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S7 E2: Roger Pielke Jr., When Science Gets Political
12 Plays1 year ago
Roger Pielke Jr. is a Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, who studies the politics of science and authors a popular Substack blog called The Honest Broker. Never one to shy away from controversy, Prof. Pielke has done high-profile research and writing on climate change and natural disasters, the origins of COVID-19, and the inclusion of transgender and intersex women in women’s sports. We discuss the relationship between science and politics and what can go wrong when science is politicized.
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Transcript
Introduction to Free Mind Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome back to the Free Mind podcast, where we explore topics in Western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions. I'm Matt Burgess.
Meet the Hosts - Matt Burgess & Roger Pilkey Jr.
00:00:17
Speaker
an assistant professor of environmental studies, and a faculty fellow of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. My guest today is Roger Pilkey Jr. Roger
Roger Pilkey Jr.'s Research Journey
00:00:28
Speaker
Pilkey Jr. is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the politics of science and authors a popular sub-stack blog called The Honest Broker.
00:00:37
Speaker
He has a popular book by the same title. Never one to shy away from controversy, Professor Pilkey has done high profile research and writing on climate change and natural disasters, on the origins of COVID-19, and on the inclusion of transgender women and women with differences in sexual development in women's sports. We discussed the relationship between science and politics and what can go wrong when science gets politicized.
From Math to Public Policy: Roger's Story
00:01:00
Speaker
Roger Pilkey Jr., welcome to the Free Mind podcast. Thanks Matt, great to be here. So you study the politics of science, is that right? Yes. I talk about science in policy and politics. So how did you get interested in that? Because you have kind of an interesting academic background where you were a math major and then you did earth science. So how did you get interested in that? Yeah, it was interesting. You stumble into these things and when you're living your life, it's all uncertain and when you look backwards, it kind of makes sense.
00:01:29
Speaker
But my dad is and was a famous atmospheric scientist and I learned how to program in Fortran, I guess when I was like in third grade. So that allowed me to get a really good, decent paying job at an NCAR, National Center for Atmospheric Research, when I was an undergrad and I worked with the world's leading scientists of the ozone layer. And this was the time, it was pre-climate change is when ozone depletion was the big issue. And the scientists kept saying, you know, if only these policymakers understood our science world would be a lot better.
00:01:58
Speaker
And here I am hot on the path to become an atmospheric chemist or something like that going forward. I said, all right, I'm going to up my skills and learn something about policy. And so I said, I'm going to get a master's degree in public policy.
Scientists and Politics: A Necessary Engagement?
00:02:09
Speaker
Long story short, that took me to Washington, DC, and I worked for the House Science Committee. And I learned that the people who worked in Washington thought the same thing about scientists, that scientists thought about them.
00:02:20
Speaker
If only these damn scientists understood policy and politics, the world would be a better place. And so I realized that this interface, this intersection between science and policy and politics, it's interesting and fascinating, but it's also important. So I got a PhD in science policy. Yeah, really interesting. By the way, you mentioned ozone. I believe it's the case that I and the Montreal Protocol were born on the same day, possibly in Montreal.
00:02:42
Speaker
Oh Lord, you're making me feel old now. I should have double checked that, but certainly the same year. One of the things that's really interesting about your work is there's been a lot of debates publicly recently about scientists getting involved in politics. Should they, shouldn't they, when should they?
00:02:58
Speaker
And often the public debates are quite black and white. Some people saying they never should, some people saying they always should. And you have, in your public writings, taken a more nuanced view of this issue. And in fact, you wrote a well-known book called The Honest Broker, which outlined some of the good and bad ways scientists can get involved or not get involved in politics.
00:03:19
Speaker
So can you give me a short summary of what are some ways that you consider good or productive that a scientist might get involved in politics and what are some bad ways? Keep
Roles of Scientists in Policy Discussions
00:03:28
Speaker
it general because I'm going to ask you to revisit it later with examples.
00:03:31
Speaker
So the first thing to say is, yes, experts, including scientists, not only should they participate in policy and politics, but they have an obligation to. Most of us in academia are in some way, shape, or form funded by public money. And we're doing interesting work, but also there's an expectation that we're going to help make the world a better place. And so engagement really, I think, goes along with the job description.
00:03:55
Speaker
engagement is complicated and there are different roles that we can play as experts. In my book, which had a framework that fortunately resonated with a lot of people, it's pretty straightforward. I outline what I call the pure scientists. I'm not sure they exist in the real world, but if you don't want to be
00:04:14
Speaker
engaged in policy and politics. Maybe Elon Musk will give you a billion dollars. You go to a deserted island, cut your internet connection, and follow your curiosity. But there are other categories too. So one is what I call the science arbiter. And we see this most in expert advisory committees, which we do generally really well. So like vaccine approval is an example. Another example of a way to intersect with policy and politics is advocacy. We're all political creatures. We all have values.
00:04:43
Speaker
And so it's very common for scientists to go out and demand what they want, just stop oil or vaccinate your children. And advocacy is characterized by wanting to limit the scope of choice, usually to a preferred outcome. At the other end of the spectrum from advocacy is what I call the honest broker of policy alternatives. Sometimes policymakers don't need to hear what we want them to do, but they want to hear what they could do. What are the choices? What are the options? And we're all familiar with honest brokers.
00:05:12
Speaker
If you go to a travel website and you want to find flights or a hotel, you don't want the website to tell you where you should go. You want to know what your options are, what the costs are, what the dates, what's available and locations and things like that. That's honest brokering. These are all ideal types and they give us a language where we can have much more sophisticated discussion. There is another category, a fifth category.
00:05:33
Speaker
that I call stealth advocacy, and it happens a lot, and it's embodied in the phrase, just follow the science. The idea that we are dispassionate, value-free oracles, and the science speaks, and really what that does is it smuggles the values of the scientist or the expert into political discussions
00:05:52
Speaker
kind of in the guise of science. I've long argued that makes science more political rather than politics more scientific. Let me revisit this for a second. Here's an example that I study economics of climate change among other things. Here's
Communicating Climate Science
00:06:08
Speaker
an example related to climate change that economists find vexing.
00:06:13
Speaker
Would you agree that this is an example of stealth advocacy? When people say things like climate science, usually meaning physical climate science, proves that we need to abandon capitalism. That may be an extreme example, but things like that. Is that stealth advocacy because the person is misrepresenting what their scientific expertise speaks to and what it doesn't? So it speaks to, in the case of earth science,
00:06:37
Speaker
physical science the planet warming because the greenhouse effect because of human emissions but that is necessarily speak to what the solution is and the person's values being the solution is that an example of stealth advocacy and and and is there is there a way to generalize it. In the context you've written about like where's the stealth come in is it people misrepresenting where there's they're taking off their science hat and where their values had is putting on or is there other kinds of misrepresentation that's happening.
00:07:04
Speaker
I've long argued against the two hats sort of argument because we're all humans and it's very difficult to take yourself out of your preferences and values. We have institutions and procedures for doing this, but I'll illustrate it with this example. So often we hear the claim, the IPCC says we have to cut emissions by 50% by 2030. And what is left off from that is the conditional. So if we want to have a
00:07:30
Speaker
probability of hitting the Paris 1.5 degree target, then that implies we would have to cut emissions by a certain amount. The 1.5 degree target is itself a politically chosen, fairly arbitrary, nice round number that's been negotiated in politics. So science isn't telling us we have to cut emissions, we're telling ourselves. And so what happens in stealth advocacy is we put
00:07:55
Speaker
the burden of the demand for action or a particular course of action on this nebulous thing called science, when it's really the product of political negotiation. It's all the same thing in COVID with the phrase, it was made more popular in the UK, but just follow the science as if science tells us what to do. Really, that's a way for people to advocate for actions without having to be explicit about values. That's not good for science.
00:08:22
Speaker
So let me try an example of what I think might be something you would be more okay with in your issue advocate framework. Suppose a scientist said, if we don't cut emissions by 50% by 2030, then the science leads me to believe that that makes it quite likely that we're going to miss the one and a half degree target. And I personally am concerned about that for X, Y, and Z reason. And therefore, I think we should stop oil or whatever it is. Would that be okay?
00:08:52
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's perfectly fine. I mean, the default mode for just about every of us in every context is advocacy, and that's fine. The distinction between stealth advocacy and formal out in the open advocacy is the degree to which you're being open about that advocacy stance. Not that advocacy is inherently bad or good. I mean, that's what the fuel that democracy runs on.
00:09:16
Speaker
So advocacy is fine. And there's this technical term in science and technology studies called the value-free ideal.
Politicization of Science and Public Trust
00:09:23
Speaker
And there is this view that, well, we need to separate science from politics and all we want are the facts and we don't want values to get in the way. And the reality is that in very simple cases, sure, maybe you can do that like a weather forecast, but in more complicated cases like COVID or climate change, values and science are all mixed up together.
00:09:41
Speaker
So on a related topic, would it be fair to say that one of the things you're well known for is calling out scientists and scientific institutions that you think have been stealth advocates or have some way violated your ideals for how to engage in policy and politics?
00:09:59
Speaker
I think it's fair to say that when science is used as kind of a Trojan horse to smuggle in political or values concerns, it should be a concern to all of us. The idea of calling out scientists, another way to say that is, that's what we do. In academia, that's our job is to... Science is a self-correcting process. And so we're very open and the literature is full of people, quote unquote, calling out people.
00:10:25
Speaker
Because there are really important issues where science meets politics today, I feel very strongly that we want to be really careful about how science gets politicized. Because as we've seen, and maybe we could talk about this, different parts of our society have more or less confidence in science institutions. That's a problem because we really need science.
00:10:44
Speaker
So I was going to ask you about this later, but let's talk about this now, what you just alluded to, right? So that their trust among Americans in universities has gone down by something like half or more since 2015, driven almost entirely by independence and Republicans, such that Republicans, for example, used to trust, used to have confidence in higher education by something like 60% trust, and now it's less than 20%. And
00:11:13
Speaker
Some people argue that this has to do with stealth advocacy or institutional advocacy, when that's maybe another distinction we can get into later. Is there a difference between individual scientists engaging in politics in a particular way at institutions? But then other people point to just the composition of scientists. So let me put the question to you this way.
