YouSaid · the spoken record

Bret Weinstein

lines on the record: 202
first: 2021-06-25
most recent: 2021-06-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, so I think Steele Manning is a tool that is extremely valuable, but it's also possible to abuse it. I think that you can only steal man a good faith argument. And the problem is we now know that we have not been engaged in opponents who are wielding good faith arguments because privately their emails reflect their own doubts. And what they were doing publicly was actually a punishment, a public punishment for those of us who spoke up with, I think, the purpose of either backing us down or more likely warning others not to engage in the same kind of behavior. And obviously for people like you and me who regard science as our likely best hope for navigating difficult waters shutting down people who are using those tools honorably is itself dishonorable. So I don't really... I don't feel that it”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There sure is a lot of evidence that suggests that this is a self inflicted wound. When you have done something that has caused a massive self-inflicted wound, self-inflicted wound, it makes sense to dwell on it exactly to the point that you have learned the lesson that makes it very, very unlikely that something similar will happen again.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's frightening, but it's also hopeful in the sense that actually if we did the right thing now, we're not navigating a puzzle about Chinese responsibility. We're navigating a question of collective responsibility for something that has been terribly costly to all of us. So that's not a very happy process. But as you point out, what's at stake is in large measure at the very least the strong possibility this will happen again and that at some point it will be far worse. So just as a person that does not learn the lessons of their own errors doesn't get smarter and they remain in danger, we collectively humanity has to say, well,”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In our live streams on Dark Horse, Heather and I have been talking from the beginning about the fact that although, yes, what happens began in China, it very much looks like a failure of the international scientific community.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More safely than the ones you're selling that aren't true and do cause people to die in large numbers. But it's some kind of autopilot, at least part of it is.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And extinct. I believe we could have driven it extinct six months ago, and we didn't do it because of very mundane concerns among a small number of people. And I'm not alleging that they were brazen about or that they were callous about deaths that would be caused. I have the sense that they were working from a kind of autopilot in which you, you know, let's say you're in some kind of a corporation, a pharmaceutical corporation, you have a portfolio of therapies that in the context of a pandemic might be very lucrative. Those therapies have competitors. You, of course, want to position your product so that it succeeds and the competitors don't. And lo and behold, at some point, through means that I think those of us on the outside can't really intuit, you end up saying things about competing therapies that work better and much better.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine we get stuck with SARS-CoV-2 and its descendants going forward, and that it just settles in and becomes a fact of modern human life. That would be a disaster, right? The number of people we will ultimately lose is incalculable. The amount of suffering that will be caused is incalculable. The loss of well-being and wealth incalculable. So that ought to be a very high priority driving this extinct before it becomes permanent. And the ability to drive it extinct goes down the longer we delay effective responses to the extent that we let it have this very large canvas, large numbers of people who have the disease in which mutation and selection can result in adaptation that we will not be able to counter the greater its ability to figure out features of our immune system and use them to its advantage. So I'm feeling the pressure of drawing”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also think that there's a clock ticking with respect to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID, the disease that it creates. And that has to do with whether or not we are stuck with it permanently. If you think about the cost to humanity of being stuck with influenza, it's an immense cost year after year. And we just stop thinking about it because it's there. Some years you get to flu, most years you don't, maybe you get the vaccine to prevent it, maybe the vaccine isn't particularly well targeted. But imagine just simply doubling that cost.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am most freaking out about both of them because they're both really important. And we can put bounds on this. Let me say first, this is a perfect test case for the theory of close calls, because as much as COVID is a disaster, it is also a close call from which we can learn much. You are absolutely right. If we keep playing this game in the lab, if we are not especially if we do it under pressure and when we are told that a virus is going to leap from nature any day and that the more we know, the better we'll be able to fight it, we're going to create the disaster all the sooner. So yes, that should be an absolute focus. The fact that there were people saying that this was dangerous back in 2015 ought to tell us something. The fact that the system bypassed a ban and offshored the work to China ought to tell us this is not a Chinese failure. This is a failure of something larger and harder to see.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“SARS-CoV, too, and hopefully driving it to extinction, which ought to be our priority. It is a priority that is not apparent from our behavior, but it really is, it should be our objective if we understood where our interests lie, we would be much more focused on it. But those protocols would tell us a great deal if it wasn't the Wuhan Institute, we need to know that. If it was nature, we need to know that. And if it was some other laboratory, we need to figure out who what and where so that we can determine what we can determine about what was done.