Lying, Bullshitting, and the Meaning of Truth

Oh I teach political philosophy at Dartmouth College and any student of political philosophy reads thinkers such as Machiavelli and learned that powerful people people who want power will do ruthless things they will certainly most certainly lie if they need to to advance their ends lying is a in illimitable part of politics it's everywhere in the political world not just because power seekers are ruthless but also because liars like political people want to be free they want to reshape the way things are and resist the recalcitrant the stubbornness of the world as it is and remake it according to their wishes and desires and that's what political people want - so political people are deep have a deep affiliation with mendacity with lying and that goes back as far as politics goes nonetheless there's a widespread sensibility in the United States today that we are up against something new not just the customary affiliation of politics and lies but something different and just Sunday David Lin art and Stewart Thompson in the New York Times compiled the definitive list of president of the lies that they say President Trump has uttered merely since he's been inaugurated beginning with statements like the reason I lost the popular vote is because between 3 and 5 million people voted illegally and they isolate each lie and stack them up one by one like bricks in a wall that eventually separate hates us from reality such that we're disoriented and don't quite know what's true and what's false anymore indeed they say every president has shaded the truth or told some occasional whoppers but no other president of either party has behaved as Trump is behaving he is trying to create an atmosphere in which reality is irrelevant today's deep drop deep dive is meant to help orient us as citizens in this moment when when some fear that our relationship to reality is being altered and when the place of lying in politics is taking a new direction so first to help us understand our own relationship to truth and falsity we have Fred dust from IDEO and and he is going to lead us in an exercise that's meant to illuminate for ourselves our own something of our own relationship to truth Fred thank you okay so I'm also here to make sure that you're all awake after lunch so and that's a piece of it so this is going to be a very interactive very short so at least if it's interactive and it's awkward it's very short just know that phew so it's actually good but exactly right we want to hear from you guys today a little bit about what does it mean to think of to have truths as individuals and how much commonality do we actually see in the truths we have so we're going to do a quick exercise called truth and lies we're going to be asking you guys questions about what we believe is true and why so to help you with this count with this conversation there's a paddle everybody grab their paddles and these are really fun and so basically when I ask you to I'm going to ask you to answer a question choose their lives and if you but Gris with the truth and you're going to hold it up like this okay good y'all good and if you disagree you're going to hold it up like this you all get to take this home and use it with your spouse afterwards so it's great it's like I promised you in our household it makes everything work so it's like it's like you can use it in all kinds of different things so um but it's good it's be fun I am going to ask people to kind of volunteer a little bit so get ready it's no one volunteers I'm going to call on me so we're going to go from there so here's the premise of what I want to talk about and then we're going to go we're going to go into like a few examples and so I'm going to throw out some truths and I'm going to ask you first of all the first question is what you know is true do you believe this is true so I'll throw out a truth and I'm going to have you basically look at the screen don't look at each other and put up your paddle one way or another and tell me yes I agree or I don't agree the next question I'm going to ask is what kind of evidence do you have evidence for this piece of truth and I'm going to call on you around the room to basically like yeah I think I can prove this let me let me get something but the in the end I don't actually care if we prove it or not that's not the goal what I really want to discover is um so what it would mean to you if despite all the evidence you have it wasn't true how would you feel and that's the question that I'm going to be asking you kind of in the in the latter part of it so this feel pretty straightforward we're all ready for it we all have hands on our paddles so it's like what we're they're good so I'm going to throw out the first question and and the first the first truth and see how you guys respond to it so and I'm not going to I won't vote ready the earth is around us so forget if you don't believe it's Oh a bow later or whatever okay so you did look each other everybody look at each other and pretty much everyone there are no flat earthers in this room that I can see any flat no one okay no all right so that there are no flat earthers in this room so that's you guys kind of fundamentally believe that's its fruit that's great so let's go to that next question that I had which is bring the paddles back up because I know you all believe this one so who has evidence what what are the things that people believe if they actually holding true that they can actually say actually makes them feel like this truth anyone want to give it it doesn't have to be scientific just like what makes you believe is it true you've got something here Mac great so so max basically said it's like there's two things he gave two examples which are great examples one is that we learned it so there's actually something that feels like it's fact but also it feels observable to you so you feel like when I when you look out you can see it over a distance anyone else want to add something into that yes Robert you just you travel you think you've traveled around the world okay awesome by the way isn't it kind of like oxygen paddling I wish I was selling something right now because it's like it's like anyway who else has evidence or two yes over here I can't see your name a satellite photo so that's a great example and I wonder how many of us would have hold that news in our lines which is actually there's a very famous first image right of like taken from a spacecraft but also satellite photos that basically tell us oh observably it looks like it's at least round it might be you know round on the other side as well but we don't about it but it looks like it so easily believe we have observable evidence thank you exactly anyone else yes Galileo right great so here's a here's the thing so we have learning and education we have things we've observed ourselves we actually have kind of outside evidence of observation it's been studied and you would say that science is there so those are those are things that we actually say we actually believe and let's go back to the thing that I think is sort of the harder question so um what would it mean to you personally if this wasn't true so like let's say something comes through tomorrow and it basically says um we just figured it out and it's actually it turns out it's triangular and like you know it's you know it's like and we're the only thing here what would that mean to you so how does that feel and and what does that do to your worldview so it's a harder question but I really want somebody to kind of offer up it right here there you go so so it has huge business implications for for a cruise ship than whatever it is you're like how we're going to keep doing this if we don't believe in it's fundamentally yes it would so I can say one more time a little outers like it would shake my faith in science so I think this is a really important one like think about that sounds fundamentally there's there's an amazing book that and I found out because it was on Obama's reading list called a free body problem that's basically talked about what happens when basically physics is disproved and what happens to scientists and how they kind of like have this huge issue around it so anyone else yes you'd say opposite so that's really interesting so basically that the argument there is like if there's new science it's actually look kind of immediately proven that actually it's kind of giving me more faith in science so it's an interesting kind of new one anyone else this one way in the back with your hand up you might have to really yell sorry nothing is physically shape oh sorry if nothing if nothing is physically changed I feel like it would be irrelevant that it's been found to be untrue that the earth is round okay so stop pressing this is really interesting so it would change my faith in science it would actually make me feel more faithful and it really wouldn't change that much like it's like if everything seems like it's kind of working then I feel okay with it for the moment so so that's it I'm going to tell you in the world I'm going to show you three quests and in the world this was actually meant to be the easiest one so it's like after this it gets a lot more difficult and I think some people think the last ones the hardest the next one I'm going to show you I think is going to be absolute the hardest one for this room so um so I'm going to go on to our next truth are you ready for it dogs and cats can love me I'm going to put and love me so who agrees or disagrees dogs and cats can love alright so as you look around the room most people agree and there's about like seven or