SIO179: Phil Torres on X-Risks and Pinker's Sloppy Scholarship

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 179, I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and joining me today will be Phil Torres, you may remember him if you've been listening to the show, I think back during the Atheistically Speaking days, toward the end of that was when I had Phil on, Phil has written a couple books, he studies global catastrophic risks, so he's all about which ways humans are going to end up dead, basically, or maybe which ways the planet will be fundamentally altered, or, Just anything catastrophic, anything extreme, anything existential, any of those sort of problems. So, you know, AI, global warming.

Super volcanoes, all kinds of fun stuff, disease, you know, the classics, fun topics, we talked mainly about that last time, so feel free to check that out, but this time, it's been long enough, we may rehash some of that territory, but also, he's recently been involved in a little bit of a back-and-forth because he did some proofreading of a chapter of Steven Pinker's latest book that dealt with existential risk, AI threat, some other stuff like that, and he found what he views, what Phil views as some poor scholarship, wrote an article about it, wrote a long, long article, and then wrote like a shorter version that got picked up by Salon and went somewhat viral.

Eye roll. So that'll be the second half of this show. If you're just looking for that part, go about halfway through, we get to that topic. But first we have plenty to talk about.

0:02:00 Thomas: I mean, after all, the guy studies global catastrophic risks and we elected one president since then. So there's a lot to talk about. Alright, with that said, let’s get on over to the interview.

0:02:20 Thomas: Join me back on the show after what has been too much time, Phil Torres, how you doing, sir?

0:02:27 Phil: The show, um.

0:02:28 Thomas: Now, the world hasn't ended since we last spoke, so does that mean your entire career is bogus? Is that... I sky to fall, yeah.

0:02:36 Phil: The short answer is yes. Um. No, I mean, you know, fortunately, uh, yeah, the the apocalypse hasn't yet occurred, but you know, we're kind of sleepwalking a bit closer to the precipice, uh, you know, the Bulletin the Atomic Scientist Doomsday Clock remains at, uh, two minutes before midnight, night, or doom. So that's, you know, pretty ominous, uh, sign.

0:03:03 Thomas: Yeah, You, we got a little, a minor feud to talk, talking about, we've got, of course, your your work that you've done over the years, your newest book, Morality, Foresight and Human Flourishing, uh, but you know, on the on the topic you bring up, that Doomsday Clock, that used to be, I'm not an expert on this or by any means, but like, I feel like that used to mainly be like, oh, nuclear winter, you know, that's, we're all gonna, the risk that we all nuke each other, right? And nowadays, I feel like where does that rank? Like nuclear war, to me, I don't know, I feel like is there a certain point where climate change, we get so bad on climate change and not doing anything about it, that that kind of robs you of the opportunity for the robot apocalypse, you know?

0:03:03 Phil: Uh-huh. Yeah.

0:03:43 Thomas: At what point does climate change just kind of make your work a little less interesting where you're like, oh no, there could be robot wars. There could be this, there Could be famine. There could Be a super volcano. And then it's like, no, no. It's just climate change. Like that's gonna get us.

0:03:55 Phil: Um, well, I I think all of those risks are pretty, um, significant, you know, it's, maybe it's helpful to distinguish between the existing risk and the emerging risks, so you know, AI would would, uh, fall into the latter category, um, but climate change, um, it's actually kind of interesting to juxtapose it with, uh, like nuclear conflict. You know, initially the big concerns, the sort of apocalyptic worries had to do with radioactive fallout. And then it was kind of in the 1980s, there was, you know, a number of computer models that were, that attempted to figure out what might happen if there was a nuclear bomb dropped on a city, and the result was a huge conflagration or a firestorm that, you, you know, was hot enough to launch all sorts of soot into the stratosphere, which is above the weather.

0:04:47 Phil: So it ends up getting lodged in there and, you know, diffuses around the whole world and then could block out incoming solar radiation, which would cause agricultural failures. So like that event is kind of a, um, you know, it could unfold somewhat rapidly, whereas climate change is this like slow motion catastrophe. We're sort of in the midst of it, but already, of course, I mean, anybody who reads the news understands at this point that it's connected to the extraordinary heat waves in Australia right now, yeah,

0:05:08 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, half, you Know, half our country is frozen to death right now. We got that going on too.

0:05:29 Phil: The unstable polar vortex. You know, there's even a study out from, I think, 2015 that linked climate change in a very plausible manner with the Syrian civil war that started in 2011 and which also gave rise to ISIS. We're already seeing the effects, but because this is a slow-motion, multi-decadal kind of phenomenon, by 2100, you'll really see some really profound alterations to conditions on Earth, um, but I think all of these threats are, you are a big deal, and certainly I mean, one of the things I worry most about with respect to climate change is its property as a threat multiplier.

0:05:46 Thomas: Yeah. Right.

0:06:17 Phil: So I, I think, I, I mean, the term that I've used is like a context risk risk, because it's it sort of frames our entire existential predicament on Earth, and I think just kind of makes everything worse. It's a little bit harder to, uh, you know, when, when there's social upheaval and political, um, instability, it's going to be harder to properly regulate, um, you know, synthetic biology, uh, design, um, safe AI systems. You know, so climate change is, I think, I have written before that it should be perhaps, um, the number one priority, and that's, it's not because I think that it's going to cause human extinction. I think it's unlikely, although entirely possible, but I think it's just going to exacerbate everything.

0:07:00 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, that's encouraging that you think it might not cause human extinction. I'm worried that, you know, again, not my area of expertise, but my worry, and I'd be very grateful if you could make me worry less about this, is just the snowball effect of it. Yeah, the snowball affect of it. Like, you Know, the, because this is, I don't know if you know this about me, probably not, but yeah, I grew up in a Fox News household. I actually grew up a conservative. So over the course of my life, it took a while to recognize, oh, wait, of course. I would believe what scientists say over Fox News on climate change, took a number of years.

But at first, I remember kind of coming out of that process, and one phase of it, for me anyway, like the different stages of grief or whatever, one phase was like, well, whatever, it'll get a little warmer. Like, who cares? You know, yeah, okay, some areas will be, we won't be able to live there. They'll flood or something, but no big deal.

And then, you know, I saw a number, you know, who knows, a documentary, a Vice News segment, whatever it would be, where it's like, Like, no, it snowballs into like all these things. You know, if there's less ice reflecting the sun, then this happens.

0:07:16 Phil: It's unlikely. But go ahead.

0:08:04 Thomas: If there's the, you know, the, if the, the reefs are dying in the ocean, then that can't contain as much. And it, and it could literally snowball into like a, our atmosphere is Mars, you know, like the great onion article said, uh, Mars, I that, or Mars lack of atmosphere shows it was, yeah, it was once ruled by Republicans or something like that, you know?

0:08:19 Phil: I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah,

0:08:24 Thomas: And So Like how How big of a worry is that? I mean, it's obviously it's still horrible if there's all kinds of casualties and there's all kinds of displaced people, that's going to be awful, but like it's still, I guess, a different category thing if it's complete human extinction versus we're, you know, we'll make massive adjustments to how we live. Yeah.

