Brett Hall

andrew

Aaron Stupple

Jurij Kulik

Naval

Christopher

Kiran

Keith

Aditya

Matt Anderson

Aiden Matt

Shadi Bucklin

Arjun Khemani

Jeff

Nico

Wayne Marsh

Siphiwe

Stephen Mix

Jess

Logan Chipkin

PARSA

Zelalem

On Twitter @ToKTeacher

Bio: https://www.bretthall.org/about.html

Podcast: https://www.bretthall.org/tokcast/tokcast

Also on Naval’s podcast: https://nav.al

 When I say boys are better, boys are better at physics, in other words, by the

 metric that they perform better in the examinations at the end. That's one metric,

 okay? Fair enough, it's not a great metric but it's a metric. They perform better in

 spite of the disincentives and the lack of help and the special attention that

 is paid to girls when it comes to education broadly but the sciences in particular.

 If you're in a co-educational school, boys and girls, the girls will have special incentives,

 special classes, female-only assistants, all that kind of stuff that comes along with simply being

 a female in this day and age denied to boys 

 because it's presumed boys don't need it because

 there's a systemic entrenched sexism in the education system that's biased against girls

 when in fact the absolute opposite is true. The absolute opposite is true.

 Boys are routinely derided, masculinity is regarded as toxic, all of that stuff that

 we've heard about for a long time from the conservative speaking sense on this topic,

 people like Jordan Peterson. It's been known for decades now that actually girls are,

 broadly speaking, outperforming boys except still in those areas like mathematics and physics. you

 But, despite that, despite that, the universities, I guess because the administration and the

 universities are now replete with administrators, there's more administrators than there are

 academics, insist on this moral axiom that is diversity parity, in terms of gender, I

 guess in terms of sexuality, and certainly now, of course, in terms of ethnicity or race.

 You've got to have, I don't know, more non-white people in astronomy, or whatever the course

 happens to be. I don't know if this discussion's going on in psychology, by the way.

 Is it true in psychology departments they're trying to get more males in?

 Because the overwhelming majority of psychology students, undergraduates, are, of course, female. Again, I digress.

 This article refers to a paper published in Nature Astronomy, but basically you don't 

 need to go to the paper because the article tells you everything you need to know about it.

 They've said, this article has said, the paper published in Nature Astronomy reports how a 

 National Australian Astronomy Centre achieves equal numbers of women and men using science.

 So they've used science, a scientific approach. How is it? Well, the 

 scientific approach is, well, they got published in Nature Astronomy.

 So it counts, therefore, as science because they got 

 published in a scientific journal. That's one metric.

 But no, they go on to say, quote, we used research in sociology and psychology 

 to develop evidence-based strategies and to create a supportive and positive 

 culture in our centre, says Professor Lisa Cooley, the founding director of Astro3D,

 the Australian Research Council Centre for All Sky 

 Astrophysics and Three Dimensions and the lead author on the paper.

 Professor Cooley now leads the Centre for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian.

 All right, end quote. So they've used research in 

 sociology and psychology. Oh, well, I'm convinced then.

 Well, there we go. We've got the hard science of the 

 sociology and psychology being brought to bear on astronomy.

 These people don't even know what science is. Somehow they're professional astronomers. They're professional astronomers.

 The article goes on to say, our success offers a model to other organizations

 especially in the physical sciences where participation rates for women

 continue to be well behind the biological sciences and where gender

 equality has remained stubbornly low says professor blah blah blah. So they're

 saying here that the participation of physical sciences remains stubbornly low

 participation rates for women. They also go on to say that women tend to drop out

 of, you know, being, you know, being in the physical sciences. Maybe because they

 become mothers, a more important role in society than being an astronomer, by far.

 Maybe because they find that it's boring and uninteresting and fair enough. There

 could be a whole bunch of reasons. But of course it's insinuated here that it's

 sexism, that there's something, some bias against them. Never mind that astronomy is

 already the most woke of the physical sciences out there. Well, I shouldn't say

 that. I know that it's woke. I don't know how woke industrial chemistry is. I don't

 know how woke geophysics is. In fact, I tend to think that geology is probably

 not woke at all. They don't care. They drink beer and they dig up the earth.

 They're pretty unwoke. At least last time I was associated with them, which was about a

 decade ago. They seem pretty unwoke, unlike the astronomers. So here, they're saying

 that the success in having astronomy be 50-50 parity should be emulated in other physical

 sciences. Because in the biological sciences, they're doing well. At no point does the

 idea that, well, girls might be a little bit more interested in biological sciences. And

 let's say in some of those biological sciences, if you want to call sociology and psychology

 a biological science, let's say, where women already make up far more than 50% of your

 undergraduates and your professors, is there going to be an equal project to try and bring

 down the number of women there and increase the 

 number of men? Of course not. Of course there isn't.

 Anyway, I'm not going to read the entire 

 article. It's just, you know, woke talking point after

 woke talking point. And at no point does 

 anyone consider the fact that there are other areas

 where women outnumber men, but that's not a problem. But where men outnumber women,

 it is a problem. Why? We never discussed the fact that there's just inherent differences

 in people's interests, curiosity, desire to go into a particular field. Whether that interest

 comes from some innate knowledge, okay, we're not tabula rasa, maybe there is a genetic

 component here. You know, Jordan Peterson talks about how males are interested in things,

 females are interested in people, in relationships. Maybe there's that, maybe there is a genetic

 component or maybe it's just culturally the way we're brought up. Maybe it's both, a combination

 thereof. But whatever the case, it's a fact of our circumstance that when boys and girls

 graduate from school, they want to do different things. Why are we forcing girls or coercing

 girls almost, strongly encouraging girls to go into the sciences rather than go into the

 areas they've traditionally been more interested in, and in fact are more interested in? We're

 enticing them under false pretenses. Hey, come and do this, you're going to like this,

 you're a girl, you'll like astrophysics, come on, just do this, you know, it's what you

 should be doing, you're really good at it, 

 even if they're not. Why are we doing this?