eight people we want to really explore with them what's wrong with them and who basically disagrees so so so first let's go put the paddles back up who can what's your evidence that dogs and cats can love who wants to actually sort something out somebody come on okay you in the back okay so okay so your dog is not stimulating a motion for food it's basically saying oh I really love you I'm back okay so it's like you you have you have direct physical evidence you believe of some others space somebody else over here okay so even after I feed my dogs they still want to be with me so that's that's pretty nice that would be proof in like a spousal contact certainly so I was like behind you so basically she was saying that it's like I've seen evidence so first of all there's actually been some study that's kind of seem to prove that actually dogs and cats are so so so AM connection to other species so it's actually not it could be any other species actually if I'm correct and so it's like I mean or any other kind of creature so there's multiple things there it's both the evidence as well as kind of its goes beyond maybe even human yes thank you feel pain so that's a great so they can feel pain so they should be able to feel the opposite and that's a really great I think that's an example of a deep empathy perhaps as a way of kind of proving it so you're saying well I feel this so and if I can feel this and I also feel this is there some connection between it which is an interesting thing okay so this is like it's just you're just saying it's a low low bar for love and you okay great so it's like all right whoo so wait there's like seven people I just want to see the people who were like no way okay so over here I found have to be completely indifferent dogs dogs are completely different they're lovable the cats completely indifferent toward at me okay that's my i'ma facial so there's not thank you right so there's not more debate about whether cats or dogs can love like do some people believe dog can love and cats can I'm just curious all right so wait so in the middle I know you've got lots of famous I think it completely depends on how you're defining love okay it just depends on the definition so back here so so I don't think either dogs or cats can love but I think they can exhibit other tendencies that we would equate with love between human beings for example so I think they can have dependence I think they can have loyalty I think they can show appreciation I think they can show disappointment if they don't expect and if they don't receive an expected outcome and for me that doesn't add up to love although many of those things can sometimes be characteristics love that's really interesting so I really want to call that answer because I think all these answers been great examples but I think this is one of the things were most interested in exploring this this year while we're at the festival is I'm how are we defining the terms that are put in our place and what you did very well I think is you defined you said I don't think it's it's it could be something like love but it's not our definition of love or it's a different definition of love and that's one of the things that I think we have to really kind of be careful around as we're thinking about truth and lies is that how often are we bringing our definition to the table and how often have we spoken through what that definition is I'm going to go to the hard one and to the people who basically were like my dog loves me like a lovely what would it mean to you if it wasn't true let's go back let's see the paddles again this one way in the back who has a very as a really big animal lover I think it's kind of like a lost sense of companionship if it's just it's like a false sense that you build because for a lot of people like your your pets become like part of your family and if it's it feels like that emotions reciprocated and what if it's like a lie and it's kind of like our manmade concept then it's kind of like for what was I believe in in hmm there's two things there which is both like you feel a little more alone in the world maybe and also it's actually shaking your faith so going back to the earlier things we talked about like you actually believed it so what happens when it goes away who else there sir students coming from my animal even if I anthropomorphize the emotions coming from my animals it doesn't change the fact that I love them interesting so actually it might not change your perspective at all so the reality is that actually like even if it's like you still love them and that's what matters in this case yeah I don't think necessarily I love them because I perceived them only because I perceived them loving me back that's interesting okay so by the way the president the response to it might call into question what human love is so let's go back to the first question that I asked what about Flat Earth and if you remember it was like it might call into question science it might actually call them so it makes actually previously like affirm science or it might not matter at all and you just basically try and go to the same exact thing so I don't care because I still love it like that's the dog or cat I actually now it calls it a question my faith and you're basically saying it actually calls into question that's a liquid oceans I have about humanity or what it means to be alive right okay so interesting thing so I'm going to do one last one and I'm arguably this should be I'm curious to see what this plays out and this is a this is the yeah well here we go climate change is man-made not as fun right and as the other two so so let's let's let's see the paddles I'm seeing a correlation between people who think dogs can love and climate change but I'm not going to I'm not going to tell you what that is actually it's like alright and so who has who has some evidence that they want to throw sir uh-huh but so do many other things haha so there's lots of evidence of significant climate change not involving human activity in fact that may be the most important source of climate change we may be headed for another Ice Age but it may come a little late great because we have tipped the balance in the short-term in a way that is likely to be very disruptive to us and the rest of nature is remail interesting so that's that's a great thing and I think it's really interesting thing to think about if you think about truth which is that your point is that it may or may not be the most important factor but it's a factor that actually has kind of contributed and the reality also is that we it doesn't matter because it's still moving forward so you're kind of like you're Greek contextualizing it can I get somebody else on this yes yeah so this is it's a great point and I think it goes back to the and I know I have to wrap up here it goes back to defining our terms right which is your sort of thing it's a simplistic question and but often true their lives are often simplistic we actually keep them at that level for reasons and so we're actually not having to draw this right those are things back around that so I'm going to leave you with this I'm not going to ask you what would it mean is them it's emotionally this wasn't true but I do want to talk about this for a moment as you go forward I think the critical thing here that we want to talk about and one of things were most interested in the festival is making sure that we understand how we're defining our terms as we're talking about things and I think that's as true with truth and lies and the things we might call truth and lies as anything else like you must stop for a moment and basically say why it's not there's nothing like what proves it but what do I have at stake if it's not true and what's not making me kind of think about so as we go into this conversation this afternoon think about that you have things at stake what does that mean when we think about truth and lies how the law in particular the First Amendment relates to truth and and and lives does our law protect lies was it meant to protect the culture of lying or a politics of lying or is it is it really motivated by the desire to protect the truth and and so let me let me turn first to you jack and ask you about the founders how did they understand what say the First Amendment was meant to do was it meant to make the political world safe for for for lying so the kind of Jeff I I'm supposed to provide is the depth of historical context my own view is if you don't have historical context you get you could never properly understand any issue nor in our own time so I think the starting point is answer us is to say that there was a dominant idea about freedom of speech and freedom oppressed in 17th and 18th century anglo-american law and the dominant idea is that while there was no prior restraint on what presses could publish in a theory and what people could say in any public forum there was a well-defined tradition that said that if you engage in speech acts that were seditious that were destructive of or animal to the authority of government you would be legally liable so doctor we know is a seditious libel truth has no place in this doctrine the key harm being done is that a statement you may make is going to be so derogatory so inimical to the authority government it's going to impose some kind of net harm on social well-being and political stability so what you say in criticism of the king and its ministers or let's say a royal governor it might be perfectly true but if it's really destructively two-thirty government then then should become subject to subject to prosecution dead then argument comes