In his introduction to "The Worst Epidemic," Sam Harris warns that the subject matter might be difficult for listeners. The topic is the global epidemic of child sexual abuse involving children as young as one year old. Sam is joined by Gabriel Dance, a NYT reporter who has thoroughly investigated this issue. Until I forced myself to listen, I had assumed that this predatory behavior was relatively rare, but I was shocked to learn that sexual predators have exploited every corner of the Internet. To illustrate, Dance mentions that law enforcement experts estimate that of the 9 million citizens of New Jersey, 400,000 have been exposed to these highly illegal images and videos, some of this exposure being inadvertent, but much of it being intentional. It makes you wonder who we are, as a nation, that so many among us are willing to torture children. The tragedy is widespread, making the technical challenges and law enforcement needs overwhelming.
As a public service, Sam has put this episode in front of his paywall. The topic spirals in many directions, including the misleading concept of “child pornography,” the failure of governments and tech companies to grapple with the problem, the tradeoff between online privacy and protecting children, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, photo DNA, the roles played by specific tech companies, the ethics of encryption, “sextortion,” and the culture of pedophiles.
I am proud to say that I have been a paid subscriber of Making Sense for years. Sam Harris does a great job of exploring complex and oftentimes thorny issues unflinchingly, week after week. From Sam's About Page:
His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.
If you are unfamiliar with the work of Sam Harris, I invite you to listen to this Episode, or any Episodes of Making Sense.
I've followed Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt closely for many years (as you can see by searching for his name at DI). He is the author of several excellent books, including The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind. Haidt's thought process crosscuts the prevailing two wings of political thought in the United States. In this extended interview with Joe Rogan, Haidt dissects many topics, including identity politics. He urges that this phrase encompasses two separate approaches, "Common Enemy Politics" and "Common Humanity."
Haidt also distinguishes between two prevalent types of conversations, two types of "games" being played that often make conversations frustrating. Many of us insist upon playing the "truth seeking game," while others play a game that assumes a Manichean battle where A) no one gains except at the expense of someone else, B) where people are not seen as individuals but a members of groups, and C) you can tell who someone is merely by their appearance. Much of the fruitless dialogue on social media and elsewhere makes a lot more sense once we realize that these two approaches have virtually nothing in common--they serve entirely different purposes. Just because we exchange words does not mean we are, in any meaningful way, communicating.
In addition to embedding the video of the interview, I invested some time to create a transcript of several sections of this interview, from about Min. 33 - 55. I have cleaned up the wording to omit throat-clearings and false starts, but I have worked hard to be true to the substance of the conversation.
33:18
JH: You have to look at different games being played. Yale was a place that taught me to think in lots of different ways and it was constantly blowing my mind when I took my first economics course. It was like wow, here's a new pair of spectacles that I can put on and suddenly I see all these prices and supply. I never learned to think that way, where I learned about Freud in psychology or sociology. A good education is one that lets you look at our complicated world through multiple perspectives. That makes you smart. That's what a liberal arts education should do. But what I see increasingly happening, especially at elite schools, is the dominance of a single story, and that single story is life is a battle between good people and evil people, or rather good groups and evil groups, and it's a zero-sum game. So if the bad groups have more, it's because they took it from the good groups, so the point of everything is to fight the bad groups. Bring them down create equality and this is a terrible way to think in a free society. That might have worked you know in biblical days when you got the Moabites killing the Jebusites or whatever, but you know we live in an era in which we've discovered that that the pie can be grown a million-fold. So to teach students to see society as a zero-sum competition between groups is primitive and destructive.
34:22
JR: In your book, you actually identify the moment where these micro aggressions made their appearance and they were initially a racist thing.
JH: Yeah. The idea of a micro aggression really becomes popular in a 2007 article by Derald Wing Sue at Teachers College. He talks about this concept of microaggressions. There are two things that are good about the concept, that are useful. One is that explicit racism has clearly gone down--by any measure explicit racism is plummeted in American across the West—but there could still be subtle or veiled a racism.
37:27
JR It's ultimately for everyone's sake, I mean, even for the sake of the people that are embroiled in all this controversy and chaos. It would be fantastic across the board if there was no more sexism, there was no more racism, there was no more any of these things. It would be wonderful. Then we could just start treating humans as just humans. Like this is just who you are you're just a person. No one cares. What a wonderful world we would live in if this was no longer an issue at all.
JH: Beautifully put.
JR: How does that get through?
38:01
JH: We were getting there, okay? That's what the twentieth century was. We were shaped by the late 20th century. The late 20th century was a time in America in which, you know, earlier on there was all kinds of prejudice. I mean, when I was born, just right before you were born, it was legal to say you can't eat here because you're Black and so that changed in 1964-65. But it used to be that we had legal differentiations by race and then those were knocked down. But we still had social [discrimination] and it used to be that if you were gay that was something humiliating. It had to be hidden. If you look at where we were in 1960 or ’63, when I was born and then you look at where we got by 2000, the progress is fantastic on every front, so that's all I mean when I say we were moving in that direction.
