Navigating Nuance in Today's Polarized Conversations
I listened to Bret Weinstein's most recent Dark Horse Podcast and emotionally regressed. He and his brilliant wife Heather were discussing breastfeeding, citing statistics from an academic journal. As I listened, I felt irritated, skeptical, and sad. Primarily INF person (a la Jung's typology), a red "danger" light started blinking on my mental dashboard. I thought, "a juggernaut of reason and nuance is being manipulated."
Since 2018, I've followed Bret's writings and podcasts and life. He mediated Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson's "debates" wonderfully. He and his incredible brother Eric were powerful voices balancing reason with curiosity, calling for public awareness and action against our escalating social and political divisiveness. Bret and his wife, Heather, were an inspirational couple and beloved teachers at Evergreen. Bret's 2017 ouster from Evergreen was a tragedy which brightly illuminated the dangers of the extreme political left. Finally, he demonstrated powerful foresight at the start of the 2020 pandemic, arguing ardently for 1) masks when our government said masks weren't necessary or beneficial, 2) the importance of being outside & Vitamin D, and 3) the danger of socially isolating young children. And, like all science-minded folks, he's always warned of the dangers of conflating correlation with causation.
Unfortunately, over the years I've found him to move further and further away from nuance and mindfulness, most notably in his discussions over vaccine controversies and trans/gender rights. The aforementioned Dark Hose podcast, here, is a recent example where Bret and Heather, in their outrage over the continued push for gender equity/biological sex elimination, end up being manipulated by data in the opposite camp. They cite an article which confuses correlation with causation: "Globally, it has been calculated that at least 845,000 annual deaths of children (largely from infectious disease and malnutrition) and 98,000 maternal deaths (from breast cancer, ovarian cancer and type II diabetes) are attributable to premature breastfeeding cessation." The data shows a correlation, or association between type II diabetes and premature breastfeeding cessation, not a causation (see this article on how women diagnosed with prepregnancy diabetes have reduced breastfeeding durations, and this article showing how longer breastfeeding durations act as a protective factor for women who develop gestational diabetes to develop type 2 diabetes later in life). This may seem like a subtle difference, but the implication is heavy: gender equity threatens breastfeeding, thus gender equity is bad. Confusing causation with correlation is the very thing Bret strongly argues against.
Bret (and many others) are clearly afraid of the dangers of novel vaccines generated by novel methods for a virus of unknown origins. They are clearly afraid of a society where biological sex is eradicated from the practice of medicine and culture. Understandably so. But lack of nuance combines with strong emotions to become a sledgehammer of confirmation bias and emotional regression.
This blog is not meant to be a critique of Bret. Rather, this blog is intended to be a general warning to us all of being manipulated into emotional regression and hasty judgment.
We must remain vigilant of our emotional regressions. I don't begrudge Bret, Heather, Jordan Peterson, etc. for voicing their strong opinions. I feel frustrated and sad when their strong emotions--fueled by [lies, damn lies, and]statistics--are voiced as weapons against our fellow brothers and sisters. We are, all of us, perfectly imperfect. We share this planet as we continue the ageless task of evolving our bodies and minds into more helpful, less hurtful creatures.