Peer Review is Dead: Publishing & Progress (in Science and Politics).

this is the kind of video I don't think
any other channel does without a script or without extensive editing but I'm gonna try to do this freestyle the moral of the story hashtag spoilers is that peer review is not what people think it is I got my best girl here Melissa off camera so I'm talking to her in as much as I'm targeting the camera to keep this spontaneous keep this off script keep keep this let's let's keep this train in a constant state of derailment okay there's there's a hilarious example I'm gonna edit in a clip of this here of a study that was published in multiple respected peer-reviewed journals that took the completely science fiction concept of having magical superpowers in the star wars movies and published it as as peer-reviewed science in 2017 a paper was written about midi-chlorians a made-up microscopic life-form from the Star Wars franchise the paper was a mash-up of a Wikipedia article on the mitochondria with star wars fiction even including the monologue about Darth Plagueis the wise from Revenge of the Sith this article was published by four journals the American Journal of medical and biological research the International Journal of molecular biology open access the Austin Journal of pharmacology and therapeutics and the American research Journal of Biosciences would anyone use this as proof that molecular biology is a fraud that biologists are corrupt yeah it's like the technical made-up terms that are in the Star Wars movies for how people yeah you know in the movies they get these magical superpowers there's some jargon for that in there there says the universe now I think this was of course partly to to prove the extent to which academic peer-reviewed is flawed even in the hard sciences but I think this example was chosen because any one of those key terms if a person doing the peer review just thought oh I don't really know what that term means and Google did a Google search would immediately direct them to look Star Wars fan page right so this is like the you know the worst way to kind of Lampoon you know the system but my point in this video is not that peer review is a good system and that the system is broken but that people fundamentally misunderstand what peer review is so whether it's good or bad I think by the end of this video you'll you'll have a sense it's not what you think it is now all right so Melissa you probably grew up with some praise of the scientific method this this is a real difference in people's upbringing in the school system like so did you did you learn the scientific method is like the guiding light of Western civilization get them to look ok off the top of your head what is the scientific method what why does it matter was this well what was the etiology or what was the ideal of the scientific method that you you know you grew up is a short memory there aren't corrupting factors from one another do this test variables and look for you in terms of like romanticizing this for kids or making giving it life in the classroom were you given examples like I mean sorry I'm thinking of examples I learned much later in life there was a famous example of a scientist in England who discovered that cholera was being spread by a public well or something well or maybe was just Isaac Newton in the Apple in the discovery of gravity or something I mean was there something given you to say like hey this was the difference between the Dark Ages when people you know Oh people didn't know to wash their hands with soap and water and the emergence we given some kind of set of snares nothing sticky remember right now they aren't coming to mind but you know so right so my for my generation this stuff was different because partly cuz that terrible education in Canada but partly because the the dark cloud of the atom bomb was really hanging over Western culture and when you grow up that was that it really dissipated like what is science and what is the scientific method um [Music] you know the atom bomb and even the Holocaust itself you know that because the Holocaust you know it wasn't just mass murderer it was technologically sophisticated factory production you know applied to mass murder and any gas chambers this was a new technology you know I just say the image of the progress of science a new technology and also sir just just keeping all the way real the link between Nazi experiments and vivisection in their own culture and the push at that time try to end testing of cosmetics on rabbits those things added up this is long before I'd heard of veganism or became vegan that that added up to give science a really menacing quality so I think that that relief for my generation I was at the end of that period time because after about 1989 1991 all that stuff with the atom bomb starts to disappear indeed the memory of the Holocaust of World War two was increasingly kind of put in a locker it's not the you know because for me my grandparents were still alive that generation was still around so that the the etiology of scientific progress I think starts to change with the end of the Cold War right well you you grew up with more of a straightforward positive view of scientific method and for Western civilization it was a project one I believe I was in elementary school we actually went to the top the roof of my school and we dropped eggs that were encapsulated in various contraptions