https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=boOBIzO3nck
Let me give you another one that I think you’re particularly, I think, sensitive to, and you’ve probably also opined on. So the DAI religion, which stems from identity politics, another idea path, DAI 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 topics that apply to HR departments, human resources department. Yes. I think before I start, are you you’re out of your position at University of Toronto now, Jordan, are you? Or are you on leave? OK, well, maybe it’s a good thing, because since you were last at the university environment, the DAI religion has only proliferated with much greater alacrity. So that now when you apply to 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 national sciences in Canada. You have to have a DAI statement that basically says, you know, what have you done in the past to to advance DAI causes? What will you do if you get this grant, if this grant were granted to you, how would you uphold DAI principles? And there is a colleague of mine, a physical… That’s for shirk and incircant and the medical research couldn’t say, oh, my God. Exactly. So, yeah, that’s unbelievable. A physical chemist at one of our mutual alma mater’s, McGill University, maybe I’ve given too much information here, was denied a grant because it didn’t pass the DAI threshold. In other words, it didn’t matter what was the substantive content of his grant application, the scientific content. He just wasn’t sufficiently convicted. By the way… Right. So that’s an indication, that’s a situation where the elevation of that particular ideological game, that’s 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 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 postmodernism. It’s not booga booga. It’s not indigenous knowledge. Now, again, people think that… Let me mention what I just said now, indigenous knowledge. Yeah. People will think, 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 there 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 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 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 DAI 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 introduce, I think, a very powerful way of adjudicating different claims of truth. And we can talk about that. That’s a 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 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 identities? You know, when you can say that and you can still say that people use knowledge to obtain power. That’s a primary postmodernist 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 and self-interested just like all other people. And they’re going to use their theories to advance themselves in the sociological world. 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 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. Which is to say that you can adopt much of the criticism that the postmodernists 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 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% 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 100%. But by the way, that’s one of the things that I love so much about evolution psychology, which might allow us to segue eventually into a normal logical network, is many of the phenomena that evolutionists study by the very nature of, for example, them there 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.