ASM240 The Last One

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[Music] well hello my friends it is good to talk with you all again welcome to ask science mike that weekly podcast where we believe that every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response i'm your host mike mccarg for this the final episode of ask science mike now before uh anyone panics or it takes your breath away it is not the last mike mccarthy podcast it is not the last thing i will make it is simply the last episode of the podcast ask science mic we are starting monday some major changes that have been in the works for months and i'm just totally thrilled to share them with you because ask science mike is going away and it is being replaced by a new show called the cozy robot show the cozy robot show is a lot like ask science mike in that we explore curiosity about the world and about our feelings together what's different from ask science mike is that the cozy robot show will be a live program that will go out on streaming web video so monday nights at 5 00 pm pacific 8 pm eastern you can go to cozyrobots.com watch and see the show the first episode will be september the 7th again 5 pm pacific 8 p.m eastern at cozyrobots.com watch now don't worry there's still going to be a podcast version so that show will then come out as an audio edition on this very podcast feed on wednesday so we'll probably do i don't know three episodes four episodes and it'll still look like ask science mike in the feed because if we switch it immediately people won't realize it's the same show so there'll be a transition period where you'll see the science mike r you'll see the ask science mic name and then it will move over to the cozy robot show and so if you listen right now uh to me is a podcast you'll listen to this new show as a podcast it'll sound great as a podcast there won't be anything uh restricted to visuals alone but because it's a live program i will get to interact with those of you who choose to be there during the recording so i'll be able to see and respond to your comments as the program is recorded we have all kind of wonderful segments planned um it's going to be a really fun show i'm very excited about it we did a pilot episode for my patrons um and got some great feedback and took that to heart and um you know just it's a brand new show brand new energy just so excited about it we've got some exciting guests that are going to be a part of that program we have we're going to move to a topical focus and which means on a given week we will look at a particular topic and every single week there will be a segment called ask mike and ask mike is an homage to ask science mike the show that got us this far but it's changing in that now you'll be able to send email questions like you've always been able to send a written question but now you can send in a video question and your face is on screen and i get to see you ask your question and respond in a more personal way so we need your questions uh the first episode of the cozy robot show is going to be about fake news and conspiracy theories which is a very timely topic and then we have additional topics lined up you can learn more by going to cozyrobots.com ask mike and that is where you can go upload a question and be a part of this new program it is by the same team that brings you ask science mike every week with some new additions like i say have been working really hard on it i'm very very excited about it and it is something people have asked for you know i got my start in podcasting i will always be a podcaster but there's a lot of people who listen to this program who are younger um you know ginzy even young ginzi people who still have the word teen in their name in some cases or in their early 20s and they've told me that they love interacting with me on social media but that they don't really do podcasts and so streaming web video is going to let everybody in this community get a chance to be involved but again the podcast format is sticking around as well okay so episode 240 the last episode of ask science mike next week september 7th episode 1 of the cozy robot show premieres at cozyrobots.com slash watch now some of you are are early adopters and you go straight to that url there's nothing there yet we're going to launch that website really close to the launch of the show but if you go cozyrobots.com ask mike that is ready to go right now uh in terms of you know oh how does this work well we're going to be broadcasting on uh periscope which is twitter's platform youtube uh twitch and facebook simultaneously uh then it will go out on instagram tv as a replay and then on the podcast feed as a replay as well so it's going to be everywhere however you watch a streaming video we will be there however you listen to uh podcast audio will be there too so really really excited to share that with you number two uh we are about to have our first flight of the overview program the overview program is an evidence-based system for managing life transitions hosted by me and the first one of those will begin in september it's just about full uh but we are also accepting applications for people who'd like to join us you know and in later programs the second program will probably begin in november um really excited about this i've got a couple of people in the overview voyages program already which is the one on one version of the overview program where it's just me and you on a weekly call to go through this system of of navigating live transitions and then the first group overview stations will start this september it's basically a weekly call with me uh in person and we go through a system for understanding how to contextualize and navigate the kinds of transitions we face in life whether those are face transitions career transitions