Abandon Ideology | Gad Saad | EP 154

[Music] Hello everybody! Today I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Dr. Gad Saad, a friend of mine, a colleague, an early supporter of mine when those were few and far between. When all the publicity emerged initially surrounding me and the videos I made regarding Bill C-16 in Canada, Gad was one of the first people to interview me, and he took, I would say, a substantial risk in doing so. We stayed in contact since then, doing some podcasts together; we've done each other's podcasts, and we spoke together at a free speech rally in Toronto, and that's a couple of years ago now, three years ago I think. Yeah, three tumultuous years to say the least.

Gad has recently written The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense and a number of other books as well, which you can see arrayed behind him: The Consuming Instinct, a contributor to The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, if I remember correctly. No, the sole author of that one, but the other one is the edited book, right? And that's Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences, exactly, yeah. So we're going to talk about Gad's book today, but a variety of other things too, and I think the conversation will naturally tend towards the topics that are outlined in the book.

In any case, let's start with that. You talk about infectious ideas. Anyways, I should say it's very nice to see you, Gad. Thank you very much for coming on to this podcast, YouTube Jordan. It's so nice to have you back in the public sphere. I can speak for millions of fans: we've missed you, and I'm delighted to be with you.

Well, I tell you, for me, it's a lifesaver, man, to be able to come back after being sick for so long and to be able to jump back into doing this. I'm certainly not at my peak by any stretch of the imagination, but it's such a relief that I still have a life waiting to be picked up and that I can ask people to come and talk to me, and they will, and I can start communicating with people again. It's literally a lifesaver, and I mean that most sincerely. So I really do appreciate you coming to talk to me, and I hope we get a long ways today. There's a lot of things I want to talk to you about.

You talk about infectious ideas, and let's talk about that a little bit. Your book... So I'm going to take a bit of a critical stance to begin with. I think your book concentrates a lot on infectious ideas on the left, and of course, that's been a particular preoccupation of mine in recent years, although I spent a lot of my career dissecting infectious ideas on the right, because I was very appalled, as any reasonable person would be, about what happened. I mean, it's ridiculous to even have to say it, but I was preoccupied, in some sense, with what happened in Germany in the 1930s and the 1940s and the infectious ideas that possessed that entire community, that entire country, and the devastating consequences of that.

And so, it's obviously the case that infectious ideas can emerge across the political spectrum; maybe even in the moderate center, but certainly on the right. But your book concentrates almost solely on the excesses, the ideological excesses of the left, and I'm wondering what you think of that as a scientist.

Sure, it's a great point that you raise, and I actually address it very early in the book, where I argue that it is absolutely not the case that it's only one side of the political aisle that could be parasitized by bad ideas and idea pathogens. The reason why I specifically focus on ideas stemming from the left is not because this is a political book, but rather because I operate, and you've operated your entire life, within an ecosystem called academia. Within the context of academia, the idea pathogens that are most likely to proliferate are those that are being spawned by leftist professors. This certainly does not apply that the right could not itself be parasitized by countless other idea pathogens.

So, it's not because I was trying to take a political position, but rather, as any epidemiologist—or, and or—I call myself a parasitologist of the human mind, I happen to be focusing on idea pathogens that are the ones that define my daily reality.

Exactly. Okay, I can sympathize with that because I would say as well that as an academic, I haven't felt the pressure of right-wing conspiratorial theories in relation to my work. But I would say this is something that has happened: I started to talk about political ideas because of the consequences of left-wing ideological thinking in the academy. What happened as a consequence of that was that I was branded, as you have been, as a right-wing thinker, an alt-right thinker, maybe even a Nazi, because I was called out on more than one occasion. And I think that might be true of you too, although you make a less believable Nazi than me, I would say, given your background. A less plausible Nazi, let's say.

So I found that when I objected to the excesses of the left, the people who sprang to my defense tended, logically enough, to come from the right. And there were tendrils, feelers out from even the more radical right to see, because I was opposed to the radical left, whether I might be a supporter, say, of the radical right. What was interesting about that to me, watching that, is that you tend to think better of people when they come to your defense. So I noticed, what would I say? It's hard to keep your centrist bearings when you go after one side of the political equation, and you're befriended, at least in part, by the other, or the feelers are there. And so I'm wondering what you think about that. Do you think that, have you shifted more towards the right as a consequence of opposing the radical left?

I don't think so, because oftentimes people ask me, "You never espouse a particular position about your political tribe," and I answer them not to be coy or to be evasive. I tell them that's because I truly don't believe in sort of an all-encompassing label that defines my political positions. There are many positions on which you would think, "Oh, this is a conservative position." So, for example, when it comes to open-door policy, or aka immigration policy, then you would think I'm, quote, conservative. When it comes to capital punishment for predatory serial pedophiles, I have absolutely no moral restraint in the idea of executing someone who's raped five children. That would be considered a conservative idea. When it comes to social issues, then you would think of me as extremely socially liberal and, quote, progressive.

So really, my own personal tribe is one that is defined by examining each individual issue and then proposing a position based on sort of universal foundational principles. So the fact, again, that I criticized largely the left says nothing about my ability to have most of my friends be leftist by me believing in many of their positions. It's simply that, you know, it's the way I like to compare it is if I were an endocrinologist who specializes in treating diabetes, it would be silly for someone to come to me and say, "But wait a second, Dr. Sad, how come you're never exploring melanoma? Don't you know that melanoma is a deadly disease?" Well, of course it is. I just happen to be someone who is studying diabetes. That doesn't state anything about the dangers of the endless other panoply of diseases that might afflict human beings.

And so I think it's really very much in that spirit that I wrote this book. It's not at all that the right cannot be parasitized. Take, for example, anti-scientific reasoning. Oftentimes, my leftist colleagues will pretend as though it is the right who engages in anti-science rhetoric. Now let's take a discipline that I'm in, evolutionary psychology. Well, when it comes to the rejection of evolution, it is much more likely to be people on the right who reject evolution. When it comes to evolutionary psychology in particular, though, it's a lot more likely to be people on the left who reject, you know, evolutionary arguments to explain, for example, sex differences.

So it's not that one party is anti-science more than the other; it's that each party has its own anti-scientific lenses and myopia.

Okay, so I guess these questions are particularly germane given what happened in Washington in the last two weeks and what still might happen in the next few days. We'll see. I've noticed recently among friends and family members, as well as more broadly in the culture, that there is a pronounced increase in the degree to which conspiratorial theories in particular and paranoid theories are propagating on the right. I think, now, I don't know much about QAnon. I've been out of the loop, and I should be more on top of that, but I'm not. But I do know that it’s popular and pervasive, and I do know that Trump's claims to have won the election are supported by a network of conspiratorial thinking. I was speaking with Douglas Murray about that, and you tell me what you think about this.

This is sort of the conclusion of our discussion, was that Trump claims that he lost it or that he won the election, and actually that he wanted by a substantial margin—that's the claims as far as I've been able to understand them. And then to believe that, this is what you have to believe: you have to believe that the electoral system in the United States is broken to the degree that fraud is widespread and pervasive and of sufficient magnitude to move an election. You have to believe that people as close to Trump as Mike Pence have become part of a conspiratorial network or have been shut down by people who are able to put sufficient pressure on him. You have to believe that the judiciary in the United States—which I believe has ruled something like 60 times against his claims and one time in favor—you have to believe that it’s become uncontrollably corrupt, even on the Republican side, even when those Republicans were nominated by Trump or Trump's people. And you have to believe that the only person standing on moral high ground throughout all of this has been Trump.