to see if the egg would crack or not and you know what what was more effective like what padding was more effective than this is like re-enacting Galileo's experiments with thorns and stuff yeah like chemistry experiments too like you know there are some well I think I think this is part of you know the very definition of modernity is the idea that civilization is scientific progress as opposed to the idea that civilization is tradition you know which may well include religion that you know with tradition legends common you know common fables that the the the fabric of folkways that's a bit of a technical term but still it's completely if you'd ever put the folkways you know the you known it's not folk culture folklore or tradition but it's a scientific progress is the very stuff of of civilization itself as they say from my generation that took a hit I think this this is the illusion that people project on to peer review so like what is the difference between people dying of cholera and people having you know modern hygiene now again I think what were actually taught in schools that the difference is the scientific method that we discover the necessity of sewage treatment and that we had to reorganize our cities and stop drinking river water that hadn't run poo in it so what a human civilization you know we learned the hard way bit sir I don't feel that's another famous example you know doctors would handle sick people and corpses right right and they would transmit the disease yeah yeah yeah that's even during the early life of Sigmund Freud those basic concepts about transmission of disease were still not properly understood sorry I read a biography of Sigmund Freud that don't let some of that stuff in Vienna you know the the what were then the breaking discoveries when he was coming up as a student and changing attitudes towards medical science and progress um but that's not what peer review is that's no interview is at all neither in its function nor in its dysfunction so is it unlike this funny example of the Star Wars pseudoscience getting in there's another example I can put up a you know where we're an author as scientists I suppose as a joke wrote a hilariously awful article which is kind of a Lampoon on postmodern jargon I managed to get that published even though it was completely meaningless in this kind of thing whether it's in the pure sciences or the social sciences are not here so much concerned with the dysfunction at the real function and limits of peer review so my perspective on this is partly as someone who cares passion about politics and I mean this comes up even when you discuss something like Wikipedia how can you possibly expect Wikipedia to have Newt politically neutral information over there their editorial process to work no I I'm not saying Wikipedia is the worst probably Wikipedia is better than most newspapers in terms of giving you a somewhat balanced you know variety of sources but whenever you get in anything that's really politically dicey you know and you whenever you get to applica pd article has a little lock symbol in the corner you know there are people who passionately care about this issue there are people who are willing to tell lies people willing to back up their lives and they may well have sources in print so I mean most extreme and easy case is something like Holocaust denial they have sources they can cite of course those sources are dishonest and bad and wrong but I mean you could have an endless series of revision Wars of editorial struggles at Wikipedia for how you're gonna write you know the history of the Holocaust so how can how can we Cappy do work now by the same token so I've been involved in politics basically all my life I had a period of about ten years where I was a scholar of Buddhism no in case you're new to the channel I was a very edgy scholar of Buddhism who was interested in social political problems so I didn't turn off my brain within Buddhism I was genuinely interested in for example the hit slavery you know the plight of the poor and all kinds of political and economic issues you know past and present but I was nevertheless a canonical Tara betta Buddhist scholar how do you expect a peer review committee in Japan that may be primarily staffed by Buddhist monks to have a what does peer review mean when the people reviewing your paper are Japanese Buddhist monks in a conservative Buddhist university or even they may literally be located in a monastery where they have this this meeting right if that's a little bit too exotic for you you can change it to a group of Catholic priests and you present them with an essay I wrote an essay about the history of slavery and how the Catholic Church was involved in all the terrible things you guys did and and how the priests were involved and they would torture people and the priests would interrogate them yeah I did all this historical research about how you guys were now look I have not been involved in journals of Catholic studies I think it probably are some journals of Catholic studies where we're you know the editors even though they're their true belief in Catholics may really be people of merit and integrity and they say hey this is important part of our or history to publish but God says it's not my experience of Buddhism it's not right it's really not and uh not to get too deep into this but I mean an earlier video of myself talking to a professor a current professor of