under a lot of strain in the American Revolutionary era and by the time we get to the early 19th century it's effectively been undermined and so the question arises what's the nature of the strain that's imposed on the dominant idea that says seditious libel is bad I don't know whether what you say is true or not the net harm is there therefore we have to prosecute it and the story wanted to tell the historical dev site actually says there are two parts of the First Amendment that we have to pay particular attention to First Amendment begins with the religion clauses Congress shall make no law respecting established religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof and then it proceeds to the freedom of speech freedom of press clauses and then on to our right to assemble and and peaceful efficient there is a kind of hierarchy there and it won't suggest historically that religion really mattered in a way that's hard for us now to understand which I think would play it the kitties kitties theme about morality we argue about something like this under the pressure raised by you know in the aftermath of the early 60s Reformation you know taking place 500 years ago you know you know with you it was in two years the dominant understand espoused by people like John Locke being the dissenting centrist really by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison the end of the 18th century is that religious belief is essentially a matter of opinion of course there are the great truths of Christianity respect to subscribe to but what what exactly to believe about the structure of a church or the proper mode of salvation how you think about the thing but the sacraments how you think about baptism all of these in the end are matters of opinion and we want to protect the individuals right and let's say individually I mean men and women he created them both we want to protect an individual right to make up one's mind on that opinion and maybe even the American Revolution the American colonists did not set out as being heartfelt devotees a series of religious liberty they wanted for themselves were not the groups that they disagreed with but by the middle of the 18th century I think that I believe the revolution after the great religious servile revival we we call the first Great Awakening I think this acceptance of the kind of sovereign autonomy at the part of individuals to decide what they believed it was coming to be broadly recognized the problem this is opinion is not a matter of truth opinion says I have some final right of judgment based on my individual reading of the Bible you know that you can argue it out with your neighbors and be open in your church but it's essentially it's it's a lower it's a lower threshold for jury what's really true what's that so we're going to recognize your moral a time he's an individual what happens after that didn't randomly start pretty quickly is I think a set of beliefs about the importance of opinion that actually originates not in the realm of politics where it's too dangerous but in the realm of religion starts moving to the political sphere that happens with the American Revolution it's reinforced by the great political disputes of the 1790s dhf Jefferson Madison one side to Hamilton in Washington and John Adams on the other side which called Bayes for the passing of the famous Sedition Act of 1798 which did a lot of truth to become a defense so there is no some significant wrinkle doctrine but my key point is that what originates in the realm of religion moves into the realm of politics so there's the kind of sequencing here which on the moral side I think it's important to us to understand the last point I want to make here is that there is a Jefferson took that Jefferson Madison angle here is that they they aligned themselves being built an opponents of the Sedition Act they did believe very much in freedom of speech freedom of press and they felt in the kind of a great Jeffersonian calculus that the best way to resolve these issues was to be able to argue the mouth in the realm of religion and the realm of politics are like the more open debate we have the more truth test will emerge in the process of the debate and the better off we will be not just individually but collectively to figure out what is politically or religiously true and what isn't really inside you ever said rather become Unitarians Madison at a somewhat different opinion that didn't happen in fact but that sense Jefferson's Unitarian projection represents its own belief about how those system would operate so we become over the course early of many decades a country where each person has a right to his or her own opinion but we didn't start out necessarily that way I I can't help but read these tweets and I noticed a tweet by President Crump where you said it's not freedom of the press when newspapers and and others are allowed to say and write whatever they want even if it's completely false and and I have to say I I'm inclined to agree with them at a common-sense level does freedom of the press protect fake news does it protect us in in publishing and voicing our opinions even if those opinions have no basis in in fact is that what the First Amendment is about let me turn to the caller of contemporary constitutional law Jeff is that freedom of the press so the Supreme Court first touched on the question of false statements in the very first opinion it ever issued on the meaning of the First Amendment 19:17 Oliver Wendell Holmes confronting the question Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press well what does that mean it sounds like it's absolute and what home and space is we said it can't be absolute that wouldn't make any sense it was absolutely and he gave the famous hypothetical of the false cry of fire in a crowded theater and what makes that hypothetical work is that the cry of fire is false a true crier fire is a completely different thing of course and so it from the very first the court understood that false statements of fact are different and indeed they don't actually presumptively serve any purposes that the First Amendment itself is designed to further and therefore for the next 40 or so years the basic assumption was that false statements of fact were not protected by the First Amendment and that came to a head in 1964 in a landmark decision called New York Times versus Sullivan which involved a libel action brought by a public official against the New York Times for a statement that was factually false about that public official and the Supreme Court said that consistent with the First Amendment the plaintiff the public official cannot recover damages even though this was a false statement of fact unless the public official can prove that the speaker acted with either reckless disregard for the truth or knew it was false it was absolute lie and the court said that because it recognized that even though false statements of fact don't have any value if we allow false statements of fact to be punished then that will chill the willingness of people to make statements that they think may be true but they're not sure and they will therefore be silenced in a way that would dampen in a serious way the robustness of free speech and that became a landmark and critical decision in the years since then the court has recognized that there are certain types of false statements that can be subject to government action libel being one in the circumstances identified New York Times others would be perjury in a court of law another would be fraud in which one defraud another person by making false statements another would be false commercial advertising but the court has since taken the basic you that even false statements effect cannot be restricted unless there is at the very least a very substantial government justification as in the defamation that burglary the fraud situations and even then only if the person acted with reckless disregard or knowledge of falsehood now the question then is well what about false statements in public discourse right what about lies in public discourse right people tell lies and they influence others and they have a serious impact potentially on how people vote and have you behaved as political actors and the court up till now has taken the view that those lies are not actionable consistent with the First Amendment and it's done that for basically two reasons now one of them is the chilling of that problem if you know that you are going to be held or potentially be held liable for a statement you make in public discourse because some juror finds it to be false you'll be very careful about what you say and the sacrifice of freedom from that the court says is to be taken very seriously the other and even more compelling justification is in the realm of public discourse the idea of allowing government officials to decide which false statements to prosecute and which not to prosecute puts in the hands of public officials in extraordinary power to manipulate public discourse and imagine for example is the Trump administration had the authority to decide which false statements it would prosecute and which would not it's easy to see how that would completely distort the marketplace of ideas and so for those reasons the court has basically taken the view that the government is not allowed to restrict that sort of false speech now one of the interesting questions we face going forward in our society is up until now we've been able to rely upon what Holmes called the marketplace of ideas as a way of hoping to sort out truth and falsity that basically when people tell lies in public discourse even if there's no