Each of those propositions seems to me to have a low probability of truth, and their combined probability is infinitesimally small. But there's widespread support for Trump's claims that he won the election and was robbed of it. So someone who is looking at your book, especially from a leftist perspective, would say, "Well, not only are you concentrating on the wrong side of the equation with regards to clear and present danger, but the omission of analysis of conspiratorial thinking on the right shows a blind spot that is of sufficient magnitude to threaten the stability of society." Now, not to say that you're personally responsible for that by any stretch of the imagination, but, see, I've really been thinking about this because I have felt as an academic that the greatest threat to my scientific inquiry, and to my free inquiry for that matter, has clearly come from the left. But, well, but there's no doubt that conspiratorial thinking is on the increase on the right. I mean, I knew that was going to happen five years ago, and that's partly the sorts of warnings that I was trying to put out—that with enough cage-rattling, the right was going to wake up; but, well, I'll let you comment on that.

So, to go back, I guess to reiterate what I said earlier, but in a slightly different way, I think what you're...the argument that you're making is that the susceptibility to believe...there's actually now a psychometric scale, which perhaps you're aware of, that actually measures susceptibility to BS. It's actually published, I think, in the journal called Judgment and Decision Making, and there's been several follow-ups of that work. So really looking at our ability to believe nonsense using a psychometric scale.

All I think that you are demonstrating, and the question that you're posing is that the capacity for people to think in non-critical ways is not restricted to a political aisle. The left could be anti-scientific; the right can be anti-scientific. The left can succumb to idea pathogens; the right can succumb to idea pathogens. In Chapter Six of my book, I talk about a particular cognitive malady which I coined as "Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome." I think Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome is something that all people can succumb to, by the way—not only the left and the right can succumb to Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome. Being highly educated and otherwise intelligent does not inoculate you from many of these cognitive distortions and irrational ways of thinking.

So you would typically think, "Oh, well, you know, while professors who are in the business of critically thinking would be the ones who might be immune from this." And meanwhile, as I described in the book, the ones who spawn all of this nonsense are typically professors. So again, to reiterate, I truly don't think that it is a political statement to argue that people can think irrationally. I simply chose to focus on the left because, as you said, that's the world that I inhabit. That's though the dangers come from those folks.

Now, that doesn't mean that...listen, in 2017, when you and I finally appeared at that event in Toronto, I had received, because of what had happened with that journalist where she wasn't invited and so on... Do you remember all that stuff, Jordan?

Sure, Faith Goldie.

Exactly! I can remember where I made the extraordinarily difficult decision to not include her on the free speech panel. Right! And more than that, I mean, we sort of advised the organizer what our thinking was, and then ultimately it was up to her since she was the one who was organizing. Well, by simply stating that, the number of death threats that I had received... Without being able to absolutely know for sure, I would predict that based on the demographic profile of many of the people who were sending me death threats, they would have been much more on the right. Right? So again, it's not as though I am negating the possibility that people on the right could be absolutely insane in their own unique and flowery ways. All I'm doing, though, in the book is I am focusing on diabetes without rejecting the fact that melanoma could also be important.

So again, it's really...I hope that people don't read the book as though it is a political treatise. It just so happens that that's the ecosystem that I reside in.

So what do you think the metaphor buys you? I mean, you're a biologically oriented thinker; you talk about ideas in some sense as if they're analogous to life forms. So let's explore that metaphor a little bit. What do you think that buys you in terms of explanatory power?

Well, what it does is it contextualizes the fact that many people slowly walk into the abyss of infinite lunacy in complete complicity. So let me give you a couple of analogies because, again, in part, it's just prose that allows me to draw a powerful analogy, but I actually do think that there are literal comparisons in using those biological metaphors.

So take, for example, the spider wasp. The spider wasp looks for a spider to sting, rendering it zombified. It's still alive; it then carries this much larger spider into its burrow, and then while the spider is fully alive but zombified, it lays an egg, and then the offspring will eat the spider in vivo. Well, I argue that political correctness is akin to the spider wasp's sting, right? It zombifies us into being complicit in our silence, leading us slowly into the burrow of infinite lunacy.

So you could view it as just powerful writing rhetoric or literally the equivalent, a mimetic form, equivalent of what happens in biological systems. Take now when I talk, for example, about parasitic ideas. Well, in neuroparasitology, what you typically study is how a particular parasite will end up making its way to the brain of its host, altering its neural circuitry, so that then the host will engage in behaviors that are maladaptive to it but adaptive for the parasite. And so when I was trying to come up with a powerful way of explaining why do people hold on and get infected by these alluring parasitic ideas, I thought, "Aha! The neuroparasitological framework is the ideal framework to try to explain why otherwise supposedly rational people could completely become parasitized by insanity," right? Why it would be that the LGBTQ community could suddenly become in favor of “Queers for Palestine.” That this is an actual group.

So “Queers for Palestine”—but down, down, Zionist pigs! So Tel Aviv is one of the most welcoming spots for the LGBTQ community. And so if I'm a member of that community, it would make rational sense for me to be supporting a system, a political system, a country where I could live in safety and freedom. But instead, I walk around saying "Queers for Palestine"? That sounds parasitic. It sounds like the idea—the framework—that would cause me to say “Queers for Palestine” rather than “Tel Aviv is not a good position to hold” because—as someone who comes from the Middle East, I can tell you that the LGBTQ community in Gaza or the West Bank are not usually embraced with infinite warmth. So this is why I thought that using a neuro-parasitological model would be really apt in describing why we become so intoxicated with these bad ideas.

Okay, so a parasite takes over a host so that the parasite can replicate. So it has an interest in the outcome, so to speak, or it acts like it has an interest in the outcome. That might be a more accurate way of thinking about it. So in order for that parasite metaphor to hold true, the ideas—which are acting as parasites—would have to have an interest in the outcome. So are you presupposing, I guess you're presupposing, like Dawkins, that ideas compete in a Darwinian fashion and those that are the best at taking over their hosts are the ones that propagate?

The difference between...and of course I cite Dawkins's work, yes, memetic stuff. The difference between, say, a mimetic approach and the approach that I take in the book is I guess twofold. One, memes can be negatively valenced; they could be neutral, and they can be positively valenced. So memes—a jingle, if I start humming a jingle and you happen to hear me humming that jingle, Jordan, then you might hum it as well, and so my mimetic jingle has now infected your brain. So that could be a completely neutral meme, or it could be a positive meme.

So first, the valence of memes can be all possible options, whereas the parasitic idea pathogens that I'm speaking of, I'm implicitly, if not explicitly, stating that they are negative. That's one. Number two, the mimetic framework operates as though they’re viral, whereas there's a unique element to it being parasitic. Right? So pathogens can be viruses; they could be bacteria; they could be parasites; they could be fungi. And so the reason why I call them idea pathogens is because pathogen is a broader term that can incorporate viral infection or parasitic infestation. So there are a few of these types of nuances between the approach that I'm taking and the one that Dawkins took.

So a parasite tends to make a host act in ways that aren't that good for the host, exactly. And it seems to me that that's potentially where the metaphor breaks down here because it also seems to me that people who are pushing these ideas forward or who are allowing themselves to become possessed by them—which is a metaphor I've used, actually—gain as a consequence. So they're working for the same purposes as the parasite, and so then you have to wonder if that actually constitutes a parasite. I mean, the people who are pushing a given ideological position or even a given theoretical position, hypothetically, benefit from pushing that position as a consequence of the effects it has on their success within their broad community.