Buddhist studies well it was still proposing that I go back and get a PhD in Buddhism that door is still open to me I really do have enough background to very easily get get a PhD in that field which would change my whole life from this point out if I deign to do so and one of the points at which he suddenly got very defensive was where I simply talked about bias within the field and I backed that up you know I don't mean racism necessarily in a conventional lowbrow sense and what I said to him then also even though it was for the moment I said you know I think quite convincingly and quite clearly I said if you're talking to someone who's devoted their life to Japanese Buddhism what is their attitude towards a paper about Sri Lankan Buddhism or Buddhism in Cambodia I mean the geographic and linguistic divisions here Tibet is unimaginably far in both the far away both in language and culture and history and politics is a whole different set of questions from Sri Lanka and Thailand okay so you know but that those are exactly the forms of editorial bias but my point here is peer review doesn't work either way peer review doesn't work if I'm a specialist within Tibetan Buddhism and all the reviewers are pious true believing Tibetan monks and it doesn't work if it's someone from Tibet submitting their paper to a group of reviewers who are all Japanese Buddhist monks it uh turley breaks down and breaks the parts right it's not even that it break this is how it works this is what peer review really is it's a conclave of true believers giving their imprimatur to studies that agree with their Leighton biases and their political and ideological agendas so this has come up in debates about global warming and anti global warming so you've got ten academics with PhDs who do peer review for a publication they may be sincerely okay let's let's just say we started a publication we had ten professors who are all specifically passionate about endangered species conservation okay that's really their background and then over time because global warming is the big issue they start peer reviewing papers on global warming they probably don't have the same way the Japanese scholar I'm what expertise you can have relevant to my paper about slavery probably none even though it's a subtle shift this guy's an expert in in endangered species conservation all he sees is well this is a study with a lot of complex math in it and it's supporting a global warming hypothesis again he is not paid to take the time and go through those numbers in detail believe me if I if I write a paper for Buddhism and I'm quoting the original poly I'm dealing with complex linguistic and Esther nobody know I'm going to come back this is all part of part of the reality of peer review versus editing peer review is not editing it's not the same thing in terms of making an in-depth edit and evaluation and go when checking your math or checking your no no that's not gonna happen whether you have 10 scholars who are sincere sincere about wanting to ring the alarm bells on global warming they're gonna sit there and say okay good like this is on our side it seems to me it looks the data looks like data not gonna die on it rubber-stamp imprimatur it gets published and then the opposite is what you also see there's going to be some publication and they have managed to get ten scientists who are against global warming and they're rubber stamping publications that come the other way and within Buddhism I think that the saddest and sickest example this Trudeau within several videos on this channel is the science the complete [ __ ] masquerading as real science of publishing peer-reviewed scientific papers about meditation and that this stuff is just as fake as in the old days when Christians used to publish peer-reviewed studies trying to prove that prayer was effective the prayer was effective in healing people who are in a coma or that prayer had some impact on a on a plant that was a real that was published in all the newspapers they did a study where like they have one set of potted plants over here that nobody prayed to and that another set were that true believing Christians come in and pray to the plant and see which plants grew better it's like laughing with the friend of I was like even if this is true like why do you worship this God that you think makes a five percent difference and how rapidly uh you know a daisy grows out of a pot or something Wow so you know that that kind of junk science has always been around and this is this is not peer-review failing to work this is how peer review actually works so one of my perspectives on this is because I used to work as a professional editor of academic nonfiction and I was offered that job again in Taiwan my whole life would be different if I'd taken it but and I had authors from all over the world you know mostly white Europeans but also some Asians had quite a number of Japanese authors maybe one from Thailand one from neasha because they were mostly white Westerners but even then you saw a really deep culture like the difference between a German academic and a French academic and an American academic it's remarkable and I deal with all these people at phd's they'd be sending me their manuscripts or their book chapters and I'd be making the book but I'd be going through and really editing and one of the guys I have to get across the mists no editing is not peer review they were used to peer