I first encountered Zuby on Twitter, where I was intrigued by his upbeat mini-prose. Zuby says that his race is the most uninteresting thing about himself. If I told you that Zuby currently lives on the southern coast of England, you probably wouldn’t guess that he spent much of his life in Saudi Arabia. If I told you that Zuby was an up and coming rap artist, you probably wouldn’t guess that also graduated from Oxford, with a degree in computer science or that he spent several years of his life as a business consultant. In addition to creating music, Zuby is now an author, podcaster, public speaker, fitness expert and life coach. Zuby refuses to allow his do not fall into any predictable silo. To make a political point that trans women should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports, he posted a video in which he claimed to have broken the British Women's deadlift record of 238kg (528 pounds). Zuby claimed that he "identified as a woman whilst lifting the weight."
On July 24, 2020, Zuby joined Brett Weinstein on the DarkHorse podcast. I took the Youtube transcript, edited it for clarity and present it here as an introduction to Zuby.
Zuby - Min 74:53
There are certain games you win by just not playing. Just don't play that game. Don't get dragged into this thing. It's something I experience. I always feel like I've often got people, especially nowadays, trying to drag me into things that I don't want to get involved with. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think it helps.
My worldview is really simple when it comes to stuff like this. It is the Martin Luther King, Jr. vision. The way I was raised from when I was a child growing up in Saudi Arabia . . . from the beginning I've been surrounded by all types of different people, different religions different colors, different ethnicities, different nationalities, whatever. That's just been the norm for me forever, so the whole idea of viewing people through this very narrow lens, from being a child I've always thought, it's silly and it's asinine. It makes me somewhat upset when I see that now day in and day out. It's white this and black that. Can we can we stop?
So much of this is just unnecessary and it's antagonizing and it forces people to keep viewing the world that way. That's the least interesting thing. It's such an uninteresting thing about someone. That's the thing. The fact that I'm a black male is one of the least interesting things about me. It certainly doesn't say anything about my personality or my character or my beliefs or my abilities or anything. Yeah, it's observable and, cool, okay. But if someone is talking to me, I don't want that to be the thing that's in their head and that they're obsessing over. I'd like them just to talk to me. I'm Zuby. Just talk to me and we'll be cool. We can be friends. All that stuff is details.
There is a growing tent of people who are politically sort of in the center left and center right who are sort of uniting and recognizing that they're tired of the extremism and they don't like cancel culture and they don't like this super identity politics thing on any side, and they don't want to destroy the whole system and they don't think the country is terrible. I think there's that there's that growing group of people Who I think are slowly gaining a bit more and more courage. I think that they're sort of seeing podcasts like this. What I'm doing with my podcast and you know whether it's Joe Rogan or Dave Rubin, etc. like all these guys, they're sort of saying okay, cool.
People are talking about this and there's a range of people here who are sensible and don't want to scream at each other and call each other racist every three seconds. There's that growing group, so I do hope that that swells and gains enough courage and momentum for people to eventually just be like, okay, look, like we're going to stop entertaining the crazies and we're going to stop letting them sort of determine everything and set all the rules and control everybody and cancel everybody. I think once enough once there's enough critical mass there, then you can get back to a sort of stage of normalcy where people are being reasonable again. And we can actually solve some of the problems because we can talk.
Zuby - Min 29:20
In the in the USA, you guys say Black American, African-American, Latino, American, white American etc. Here (in Great Britain) we just say “British.” Right! There you go. So it's not common to hear that this person is white British or this person is a Black Brit.
Zuby - Min 12:12
Last week I spent two days just getting attacked for the fact that I said that it's bad to be racist to white people. I was getting emails, DMs like, all kinds of horrible stuff, for me saying no, this is bad. This isn't good. I don't think we should judge people based on the color of their skin or call people inferior or do any of this and then I start getting attacked. What kind of what is this world that we're living in that that is considered? It's a strange thing.
So what, exactly, does a cancellation consist of? And how does it differ from the exercise of free speech and robust critical debate? At a conceptual level, the difference is clear. Criticism marshals evidence and arguments in a rational effort to persuade. Canceling, by contrast, seeks to organize and manipulate the social or media environment in order to isolate, deplatform or intimidate ideological opponents. It is about shaping the information battlefield, not seeking truth; and its intent—or at least its predictable outcome—is to coerce conformity and reduce the scope for forms of criticism that are not sanctioned by the prevailing consensus of some local majority.
Here are the six characteristics. He elaborates on each of these in his article:
Punitiveness
Deplatforming
Organization
Secondary Boycotts
Moral Grandstanding
Truthiness
Rauch mentions others who have explored this issue:
Obviously, mine is not the only approach. Other people, such as Emily Yoffe and Greg Lukianoff, have made their own attempts at characterizing the current climate of fear or defining cancel culture. Hopefully, many more suggestions and refinements will follow.