0:08:24 Phil: Yeah, yeah. That's great.

0:08:44 Phil: Yeah. Well, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a couple of years ago, so one of their big reports described climate change as severe, pervasive. That is the effect, severe, pervasive, and more or less irreversible. So you're totally right that the repercussions of warming average global surface temperatures, they're going to percolate into every domain. You know, they're going to have consequences in just a wide variety and a myriad of different ways. I already mentioned like terrorism and, you know, war. Right now, you Know, sort of the the populist movement in the West are being fueled, at least in part by migrations.

0:09:36 Phil: You know, the migration out of Syria was described as the biggest such event since World War II. And so already we're having trouble dealing with, this sort of movement of people in the world. Just imagine when there are a billion people that need to find a new home because, you know, a lot of people live by the ocean, and sea levels are going to rise because of melting glaciers and also because of thermal expansion. As the ocean gets warmer, it expands. So that also causes the sea levels to rise.

0:09:57 Thomas: Right.

0:10:13 Phil: So, yeah, it's extremely, extremely worrisome. And I certainly don't mean to give you a sense that just because, we just because I think there's a lower probability of human extinction, that that means things are going to be fine.

0:10:30 Thomas: No, yeah.

0:10:31 Phil: You know, if civilization collapses, that's bad. That's going to, you know, that's going to cause a lot of human suffering. And, yeah, there are questions. I mean, you mentioned Mars and, you know, Carl Sagan was fond of bringing up the example of Venus, which seems to have undergone a greenhouse warming effect at some point in its history that was driven not by carbon dioxide, but by water vapor, which is also which is a very potent greenhouse gas. And at this point, I can't remember exactly, but, you know, surface temperatures on Venus, because of its own global warming process, are something like 800 degrees Fahrenheit. So, you know, Sagan and some others have judiciously speculated that, you know, perhaps Earth is, you know, it's not impossible that Earth ends up being, you know, this unlivable cauldron like

0:10:31 Thomas: That's not what I Yeah, yeah.

0:11:22 Thomas: Right.

0:11:22 Phil: Venus. And indeed, there are super complex feedback mechanisms. You were mentioning, you know, ice, which reflects light back into space. So the amount of light that's reflected back into space is called the albedo. So right now, there is a positive feedback effect, which we're gesturing at as the ice and snow melts, then, you know, visible light can pass right through carbon dioxide, you know, so light from the sun passes through the atmosphere, through all the carbon dioxide there. It's absorbed by the earth in regions without snow or ice, and then it's re-radiated out as infrared light. And it's the infrared light that can't get past the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

0:12:08 Phil: So you want to keep the ice and snow there, because what it's doing is reflecting the visible light, which then passes right back through the atmosphere into space and thus not warming the earth anymore. So, um, yeah, and there, you know, obviously there's like a huge amount of methane that's trapped in permafrost and, uh, you know. Down in regions of Antarctica, and methane is way more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.

0:12:29 Thomas: Yeah. It's it's just amazing you keep I keep rooting for one of these things to go the other way, like I don't know if this is just bad luck or what, but it's like every single thing you think, oh yeah, and then there's this gas trapped in the eyes, oh, is it a good gas that like cools the plant? Nope, sorry, it's the opposite.

0:12:35 Phil: Yeah. Yeah. Right.

0:12:49 Thomas: Every single thing where it's like, oh yeah, well this will happen, and what's the consequence, will it, you know, will it bounce back? Maybe it will cool. Nope, it'll warm the planet even more. See, it's, it feels, it feels unlucky. Is there, could there be something, is there anything where, like, any process that goes the other way, where as the planet warms, there's something, something's triggered, and it might have an offsetting effect, or do they all just coincidentally go in the direction of more warming? Yeah.

0:12:50 Phil: Right, yeah.

0:13:16 Phil: No, so there are some possible negative feedback effects. So this would include, some of these ideas are just a little bit dusty, a little mental dust on them.

0:13:26 Thomas: I am really putting you on the spot, and this is not anything that I prepped you for, right?

0:13:28 Phil: No no, it's fine. So one of the possibilities is that as a result of human activity, there is an increase in cloud cover over the planet. So that also, because clouds tend to be white, that they're also going to reflect a certain amount of incoming sunlight right back into space without warming up the planet, so that's one possibility. Reforestation, I mean, if you have a really carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, that is actually going to be good for plants because that's what they breathe, you know?

0:13:43 Thomas: Right Yeah. Yeah.

0:14:02 Phil: So, um, so it's possible.

0:14:03 Thomas: Just as long as we don't get any more of those giant bugs that used to exist at that, whatever stage of the earth that was. I don't like that stage.

0:14:05 Phil: Oh yeah. Like three foot long dragonflies and stuff like that. Yeah. Well, was a report, um, flooding, after I think a hurricane hit, uh, North Carolina in the past year. Um, and there there were reports of, of giant mosquitoes. This is something for listeners to look up online. Um, cause again, I'm not remembering the exact details, but there were apparently this particular species of a quite large mosquito that was terrorizing the poor folks down in that, in that region.

0:14:12 Thomas: Yeah. No, no thanks. Sorry.

0:14:41 Thomas: Yeah, you know, if I'm remembering my science right, I think that was when the atmosphere was way more oxygen, like there's more oxygen than there was now. So bugs were able to, because they don't have lungs or whatever, they were able to, I feel like, you're right. Safe from the giant bugs we'll just all be, you know, roasting and uh maybe wearing loincloths. I'm gonna get into the loincloth business, I think that's a good, I'm going to invest in loinclough futures and then see, uh, see if it pays off. But uh, you know, if I'm remembering right, last we talked, I don't think I don't think Trump had been elected last we talked. Um, I imagine

0:14:42 Phil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's sounds

0:15:16 Thomas: I could be wrong, yeah, it was sometime in 2016, but I imagine that your job, your area has changed a little bit in these past few years. Um, can you talk about that? I know climate change is going to be a big one because that's definitely the Paris Climate Accords and all that, there's definitely ways that Trump is screwing us over there, but what are, are there any other ways that maybe, you know, I might not occur to the average listener, that that, that risks in your mind and your personal doomsday clock have gone up in the last couple years?

0:15:16 Phil: Right.

0:15:47 Phil: Like to joke sometimes that, um, The field, the sort of nascent but burgeoning new field that studies global catastrophic risks is a growth field, and there's a kind of job security moving forward because these issues –

0:16:01 Thomas: Until the ultimate insecurity which is nobody has a job, it's like job security, job security, earth ends, yeah

0:16:07 Phil: Yeah, right, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, unless there's an existential catastrophe or, you know, civilizational collapse or something of the sort, we may have, you know, there's plenty to do, let's say. So I think Trump being elected was a bit horrifying for many people who studied these issues. You know, the bulletin's Doomsday Clock went from three minutes to two and a half minutes and then to two minutes. And the initial movement forward was a result specifically of – so I guess this would have been in 2017, shortly after Trump was elected, January 2017.

