September 18, 2020

Brett Weinstein on Freedom Pact with Lewis Edward

Check out the The Freedom Pact Podcast Page

Key Takeaways

• “What unites us exceeds what divides us by leaps and bounds” – Bret Weinstein
• The greatest historic successes of human beings depend on cooperation against a common enemy
• Utopians believe that they know the blueprint to get to their imagined Utopia
  • It is impossible to design a “perfect” system upfront
    • You won’t know its flaws until the system is in place
  • “The way to make a functional system is through prototyping” Bret Weinstein
  • “Many of the greatest tragedies in human history are the result of Utopians attempting to inflict their viewpoint on a population and then discovering in which way it comes apart” Bret Weinstein
• Most people don’t have ill intents; they simply start from very different sets of assumptions
• “The most precious thing we have is a human life that is liberated” – Bret Weinstein
  • Human life is very easily squandered if someone has to focus exclusively on getting by
  • If one is liberated and can focus on things that matter, he ends up delivering value to humanity
• A society that rejects science is like a driver that puts on a blindfold, it will crash eventually
• A meaningful live for Bret is a life in which one gives more than he takes

Books Mentioned

• The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense by Gaad Saad was mentioned in regards to “pathogenic ideas”
• Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared M. Diamond had a big influence on Bret

Intro

• Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary theorist, the founder of Unity 2020, and the host of the DarkHorse Podcast
  • Check out Bret’s website
• Hosts: Lewis Edward (@FreedomPactPod)
• In this chat, Bret discusses the current political situation, the ideas behind Unity 2020, and more interesting ideas about society

The Current State of Media and Avoiding Bias

• Every news channel has a pronounced bias
  • To make sense of the world, it is necessary to correct for that bias by tuning into channels that are not targeted at us
• The popularity of the Intellectual Dark Web signals that people are starved for authenticity
  • We’re mostly used to being targeted from marketers that are trying to sell us something
  • When we see someone authentic, we get a strong desire to listen to them
    • It works the same way in classrooms. Students respond much better to candid professors who admit the limits of their knowledge

Social Justice and Unfairness

• Humans (and other primates) are built to register unfairness
  • We seem to care more about wealth distribution than the absolute level of well-being
    • Even though total levels of wealth have risen dramatically and we are all better off than our ancestors, people still attack Western civilization
  • Unfairness is a real problem, and if not addressed it could destabilize civilization
    • The issue is that it is not being addressed correctly right now, causing many people to tune out and stop caring about it

On the Upcoming Elections

• Bret sees both candidates as disastrous and that’s why he started the Unity 2020 movement
• Assuming that Unity 2020 doesn’t take off, Bret expects Trump to win by a large margin
  • Biden hasn’t laid out any vision and has only portrayed himself as “not Trump”, not a strong position

The Current Political Duopoly

• Our system is structured to condense different faction into large incoherent alliances (Democrats and Republicans)
  • You can’t be part of the conversation unless you join one of the alliances
    • As everyone joins, they get stronger and make any third party “dead on arrival”
  • This structure allows the two main parties to be highly unpopular without being vulnerable
• Third parties have a further disadvantage: The Greater Evil Paradox
  • They tend to “steal” votes from the major party that’s closest to their values (e.g. Green Party takes votes from Democrats)
  • So voting for them has the effect of favoring the party that one dislikes the most
• The current duopoly guards high office from anybody who would seriously address corruption

What is Unity 2020?

• “What unites us exceeds what divides us by leaps and bounds” – Bret Weinstein
• Unity 2020 is a movement aiming to solve the problems of the current political system
  • It proposes to draft two candidates (one from each party)
  • Elected candidates will govern as a team, by consensus
  • Each candidate stays at the top for four years and then exchange until one of the candidates has governed twice
• Three characteristics of potential candidates
  • Courageous, Capable, and Patriotic
• After running a voting process the most popular ticket was to have Tulsi Gabbard and Dan Crenshaw
• The greatest historic successes of human beings depend on cooperation against a common enemy
  • A nation can succeed until it has an opposing force, after which it will create factions competing inside
  • The question is, can we inspire unity and cooperation among the factions?
• Bret sees Unity 2020 to continue expanding the movement beyond 2020

What is the Most Pathogenic Idea?