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Virus appears to be excellent at spreading in humans and minks and ferrets. Now minks and ferrets are very closely related to each other and ferrets are very likely to have been used in a cereal passage experiment, the reason being that they have an ace 2 receptor that looks very much like the human ACE2 receptor. And so were you going to passage the virus where its ancestor through an animal in order to increase its infectivity in humans, which would have been necessary? Ferrets would have been very likely. It is also quite likely that humanized mice were utilized, and it is possible that human airway tissue was utilized. I think it is vital that we find out what the protocols were, if this came from the Wuhan Institute. We need to know it, and we need to know what the protocols were exactly because they will actually give us some tools that would be useful in fighting”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, mind you, I learned what I know in the aftermath of this pandemic emerging. I started studying the question. And I would say based on the content of the genome and other evidence in publications from the various labs that were involved in generating this technology, a couple of things seem likely. SARS-CoV-2 does not appear to be entirely the result of either a splicing process or serial passaging. It appears to have both things in its past, where it's at least highly likely that it does. So, for example, the fern cleavage site looks very much like it was added in to the virus, and it was known that that would increase its infectivity in humans and increase its tropism. The, uh,”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You would see the virus, you would see the clumsy virus get better and better. And yes, I am a full believer in the power of that process. In fact, I believe it. What I know from studying the process is that it is much more powerful than most people imagine, that what we teach in the evolution 101 textbook is too clumsy a process to do what we see it doing and that actually people should increase their expectation of the rapidity with which that process can produce because jaw dropping adaptations. That said, we just don't see evidence that it happened here, which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it means in spite of immense pressure to find it somewhere, there's been no hint, which probably means it took place inside of a laboratory.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no That's called a hopeful monster Hopeful monsters don't work. It's the job of becoming a new pandemic virus is too difficult. It involves two very difficult steps, and they both have to work. One is the ability to infect a person and spread in their tissues sufficient to make an infection, and the other is to jump between individuals at a sufficient rate that it doesn't go extinct for one reason or another. Those are both very difficult jobs. They require, as you described, selection. And the point is selection would leave a mark. We would see evidence that it was taken animals or humans.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we can get back to that. Would say, yeah, the giant piece of evidence that will shift the probabilities in the other direction is the discovery of either a human population in which the virus circulated prior to showing up in Wuhan that would explain where the virus learned all of the tricks that it knew instantly upon spreading from Wuhan. So that would do it, or an animal population in which an ancestor epidemic can be found in which the virus learned this before jumping to humans. But I'd point out in that second case, you would certainly expect to see a great deal of evolution in the early epidemic, which we don't see. So there almost has to be a human population somewhere else that had the virus circulating around an ancestor of the virus that we first saw in Wuhan circulating. And it has to have gotten very sophisticated in that prior epidemic before hitting Wuhan in order to explain the total lack of”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A huge amount of incentive. On the other hand, why didn't the powers that be the powers that lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Why didn't they ever fake weapons of mass destruction interact? Whatever force it is, I hope that force is here too. And so whatever evidence we find is real.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, there is evidence. I always worry that somebody is going to make up some evidence in order to reverse the flow. Well, let's say I am.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not evidence of the kind you think it is. It's a justification for a presumption. So, the presumption upon discovering a new virus circulating is certainly that it came from nature. The problem is the presumption evaporates in the face of evidence, or at least it logically should. It didn't in this case. It was maintained by people who privately in their emails acknowledged that they had grave doubts about the natural origin of this virus.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sanitizing gel and whatever else you would do. So am I saying that I think somebody did that? No, I really don't think it happened. We've seen zero evidence that this was intentionally released. However... Were it to have been intentionally released by somebody who did not know, did not want it known where it had come from. Releasing it into Wuhan would be one way to cover their tracks. So we have to leave the possibility formally open. Acknowledge there's no evidence.