Sorry if I interrupt. No, I think I would look at it as does the parasitizing of your mind result in the proliferation of the idea pathogen? The idea pathogen doesn't care about, you know, your reproductive fitness. So for example, take Islamophobia. If now I'm speaking as a, you know, an Islamic supremacist, if I want my society to become more Islamic— or not my society, The West, to be more Islamic—spreading Islamophobia as a narrative is certainly very good. So if I could convince a lot of people in intelligentsia, in the humanities and the social sciences, that it is Islamophobic to ever criticize anything about Islam, so if the Islamophobia memeplex, to use Dawkins's term—or I would call it more of an idea pathogen—if I can parasitize enough minds to repeat this, then that Islamophobia memeplex, by its spreading from brain to brain, has an ultimate goal of creating greater Islamization of the West. I don't care about the reproductive fitness of the humanities professor who is spreading that Islamic Islamophobia idea pathogen. Do you follow what I mean?

So, yeah, well, but it might be to your benefit if you actually did enhance the function of your host, if by being parasitized by the idea pathogen, it improves the reproductive fitness of the host. Yes, or in this situation, maybe the ideological or the academic status of the host, because then the ideas could be spread more rapidly.

That it certainly does, right? So if we can create an echo chamber where we could then spread that idea pathogen more readily, as happens, like in the academic ecosystem, that’s perfect! But the reality is, the reason why I like the term parasitic rather than mimetic is because by having... So go back to the example of “Queers for Palestine.” By having someone from the LGBTQ community fighting hard against Islamophobia and fighting hard against the Zionist pigs and so on, it is actually detrimental to my reproductive fitness. I mean, or never mind my reproductive fitness, my survival, right? Being someone who is a member of the LGBTQ community and standing up for a system that would be brutal and repressing me is not exactly a good rational strategy to pursue, and yet I pursue it precisely because I have been infected by a parasitic idea pathogen. You follow what I'm saying?

Alright, well I follow it, but it doesn't explain to me exactly the motivation for putting the idea forward, you know, because the idea isn't literally hijacking the nervous system of its host in the same way that the parasitic wasp that you described hijacks the nervous system of the spider. Like there's no direct—well there is! There is a connection between the ideas and the motivations of the host. And so I guess that’s partly... I’m striving to understand that.

Yeah, so I mean in the sense that the parasitic wasp is actually causing direct neuronal alteration that causes the spider to become zombified, you're right. Ultimately, you know, not to be too reductionist, ultimately everything that we do—including our ideas—could be translated to neuronal firings, right?

Right, but you have to hopefully be able to specify that mechanism. So that leads to—well I mean, I'm not suggesting that you should have pushed your research to the point where you could specify the neural mechanisms—but it does open up a problem, I would say. Maybe the problem would be what you see, in some sense, in the continual debate between right and left. It might be construed in the terms that you're using as a constant battle between proponents of the claim that one set of ideas is parasitical, while the other set isn't. And so, for example, people who object to a biological definition of sex or gender would claim that the reason that the person who puts that claim forward has been parasitized by an idea, in your parlance. And I think this is actually quite close to the claim that is made, but that the true reason for the claim—the true motivation for the claim—is something operating behind the scenes: is that the person who's making the claims is bolstering their position of power or maintaining their position in the status quo or attempting to put down another group, but mostly for the purposes of maintaining the status quo within which they have an interest. So they're actually not putting forth an idea that has any objective validity, but being possessed, in some sense, by an idea that has a function similar to the function that you're describing. So how do you, using this metaphor, how do you protect yourself or protect even the entire critical game where ideas are assessed from degenerating into something like claim and counterclaim? That all the ideas that are arguing are nothing but—or that are competing are nothing but parasites?

So, at first, I'm going to, here maybe surprisingly, be more charitable in attributing a cause to the people who originally espoused and spawned all those idea pathogens. And let me explain how. When I was looking at all those pathogens...and by the way, let me just mention them very quickly for your viewers who may not have yet read the book. So post-modernism would be the granddaddy of all idea pathogens—cultural relativism, identity politics, biophobia, the fear of using biology to explain human affairs, militant feminism, critical race theory—each of these is an idea pathogen.

So as I was trying to think of some common thread that runs through all these idea pathogens, very much like if I were an oncologist, I may be someone specializing in pancreatic cancer, which is very different than melanoma. And yet, of course, all cancers at least share the one mechanism of unchecked cell division. Right? So even though they might manifest themselves and project through different trajectories, there is some consilient commonality across all cancers, and so I was trying to look for a similar synthetic explanation for what do all these idea pathogens have in common.

And here's where I'm going to be charitable. I think that these idea pathogens start off from a noble place, and they start off from a desire to pursue a noble cause, but regrettably, in the pursuit of that noble cause, then they end up—then they, meaning the proponents of those idea pathogens—end up willing to murder truth in the service of pursuing that otherwise noble goal. Right?

So for example, if we take equity feminism, most people who are going to be watching this show are probably equity feminists. I'm an equity feminist. And if I can speak for you, I bet you're an equity feminist, which means basically what we are: men and women should be equal under law. Under the law, there should not be any institutional sexism or misogyny against one sex or the other. So the Christina Hoff Somers position. So we can start off with that being a great idea, right? Well, we could even push that a little bit further and say that if we had any sense, we'd want the sexes to be opened up to equal exploitation, so to speak, because everybody has something to offer. And that only a fool would want to restrict half the population from offering what they have to offer, even if he was driven by nothing but self-interest. Fair enough? Great.

And so the problem then arises when militant feminism comes in. They argue that in the service of that original goal and the desire to squash the patriarchy and the status quo and so on, we must now espouse a position that rejects the possibility that men and women are distinguishable from one another—not better, not worse—but there are evolutionary trajectories that would have resulted in recurring sex differences that are fully explained by biology. And by the militant feminists will reject that and hence they'll have—they'll suffer from biophobia—another idea pathogen in the service of that original noble goal.

So think first I'll just do one more, if I may. Cultural relativism, the idea that, you know, there are no human universals; each culture has to be identified based on its own merits and so on. Again, it starts off with a kernel of truth; it seems to make sense. The gentleman who first espoused this, Franz Boas, the anthropologist out of Columbia, was trying to stop the possibility that people might use biology in explaining differences between cultures and so on, and therefore—and justify them that way, exactly.

And right. The biologists would say this is how it is, and therefore that's how it should be. Exactly! So in the service of that original noble goal, they then end up building edifices of evidence for the next 100 years where the word biology is never uttered. Right? I mean, and that's been my whole career. Right? Which is, I go into a business school, and I look at organizational behavior and consumer behavior and personnel psychology and all of the other panoply of ways that we manifest our human nature in a business context, and never do we ever mention the word biology. Well, how could you study all of these purposes of important behaviors without recognizing that humans might be privy to their hormonal fluctuations? To me, it seems like a trivially obvious statement. To most economists, this is hearsay. What does what the hormones have to do with the economy?

So again, you start off with Franz Boas having a noble cause, but then it metamorphosizes into complete lunacy in the service of that original noble goal. So I think if I were to look for a consilient explanation as to why all these idea pathogens arise is because they start off with a kernel of truth, with a noble cause, but then they metamorphosize into...