gender and sexuality transitions new cities new relationships new anything tends to put us at odds with the people that we've known our existing community tends to get stressed out by change and this is a way to get the support you need to successfully navigate a transition and to suffer less as you do so uh so you know i'm really excited about that if you'd like to learn more you can go to overviewprogram.com okay i'd love to see you be a part of that so cozyrobots.com watch to watch the new program at 5 p.m pacific 8 pm eastern every monday cozyrobots.com ask mike to send in your video questions for that program and if you'd like to be a part of the overview program or just learn more about it go to overviewprogram.com and now what do you say let's get it started hi science mike i wanted to start out by saying a big thank you to you for um all the work you do with this show i don't think i or any version of my faith could have survived graduate school without the grounding that i've found here and the rationality so big thank you for that uh as a phd in electrical engineering obviously i live and work in a very male-dominated field i'm sure you remember several years ago this manifesto put out by a google employee about how men are biologically superior to women in technical skills like science and mathematics and i know that of course most of that has been debunked and i know that the reason that there are so few women in fields like mine has much more to do with socialization of girls and boys um but i do have questions still related to biology of it um for instance we we know that at any given time the best male sprinter in the world is probably faster than the best female sprinter in the world and that's true against most true across most physical disciplines so my question is about the biological differences of the brains of men and women is there any uh physiological difference in the brain structures of men versus women uh and do we expect that to have any effect on these sorts of skills is any proven effect what's the science on that the second question is maybe a little closer to my heart which is can we ever expect changes we've been aware for some time now of how the socialization of girls versus boys affects their choices on what kinds of fields for to pursue in academic studies and what kinds of jobs they'll end up in but at the same time there hasn't been much change for instance my mother is also an electrical engineer and the percentages of men and women in her classes are no different than mine in fact there might have been fewer girls in my classes than weren't hers in college back in the 80s so the question is is there any hope are we seeing changes in these numbers are girls becoming more common in science and math i feel such sadness hearing a woman with a phd ask if the ear is any hope i just i had to start by naming that a deep sadness in my heart if anyone ever wonders why i am a feminist that is why that is why i am a feminist because a woman who has a phd is asking if there is hope for true inclusion for women in engineering and in stem so we'll get back to that let's start with the brain stuff you know uh way back uh when finding god in the ways came out my first book that was in 2016. i had this bit that i did on stage a lot that made it into the book and whenever i did this bit i got so many laughs from the audience and as a former you know fundamentalist a conservative religious person i knew that my understanding of science and was was just very stunted uh compared to many people who grew up in more secular circumstances or even just non-fundamentalist circumstances and so i did a lot of um speaking engagements at churches where i basically uh helped people kind of get a boot camp in some basics of science and science literacy so the more i could work in good peer-reviewed science into a given talk the better i felt and so gender differences are an easy way to warm up most crowds and um and it played into a point i wanted to make about the brain and faith so i would talk about the difference between men and women's brains and the way the two hemispheres communicate with each other along a channel of nerves known as the corpus callosum this was based on real research a study that was published in 1995 that basically said the two halves of men's brains don't talk to each other as often as the two halves of women's brains and that fits in really well with gender stereotypes in our culture and people would laugh i had a lot of jokes you know about i'm not going to rehash the jokes introduce them as jokes make them makes them less funny if you're curious if you got to copy the book you can you can read in there by the way finding on the ways was originally called split brain that was the original title of the book that's how deep that story is in that text in the premise and guess what further research has really undercut that 1995 study um when we look at the study of brains the field known as neuroscience especially neuroscience that involves brain imaging we are dealing with very small sample sizes and we have a problem in all of science neuroscience included where scientists aren't great and often um even if they do a study that is rigorous and well composed and even if they don't have a limited sample size the phase in which the numbers are analyzed things can get pretty rough because statistics is its own discipline and uh frankly one that baffles me i i'm not speaking from some pedestal over real scientists here as a podcaster but i trust statisticians when they tell me that scientists often do a poor job with statistical analysis and um and so when we look at a lot of like gender different studies in brains we either find you know poor statistical analysis we find small sample sizes or we find um just a non-rigorous methodology