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends. I don't even think that's one possibility. Sometimes when Eric and I talk about these issues, we will. Generate a scenario just to prove that something could live in that space, right? It's a placeholder for whatever may actually have happened. And so it doesn't have to have been an attack on China. That's certainly one possibility. But I would point out If you can predict the future in some unusual way better than others, you can print money, right? That's what markets that allow you to bet for or against virtually any sector allow you to do. So you can imagine simply amoral person or entity generating a pandemic, attempting to cover their tracks because it would allow them to bet against things like cruise ships, air travel, whatever it is, and bet in favor of, I don't know,”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order that we would connect the dots in the wrong way, that's conceivable. I currently have that below 1% on my flowchart. But I think”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are multiple different kinds of evidence that point to the lab, and there is literally no evidence that points to nature. Either the evidence points nowhere, or it points to the lab, and the lab could mean any lab, but geographically obviously the labs in Wuhan are the most likely, and the lab that was most directly involved with research on viruses that look like SARS-CoV-2 is obviously the place that one would start. But I would say the likelihood that this virus came from a lab is well above 95%. We can talk about the question of could a virus have been brought into the lab and escape from there without being modified? That's also possible, but it doesn't explain any of the anomalies in the genome of SARS-CoV-2. Could it have been delivered from another lab? Could Wuhan be a”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I maintain a flowchart of all the possible explanations, and it doesn't break down exactly that way. The likelihood that it emerged from a lab is very, very high. It emerged from a lab, the likelihood that the lab was the Wuhan Institute is very, very high.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first internal combustion engine in a vehicle driving down the street. And you imagine somebody running after them saying, hey, if you do enough of that, you're going to alter the atmosphere and it's going to change the temperature of the planet. It's preposterous, right? Why would you stop the person who's invented this marvelous new contraption? But of course, eventually you do get to the place where you're doing enough of this that you do start changing the temperature of the planet. If we built the capacity, if we basically said, look, you can't involve yourself in any process that you couldn't reverse if you had to then progress would be slowed, but our safety would go up dramatically. And I think in some sense, if we are to be around long term, we have to begin thinking that way. We're just involved in too many very dangerous processes.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we need to do a couple things for it to work. So I've been an advocate for the idea that sustainability is actually, it's difficult to operationalize, but it is an objective that we have to meet if we're to be around long term. And I realize that we also need to have reversibility of all of our processes because processes very frequently when they start do not appear dangerous. And then when they scale, they become very dangerous. So for example, if you imagine”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of disaster that is unimaginable. And that wisdom, you know, you can be highly intelligent and cause these disasters. To be wise is to stop causing them, right? And that would require a process of restraint, a process that I don't see a lot of evidence of yet. Think we have to generate it and somehow At the moment, we don't have a political structure that would be capable of Taking a protective algorithm and actually deploying it, right? Because it would have important economic consequences. And so it would almost certainly be shot down. But we can obviously also say, you know, we paid a huge price for all of the disasters that I've mentioned. And we have to factor that into the equation. Something can be very productive short-term and very destructive long-term.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Break down the entire world economy. It threatened to, but a Herculean effort managed to pull us back from the brink. The triple meltdown at Fukushima was awful, but every one of the seven fuel pools held, there wasn't a major fire that made it impossible to manage the disaster going forward. We got lucky. You know, we could say the same thing about the blowout at the Deepwater Horizon where a hole in the ocean floor large enough that we couldn't have plugged it could have opened up. All of these things could have been much, much worse, right? And I think we can say the same thing about COVID, as terrible as it is. And we cannot say for sure that it came from the Wuhan lab, but there's a strong likelihood that it did. And it also could be much, much worse. So in each of these cases, something is telling us we have a process that is unfolding, that keeps creating risks where it is luck that is the difference between us and some scale.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is sort of my point about the close calls that there's a level at which we can't control it, right? The gigantic asteroid that comes from deep space that you don't have time to do anything about, there's not a lot we can do to hedge that out, or at least not short-term. But there are lots of other things, you know. Obviously, the financial collapse of 2008 didn't.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“COVID 19 and its probable origins in the Wuhan lab. What processes do I not know the name of yet that I will discover at the point that some gigantic accident has happened? And can we talk about the wisdom or lack thereof of engaging in that process before the accident, right? That's what a wise civilization would be doing. And yet we don't.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The accidents and disasters and misfortune describe a distribution that tells you what's really likely to get you in the end. And so personally, you can use them to figure out where the dangers are so that you can afford to take great risks because you have a really good sense of how they're going to go wrong. But I would also point out civilization has this problem. Civilization is now producing these events that are major disasters, but they're not existential scale yet, right? They're very serious errors that we can see, and I would argue that the pattern is you discover that we are involved in some industrial process. At the point it has gone wrong, right? So I'm now always asking the question, okay, in light of the Fukushima triple meltdown, the financial collapse of 2008, the Deepwater Horizon, Blow out”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She didn't, you know, car didn't touch her, right? Now, you could walk away from that and think nothing of it because, well, what is there to think? Nothing happened. Or you could think, well, what is the difference between what did happen and my death? Difference is luck. I never want that to be true, right? I never want the difference between what did happen and my death to be luck. Therefore, I should count this as very close to death. And I should prioritize coding so it doesn't happen again at a very high level. So anyway, my basic point is.