ask the other side?
What evidence do they have to support that position, especially when you know the correct answer and that they're sharing BS?
Yeah.
So sometimes, so look, here's the problem.
Let's say that I want to ask you a question about, you know, I've been really thinking about the issue of surrogacy lately.
I find it, I find it fascinating.
And let's say I've never, we've never spoken about surrogacy, but let's say that you have a strong opinion about surrogacy.
And it doesn't matter what it is.
You think it's a great, you think it's a moral abomination.
I said, okay, well, what is your evidence to that?
Why do you think that?
So what almost always will happen is you'll tell me, right?
And so what you'll do is in the very act of telling me your evidence, you will increase your confidence because you'll listen to your own reasons.
So this is kind of a heresy.
And I'm one of the few people who does this.
I almost never ask someone for their evidence.
I ask them for their reasons, not their evidence.
And there's a big difference.
So I try to take their reasons and parse them out into syllogisms, premise, premise conclusions.
And then I try to take a look to see if not, if it's sound, in other words, not if it corresponds or hooks to reality, but if it's valid.
If the reasons they have justify the confidence, because belief is not binary.
It's not on off.
It takes place on a spectrum, on a continuum, unlike actual sex.
Come on, that was a funny joke.
So belief isn't binary.
So people will hold beliefs to various degrees.
And asking people for evidence is almost never a good thing.
But on occasion, I will ask them for evidence, on rare occasion.
We're talking here now about humans.
I spent a lot of my time online and I'm increasingly convinced that I'm fighting bots or exposed to bots.
In fact, they actually have my name on them.
This isn't like an ego thing.
I think all of us have, if you have a significant online presence, there are bots that know you.
And maybe know you better than you know you.
So my question is, how much of what we're experiencing this seeming madness is organic?
This is what happens when thought processes go too far off the rails.
And how much of this is intentionally poked?
I'm going to do what I said in my talk and I'm going to pre-complement myself by saying, God, this is a great answer.
I don't know.
I really don't know the answer to that question.
I know that social media is a significant contributor to that.
I know that disinformation, active disinformation is a significant contributor to that.
But I also know that we need to be aware of something that's labeled disinformation when it might not be disinformation.
So it's a very complicated, it's a very complicated problem.
But I think that the way to do it, like on social media, my rule is I never answer something more than, like if someone will tweet at me something and I want to respond,
or you know, I try to answer my YouTube comments, but the channel's getting pretty big.
I'll answer it once, twice, and then again, and that's it.
And then I'll stop.
There's simply no point in chasing that down the rabbit hole.
Yeah.
Well, it was fascinating to me to watch, particularly like with ivermectin hydroxychloroquine.
Hydroxychloroquine went from being one of the safest compounds to this thing that caused heart attacks all of a sudden, allegedly.
And I had doctors tell me that, and they were certain of that, and they had facts.
Even though they had no facts, and you know, if you scratched at that, you hit primer right away.
You know, there was no, and I'm just interested how those things go to being a known fact.
Yeah, that's part of the problem with the corruption of the peer reviewed process, right?
Because what we all need is, we need, we just need something we can rely upon, right?
So, and I don't just mean the significant other, like we need something that if you're in churches, you know, you can have scandals or corrupts,
like we really need something that has impeccable integrity.
And ideally, that would be the peer review process.
And that should be the gold standard for how we adjudicate competing claims, right?
But we don't have that.
And because we don't have that, that places a burden upon us when we're busy, we're tired, we're working all day, we're doing whatever we're doing.
And so, the problem itself is just immediately put into hard mode.
Does that answer the question?
Okay.
Yeah.
Dr. Ryan Portovi is asking, are you familiar with philosopher Steve Patterson's hypothesis that we're in a dark age?
If so, what do you think about it?
I don't, not familiar with it.
Okay.
You think we're in a dark age?
I'm worried.
I've passed the point of concern.
And I'm worried that enlightenment values are under attack.
I'm worried that free speech, open inquiry, freedom of the press, freedom of the assembly.
I'm worried about basic American values being under attack.
I'm worried about mass migration.
I'm worried about, what's the charming conference?
There's a charming conference.
I'm worried that our debt just went from, but it's honest.
You know, I'm just being very honest with you.
I'm worried that our debt just went to $34 trillion that I don't know if it's possible to pay that off.
I'm worried that nobody cares that the debt is $34 trillion.
I don't even know.
That's probably even worse.
I think that we have very serious obstacles.
We have the rise of Iran.
We have a problem in the Middle East.
We have North Korea, Russia.
We have Ukraine.
I don't know.
The world was just much easier when I was younger.
It was, wasn't it?
Yeah.
I'm worried.
Are we in a dark age?
I don't know.
I mean, there are significant signs of optimism technologically developing AIs.
I am not Pollyanna, but I'm very optimistic about certain AIs that we're developing.
Paul, this is a weird thing to say.
I'm very optimistic about potentials for quantum computing.
So I think that there are some technological bright spots.
People think that almost everybody has a breaking point and people are just sick of this.
They're just sick of it.
Yeah.
And I think enough people have either attempted to be canceled or been called crazy names.
I think that we're starting to see a change in this.
And I do think that the plagiarism thing is going to help either, it's going to give us
an opportunity to either recapture corrupt institutions or to burn them to the ground.
Indeed.
So you mentioned before about that need for that certainty to have something, some integrity
that you can hang on to.
Correct.
So the question here is what does God and basic moral conscience, how does that play into
this knowing right from wrong?
Well, you say this in half the audience will get up and walk away.