behind that study so you can discount most of the studies that reveal differences in brains on those grounds and the ones you can't we have another problem with gender differences in brains you know our brains are shaped by our lives literally our brains are incredibly plastic organs and the types of things we do and the types of things we think and feel affect the anatomy of our brains more so than say our hearts our lungs or even the muscles of our bodies and so it is so hard to talk about neurophysiology independent of social factors and cultural factors it's very very difficult different societal roles and developmental differences meaning that the different ways for example that boys are treated from girls in childhood literally shape our brains because of neuroplasticity so many of the differences we could find neurophysiologically we cannot say definitively that those are in some way you know inherent to men and women's physiology um there's a great book that i've got a link to in the show notes called the gendered brain the new neuroscience that shatters the myth of the female brain that if you're curious about this topic is a terrific read i enjoyed it a great deal um i also linked to an article called neurosexism the myth that men and women have different brains i haven't read either of those in some time but they're so baked into my thinking that they without question influence the way that i answered your question now that second part is there any hope is there any hope for change in stem fields i think there is and here's why change has already happened change has already happened there was a time when the number of women working in the doctorate level of electrical engineering was zero now that's terrible and true when we talk about social change this is a drawn out process so we have to work on cultural norms and expectations we've been doing a lot of that work the idea that a woman could be an engineer is increasingly less shocking to increasingly more people more and more people find it less and less shocking that a woman could be an engineer or a scientist or a technician or technologist or a mathematician but we also have to reform educational access we have to make it so women are more readily admitted into educational institutions once they are there the culture of those institutions has to be reformed in ways that are less hostile to the presence of women we have to reform the work culture that happens after education companies and non-profits and research institutions their culture has to change to be more accommodating for women and to give women access and critically the management philosophy of these organizations must change as well and ultimately i don't think change really happens until inclusion happens at the management level right until then we kind of have tokenism and that's a long process and that process unfortunately because humans are so darn change resistant involves significant advocacy efforts that many people find upsetting and even threatening you know i used to work in information technology which historically is not the most woman friendly field in the world and when i first entered it and i worked for some large organizations the women who were in those organizations were often restricted to clerical roles they weren't in clerical roles then they were either objectified sexually or became somehow an honorary boy which is equally ridiculous right if you assimilate basically act like a man then you get to be one of the boys and then later in my career um and by this time i transitioned into it management um i was lucky enough to work with a team that was actually excited and actively supportive of women being a part of the team as equals and that was some of the most rewarding and fulfilling time i had in the corporate world and you know we're talking about um an eight or twelve year time difference between those events and going from large institutions and government institutions to you know a small creative company so the culture is a little more forward-thinking there to begin with and i think that's just what we're looking at we're looking at more hard work by feminists and men who are true allies to feminists in opening up these spaces and pushing back on the gendered assumptions you know i looked up some statistics and i included links to them and true to your observation the numbers are terrible for stem and women they're really embarrassing and not just in the united states but worldwide kind of the best case globally as women in stem get up over about a third of the workforce which is pitifully low but we do also see a positive trend over time and that gives me hope but it's easier for me to have hope sitting here in my home office um you know my daily workplace and is me myself and it's you know um i don't i don't uh i'm not part of a a company culture there's a team that helps produce this media but we all work in our our homes and our own places and collaborate as needed and so i think it's easy for me to feel hope looking at some figures in a table compared with your lived reality of looking around the office and seeing how few women are there with you also in that data one thing that i found a lot of women and a lot more women are entering stem uh at the at the um graduate and postgraduate level and entering the workforce than ever before here's the problem a lot of women are exiting too a lot of women are exiting at the graduate level more than men at the postgraduate level and at the professional level so what does that tell me it tells me we're we're doing our work reforming the culture women are able to imagine themselves and stem roles but the culture of our graduate postgraduate and doctorate programs and stem companies is still hostile towards women so that reformation work must continue which by