00:11:30
Speaker
Imagine a scenario where we didn't have any self-advocacy, but we still had an overwhelming monoculture among scientists such that marxists and anarchists were more common than Republicans, which I think is the case among climate scientists. But they were all very upfront about that, right? So everybody was for stopping oil, but they all were explicit about, these are my values as a progressive or whatever. How much of a difference would that make in the trust?
00:11:58
Speaker
I think the problem of stealth advocacy is, I think, a separate issue from the loss of trust in institutions. I mean, we've seen society-wide, a general downward trend, really across the board of trust in institutions, whether it's Congress or the media or science. But one thing that's interesting about the scientific community, as you suggest,
00:12:19
Speaker
The scientific community and academia in particular tends to have a lot more representation of people who are on the political left than on the political right. That means that if people openly witness and advocate to their values from the left, it's going to not hit right with whatever half of the electorate who aren't on the left.
00:12:40
Speaker
We've also seen an increasing trend of what I would call combatant academics, people who are very loud in their partisan beliefs. You have a climate scientist named Michael Mann who says the GOP should be removed from the face of the earth. The editor in chief of science, I just had an exchange with him on Twitter yesterday or the day before about his overt advocacy for democratic
00:13:01
Speaker
causes. If I go to a doctor and the first thing I hear from them when I walk in is, I love this drug. It's my favorite thing. I assign it to all my patients. I'm going to question whether he's serving my best interests. I think it's similar for the average American if you hear a scientist out there loudly proclaiming their beliefs. It would be the same if they were on the political right.
00:13:22
Speaker
it does call into questions like trust because the response is, well, this person doesn't share my values. So why should I trust what they're saying? So I think we do have a problem in the expert community, not only in the fact that ideologically our diversity doesn't match up with the broader society, but also that we have become much more aggressive in pursuing our community's politics such that people notice out there in the real world. And I think that's a problem.
00:13:50
Speaker
Let's put a pin in this and come back to it because I want to go over some examples from your work first, but this is a really important topic that I want to circle back to at the end. So as far as I've known you, you've been involved in at least three very hot topics, climate change and natural disasters, COVID-19 and its governance and origins of the pandemic and the inclusion or non-inclusion of intersex and transgender women and women's sports. Have I missed any?
00:14:20
Speaker
Those are the ones of late. Okay, so let's just do a quick rapid fire, drawing in some of these themes from your general philosophy of science and politics.
00:14:30
Speaker
So on climate change, I would say that you have at times been very critical of climate scientists and journalists for misrepresenting the data and evidence on natural disasters and on climate change scenarios. Now, on those two topics are a little bit different because, for example, natural disasters. One of the things that you often point out is that your position is very consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC's position. In fact, it
00:14:55
Speaker
does or at least used to heavily cite your work in arriving in its position. Is that right? So what does the IPCC say about disasters and climate change in a broad sense?
Climate Change Data Representation
00:15:07
Speaker
Finding conclusion, which has been consistent for more than a decade, is that disasters. A disaster is where an extreme event meets an exposed and vulnerable society. Disasters are primarily the result of what we build, where we build our preparation for these events, not the number or trend in those events themselves. If we want to talk about disasters, keep that separate from extreme events. If you want to focus on extreme events, which I think is important, you look at weather and climate data.
00:15:36
Speaker
And it turns out that the... And then there's a reason for this because climate advocates 15 years ago decided to bring climate home to people through extreme events. And that has required going well beyond what scientific evidence can support. And so it's no surprise to anyone listening to this, every single extreme weather event that happens anywhere in the world is really quickly taken up in the cause of climate advocacy. I think it's important for two reasons.
00:16:02
Speaker
One is, I was just talking to somebody in the reinsurance industry earlier today, there are people making decisions about risk who need to be well-informed based on the science, not just for advocacy. The second reason is that
00:16:15
Speaker
getting back to the issue of trust, we want people to trust us. And if there are claims made, for example, you know, there's more tornadoes or more hurricanes hitting and you can check on Google in five minutes and find that that's not true. You are definitely not going to trust the people who are making those statements. So I do think calling things as they are, that's the job of the IPCC. It's done a very good job on extreme events. We all have an obligation to do so, even if it may not in the short term,
00:16:44
Speaker
contribute to our advocacy goals. For me, I started doing research on extreme weather as a postdoc in the 1990s, and the issue came and found me when it was politicized. At some point in my career, I decided I could either just be quiet and not talk about it, or I'm going to go out there and defend what the scientific community knows and what the data says. I feel pretty good about the accuracy of all the work that I've done, even though I take a lot of heat for making those accurate claims.
00:17:11
Speaker
So let me try to steal man what might be an opposite view, but might be a somewhat different perspective, which would be that with any extreme weather event, it seems to me and correct me, I'm wrong. I'm an economist. I'm not a climate scientist. So correct me, I'm wrong.
00:17:28
Speaker
But it seems to me that there are gradations of the extent to which attribution is appropriate for a particular event. So for example, like you said, tornadoes, as far as I know, there's no evidence that tornadoes are getting stronger because of climate change. So if somebody says that, then they're just misrepresenting the science.
00:17:46
Speaker
Or another example, again, correct me if this is wrong, but I believe it's the case that the models have Eastern Canada becoming wetter as we get warmer, and therefore wildfires in Quebec may not be more likely because of climate change than they were before. And we had a big wildfire in Quebec recently.
00:18:04
Speaker
But then on the other hand, it seems at least intuitively to me to be more okay to say something like if you have a big wildfire in Western Canada or in, you know, Colorado, right? We had the horrible Marshall fire here in Colorado, you know, a few blocks literally from where I live.
00:18:25
Speaker
which was a big fire in the winter on an unusually dry snowless winter up to that point, extremely windy day, unseasonably warm. In fact, I was golfing when the fire started. Would it not be reasonable to point out that those conditions, even though it's hard to say this particular
00:18:49
Speaker
event happened or didn't happen because of climate change? Is it not reasonable to say that the conditions that made this event more likely are attributable at least somewhat to climate change? And wouldn't that be useful information for policymakers and for citizens who are trying to understand how much of a concern climate change should be? There's a
Media Narratives and Climate Change
00:19:09
Speaker
couple of things here. So one, it's exactly correct. The way you're doing this is you go phenomena by phenomena because it's different for heat waves than it is for tropical cyclones and so on.
00:19:18
Speaker
The second thing is climate change is real. The climate is changing. We can attribute things like heat waves, average temperature, precipitation patterns, and variability in certain places. The thing to understand is that the IPCC has a very formal and technical definition of what detection and attribution are.
00:19:36
Speaker
And those involve looking at trends and specific statistics of weather and climate over many decades. And there are other ways we could think about attribution. There's a new field of event attribution that's purely statistical that's arisen, I think largely because of the failure of the IPCC's ability to detect and attribute. But yeah, so what you described is a storyline approach. And the storyline approach says exactly that, well, we know that some of the underlying conditions are related, and that's fine. That's perfectly fine.
00:20:07
Speaker
And it's not a particularly, I would say, quantitative or rigorous approach. I mean, the reality is that all of our weather every day is affected by the fact that we're pumping not just greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but we're changing the albedo of the planet, we're putting aerosols, we're changing land use. So of course humans are affecting the climate and I think that's long been settled. If you care about things like flood damage or damage from tropical cyclones or tornado damage, then you will want to know
00:20:34
Speaker
have those events become more or less common. You can do it globally, you can do it regionally, you can do it locally. In many instances, we have good data on which to answer those sorts of questions. It just turns out that a lot of the claims that are made out in public far exceed what the scientific community can back up. That does make a difference
00:20:55
Speaker
beyond the hot politics of climate change, if you're trying to set pricing for insurance in California or Florida for fires and hurricanes, then you want to be actuarially sound. You don't want to do it based on media reports and political messaging. If you're building a bridge or the Boulder Library in the floodplain, your design criteria are going to be based on your expectations of what you need to prepare for. You can either underspend in preparation or overspend.
00:21:23
Speaker
and both of those are economically inefficient. So I think there are real good reasons out there beyond just, you know, we should always, you know, play it straight, but also better decisions are grounded in better evidence and science so we should get it right on extreme events. So I think, correct me if this is wrong, but one, I think there's a difference between
00:21:42
Speaker
Extreme events and scenarios is where we're going next at least in how you've written about it, which is that it seems like with extreme events, you know, the IPCC essentially summarizes the literature and so if the IPCC's description of the science of extreme events.
00:21:58
Speaker
is accurate and reasonable in your view, then it sounds like you're saying the problem is communication. There's journalists that are taking claims out of context. There's maybe some scientists on Twitter. There's activists. Is that right? If so, where does the problem lie if it's not so much in the scientific literature? One distinction I think it's important to make as we have this conversation is that we have evidence for what has happened
00:22:23
Speaker
from the past, whatever date we have for data from up to today. So that's one way to look at things. Another way to look at things is how we project the future and how things might change. When we're looking at the past, there's good data out there that's kept by agencies like NOAA and their equivalents around the world. And the IPCC does a nice job of summarizing it. Deborah Gujas up here, who is the owner, the leader of the EM debt
00:22:49
Speaker
database on global disasters has said publicly that they've had press conferences where they've said very clearly that the number of global disasters from all weather phenomena worldwide has gone down in the 21st century by about 10%. That's good news.
00:23:05
Speaker
Her frustration is, well, nobody will report that because there's a narrative out there. I think it's not just that people don't understand, it's that people don't want to understand and that there is a very strong, powerful narrative. Can you imagine if you're a reporter at the New York Times and you write an article and your editor allows you that says hurricanes have not gotten stronger, they've not gotten more intense. In fact, the last three years has seen record low
00:23:33
Speaker
since 1980. This is true in the number of intense hurricanes worldwide. I'll give you another example. I wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago.
00:23:41
Speaker
And I had a line in there about how hurricanes have not increased since 1900, their landfalls in the US. And the editor I was working with, I asked, I said, well, why'd you take that out? And he said, well, I know it's correct, but our readers won't believe it's correct. And then they won't believe anything you've written, so we're going to take it out. And so we're at this point in the narrative where we're counting to what people think is true rather than saying what is true because of the perceived political or career implications of doing so.
00:24:08
Speaker
So if we can try to understand the mindset, because the editor telling you to take out that line is basically making an empirical claim about their readers that may or may not be true, but that's kind of a description of what they perceive to be the narrative, not necessarily a desire to perpetuate the narrative.