criminal prosecution for it other people will correct it they will say the truth and individual citizens will be able to decide for themselves in a rational way what is true and what is false in the world of social media that now becomes much more romantic we now have a world in which people are increasingly fragmented polarizing in their sources of information and in which they only hear one side of the debate and in that context false statements can have an increasingly powerful effect much beyond what ever existed before and whether that opens the door to saying there may be circumstances in which false statements can be restricted poses a really dire problem for democracy from the one hand ignoring the problem it's a problem on the other hand addressing it by allowing the government to decide who to prosecute not to prosecute is also a dire problem but that's something we will have to face going forward it sounds like you can definitely imagine Supreme Court changing First Amendment law I think they would back to the way it pretend I think they'll be loath to do that I think the danger of allowing government the power to decide who did prosecute and not to prosecute is overwhelming but at the same time we face a real problem how do we address this polarization in information so as to avoid the kind of fragmentation and an ignorance that this advice and the solution shouldn't be prosecution it should be figuring out ways to make people have access to ideas and facts different from the ones do nail choosing to focus on the solution to two lies in the public sphere it's not going to come from law you know you hope it doesn't come from law it's got to come from the from the culture from character from something else right it'll come partly from education I think we need to educate people much more seriously about the dangers of getting all of your information from highly polarized sources and it'll also come I think from the media come from entities like say Facebook and others who may start developing mechanisms instead of sending people only things that reinforce what they already look at instead beginning to send them sources of information they're different from the ones that they automatically look at I'm a big balloon as a historian I'm a big believer in the passage of time and though there was the kind of expression that Trump yours your dog yours going back to our prior presentation you're only some into this administration the disturbing aspect this one might say is so much material came out during the election campaign itself I think the work done by the Washington Post in New York Times I was appealing to a to a liberal reading body was pretty compelling work in their example evidence of the difficulties the nation finds itself now this is already available so it wasn't contra barely enough at that point in terms of electoral politics but you know it's only some months in and it seems to me it's still a highly dynamic situation and you know there is movement into public opinion both I mean I ever met believer I think even though Jefferson was a real Pollyanna and was terribly naive about a lot of things but I think the Jeffersonian norm that we want to argue things out as much as we possibly can first without having strong government restraint I think that's a powerful Norman if we look around the world the number of authoritarian regimes that are flourishing in other countries that are quite happy to start cracking down on freedom of speech freedom press in ways that would be wholly unacceptable by American standards I think we're better off sticking so far at least with the conventional wisdom let the story play out into panic you know the libertarian libertarian regime when it comes to when it comes to speech and and and writing and also religious and and religious but we move from a world where most people used to get their information from mainstream reasonably responsible relatively moderate sources where there was a Fairness Doctrine which required radio and television stations to present both sides of all issues if they allowed one candidate to appear the actual about the other candidate to appear that's all gone and the sources of information that we get now is completely different market was 3040 years ago if they're an analog that you could locate in American history when when citizens got their news for very restricted sources and maybe only legislate not that I was in today's New York Times two miles your Texas historians don't believe in analogies and we don't make comparisons we want to you know take over Katie telephone right but on the other hand you know it's not unlike the 1790s and it's not wholly unlike the 1850s I mean those were periods of deep political passion you know one waiting to an election where you don't have the population to us that the Union might was involved and the second one lead to an election where the Union really did devolve so you know taking the long view is the striking serve by nature want to do and so yeah so we cut it some slack just maybe it may not be quite you know dramatic crisis you know did yet seems so when it comes to differentiating or finding our way in a world where where there's truth and where there's lots of lies and lots of deception you're both libertarians you you're believers in reason you think it's up to citizens to to sort this out as best they can manage through argument through discussion through reflection and and that the solution isn't going to come you hope from from law and and what can come from education and I think that's important all right well thank you thank you so much we're going to turn to our next the next episode in this deep dive session thank you Jeff thank you can buy who couldn't spell a true story of espionage that you can download to your Kindles after the session and read on your flights home I will do that and you've also an in a recently done a long piece for the National Geographic on lying the result of your own investigation into the into the science of lying to to better understand it and and let me say I don't know myself I've never looked into the science of lying but if I were to guess I suppose what I'd say is that most people aren't liars most people tell the truth most of the time all the time there are few people maybe bad apples rotten apples well that sir I like that that is a lie that's not if everyone was tell us then what's because it turns out and and you know you were only slightly exaggerating when you said that I investigated the science of lying I actually spoke to researchers who investigated the science of lying but but to simplify matters yes indeed it turns out that lying is a very common human trait it is both universe so it is it is it is done frequently people on average lie at least 2 to 3 times a day most people like people there are outliers as in as in people who both lie a lot more and egregiously than others as well as people who are you know just by default so honest as as you said your wife is right well that's maybe here that's how I think of her I think you know and it's true there are there are some people who have reevaluate after having well there are some people who just who are truth tellers almost you know to a fault certainly but the fact is that most of us lie and rely frequently and what are we lying about every day so two three four or five times right so our day-to-day lies are mostly sort of poll idolized the white lies that sort of lubricate social interactions you know we rely when we say to a friend that we're supposed to meet that oh I I'm on my way when actually you're just exiting you know your your bathroom to get ready or something so those those lives are sort of harmless lies but we we tell them because we don't want to hurt other people's feelings but we flex the same muscle when we tell bigger lies we tell lies like oh I'm sick today I can't make it into work when actually you know your kid needs to go somewhere you know to pick up shoes or something for a baseball game and so you you want to not go into work that day really flex the famed muscle well we flex the same muscle in the sense that we we have the capacity for bending the truth in ways big and small and it's not just the polite lies that we're telling we're also telling less frequently the bigger lives and there's a continuum of lying and we know who stands at sort of the the far end of that continuum so we we we all lie I mean this does strike me as a superb surprise fight it but anyways we all lie we all lie a lot when do we learn to lie is it College or business school we we learn to lie as as kids we learn to lie you know by the age of four or five we've already started telling little lies and we do this I think somebody said earlier in one of the panels I think you mentioned it when you were introducing the panels that politicians lie in order to create an alternate reality so that they can enjoy power well kids sort of do the same thing because there's a huge power imbalance between children and adults and so by the age of four and five kids have started to tell little lies not very sophisticated ones but as their language develops and as what's known as theory of mind develops which is their ability to read the thoughts and intentions of others they start getting more sophisticated in their line and by the time they're teenagers they actually hit the roof you know as teenagers people lie a lot more than they will once they've actually grown into full adults how should we should we feel good then when our children lie that well in one sense yes because when children start to lie you know that they're developing theory of mind which