the way you are doing by existing you are doing that just by being there by normalizing a phd level electrical engineer who is a woman you are making space for more women to stick it out in difficult culture and ultimately at some point to feel at home so i hope if there's some hope you can find it's the same hope that i'm finding and that's in you you just showing up unapologetically doing your work carrying your expertise which is considerable you doing what you are doing is changing the world the world is becoming what you hope for by the simple act of you existing [Music] ask science mike would not be possible without the support of our amazing sponsors and this week i'd like to tell you about one of my favorites betterhelp.com betterhelp is an online counseling service that works with individuals couples with teens and works through all kinds of life issues it's the support you need from a professional licensed and vetted counselor and what i love about better help is that they match you to a therapist so you go to their site and you fill out a questionnaire and then they have a team of professionals who finds a professional therapist with the training and experience in the particular issue that you are facing now you know it's not always a fit personality-wise a therapist that's normal finding a new therapist is incredibly difficult better help makes that easy too you can request a new 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today and get 10 percent off your first month's service and you can do that by visiting betterhelp.com sciencemike [Music] our next question is an email question it reads hello mike in a long ago episode you were talking about probabilistic wave functions and if i recall correctly on one of your social media pages you described yourself in terms of a collapse into matter first of all what was your line i loved it but i can't find it my memory is falling short second your brief mention of this concept in that episode has plagued my faux scientist mind i like you am an uneducated science lover and my attempted research into the field and concepts of probability wave function collapse have yielded nothing that is palatable to a novice please help if a wave function collapse is triggered by an observer this denotes reality outside of the wave function but if mass wave functions collapsing and proximity to one another define reality does it then where does the observer come from or are multiple wave functions observing each other and thus causing each other's collapse in a chain reaction resulting in reality if my consciousness is an observer causing wave function collapse chains reactions would it not be different from the collapses cause and therefore perceived by your consciousness this would seem to support the idea of multiple if not infinite co-existing and overlapping realities but in this context it would seem distinguishable from the multiverse idea and that these infinite coexisting and overlapping realities would also be constantly interacting with one another and perhaps in some ways reliant on one another can you explain how probabilistic wave functions and collapses work and their relationship with matter reality consciousness and perspective love you love your work in peace love and entropy danica i hope you can hear the genuine joy in my voice as i read your question danica uh i loved it in so many ways one is it is so familiar to me i remember when i first started to study quantum mechanics seriously and your head starts to spin as you feel like you are on the verge of a total understanding of the most mystical reality that surrounds us and two i was thinking about how many wonderful listeners of this program simply cannot even follow the question because by the time you wrote this you have done some significant study on your own and so let me start by saying this answer that i'm about to offer in response to that question will probably be the hardest answer to follow in all 240 episodes of this program and i would like to apologize to all of you who have not studied and are not interested in quantum mechanics but remember what this show is about every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response and so it is my delight to dig into these questions your first question what was the line about probabilistic wave functions and i will tell you i have no idea it would shock you how many things i say and then forget this is absolutely one of those and if i said probabilistic wave functions which i absolutely believe that i did what i was referring to was quantum wave functions and quantum wave functions are wave functions that we understand and relate to probabilistically so yeah but if you want you'll find more fertile soil if you look up quantum wave functions instead of probabilistic wave functions now what is a quantum wave function i find it helpful to consider the words themselves uh quantum is simply means the smallest divisible unit in a given physical system photons would be a quanta of light quarks would be a quanta of matter as we understand it today except when they're not which is why quantum physics is pretty confusing um and then a wave function is a mathematical description or system describing an oscillating factor or measurement what the heck if you imagine an ocean wave going up and down and we were to graph the height of that wave on a sheet of paper you would see a wave on the paper that looked like a lot like the ocean wave itself okay so that would be a wave function now quantum wave functions are different and special because they are not real i'll say that again quantum wave functions are special because they are not real in the way the wave function describing an ocean wave is real this is because quantum wave functions must use imaginary numbers to be descriptive and then we use