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think what you will find, and believe me, I think what you're talking about with respect to robots unlearning is going to end up having to go to a deep developmental state and a helplessness that evolves into hypercompetence and all of that. I live, I noticed that I live by something that I, for lack of a better descriptor call the theory of close calls. And the theory of close calls says that people typically miscategorize the events in their life where something almost went wrong. And for example, if you, I have a friend who. I was walking down the street with my college friends, and one of my friends stepped into the street thinking it was clear and was nearly hit by a car going 45 miles an hour. Would have been an absolute disaster. Might'd have killed her. Certainly would have permanently injured her”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That there's a point, you know, presumably from diminishing returns if not counterproductivity, there is a point at which you should stop because that is what is in your best interest. Then knowing that you're looking for that point is useful, right? This is the point at which it is no longer useful for me to dwell on this error I have made, right? That's what you're looking for. And it also gives you license, right? If some part of you feels like is punishing you rather than searching, then that also has a point at which it's no longer valuable and there's some liberty in realizing, yep, even the part of me that was punishing me knows it's time to stop.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a lovely story. Do you think this is one of these places, and frankly you could map this on to all of modern human experience, but this is one of these places where our ancestral programming does not serve our modern selves? So I used to talk to students about the question of dwelling on things, dwelling on things as famously understood to be bad. And it can't possibly be bad. It wouldn't exist, a tendency toward it wouldn't exist if it was bad. So what is bad is dwelling on things past the point of utility. And, you know, that's obviously easier to say than to operationalize. But if you realize that your dwelling is the key, in fact, to upgrading your program for future well-being.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't know he said that. I must say I resonate with it a bit. And, you know, unfortunately, my life currently has me putting a lot of stuff into the world. And I effectively... Watch almost none of it. I can't stand it.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, trust is a big component of that. Your conscious mind retains control if you are very uncertain. But when you do get into that zone when you're speaking, I realize it's different for you with English as a second language, although maybe you present in Russian and it happens. You ever hear yourself say something and you think, Oh, that's really good, right? Like you didn't come up with it some other part of you that you don't exactly know came up with it.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm not saying that tennis is played consciously and table tennis isn't. I'm saying that because tennis is slowed down by just the space on the court, you could imagine that it was your conscious mind playing. But when you shrink the court down, It becomes obvious that your conscious mind is just present rather than knowing where to put the paddle. And weirdly for me, I would say this probably isn't true in a podcast situation, but if I have to give a presentation, especially if I have not overly prepared, I often find the same phenomenon when I'm giving the presentation. My conscious mind is there watching some other part of me present, which is a little jarring, I have to say.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't exactly know how one would establish this, how one would demonstrate it, but it must be the case that the human mind contains sandboxes in which things are tested, right? Maybe you can build a piece of code and run it in parallel next to your active code so you can see how it would have done comparatively. But there's got to be some way of writing new code and then swapping it in. And frankly, I think this has a lot to do with things like sleep cycles. Very often, you know, when I get good at something, I often don't get better at it while I'm doing it. I get better at it when I'm not doing it, especially if there's time to sleep and think on it. So there's some sort of, you know, new program swapping in for old program phenomenon, which... Will be a lot easier to see in machines. It's going to be hard with the wetw”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the highest kind of thinking. And I really think that this is an error. Consciousness is an intermediate level of thinking. What it does is it allows you, it's basically like uncompiled code. And it doesn't run very fast. It is capable of being adapted to new circumstances. But once the code is roughed in, right, it gets driven into the unconscious layer and you become highly effective at whatever it is. And that from that point, your conscious mind basically remains there to detect things that aren't anticipated by the code you've already written.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cannot imagine that if you've ever played ping pong decently. A volley in ping pong is so fast that your conscious mind, if it had, if your reactions had to go through your conscious mind, you wouldn't be able to play. So you can detect that your conscious mind, while very much present isn't there. And you can also detect where consciousness does usefully intrude. If you go up against an opponent in table tennis that knows a trick that you don't know how to respond to, you will suddenly detect that something about your game is not effective and you will start thinking about what might be. How do you position yourself so that move that puts the ball just in that corner of the table or something like that doesn't catch you off guard? And this, I believe, is we highly conscious folks, those of us who try to think through things very deliberately and carefully, mistake consciousness.