Alright, so here's another way that they might be conceptualized as parasites too. Imagine that the academy has built up a reputation, which is like a reputation is like a storehouse of value in some sense. So you get a good reputation if you trade equitably with people, and then your ability to trade equitably is relatively assured in the future, right? You'll be invited to trade, and so reputation is like a storehouse in some sense. Now, academia, at least in principle or the intellectual exercise, has built up a certain reservoir of goodwill which is indicated by the fact that people will pay to go to universities to be educated. And the hypothesis there is that the universities have something to offer; that's a practical utility of sufficient magnitude so that the cost is justifiable.

You go to university, and you come out more productive, and the reason you come out more productive is because the intellectual enterprise that the university has been engaged in has had actual practical relevance. And you might justify that claim by pointing to the fact that the technological improvements that have been generated in no small part by raw research have radically improved the standard of living of people everywhere in the world, and some of that's a consequence of pure academic research, a fair bit of it pure scientific research.

Now, what happens is that other ideas come along that don't have the same functional utility but have the same appearance. And so they're not so much parasites; they don't so much parasitize individuals, let's say, as they parasitize the entire system. The system has built up a reputation because it was offering solutions of pragmatic utility. Even training students to think clearly and to assess arguments clearly and to communicate properly has tremendous economic value if you do it appropriately, because that means they can operate more efficiently when they're solving problems.

Now, but once that system is in place, with its academic divisions and its modes of proof and all of that, it can be mimicked by systems that perform the same functions, putatively, but don't have the same pragmatic—they don't have the same history of demonstrating practical utility. Well, let me give you an example. The idea of peer review. Peer review works in the sciences because there's a scientific method, and because you can bring scientists together and you can ask them to adjudicate how stringently the scientific method was adhered to in a given research program.

But then you can take the idea of peer review, and you can translate it into, say, a field like sociology, and you can mimic the academic writing style that's characteristic of the sciences, and you can make claims that look, on the surface of them, to have been generated using the same technologies that the sciences use, but all it is, is a facade.

Yeah, and it's...that’s where the...it's that level where the parasitic metaphor seems to me to be most appropriate. And so, let me take an example here, if I may. So, I...

That brings up some questions about exactly what constitutes a claim to truth. And I think engineering is actually a really good place to start because scientists often claim, and I've had discussions with Sam Harris about this a lot, and we never did get to the bottom of it, partly because it's too damn complicated, but, you know, I tend to adopt a pragmatic theory of truth even in the scientific domain. And what that essentially means is that your theory predicts the consequences of a set of actions in the world, and if you undertake those set of actions, and that consequence emerges, then your theory is true enough.

So what it's done is it's just demonstrated its validity within that set of predictions. Now, whether it can predict outside, that's a different question. Hopefully it could be generalizable, but it's at least it's true enough to have predicted that outcome. And so maybe you could have built it more efficiently, and maybe there's a more...you could have got more strength for less use of materials and time— that's certainly possible—but there is that...there's the bottom line there that's very, very close. And in business, it's the same thing, which is part of the advantage of a market economy, is that your idea can be killed very rapidly. And that's actually an advantage because it helps you determine what a valid idea is in that domain and what a valid idea isn't.

It does seem like the closer that disciplines in the universities have adhered to the scientific methodology, the more resistant they have been to these parasitic ideas, in your terminology. We should go over again exactly what those ideas are, right?

Just so that everybody's clear about it, when I start with post-modernism, since this is one that you've tackled so many times, yeah, you want to define it? And do you want to let everybody know exactly what we're talking about?

At its most basic level, post-modernism begins with the tenet that, you know, there is no objective truth; that we are completely shackled by subjectivity; we're shackled by a wide range of biases. And so, to argue about absolute truths is silly.

And so maybe...

Okay, so sorry, let me add a bit to that so we can flesh it out. So the post-modernists also seem to claim, and I'm going to be as charitable as I possibly can in this description, because I don't want to build up a straw man. They're very, very concerned with the effect that language has on defining reality. Yes.

And the French post-modernist thinkers in particular seem to have come to the conclusion that reality is defined in totality by language. There's no getting outside of the language game. There isn't anything outside of language. So that's where they differ would be exactly that, right? Deconstructionism, language creates reality, is exactly what you just described. Correct. Right? And it's a weak theory in some sense because it doesn't abide by its own principles.

So for example, and this is one of its fundamental weaknesses as far as I'm concerned, is that Derrida says that, but then he acts as if, and also explicitly claims, that power exists. Right? Right. And so that... if you're building realities with language, the question arises of why you would do that.

And the answer seems to be for the post-modernists is that it's power and that's a quasi-Marxism. Right? Right. Okay. So do you think that seems fair? Don't you think what would someone who was a post-modernist agree with that definition?

I mean, yes, the problem though is that post-modernism allows for a complete breakdown of reality as understood by a three-year-old. It is a form of, this is why, by the way, in the book I refer to it as intellectual terrorism, and I don't use these terms just to kind of come up with poetic prose. I genuinely mean so I compare post-modernism to the 911 hijackers who flew planes onto buildings. I argue that the post-modernists fly buildings of reason into our edifices of reason.

And maybe if I could share a couple of personal interactions that I've had with post-modernists that capture the extent to which they depart from reality, may I do that?

Sure, and then we'll get back to elucidating the list of ideas that you've defined as parasitic.

Fantastic. So in 2002, and I think this story might be particularly relevant to you, Jordan, because of course you broke through in the public conscience because of the gender pronoun stuff. Well, you'll see that this 2002 story was prophetic in predicting what would eventually happen. So in 2002, one of my doctoral students had just defended his dissertation, and we were going out for a celebratory dinner. It was myself, my wife, him, and his date for the evening, and so he contacts me before we go out for the dinner, and he kind of gives me a heads up. He says, “Well, you know, my date is a graduate student in cultural anthropology, radical feminism, and post-modernism—the holy trinity of…”

And so basically, the reason why he was telling me this is he's basically saying, “Please, be on your best behavior.” Let's not…

Yes, and you recount this in the book.

Yeah, okay, so yeah, that's okay. No, go ahead. I’m just letting everybody know.

Yes, exactly. And so I said, “Oh yeah, don't worry, I'm—you know, I get it. This is your night. I'm going to be on my best behavior.” Of course, that wasn't completely true because I couldn't resist trying to at least get a sense of what this woman— what her positions were. So at one point I said, “Oh, I hear that you are a post-modernist, yes? Do you mind? So I'm an evolutionary psychologist. I do believe that there are certain human universals that serve as kind of a bedrock of similarities that we share whether we are Peruvian, Nigerian, or Japanese. Do you mind if I maybe propose what I consider to be a human universal and then you can tell me how that you don't think that that's the case?”

Because absolutely go for it! Is it not the case that within Homo sapiens only women bear children? Is that not a human universal?

So then she scoffs at my stupidity, at my narrow-mindedness, at my misogyny, says, “Absolutely not! No, it's not true that women bear children.” She said, “No! Because in some Japanese tribe in their mythical folklore, it is the men who bear children.” And so by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm, that's how you, you know, keep us barefoot and pregnant.

So once I kind of recovered from hearing such a position, I then said, “Okay, well, let me take a less maybe less controversial or contentious example. Is it not true from any vantage point on earth, sailors since time immemorial have relied on the premise that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west?”