math to cancel out the imaginary values on two sides of an equation in order to extrapolate and project real values that help us assign the probability of the range of outcomes for a given property of a quantum particle like its position or its momentum for example and a quantum wave function collapses from something called superposition and superposition is when you have multiple eigenstates that can describe a single particle or a single quanta and when that moves into a single eigenstate an eigenstate there being this is extremely complex um similar to a projection of an eigenvalue um which itself you kind of have to understand differential equations to ethan talk about um but that's when we talk about a collapse we're talking about finding out something more definitive about a quantum particle okay so um an observer in quantum mechanics and this is very important this is where a lot of confusion with quantum mechanics comes up an observer doesn't mean like consciousness it doesn't mean awareness an observer is a particle so for an observer for me to observe my microphone that i'm talking into light has to bounce off of that microphone and then strike my retina right that causes that collapse that is the observation that photon it represents the observer that is what carries the information to me and so that's fundamental on observers but then when you get into your other questions about like do wave functions cause each other to collapse probably do wave functions observe each other is is is reality kind of a a symphony of uh wave functions causing each other to collapse or is there special types of observers these are unanswered questions in quantum physics um i've heard more deterministic notions of quantum physics and i've heard more kind of uh almost symphony of multiverse that there's an infinite number of valid perspectives in reality and that's just a debate that physicists have so the good news is uh that you have done enough study to get to the great questions and the great questions in my minds are the one that no one has an answer to yet i think that's really exciting but i only think that's exciting after i had enough time to feel frustrated by it because for me for a while cosmology and quantum mechanics was a new religion a new way for me to get a hold onto reality and control it through understanding and the way i once did using theology and so i was very frustrated when i went far enough in my study of quantum mechanics to find that in some of the most fundamental questions there were not definitive answers and in many cases there were no answers at all and now i just delight in it the search for knowledge and information and understanding is so delightful to me sometimes i'm almost disappointed when questions have definitive answers so danica i hope that you continue to read and learn and grow and delight in quantum physics and every area of the sciences that you enjoy and i hope that you're not too let down that in terms of the relationships between wave functions and matter reality consciousness and perspective itself well gosh i don't have answers to those questions because nobody does [Music] hey science mike i was wondering why do human beings talk to babies and animals especially our pets in funny voices i don't hear us using those voices in any other situation and it seems like a pretty universal behavior and i wonder if that is culturally driven or if there's anything in our biology that drives that or some combination thanks one of the reasons i started a show about science is there is something frustrating in science media to me and that is someone would have a question about how something works and then a science literate journalist would write an article about it and they would look up the different theories and hypotheses that surrounded that question and then write one of them is like definitive and then write others as kind of dissenting viewpoints and uh i often found that in a search for readership publications overstate their certainty and this is one of those times in fact this is one of the questions that inspired me to launch ask science mike in the first place because the fact is to my knowledge we don't definitively know where that funny sing-songy voice comes from when we talk to babies and animals because you're just so cute right um i have a special voice i used to talk to my dog ruby with um i think it is so it wasn't the one i just did that was so subtle compared to my ruby voice uh it is obnoxious in its uh cuteness uh but i just i see her furry face i can't help myself and uh i've often been curious about where this comes from we do know that it is common to the point of near universality in our culture in most other cultures as well this is often called infant directed speech or mother ease and although there are cultures who don't use a specific infant directed speech tone or timber uh or tambour i suppose is the pronunciation of that word timber timber not honestly no idea um anyway uh there are cultures that don't use it the overwhelming majority of cultures do and the cultures that don't use infinite directed speech not infant infinite infant directed speech uh they tend to not they have some restrictions about communicating with babies in the first place um the sing-songy mother reese that we use uh it is commonly used with both infants and with animals interestingly enough it seems to be used in context where the being we're addressing a child or an animal we believe has a limited capacity to understand our speech babies and dogs to our understanding just they don't have significant language skills now what's interesting is we don't use mother ease when speaking to someone who does not understand our language but does understand other languages so i wouldn't go up to a foreign language speaker and say oh do you