is a very important developmental milestone and so children do sort of rehearse they practice you know theory of mind meaning theory of mind meaning you can imagine they can imagine way other people are thinking that's why they try to re shape other people's thoughts by putting a distortion out there that's exactly right yeah yeah so this imaginative participation in the thoughts of another if I can't imagine the way you're thinking that I'm not going to be able to know how to lie to you effectively so there's it that's right I mean think about the power of a lie just in general you know it's like you might have to physically overwhelm somebody you know beat them to the ground to steal something from them but if you can make them believe something that is not true that is convenient to you then you might be able to extract certain a certain power from that situation that you otherwise wouldn't so children that turns out learn the power of lies very early we can lying allows us to have our way with that with much less violence than we might otherwise need to undertake indeed I mean I guess I'm feeling better about this does this mean if we're natural liars does that also mean that we are naturally skeptical and distrustful and of other people that would seem to go along with it if we all learn to lie at age five or six most I'll learn to not believe each other by age seven or eight so that is the paradox of human nature that we rely we all lie but we are also inherently very trusting of information that we get and there's a reason for that because we're a cooperative species Society would just collapse if you know if I were here on stage and and if you just couldn't believe a word I said I hope you do so we're naturally credulous we naturally believe each other yes we do be there also because we need to in order to function we all have a propensity to lie that's maybe as much as every day and in fact because we're so trusting of others it also makes us very poor as lie detectors and so especially teenagers teenage kids can lie to their parents very very effectively and parents are completely bamboozled even though the parents you know have theory of mind they know that they did the same thing when they were teenagers but but there you know it is the result of our trusting nature that people get away with so many lies even in the political discourse it's fascinating I mean it's listening to you makes me think that on one hand I guess the world can't really accept truth it did to be to be a complete truth-tellers kind of brutal and maybe inconsiderate and and so it's like social life requires a lot of lying but also a lot of believing like lying makes the world turn on your account and well certainly you know social interactions require lying but it's funny that we don't lie much more than we do I mean that really you know there's a researcher named Dan Ariely he's a professor at Duke University and when I talked to him he wasn't surprised by the fact that lying is so frequent because that research is somewhat old he was interested in the fact that when we do have the option to lie and cheat and be dishonest most of us actually don't exercise that option as much as we could you know we don't walk around our workplaces stealing pencils and staplers every day I mean we might do it why right yes I mean so there's there these limits that are placed on dishonest it has exquisite equilibrium where we lie we all lie just a little bit just a little bit right it's almost like you know the fine engineering of lying has been worked out by social consensus it's just like driving ten miles over the speed limit can we maintain that sort of traditional wholesome common sense view that lying is bad after digesting this research right I mean if I I think if I heard my son or daughter lives they don't that's bad you shouldn't and see how yes yeah well I think that lying is bad and I think that the evidence that we're seeing from you know the era that we're living in right now which other panelists have talked about certainly reinforces my my belief that lying is bad I mean just the fact that lying as a part of human nature doesn't give us license to now be lying more and more frequently and tell bigger lies we're you know it it's it's really interesting what social media and President Trump have done sort of in tandem to our sense of reality and again I'm just echoing what you alluded to when when we began you know President crumbs lies such as the one that you know I think you voted maybe one or two about the illegal voters I mean there's sort of a Hurricane Katrina you know in in sort of the lying landscape and they're literally they have shaken you know that the boundaries of how much lying is acceptable and then you've got social media which is a new technology relatively new where all you need is an army of believers to peddle the same lies until it just gets accepted as the truth by enough people so that it can live on forever and I don't think we've found a solution I mean I you know I'd love to share the optimism of the legal scholar who spoke before me and I'm blanking on the name I'm sorry but but I do think that we're in an unprecedented kind of a of an era where unless we reflect on what is going on and really become more vigilant about what kinds of information to believe and then more importantly what kind of information to then pass on to our social networks you know we won't be able to solve this problem in fact I spoke to a number of communications researchers who are trying to work on this problem of how do you debug a lie on social media what is really effective do you simply put out the actual facts of the case and keep blasting it up but regular work it doesn't I mean I think somebody before me mentioned that despite all of the stories all of the great journalism that was done by the New York Times and The Washington Post it didn't really swaye the electorate to the extent that people thought it might and and the reason is that none of those actual facts were taken into consideration when people took stock of what they believed to be the reality of the situation maybe where we're moving into a world where there's there's not so much truth and lies but where everything is opinion and where every opinion is as good as every other and and let me let me just invite anyone from the audience who might have a question about the science lying for you digit raise your hand we have a couple microphones around and if anyone has a question be happy to we ask a question over here we go I see go ahead I see over there - thank you yes on very interesting on when do you advise what that's a somewhat teenager and then you're growing up and you learned it'll you learn the lie then your gets you're so good at it that you actually believe it's true how would you go about talking to them what's your recommendation well my kids are still seven and twelve so check back with me in a couple of years but but I you know I was on a radio show recently and somebody brought up a similar question where they said that they had this was a person who had kind of become a habitual liar and he said but he had developed this habit since childhood Cindy since the age of 11 of 12 because he was gay and he would he was not able to disclose to his family and his friends that he was gay and so starting with that secret he just became kind of his tendencies for lying just increased from that point on and so he was asking me if there was any advice for a person like him to kind of undo this lying habit and I didn't have a good answer which is sort of my long way of saying that I don't have a good answer to her question yeah they got the microphone on okay the question is I've got is in between the two so between truth and lying is this big gray area and commonly referred to as spin in politics listening to politicians of both parties some of individuals every word that comes out of their mouth is spin every word so is that line I let me just step it I know that's what makes it sometimes hard I teach politics and I feel like I should watch more of you know debates and things than often I just can't dare to watch because that that quality of spin just turns me off and and I think that's what Professor Frankfurt was trying to define and that elegant little essay on there's something quaint about both truth-telling and lying those liars and truth tellers believe and the truth liars want you to believe them they want you to think that what they're saying is true so they they like the truth too you might say well but I think I think space is about making yeah you know that's all indifferent to what's true and what's false writing up our hands if we just can't you know see through the fog well I think spin is you know is a very clever form of lying and it's been accepted in the culture of marketing and advertising and political communication yeah and you know it's really it really falls on that continuum between outright falsehoods and you know the complete and the whole fruit but spin comes in different forms you know when people say look the evidence is still not out there you still don't know I mean that's one kind of spin you know that was a kind of spin that the tobacco industry used for some time when they said well we don't really know which was their you know their form of they couldn't just say there's no link between lung cancer and tobacco they have to say something like well we don't know yet we just bought them time and I see something similar going on with climate change right now where you know the deniers are trying to buy more and more time by saying human activity isn't that important that's another