review we just wanted to scrap it before right and the peer reviewer isn't paid a salary and the peer reviewer doesn't correct grammatical error I mean they they may you know if they if they go through it in detail a peer reviewer is not going through and like this is the type of error of catch all the time you have the date 1763 in your essay and I just take the time to look it up oh no no no you meant 1673 all the time those are in there I ice I'm an editor not a peer of your I stop and I challenge you okay when you said this about the government policy at this time but in this section of the essay you said this instead there's a good that's editing and the editors role has withered up and died because basically the the publishing industry no longer as though the money for it and nobody's willing to pay for it you have to pay up an area di't hardworking person with attention you'll do it sorry on this clear editing is also not copy editing right copy editing a separate word then so does refer to as sub editing copy editing is where you just check for spelling errors and commas in the wrong place and you know formatting errors and hyphens this kind of stuff real editing real editorial is where you actually challenged I say okay you said this here there's no foot no how do you know that how do you back it up everyone got that furious with me because I just pointed out that he presented us it look you present an interesting argument here but you don't have any footnotes or context explaining it I don't know to what extent this is your original work or if this is something that's appeared in five other books before I need so he was furious he called down he calmed down and eventually we had several emails back and forth trying to iron this I was like look we're going to publish this you know you can't claim to be inventing the wheel with research that's not really a research and and this sort of thing so this is this is another of misconceptions now one of things people said about me back when I was a scholar of Buddhism I'd never seen this work for is it oh that aisel misery he's an origin he he analyzes things by looking at their origins was it was interesting comment about me okay um what is the origin of peer review I have brought this up with many many professors at a very brief story about it on my old blog and every single time professors were astounded to learn this okay peer review originated in the United Kingdom I was just a England Scotland and Wales but it really especially has to do with Scotland this came up a lot we were living in China I was explaining to my students that the real turning point in the history of Education in Europe actually took place in Scotland not England and then England caught up you know several generations later but Scotland started having these learn in societies in places like Edinburgh and Glasgow they sort of that were making remarkable scientific progress and discoveries also the Medical School in Edinburgh and so on but of course also in other fields even like sociology you know stuff that's more Social Sciences what have you they were doing and publishing a lot of original research and up to that point they had ye all the sensors office in England there still is the office of the censor there is still one man in England who has the title censor it's an official government post there it's not just we just complained about censorship as an abstract concept that's actually a job still today and in front of an NGO to be the censor he's one man and this one man you know I assume has a few secretaries and assistants what have you could not oversee these scientific publications and a couple centuries earlier in the Dark Ages you could you know and that was a job sorry this is also links to the different the split between Protestantism and Catholicism in Europe because before you know when England was was Catholic before Henry the eighth and it's put away that job was was really handled by Rome and for many parts of Europe it continued to be so when Copernicus started Pablo sorry it's really in one publication from Copernicus but he wrote this one important work and he published it only in Latin not any vernacular which I think he knew that was to avoid censorship it was handed over ultimately it was it was the Vatican it was the cathode he's in Rome who would decide whether or not to suppress it and an historian went in and did the did the detailed analysis it would have been censored but apparently the want the reviewer who mattered the viewer who was ringing alarm bells cuz you had to read the Latin carefully there's a lot of math we had to do with observations of the movements of the stars and planets and explain this things he had to be really good at both Latin and math to figure out how subversive this work from Copernicus was but the one guy who figured out in Rome he died he died of natural causes at the right time so the book wasn't censored so yeah so I just say that the censors roll one Protestantism cuts you off from the Catholic tradition of censorship and serving again that that battle then get's fought generations later by Galileo Galileo is the murder for modern science in that way in his own peculiar historical character right so in England this becomes England's own responsible in Scotland's own responsibility and they don't want to do it so they set up a system of decentralized censorship and that is the origin of peer review the role