00:24:27
Speaker
But let me ask you, so people who want to emphasize only the scariest, most dire aspects of climate change, to what extent do you think that that is A, that they really perceive it with that filter on and they're really, really scared?
00:24:47
Speaker
maybe disproportionately to what the evidence says it's kind of one hypothesis another hypothesis would be that they're really scared about what might happen say by twenty one hundred if we don't get our act together and they're worried that if we don't. Play it up a little bit now people won't be scared enough because of discounting and all these other reasons why people don't think far enough in the future.
00:25:10
Speaker
And then the third option, and obviously none of these are mutually exclusive, but the third option is they perceive, I think correctly that there are some forces, which maybe you could argue are in decline somewhat, but there certainly have been historically potent political forces.
00:25:27
Speaker
trying to misrepresent the science in the other direction to, you know, to say it's the sun or that, you know, climate change isn't real or isn't manmade or, you know, because of this may be a little bit of inside baseball, but, you know, there was a paper that came out a few years ago that said, you know, quoted unrealistically optimistic economic scenarios and said, well, we shouldn't worry about climate change because we're all going to be super rich.
00:25:49
Speaker
So which of those three or what combination of those three hypotheses or some other ones do you think are driving this desired to fit a particular narrative towards more alarm.
00:26:02
Speaker
I mean, I think there's some truth in each of your three examples there. I mean, you and I both have had this experience in the classroom. I mean, there's some particularly young people are truly afraid of climate change, a significant proportion. And this shows up in the opinion polls, but it also is matched by my experience talking to environmental studies undergrads. Same here. So yeah, I do think that there's legitimate fear. And I think the fear is stoked by a lot of the media coverage and what they hear.
00:26:27
Speaker
I also think that there are among advocates and scientists a very powerful theory of change out there, that the way we get climate action is we scare the bejesus out of people and that'll motivate them to vote a certain way or support certain policies or whatever.
Complexity in Scientific Communication
00:26:43
Speaker
This is the weapons of mass destruction in the Iraq war theory. Climate policy requires decades, probably the better part of a century of political support.
00:26:52
Speaker
you can't keep people in a state of fear for decades. So I just reject that as a theory of change. And then also, I think that there is, among some people, and certainly among some climate scientists, a view out there that thou shall not criticize any aspect, any claim made related to climate science, lest you give ammunition to the quote unquote deniers. And so I do think there's been a very unhealthy dynamic, both in science and in the media,
00:27:22
Speaker
where any counter view descent from a particular narrative is equated with supporting climate deniers. I've heard this upfront. There's a theory that's out there from about 20 years ago called Balance is Bias about the media and the idea that if you're doing a climate story, there's only one side to tell.
00:27:42
Speaker
And science is complicated, politics is complicated, and there are ways to talk about these complexities without bringing in people who think it's the sun or flat earthers or whatever. And in areas of science like COVID, there's been a lot more willingness to embrace diversity of perspectives. And on climate change, there still is a very strong prohibition against diversity of thought on these issues.
00:28:08
Speaker
So just a really quick point about balances bias, because I think there's actually a really interesting distinction there. So as I understand it, the theory of balances bias, which comes from, for those of you who don't know, a famous paper by Max and Jules Boykoff in 2004, and that was about the science, right? So is global warming real? Is it human cost? And the argument was, at least as I remember it, was that if, you know,
00:28:35
Speaker
Overwhelming majority maybe it's ninety seven percent maybe it's higher there's a recent debate about that of scientists believe that those two things are true. I think at this point it's fair to say that they're definitely true we know that they're true does it not muddy the waters to have you know it's fine to have descent.
00:28:52
Speaker
but to have, you know, dissent equally represented, say, in the media or, you know, on that point, not on the policy. Like, I don't think that there's yet been a version of balance of bias about the policy. Maybe there isn't kind of the Twitter and media narrative. Is that a correct distinction? Like, I guess where I'm going with this is I would argue that it's reasonable to say we should have the public presentation of the science be consistent with the science.
00:29:18
Speaker
So, for example, you know, I don't think RFK Jr's theory about autism being caused by vaccines needs to get equal airtime as, you know, other views based on the science. But I think it's fine to have airtime given to people who have all different moral, ethical policy views on, you say, whether a vaccine should be mandatory, you know, for whom, under what circumstances.
00:29:37
Speaker
Can I oversimplify it? It's interesting because use this phrase, the science, and there's a big difference between is climate change real, yes or no, and how many hurricanes have struck the US over the last 100 years. The problem with the balances bias thesis is that it took over every aspect of discussions of climate change. If someone goes in the media and says, oh, we have an increasing number of hurricanes,
00:30:04
Speaker
Therefore, we should act on climate change. And I come out and say, yeah, climate change is important. We should act. But we actually, the data says we haven't seen an increase in hurricanes. That is viewed as an improper balance of that original false claim. So the problem isn't that, I mean, it's almost trivial. Like is the earth flat? Is it round? Well, let's hear the opposing view. Of course not. We wouldn't want to do that. But there's no such thing as the science when it comes to a lot of complicated things.
00:30:31
Speaker
What caused the Marshall fire? Well, it was a lot of things caused it, like bad development, open space policies, invasive grass species, maybe a power line down, maybe some burning that wasn't put out, and background climate change. Those all were part of it. And if you start introducing that complexity and a reporter or an editor says, well, we're not going to balance out the climate change discussion with a down power line.
00:30:56
Speaker
That would be an improper use of the balances bias thesis. I see that an awful lot in the media. It's not just a distinction between policy and science. It's that there's complexities. Talking about complexities, it's not appropriate to call that balance. That's just reality.
00:31:11
Speaker
Right, but would it be fair to say that in the example that you gave, that the problem is the people who are invoking balances bias, don't actually understand what the balance of evidence is, right? Is that basically what you're saying in the context of? That's probably part of it. But it's also like that editor that I mentioned who fully understood what the evidence says, but didn't want to complexify the discussion for his readers, who his belief was have a very simple, if incorrect view of quote unquote, the science.
Impact of Implausible Climate Scenarios
00:31:40
Speaker
Okay, so this is actually a nice segue into scenarios because I see scenarios is different from disasters in that with disasters, the research in so far as it's summarized by the IPCC is correct or balanced.
00:31:55
Speaker
or fairly represents what we know in your view. And I think we've written about scenarios together. You're much more versed on the policy side of this and the history side of this. But I think it would be fair to say that one of the issues with scenarios is that the scientific literature is not representative of the evidence. In particular, there are some hot scenarios, most notably
00:32:18
Speaker
the one called rcp 8.5 or the new analog of it ssp 58.5 that are used you know and we had a study in fisheries that found that it was used in about 90 percent of papers
00:32:30
Speaker
And yet, you know, our work and other and work of other groups have suggested that this is a very implausible scenario. And then, of course, the results from, you know, using an unplausibly hot scenario give you implausibly hot but very scary sounding headlines that then get perpetuated in the media. But it seems like it's a different problem because if the IPCC's job is to summarize the literature and the literature is very skewed towards these hot scenarios,
00:32:54
Speaker
then you could argue that the IPCC is doing its job by summarizing the literature skewed towards these hot scenarios. But then it's not the same. You could point to, say, New York Times headlines often being based on RCP8.5 studies, and yet you couldn't say, in contrast to the disasters, that these headlines are coming from something that's not directly coming from the literature, because in a sense it is. Is that right? I mean, the IPCC has one job. It's to assess the literature. It's not to be a stenographer. It's not to count up.
00:33:24
Speaker
the literature, it's not just to report what the literature says, it's to assess the literature. And it does this. The IPCC, for example, looking at physical earth system models, looked at projections of future temperature change, and they developed a subset of those projections from models that best were able to represent the historical record. And so that was a kind of a conditional approach. So the IPCC does do
00:33:49
Speaker
assessment. The problems with scenario, and let me just say, here's a more fundamental problem with the IPCC. In my areas of expertise, the IPCC does everything from an outstanding, wonderful, excellent job to really falling down on the job. And the problem I think is that you need to be an expert, be able to tell the difference.
00:34:07
Speaker
That's a problem because the IPCC is supposed to be trustworthy across the board. Can you give some examples of those specific gradations? So, so give me an example of something, you know, I guess we talked about natural disasters, extreme weather and attribution of trends in weather and climate extremes. So what's an example of somewhere where you think that the IPCC has not done a good job of summarizing the evidence? The RCP 8.5 issue is probably the most significant one in my area of expertise. We have a scenario that the IPCC itself admitted it was in one chapter
00:34:36
Speaker
And it was kind of a passing comment that the 8.5 scenarios were low likelihood, a euphemism for implausible. And yet, RCP 8.5 was the overwhelmingly dominant more than 50% of mentions across the six assessment reports. So the IPCC furthered the use of this out of date scenario. It would have been very difficult
00:34:58
Speaker
very painful to try to excise that in writing their report. But if the goal is not just to summarize a literature, whether it's accurate or not, but to well inform the public and policymakers, I would argue that it's the IPCC's job to make those hard decisions. They still could have written that report and centered RCP 4.5
00:35:18
Speaker
And to this day, the climate science community is still pumping out about 20 peer-reviewed RCP 8.5 papers a day. And the IPCC, all right, forget about what they did about the past. They could have been much stronger about, all right, going forward, it would be most useful to focus on scenario A, B, and C.
00:35:36
Speaker
but it hasn't done that, at least to date, that's sort of a leadership in the community. Whereas it does that in more of the physical science modeling side of things. So let me deal man the IPCC in this respect in a couple of ways. So first, so the vast majority of studies that say take impacts, right? Say take climate impacts. So studies that are looking at where are we going to be the impact of climate change on this, that or the other thing, you know, coral reefs, sea level rise, whatever.
00:36:03
Speaker
Most of the studies that the iBCC is going to summarize that look at impacts use rcp 8.5 many of them only use rcp 8.5 and yet my work in fisheries has found that i wouldn't be surprised this is a would be common in other disciplines or other domains.
00:36:19
Speaker
has found that the differences when studies do look at both RCP8.5 and the more realistic RCP4.5, they tend to find a quantitative, not a qualitative difference. So RCP8.5 is going to cause more sea level rise than RCP4.5, but it's very rare that there's a tipping point in between or some qualitative difference with some exceptions.