form of spin but I think I think somebody here already stressed you know the idea of Education but along with education I would stress the idea of critical thinking where you know where we developed the faculty to really undo the spin that we're receiving with our information critical thinking that's the perfect note to end this this this episode where thank you we have a faith in in this whole Oliver Wendell Holmes idea of the marketplace of ideas the idea that the way you can get it truth is encouraging people of opposite views to yell at each other and that is not an obvious and nor is it always been the way to get at truth and I think that one of the origins is the law and so I wanted Neal to explain to us where that comes from yeah so thank you you know it started we had all sorts of different mechanisms for obtaining truth so in the middle medieval ages we use trial by ordeal which is literally forcing people who we thought were guilty you have to carry a burning hot iron bar and we would decide whether or not you're able to hold it long enough or pluck a stone from boiling a pot of boiling water and see how long it hold it and that would be the way in which we determine truth or not obviously that didn't work so well and so from the 14th to 18th centuries we started to move toward an adversarial system and that's now really the American legal system and if I could you know maybe the best example of it is my very first Supreme Court case I was defending bin Laden's driver and you could imagine lots of emails lots of people think he's guilty he's guilty she got the death penalty and I took the case brought it all the way up to the Supreme Court and 11 years ago tomorrow won the case and I remember listening to the opinion being handed down by the justices by Justice Stevens he's reading this opinion 174 pages long and he's summarizing in like a half hour and why you know he's mr. Hahn down this driver would hit all sorts of Rights that President Bush wasn't giving him and so on and then you know they decide we're being written wet the people who disagree Justice Scalia thing Americans will die Justice Thomas thing I believe so strongly I'm going to read my defend for the first time in my 15 years on the bench he actually that was itself not true he had forgotten me it's spread is it said before but I went out on the courtroom courthouse steps and there's like 500 cameras and everyone's trying to ask what is the decision mean what 174 pages long so I'm reading it but here's what I think it meant and I think it demonstrates the genesis of the adversarial system I said look here's what happened on this day you had in America the lowest of the low this guy's accused to being the worst of the worst bin Laden's you know accomplice and he brings a case not just against anyone but the highest man in the land the President of the United States and he brings it on in some rinky-dink traffic court but in the highest court of the land the Supreme Court of the United States and he wins that's something great about America in many other countries this driver would have been shot for bringing his case more to the point to me his lawyer would have been shot but that's what makes America special the system of truth seeking and that's something we see day-in day-out I mean just to make bring you up to date you know two hours ago the Supreme Court said that they were going to hear this travel ban case my my case I'm representing Hawaii on that in the fall again we our system doesn't just say oh president or you say this is important for national security and you win no we test that out in the crucible of ideas with advocates on both sides coming in and trying to defend their position and the ideas both sides are going to advise these and that's how we ultimately get a truth because hopefully those biases will cancel each other out well shoot that I mean that leads me to something that's a little perverse about our adversarial system which is that it requires it's not only it gives them incentive but in fact it makes it a duty for advocates to push for the winning of their side rather than the truth it promotes untruth in the service of truth so I was wondering if you could talk about that and also maybe compare it to a system which we're less familiar with the Continental legal system which is not adversarial in a way so you're absolutely right the adversarial system has its genesis the idea that you're supposed to defend it basically almost all cost so this is what like one of the most prominent English lawyers said last century Henry Berger was defending Queen Caroline quote an advocate knows what one person in all the world and that person is his client to save that client by all means and expedience is first and only duty in performing in the city he must did not destroy him up disregard the alarm but torment the destruction which he may bring upon others so the adversarial system depends on essentially you coming in you know guns blazing and if you have for example the European system which has really a judge kind of as an Inquisitor asking questions and trying to formally get at the truth in a way that doesn't have advocates on both sides that's a different way of looking at it I think our founders thought we don't trust any judge enough to be neutral because that judge is also going to have biases that's so-called Inquisitor but the European system that is you're absolutely right the way it operates you know I think there's pros and cons the biggest con to our system is that the adversarial system really does depend on competent counsel that you can afford in a world in which approximately 80 percent of felons don't actually have money for representation and have to use public defenders who are often financially strapped with low funding you know you don't often get it true and that's why you have plea bargains and all the kinds of things that we see happening so I wanted to turn to you drew because one thing I'm sure we've all read about recently is the replication crisis in the sciences particularly not so much your area but psychology and clinical medicine the discovery that many many often long-standing findings could not be replicated did not hold up and so I was wondering if you felt that there was a lack of adversarial culture in the publishing of scientific journals should they have some kind of prosecutorial function should they be more of an incentive or a duty to try to undermine findings that have been published sure that is that practical and does it scale so it's a nice to think about but I wouldn't know how to implement I think part of science also depends on a type of cooperation and sharing and and maybe I could offer that simply with an example so how could we agree on the width of this room how could you have confidence in my assertion that maybe it's 30 or 40 meters across so science depends on observation initially and you know in the case of length that's because in 1875 seventeen nations came together in Paris and agreed on the meter and signed a treaty that said we're going to keep track of length through this agreement and so I can observe something and then represent it and trace it back to a reference object that we all agree and you know if we can't agree on what we're observing then it's going to be very hard to be an adversary to try and replicate something to communicate what I observe such that you could attempt to repeat it or undermine it through a adversarial position so in the one hand we do have scientific peer review that comes at the end of the process but science is a process begins with ideas right and we heard this morning you know there's a lot of idiosyncratic individuals coming from many different backgrounds who re mixing observations ideas and concepts and then something beautiful is discovered or invented from that maybe you weave more adversarial competition upfront or it's hard to say but I think the important thing that could represent so far as science goes is it starts with observation if we can't make and share observations and not have faithful observations but confidence in the sharing of observations then we're done for and that's just an important thing to open what I think well we talked a little bit before about about open journals which is a new model for scientific publication that rather than having peer review and on this peer review is it is much more open system what do you think I mean you said that you thought that was a great thing the openness in the research process with journals again being the back end and then you have preprint servers where things were published prior to peer review you could you know if I had a manuscript I could put it online and everybody in the world could read it in the about 60 minutes it'd be open that's great but you can go even further you could share your ideas openly on a wiki say hey I'm thinking about doing this experiment what do other people think and you could have constructive adversaries or competition right from the very beginning of ideation the entire rambling research cycle could be open that's both good and bad some of my best friends professors at Cal Tech will run their research meetings in secret and that's special for them because they need that privacy to feel that they're really concentrating their energy and keeping people from stealing ideas you know seems kind of strange but it's good to have options I would say an openness in biology in particular has been a big boon over the last couple years yeah Evon I wanted to ask you about obviously truth truth checking in the media obviously in faster-moving forms of media like blog posts and newspapers there