And here, Jordan, she used the kind of language that creates reality, the Derrida position. She goes, “Well, what do you mean by east and west? Those are arbitrary labels! And what do you mean by the sun? That which you call the sun, I might call dancing hyena.” Exact words!

I said, “Okay, well, the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west.” And she said, “Well, I don't play those label games.” So the reason why this is a powerful story that I continuously recount and hence included in the book is because she wasn't some, you know, psychiatric patient who escaped from the psychiatric institute. She was exactly aping what post-modernists espouse on a daily basis to their thousands of adoring students.

When we can't agree that only women bear children and that there is such a thing as east and west, and that there is such a thing as the sun, then it's intellectual terrorism!

Alright, so back to the parasite idea.

Sure!

Okay, no, let's not do that. Let's finish listing the ideas that you'd describe in your book as having this commonality. So there's post-modernism, and we already defined that as the hypothesis that reality is constituted by language. Right?

Which, by the way, is a close ally to another idea pathogen, social constructivism. Or if you want, social constructivism on steroids, which basically—and the reason why I add the “on steroids” is because social constructivism, the idea that we are prone to socialization —no serious behavioral scientists would disagree with that and no avowed evolutionary behavioral scientists would disagree with the idea that socialization is an important force in shaping who we are.

Okay, no serious intellectual would deny that language shapes our conceptions of reality exactly right.

So the issue is degree. Exactly. The problem, and hence the steroid part, is where you argue that everything that we are is due to social constructivity, right? It's the collapse of a multivariate scenario into a univariate scenario—

Inappropriate collapse.

And that’s by the way, I remember your brilliant chat with the woman from the British woman—that you know, I don't remember her name—the lobster stuff.

Where Cathy Newman?

Cathy Newman, thank you, where you made exactly that point about multifactorial, right? Where you were—she was arguing everything related to the gender gap must be due to misogyny when the reality is that, of course, there might be 17 other factors with greater explanatory power that explains why we're there, but she can't see the world in a multifactorial way. She only sees it as due to a single...

Look, but this might have some bearing on the attractiveness of certain sets of ideas. We might even see if it's the attractiveness of the so-called parasitic ideas. I think it was Einstein who said that—oh, I probably wasn't, I probably got the source wrong, but it doesn't matter—that a scientific explanation should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Right, right.

And so, and that's an Occam's razor, exactly, with a bit of a modification there, and you want to—

A good theory buys you a lot!

Exactly, and you want your theory to buy you as much as possible because it means you only have to learn a limited number of principles, and you can explain a very large number of phenomena. So, but there's the attraction of the inappropriate collapse of the complex landscape into its simplified counterpart whereby you rid yourself of complexity that's actually necessary and inevitable.

What that means is that you couldn't make progress employing your theory in a pragmatic way, but if you don't ever test it in a way that it could be killed, you'll never find that out. Right?

And so it’s very easy. In my new book, which is called Beyond Order, I wrote a chapter called Abandon Ideology and I'm making the point in there that it's very tempting to collapse the world into...to collapse the world such that one explanatory mechanism can account for everything. And that it's a game that intellectuals are particularly good at because their intellectual function enables them to generate plausible causal hypotheses.

And so you can take something like power or sexuality or relative economic status or economics for that matter, or love or hate or resentment, and you can generate a theory that accounts for virtually everything relying on only one of those factors. And that’s because virtually everything that human beings do is affected by those factors. And so that’s that—it's the attractiveness of that simplification that accounts for the attractiveness of these, is it, the attractiveness of that simplification that accounts for the attractiveness of these parasitic ideas?

So I would say the idea of you— or the process of finding a simple explanation for an otherwise more complex phenomenon maybe could be linked to... I don't know if you're familiar with the work—do you know...are you familiar with Gert Gigerenzer?

Yes!

Right! So if you remember in his work, which, by the way, I love the fact that he roots it in an evolutionary framework. Yes, I like his work a lot. Great. I actually had gone many years ago. His group had invited me to spend some time at the Max Planck Institute, and so he's got the idea of fast and frugal heuristics, right?

Yes.

Yes, right? Because it basically says, look, you know, economists think that before we choose a given car, we engage in these elaborate, laborious calculations because we're seeking to maximize our utility, because otherwise we won't pick the optimal car. If we don't engage in utility maximization, of course, while that's a beautiful normative theory, it doesn't describe what consumers actually do because you and I when we chose our last car, we didn't look at all available options on all available attributes before we make a choice.

Rather, we couldn't! We couldn't!

Exactly! We used too many!

Exactly! We used a simplifying strategy, and in the backlash of Gigerenzer, it would be a fast and frugal heuristic because we've evolved, I mean, if I sit there and calculate all of the distribution functions of what happens if I hear a rustling behind me, then the tiger will eat me before I finish all of the distributions, right? The calculations—all the distributions.

Therefore, in many cases, when I deploy a fast and frugal heuristic, it makes perfect adaptive sense, but the downside of that—so to go back to your point— is that oftentimes I will apply a fast and frugal heuristic when I shouldn't have done so. Right?

So for certain complex phenomena, my innate penchant to want to seek that one causal mechanism is actually, in this case, suboptimal. So knowing when I should deploy the fast and frugal heuristic and when I should rely on more complex multifactorial reasoning is the real challenge here.

Okay, so let's say that a robust discipline offers a set of simplifications that are pragmatically useful, okay? And then being a—developing mastery in the application of those heuristics boosts you up the hierarchy that is built around their utilization.

Okay, so you have a theory that allows you to get a grip on the world and to do things in the world like build bridges, and then if you're good at applying that theory, you become good at building bridges, and that, and because people value that, that gives you a certain amount of status and authority— and maybe even power, but we'll go for status and authority.

So you have the simultaneous construction of a system that allows you to act in the world in a manner that is productive, but also organizes a social... organizes a society. Now it seems to me the post-modernists get rid of the application to the world side of things. So they really have constructed a language game that actually operates according to their principles of reality. It isn't hemmed in by the constraints of the actual world except in so far as that world consists of a struggle for academic power and endless definitions of reality within the confines of a language game.

I've actually argued exactly for what you just said, and speculatively trying to explain why otherwise intelligent people like Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida would have espoused all the nonsense that they did. And I argue—and I think there is some evidence to support my otherwise speculative hypothesis.

So let me put it in colloquial terms. So I am one of those post-modernists—I'm Jacques Lacan or, you know, Jacques Derrida, and I'm looking with envy at the physicists and the biologists. Yeah, and the neuroscientists and the mathematicians getting all the glory. They're the hot quarterbacks on campus getting all the pretty women. Right?

Why aren't we getting any attention? Well, you know what? If I create a world of full profundity where I appear as though I'm saying something deeply profound and meaningful, whereas in reality, I'm uttering complete gibberish, then maybe my prose can be as impenetrable as those hottie mathematicians, right? They are physicists. Yep, exactly!

I happen to be generally... if you do IQ ranking among the disciplines, the physicists are the smartest—surprise, surprise! And so we have physics envy, exactly. So our physicists envy, economists have physics envy, and that’s why they’ve created now sub-disciplines of economics that are completely mathematical but fully devoid from any real-world applications.

It all stemmed originally from wanting to be accepted at the table of serious scientists, right?