00:36:42
Speaker
Mass coral bleaching might happen under both RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5, so in some sense there's less of a difference between those two. And there's some where there's, you know, there is a big difference between those two.
00:36:52
Speaker
Let's just, for argument's sake, assume that it's a general phenomenon that the impacts of RCP8.5 are similar but more severe than the impacts of RCP4.5. Would it not be reasonable for the IPCC to say, look, here are all the different impacts that studies have projected to occur? In most of the cases, or many of the cases, we only have RCP8.5 information. And so we're going to report that, but we're going to note that the RCP4.5 is a more plausible scenario.
00:37:21
Speaker
I know that's not quite what happened, but would that be a reasonable way to handle the situation? Short answer is no, that would not be reasonable. Why not and what should they do instead? I'll give you a concrete example. If you look at the scenarios for sea level rise that the US government formally uses under the US National Climate Assessment and they're put out by NOAA, great agency. At the upper end, they have up until this year used the 90th percentile of RCP 8.5
00:37:51
Speaker
which is 2.5 meters by 2100. RCP 4.5 isn't just more realistic. It's a plausible upper bound for current policies today. This is getting down in the weeds, but in our work, we look at a 3.4 scenario as most consistent.
00:38:06
Speaker
If a more plausible scenario says, oh, well, we're actually looking at maximum of one meter as a worst case scenario in 2100. If you are the decision makers, and this is a real world case in San Francisco and planning to build infrastructure for SFO, San Francisco International Airport.
00:38:25
Speaker
The difference between preparing for 2.5 meters by 2100 and one meter might be billions of dollars. And those are taxpayer dollars. So the difference matters. So in the hot politics of climate change, are we going to have sea level rise? Yeah. Are we going to measure it in meters? Yeah. But the details of the scenarios actually matter. The other response to that little thought experiment is that, well, you know, in that case, scenarios don't even really matter. I mean, if all we're doing is looking for a direction of change,
00:38:53
Speaker
If all people want to know is climate change going to be better or worse and is more climate change more worse? I mean, the answer is yes. We don't need models. We don't need scenarios. We don't need any of that to know those are the case. But if we actually care about things like, well, is it going to be closer to 2.5 meters or closer to one meter, then the plausibility of scenarios then takes on a really important issue. The last thing I'll say about this, and I'm going to go back to the weapons of mass destruction example. If someone says, well, you know, Saddam Hussein was a really bad guy.
00:39:22
Speaker
He could have had weapons of mass destruction and we found some old biological weapons in a shed somewhere. It wasn't nuclear weapons, but it's on that spectrum from benign all the way up to WMDs. Forget about the details. It doesn't really matter. He's a bad guy.
00:39:39
Speaker
I don't think anyone would accept that sort of a hand wavy sort of argument. So if we know that the leading scenario that's in use is flawed to the point of being unusable, then we simply should, rather than making excuses for its continued use, just correct the scientific baseline for scenarios and then move forward with updated and new scenarios. You know, I am optimistic that the community is well aware of these issues and are moving towards more realistic, more plausible scenarios.
00:40:08
Speaker
The problem is gonna take a couple years at the earliest before they're in play, so that's a challenge. So that's a good segue into my second steelman of the IPCC, and that is maybe if we're only asking the IPCC to be the ones correcting the record, then given the length of their assessment cycle, maybe we're asking too much.
IPCC's Role and Future Improvements
00:40:28
Speaker
I think a story that a lot of people who've been following our work might tell about the IPCC with respect to scenarios is that in the fifth assessment cycle, which came out in 2014, RCPA.5 was mentioned, it was heavily mentioned. It was treated somewhat like business as usual. And yet, if you weren't somebody who was playing really close attention to energy systems, it might have been somewhat of a reasonable
00:40:55
Speaker
viewpoint to think that that was a business as usual, you know, where we were going. I know that there's some nuances that's not, you could argue against that, but I think many people would argue that that was the consensus view of the time.
00:41:05
Speaker
Then by the time AR6 came out and the six assessment report in 2021 and 2022, our work, Zeke Housefather and Glenn Peters' work and others was out. And the IPCC did acknowledge that this scenario probably wasn't plausible, even though the debate, the public discussion of that in the literature came out fairly late in the context of that assessment cycle.
00:41:26
Speaker
And so they kind of acknowledged it, but then still had to deal with the body of literature that hadn't caught up. And then in the next, the seventh assessment cycle, there have been some preliminary signs, shall we say, that you and I have seen that suggests it's possible this scenario will not be emphasized and may not even exist in that assessment cycle. So I think a steel man view of the IPCC there is that the IPCC is doing its job of correcting itself within the constraints of having a six to seven year cycle.
00:41:54
Speaker
So it's really up to the rest of us to be paying more attention to how the literature evolves so that the IPCC doesn't have to be the only group trying to right the ship when these kinds of things change. Is that fair?
00:42:05
Speaker
I mean, overall, it's pretty fair. There's a few things I would add to that. So first, the explicit mention of RCP 8.5 as business as usual, occurred many more times in AR6 versus AR5, particularly in Working Group 2. That's interesting. Yeah, you can find many, many examples. The other thing is, you know, where I agree, the IPCC is us. The IPCC is the scientific community.
00:42:28
Speaker
Yes, it's intergovernmental and yes, governments play a role in the top line findings of the reports, but writing the reports, doing the research that informs reports, that is us. One of my challenges I put out to the climate community
00:42:43
Speaker
and which I and Dan Sarowitz first wrote about in 2003, is we need better leadership within the scientific community in defense of scientific integrity. And that does mean saying difficult hard messages. And for better or worse, the IPCC and its leaders are in one of those rare leadership positions in the climate community.
00:43:02
Speaker
Yeah, there's some senior men and women who could influence things. But where do you want to go if you want to find leadership in the community that can actually make decisions that affect the broad spectrum? And it's people who create scenarios, people who create models. And it's of the IPCC and around the IPCC, like the CMET process and the modelers also.
00:43:23
Speaker
Final point on that is that the IPCC's heavy use of RCP8.5 is, I would argue, one factor in why the IPCC almost a decade ago turned to carbon capture and storage as an essential element of their modeling going forward for policy solutions. Because this very aggressive scenario had so much carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere that the policy options they came up with were just incapable
00:43:51
Speaker
of getting it down to close to zero. So they, quote unquote, invented some bells and whistles in the models called Beck's Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage to mop things up. Turns out if we start with a policy trajectory more consistent with where we're at today, it's possible that we would need much less of that carbon capture and storage. And so there are resource implications. There are implications for the direction of our policy discussions and debate. And if the IPCC is a lagging indicator of the science,
00:44:21
Speaker
then that's a problem for the IPCC in its role in policy and politics. We want the best information, the most up to date information in the hands of policymakers when they're making
Scientific Integrity and Political Misuse
00:44:30
Speaker
decisions. Not, oh yeah, here's what the literature said in 2014 or 2015. That's a recipe for driving real fast, looking in the rear view mirror.
00:44:39
Speaker
Okay, last quick question on climate change, and that is I want to circle back to this argument that you've heard that says, you know, you're just feeding the deniers. And I think it's fair to say, or at least my perception has been that in some cases that argument is wheeled, you know, somewhat dishonestly as a cudgel, right? By people who just don't want to hear what you have to say, or don't like how you say it or whatever else, and just kind of want to make it go away.
00:45:04
Speaker
But I do think that there are some people who genuinely have that worry for reasons that they come about honestly. And so I just wanted to get your thoughts on this. And of course, I also have thoughts on this as something I thought about a lot, but just to give you an anecdote. So when we were about to publish our paper, our first paper on the scenarios, the environmental research letters paper that came out in late 2020, that one of its headline results was basically that RCP.5 was very unrealistic.
00:45:31
Speaker
and in the context that have been heavily used by the scientific community. I had a meeting in my lab group right before we submitted that paper where someone asked, how concerned are you or should you be that this will be misused by the deniers? And I think that it's not a completely unfounded concern. So for example, our paper was cited by Donald Trump's
00:45:53
Speaker
those climate pamphlets that came out, you know, right before he left office, that caused a bruja and Noah, one of them cited our paper. And I believe it's the case that although it didn't cite our paper inaccurately, so it's sort of the thing that it said our paper said was correct, those pamphlets, you know, drew many conclusions that I, you know, deeply disagree with, some of which that I think did misrepresent the science.
00:46:12
Speaker
Okay, obviously, I still publish that paper and several others. So I have my own answer to this. But what do you say to somebody who asks you that and points out, you know, I think accurately that there are bad actors on the climate denial side that do sometimes seize on findings like ours to push their narrative? What would be your response to that?
00:46:34
Speaker
We're getting borderline up to the story behind proximal origins and the origins of COVID. We're going there next. I feel very strongly that we do not conduct research and present findings as a function of whose interests they serve or some political calculus who might use them, who don't use them. If Donald Trump's political appointees are accurately citing my work,
00:46:57
Speaker
I'm gonna be proud and think alright thank goodness because that's you know they're not citing misinformation or disinformation if my work is being used to counter someone who's politics i agree with but who's you know hyping them with rcp eight point five the problem is in my research is the person that's hyping.
00:47:13
Speaker
with RCP 8.5. So the more general issue, and I hear this from people in our community, like you shouldn't talk with Republicans, you should not interact with climate skeptics. I'm in the business of knowledge creation and communication of important policy issues. Of course I'm going to talk to people I disagree with. I try to do that every single day. Do I convince them? Rarely. But just the act of engaging with people
00:47:39
Speaker
who you disagree with for me is one important way to build trust. Have I gotten better over the decades in writing research that may challenge existing narratives in ways that is less apt to be co-opted? I hope so. But I don't use the fear of, if I say there's
00:47:56
Speaker
hurricanes haven't increased, I'm sure that's going to be seized upon by certain political interests, but it's right. My response is the people who are saying false things don't say false things and then you won't be corrected with accurate information. I don't have much time for
Engaging Across Political Divides
00:48:11
Speaker
that. A lot of the criticism, the association with deniers is a political strategy to try to marginalize or diminish someone else's work without having to challenge that work.
00:48:22
Speaker
It's kind of a success because if somebody could challenge my math or our scenario work, they'd probably do that. But if they're resorting to associating you with the right wing or Republicans, that speaks for itself.
