Astral Codex Ten

Bret Weinstein

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Bret Weinstein

Article

Bret Weinstein is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 23, 2021 and February 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “objection of Bret Weinstein, a biologist, podcaster, and author”; “If by some inexplicable theological anomaly Bret Weinstein turns out to be God”; “I’m listening to Bret Weinstein”. It most often appears alongside ivermectin, Strongyloides, 1/6 insurrectionists.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: November 23, 2021
  • Last seen: February 14, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Ivermectin
November 23, 2021 · Original source
Something like this was also the objection of Bret Weinstein, a biologist, podcaster, and author who’s been another big ivermectin proponent:
Something like this was also the objection of Bret Weinstein, a biologist, podcaster, and author who’s been another big ivermectin proponent: @Ravarora1 @coldxman @PierreKory A substantial piece of work that crashes and burns with a deeply suspect ad hoc hypothesis in need of a test. cc: @slatestarcodex, @alexandrosM","username":"BretWeinstein","name":"Bret Weinstein","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Nov 19 04:01:31 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":5,"like_count":154,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> I agree this is speculative and not yet tested by formal studies, which was why I only gave it ~50% confidence in the summary at the end of my post.
Contra Kavanagh On Fideism
February 14, 2023 · Original source
I’ve been looking into the world of YouTube streamers; if you want to make it big, you need to have a beef with some other online celebrity. Fine; I choose Chris Kavanagh, who tweeted about me recently: astralcodexten.substack.com/p/response-to-… ","username":"C_Kavanagh","name":"Chris Kavanagh","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Feb 14 07:46:17 +0000 2023","photos":[{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/Fo6TtYEaYAIxYu5.png","link_url":"https://t.co/GZpY9gU9V3","alt_text":null},{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/Fo6Uiv2aMAIj_P_.png","link_url":"https://t.co/GZpY9gU9V3","alt_text":null}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":14,"like_count":100,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":false}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> @C_Kavanagh I think it probably persuaded some people that mainstream experts wouldn't have reached to get vaccinated instead of taking ivermectin","username":"RachelBCam","name":"Rachel","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Feb 14 09:49:06 +0000 2023","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":2,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":false}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> @RachelBCam And for that I’m glad. But my critique here is to some extent orientated towards the rationalist community and what it says it does vs. what I see. It isn’t ‘rational’ to ignore conspiracy ecosystems and how they distort things & argue. It actually gives bad heuristics.","username":"C_Kavanagh","name":"Chris Kavanagh","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Feb 14 15:47:19 +0000 2023","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":0,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":false}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> @RachelBCam Imagine Scott’s blog with some more generous degrees of freedom exercised in his analysis, suddenly you have a more positive result & the impression the issue is a genuine controversy. Indeed, this is what people like Alexandros did in response.","username":"C_Kavanagh","name":"Chris Kavanagh","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Feb 14 15:50:05 +0000 2023","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":0,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> This is an admirably concise encapsulation of everything I despise, so I want to respond. But first, a personal story:
A picture my instructor took of me at one of the ruins. Nobody was under any obligation to handhold me out of my Atlantis beliefs. But the #1 Google rank for “site about how Atlantis isn’t real” is a scarce resource. Article space on skeptic blogs (podcasts were still years into the dystopian future at this point) was a scarce resource. And when people frittered these scarce resources away on a thousand identical pieces saying “lol you’re stupid and racist if you believe this, haven’t you heard that conspiracies are always wrong?” - and never on any explanation of the GIANT UNDERWATER PYRAMIDS - yes, I feel like I was wronged. Eventually I lifted myself up by my own bootstraps. I studied some of the relevant history myself (less impressive than it sounds, Wikipedia was just coming into existence around this time). I learned enough about geology to understand on a gut level how natural processes can sometimes produce rocks that are really really artificial-looking - yes, even as artificial-looking as the ones in the picture above. More important, I learned something like rationality. I learned how to make arguments like the one I use in The Pyramid And The Garden. I realized that, for all their skill at finding anomalies, the Atlantis books couldn’t agree on a coherent narrative of their own. Some placed Atlantis in the Atlantic, others in the Pacific, others in Antarctica; some used it to explain artifacts from long after others said that it fell. For a while if I squinted I could sort of kind of smush them into a single story, but that story had even more anomalies than normal historians’. Eventually I gave up and joined the mainstream. I’m not angry at Graham Hancock. I see no evidence he has ever been anything but a weird, well-meaning guy who likes pyramids a little too much. But I feel a burning anger against anti-conspiracy bloggers, anti-conspiracy podcasters, and everyone else who wrote “lol imagine how stupid you would have to be to believe in Atlantis” style articles. Either these people didn’t understand the arguments for and against Atlantis, or they did. If they didn’t, they were frauds, claiming expertise in a subject they knew nothing about. If they did, then at any moment they could have saved me from a five year wild-goose-chase - but chose not to, because it was more fun to insult me. II. Kavanagh makes