• In The Parasitic Mind, Gaad Saad calls “Postmodernism”, the most pathogenic idea
• According to Bret, “Utopia” is the most pathogenic idea afflicting us
  • The human mind is attracted to the notion of a perfect world
  • Many people try to design a perfect world, without understanding the characteristics of a complex and dynamic system
    • In a complex system, if you maximize any value, you will cause all the others to crash
  • Utopians tend to believe that they know what’s the blueprint to get to their imagined Utopia
    • It is actually impossible to design a “perfect” system upfront
      • You won’t know its flaws until the system is in place
    • “The way to make a functional system is through prototyping” Bret Weinstein
    • “Many of the greatest tragedies in human history are the result of Utopians attempting to inflict their viewpoint on a population and then discovering in which way it comes apart” Bret Weinstein

Issues with Academia

• The way we fund Universities puts a bias in favor of experiments against theory, “which is preposterous”
  • Theorists don’t need lots of funds and don’t win big grants, so Universities tend to discard them
  • Without the partnership between experiments and theory, we shortcircuit the scientific process
    • Ideas that should have quickly been dismissed may come to dominate scientific fields
• The culture of Academia is timid and compliant in the face of power
  • It tolerated low-quality ideas such as postmodernism, critical race theory, and queer theory
  • “It is hard to imagine the system being corrected without a turnover of who is in the faculty” Bret Weinstein

Is Going to University the Right Choice for Young People?

• Bret thinks there’s no good answer to this question
  • “Even if a University education is close to useless at this point, one may need the credentials to be taken seriously” Bret Weinstein
  • The price of a college education doesn’t reflect the value of what you learn
    • Due to the free resources available now, you can still get a great education outside of the traditional system

About the Recent Riots

• We have to be careful about the ability of ideological movements to detect and capture the public’s sympathy in a given moment
  • The anarchist movement used the death of George Floyd as an opportunity to associate itself with BlackLivesMatter and come in the mainstream
• Bret sees the possibility of a Civil War emerging as fairly likely
  • When people see their antagonists as subhuman, they tend to go after each other
    • That’s what we are starting to see in many situations
• A game/activity that Bret suggests
  • Tune in to people with opposed worldviews to ours
  • Try to see the world through their eyes and bridge the gap
  • It’s really rewarding to cross that bridge
    • Most people don’t have ill intents, they simply start from very different sets of assumptions
    • As you practice this, beware of bad actors and sociopaths

Don’t Game Honorable Systems

• Bret’s principle to decide when to play by the rules is: Don’t Game Honorable Systems
  • If a system is well-intended, it’s not your right to destroy it, so play by the rules
  • If the system is not honorable (dealing with a greedy corporation), you can see the rules as flexible and it might be ok to break them

Guns, Germs and Steel

• Guns, Germs, and Steel, written by Jared M. Diamond, had a big influence on Bret
  • The book reveals the real forces that shaped winners and losers in history
    • We tend to think that what makes civilizations powerful or weak depends on differences among people
    • The truth is that some historical accidents empowered some societies and disempowered others
  • Bret’s takeaways from the book:
    • The prospect of a fairer world is reasonable
    • The idea that those who are more deserving tend to acquire more, is not the dominant force between populations

If Bret Could Broadcast a Message to Humanity

• “The most precious thing we have is a human life that is liberated” – Bret Weinstein
  • Human life is very easily squandered if someone has to focus exclusively on getting by
  • If one is liberated and can focus on things that matter, he ends up delivering value to humanity
• It follows that we have an obligation to maximize the number of people with that liberated experience
  • This means keeping the population below carrying capacity so that we can experience abundance

Additional Notes

• A society that rejects science is like a driver that puts on a blindfold, it will crash eventually
  • It would be an invitation to a dark age, where progress comes to a halt and injustice reigns
  • We must at all cost prevent this shift in our mindset
• Cancel Culture’s ideas are foolish, but its strategy is brilliant
  • It’s very difficult to reject their deal
    • You can either join them and support them or you can resist and be stigmatized publicly (which most people won’t do)
• Bret’s biggest mentors
  • His Ph.D. Advisor Dick Alexander
  • His undergrad advisor Bob Trivers, one of the greatest evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century
• A meaningful live for Bret is a life in which one gives more than he takes

Freedom Pact Podcast : 2020 election, politics, society
Notes By Giorgio Parlato