 And then they complain that females are dropping out at higher rates, maybe because you kind

 when you knew the whole time that they weren't

 all that interested in it. By virtue of the 

 fact they didn't get the marks, and they would

 have got the marks if they hadn't been absolutely fascinated by the subject, and they would

 have put it as their first preference rather 

 than their fifth. They wanted to go into nursing

 or into psychology or into sociology, to 

 areas that you say aren't a problem, the areas

 that apparently you're deferring to to tell you there's a problem in astronomy. Woke irrationality,

 and anti-rational means that allow, that don't allow people within these institutions

 to even complain about the politics of the institution. Oh 

 well, academic astronomy is dying a slow and strange death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anFm0rKidkY

00:00 Introduction04:16 The physics of greenhouse gases10:46 CO2 Fertilization (the greening of Earth)11:50 People are planet engineers15:38 The double stand...

Net Zer0

 I was just announcing on Twitter, X, whatever,

 that TopCast is on a brief hiatus as I wait for my special guest,

 Chiara Marletta, for episode 200 to be available for an interview.

 And so that will happen the week after the coming week.

 And so then we'll be back to normal TopCast programming.

 In the meantime, I'm using my... because I want her to be number 200.

 I know it's an arbitrary number and whatever else, but hey,

 nice and neat if I have episode 100 with David Deutch, episode 200, Chiara Marletta.

 So I say that because my other podcast, lesser known, called the 3Rs,

 Reason, Rationality and Reality, over there on Substack,

 and I'm putting out videos for these, and 

 I'll probably put out one or two more this week.

 This latest one was about net zero, environmentalism,

 and I wanted to ask the Brainstrust here if they've got any ideas on the following,

 because I honestly don't know the answer to this question. It's a conundrum.

 The conundrum is what I might call the paradox of wood.

 Wood, when I was a kid, growing up, was said to be,

 well, don't use wood, it's environmentally unfriendly,

 don't build your house with wood, that's bad,

 because if you're building a house with wood,

 that means you're chopping down trees, and deforestation is a terrible evil,

 so wood is the environmentally unfriendly thing to use,

 a push to use more bricks and more metal

 and more plastics and that kind of thing.

 Then things kind of... Well, actually, no, it didn't all change,

 because at the same time, recycling became a huge deal, right?

 You're supposed to recycle everything so you save the forest.

 The forests are being cut down in the Amazon,

 so we've got to start recycling to save the forests,

 that kind of thing. So you had recycled products,

 everything from recycled building materials through to, obviously, paper that was printed

 through to toilet paper, recycled. So that went on when I was a kid.

 It's still going on to a certain extent,

 which is the question I want to come to.

 And it's that today, it seems to be reasonably well-agreed that wood as a

 building material is regarded as a carbon sink. If you're a greenie, if

 you're an environmentalist, use wood because that house is storing carbon

 dioxide, effectively it's storing carbon, preventing that carbon from bonding with

 oxygen in the atmosphere to lead to global warming. So if you're

 fully on board with the climate change thing and the global warming thing, build

 your house out of wood, have your entire house, you know, furnished with wood

 products because, hey, that's all a big carbon sink, you're helping keeping the

 carbon out of the atmosphere, right, as 

 long as you don't burn it all, as long as it

 doesn't burn down in a terrible fire, etc. So that's going on, so we're telling

 people use wood, use lots and lots and lots of wood. But on the other hand,

 things like recycled toilet paper are still a thing, and they're marketed as

 being environmentally friendly. Don't use paper, don't use wood chip, but I don't

 understand why. It would seem to me, to be obviously the case, that recycling

 takes a vast amount of energy. You've got to take all that stuff that's being used,

 clean it, you've got to use chemicals to

 do that, and you've got to put it all back together, which takes energy, and

 then you mass-produce it, and blah. Compared to, you want to get your toilet

 paper from, you know, trees that have been freshly cut down and put through the

 wood chipper, and then you do whatever you normally do, that seems to take less

 energy. You don't have to clean anything, you're just chopping down the tree, and

 the tree is, of course, renewable. Just plant another tree, right? There you go,

 and people are doing this, and in fact, lots of the wood products that are used

 are not old growth forests, they're new growth forests, they're literally farming

 trees. So I don't get why, on the one hand, wood is environmentally friendly when

 you use it in your house, but it's not environmentally friendly if you're using

 it as toilet paper. This is a weird paradox 

 that's going on with wood products and trees right now.

https://x.com/tokteacher/status/1726756491162730499?s=46

@VadenMasrani @Sam_kuyp Airchat works well. Yes to a "natural" conversation but problem is if the discussion is to be (in part, and not my preference) about what someone said or wrote (like Popper) then it's hard to pick up a book mid conversation and quote. Hence: async works for that better.

Brett Hall (@ToKTeacher) on X

 Well, I tried my best here in an attempt to extol 

 the virtues of AirChat, which I genuinely think for a

 discussion which tends in the direction of a debate, which is 

 what my interlocutor here seems to want, AirChat would be ideal.

 I mean, on the one hand here, our fellow 

 says he wants to have a natural discussion and

 other, he says he's not a fan of the format.

 So I don't know what's going on because he 

 wants to talk about what Popper actually said.

 It seems to be. And so many people want to 