Today I’m writing basically to recommend a podcast interview to you. Last night I caught Bret Weinstein’s appearance last week on The Joe Rogan Experience. It’s a great conversation and I highly recommend it to you all.
Bret is an example of a very encouraging trend. A whole bunch of very smart people who were formerly “on” the left or the right side of the political spectrum are waking up (to various degrees) to the fact that their former trust in big government was misplaced. Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald and Bret’s brother Eric are also examples.
And of course there are many many others.
Longtime readers of Haman Nature will recognize in Bret Weinstein a very similar epistemology to my own. He’s very smart and very skeptical of big truth claims. Bret is happy to entertain claims about aliens, the simulation hypothesis, the multiverse hypothesis, etc.
But all these big truth claims require similarly “big” evidence. It’s nice to hear a smart guy express a healthy (in my view) skeptical approach to these things.
One interesting aspect of Bret’s conversation with Joe Rogan is when he talks about complicated systems versus complex systems. Bret is an evolutionary biologist. He was bringing up the concept in relation to medical interventions to the very complex system that is a human body.
Complex is different than complicated. As Bret explains, an iPhone is complicated, but we know exactly how the thing works. We can predict with great accuracy how any mechanical intervention will affect the system.
Not so with the human body. That’s a complex system. We need to be very very careful when and how we intervene with the human body’s natural processes because we can’t predict very well what will happen if we do.
That’s why the ancient medical adage, “First, do no harm” (attributed to Hippocrates, but not actually in the Hippocratic oath) is such an important framework. Go ahead and heal if you can, but be aware that often the most dangerous thing to a patient is intervention itself.
I was immediately struck by how this concept applies to government intervention into society, both at home and abroad. Societies are complex systems every bit as much as human bodies are. And intervening in them should be done very judiciously, if at all.
That’s why we so often see one government intervention leading to cascading societal problems requiring more interventions, which then create their own cascading problems.
As I often say, “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly…”
So, check out Bret Weinstein’s latest appearance on Joe Rogan’s show. It’s a good’n. You can find it on Spotify for sure, and probably elsewhere on the interwebs if you’re savvy in the digital arts.
And thanks, as always, for your time.
Naturally,
Adam
PS: Connect with me on Twitter(X): “@rerazer”
Bret Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, are sharp, deep thinkers; I enjoy the clips they post from their Darkhorse Podcast.
Eric Weinstein is also in that mold of sharp-deep. If you like him, have you heard his most recent appearance on Chris Williamson's show? An engineer friend with whom I worked briefly in software (he's also a Las Vegas resident, like you) sent me the link last week. Long talk -- Roganesque, even! -- but full of interesting conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYRYXhU4kxM