of the peer reviewer at its inception is still today was simply to review the work and rubber-stamp it that there was nothing objectionable to the government it was taking was developed very literally as taking the role of censorship and farming it out to established scholars you say okay well you remember at the establishment you're already a professor or something you're some kind of respectable scientist you know the kind of thing the government wouldn't allow to be published or that we'd asked to be deleted or rewarded or something so two of you or three of you go through a process where you guys read it and you okay it and if you okay it it'll go ahead and of course implicitly if something offensive to the government was published you know you know whose head could we know who could be held responsible for this okay so peer review in terms of its origins was created as a system of censorship it's not created as a system of scientific fact checking fact-checking as part of the editors role in fact checking is very time-consuming and today nobody wants to pay for as you see in terms of the decline in the quality of journalism and everything else mr. but just imagine I used to do this for a living but if I'm handed something and it makes a bunch of complex claims but what was going on in the government of Vietnam in 1984 you know it's very hard to sit there and say okay you know is this person accurately reporting because I'm pure reviewing an article about no sir I'm not here reviewing of anything of anything an article about what was going on in Cambodian politics and it briefly mentions a bunch of stuff about what was going on in Vietnamese politics which is of course links I start checking into it and I'm like look this this doesn't add up like you know where did you get this from you got this from Breitbart news agency notice from the Vietnamese equivalent a Breitbart is something that this doesn't match up with the basic facts but here's the difference with real editing right real editing is also a dialogue and discourse the pure of you has none of that peer review is either it's approved or it's rejected period and that's because it developed the system system censorship what you really need is exactly say look you know and you can even be played by said look I like your article there's some good things about it but you have this one paragraph but what was happening in Vietnam in the early 1980s and you know that this doesn't check out for me I mean so what are your sources here or what are you thinking or could you rewrite this because I mean in terms of the basic facts I don't I don't see how this message of the first era and though you went back to you you know what either they'll do it or they refuse either they back can back it up or they can't that is the process of fact-checking and editing you have it has to be back and forth with the author that's that's utterly lacking right now sorry the final I mean I could I could give many examples just from my own life about how pure review works as well I have me an a peer reviewer I have no PhD I have peer reviewed multiple articles and I'm good at it No partly because I have this background in an editing partly because I'm incredibly cynical about what peer review is and what it ought to be I had a situation in Cambodia where I wrote an article it's still on the Internet the article deals with racism imperialism mass murder it's about I mean again say I was a scholar of Buddhism but I dealt with real issues and deals with even the origin of Nazi ideology in Buddhist studies so the connecting Buddhist research and Orion race theory and and racism in Western Europe which is fascinating there's a lot of really politically hard-hitting stuff here coming out of Buddhist studies and you guys self why is it you don't why you don't see hard-hitting stuff like that coming out of academia or what a studies and put his publications it's because peer review is a system of censorship reckon this article okay so this article it's and is especially relevant to to Cambodia and I was gonna publish it in quite a humble publication that's based in padam Penh Cambodia now I thought it would go ahead for a number of reasons that publication the reviewers are not Buddhist monks I don't think they're they're Buddhist period they're a bunch of old white men with PhDs from France I would guess all of them are French maybe one or two or Australian but the the peer reviewers are probably all conservative white French scholars based in in thumpin Cambodia so they get this essay and the the lead editor the the senior academic who's in charge says right away he reads it he says wow this is brilliant this is important we're gonna we're gonna publish it great months and months go past I'm living in Cambodia this time I'm busy with other things and then I get back to him and for me the main reason to publish them was that they would everything they published and that in that publication they published in both English and Cambodian and I really wanted to reach the Cambodia that's what I cared about frankly and a humanitarian when I get back to Macomb once there and say okay so what's what's happening with the translation cuz you know I'm really you know what I really care about is the human and he says well you know it's complicated and he says if you want to speed up the process you could pay a translator you could start working with transfer because I know