know where the potty is like that's not how we do that in the same way i wouldn't walk up to someone who speaks american sign language and use a sing-songy baby voice somehow our brains understand when people have a capacity for language in general even if it's not our language versus not having linguistic capacity as is the case with infants and dogs now is that cultural is that an eight i have no idea i have no idea i couldn't find any convincing cases uh that that uh sold me um now it is interesting in one experiment that puppies really do respond more readily to infant-directed speech than normal vocal tones although with adult dogs those differences were not found and researchers surmise that's probably because adult dogs what they care about is the familiarity of a voice over the tone of a voice my dog ruby would much rather hear my voice in a normal tone than a stranger's voice in a sing-songy one and that's because ruby is perfect in every way for those of you who did not know that she is the single greatest living dog of today or any point in human history so i [Laughter] do love that dog we have the best snuggles y'all we just we just have the best snuggles and i'll walk into the room and she'll kind of she she has this thing where she puts her head on her shoulder and then tilts her head forward like are you gonna come over for a snuggle or do i have to get up and that's more than you needed to know i just love that dog and my affection for her and somehow my understanding that she does not actually conversely understand english means i use i use mother ease when i speak to ruby mother ease um yeah so i've got a couple uh links if you want to dig deeper in that but this is one of those another unanswered perhaps unanswerable question although perhaps a little more accessible than quantum wave functions what i do know is infant directed speech is delightful i can't get enough of it and so i'm completely unself-conscious about using that manner of speaking when i am talking to animals although i will admit i don't actually use it much with babies i tend to talk to babies in a very similar manner as i would talk to an adult which probably describes my children's of vocabulary scores they've really they had to pop open the dictionary and the thesaurus and uh and pre-k in order to understand what dad was asking them to do so anyway uh great question i really enjoyed it and here we have it the final question of ask science mike and it came from email hey mike i hope you're doing well these days my question has to do with jordan peterson and i want to preface this by saying that i have no interest in instigating an internet takedown as i'm sure you don't either but i have heard you obliquely reference his work in the past and i was wondering if you'd be willing to go into a bit more detail specifically i am curious about the ways in which you see peterson's work appeal to people and draw them in in this rather dual process type of way where he seems to speak on this highly intellectualized and neutral way while simultaneously igniting fierce and ardent and what often seems like very exclusionary stances from his followers the reason i ask about this is because i've had several friends and family members suggest his work to me and i have tried unsuccessfully to pinpoint why i find him deeply deeply saddening and painful to listen to i've listened to many of his lectures in order to put together a cohesive argument as to why i disagree with him on maybe the more meta processing level of his work but each time i've tried to do it in the past i find myself just feeling very heavy and raw and have given up trying to form an intellectual critique of his stances due to this emotional response would you perhaps be able to tackle this one why is he appealing to so many and in what ways do you see his work as harmful especially to marginalized populations thanks so much carrie carrie thank you for your question even though i don't like talking about jordan peterson at all and not just because his followers can be aggressive and not just because there's some overlap in our followings a lot of the men who listen to ask science mike are also listeners and followers of jordan peterson's work i'm not afraid to push back i get pushed back i get some of the sadness and the heaviness that you feel trying to confront peterson's work i feel that too um when people speak of emotional labor some people roll their eyes and say that's not a thing but it is true that if a viewpoint is sufficiently antagonistic to your existence or the existence of people you care about there is an emotional process required to engage that work and often white men find that a notion ridiculously and of course i believe this is because white men are so deeply culturalized to be dissociated from their feelings which is one of the tools of white supremacy and already i have lost jordan peterson because jordan peterson embodies this unexamined white male lens and the way society treats that white male lens as the so-called neutral frame if we reduce everything to ideas then everything is up for discussion and debate so the petersons of the world tend to deny that for example discussing incarceration incarceration rates for black men has a different emotional consequence for a black man and a black woman than a white man or a white woman and that's the big split in terms of your specific question an intellectual takedown of the work no i can't do it but that doesn't matter people who are better writers than me and better thinkers than me have already done it so i've got two links for you one is called why jordan peterson is always wrong which is a click baity terrible headline for a quite good article jordan peterson is not always wrong nobody is always wrong but that does get the clicks i get it and the