0:16:55 Phil: And the clock ticked forwards a bit specifically as a result of his election and his, as they put it, his reckless rhetoric surrounding nuclear weapons and his climate denialist statements about climate change being a Chinese hoax.

0:17:08 Thomas: Lest we forget he started tweeting back and forth with, back and forth avec, Kim Jong Un. I mean, I, it's, we can't keep up with the news cycle, but I, I mean, I just realized that happened. I mean. Wow.

0:17:20 Phil: Yeah, it's really stunning. It makes me think immediately of some situations involving Richard Nixon. Nixon, he was known to be a heavy drinker. And apparently there were times when, you know, he'd be drunk at night and he would just, you know, exclaim something like, why don't we just, why do we just launch the nukes? And I believe Some of his advisors even got in touch with the relevant parties and said, if they ever get an order from Nixon to launch a nuclear strike, that those individuals should get, should, uh, first, um, talk to the advisors about it.

So anyways, there was some kind of, like, it was a dangerous situation. I imagine Trump, uh, giving his, given his, uh, the extent to which he's an impetuous, uh, puerile child, you know, man child, um, I, I worry that there are moments when he, you know, he, this sort of is a comment that's gotten a lot of attention recently, uh, he mentioned that the country will not, uh, be become unified unless there's some kind of major event and Indeed, oftentimes when, you know, there's something called diversionary war, which is a type of war that is aimed to sort of save, uh, someone's political

0:17:42 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, my God.

0:18:40 Phil: You know leaders Uh, don't know I don' t know that reference

0:18:40 Thomas: You're talking about a wag the dog scenario. And Wasn't that the book that or the movie? Oh, well, It's a, I believe that's what it was. It was a movie or might have, might have been a book first. But it's where, haven't, honestly, I haven't even seen it. I just know the reference where the president, you know, declares a bogus war to to Save his reputation. And then also, I mean, I'm reminded too, after Yeah.

0:18:46 Phil: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. To distract the population.

0:19:03 Thomas: Yeah. I mean, after 9/11 Frigging Bush, George W. Bush's approval rating was the highest. Yeah, that's one of those trivia facts, he has both the highest ever and lowest ever approval rating, uh, since, since they've measured it, um, but Isn't that amazing

0:19:03 Phil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah, and it's also the order matters here, right? If it was really low and then it became, became really high, but I think it was the other way around.

0:19:17 Thomas: Yeah. It was the other way. Yeah, yeah.

0:19:28 Phil: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, Trump is super worrisome. The Bulletin, the other thing they mentioned is, maybe this was the year before Trump was elected, that the two bright spots, as they put it, in a world that is otherwise replete with threats and risks to human prosperity, those two Two bright spots are the Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. They said those are the two reasons for future logical optimism.

0:19:29 Thomas: Is

0:20:06 Phil: Of course, Trump has pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and he believes that the Iran nuclear was the worst deal ever signed. Of course, he's also just recently announced, that Pompeo has announced, that they're going, going to withdraw from the INF Treaty, which has been, you know, kind of a mainstay of, you know—it had a stabilizing effect during the Cold War. And as I—I haven't actually read articles, because this is—this is breaking news. But I— I do remember seeing some headlines this morning about how Russia is now going to start manufacturing some new nuclear weapons, since we announced that we're withdrawing, so that's, it's a major leaps backwards, uh, totally avoidable, and I suspect it's just stupidity, you know, it's utter stupidity. I don't think there's any kinder way to put it.

0:21:06 Thomas: Uh, is there, like, a pet, uh, apocalypse scenario of yours that, I, because I'm curious, we might have talked about this a bit, you know, two or three years ago in the last talk, but even if we did, uh, it's been a while, but what, what got you thinking about this? I mean, was there a scenario where, like, oh my gosh, the world can end, and then you kind of were like, oh, what's some other ways the world can enter, or, or how did you, how did you start getting into this field? How did you become interested in this?

0:21:27 Phil: Yeah. For For whatever reason, when you said pets initially, I thought you were, we're going to maybe bring up, like, a therapy dog you know, to help one deal with the bad news.

0:21:37 Thomas: Yeah. Like you need just to calm you down. Yeah. It's a coping

0:21:42 Phil: Um, Yeah, it's not a bad idea. Um, uh, well, I mean, I grew up in a household, uh, where, um, I grew up in a community that sort of emphasized, um, eschatological issues, end of the world type issues, from a particular Christian religious perspective.

0:21:42 Thomas: Mechanism. Yeah.

0:22:01 Thomas: Hmm.

0:22:02 Phil: Um, in particular a perspective called dispensationalism, uh, that's a sort of, like, framework for understanding, um, you know, cosmic history, and it's the interpretation of scripture that the rapture is associated with. So there was quite a bit of talk about the rapture. I do have a vivid memory. I've mentioned this a number of times in some interviews. I have a quite vivid memory of the night that Bill Clinton was elected and being just overcome with terror because it was sort of widely recognized among certain people in the community that Bill Clinton was the Antichrist. So I remember just thinking, oh my God, like, it's like, you know, the end is, is

0:22:43 Thomas: They love going back to that well, by the way, like, oh, well, Bill Clinton. Okay. Well, Obama, definitely. He's the antichrist. It's whoever, whoever the guy is, is the antichrists, whoever the candidate is.

0:22:44 Phil: Yep.

0:22:54 Phil: Yep. Uh, there was a study in, I think 2013, a survey that is, uh, that found, um, something like 14% of Americans believed Obama was the antichrist, um, so, uh-huh.

0:23:05 Thomas: Yep. You know, this interesting sign of progress, and this might be a, if onion writers are listening, this gives maybe, maybe an an onion idea. Will Republicans ever allow a female Antichrist? That'll be interesting. So if there's a female presidential candidate or president, you know, on the Democrat side, that sign of progress, you have progress of a kind, as Hitchens always used to say, a female antichrist. Kim, is that allowed? I don't know.

0:23:14 Phil: Yeah. Yeah, it's a really interesting question. As it happens, I have come across some Christian apocalypticists, apocalypticist who have begun to identify the Antichrist with a super intelligent machine, which is. Yeah.

0:23:46 Thomas: Ooh, agender, agendere Antichrists.

0:23:50 Phil: Yeah. And, you know, that would explain how the Antichrist could gain so much power, people, manipulate people and so on. So that's a pretty interesting idea. Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence from 2014, is cited by some of these individuals, which is just amazing. And it's it's always fascinating to me. You look back at the history of eschatological thinking, and new technologies have very often been integrated in really fascinating ways into the prophetic narrative. There's a famous case of, I think it was 1972, I think, when Ronald Reagan was was governor of California, and he was at a dinner and he talked about how nuclear weapons clearly enable the fulfillment of certain prophetic verses in Ezekiel versus having to do with, with, like, flesh being melted off of, uh, you know, bones. Um, yeah, anyways, so so he, there was kind of, um, among certain religious believers there was a little bit of giddiness, I think, that having to deal with nuclear weapons, you know. Because this –

0:24:10 Thomas: Wow. Yeah. It

0:24:58 Phil: It seemed to – them, at least, it seemed to be kind of evidence. It seemed to fit into their view about what – how the world was going to end.

