Difference between revisions of "19: Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC/lang-it"

'''Eric:''' What I'd like to do is to try to be the foil for you that I don't think anybody else can be, because I was tracking the story very early. And by the way, when I originally tried to get you help and allies, I think almost the only person who could get what was happening at Evergreen State was our mutual friend, Sam Harris, who was willing to amplify and retweet this, because it was so confusing that most of the rest of the world had just never seen these kinds of arguments. And now it's much more common for people to be aware of these problems. But when it started happening, we didn't even have any framework for how to think about these things.  

'''Bret:''' Yeah, and in fact, Sam, I remember even the content of his tweet where he entered this discussion, where he suggested that what was necessary was a deprogramming for these people. And from living inside of this very confusing scenario, to hear a message of reason from the outside, that it was visible how insane this was, meant a lot to me. It really, it changed things. It was like a reality check.

(00:18:00)

'''Eric:''' Yep. Sam's a real hero in that regard. It's just amazing that he got there early and he got there correct. And, you know, more power to him.  

'''Bret:''' Yep.  

'''Eric:''' Okay. As you know, I was not happy about you being at Evergreen State College, long before this problem was occurring. I viewed you as sort of retreating into this very obscure college and using the undergraduates as if they were graduate students, teaching very advanced concepts, and running kind of a weird Harvard-style program with very adventurous material, with no recognition that this kind of unusual educational environment was even occurring. Fair? Unfair?

'''Bret:''' Well, it's mostly fair. It was not really an appropriate place. I don't regret it. I think for the last year or two, Heather and I were living on borrowed time, that this could have come for us in a worse way, and it could've come for us at any moment. But the thing about the job I had was that it was the upside of a crazy experiment in education. The founders of the college had broken every rule of a normal university, and half of what they did in breaking it was crazy, and half of what they did was brilliant. Nobody ever bothered to separate the two from the prototype, and, you know, fix the broken part. Didn't happen. But, the administrators had no power, and very little knowledge about what was going on in the classroom, which meant that I could create a learning environment that worked both from the point of view of students and worked from the point of view of me in my objectives to keep advancing a research program that frankly I would have had no way to keep on at a normal college. I would have been so burdened by teaching that I couldn't have combined the two things. So anyway, I do think one has to figure out how to make their way in the world financially. One has to figure out where to raise their kids. And from many perspectives, as much of a mismatch as Evergreen was for me in some ways, in some other ways, it was not a bad place to be parked. It gave me—I was anonymous from the point of the world and I could make progress on biology. So I have fewer regrets than I might.