Today we are all over the map. First: Elon, AI, and humanoid robots, with discussion of sex, the industrial revolution, specialization, the Pleistocene, feminism, men’s work, porn, clankers, and vaping. Obviously. Then: are there differences between moral panics and social contagions, and is the current focus on pedophilia one or both? Finally: how widespread is fraud in science? It’s not rare, and not merely the result of bad actors. Taking a game theoretic approach, authors of new research suggest that many scientists are defecting from honest scientific work for rational reasons.
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Mentioned in this episode:
Elon Musk and the AI fashion show: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1958254084806578534
Michael Tracey on moral panics: https://x.com/mtracey/status/1958299632703795348
Richardson et al 2025. The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(32), p.e2420092122: https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2420092122
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Holding Screen
00:05:09 A Hectic Morning
00:19:09 AI Fashion Show
00:26:12 Can We Call AI Women, "WOMEN?"
00:34:11 Humans Are Wicked Cool
00:49:40 Feminists Did NOT Invent Birth Control
01:02:35 Be Careful About What You Like
01:07:00 The Danger of Porn
01:10:29 Is the Outrage Around Epstein and the Las Vegas Child Sex Sting a Moral Panic?
01:23:53 Scientific Fraud is REAL
01:40:05 What is the Direction of Scientific Fraud?
01:45:59 Why Didn't Peer Review Catch the Fraud?
01:51:35 The Hoax: What They Missed
02:01:58 How Does This Connect with COVID?
02:07:58 Bonus Point!
We have "cartesian blinders being put on us so that we are trying to make sense out of scraps of information and hints." - @bretweinstein
WEINSTEIN: I mean, even if you have your villains who are engaged in the behavior that motivated this war in Iran, even if that's the story, presumably most of the people in the path of these ferocious bombings that he is describing are not deserving of going back to the Stone Age.
In fact, I distinctly remember him telling us that part of what we were up to was liberating the people of Iran from their tyrannical regime.
So if it's the tyrannical regime that justifies the ferocious bombing, then it's a tragedy that other people are going to be sent back to the Stone Ages with them. Right?
HEYING: It's it's not a narrative. It's an incoherent set of talking points.
WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it's a kind of cheerleading that is completely inappropriate from the perspective of the president.
Bret Weinstein discusses the Trump administrations "back to the stone age" recent remarks in the latest episode of The Evolutionary Lens, Episode 320 "Are we back in the stone age?" on DarkHorse.
Bret Weinstein explains, "If you stop businesses from starting here, and if you drive people so that they move elsewhere—even though it's difficult to do—then the point is the tax base dries up, which then forces you to become even more predatory for the people who stayed.
And that's really the thing, right? They're setting themselves up so that they have to go after more and more people, because the people who are starting new businesses are not going to do it here."