fun of me for writing 25,000 words on ivermectin. I agree this might not have been the best use of my time, and I would accept this criticism from anyone except Kavanagh - who’s devoted his whole career to thinking about ivermectin and ideas closely aligned to it. There’s a Hindu legend (maybe apocryphal?) about an atheist philosopher who spends literally every second of every day denouncing God. When he dies, God welcomes him into the highest heaven, praising him as a great yogi - for he never let his consciousness stray from awareness of God even for one moment. If by some inexplicable theological anomaly Bret Weinstein turns out to be God, Chris Kavanagh is definitely going to the highest heaven. So Kavanagh’s complaint can’t be that I’m thinking about this question at all. He sort of hints at a complaint where it took me too long to figure out that ivermectin didn’t work - shouldn’t I have been able to do it without the long review? But I clearly said on my first post on the subject that I had long since decided it to my own satisfaction, and was just trying to clear up some of my remaining questions. What is his complaint? At the risk of putting words in his mouth, two parts of his comment stand out to me as having important arguments: I interpret this as - to even try to “evaluate the evidence” at all is a mistake, because it suggests there might be evidence on both sides. Instead, you should admit that some people are idiots who believe things there’s no evidence for, and move on. But the problem with “if studies had supported ivermectin as an effective treatment, it would have been adopted”, is that about thirty different studies did support it, and it was adopted in several countries, mostly in Latin America. The first few meta-analyses of ivermectin found that it worked! I’m not defending ivermectin here. I think there was a reasonable explanation of this: a combination of fraud, poor methodology, publication bias, and maybe Strongyloides infections. But until someone tells you the reasonable explanation, there’s no reasonable explanation! It’s like the giant underwater pyramids. If I go diving and see the giant underwater pyramids, and you just say “LOL, you are stupid, don’t you know conspiracy theories aren’t real?”, you’re not going to convince me! I wanted to give the reasonable explanation, in terms that people could understand. Before doing any research, I had some intuitive guesses about what the reasonable explanation would look like - something something methodological problems something something small studies. But this, itself, isn’t a reasonable explanation. It’s an IOU for a reasonable explanation. I agree that many people are unreasonable and don’t respond to reasonable explanations. I think sometimes this is genetic or something and can’t be helped, but other times it comes after a hundred different experiences where you want reasonable explanations and don’t get them and also people are jerks to you and you learn that the establishment can’t be trusted. Mahabharata: “Even after ten thousand explanations, the fool is no wiser, but the wise man requires only two thousand five hundred.” If I had had to suffer through a few more skeptics calling me racist because I wanted to know why there were giant underwater pyramids, I probably would have believed in Atlantis even harder, out of spite, and never talked myself out of it. And then when ivermectin came along, I would have thought “Scientists? Experts? They’re the guys who are so dumb they can’t even figure out Atlantis existed when there are giant underwater pyramids right in front of their eyes. Screw them, I’m listening to Bret Weinstein.” I side with the Christians. There may be people so far gone into the outer darkness that they can’t be saved, but you are forbidden from ever believing with certainty that any specific individual is in this category. Act as if everyone is one good deed away from falling to their knees and acknowledging the light of Jesus. Moving on: @RachelBCam Imagine Scott’s blog with some more generous degrees of freedom exercised in his analysis, suddenly you have a more positive result & the impression the issue is a genuine controversy. Indeed, this is what people like Alexandros did in response.","username":"C_Kavanagh","name":"Chris Kavanagh","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Feb 14 15:50:05 +0000 2023","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":0,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> This is the part I have the most trouble interpreting charitably. I can’t stop reading it as “doing good science is a near occasion of sin for doing bad science”. It sounds kind of like fideism, the belief (more common in atheists’ imaginations than real religion) that somebody who reasons their way to belief in God is a sinner, because a real saint would have believed through blind faith, without having to reason. The best I can do is to think of this as a PR argument: it looks bad to be treating these kinds of questions as live issues. I generally don’t like PR arguments, but while we’re having them: doesn’t it kind of look bad for one side to be promoting fideism? The ivermectinist slogan is “do your own research”. Kavanagh’s apparent slogan is “don’t do research” - even if you get it right, having tried it at all makes you impure. If there’s some argument I know nothing about - pro- vs. anti- skub, perhaps - and all I’ve heard is that the pro-skub people say that you should look at evidence and decide rationally based on your best judgment, and the anti-skub people say you should never look at evidence and have to trust them - I’m already 90-something percent sure pro-skub are the good guys. My model of the PR here - of the overall milieu and psychological factors that turn people into conspiracists - is that they spot some giant underwater pyramids, compelling-seeming facts that appear to point toward conspiracy. These facts have alternative explanations, but these alternatives are less compelling and harder to explain. Realistically some people are going to get caught up in the conspiracy’s superior first-level compellingness and you can’t help them. But other people are on the fence and can be talked down. This is the job of the pro-mainstream-anti-conspiracy people. Instead of doing their job, these people: ignore them
Inline links: The Pyramid And The Garden, so far gone into the outer darkness that they can’t be saved, pro- vs. anti- skub