Increasingly, when I express my concerns about the sudden dramatic increase in teenaged girls who are declaring themselves to be men trapped in women’s bodies, I receive a rash of ad hominem attacks. For example, I have been accused of being a “conservative,” though I have never affiliated myself with the Republican Party. I have been accused of being anti-trans, which is utterly false. In my view, every adult has the right to do whatever they want to do with their body. I will happily address every adult with whatever pronoun they choose. It is my opinion that all members of the transgender community should all be vigorously protected pursuant to civil rights laws and every other law that applies to every other person.
My concern in writing this article is not about adults. It is about teenagers, especially teenaged girls. Although there appear to be some teenaged girls who are legitimate candidates for transitioning, the recent numbers of girls clamoring for this treatment is extraordinarily and suspiciously high. I also have a personal stake in this controversy. I have friends whose daughters who in various stages of undergoing what might be needless and dangerous medical treatment.
In America and across the Western world, adolescents were reporting a sudden spike in gender dysphoria—the medical condition associated with the social designation “transgender.” Between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender surgeries for natal females in the United States quadrupled, with biological women suddenly accounting for—as we have seen—70 percent of all gender surgeries. In 2018, the UK reported a 4,400 percent rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatments. In Canada, Sweden, Finland, and the UK, clinicians and gender therapists began reporting a sudden and dramatic shift in the demographics of those presenting with gender dysphoria—from predominately preschool-aged boys to predominately adolescent girls. . .
In 2016, Lisa Littman, ob-gyn turned public health researcher, and mother of two, was scrolling through social media when she noticed a statistical peculiarity: Several adolescents, most of them girls, from her small town in Rhode Island had come out as transgender—all from within the same friend group. . . . Dr. Littman began preparing a study of her own, gathering data from parents of trans-identifying adolescents who’d had no childhood history of gender dysphoria. . . . She assembled 256 detailed parent reports and analyzed the data. Her results astonished her. Two patterns stood out: First, the clear majority (65 percent) of the adolescent girls who had discovered transgender identity in adolescence—“out of the blue”—had done so after a period of prolonged social-media immersion. Second, the prevalence of transgender identification within some of the girls’ friend groups was, on average, more than 70 times the expected rate.
Many of the adolescent girls suddenly identifying as transgender seemed to be caught in a “craze”—a cultural enthusiasm that spreads like a virus. “Craze” is a technical term in sociology, not a pejorative, and that is how I use it here. (Dr. Littman never does.) It applies to Hula-Hoops and Pokémon and all sorts of cultural fads. If this sudden spike in transgender identification among adolescent girls is a peer contagion, as Dr. Littman hypothesized, then the girls rushing toward “transition” are not getting the treatment they most need. Instead of immediately accommodating every adolescent’s demands for hormones and surgeries, doctors ought to be working to understand what else might be wrong. At best, doctors’ treatments are ineffective; at worst, doctors are administering needless hormonal treatments and irreversible surgeries on patients likely to regret them. Dr. Littman’s theory was more than enough to touch a nerve.
Dr. Littman has been treated unfairly, even grotesquely, by the academic community and by the news media, as reported in this same article. This side issue is well worth considering, as a red flag indicating that many news outlets are being driven by ideology rather than science on this issue.
There are many reasons to believe we are in the midst of a transgender “craze”— a mass enthusiasm that captivates a population so that matters more essential to its welfare fall neglected, to borrow Lionel Penrose’s use of the term. There are the alarming statistics, indicative of an epidemic: For a century, gender dysphoria has been understood to begin in early childhood (ages 2 to 4) and afflict males almost exclusively. In the last decade, apparently out of nowhere, gender dysphoria’s predominant demographic has shifted from young boys to teen girls. (The rise in girls presenting at gender clinics in the UK has been estimated at 4,400%).
All across the West, adolescent girls are suddenly identifying as “trans” with friends, clamoring for hormones and surgeries. Teen girls who are struggling with anxiety and depression but who had no childhood history of gender dysphoria at all. Under the guidance of numberless trans social media influencers, with the encouragement of peers, clusters of girls are transforming themselves from desperately unpopular to the toast of the virtual town.
In my book, I offer several explanations of how this particular social contagion came to befall teen girls. And one of the many flags I plant is this, garnered from academic psychologist Jean Twenge: Teen girls today spend a whole lot less time with each other in person (an hour less per day) than those of prior generations. That’s less time hanging out in each other’s rooms, combing the details of their lives for hidden grandeur; less time savoring gossip and telling secrets; less time caught in the current of breathless laughter, half-shrieking the lyrics of a song.
I wonder whether, as an evolutionary biologist, you agree with the significance of this loss?
[As indicated, the above series of letters is ongoing].
In light of these disturbing statistics, you would think that this topic of gender transitions would be a hot issue that is being vigorously discussed by news media from across the political spectrum. You would be wrong.
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“sextortion,” and the culture of pedophiles.