again I'd have to talk the translator would have questions okay what do you mean in this passage is translating academic English in to Cambodia it's not easy there'd be a lot of QA so well you can get start with the translator and up to so much money will pay you back like you know what this is this kind of thing so he said because we have a budget for translation but it's probably better if you want to speed it up so that's how certain he was he was gonna he was gonna focus today I start talking to translators months go past and he breaks down and admits to me the reality of the situation he kept presenting it to peer review they kept rejecting it for purely nationalistic reasons my essay was insulting to the memory of the French Empire in the 21st century this is in the 21st century right when you think anti-imperialism and sort of left-wing white guilt is like this so yeah I thought okay I thought I had a secular Western non religious I thought because I knew this would not get published by a Buddhist studies conservative pitously this was too insulting to the memory of what they thought of us the greatness of the French Empire in Cambodia and Vietnam because France conquered Cambodia and Vietnam and said oh you know it worked out great if you heard of the Vietnam War it's kind of like the the appendix to that disaster right okay and so what he kept - he kept giving it to a scholar and they reject it and then he would crumple up the record that he'd given it to a peer reviewer because you know like it's supposed to be just given to two peer reviewers and if they both say no it's rejected right and he would pretend he hadn't done that and he would try with another scholar than others contra and he tried with the whole college so whatever get most most of these but maybe they have ten people with PhDs may be fewer maybe six or something right and every single one of them rejected it out of pure political bias not even religious bias right and that this shows many things about the proof is because this guy the one doing the review his name is Michelle and tell he's that in Alko in France he's a major scholar in his field he's probably the number one scholar on Cambodia he recognized the merit and importance of my article so why can't he go ahead and publish it why can't why even if there are problems with it why can't he start engaging with me as an editor because it's fine he can challenge me the same way I've been describing an editor challenge someone he could go through and say okay well in this paragraph of where he coming from or how do you back this up fine I'm all for that scrutiny what the process needs is scrutiny but peer review is not scrutiny and again even this joke example it's a real example of the starwars science fiction [ __ ] being published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal it shows peer review is not a system of scrutiny it's not a system of content driven editorship it's not a system scrutiny it is just a system of censorship I've seen this again and again in my life I saw it when I was doing work on social conditions in Cambodia I saw complete fiction published in the lancet the lamp said The Lancet is the single most reviewed single most revered peer-reviewed journal in medicine and I was going through their stuff on Cambodia that was linked to the research I was doing social science research in Cambodia my research involve AIDS and a lot of other social problems and the medical care system and I was finding stuff just like the the article about Star Wars things that I could prove were false just by taking them in googling them we think oh that doesn't seem right let me google it let me check these couple reports M&S and strong because nobody's doing that sorry so guys that's that's my conclusion peer review is not a system of scrutiny it's a system of censorship it's not the scientific method it's not even the writers guild method provides a script I know people believe in peer review as the difference between light and darkness between what's legitimate and what's illegitimate what I'm inviting you to imagine here is that Buddhist studies is not so unique the important research the important message the important findings I had to share in in Buddhist studies were impossible to publish in Buddhist studies today in the 21st century and it's worth noting that field was way more open to new ideas new discoveries in the 19th century this is true even about about First Nations Studies and so it's one one for example but these each one of these examples is really important to me so you know Buddhist studies in the 19th century soldiers with no PhD in no formal education who were deployed in the British Empire would dabble in archaeology and research on Buddhism and they would send the has letters to whatever now peer-review journals to academic journals their findings in the film brilliant and important stuff I think one reason for that was that a lot of the soldiers had good translators they probably the best translators in the British Empire so they'd be going out and they'd be looking at ruins and they'd be saying well some of the villagers say this true and used to be this but we excavated we found that or we talked to we talked to some Buddhist monks over here and they told us isn't that you had incredibly valuable findings being published again without peer review sent in as handwritten letters from soldiers on the on the outermost parts of