00:48:33
Speaker
Here's my answer to that, which is largely aligned. First is, yes, absolutely. Scientists should report what we find or we'll lose trust. Right. And in this particular case, our point was so obvious. You know, I joked with colleagues in the economics department here that, you know, I went to school for over a decade, learned all this fancy math. And some of my most impactful papers have been basically saying, Hey, look, this line's higher than this line. Isn't that interesting?
00:49:01
Speaker
You know, it's so obvious that if we had buried it, it would have come out. And again, I think there's probably going to be a parallel to the COVID origins case, right? If we'd buried it, it would have come out. That would have been much worse for the scientific community than, you know, the truth that we reported. But also to your point about engaging, you know, if Trump had called me to talk to him and give him advice about climate, that'd be great. Right. To your point about, you know, who else would it be if not me?
00:49:27
Speaker
He didn't even talk to his own science advisor. Sure. I know that in that particular case, they had gone rogue somewhat. The only thing I'd add is that I do think there's somewhat of a distinction between good faith and bad faith actors. I very passionately engage with people on all sides of the spectrum and just to lay my cards on the table. I'm a politically moderate Canadian, so I'm no more a Democrat than I am a Republican, but I engage with both Democrats and Republicans. I think that if we're talking about
00:49:56
Speaker
changing all of society over the course of the better part of a century, there's no realistic path to doing that that does not involve engaging both sides of the aisle. So I passionately do that. But I do think that there's a difference between, and I don't think it's a left-right thing, for the most part, I do think there's a difference between people who are intentionally misrepresenting the science for some stealth advocacy in a, you could say, reason, right? People who are funded by fossil fuel companies to
00:50:25
Speaker
cast doubt on the science because that serves the fossil fuel company's interests. To me, that's different from somebody who is, say, a conservative who's concerned about government being too big and concerned about freedom and concerned about reactionary approaches to climate change that look like communism, which frankly is something I get concerned about sometimes. To me, those two people are very different. I think that the second person you absolutely engage with, that that's a critically important person to be in the conversation, I personally often don't
00:50:55
Speaker
Engage the first type and it's not about you know that per se that they're denying the science or they're not wanting to do you know climate mitigation or whatever it's more just that anybody who's not being honest about their own scientific process is is hard to have an engagement a real engagement with about the scientific process if that makes sense.
00:51:15
Speaker
Somebody who disagrees with me but is operating in good faith is somebody that I can learn from and they can learn from me and we can find the truth together. Somebody who's not operating in good faith, I do sometimes wonder if it's worth engaging with that person. In principle, that makes a lot of sense to me and I, of course, agree. In practice, I see this a lot, is that in the climate debate especially, it has become so polarized that there's an operating assumption by many people including scientists that if the other person disagrees with me, then they necessarily must be operating in bad faith.
00:51:45
Speaker
I hear this all the time, like, Roger Pelkey, he testified before Congress at the invitation of the Republicans. Therefore, I can dismiss all of his research because the GOP is a criminal party and needs to be wiped off the face of the earth.
00:51:59
Speaker
I try not to make motivations of why people believe things that they do and just choose to engage with them. Are there people who are out there operating in bad faith, promoting and hyping extreme weather? Probably, but I'll engage with them just as I would somebody who works for the fossil fuel industry who says climate change is a hoax because I'd like to hear what their views are and I'll tell them my views and they're convinced or they're not convinced.
00:52:25
Speaker
But in the process of having those interactions, maybe we learn a little bit more about each other and our thinking there. I tend to have a pretty open door policy to engaging with people. Everybody has their lines of people they won't engage with, but for me,
00:52:39
Speaker
If somebody disagrees with me, that's a much more interesting conversation than somebody who I agree 100% with. I haven't found that person yet, but it would not be that interesting. It's funny because some of your critics accuse you of being a conservative, and as somebody who's pretty much in the middle of the spectrum, I always find that really funny because when you and I disagree, I'm almost always on your right. I don't think Filgy's a conservative. You'll come around, Matt. You'll come around.
00:53:03
Speaker
So let's move on to, we're getting a little Rogany here, so give me a hand sign if you need to cut
COVID-19 Origins Debate
00:53:10
Speaker
it short. But let's get to COVID. Lots of interesting things to talk about. So you've been part of a heated public debate recently around, first of all, whether COVID-19 started in a lab. And just to be clear, as far as I understand, the lab leak theory is that it was an accident.
00:53:24
Speaker
that they were gain of function research, trying to see if it was possible to make viruses more infectious, not that it was a bioweapon. But one theory is that it came out of a lab in Wuhan. And then the other theory is that it came naturally from animals. And so there's a debate about that. And then there's a related debate that's gotten really hot recently about whether scientists, with the help of journalists and social media companies,
00:53:48
Speaker
possibly at the request of high-ranking US government officials, intentionally suppressed evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis during the first year or so of the pandemic before some major investigative journalists basically broke open the lab leak to the point where we couldn't ignore it.
00:54:05
Speaker
So those are those are the two debates so let me just ask you first on the first one on the origins of covid where do you think the pandemic started and why do you think that you know if you had to guess obviously we don't know for sure but what would be your best guess and why.
00:54:19
Speaker
So I think this is where we start with what's your operating hypothesis. And obviously it hasn't gone unnoticed since the early days of the pandemic that it started in a place and very close to where there were laboratory work going on on SARS-like viruses.
00:54:35
Speaker
If that's all you know and there's nothing else, then certainly the idea of a research-related incident has to be in play. Since that time, there has been an enormous amount of evidence and I do think there's some circumstantial evidence and then there's some other less circumstantial evidence that suggests that, yeah, we should be taking that seriously. On the other side, yes, there's a wet market and SARS-1 emerged in multiple markets and multiple locations almost simultaneously.
00:55:05
Speaker
That also has to be in play also. The thing that gets me, and I've written about this, is that we can construct a storyline that connects a research-related incident to the events we've observed.
00:55:18
Speaker
I have not seen anyone construct a storyline that can plausibly explain how a wildlife related outbreak started at the market because it involves having to have animals who haven't been found infected, transported a thousand miles across China, infecting no one along the way, and then all of a sudden creating a single outbreak at this market.
00:55:40
Speaker
It's possible it's less plausible to me so my operating hypothesis is that this was a research related incident until we get evidence proving otherwise and regardless of whether it was or was not a research related incident. The policy implications you know just even if you think there's a one percent or a point one percent chance that it was a research related incident.
00:55:59
Speaker
That by itself would be enough to say, all right, we need to have some serious discussions about so-called gain of function research, risky research with pathogens that's out there. The last thing I'll say is the amount of effort spent by virologists and government officials in covering up the possibility of a research-related incident is also extremely troubling, both in China and in the United States, that there are some profound science policy implications that come of this beyond implications for public health.
00:56:28
Speaker
Okay. So, you know, here in the free mind podcast, we can't reach out to people and ask for them for simultaneous comment. So be very careful to, especially if you mentioned specific people to mention, you know, delineate clearly, you know, what is the evidence in the public domain that you're describing and what's your interpretation of that evidence. So let's talk about the, the U S because I think the Chinese, the Chinese government suppressing evidence on COVID origins,
00:56:55
Speaker
is fairly uncontroversial, right? Even if you think it's a natural origin, I think people think that they did that. And why they would do that is so obvious as to not be worth discussing. So let's talk about the U.S. government and the science community. What is the evidence that you've seen that suggests that the officials within the U.S. government and leading virologists intentionally suppressed evidence about a possible lab leak?
00:57:22
Speaker
It's just one of the most incredible aspects of this whole situation is that we actually have the correspondence, the communication among US government officials, among the scientists in the early days of the pandemic, talking about both the possibility of a so-called lab leak versus natural origins and deciding together
00:57:46
Speaker
to craft a message that was not in fact what they believed. I mean, this has been widely reported. I've written on it. It culminated in a paper called Proximal Origins that said that no research-related incident is plausible and was used really for years to put down broader discussion.
00:58:05
Speaker
Normally in these situations, we have no idea what goes on backstage, so to speak, to use Steven Hillgartner's words, but we do in this case. And it's, I think, fairly incontrovertible that there was an organized effort to manage the discourse.
00:58:22
Speaker
And again, getting back to motivations, people have proposed why there would be these different motivations ranging from the fact that the US government allegedly has funded some of the work that went on in Wuhan that may be related to the research that could have led to a lab leak.
00:58:39
Speaker
to career interests of some of the scientists, to concerns about Donald Trump, to concerns about an international incident with China, to concerns about how research in virology might be more strongly regulated if this was a lab leak.
00:58:54
Speaker
It's a really interesting situation because we do have all of this evidence of a coverup that was put in place. We don't know exactly why, and I really think that if this is a play, we're in the first intermission. There's a lot more to come. There'll be more congressional hearings for sure. The bigger issue here is that it's perfectly appropriate for the US government, so Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins at NIH, to have questions about origins.
00:59:20
Speaker
But the way that we normally get scientific advice into high levels of government is through formal expert advisory bodies. Instead, what happened here is that a bespoke behind the scenes group was put together to craft a message outside the Federal Advisory Committee Act process, outside the National Academy of Sciences.
00:59:41
Speaker
If there's a rule book for how you get science into policy, every rule in that rule book was broken in this process. So it's troubling not just because of the substance of what we've learned went on behind the scenes, but the entire process was off track from the start. We don't want government officials calling up their buddies and saying, hey, let's do an assessment and put it together for whatever reason.
01:00:05
Speaker
and put it in the literature to help tamp down, I think is the quote, discussion of one particular outcome among many. So this is a deeply troubling... I think I've written this one of the most significant scientific scandals certainly of my lifetime and there's more to come out here, but it's not a great moment for science and policy.
01:00:25
Speaker
So a quick follow-up question as a fair-minded but more casual observer than you are. I just want to really specifically go through parts of the story you just told and ask you about the evidence for each one. It's a fact that this paper was published in Nature Medicine right in 2020 called The Proximal Origins of COVID-19.
01:00:45
Speaker
that said, you know, did have some hedging, right? Maybe evidence will change your minds, but did clearly state in one line that they didn't believe that the research origin or lab origin was possible. And so that's kind of fact number one. And fact number two is that it was definitely the case that journalists and scientists on Twitter and other kind of public forums for quite a long time after that, often citing that paper, suppressed discussion of lab league as a conspiracy theory. You know, that was that was anti-science, not grounded in science.