I'm an atheist.
Look at it.
Nobody walked away.
Okay.
That's a pretty good sign.
I don't believe in God, but I do believe in the ability.
I don't think that there's sufficient, let me phrase it to you this way.
I don't think there's sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a God of God's.
But if I were given evidence, I would believe.
So then we could talk about what would constitute sufficient evidence to warrant that belief.
Oops, they just left the question.
So I do believe that there are such things as moral facts.
I do believe that we can figure them out.
I do believe that we can reason to conclusions.
We can do things like John Rawls's experiment where we don't know our position in the system.
And then we have to create fair systems, not equitable systems, but fair systems.
Hold on.
Back up.
How certain are you on a scale of one to 10?
A very reasonable question.
And I would say I would never ask someone a question that I myself would not answer.
So I'm going to answer that.
I am nine point, Dawkins in the God delusion puts himself at a six point nine on the six on the scale.
He later up depth to six point nine.
I would put myself at a nine point nine on the nine point eight five on the scale.
And what might change you?
That's a wonderful question.
I actually love to go over and actually answer that question.
That's a great question real quick.
Let's see if I can bottom line it.
So let's see what wouldn't change it.
No empirical phenomenon would change my mind.
So Lawrence Krauss, the physicist's buddy of mine has his things.
You walk outside and you look in the sky and it says, I am God, believe in me.
Would that be enough?
And literally everybody sees it and you haven't been dropping acid.
For me, the answer to that would be no.
And it would be no because you'd have to be able to rule out other alternative possibilities.
Time travelers, trickster alien cultures, et cetera.
And because we can't do that, so it couldn't be phenomenon.
It couldn't be anything internal.
It couldn't be a feeling state.
Why couldn't it be a feeling state?
Because people who have different God beliefs have different feeling states or claim to feel the presence of something,
they're God that has very different moral pronouncements and pronouncements.
Yes, sir.
A fool says in his heart there is no God.
What did he say?
A fool says in his heart there is no God.
There is no God.
I think it didn't happen.
I think it's nonsense.
I think you're nonsense.
Well, that's interesting because look what you just did.
So this is very interesting.
Let's linger on this for a moment because it's very interesting.
So you went from calling me nonsense.
You made a claim that I called the claim nonsense.
You took the claim and went from the claim being nonsense to a personal attack on me.
Professor, if you become wise, you become a fool.
Okay.
Well, I can quote Jair or Tolkien or anything.
That doesn't make it true.
One's ability to quote something doesn't make it true.
So what you just did is adopt many of the tactics of woke people by attempting to disrupt,
by attempting to dismantle.
So you're adopting the tactic.
You're becoming what you hate, a kind of thuggery.
I'm not talking to you.
If you want to talk afterwards, I might,
but this is not a conversation in which you are no longer involved.
I apologize for my time today.
We're not in the league.
We're just going to put the question to you.
Professor, believe in morality.
What do you base your morality on?
The question is what do you base your morality on?
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's a great question.
And that would be an example of how to ask a question in a civil way without attacking a person.
And I think if we move towards questions like that and ways of engaging people civilly,
then if you want to live in a society, I'll answer your question a second.
If you want to live in a society where that becomes normative,
I hope you don't find what you seek because the pendulum will move to the other side one day.
And if you think disrupting people and insulting them and calling them names and quoting a book is going to change anyone's mind,
that's a sad state.
And I feel sorry for you.
So now I'll answer your question.
What was the question again?
What do you base your morality on?
Oh, I believe that morality can be rationally derived.
So I mentioned John Rawls.
I'll give you a quick example of how to do that.
So let's say that you're behind a veil of ignorance.
In other words, you don't know your place in society and you have to figure out what kind of a society you want to create.
You know, should you allow gay marriage?
What kind of graduated income tax if you want to have a graduated income tax at all?
Should you allow in society?
The way to figure that out is not the way we're currently doing it because people make those decisions based upon their vested interests.
The way to figure that out is to not know.
So kids understand this intuitively.
For example, if you want to divide ice cream up, one of the things people will do is still, if there are two or three kids,
one person will scoop the ice cream out and make the containers and the other person will pick.
So inherent in that process is a fair process by which people can select the ice cream.
Then you always feel like crap after you've divided the ice cream.
You're like, oh, I should have taken that much.
But you can do the same things with goods and services in a society and how they're distributed.
That would be one way.
Here's another way to think about it.
Let's say that there was some kind of a meteor hurling toward Earth and the tangent, it just barely scraped the Earth's surface.
But one of the things that it did was it dropped some crazy pathogens on the planet.
And so that everybody had, overnight, everybody had diarrhea 10 times a day.
They were half blind and they vomited 10 times a day.
That would be bad.
Somebody who worked to ameliorate that suffering, maybe they create, I don't know, some kind of cocktail or something
in which people go from having diarrhea 10 times a day to 6 times a day and vomiting 10 times a day to 6 times a day.
That would be good.
So in that example, I think everybody in the room would agree to that and yet I didn't need any holy book for that.
I didn't need to resort to any kind of ancient wisdom for that.
That's a rationally derivable moral truth.
So that's how I do it.
That's just one way to do it.
Are you a devotee of Ayn Rand?
No.
But I respect Ayn Rand.
The question was, are you a devotee of Ayn Rand?
No, but I respect her work.
All right, we have one final question.
This is me reading a question.
Will you marry me?
Raise your hand.
Unfortunately, she did not raise her hand, but there we go.
All right.
Well, thank you so much, Peter Bogosian.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
That was fun.