isn't always time for fact-checking but in magazines like the Atlantic and the New Yorker my magazine we do have an expensive process and I know that people don't always understand how that works I'm sorry if you could explain how you how what counts for you as evidence how what sources do you trust in particular books you know books are not usually themselves check so do you trust them which books how do you know what to believe you keep digging I think is how you know whether to believe what to believe and I do think that you know everyone wants a once a magic list you want to list ovo here the go-to sources and I'm only going to trust what the New York Times says Wall Street Journal Washington Post you know whatever obviously to go to a place that you know has a system in place The New Yorker any paper of record certainly has a system an editorial system whereby managing editors and editors are constantly talking to their authors and saying how do you know this how do you know this who's this anonymous source those are you know again the papers of record the ones that we should always go to and think about but what I find is that the most important thing is that you have to always try to find out who is the expert in this I'm not an expert in anything besides checking at this point and so I'd need to call one I'd need to sort of go to the person who understands the subject I'd need to talk to the lawyer I need to talk to the person and sometimes that person is not the person who wrote the article for New Yorker sometimes it is a person who is on the ground and who knows about the terrible thing that happened in Bangladesh that day and they've been they know all the people and they've been studying it for a while so it's sort of it's the bullseye effect that you go to the center of where the person who knows that information and is the expert in it but it's also in the triangulation of data like for anything that we're trying to understand you go to multiple sources so that if you know obviously every place has its own bias so then you need to go to one side and then to the other side and then to read a few more to talk to a few experts to talk to a few scientists to talk to to doctors to understand where the truth is and oftentimes the truth is somewhere in the middle there so there is that it's the mechanism and a checker is only basically acting in part as a you know sort of a guardian angel behind and also to sort of say so where did you get this and how do you know it's true and do you really think I know you're sort of you know I know your husband is in this field so let's talk about that that's sort of an issue that you know you must have your own bias that you bring to this so again it's in the conversation where we're gatekeepers of a sort we try to find the correct information by going to multiple sources we try to have a conversation with the author to know what they're basing it on we go to the books and we read the books and we bring up other questions that are imperative to it this and you talk about sort of books obviously most books are not fact checked and nothing on the web for all intents purposes is fact checked except if it's coming from a really strong reliable source but for books you look at who the author is are they an expert in their field do they have pages and pages of footnotes let's look to the footnote let's go to the original source in order to understand if that really is accurate or not again it's it's there's no magic pill it's time and work yeah so in effect the model there is replication rather than adverse there and it's not matter Sariel process agency it's trying to replicate the process of reporting that led the writer to that position um I wanted to ask you for a second about about lies I mean most most falsehoods in journalism are a result of rushing or incompetence or just just up there mistakes but sometimes you get outright frauds that are often quite famous you know the Stephen glasses where the Jason's layers have you as a fact checker developed a sort of sense when you're reading something a smell for are there indications that make you suspicious that you can pass on to us yeah yes I mean the answer is sure that it actually that you do sort of tell it's food the Stephen glasses and the Jason Blair's I mean if someone is truly certifiable and mentally ill that they're so desperate that they need to make fake voicemails and fake documentation that's you know you're it's very hard to combat that and I you know sort of do not sleep well at night because of my constant fear of that but what I sort of find again and again is that and I'm I don't know you know sort of what the checker did or what has checkers did in that case but the reality is is that if a checker picks up the phone and tries to call that person who tries to sort of reach that company tries to get a comment tries to sort of really follow the trail you know that that would have sort of exploded that a lot earlier than a kid and I think sort of we're all reliant on the web now we forget that phone that we have now in our pocket we you know take emails and rather than sort of taking an email you should basically be calling the same people that the journalists both - making sure that every conversation you know sort of is replicated and I think if that's done then that makes all the difference it's it's the failure of the one source stories the Rolling Stone you know terrible case about the UVA rape story again it's a one source story that was not defined as a one source story if the it's the checker or if whoever had called any number of the main characters of that story besides the one woman who was you know claiming that she had been raped that story would have been blown up very early on so that is the sniff test if it's a one if you can't speak to the people that the journalist spoke to seven years that are filled to the editor and say there's a problem here and you keep digging with that but I I was I was preparing for this talking to a wonderful writer at The New Yorker who who was a fact-checker Rafi katchadourian and he he felt that it was a very important aspect of truth seeking to have people in a room together talking to each other or on the phone that that that not just relying on documents on pieces of paper and I wanted to ask me about this because obviously cases are tried in person and that means that there are some possibly biasing effects of the personal qualities of the people involved the attorneys the defendants the witnesses do they seem truthful obviously that's not always tied to them actually being truthful and so I was wondering what difference you thought it would make if cases were not tried in person in a room with people together but rather were tried by documents right so the European system does use documents a lot more in a lot less live testimony they do you think it doesn't work as well I mean the fact is very similar to it if one saying is you know it's easy to sculpt the lie and on paper and to defend it on paper but it's the dynamic process of interaction between people and seeing how they react and seeing how a story coheres and you know it's harder to lie in person than it is on a piece of paper all of that together is what underlies our system and to be sure there's distorting effects when you have personalities physically involved I mean actually my first article I read of yours may 15 years ago is about a divorce attorney who would come in and you know call the person by the wrong name just to try and get them flustered or make a comment about their appearance or something like that so there's all sorts of shenanigans that are playing in person dynamics but at the end of the day my sense is it's a lot better to have the in-person truth-seeking function than some cold paper record drew when you iris where discussions before you said that and I think we would all agree that it's crucially important to what we believe what we want to believe and I was wondering how that affects your work as a scientist yeah I mean if we can't agree on what we observe and what we can do then it becomes very hard to articulate a common Tilos what we would imagine is possible what we would aspire to make true and so if there's an undermining of observation or undermining of trust and communication about what we observe then it puts somebody in my position of doubting what other people are reporting but also grossly inhibiting what I dream and it's an interesting time from the world of science and engineering where you can see advances in information and biology and other forms of technology and if you do the back-of-the-envelope analyses it looks like the numbers add up such as we could provision for 10 billion people without trashing the planet that's what the physics says if you believe the facts and the observations but if I can't for example read the report from a company that makes photovoltaic solar and says how much energy we use to make these panels and this is how much we shift in terms of panels and this is how much energy is produced off those panels then I can't come to a net assessment of our energy budget and so I can't make an argument for a policy maker or anybody about what we might as a civilization to aspire to and that undermines my capacity to both dream about what I would want to discover or what technologies I'd want to invent or what world I'd want to be part of and you know I guess I could just say plainly it's baffling to me it's amazingly frustrating to me I would agree with Russell's comments that there's an undermining of political power that's at play debasing certain factions within our society relative to