the British Empire but it was really important vital stuff that was getting published there was a hypothesis I mentioned this to my girlfriend recently were talking about Korean ship way we still look at the possibility of studying First Nations languages here in this apartment a destroyed ship we're talking about whether or not we could go back and study creative way Algonquian languages that language is indigenous to Canada there was this hypothesis that was published many many decades ago so I think it was the 1970s and today it wouldn't be polish because it was it was just a hypothesis it was a hypothesis in the purest sense of the word this guy looked at the linguistic data for all the native peoples in North America and South America the whole mega continent North and South America in the Caribbean and he drew lines in a map and he said hey look I don't really have any evidence but based on comparative study of these languages this is my theory of how how the actual migration took place when these people first settled northern South America all right forty years later or something DNA research bang confirms that his hypothesis was right on it's such an important article but it was just a hypothesis it was just speculation and that's exactly what peer-review excludes now again syrup all the problems you have with Wikipedia are infinitely worse with peer-review they're worse both positively and negatively they're worse in terms of what they will publish they're worse in terms of what they exclude they're worse because they utterly lack the back-and-forth of challenging the person said well do you have a source and this can you improve this can you rewrite this it's a single stage process and exactly the areas where Wikipedia is impossible to trust like politics like religion but some of these examples I'm giving are hard sciences even linguistics you know physics and chemistry and what-have-you in exactly those same areas where Wikipedia is unreliable peer-review itself is worse than useless guys if you watch this video thank you for spending the time with me any less thoughts babe what is civilization is civilization the aggregate some of our traditions or you know cultural assumptions our beliefs are our folklore and our national characteristics or is it scientific progress well one of the fundamental problems of scientific progress is that it is elite it is elitist it's something the vast majority of us can't participate in in any meaningful way and peer review I think is another example of one of these aspects of academia whether it's in the sciences or the arts you know and anything anything do that D mia where it's it's remained behind the curtain it's remained buying a veil of instability it's been glorified and glamorized in many people's minds just because if it's just slightly out of sight and I think that will change for one reason and that one reason is what's now called sousveillance so sousveillance is the opposite of surveillance when I first went to Cambridge University England they were just experimenting with taking professors lectures and dumping them on YouTube basically dumping them all on the internet and I mean one of them was a famous famous left-wing professor giving a lecture on Marxism he'd probably give him the same lecture for 20 years and you know it sounds impressive oh this great professor he has a PhD he has peer-reviewed articles and you know lecturing at this incredibly elite incredibly expensive incredibly hard to get into university and the lectures were garbage sousveillance changes everything there's a facebook project called film your Marxist professors so far it's it's garbage they're not doing anything they're not but but the concept of that is very powerful we all know if you've been university you know what it's like to be in the classroom with a professor who's saying something so crazy and so stupid or so ill-informed and so ignorant that you can't believe it's being said in the classroom and you're powerless to challenge it because there's an absolute unequal relationship of authority well now as never before you can film that and you can put it on YouTube and this will challenge academia in a way that it has never been challenged before the power of sousveillance the power of film your Marxist professors you know to shake academics out of because most of the suppressors are saying crazy dumb things it's because for the last 20 years they dug down into a narrower and narrower little trench they're just within radical left-wing women's studies or indeed the Buddhist professors they're within this little narrow trench where nobody challenges how insane their ideas about Buddhism are not even other Buddhists they don't even hear it from mainstream Buddhism or something they're working within this within politics but even within the sciences they're lotzie we need to talk to people in the STEM fields there are a lot of horror stories about about awful professors in science I think what is ultimately going to change peer review in academia itself is the camera the miniature camera the culture of the internet YouTube I think sousveillance is going to mark a line in the sand between the past and the future of what we do in higher learning and and then and only then will freedom of speech come to academia and maybe we can see a fundamental reform in the way peer review and the progress of human knowledge in every work there at that time [Music]