[T]his feedback loop has re-engineered our system cryptically and turned it into an engine for the concentration of wealth and power. ...It has insta… - Bret Weinstein

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.

We hypothesize that (1) in vertebrates, a telomeric fail-safe inhibits tumor formation by limiting cellular proliferation. (2) The same system results in the progressive degradation of tissue function with age.

[T]here is something very significant in this question of the hubris involved in imagining that you're going to improve the discussion by censoring... [T]he majority of concepts at the fringe are nonsense... but the heterodoxy at the fringe, which is indistinguishable at the beginning from the nonsense ideas, is the key to progress. So if you decide... the fringe is 99% garbage, let's just get rid of it. ...Yeah, but that 1% ... is the key. ...Eric makes an excellent point about the distinction between ideas and personal attacks, ... [T]here's no value in allowing people to destroy each other's lives, even if there's a technical legal defense for it. Now, how you draw that line, I don't know... Yes, people should be free to traffic in bad ideas, and they should be free to expose that the ideas are bad, and hopefully that process results in better ideas winning out.