You're making two arguments now, I think. I think one is that in the example you just gave it's actually the thinker that's the parasite, right? Because the thinker wants to ratchet themself up the hierarchy and attack... Who's the thinker? Is it—yes, exactly! The originators of these theories, in your example, they want to accrue to themselves the meritorious status that a true scientist or engineer would have generated.

Yes! Okay! And so, and they do that by setting up a false system that looks like the true system but doesn't have any of this real-world practicality, and they justify that by eliminating the notion of the real world.

Yes! And so in that case, going back to our earlier conversation, in that case, the originator of the parasite is actually getting—I mean literally reproductive fitness!

Right! Well, but it's also acting as a parasite on a system that's functional. But then you could say, on top of that, now he's allowing ideas to enter his consciousness, and some of those will—some of those will fulfill the function of producing this faux reality in which he can rise. And so it's a parasitical set of ideas within a parasitical strategy.

Yes, yes! I like it! And by the way, for this particular parasitic sleight of hand to work, it relies actually on a principle that you and I probably teach in sort of the introductory psychology course: fundamental attribution error. The idea of that— that people sometimes attribute these dispositional traits to otherwise—for example, situational variables, or vice versa, right?

I did well on the exam because I'm smart, rather than because the exam was easy! Right? Well, they, Jacques Derrida, being the brilliant parasite that he was, he was relying on exactly that.

And let me explain how: if I get up in front of an audience, so now I’m Jacques Derrida or Jacqueline, and I espouse a never-ending concatenation of syllables that are completely void of semantic meaning but that sound extraordinarily profound. Two things can happen: the audience member can either say, "I don't understand what Jacques Lacan is saying because I'm too dumb, and he's very profound," or "I don't understand what Jacques Lacan is saying because he's a charlatan who's engaging in full profundity."

Well guess what? Most people in the audience go for the former! Right? When I explained this to my wife, by the way, she said, “You know what? You just liberated me from a sense of feeling that I was inadequate in college when I did”—

It's really a complicated problem, like look, my assumption generally is that if I don't... it's not always this: that I can't read physics papers in physics journals. I'm not mathematically gifted, and so there are all sorts of scientific and mathematical claims that I can't evaluate! Yeah, but most of the time when I read a book, if I don't understand it, I believe that the author hasn't made it clear.

And, and I’ve read some difficult people: I've read Jung, who’s unbelievably difficult—

Um, Nietzsche—and neuroscience texts! Jacques Panksepp, Jeffrey Gray's book Neuropsychology of Anxiety—that bloody book took me six months to read! It's a tough book, it's 1500 references, something like that, and an idea pretty much in every sentence—very, very carefully written—but a very complicated book. But I hit the—I read Foucault, and I could understand him, but I thought most of what he said was trivial! Of course, power plays a role in human behavior, but it doesn't play the only role! Of course, mental illness definitions are socially constructed in part—every psychiatrist worth his salt knows that! It's hardly a radical claim!

Um, when I hit Lacan and Derrida, I was like, “No, sorry! What you guys are saying!” It's not that I'm stupid; it's that you're playing a game! You had enough self-confidence in your cognitive abilities that you didn't succumb to their fundamental attribution sleight of hand!

Right! So you’re one of those rare animals that said, “Wait a minute, he’s saying because I know that I can think, and I'm not getting him!” The problem is, that most people that are sitting passively in the audience didn't come with your confidence!

Well, maybe that's it! Maybe it's that they also didn't have a good alternative—like I was fortunate, eh, because by the time I started reading that sort of thing, I'd already established something approximating a career path in psychology, in clinical psychology, with that heavy biological basis.

And so, but if I was a student who had encountered nothing but that kind of theorizing, and I was interested in having an academic career, I might well believe that learning how to play that particular language game was valid and also the only route to success.

I mean, one of the things that really staggers me about the post-modernist types that I read and encounter is that they have absolutely no exposure to biology as a science whatsoever! They don't know anything about evolutionary theory! By the way, not just post-modernists—most social scientists, yes, certainly the ones walking around in the business school, think that biology is some Nazi vulgar!

Oh, it's the same! It's the same in psychology to some degree. But my sense has been that psychology has managed to steer clear of the worst excesses of, let's call it, this degeneration into this abandonment of pragmatic necessity. They've managed to steer clear to that to the degree that these sub-disciplines have been rooted in biology, it's actually been a corrective!

It's interesting you say this, because I discussed this briefly in the book. I gave once, when my first book was released—this one right here—The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption. This is a book where I try to explain how you can apply evolutionary thinking to understand our consumatory nature. I had given two talks at the University of Michigan. The first day, on I think it was a Thursday, I gave the exact same thought in two different buildings, two different audiences, on one day. It was in the psychology department, and as for your viewers who don't know, the University of Michigan has consistently always ranked in, you know, the top three to five psychology departments in the United States.

My former doctoral supervisor got his PhD in psychology in University of Michigan. He actually overlapped with Amos Tversky, by the way, just a little bit of a historical parenthesis. So I give the talk on Thursday in front of the psychology department, and because, as you said, many of them are neuroscientists, biological psychologists, and so on, they're listening to it, and they're like, "Oh yeah, this is gorgeous! Good stuff. God, love it!" The exact same talk the next day at the business school, which again you would think based on what we said earlier, they should be very pragmatic in their theoretical orientations. If something explains behavior, then I should accept it.

But because they were so bereft of biological-based thinking, Jordan, I couldn't get through a single sentence! It was as if I were metaphorically dodging tomatoes being thrown at me. I couldn't get through maybe five or six slides of my talk because they were so aghast and felt such disdain for my arguing that consumers are driven by biological mechanisms. And so business schools can drift away from the real world, I think, more effectively than the engineering schools can or the biologists.

And you’d hope that the necessity of contending with free market realities would protect the business school to some degree, but my experience with business schools—well, often positive—has often been that the theorizers couldn't necessarily produce a business, right?

Well, it's interesting because I found that when I give a talk in front of business practitioners, then it's always very well received. When I give that same talk in front of business school professors, depending on how vested they are in their aquari paradigms, it either goes well or not. So if they are hardcore social constructivists, then I am a Nazi; I am a biological vulgarizer. It's grotesque! What are you talking about with all this hormone business? So the practitioners are not vested in a paradigm. If I can offer them some guidelines for how to design advertising messages that are maximally effective using an evolutionary lens, they go, "Sure! Sign me up! I don’t care!"

Right! Because there's a practical problem to me! So everybody has two practical problems, we might say broadly speaking: one is contending with the actual world, because you have to get enough to eat—that's the world of biological necessity.

And then there's the world of sociological necessity, which is produced by the fact that you have to be with others while you solve your biological problems. And you can solve your biological problems by adapting extraordinarily well to the sociological world as long as the sociological world has its tendrils out in the world and is solving problems.

So you can be a post-modernist and believe that there's nothing in the world except language as long as the university is nested in a system that's dealing with the world well enough to feed you, and that isn't your immediate problem. So you lose the corrective!

Okay, so let's continue with the list of—let me give you another one that I think you're particularly I think sensitive to it. You've probably also opined on. So the DIE religion which stems from identity politics—another idea pathogen. DIE is the acronym for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity.

That is such a dreadfully bad parasitic idea because it really removes—so let's again speak in the context of academia, but it could apply to other contexts, that apply to HR departments. Yes!

I think before I start, are you—you're out of your position at the University of Toronto now, Jordan, are you? Or leave? You're on leave?