01:01:14
Speaker
Can I correct fact number one just quickly? Yes, please do. All right. So the proximal origins paper had no hedging about origins. It presented three theories for origin, two that were natural based, one that was lab based. It dismissed the lab base unequivocally and then said, well, we don't know which one of the two natural origins might be. Further evidence might push us in one direction or the other, but there was absolutely no hedging about the possibility of a lab leak.
01:01:39
Speaker
The folks on the other side of this debate argue that there's one sentence at the end where they leave the possibility open that new evidence will change their mind, but I take your point that the papers. That one sentence is not referring to a lab leak. That's in arbitrating between the two natural norms. The two natural norms. Okay, okay. That's a good clarification. Thank you. So facts one and two. So fact three, as I understand it, is based on
01:02:01
Speaker
leaked emails and Slack messages in particular from one of the virologist labs clearly suggested that the lead author of this paper himself thought that the lab origin was quite likely, certainly right before he published the paper and maybe even a month or two after he published the paper.
01:02:21
Speaker
Is that, am I correct in that saying that's fact number three? For fact number three, all of the authors of proximal origins, as well as others who participated in its drafting, who were not acknowledged or were not listed as authors, believed in various degrees that a research-related incident was possible. So it wasn't just the lead author who testified before Congress just last month and still said a research-related incident is plausible.
01:02:48
Speaker
So the problem is that through these emails and Slack messages that investigative reporters got, and were also obtained by the House Select Committee, we know that the team of authors believe something very different than what they published. And so that is, it should not be controversial at this point. Okay. So where I think it does get more circumstantial and correct me if I'm wrong.
01:03:10
Speaker
Okay, so fact number four, which is a fact, I believe, is that there was a meeting between the eventual authors of this paper and some top officials, including Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins and Jeremy Farrar, shortly before this paper was published. Okay, so that meeting is a fact.
01:03:32
Speaker
Is it correct that we don't know exactly what was said in that meeting nobody there's not been any public release of a video of that meeting or transcript of that meeting is that correct. We have the contemporaneous notes of one of the participants that was included in the emails we have the scientist discussing before and after that meeting and we have the slack messages that they shared during the meeting so we do have a pretty good accounting of.
01:03:58
Speaker
not everything, but much of what was discussed at that meeting. And again, this is also not controversial. That meeting was called to discuss the possibility of a research related origin of COVID-19.
01:04:10
Speaker
Okay. So am I correct in saying that the hypothesis that you and others, you know, including Mike Schellenberger and his, his outfit have put forward is that at this meeting, the idea was seated to write this paper, tamping down on the lab league hypothesis for one or more of these political reasons that you've described earlier, and that that directive probably came from some combination of high ranking officials like
01:04:39
Speaker
Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Jeremy Farrar, and possibly people inside the US government. Am I correct that that's the hypothesis? That's a hypothesis. It's not my hypothesis. Things are a little bit more nuanced than that. I mean, we have thanks to work from this loosely organized group called drastic
01:04:57
Speaker
We have the drafts of the proximal origin paper. We have the reviews. We see the changes that were made in it. And it's clear that Farrar and Fauci and Collins wanted to de-emphasize a research-related incident. But the first draft of the paper included that as a possibility.
01:05:16
Speaker
There was a request made by Jeremy Farrar at the time, head of welcome trust, big funder in public health, now chief scientists at WHO, who changed a sentence that allowed for the possibility of research related incident to rule it out.
01:05:32
Speaker
And then when it went to Nature Medicine, the authors made it even stronger in that direction based on their belief that it would be more likely to be published. So all along the way, there are these, again, very direct evidence of the paper allowing for the possibility of a research related incident to downplaying it and then to eliminating it. And I think, you know, there's another factor there that, you know, the lead author had a center proposal
01:05:59
Speaker
to the NAIAD, which was headed by Fauci that was apparently on his desk awaiting thumbs up or thumbs down approval for $9 million of funding. So I think there's a confluence of interests and motivations for why this paper morphed from a broader discussion of origins to one that was very narrowly focused on tamping down the lab leak. I don't think it's as simple as Anthony Fauci getting on the phone and saying, we got to get rid of this.
01:06:29
Speaker
But you can't rule out that it would be very embarrassing to the US government and probably penal to the research community if we learn that funding from NIH made its way to Wuhan and
01:06:43
Speaker
was associated in some way with the origins of this pandemic. I can clearly see why US government officials and scientists would prefer that a research-related origin not pan out in the end.
Misinformation and Public Trust in Science
01:06:57
Speaker
Specifically, there were some of the high-ranking officials that we mentioned. If US funding had gone to the Wuhan Lab, it would have crossed their desks as one of the concerns also, right? We know that funding made its way there.
01:07:10
Speaker
I mean, the US government, Congress just passed a law saying we're not going to do it anymore, both through DOD and NIH. So we know that the funding went there. What we don't know is what activities was it used for? What did those activities result in anything that was plausibly related to COVID-19?
01:07:26
Speaker
So just to tie this off, your hypothesis is basically that there was this call to try to understand the possibility of a research incident. The idea was formed to let's write a paper on what we know about the origins, which on its face is not an unreasonable thing to want to do. And then kind of maybe slowly over gradually over the course of writing and publishing and submitting and reviewing and rewriting that paper, that various pressures from various sources
01:07:53
Speaker
push the narrative away from lab leak, more so than both the evidence and the authors themselves, interpretations of the evidence suggested. Is that what you heard about this? I would take it out of the passive voice and say that the authors willingly decided to misrepresent what they thought and knew in the context of these pressures that were out there. From the outset, the fact that Jeremy Ferrar, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci were organizing and participating in this call, that itself was improper.
01:08:21
Speaker
You don't want the head of the Department of Defense calling up his buddies and saying, hey, what should we do about this situation in Niger? We have very well-established formal processes for eliciting expert advice so that it is balanced, so that we get the best available science, so that it is accountable and that it's public.
01:08:39
Speaker
And so the minute that they embarked on this bespoke process of writing a paper to influence the discussion of origins, this effort, even if they had done a better job and done a fair job, it was still an improper use of experts by government officials.
01:08:55
Speaker
So this isn't this isn't quite a steel man, but I think it's maybe irrelevant. It's relevant to both this case and to where I'm going next is that, you know, in some sense, it's easier. You know, I basically agree with you on the scientific integrity principles that you outlined, you know, whether or not your hypothesis about what happened is right or partly right or whatever. I agree with your your scientific principles outlined. And yet I think just from a from the perspective of acknowledging people's humanity, I think it is fair to
01:09:24
Speaker
transport ourselves back to February, March, 2020. There was this new scary thing that no one had seen before in their lifetimes, except for the three or four people on Earth who were around in 1918. And there was a sense that we had to urgently act to protect the public in various ways from this. And there was no precedent. And so you can imagine humans in that decision. And I think in hindsight, it's still fair to say that those decisions were the wrong decisions.
01:09:53
Speaker
It's easy to imagine humans who do believe in normal circumstances in these kinds of you know let's let's take the time to make a appropriately balanced panel kind of thing rushing with these kinds of things and there are other cases that are somewhat like this that also you know have not stood up well the test of time you know so far in the really really early stages the pandemic.
01:10:13
Speaker
There were government officials, I believe, saying that masks didn't prevent the spread of COVID. And it turned out that what they were really concerned about was people buying up all the masks and not having enough masks for first responders. And then, of course, that change to masks does help the spread of COVID and we should all be wearing masks. And that was at least partly right. I think that as far as I understand, there was a scientific debate about whether small children wearing masks made a difference. And someone who had small children during the pandemic, I can tell you that
01:10:42
Speaker
the way that they wore the mask was not super effective you know there are things right the protesting is another one right when there was a right wing protest in the michigan state capitol this was this you know
01:10:52
Speaker
horrible pandemic super spreader event. But then, you know, when it was Black Lives Matter, it was, you know, white coats for black lives. This is a great, important thing. Okay, so and I mentioned all these things, because I think it is fair to say that these moves by the scientific community and by, you know, the government, your government science apparatus, you know, to misrepresent the science for some, you know, public health or political reason.
01:11:17
Speaker
I think it's fairly well established that these things did happen. And I think it's fair to say that they had an effect on the partisanship of science around COVID, which has resulted in the US much more than, I believe, any other country, whether you get vaccinated has strongly correlated with what party you're in. And that has had a big measurable death effect on the Republicans. So the Republican voters did not have a higher excess death rate.
01:11:43
Speaker
than Democrats before the vaccines came out and a difference emerged after the vaccine, strongly suggesting that the difference in vaccination rates was basically killing a whole bunch of Republicans. So I guess two questions about this. One is, would you agree with my hypothesis that the well-established misrepresentations of science at various points in the pandemic by government and scientific community contributed to that partisan gap in trust?
01:12:12
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. You've put your finger on what is a much broader failure in the United States. It's not unique to the United States based on our research, but it is pretty rare. The United States to this date does not have a high level advisory body related to COVID-19. This is the sort of thing that you don't need a pandemic to put it together. The US has pandemic plans. Science advice is not prioritized in there at all.
01:12:38
Speaker
So, when there were questions like, are masks effective? Do kids need to stay out of school? Should we mandate masks for toddlers? What are the origins of COVID? We had no place to go. And so, of course, in those situations, you know, scientists will self-organize. You get Scott Atlas going on Fox News with his message. You have the Great Barrington Declaration. You have people trying to fill in the gap. And then you have, you know, there were various science advisory bodies at the state level. Every university had one. Sports leagues had one.
01:13:07
Speaker
And you had all of this different information that was out there. This is not to say that if the federal government does it, they're going to be right or always have the best information. But they are a touchstone, like we talk about the IPCC. And one of the most baffling things to me is, all right, so the Trump administration, they were kind of whack and did their thing. And he appointed political appointees to look at COVID.
01:13:27
Speaker
But when the Biden administration came in and there's questions about vaccine mandate for elderly people and other sorts of decisions, the US still does not have a high-level advisory body. So when Anthony Fauci, in the very early days of the pandemic, wants to get some information on origin
01:13:44
Speaker
Of course, it is perfectly appropriate for him to call up experts, talk with them on the phone, get a different set of views. But the minute that that exercise goes from, hey, I want to learn more to, hey, let's write a paper on this topic and rule out one thing and we'll win another. One of the most troubling episodes in all this is one month to the day after Proximal Origins came out in Nature Medicine, Anthony Fauci was at the White House at the podium and he was asked about Origins.