0:25:06 Thomas: Is a bizarre worldview. Like, you're excited, finally we've been waiting for thousands of years for the stupid world to end, and it never seems to happen, to be like cheering for the for that, finally it's an interesting thing.

0:25:16 Phil: Yeah. Well, there is – there's a kind of logic to it, I think, once you accept the utterly irrational and absurd and ridiculous premises, because you're not going to get eternal peace. You know, that's ultimately what you want. You want to be in the presence of God, you know, the artificer of the entire cosmos in total bliss and ecstasy for all eternity. But that's not going to happen until this weary world of sin and suffering.

0:25:18 Thomas: Yeah. Makes you wonder why, uh, why

0:25:49 Phil: Bring.

0:25:49 Thomas: God did it that way. It feels like he could have just skipped all this and just created that world. Let me ask you this: would it have been beyond an all-powerful being's power to just start there? Could oh

0:25:59 Phil: I remember reading once, I forget who said this, but the line was something like, you know, pretty much all of theology is basically just looking in more sophisticated ways at possible answers to questions that five-year-olds might come up with. You know, like the question you just asked. I remember stumbling on these questions.

0:26:27 Thomas: I have that same memory in church, and it's like, it's It's like you ask the stuff and then they're like, and they kind of, it's never answered. It's sort of because you're young at the time. Usually it's like, it's laughed off in a way that signals to you as a child. Oh, that's not a valid question. And then when you start later on in life, you're like, wait, no, those were all valid questions.

0:26:47 Phil: They were valid questions. It's really weird.

0:26:48 Thomas: Yeah. How did Adam and Eve create a whole human race? That's two people. So there's a lot of a lot of incest back then, I guess. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

0:26:57 Phil: Quiet with those questions. These are questions that a kid would ask, but I never understood why um, he, God, created, why he planted the Tree of Knowledge in there, you know. I've also yeah I

0:27:02 Thomas: Exactly, yeah. Exactly.

0:27:20 Thomas: I made that joke. You know, I did the podcast where I went through the whole Bible, and I remember I still remember, it's been seven, eight years by now since I read Genesis, and one of the parts was, like, he could have just put the tree outside of the garden, even, like, if he needed a tree, just move it out of the beyond the fence.

0:27:26 Phil: Remember that I I feel like this stuff is so silly that it's it's almost embarrassing to to be talking

0:27:39 Thomas: Yeah yeah well and then they can do the, "I don't take it literally, I don't take it literally except they still people still literally believe in it, but but back to the to the topics at hand, it's so you were you raised under a kind of extreme world nd Christianity that that is that what predisposed you to this stuff? Well, the technical I'm sorry, I'm using technical terms, uh, for the maybe define them for the audience.

0:27:43 Phil: About it." Yeah yes it was world ending yes, um so yeah So, yeah, that was the, uh, the milieu in which I, uh, grew up. But I feel like there were seeds, um, planted, uh, uh, that, you know, later sort of led to my interest in the long-term future of humanity. And, you know, I'm working on a book right now that's tentatively titled A Brief History of Human Extinction, um, and the but the topic really is sort of tracing the emergence and evolution of the idea of human distinction. And, so far as I could tell, the it was not that long ago that people actually linked together the idea of humanity and the ideaof extinction. In fact, extinction seems like perfectly, uh, mundane to us at this point, but there was a huge, um, battle within science, um, that happened in the in the early 1800s.

0:29:03 Phil: Basically between — so there's a guy named Georges Cuvier, who, um, more or less established, for the very first time at the very beginning of the 19th century, that species can actually go extinct. So we it seems like a obvious, you know, feature of the the of, you know, the history of life on Earth, but it wasn't that long ago that, you know and then even more so, um, thinking about the past, taking seriously the possibility that, um, you know, homo sapiens could have, uh, end up with the exact same uh, could follow the dodo into the, you know, the oblivion that really, you know, HG Wells thought about it just a bit in the early 20th century, uh, and then I guess it was kind of wasn't till the 1980s, uh, when there was work done on nuclear winter and other, uh, phenomena, uh, you know, volcanic winter and impact winter and so on, that kind of people kind of started to take it seriously. Um, so anyways, my my point of saying that is, yeah, I was interested in

0:29:17 Thomas: Well ahead

0:30:03 Phil: The future of humanity sort of early on, and then discovered this pretty incipient literature that looked at this question and looked at the possibility of human annihilation from a purely scientific, secular perspective. And that, I don't know, I mean, there's a sense in which, know, thinking about one's human's own mortality is kind of a quote-unquote deep issue, and if that's the case, then what's deeper than thinking about the mortality of the species? The possibility of all humans around the world dying out what are the ethical implications? Would that be bad, and, if so, how bad? What are the various strategies or meta-strategies that we could implement to try to reduce the the probability of this sort of outcome? So, yeah, it I find it to be an intrinsically fascinating topic, and usually at, if I'm at parties and I start talking about this, it either results in the party sort of, you know, the the liveliness sort of dying out, or it starts a really vigorous, fascinating conversation that lasts for five hours. Are

0:30:35 Thomas: Right yeah or Yeah, I I like that idea. There's a 50 50 chance you just bomb everybody out, that there's the record scratch, everyone's like, uh, I don't feel much like partying anymore, let's all go home and recycle some stuff or something.

Um, well, we've established, uh, a lot of your area of interest and your credentials in this topic, and I think it's time you know, I realize we've already gone at least a half hour here, I think it's probably time we we talk a little bit about this elephant on the internet, which is, uh oh, which is this a bit of a back and forth you've had with Steven Pinker, kind of, although I guess you haven't directly been been addressing each other.

Um, but I so Steven Picker, I I've talked about him a little bit on the show, and and feel free to distance yourself from any of my opinions as much as you want but he's doing something that I found a little frustrating recently, which is, you know, there's... there's always the thing, and I'm not an academic, but, you know, it there's only the thing where in academia I feel like

0:31:22 Phil: Hey

0:32:16 Thomas: You can write and you can research directed towards your field, and then there's sometimes people go the route of, like, popularization, you know, where they start writing about, like, who Sagan a while, but maybe Carl Sagan starts writing books, or Richard Dachshund starts writingbooks that popularize the field they're not intended for, like, an expert audience of, or readership and then there's what I feel like people are doing lately, and I I I would put Steven Pinker in this category, which is doing that, but but not even in their field. So, like, Steven Pinker is, you know, I think of him as a linguist or whatever, but I guess he's a psychologist by trade? What are his precise credentials?

0:32:55 Phil: Cognitive scientists.