other one more reasonably is titled jordan peterson explained i recommend them both because they will go in point by point into the things jordan peterson says and the controversy that surrounds them and why it's upsetting to people and that will give you lots of fodder for discussions with your friends and family who recommend jordan peterson and instead i would like to offer you my experiences because i am so similar to the core constituency of jordan peterson's audience i am white i am a man for most of my life i identified as straight and so i kind of i fit that that box jordan peterson's followers the people that buy his books and follow his media overwhelmingly are white and male and generally straight as well and many white men like myself we're raised to be good people and want to be good people and we're taught that you know racism is something we did away with in the civil rights movement we all got together we listened to that intelligent reverend king and we just stopped being racist and women work now and we did it social transformation done and then you start encountering people who offer different perspectives and rather inconveniently they tend to be people of color they tend to be black they tend to be women they tend to be gay or lesbian or trans or intersex or disabled and these people start talking about what's happened in their lives in a way that undercuts what you've been told that everyone is equal and in fact they tell you my life has been bad and in many ways you have had a privilege because of the ways you're different than me it's been easier for you to get a job to get an education to have family wealth all of these things it has added up to a systemic advantage and many many men start to wake up notice i didn't say woke but they start to wake up to the inequality in the world they start to do some reading some thinking some studying and some emotional work and then they go this is not okay because i'm a good person i want to be a part of the solution and then having read their first book on racism they do what men are trained to do especially white men especially white straight men and that is what lead and teach and so they show up to social change movements hundreds of years in the making ready to fix it and somebody says sit the [ \_\_ ] down what are you doing and that hurts their feelings and that by the way both of those things are valid number one it is valid when a marginalized person from a marginalized group who is doing advocacy work corrects the uninformed contribution of a newly waking white man and it is valid for the feelings of that man to be hurt all feelings are valid what we do with our feelings however can be troublesome and so often it takes one or two or five of these exchanges where a white man feels rebuffed by a martial marginalized group that he feels like he's here to help and he says hey i'm just here to help un unrealizing or unaware that that is further cementing his own privilege the option to not engage in a social change movement or even a conversation about social change and this is where the jordan petersons of the world appear and they say yeah there are problems with the old way of doing things but these cultural marxists and these post-modernists are perpetuating a victim mindset that will never fix things and they put white men back into a place where white banking can say i am not a part of that old white supremacist crowd i'm not a part of that sexist crowd i am enlightened and i am intellectual and i am so enlightened that i'm actually enlightened beyond the people who organize black lives matter or the people who organize me too or the people who do work around pride or disability so white men get to put back on that teacher leader identity and it is psychologically soothing and that is why 12 simple rules is a mega bestseller because men who feel lost in the legitimate critique of whiteness and of masculinity also don't know how to find a home in a truly pluralistic egalitarian environment friend's going to tell you something i have been told hundreds of times not dozens hundreds i say that word intentionally by women and people of color and queer folks and disabled folks that they've never heard a straight white man speak like i do not that they rarely hear but that they never hear white men speak about issues of marginalization the way that i do so what's happening because i'm not that smart i am not some enlightened person i don't have some uh elevated position of mental health my gosh i i've had some some of the most challenging mental health periods of my life in the last 90 days i am a a barely contained mess right and i am a very empathetic person i will say i i that is special about me the degree of empathy i have but i am not the only empathetic white man in the world so what's happening i i've been thinking about that a lot and about jordan peterson carrie i haven't lost your question this stuff is hard social change is hard confronting collective injustice produced by our own lifestyles is hard and worse the problems that we're talking about right now there are no simple solutions we want we crave simple solutions where none exists there is no simple solution to police brutality there is no simple solution to homelessness but humans are fundamental psychological makeup resists that we crave simplicity and so people on all points of ideological spectrums gain huge followings by promising certainty and simplicity jordan peterson is simply one of these people as are most people who are popular public figures who are intellectuals or advocates entertainers often get away with this because they don't have to they don't have to be known for believing things just making you laugh make you cry whatever they do and peterson's over simplification is simple he is conflating the victim mindset