Okay, well, maybe it's a good thing because since you were last at the university environment, the DIE principles have only proliferated with much greater alacrity. So that now when you apply for grants— for grants, you know, with all of the major grants, the equivalent for our American viewers, the equivalent of say an NSF grant, the National Science Foundation. We have similar grants for people in engineering or social sciences or natural sciences in Canada.

You have to have a DIE statement that basically says, “What have you done in the past to advance DIE causes? What will you do if you get this grant? If this grant were granted to you, how would you uphold DIE principles?”

There is a colleague of mine, a physicist—

That's for sure!

Oh my God! Exactly! So yeah, that's unbelievable! A physicist at one of our mutual alma maters, McGill University—maybe I've given too much information here—was denied a grant because it didn't pass the DIE threshold.

Right! In other words, it didn't matter what was the substantive content of his grant application—the scientific content—he just wasn't sufficiently convinced!

By the way, right? So that's an indication that’s a situation where the elevation of that particular ideological game has been elevated over the game of science—exactly! Now that would be fine if they were both games, but science isn't a game.

Right! It's a technique for solving, it's a technique for solving genuine problems. Science is what allows you and I—friends that haven’t otherwise seen each other physically for many years—to reconnect today and have a fantastic conversation as if we were sitting next to each other! It's science that did that! It's not post-modernism; it's not bugabooga; it's not indigenous knowledge.

Now again, people think, “Let me mention what I just said. Now, indigenous knowledge?” Yeah, people will think, “Oh, oh, that's racist! That’s hateful!”

If I want to study something about the flora or fauna of an indigenous territory where indigenous people have lived for thousands of years, I can defer to their domain-specific knowledge because they've lived within that ecosystem. So specific knowledge about a particular phenomenon could be attributed to group A knowing more than group B.

That's what ethnobotanists do, exactly! But the epistemology of how I study the flora or fauna—how I adjudicate scientific issues within that ecosystem—there isn't a competition between the scientific method and indigenous way of knowing. There is only one game in town; it's called the scientific method!

Yeah, well, that's what knowing is! That's the thing! That's why there's only one game, is because there's... As soon as we use the word "knowing" and we apply it in a domain that would pertain to indigenous knowledge and a domain that would pertain to science, as soon as we use the uniting word "knowledge," we're presupposing that knowledge is one thing!

And knowledge is—knowledge has to be something like the use of abstractions to predict and control. The use of abstractions to predict and control! It's as simple as that! And you could be predicting and controlling all sorts of things, but you act in a way—you act in a manner that is intended to produce the outcome that you desire, and the better you are at that, the more knowledge you have!

Right? So imagine if now in the university, the DIE principles are not only being used to determine who gets a shared professorship, who gets a grant, who do we hire as an assistant professor, but it's also used to make the point that there isn't a singular epistemology for seeking truth.

Which, by the way, I would love later to talk about Chapter Seven in my book where I talk about how to seek truth, which is maybe relevant to the many conversations that you and Sam have had, because I introduced, I think, a very powerful way of adjudicating different claims of truth, and we can talk about that as soon as that's...

The nomological network!

Exactly! Thank you, Jordan! So we can talk about that if you want later, but I mean imagine how grotesque it is to teach students that, I mean, is there a Lebanese Jewish way of knowing? Is there a green-eyed people's way of knowing? Is there an indigenous way—the distribution of prime numbers is the distribution of prime numbers irrespective of the identity of the person who is studying the distribution of prime numbers? Isn't that what liberates us from the shackles of our personal identity?

You know, when you can say that and you can still say that people use knowledge to obtain power—that's a primary post-modernist claim—people use knowledge to obtain power. Now, that gets exaggerated into the statement that people only use knowledge to obtain power, and that's all that's worth obtaining, and then of course, that becomes wrong because both of those claims are too extreme.

But even in science, you can criticize science and the manner in which science is practiced by saying, "Well, scientists are biased just and self-interested just like all other people, and they're going to use their theories to advance themselves in the sociological world."

Yes, and then you can be skeptical of their theories for exactly that reason, but then you also have to point out that, well, scientists have recognized this. And just like the wise founders of the American state put in a balance—a system of checks and balances—scientists have done the same thing.

And said, "Well, because we're likely to be blinded even when making the most objective claims about reality that we can, we're likely to be blinded by our self-interest, so we'll put scientists into verbal competition with one another to help determine who's playing a straight game."

And so the checks are already there. And which is to say that you can adopt much of the criticism that the post-modernists level against the scientific game without throwing the baby out with the bathwater! You still say, "Well, despite all that—despite the human nature, despite the primate nature of the scientific endeavor, and the jockeying for position that goes along with it—there's still a residual that constitutes progressive, what, progressive expansion of the domain of knowledge."

Well, so when you're talking about the checks and balances, that replication is something that is central to the scientific method that is second nature in physics or chemistry or biology, but not in the social sciences, is where the social sciences fail. Now obviously, you know about the reproducibility crisis and so on.

I mean—I was always less pessimistic about that than everyone else, because I, or not everyone, but most people, because I always assumed that 95% of what I was reading wasn't reproducible, and that we were bloody fortunate if we ever got 5% of our research findings right.

It's still 5%—5% improvement in knowledge if that's an annual rate, let's say—that's an unbelievably rapid rate of knowledge accrual! And if 95% of it is noise, well, c'est la vie!

It's not a hundred percent, but by the way, that's one of the things that I love so much about evolutionary psychology, which might allow us to segue eventually into neurological networks, is many of the phenomena that evolutionists study, by the very nature of, for example, them being human universals, it forces you to either engage in a conceptual replication, or rather a direct replication of that phenomenon.

So for example, if you want to demonstrate that facial symmetry is one of the markers that are used when deciding that someone is beautiful, I can demonstrate that in 73 different cultures!

Right!

Right! We could talk about the nomological networks a little bit. So this is a way to establish—let me introduce it a bit, okay? Because I think this is a simple way of introducing it. What you want to do to demonstrate that something is real, you sort of triangulate—except you use more than three positions of reference.

So, for example, we've evolved our senses as a normal logical network system. So we say that something is real if we can see it, taste it, smell it, touch it, and hear it.

Now, each of those senses relies on a different set of physical phenomena, so they're unlikely to be correlated randomly. And we've evolved five senses because it's been our experience evolutionarily that unless you can identify something with certainty across five independent dimensions, it's not necessarily real.

And we go even farther than that in our attempts to define what's real! Outside of our conceptions, once we've established the reality of something using our five senses, then we consult with other people to see if we can find agreement on the phenomenon.

And then we assume that if my five senses and your five senses report the same thing—especially if there's 50 of us and not just two—and across repeated occasions, then probably that thing is real.

And a nomological network is sort of the formalization of that idea across measurement techniques in the sciences.

Yeah, I love the way you use the senses to introduce this because there is a term that I didn’t describe this phenomenon in the parasitic mind, but I've discussed it in other contexts. I call it sensorial convergence.

So for example, there's a classic study in evolutionary psychology by two folks that I know well, one of whom is a friend of mine, Randy Thornhill, where they asked women to rate the pleasantness of t-shirts that were worn by men. It turns out that the one that they judge as most pleasing, olfactorily speaking, is the one that is also identifying the guy who is the most symmetric.

Yes!

So in other words, there is sensorial convergence. So that two independent senses are arriving at the same final product, in this case, the product being the optimal male for me to choose.

And it would make perfect evolutionary sense for there to be that sensorial convergence!