01:14:12
Speaker
And he said kind of cagely, yeah, there's this paper. I don't remember who it's by, but it's basically ruled out research-related incidents, so we can put that aside. No indication that he helped coordinate it, that he participated in it in the process that led to it. And it was just a little too clever for me.
01:14:28
Speaker
So, all of these questions, and it gets back to how do we build trust? We don't build trust by doing things quietly behind the scenes and organizing experts to deliver messages that may be friendly to certain political interests. And of course, that's one reason why COVID in many dimensions became politicized. And I think that politicization has led to a large number of deaths among Republicans who have lost trust in the public health apparatus of the country.
01:14:56
Speaker
Now, there's another side to that story too, which is that, you know, it's not just that Republicans were passive consumers of this information about, you know, misinformation. There also have been and continue to be forces within the Republican Party pushing not just, you know, questions that I think are fair to ask about, you know, when is it okay for the government to require a vaccine or to require masks or to require lockdowns, etc.
01:15:21
Speaker
but going beyond that to misrepresenting the science about the effectiveness of vaccines. So, for example, there is some evidence for a rare side effect of myocarditis in young men from getting the vaccine. And that has been pushed by a lot of people, not just on the right, but I think disproportionately on the right. But that has been pushed by some people to say that young men shouldn't get vaccines.
01:15:44
Speaker
And yet the evidence that vaccines prevent deaths on average in young men is very strong. And not only that, myocarditis is a more common, about twice as common side effect of getting COVID as it is of having the vaccine if you're a young man. So even if you're only worried about myocarditis, you would still want to get the vaccine. And so where I guess we're going with this is, you know, how can we acknowledge the fact that people are understandably upset about having some of their freedoms infringed on in ways that, varyingly, were supported by
01:16:14
Speaker
the science and sometimes were supported by misterizations of science and yet also you know be firm on the fact that the evidence is very clear that vaccine saves lives and i think i would go even further to say you know be firm in our criticism of politicians like i think ron de santis who themselves there's evidence that they privately you know have been vaccinated and so believe in vaccines and yet they're willing to
01:16:38
Speaker
you know, play up the anti-general anti-vaccine sentiment for what they perceive to be political gain. It seems like we also have to be critical, very critical, of those actors.
01:16:48
Speaker
in the context of the tragedy of the completely preventable deaths that they've caused, and Republicans in particular should be offended by this. I tweeted recently, I would love to see somebody on the Republican debate stage call out Republican politicians who are pushing anti-vaccine narratives for literally killing Republicans. Am I throwing the needle right there?
01:17:09
Speaker
There's no better example of this than Donald Trump standing at the bully pulpit in the White House telling people to drink bleach. But here's the problem is that I would love to have better politicians and I would love to have politicians that tell the truth and don't try to advance political causes even if it kills people. Donald Trump said, take bleach. And he also said, well, COVID might've come from a lab in China. One of those things is very, very wrong. And one of those things is plausible and could be right.
01:17:37
Speaker
The problem is that for both of those statements, people interpret them based on their politics. So people in the right said, well, both those things must be true. And people on the left said, both those things must be false. Having an expert advisory mechanism doesn't solve the problems of bad governance, but it gives us another place to go rather than politicians on the campaign trail or people like Donald Trump outright, you know, making things up and lying to get that information.
01:18:06
Speaker
making important policy decisions. We want to have the most reliable, best information available. We are never going to get that from politicians.
01:18:13
Speaker
And even if we did, the interpretation of that information will be colored by people's politics. So I do think it's absolutely essential that we have these expert advisory mechanisms in place well-established long before we need them so that people can choose to believe them or not, but we know how to make them more or less trustworthy. And we didn't even try in COVID. And so that's the big tragedy for me.
01:18:36
Speaker
So, last super quick question about trust and then I want to quickly get to trans and intersex women and women's sports and then wrap up. So, trust has taken a nosedive, trust in the scientific community, trust in universities, especially in the US among Republicans and independents. We've talked about contemporary instances that illustrate maybe why that's happened or how scientific communities contributed to that happening.
Rebuilding Trust in Science
01:18:58
Speaker
What's the way back? And here are some ideas that I've heard. One is, you know, individual scientists can be better at separating publicly our values from our facts. Two is, although it's okay for individual scientists,
01:19:14
Speaker
to advocate as long as they're transparent about their values and their facts. Institutions should never adopt, scientific institutions should never adopt political postures is another idea. And then a third idea is we need to somehow significantly increase the representation of conservatives and Republicans in the scientific community. What do you think about those three options? Have I missed any? And do you think that those three or some subset of them will fix the problem of trust?
01:19:43
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know that there's a fix. This is a pretty messy, sticky, complicated set of issues. I do think there's an element where we in the expert community and academia can do things better. And you've hinted at some of them there. One of them is that when
01:20:00
Speaker
normal people out in society look at academics, they look at scientists, they look at universities, they see institutions that look very different than their lived experiences. And that comes up in other kinds of diversity too, right? Right, absolutely. I mean, we work at a university that has the highest proportion of students from families in the top 1% of any public university in the country.
01:20:22
Speaker
It's an elite place, universities in general, research universities, not community colleges or normal universities. It's disproportionately populated by researchers and faculty who come from the political left. Even if people are being open and fairly representing their views,
01:20:42
Speaker
what normal people would hear is a whole bunch of people on the political left out there. In some of the research I've done, if you look at the 1950s, 1960s, universities used to be a much more ecumenical place when it comes to political diversity. It was still about three or four to one left to right on the faculty.
01:21:00
Speaker
Well, it depends if you look, if you look at like engineering and the sciences, it was much more balanced overall. And that's changed over time. And that kind of mirrors this educational divide in the United States.
01:21:14
Speaker
where people with more academic credentials tend to be on the left, they marry people on the left, they move to communities like Boulder and Austin. Universities, I think, have contributed to that. There's a lot of ways, it's a much longer discussion to think about how we would fix that, but if universities
01:21:32
Speaker
I'm a big fan that public university education should be like high school education. It should be free or near free. We should have a lot more vocational and trades sort of education in the university environment. And we should make universities... I'm not talking about the IVs, I'm talking about state universities.
01:21:52
Speaker
much better contributors to the economic development and health of the communities that they're in and the states that they're in. So that when people look at a university, they say, yeah, that place is doing something for me. Instead of looking at a university and saying, I don't know what that place does for me, but I do know the people in there don't talk like me and they don't share my values. So that's one thing. Another thing is we need to do a much better job of opening our doors to students
01:22:16
Speaker
from across the income spectrum. You're familiar with the recent work by Raj Chetty and others that shows that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to get into an elite university, massively so. Among the super elite, the upper middle class are actually the most biased against. Exactly. Yeah. And I would think that's probably to some degree at the R1 research universities have similar trends. If you take a look at some of Chetty's earlier work,
01:22:42
Speaker
There's a disproportionate representation of students whose families are in the top 10% or top 1% of the, of the income distribution. We're perpetuating a system where the elite, the economic elite benefit from universities and society. And if people in general don't see benefits from universities, they're not going to support them. They're going to lose, lose confidence in them. Last thing I'll say is a statistic. If you look at the number of people, adults in the U S economy who have terminal high school degrees, something like 60 million people, it's a massive number.
01:23:12
Speaker
And if you look at the number of PhDs, it's less than 5 million. So I think we need to do a better job of doing research, doing teaching, opening our doors, making universities much more open to the wants, needs, interests of the broader population. And we haven't done a particularly good job of that.
01:23:29
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with that. And I'd love to dig into it, but we probably don't have time. And I have another guest coming on later this season who's going to just talk about that because he's writing
Sports, Inclusivity, and Fairness
01:23:37
Speaker
about it. So last topic really quickly, I want to touch a little bit on your work on trans and intersex women and women's sports.
01:23:45
Speaker
And just by way of definitions, correct me if this is wrong, with intersex, we're talking about athletes like probably Castor Semenya, although I'm not sure if there's actually public evidence of this, but athletes who have some kind of intersex condition. So one example would be somebody with an X and a Y chromosome, but that has androgen insensitivity and so grows up, is born and grows up anatomically female, but with higher testosterone levels.
01:24:14
Speaker
which is the male sex hormone for anyone who doesn't know, higher testosterone levels than is typical in developmentally typical women. But importantly, I think, is not somebody who has done anything to change their body. The body that they have, the testosterone levels they have are what they were born with, what they develop naturally.
01:24:38
Speaker
So, there's athletes like that, Castro Semenya, probably being one of them, who is a South African middle-edition runner. And some people say that these athletes, when they are anatomically female and compete and have been women their whole lives and compete in women's sports, that some people say that they have an unfair advantage because of their testosterone levels. Other people say it's not fair to force them to have a medical intervention they don't need to compete. And so, that's one thing.
01:25:03
Speaker
related, but I think distinct question has to do with trans women and women's sports. So these are people who were born anatomically, biologically male, and transitioned at some point in their lives to being female.
01:25:19
Speaker
either socially or surgically or some combination of those. So there's some that have had what people call top surgery, but not bottom surgery on hormone supplements, et cetera. And there's also a controversy about whether those trans women should be competing in women's sport. And again, the issue is, does their history of anatomically male development, in many cases male puberty, give them an unfair advantage in sports? So how did you get interested in this topic, first of all?
01:25:47
Speaker
Because it's a bit different from some of your other stuff that we've been talking about. I mean, and I tell people it's the same stuff. It's science and scientific claims in a very heated political context where we have to make policy decisions. I got into it about 15 years ago. I was teaching science and technology studies to graduate students as part of our graduate certificate program. And I realized that some of our students were coming in, shocker, I know, kind of jaded.
01:26:12
Speaker
And they'd been hearing about climate change all their life. And a lot of the issues that we typically talk about, they had all the answers. They didn't want to read anymore. So I said, all right, I got to find a topic that is new and fresh that really exposes the challenges of using and incorporating science in policy and in very politicized context. And in 2009, in Berlin, Caster Semenya burst on the scene. And at the same time, there was a runner in South Africa, Oscar Pistorius, who ran on cheetah blades.