0:32:56 Thomas: Cognitive scientist. And then he starts writing books about the Enlightenment. So he's taking on history, and he's taken on all kinds of topics, which, you know, I guess there's no reason why someone shouldn't be able to do that, but what wonder. And, you now, I'll give you an example from this Enlightenment thing that really bugged me. I watched a bunch of his lectures on this, know anybody. I've just always thought of Steven Pinker as a genius who had a bunch of interesting things to say about language and all that kind of thing. And then he starts talking about free speech, for example. And his argument about free speech and the Enlightenment, this was his big, like, critical Enlightenment value was free speech. He thought he had this knockdown argument, which is, how in the world could you ever argue against free speech because any argument you make against free speech, well, you're utilizing speech, so therefore you're contradicting yourself, which is the most facile argument. That Nobody, nobody argues that there should be no talking. People argue that, like, there might be restrictions on free speech, you know what I mean?

0:32:57 Phil: Yeah. Yeah,

0:33:59 Thomas: Like, and there are restrictions on freespeak, I can't just slander you, for example. Nobody, when someone was like, should, should we have rules against slander? Well, you just used speech to say that, so we can't, obviously, because that would be a... No, that's not the argument. And I've noticed there are a lot of those examples in his Enlightenment shtick, where it's like, that sounds profound, but it's not. And this is all my opinion. You don't have to co-sign this. But in that light, I saw your critique of his book, Enlightenment Now, or at least a section of his books, dealing with your field. And you wrote a piece about it. I wonder if you'd want to maybe give people a rundown. Of course, I'll include the link, but give people a little bit of a rundow from your perspective of reading that section of the book and what you found.

0:34:00 Phil: Yeah. Yeah? Yeah.

0:34:50 Phil: Sure. I mean, first, a couple things come to mind. One is, yes, I'm also frustrated when I hear some of these These individuals of almost always white men, you know, who to like the now disgraced Lucy Kay once said, you Know, what can you tell a white man to hurt his feelings? So these are people who just – I think have never experienced what it's like to be attacked verbally and called really hurtful, psychologically distressing names. So like Michael Shermer refers to himself as a free speech purist, and that's such a frustrating term for me because he's not. He also thinks that slander, that,

0:35:05 Thomas: It's true.

0:35:38 Thomas: Yeah,

0:35:38 Phil: You know, child pornography, That all of these are should, should not be speech that's free. So it's really, it's a question of where one wants to draw the line. And yeah, and I think so, sort of framing the debate as one between people who are like for free speech and those who are opposed to it, it's quite misleading because, again, the people who are for, quote unquote, free speech are nonetheless – a lot of them are quite happy that you can't just shout fire in the middle of a theater. So that's one thing that comes to mind. Another thing that's, I think, relevant and kind of interesting is something that Karl Popper referred to in a footnote of his – one of his major works, which he called The Paradox of Tolerance.

0:35:38 Thomas: Yeah. Oh,

0:36:27 Phil: Which is which is the it's the situation whereby, like, there's some forms of behavior that maybe are antithetical to tolerance. And the question then is, to what extent do we tolerate these behaviors or these attitudes that ultimately, if they were to gain power, would result in a termination or compromising of free speech and so on. So, I mean, the obvious example would be like – there have been some crazy debates with Muslim extremists over in the UK who have been asked point blank, would you – are you a fan of free speech? And they say no, not at all.

0:37:13 Phil: There's all sorts of restrictions that I'd like to impose on society. And the interviewer says, yeah, but you realize you're benefiting from free speech right now to be able to say such heinous things. And they kind of wink and nod to use your expression. And yeah, it's great. You're opening up the door for me to close it. So anyway, so there is I mean, these are these are not trivial questions, in my best judgment, at least. And I don't really have a good answer to them. But yeah, the whole debate right now between the classical liberals and, you know, and then the, you you know, social justice warriors.

0:37:59 Phil: It's just muddled and obfuscated by terms like free speech purity. So anyways, yeah, not to be long winded about that point. But yeah, so the article, there were some hints that some of Pinker's scholarship in Better Angels was not, not particularly sophisticated uh, anthropologists, a number of leading anthropologists, complained uh quite vociferously about, you know, some kind of shoddy uh work Picker, in the chapters talking about violence in the Paleolithic. And so there was that, there was there's a woman on on Twitter, who goes by, the, her handle is, I think it's at, um, Mangy underscore J.

0:38:42 Thomas: Oh, Mangy J. Yeah, I follow her as well.

0:38:43 Phil: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, she's, she's pretty awesome. And she took a close look at a few passages that, uh, in, um, Better Angels, in which Pinker was talking about rape statistics. And what she found was, like, he just, he's just kind of made these very confident claims without, uh, citations that really back up what he what he wanted to say for the purpose of, you know, corroborating this progressionist narrative that he espouses.

0:39:06 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, that is right. I remember that.

0:39:14 Thomas: And it's important to emphasize, this is an entire book about not his field, like, none of this, right? I mean, if you're making claims about it's it's basically it's history, it's what, sociology, it's a lot of things that aren't linguistics and cognitive science, or whatever his specific field would be. So it's already, it feels like it's an uphill battle again, not to say you can't write a book about a field you're not an expert in, but but like, you got to be careful, right?

0:39:17 Phil: Yeah, yeah. So I agree. Um, I consider myself, uh, used to I used used to think of myself as a philosopher. And these days, I think of myself as just as a generalist. You know, pretty much a lot of the work that I do, it's it draws from like a multiplicity of different fields. And it's like big picture. I'm a huge fan of pretty a recent field called Big History, where, you know, one author will write this entire 800 page book that starts with the Big Bang and goes all the way up. Yeah, exactly.

0:40:12 Phil: This Yeah. So I certainly have no objection to some somebody pursuing a kind of grand, hugely multidisciplinary project. But what you just said a moment ago, I think is absolutely critical. You have to be extra careful. And, you know, things that I write that are, you know, maybe I'll write something about economics or, you know, molecular biology or something, do not have expertise in those fields. So I go, I research, I convert all of the unknowns to either knowns or known unknowns, you know, so things I either know or things I know that I don't know. So then I get a full picture of the topography and then after writing the article, send it out for a kind of informal peer review,

0:40:09 Thomas: This like sapiens? Yeah, sure. Right.

0:41:00 Phil: Get feedback from actual experts, make sure that I've got all my facts straight, that I've properly understood the relevant issues. That's absolutely critical. Based on the acknowledgement section of Pinker's most recent book, it seems so far as I could tell, he didn't reach out to anybody who has expertise on global catastrophic risks or existential risks. And so immediately I was disappointed by that. And I thought, maybe that doesn't bode so well for the sophistication of his chapter on the topic titled Existential Threats. So sure enough, I combed through individual sentences, and I looked at pretty much every citation. It became clear pretty much immediately that I critique of that chapter that it deserves, Because it would be so long. Like, I just don't have that much time to spend on this project, so I I

0:41:57 Thomas: And it's kind of a thankless job too. I mean, all you get is a swarm of white dude bro enlightenment fans, you know, trolling you forever.