So right, and in the book you introduced the nomological network, which isn't discussed very frequently in books that are written popularly, right? That’s an idea that hasn't been discussed much?

Yes.

Outside of specialty courses, say in methodology in psychology. I actually think the psychologists came up with the idea of nomological networks, so I'm going to describe what you just said and tell you how my approach of neurological answers is grander, if you'd like.

So the folks who came up with the term nomological networks in psychology were coming up with a homological network of triangulated evidence when establishing the validity of a psychological construct!

Right, so you're establishing convergent validity and discriminant validity, right? The Campbell and Fisk stuff, which, by the way—if there are any graduate students in psychology—what? Never mind, graduate students in psychology, any student should read the 1959 paper the multi-trait multi-method matrix by Campbell and Fisk! It's one of the most...

Right, and there's an earlier one as well by Cronbach and Meehl in 1955—Construct validity in psychological tests. Exactly right! So it was part of the American Psychological Association's efforts to develop standards for psychological testing. So it is in fact a method of defining what's real.

How do you know that something's real? And that's what a nomological network is. If each of these validity constructs points to ticking off this construct as being valid, then I've now in a nomological network sense established the veracity of that construct—the validity of that construct, right?

And that's actually something a bit different than maybe than a pragmatic proof of truth because from the pragmatic perspective, the theory is evaluated with regards to its utility as a tool. This is more like an analogy to sensory reality.

Exactly! If something registers across multiple different methods of detecting it, it's probably real.

Detecting it across cultures, across space, across time, across methodologies, across paradigms! So it's really the granddaddy of nomological networks! If Cronbach and Campbell and Fisk were talking in a more limited sense of how do you validate a psychological construct, this is saying how do you validate the veracity of a phenomenon?

How do I establish that toy preferences are not singularly socially constructed? How can I establish that?

So maybe, right! And you do that by studying primates, for example! You study primates! So not only am I going to do a cross-species now, I'm gonna go cross-culture! Now I’m gonna go cross-time period! And then you might look at androgenized versus non-androgenized children, and you can look at across a variation in hormonal status.

I am so delighted by how closely you've read the book! I am honored, my good man! That you’re exactly right. And so if one box within my pneumological network did not convince you, oftentimes the data in that one box is sufficient to convince you, but if it isn't, then by assiduously building that entire network, I'm gonna drown you in a tsunami of evidence!

And so I consider this an incredibly powerful way to adjudicate between competing! By the way, this is why in the book I demonstrate that it is not only used for scientific phenomena or evolutionary phenomena—by building a nomological...for the question of is Islam a peaceful religion or not?

In other words, I could use this grand epistemological tool to tackle important phenomena even if they are outside the realm of science!

Does that make sense?

Yes, definitely! Well, it's a matter of collecting evidence! If you study us, if you approach a phenomenon from one perspective, you might see a pattern there, but then the question is: are you seeing that pattern because of your method, or are you seeing that pattern?

Because, are you reading into the data or is the data revealing the pattern? The answer to that is with one methodology you don't know exactly! So what you want to do is use multiple methodologies!

And the more separate they are in their approach, the better! And so when I wrote my—when I wrote Maps of Meaning, which was my first book, I was looking for patterns. But I was skeptical of it. I wanted to ensure that the patterns I was looking at sociologically and in literature were also manifest in psychology and in neuroscience. And I thought that that was what gave me the ability to use four dimensions of triangulation, so to speak!

Right?

Right! And the claim was, well, if the pattern emerges across these disparate modes of approach, it's probably real. And so a psychology that's biologically informed is going to be richer than one that isn't because your theory has to not only account for behavior, let's say, in the instance, but it also has to be in accord with what's currently known about the function of the brain!

Exactly! And that's the approach that you're taking to an analysis of business problems! Exactly!

And by the way, it is truly a liberating way to view the world because it allows you, in a sense, to—so if you have epistemic humility, you're able to say, you know, if now you, Jordan, you were to ask me, “Hey, you know, in Canada, Justin Trudeau passed the laws legalizing cannabis—what do you think of those laws?”

Well then I would say, “You know what? I have epistemic humility; I simply don't know enough! I haven't built the requisite nomological network to pronounce a definitive position on this!” On the other hand, if you ask me a question on a phenomenon for which I have built my nomological network, then I can enter that debate and that conversation with all the epistemic swagger that I'm afforded by the protection of having built that nomological network!

So it's a really wonderful way to view the world because it allows me to exactly know when I can engage an issue with well-deserved self-assuredness! And where and when I should say, “You know, I really just don't know enough about this topic!”

And by the way—and someone like you, who's of course also been a professor for many years, if you establish that epistemic honesty with your students, it's actually quite powerful because if an undergraduate student asks me a question, and in front of everyone I say, “Wow, you really stumped me with that question! You know what? Why don't you send me an email and let me look into it? What that does is it builds trust with those students because it's saying this guy is not standing up in front of us pretending to know everything. As a matter of fact, he was willing to admit that he was stumped by the student of a 20-year-old.”

Okay, so let me ask you something about that epistemic humility in relation—because we want to tie this back. You defined a number of intellectual subfields as included in this parasitic network, let's say under the parasitic rubric, and it would be reasonable to say that one of the—then you're left with a question, which is how do you identify valid theories of knowledge from invalid theories of knowledge?

It seems to me that post-modernism has to deny biological science because biological science keeps producing fact claims, keeps making claims that are incommensurate with the post-modernists.

Now it seems to me that a reasonable approach would be to say, well, the claim can't be real unless it meets the tenets of the post-modernist theory, but also manifests itself in the biological sciences. It has to do both, it can't just do one or the other!

Now maybe that wouldn't work for the biologists, but the fact that the post-modernists tend to throw biology out is one of the facts that sheds disrepute on their intellectual endeavor as far as I'm concerned because if they were honest theorists, they'd look for what was solid in biology and ensure that the theories that they're constructing were in accordance with that, rather than having to throw the entire science out the window either by omission (not knowing anything about it) or by defining it as politically suspect.

And so, I'll introduce here another term I didn't discuss this much in this book, in the Parasitic Mind, but I certainly have discussed it in some of my other works: the notion of consilience.

Which is—let me introduce this term for your viewers who don't know it. The term was reintroduced into the vernacular by E.O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist, who wrote a book in the late 1990s of that title, Consilience: Unity of Knowledge.

So consilience is very much related to the idea of neurological networks because consilience is basically saying that can you put a bunch of things under one explanatory rubric? So physics is more consistent than sociology—not necessarily, notwithstanding what you said earlier about the IQ of physicists.

It's not because physicists are smart and sociologists are dumb; it's because physicists operate using a consilient tree of knowledge, which, by the way, evolutionary theorists also do. You start with a meta-theory that then goes into mid-level theories that then goes into universal phenomena that then generates hypotheses.

So that the field becomes very organized. The problem with post-modernists is that they exist in a leaf node of—a leaf node of—that is perfectly unrelated to any consilient tree of knowledge. Therefore they could never advance anything because, as you said earlier, they exist within an ecosystem where they reward one another but they can never build coherence.

Right? That's why physics and biology and the neurosciences and chemistry are prestigious. It's not because they are necessarily more scientific than sociology; it's because they take consilience at heart.

Does that make sense?

Yes! It—I mean, I think to some degree too that, you know, you also have to note that the phenomena that physicists deal with are in