01:26:41
Speaker
And I said, aha, here's a couple of examples that I can bring into the classroom. So I started teaching the Simenia case as a question of sex and gender regulation in sport and Pistorius as the technological augmentation or modification of the human body and the ethics and the science related to that. And as you know, if you're going to teach something, you got to learn something about it. And so I started incorporating my research and by 2015, 2016, I was writing peer reviewed articles on it.
01:27:11
Speaker
And then by 2019, I was invited to be an expert witness forecaster, Semenya, in her case, based on some of the research we did. And one thing led to another, and I've been working pretty heavily on this issue for more than a decade now.
01:27:26
Speaker
So really quickly and feel free to push back if this is actually not a simple question. In your opinion, should intersex women and trans women be allowed to compete in women's sports? If not, why not? And if so, are there any conditions that they should have to satisfy or not?
01:27:45
Speaker
So one thing is the terminology intersects is kind of come and gone. And the language now is variations of sexual development, VSDs. And the language has changed, evolved as time has gone by. I think that the Semenya case is actually ridiculously simple. A woman was born female, identified as female, raised female, intersport as a female, has been female continuously all her life.
01:28:08
Speaker
then she's a female. That's actually the definition of a female. If sport wants to go out and start regulating unfair advantages that one male might have over another male or one female has over another female, well, guess what? That's a can of worms.
01:28:22
Speaker
because sport is all about identifying. So for that one, I think it's super simple and I think nobody needs to be looking at anybody's chromosomes or administering sex tests. If they've been a woman all their life, they're a woman. If they've been a man all their life, they're a man. That one's easy. Politically and procedurally, it's not so easy, but that's my view on that. If somebody changes categories from male to female, female to male, of course it is perfectly reasonable to think that there might be regulatory implications for classification.
01:28:50
Speaker
We have men's and women's sports categories for a reason. But the thing to remember is that when we regulate sports categories, we're not regulating people. We're regulating the notion of an unfair advantage. And here's where it gets complicated. What's an unfair advantage in judo is probably different than table tennis and it's probably different than archery. And so one thing we need to do is to define what is an unfair advantage. How do we know it when we see it? How do we measure it? And is it possible to mitigate it?
01:29:20
Speaker
And so mitigation might involve things like testosterone suppression. But then you are regulating people, are you not? You're regulating the advantage, right? So we do this, here's an example. So go back to Oscar Pistorius and an athlete who runs on cheetah blades. Legally and procedurally, they're not prohibited from participating in the Olympics, but you don't want somebody to show up who's seven foot six with cheetah blades that are four feet long and can run the hundred meters in eight and a half seconds.
01:29:46
Speaker
So we have to say, all right, well, what is an unfair advantage that might be given by this technology? And can we design cheetah blades so that they're fair? And the answer is yes. And so it's the same thing. Australia, for example, their elite sports, they evaluate trans women on a case by case basis. They give them athletic tests, they measure their size, their strength,
01:30:09
Speaker
They come up with a case by case example, and some women are judged, yes, you can participate. In one case that recently came down, a second division Australian basketball player was told she couldn't be eligible because she had an unfair advantage over others.
01:30:24
Speaker
I mean, the other thing for people to understand is that the number of trans athletes that are out there is ridiculously small. There have been 70,000 Olympians since 2000 and two have been trans women. And so if people are concerned about unfair advantages in sport,
01:30:41
Speaker
the best estimates of the prevalence of doping in sport are between 30% and 60%. You have tens of thousands of dopers and two trans athletes. With Spencer Harris and Scott Jedlica, we have a paper coming out on US high school sports and their regulation of trans athletes. I really feel that the focus on trans women athletes
01:31:02
Speaker
is much more part of a larger cultural movement against LGBTQ people in society, and an effort to stir up a political wedge for electoral advantage. I will note in the 2022 US elections,
01:31:16
Speaker
in the exit polls, trans athletes in sports came near the bottom for Republican voters. So- As a concern, you mean? As a concern, compared to things like the economy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we'll see if this issue has political momentum. I am sure that there will be legal cases fought over this and it'll be settled in the courts and probably not soon.
01:31:39
Speaker
So I
Navigating Controversial Research
01:31:40
Speaker
think a nuanced approach to trans women eligibility, sport by sport, individual by individual, is always going to make the most sense. It's not red meat for partisans where anything goes, declare your gender on race day, that's never going to work, and ban all trans women, that's never going to work either. So it's another example of pragmatic, thoughtful,
01:32:03
Speaker
policy that incorporates science is often going to be nuanced, it's going to be case by case, and it probably is not going to feed this person or that person's political instincts. It's just more complicated than that.
01:32:15
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for sharing that very, very interesting nuance perspective. Okay, so just to wrap up a couple of quick questions to tie it all together. So one of the things I think really interesting about you and I can only think of a couple other people that I would say this about is that you engage in controversial topics in such a way that you frequently get vitriol from both sides, right? So there are, you know, strong progressive partisans that
01:32:39
Speaker
don't like some of the stuff you write about climate and COVID-19. There are some strong conservative partisans that don't like some of the stuff you write about women's sports, for example.
01:32:49
Speaker
And I think that there are probably a lot of young scientists who follow you, who on the one hand admire your courage of convictions, whether they agree with you or not, but probably also wonder, how much abuse does he get? And how does it affect his day-to-day life? And so what would be your answer? My answer is, I mean, we don't teach this particularly well in the scientific community because we say, engage in science communication, go out, have impact.
01:33:18
Speaker
And the response is, well, what do you think impact looks like? You think impact means that people are going to send you roses and say, oh, that was a brilliant idea. We're going to put it into policy and thank you. When you engage in important issues, by definition, they're almost always political and that means there are winners and losers. And so for me, nobody likes vitriol or being attacked, of course not. But at the same time, if your work is influential and impactful as we want it to be,
01:33:48
Speaker
Guess what? That's going to happen. It's much preferable as a policy scholar to being completely ignored. It means that people are taking your ideas seriously and they're afraid of them for whatever reason. One day I'll disappear and nobody will see me anymore, but if I'm going to be doing this sort of thing where I'm engaging in important topics, producing science and participating in policy, then I'm all in. That means sometimes you have to take some criticism.
01:34:16
Speaker
but that's okay. I just mentioned, I just testified about the US Senate. I got some criticisms. I was invited by Republicans. If I get invited by Democrats, Republicans, Bernie Sanders, I'm going to go. Oh yeah, for sure. I would too.
01:34:28
Speaker
So it just goes with the territory and it doesn't bother me too terribly much. I got tenure in my fifties. I'll be okay. I do worry about younger scholars who have career implications. We don't teach the consequences of effective science communication particularly well, because in general, people try to seek
01:34:47
Speaker
shelter with their tribe and there's protection there, but that lends itself to some of the tribalism that we see out there. And we should have a lot of freedom to call things like we see them. So one last question, digging into this a little bit and I'll just preface it to say that I agree with you at the main point. In fact, I've told my students, you know, almost exactly the same thing that, you know, if you want to do paradigm shifting research, then you have to be ready to break somebody's paradigm. That person's probably going to be powerful and not happy with you.
01:35:14
Speaker
And so you have to be willing to take heat if you're going to do any anything that's influential. But I also think that there's a difference between heat of just, you know, people who are respected or not, or just anybody loudly, vehemently, aggressively disagreeing with you and, you know, people coming after your job or issuing you death threats. And I do think that if you engage in some of these controversial topics, it is reasonable to expect that that one or both of those things will happen.
01:35:44
Speaker
And so the best I can think of is just to tell students, like, decide what your risk tolerance is and go in with your eyes open and sort of know that, you know, the more the mud creates a filter, the easier it might be to have an impact if you're kind of willing to slog through it. You know, I don't think I can in good conscience tell somebody that, you know, you have to be, you have to have the Constitution just log through it or not.
01:36:09
Speaker
What advice would you give to young scientists who are thinking about whether or not they should engage in controversial topics and also how to engage? Are there ways to engage that reduce the amount of vitriol without tempering the effect? I mean, I think I tell students that if you want to engage in policy issues, political issues, number one, you need to be it helps to be have a disposition of optimism because change is hard and there are little effects and you will generate a lot of opposition.
01:36:38
Speaker
The other is that politics ain't beanbag. People don't always play fair. My experience is that if you do good work, if it's good enough, people will shy away from arguing with you about your work and will try to come after you. Otherwise, it's a well-told story. I was investigated by Congress.
01:36:57
Speaker
campaign to have me fired from 538, Center for American Progress. Spent a decade coming after me. None of that was fun. None of it was enjoyable. None of it was fair by the rules of the debate. But- Because it runs. Yeah. And so for me, where I am today, if you say, oh, you can have a time machine and you can go back to 2015,
01:37:17
Speaker
I'd be like, hell no. I do not want to do that again. But in 2015, if you say, well, this is where you'll be in 2023, I would have said, all right, I'm going to stick with it. That's what I did. So there's no way around it. I mean, you look at anyone, New York Times columnist, member of Congress, Anthony Fauci.
01:37:36
Speaker
Anyone who's in a position of influence and who works in the realm of ideas is going to attract positive and negative replies. I can't think of an exception to that. I mean, look at Nate Silver. People love him or hate him. I'm kind of a B-list public intellectual and I've seen that, but it's also, I have to say it's a position of immense privilege.
01:37:59
Speaker
And I find myself in situations sometimes where I just can't believe that I have the opportunity to talk to the people I'm talking to. And they listen, they may not agree, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. So it's not for everybody, for sure. And it's not all sunshines and puppies, but this is how the business of politics gets done. And we have really important roles to play in it. And I just wish we had an opportunity to train future experts better in what to expect.
01:38:27
Speaker
when they come into this world. Because I do know some people who have been scandalized, they've become radicalized by their experiences when they didn't expect what was going to happen. And that's unfortunate because it's like clockwork. We know what's going to happen when your ideas have impact and influence. And so we should prepare the next generation for that.
01:38:49
Speaker
Well, that's a great note to end on.
Conclusion and Future Directions
01:38:51
Speaker
You and I should build that training program here at the University of Colorado. Amen. Roger Billie Jr., thanks so much for being on the Free Mind podcast, and we'll see you on the other side. Thanks, Matt.
01:39:02
Speaker
The Free Mind podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. You can email us feedback at freemind at colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu slash center slash Benson. You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube accounts are all at Benson Center. Our Instagram is at The Benson Center and the Facebook is at Bruce D. Benson Center.
01:39:59
Speaker
Thank you.