of personal psychology with victimhood in a sociological or social context here's what i mean it is disempowering in your personal psychology to have a victim mindset and recovery and re-empowerment following trauma often involves being able to move out of and beyond a victim mindset on a highly personalized journey with the support of a mental health professional i am a survivor of sexual assault and for me to function as a person i had to go through a very difficult multi-decade journey of moving out of victimhood in that situation to feel empowered and that was important and when we study psychology we understand that focusing on an internal locus of motivation and control are important when we focus on the things that we can change and make those changes there no matter what our external circumstances we can be happier and we can be more fulfilled those things are true and just because those things are true doesn't mean that victims do not exist just because moving out of a victim mentality can be a positive movement in personal psychology does not mean there aren't corrupt and oppressive systems that impact huge groups of people white supremacy isn't a myth because of the psychology around a victim mindset and this is the fundamental in my mind misunderstanding that jordan peterson is peddling to his audience because for a woman working in an environment for example with a phd in electrical electrical engineering and there's very few women around it's not just a matter of her not having a victim mindset no the entire culture actually does need to be reformed for women to have equal access in stem fields our medical system really does offer systemic access barriers to people of color and especially black people and there really are systemic access barriers to disabled people and no amount of telling them to get out of a victim mindset will fix that fundamental threat on their life and their livelihood and their quality of life and that to me is where jordan peterson misses something fundamental and where so many people like me who are white and who are male miss the boat and they just don't understand fundamentally what my work is about is making people feel safe enough to experience true empathy it's not an intellectual exercise it really isn't as a human person george floyd awakens my empathy and as my empathy is awakened i say i can't continue to go through a pattern of life that results in people dying the way that george floyd died and so i'll make whatever changes i need to make as quickly as i need to make them in order to end that and then i find out that there are no changes i alone can make although there are changes i alone can and should make i will actually need to participate actively in societal movements to address that kind of injustice and there's injustice everywhere and as you start to become aware of that and as you practice empathy it's heavy this is why progressive social change advocates talk about self-care and they talk about emotional labor because the jordan petersons of the world they help rock your feelings asleep into numbness and there's a richness of life when we move beyond numbness but there's also great challenges and great difficulties i bet if i met jordan peterson we could sit down over a meal and have a fine conversation i bet he would say things that made me feel angry and i hope with the work i've been doing in therapy i would be able to express that anger in a productive way that shared information without making mr peterson feel threatened when i think of jordan peterson the main feeling i feel is not frustration but empathy because i understand like every person alive jordan peterson is moving through life trying to manage his feelings and that the things that he believes and teaches and shares those are all results of a nervous system trying to find safety and belonging in a difficult world cary that's also true of your friends and family who'd recommend jordan peterson to you somehow jordan peterson is providing them a sense of comfort and belonging which i believe is one of the most powerful things we can do as people and also one of the most powerful agents for change in the world [Music] on january the 18th of 2015. the first episode of ask science fight came out at the suggestion of followers on twitter who wished we could have more time to talk about science on the liturgist podcast what a journey this has been i have so enjoyed every week taking your questions on this show in this format and so many people have been a part of this program over the years thank you all for listening this whole time it means so much to me greg nordine thank you for making this show sound great all these years even though this last episode i'm gonna do the editing and sound design myself andrew golucky thank you for coming in so early in helping me organize the process of getting people's questions onto the program caitlin hermstad thank you for giving the show new life and then taking over my whole life victory palmisano tanner herr and brent cradle thank you for coming in and showing me how professionals do their work and all of you patrons on patreon thank you for your faithful and consistent support all of these years and i don't just mean money i'm so excited next week to start a new chapter with everyone in the cozy robot show but it would feel strange to not take a moment to acknowledge what this show has been in my life and what it may have been in yours and finally jeb botiford people have sung me that theme song that you wrote in coffee shops and airports and convention centers all over the world thank you for that wonderful contribution i think more than any it helped shape and inform what this program became everyone thank you for listening and as always i can't wait to talk with you again next week take care my friends