Bret Weinstein Quotes

[C]aptive-rodent breeding protocols, designed to increase reproductive output, simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence and virtually eliminate selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression. This appears to have greatly elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice. With their telomeric failsafe effectively disabled, these animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation. Safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate tissue damage and consequent accelerated senescence.

Strategies evolve within markets and their larger regulatory context.

[T]he personal responsibility vortex... sucks good people in... [W]e should redirect any effort that we are tempted to spend on personal responsibility, towards collective action... that can restructure the s that surround the market so that we... have a chance of altering the behavior.

I... struggle to find language that is strong enough for the horror of vaccinating children in this case, because children suffer a greater risk of long-term effects... this is earlier in their development, therefore it impacts systems that are still forming. They tolerate COVID well, and so the benefit to them is very small, and so the only argument for doing this is that they may cryptically be carrying more COVID than we think, and therefore they may be integral to the way virus spreads to the population. But if that's the reason that we're inoculating children... we were doing it to protect old, infirm people who are the most likely to succumb... What society puts children in danger, robs children of life, to save old infirm people. That's upside-down.

Is there a free speech crisis on college campuses? ...What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control—speech is impeded as a last resort, used when people fail to self-censor in response to a threat of crippling stigma and the destruction of their capacity to earn.
These tools are being used to unhook the values that bind us together as a nation—equal protection under the law, the presumption of innocence, a free marketplace of ideas, the concept that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Yes, even that core tenet of the civil rights movement is being dismantled.

The thing that allowed me to endure the challenge of the phony equity and inclusion forces was that they were unable to keep the story in-house. ...Sam Harris, my brother , and Joe Rogan ...took the video that the protestors themselves had posted and amplified it, and broadcast it. ...[T]here is a principle that applies to institutions like colleges and universities... It is <math>PV = nRT</math>... the ... they turned up the heat and they added pressure, and that caused the vessel to explode, and when it did, my story became public, and survival became a possibility, because outside eyes... in reviewing it, the answer became obvious. I was not a racist. Something else was going on.

Antagonistic pleiotropy, the evolutionary theory of senescence, posits that age related somatic decline is the inevitable late-life by-product of adaptations that increase fitness in early life. That... provides the foundation for an integrative theory of vertebrate that reconciles aspects of the 'accumulated damage' 'metabolic rate', and 'oxidative stress' models.

Humans are exquisitely sensitive, for very good evolutionary reasons... to being excluded from a group. ...[T]hat's effectively fatal for a hunter-gatherer, so... we very naturally act in our own self-protection by doing whatever is necessary to rejoin. ...[Y]ou exist in a very large population. If you take up the habit—the rationality community... coined a term for this called steelmanning (the IDW has borrowed it)... [Y]ou do your best to present the argument, of those that disagree with you, so well that they recognize you as having done it right. ...If you do it out of habit, certain people will reject you. They're doing you a favor. They're telling you to seek higher quality people... [S]ome of the things that are hard in life will cost you friends, but the quality of your friend group will be upgraded by the process. It's very painful... but if you'll just trust that this process will result in people... that you want to find yourself around when things get really serious, then you'll be glad you've done it.

(6) In iteroparous organisms selection tends to co-ordinate rates of senescence between tissues, such that no one organ generally limits life-span.

If the next generation of people to take over the West does not know how to think, western civilization will come apart and it will be replaced in the way that civilizations before it have been. ...What we face is a very dire problem.

I stood up for three reasons. One... I felt an obligation to do it... it was the right thing to do. Two... manipulative bullies... Three, I thought that I was positioned to endure and repel the accusation that I absolutely knew was going to come back. Why did I think I was well positioned? ...I had tenure. I was well liked by students of every description, who knew me very well... and knew that I was not a bigot. I thought that would protect me. My own personal history was also completely inconsistent with the claim that I am a racist. ...I was wrong.

Human beings... we are not a blank slate, but we are the blankest slate that nature has ever devised. ...It's where our flexibility comes from. ...We are robots in which ...a large fraction of the ...behavioral capacity has been off-loaded to the software layer which gets written and re-written over evolutionary time. That means, effectively, that... the important part of what we are is housed in the cultural... and the conscious layer, and not in the hardware, or a hard coding way. That layer is prone to make errors... [C]hildren make absurd errors all the time... That's part of the process... It is also true that as you look across a field of people discussing things, a lot of what is said is pure nonsense, it's garbage. But the tendency of garbage to emerge and even to spread in the short term, does not say that over the long term, what sticks is not the valuable ideas. So there is a high tendency for novelty to be created in the cultural space, but there's also a high tendency for it to go extinct. ...Things are being created, they're being destroyed, and... obviously, we've seen totalitarianism arise many times, and it's very destructive each time it does. So it's not like... freedom to come up with any idea you want hasn't produced a whole lot of carnage. But the question is, over time, does it produce more open, fairer, more decent societies, and I believe that it does. I can't prove it, but that does seem to be the pattern. ...I don't know how strongly I believe that it will work, but I will say, I haven't heard a better idea.

[I]mmovable objects are vanishingly rare in an academic context... If you're going to do it on the faculty side, you really need to have tenure, and in order to get tenure a lot of the things that you have to do train you not to be an immovable object. So there are very few immovable objects on college campuses, and that's a problem.

[A]ll of our environmental problems look like... somebody making a profit for degrading what belongs to the rest of us. ...[T]his behavior should not be allowed within a marketplace. We are fracturing the world. We are liquidating it, we are draining it, we are denuding it, we are over-exploiting it. It is apparent to anyone... The idea that this should not be allowed is transparent.

We need to place a firewall that is impermeable between the marketplace and the regulatory apparatus.