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I also want to point out this issue of your conscious mind becoming a spectator very well if you compare tennis to table tennis. If you watch a tennis game, you could imagine that the players are highly conscious as they play”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I still want to have kids. No. You should. It's a great experience. So let me step back into what you said in a couple of different places. One, I have always believed that the missing element in robotics and artificial intelligence is a proper development, right? It is no accident. It is no mere coincidence that human beings are the most dominant species on planet Earth and that we have the longest childhoods of any creature on Earth by far. Development is the key to the flexibility. And so The capability of a human at adulthood is the mirror image. It's the flip side of our helplessness at birth. So I'll be very interested to see what happens in your robot project if you do not end up reinventing childhood for robots, which of course is foreshadowed in 2001 quite brilliantly.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think your objective is laudable, but you're going to realize that the Boston Dynamics folks are right the first time Spot Poops on your rug.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Flying down the hill on skis, for example, bouncing from the top of one mogul to the next, and if you really pay attention, you will discover that your conscious mind is actually a spectator. It's there. It's involved in the experience, but it's not driving. Some part of you knows how to ski and it's not the part of you that knows how to think. I would just say that what accounts for this flexibility in humans is the ability to bootstrap a new software program and then drive it into the unconscious layer where it can be applied very rapidly. And I will be shocked if the exact thing doesn't exist in robotics. If you programmed a robot to deal with circumstances that”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Throw at challenges that its descendants will not be able to meet. So the thing about humans is we are a generalist platform and we have the ability to swap out our software to exist in many, many different niches. And I was watching an interview with this British group of parkour experts who were being, you know, they were discussing what it is they do and how it works and what they essentially said is, look, you're tapping into deep monkey stuff, right? And I thought, yeah, that's about right. And, you know, anybody who... Proficient at something like skiing or skateboarding, you know, has the experience of”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our bodies can move, or is it the mind? Like how much percent wise is it the entirety of the hierarchies of biology that we've been talking about or is it just all? The way to think about creatures is that every creature is two things simultaneously. A creature is a machine of sorts, right? It's not a machine in the, you know, it's, I call it an aqueous machine, right? And it's run by an aqueous computer, right? So it's not identical to our technological machines. But every creature is both a machine that does things in the world sufficient to accumulate enough resources to continue surviving, to reproduce. It is also a potential. So each creature is potentially, for example, the most recent common ancestor of some future clade of creatures that will look very different from it. And if a creature is very, very good at being a creature, but not very good in terms of the potential it has going forward, then that lineage will not last very long into the future because change will...”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would just say, for anyone who hasn't found a topic on which they can develop that kind of facility, it is absolutely worthwhile. It's really something that human beings are capable of doing across a wide range of topics. Many things our ancestors didn't even have access to. And that flexibility of humans, that ability to repurpose our machinery for topics that are novel means really the world is your oyster. You can figure out what your passion is and then figure out all of the angles that one would have to pursue to really deeply understand it. And it is well worth having at least one topic like that. You mean embracing the full adaptability of the both the body and the mind. So I don't know what to attribute the parkour to. Like biomechanics of how”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Involved in a topic like biology and doing so for one, you know, really not even just my adult life for my whole life is that it becomes second nature. And, you know, when we see somebody do an amazing parkour routine or something like that, we think about what they must be doing in order to accomplish that. But of course, what they are doing is tapping into some kind of zone, right? They are in a zone in which they are in such command of their center of gravity, for example, that they know how to hurl it around a landscape so that they always land on their feet.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the human mind is a strange thing, and I think it's probably a bit like a time-sharing machine in which I have different modules. We don't know enough about biology for them to connect, right? So they exist in isolation, and I'm always aware that they do connect, but I basically have to step into a module in order to see the evolutionary dynamics of the creature and the lineage that it belongs to. I have to step into a different module to think of that lineage over a very long time scale, a different module still to understand what the mechanisms inside would have to look like to account for what we can see from the outside. And I think that probably sounds really complicated, but One of the things about being”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around in this world, or do you see, like, from an engineering perspective, they're like first principles almost down to the physics, like the little components that build up hierarchies that you have cells, first proteins and cells and organs and all that kind of stuff. So do you see low level or do you see high level?”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source