0:42:05 Phil: Mostly people just ignored it until the most recent Salon article, which summarizes parts, but I, the original, like much more academic, uh, I had, I got out my exegetical microscope and, uh, it took a really close look. And so I think I went through probably, um, probably like, I don't know, the first seven pages or something. And it was just chock full of, of misquotes, um, you know, out of context quotes, misrepresented research, totally cherry picked data. Even some of Pinker's own citations, like I would go and read, you know, the New York Times article or something that he cited. The New York Times article would have a nice and balanced take on a particular risk, like, you don't, nuclear weapons or something, thing. Well, Pinker would just pick out the, uh, the, the happy statements of the article and just ignore the rest.

0:42:09 Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah.

0:43:02 Phil: Like, and to me, to me that in an email, I asked him about that and he said that he, um, you know, well, the point of the book was to, you Know, defend his particular thesis and it's like, well okay, fair enough. But also like from my perspective, at least the intellectually honest approach to talking about these issues wouldn't just ignore half the story. You know, you want to bring all of the evidence to light and see where the, you know, it's not about finding a piece of evidence to support your belief. It's about what the totality of evidence supports. That's basic epistemology. So are I just found so many mistakes that were really elementary in nature.

0:43:52 Phil: And ultimately what I wanted to do was hold Pinker to the standards, the same standards that are, that undergraduates are expected to meet. And when I did that, it just, the result was, you know, kind of a scholarly disaster. So then I decided to, in response to Pinker's one year later, you know, Reflections on Enlightenment Now article, which is published in Quillette, which is, as I mentioned, the full-on article, it's the online safe space for the intellectual dark web.

0:44:28 Phil: And so, in response. In response to that, I thought, well, try to summarize some of the more accessible errors that I uncovered in, again, the first few pages of the chapter on existential threats. And the article ended up getting quite a bit of attention. Perhaps you could say it kind of went viral, uh, you know, kind of some big names retweeted it, and ultimately Pinker responded, but I found his response to be pretty weak, and was very much hoping that, um, that he would have just come out and said, "Yeah, okay, there was some scholarly sloppiness here," uh, it's

0:44:22 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, true, yeah, yeah, Well, let's talk about that, I, I want to, I want to recognize a, I think it should be abundantly clear that my, my bias here would be, uh, I'm not a huge fan of Pinker in this particular area of his work, but I recognize that I, you know, I'm a little predisposed to, to be a fan of, of what you would write along these lines. So, recognizing that, I read his, his, uh, email, and, and it's weird, he didn't, it's kind of a, I don't know, like a way of sidestepping actually addressing you in the, you know, in that he had Jerry Coin on, his on Jerry Coins blog, publish an email to Jerry that, that responds to your article. It's got a kind of backwards way of doing it, but whatever, he, he did that.

0:45:51 Phil: It's a bit of a high school kind of situation, you know, there's... there's somebody in the middle

0:45:52 Thomas: Yeah, it's like he doesn't want to dignify it, but like also. Also, here, I want to say all this stuff in response to it. So here's a weird way of sidestepping that. But anyway, I have to say that as a, as not an academic, you know, obviously I have a, I have an undergrad degree, but I'm not, I'm not an academic in any way. It's hard for me to, to adjudicate this. And maybe, maybe you could respond to this, because he makes it sound like, okay, sure, sure, I quoted all these people, and maybe what I pulled from their quotes wasn't what they would have stated in their thesis of whatever I was quoting. But he's saying, "Look, I'm using these quotes to frame a discussion, in writing a book, to spice it up." And I see some plausibility in that. If I quote Einstein, "And God doesn't roll dice" or something, and then I go on to talk just, just as a way of framing something, and then I go on to talk about something that Einstein would disagree with, I don't, is that necessarily bad scholarship,

0:45:55 Phil: Yeah, yeah, if

0:46:55 Thomas: You know, or am I just using that quote in a way that's not maybe how you would think I would be using it? So talk me through that. Is that an adequate response in your view, or why isn't it?

0:47:07 Phil: You used a quote from Einstein, and Einstein himself read the, your use of it and said, "That's ridiculous, you're making it look like I'm saying something that I don't want to say." That's problematic. That's really Really basic, and I, I don't, I was profoundly underwhelmed by, uh, Pinker's response. Um, I was thinking of writing, uh, um, addressing some of his issues. Uh, actually, Free Inquiry has asked me to respond. So here would be an example. This is exactly what Pinker is doing to the various individuals, the scholars who I mentioned in the Salon article, um. As well as basically to Stuart Russell, who's a computer scientist and one of the leading experts sounding the alarm that machine superintelligence could pose an existential threat to humanity. And Pinker describes him in a footnote as a leading expert who is skeptical of the AI risk.

0:47:23 Thomas: Okay, sure.

0:48:14 Phil: That's just false. I contacted Russell himself, just like I contacted the other people. And they themselves agree that, you know, Pinker should not have characterized them or quoted them the way that he did. So by analogy, imagine that I wrote the following. And these are actual quotes from things that Pinker wrote in Enlightenment Now. But imagine that this is in an article that I'm writing about how we're all going to die, let's say. So here's the quote. As a scholar of existential risks, referring to myself, I can affirm that we are in grave danger. Indeed, as Pinker himself writes, quote, we are cheerfully hurtling towards a catastrophe. We are playing Russian roulette, and the deadly odds are bound to catch up to us.

0:49:01 Phil: We will be blindsided by a black swan, a four sigma event far along the tail of statistical distribution of hazards with low odds, but calamitous harm, end quote. Pinker literally does write that stuff. But if you look at it in context, he is using those statements to mean the opposite of the way I'm using them.

And I have no doubt that Pinker would be displeased if I were to give readers the impression, as I would in the paragraph I just read, that he actually is quite concerned that we're all going to die, um, so it's really, again, this is, this is undergrad level stuff that Pinker's pushing back against.

I have no doubt that if, in his own classes, if somebody turned in a term paper that used, you know, a quote that was intended to support, uh, theory X, to actually look like it's supporting theory Y, he would have a problem with that. That's just very basic, you know, uh, practice, scholarly practice. So, I, I'm I'm quite, uh, flabbergasted by the, this sort of pushing back. And I understand that, um, you know, Pinker is, is a persuasive writer, um, but I have not talked to a single scholar, uh, who, I mean, the exceptions would be – these are people I've talked to, but the exceptions that come to mind who have weighed in on this issue would be like Coyne and Michael Shermer. But

0:50:27 Phil: But everybody else I've talked to is like, "Yeah, Phil, obviously Pinker's misusing those, those quotes, misidentifying people," and that's not acceptable. So really, there shouldn't be a debate about this, uh, it's crazy that, that there appears to be one. Um, this is what I was gesturing out a moment ago, I, I would have gained a tremendous amount of intellectual respect if Pinkert just acknowledged, "Yeah, there's some mistakes here, I really didn't do my homework, and I apologize, I can do better." You know? And all of us, you know, we all should strive for better than this. That would have been redemption. But instead, it's just kind of digging heels in, and then various other people from the, the tribe, like Coyne and Shermer, know, further arguing for Pinker's case.

0:50:27 Thomas: Yeah,

0:51:18 Phil: In fact, Shermer, who I think is increasingly known for Trumpian outbursts, uh, vulgar, petty, uh, childish attacks, uh, um, of people who he, you know, ideologically disagrees with, um, so he weighed in on the topic and wrote the following. He actually wrote this on Twitter. "I cannot believe how totally immature and middle school level this is," but he says, "Where, where, where Richard Dawkins had his fleas," and then he cites the Dawkins Delusion, that was a book written response to the God Delusion. "Steven Pinker has his cockroaches, the oleaginous Phil Torres, desperate for attention, who is artfully squashed here." And then he links to Pinker's email sent to Jerry Coyne.

0:52:07 Phil: So this is – from the new atheist, skeptic, dark web crowd, this is exactly what I have come to expect. Name-calling, again, middle school-level bullying tactics. It's so embarrassing. And this is precisely why I want nothing to do with these guys anymore. They're not serious thinkers. They're not serious intellectuals. They're not serious scholars. They're tribalists, and dogmatic about their various views of free speech and gender studies and so on.

0:52:42 Thomas: Yeah.

0:52:43 Phil: That is not the kind of epistemic character that I care to associate myself with or to strive to exemplify.

0:52:54 Thomas: You know, I have so many thoughts on this. I want to comment on the, yeah, the attacks on your character there. But also, I just remembered another example, you know, in watching some lectures by Pinker when he was doing his Enlightenment tour, just as an example of the, honestly, the arrogance with which he enters fields that aren't his own. You know, he had a lecture where he said, it's no coincidence that the founders made the First Amendment free speech, you know, and leading up to a discussion on free speech.

0:52:58 Phil: Do you Well, it's surprising, yeah,

0:53:28 Thomas: And to his credit, Pinker later corrected this because he's like, yeah, I had someone write me and be like, actually, yeah. It is a coincidence. And the point you're making is not true. Because obviously, like if it was such a vital thing, it would have been an amendment. It would have, you know, but anyway, also the ordering of the amendments was not, it wasn't ordered that way for that reason. It wasn't an order of importance in the Bill of Rights. But the point is, he prepared a talk in which he just made that claim. Like it's no coincidence that, blah, blah, and in fairness, he did correct that one later, but it goes to show that he's willing to just barge into a field and do a talk where he makes a claim like that without checking first. You know, it's kind of interesting.

0:53:11 Phil: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

0:54:14 Thomas: It's not something you would expect.

0:54:14 Phil: I the checking first is an important point there, it's as opposed to like, oh, maybe I can cut the corner here and maybe no one will notice, you know, so yeah, I mean, I I wanted to said. I published the really long academic critique, and I wanted to write Pinker and say, like, why didn't you just send me the chapter? For a mention in the acknowledgements, I would have happily read over it, I could have corrected all the mistakes, you know, I could've hopefully apprised you and educated you about certain issues that I've been or

0:54:15 Thomas: Yeah.

0:54:24 Thomas: And I think, yeah, go ahead.

0:54:51 Thomas: Not you, anybody, you know, any relevant expert comparable

0:54:53 Phil: Anybody, yeah, I I'm only saying me because, uh, you know, I don't have an academic position, so I'm a bit, a bit, you know, my schedule's a bit more flexible. And I would have been happy to have done it because I think this conversation is extremely important, and I think the notion that we have made moral progress, that our circles of moral concern have expanded over the decades and perhaps over the centuries, is a really important point. Point. It's one issue in a larger conversation that Pinker goes out of his way to ignore. The other half of the conversation has to do with various trends relating to emerging technologies that are dual use and increasingly powerful and accessible. It has to deal with climate change, with biodiversity loss. We're in the early stages of the sixth mass extinction, extinction event in the entire 3.8 billion year history of life on Earth.

0:54:55 Thomas: Yeah, and

0:55:50 Phil: Um, these are other things, you know, if these topics were integrated into, uh, the narrative that, you know, narrative tapestry that Pinker's trying to weave, then you would get a much more fascinating, sophisticated and useful picture about where humanity is currently and appears to be headed. So I just, yeah, I just wanted to tell him like, like, why didn't you just just reach out to some, you know, you, you were willing to reach out to various experts when it comes to, know, improvements in our quality of life and so on. Just reach out to some experts on existential risks and have them read your, your sprawling chapter. Know, before it's published and before you end up, you know, maybe feeling a little embarrassed, you know, by a salon article, you could have fixed, you you know, fixed all those mistakes. So I'm, I'm ranting now and yeah,

0:56:40 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, and we're running out of time, but I did want to make sure to say, uh, that it's interesting to me, the assumptions in, in a Trumpian way, you know, how, uh, for the longest time it's, it's not so much anymore, but in the primary process. And And throughout, you know, a lot of his time in the spotlight, Trump has been an expert at accusing other people of things he does. You know, like it's kind of a reflection on what and in the same way, it is very interesting how all these people have jumped to motives of like, oh, you're just trying to make a career out of it. I have to say, like, I hope this comes across in a spirit in which it's intended, but I don't know that I know anyone else who does more work than you do, who is less geared toward the easy buck in academics.

And, you know, like you're not doing the, you know, tens of thousands of dollars lecture circuit and the selling the easy book, like accessible, you're like, seriously, I don't know anyone who does more work that's less geared toward trying to make an easy buck than you personally. And it's just such a, to me, it's such a like take a look in the mirror, you Know, kind of moment of everybody's assuming that your goal here is to make the quick buck on whatever,

0:57:04 Phil: Well,

0:57:59 Thomas: Or Or, you know, you're trying to make a career, a name for yourself by doing this kind of thing. And it's just so, in my opinion, it's so not you at all. And I just wanted to make sure to say that.

0:58:10 Phil: Yeah, yeah. Thanks. I mean, I really appreciate that. I mean I would self report, um, with all the caveats of self reporting, you know people are, are self deceived all the time. There's all this kind of biases and and so on. But I mean, my most genuine self-report is that, yeah. So I was really upset when I read, intellectually, not emotionally, but definitely intellectually upset when I read Pinker's first paragraph when he said, yeah, Phil Torres is just trying to make a career out of warning people about the risks to AI. And my dismissal of that threat that constitutes an existential threat to his career. Most of what I do is pro bono. Don't – also, it's false. It's factually false that my work focuses on the AI threat. I've written about it in some of the books, mostly just summarizing the scholarly literature on the topic.

0:58:20 Thomas: That's

0:59:10 Phil: But I haven't published any articles about the threat of superintelligence. To the contrary, the one book chapter that I have on that discusses superintellgence, it's as a means for avoiding some kind of civilizational collapse or human extinction event. And, yeah,

0:59:29 Thomas: True. I mean, you are, of course, interested in existential threats, but you're not. There are people, maybe it's confusing you or something. There are People who just focus on risk, but that's not you. That's just one of the things you've touched on.

0:59:40 Phil: That's not me. And also,

0:59:42 Thomas: It so hey

0:59:42 Phil: I just, I would just emphatically say, no, I don't, I'm not a disingenuous critic here who's motivated you know, for self-interested reasons. No, not at all. It's So I would also say, uh, quite emphatically that I ultimately don't care about whether or not the field, what happens with the field. The reason I would like at the moment, the field to, to, uh. Uh, flourish and to, you know, to inspire more eager, young, brilliant minds to contribute, is I think the topics are quite serious, and it's quite perplexing to me that Pinker seems to think that we're wasting our time and we should just close these various institutes and organizations like the Future Humanity Institute or the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at Oxford and Cambridge, respectively, Because one of the best ways to to ensure a safe passage through the 21st century is to have individuals seriously about what could go wrong.

Consistent It's with what's called a premortem analysis, where you try to figure out all of the ways that your plan could fail, and then you devise strategies for avoiding those mistakes. So that's essentially what existential risk scholars are doing. And by the way, he seems to have it in for this community of researchers. That community is tiny. It's really, really small. There are not many resources that are actually being spent thinking deeply about how we could stumble into the evolutionary grave of extinction.

1:01:28 Phil: Distinction. So yeah, I think it's quite a low blow for him to, to start off his response by suggesting that I'm an insincere, you know, I'm someone who ultimately doesn't care about the truth. I care about you my own self interest. And that, I mean, again, I would self report could not be further from what is actually the case in reality. It's platitudinous to say, but I genuinely care about the truth. And I think if you actually look at my history, my intellectual history, see that that's sort of borne out because that history consists mainly of me being really sure that certain things are true, and then going, yeah, maybe that's not true at all. So I've given up some really core beliefs uh throughout my 36 years. Um, so yeah, anyways, I know it's a bit platitudinous, it's it's bit like, uh, undergraddy to say like I care about, but it's that is my true mode motivation here, that's the reason I've I've been a critic of new atheism, because I see a lot of intellectual dishonesty. And They Did Reasoning And

1:02:35 Thomas: And and it's just so I I I agree and and I just, I can't echo this enough. There's no, there's no... This isn't the money side. There's not money in this side of things. You know, like the money is in the Right Enlightenment Now, which is a book that plays to people with a vested interest in believing that things are great and that, you know, status quo warriors and people who want to be able to be anti-progressive but have a kind of a... not a far-right justification for it, but like an intellectual, maybe center-right, right, center, maybe center, left justification for it, and write articles for Quillette, like that's where the money is. Like that's the, I mean, if you want to look at the balance of things,

1:02:37 Phil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And

1:03:18 Thomas: That's, to me, that's my opinion on it. So we are vastly over time, but go ahead and put in a final word there.

1:03:22 Phil: The The other Yeah. The other kind of dumb thing about that statement that Pinker made is the exact same idea could apply to him, you know, me pushing back against his ideas, that poses a threat to, you know, he's he's become this famous figure because of, you know, his progressionism, and so this field of study perhaps undercuts that a little bit, so that's an existential threat to his career. Thank you. Yeah.

1:03:38 Thomas: Yeah, right. Well put. It's, thank you so much for coming on, giving the time. Phil Torres, of course, you can uh just just search Phil Torres if you want to, I think there's, don't you have a uh, what's would that be a homonym, you have another, there's another Phil Torres who uh is out there being good looking and stuff, like what was that, as an actor or something

1:04:03 Phil: Yeah. There's A Nominative doppelganger or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not him, my my Twitter handle is at uh X Riskology.

1:04:09 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And no, no, no insult to you, you're a very good looking man as well, but but I believe if you look up the other Phil Torres, uh, he's he's some sort of Disney prince or something, he's a good looking guy I think.

1:04:19 Phil: Yeah. Yeah.

1:04:31 Phil: You know, every time I've been on this show you've mentioned how good looking, is that's that's a fact?

1:04:34 Thomas: Hey, feel free everybody, feel free to read into that as much as you want, I'm not even going to resist it, he's a he's good looking guy, I just think it's funny that way, I wish I had, my name's too generic, Thomas Smith, you know, but it would be kind of cool if it was like every time somebody googles you're like, oh, that's Phil Torres, huh, all right, I need to hire somebody like a Thomas Smith to be like the good looking Thomas Spitt, that's like, you see the first Google image search you get him, no, um, but just just kidding, but uh, you can find Phil Torres, find that Twitter handle, uh, your latest book, uh, it's, I guess it's uh, let's see, 2017 now, huh, boy, time flies in this, in this particular era that we're in, but Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks, thanks Phil so much for coming on, it's been too long.

1:04:50 Phil: Yeah. Yeah.

1:05:22 Phil: Thanks for having me. We'll see you then.

1:05:34 Thomas: Another big thanks to Phil for coming on, and I just want to say, if you're somebody who is not convinced, convinced about this, like, let's say you, you, you've read both sides here and you still think, well, Steven Pinker is, you know, he's not guilty of anything serious, it's just kind of minor stuff, you know, like take, take the Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker line on that, I would encourage you to look through this thread that, you know, Phil actually mentioned it in the interview, it's by the Twitter handle, just in case it was, it was not spelled right before, I can't remember, it was at Magi underscore jay, so like at M-A-G-I underscore J-A‑Y.

I will link it in the show notes, she did an excellent thread debunking and talking about how bad the sourcing is to a different chapter of this book, specifically dealing with rape and different statistics about that. He makes some claims that are just not at all substantiated. And in fact, his sourcing is junk conservative writers like Christina Hoff Sommers. That's who a cognitive scientist is using in his sources. It's really well done, this thread. So I highly recommend you check that out. Again, if you're somebody who's still not quite convinced, I think that adds to the weight of evidence that that this isn't a well sourced book. Like it's not a, you know, it's, it'S not good scholarship.

So that, that's what I think I'm, I'm kind of convinced by Phil and by Mangy Jay, the Twitter person. I actually asked her to come on the show a long time ago, but I didn't get a response. So unfortunate. Cause I would absolutely love to interview her, but I, I never blame anybody who doesn't come on this show.

1:07:14 Thomas: I absolutely never do because everybody has a podcast now, you know, many of them are excellent, and I'm just another white dude asking for somebody to come on my podcast, so I recognize, I never hold it against anybody, she didn't respond, that's okay, still a huge fan, I still follow her, and, I highly recommend that account and that Twitter thread, and also, of course, follow Phil Torres as I do, he's a great follow as well. Well. All right, well, that's the show, thank you so much to everybody who supports it, patreon.com/seriouspod, you are the reason the show happens, so go join the ranks, why don't you just support the show. All right. I will see you folks when next we see each other, until then. Amen.