others and you know a lot of what I encounter out in California is were basically walling off certain sectors of our society and we're trying to compartmentalize Washington so we can just keep moving out and that's not a good outcome or healthy and and so in any case and I think there's a relationship between truth--and Telos is what i'm trying to say in the abstract what do we aspire to make true is there a common victory that's associated with our values and what we could realize and based on what I could observe it looks like it's all right in front of us and we can really go pull it off yet ironically at the very moment where that seems like it's possible the whole questioning of you know can we communicate with each other like backs really really stressful yeah I mean it's and it seems like there is a market failure in this marketplace of ideas it doesn't function the way we want it to or imagine it does and um you mentioned you thought that in scientific methods and techniques there might be the beginnings of an answer for how we could try itself it's very difficult to move beyond what we believe how we could try to do that it's interesting so with the meter example we inherit from the 19th century an agreement we agreed to measurements of length and observations of length that way of thinking the science of metrology has kept pace a little bit so for example if you're getting your genome sequence how would you know whether or not the machine that read out your genome gave you the right sequence and it turns out there's a product from NIST the National Institutes of Standards and Technology called the genome in a bottle and it is the reference genome just like the meter stick but for a sequence of DNA so that anybody running a sequencing platform can compare your read to the standard genome and now you have a sense of confidence in the information they're telling me that's relevant for clinical decisions and so forth but much beyond that once you get into the frontier where the reference standards don't exist the metrology the science of measurement and observation haven't matured yet then what and there are some tools from science that I think are relevant it's called control experiments you know I'm doing an experiment I have no idea how it's going to behave I want to book in that with an experiment where nothing should happen and an experiment where a lot of things should happen and my actual experiment that I care about is going to be in between so I'll give you a simple example let's say I wanted to take a gene that makes a green protein and put it in an organism so the organisms green that's the thing I hope to happen but I don't know how green the organism is going to be and I'm not sure how good my detectors are measuring green so if that's my main experiment and I don't know exactly how it's going to play out and there's no meter stick for green gene yeah I'm going to run two other experiments in parallel I'm going to run an experiment where I had nothing and so that organism should not change color and then I'm going to have an organism I hope from somewhere somebody else made that's already really green and by running these two negative and positive experiments in parallel I can bookend and calibrate my uncontrolled result and then try and make sense of it so if you're operating in a context where nobody can agree on what the benchmark is one tool from science is to articulate the ends of the spectrum where everything is happening or nothing is happening and then you can get a sense of where things are in between and that's how we operate on the frontier in science when we haven't figured out how to agree on how to observe things or make measurements and it takes work it takes additional experimentation cost more if you're an individual person in a healthcare setting you know you don't have those positive negative controls you're really often time shooting in the dark right so it doesn't always work but it's a powerful tool that we try and bring to the first-year undergraduates how do you set up controls well I guess I wonder if some both views on anneal can address that fact we seem to have lost our common systems of measurement and is there any lessons from checking or from the law that we can get back to a working adversarial system of truth that we had more of I think we would agree some decades ago it's oh I hope so I really hope so you know so many other presenters are sort of said the same thing education talking about it I mean even it's interesting to sort of hear do you know sort of we're ostensibly in a very similar fields we're both looking for the truth or both looking for answers and things and it as you say it's controlled it's looking at each level and each degree and I always find that typically things really fall down to being in the middle and I think it's that necessity for more communication for more understanding that the further we divide ourselves by just sticking to one perspective or one viewpoint the further we will understand anything is there is to know so that it is it does take in order for us to sort of grow and to be truly informed for us to be open to different ideas and then somehow sort of find Forge of half down the middle and it's truly about communication it's truly about dunno sort of reaching out to people who you might be on the opposite side of an argument with to try to find the path forward and maybe I can rip off that by talking a little bit about our American design because I think our founders and the New Deal we laced something very similar in which is we don't really know what truth is we disagree in our far-flung democracy about what that actually means and so what are we going to do we're going to separate the branches and have separation of powers and federalism because we don't want any one person to have a monopoly on power and a monopoly on what truth is and the New Deal did that you know because obviously our founders didn't anticipate political parties it did it the way within the executive branch itself so if you think about the creation of the State Department of the Defense Department or the EPA and commerce normally anything on right now they do check one another you know they're they're seen as kind of clashing and you know one standing for the environment and one standing for business interests at least in an ideal world and but you know that's the genesis of where the American system I think has gone which is to say okay we're not going to always agree on truth but darn it we're going to get everyone in a room or even in written memo sometimes and they're going to debate and disagree and then ultimately be teed up for a decision and used you strongly believe that this is the best model for truth speaking I mean this is what we find it where we find ourselves yeah I mean I think it's better than anything else that's come along obviously right now poses some challenges because you have both the disintegration of several classical Madisonian separation of powers because of one Party government in terms of all the political branches but you also have really a kind of withering of the bureau see an assault on these kinds of checks and balances within the executive branch to give you one example I've written a lot about the state departments and since Vietnam has had something called a defense channel and you actually get a prize for winning for using this in the most effective way a foreign service officer who says I really disagree with something the State Department is doing and that's a kind of goes to like the elite policy planning office it's a big deal but we're seeing a lot of that kind of the use of those channels really being attacked right now and you know so I'm not a fan of how its operating right now but if you think as Jack was talking about if you think more historically I do think the American system has worked quite well I'll just end with one question anyone can answer who who has an idea about this since Moneyball and since Daniel Kahneman we've we've been encouraged to suppress our intuitions about the truth in favor of trusting data and I was wondering if you thought that was a solution or if it's possible to go too far in that direction obviously polls we many people trusted polls in the last election and that particular data did not seem to be as correct as we thought so do you think that's a solution or a fall solution I don't think it's an either/or situation like one extremer and others almost never the right strategy but I will note the poem from Bohr Hayes on exactitude in science or deviled egg or la ciencia we talked about math making and the math makers are making a map of the province that's as big as a city and then a map of the nation that's as big as the province and then they become unsatisfied and they make eventually a map of the country that's as big as the country itself and corresponds with the country point four point and it's like a big data map and it's just not useful and subsequent generations abandon it and and so the mix here is how do you combine data with abstractions data with models data with meaning and if we get better at that you know which I think Moneyball there's a model for baseball right it's not just the statistics about how the players are performing right um in any case thank you very much as I say there are some places in our society in which they've got old just never work because the cost of error I'm getting wrong is too high just a guilt and innocence in a criminal trial I don't think anyone in this room could ever imagine we could say oh well you fit the profile of someone who'd be guilty according to big data therefore we're sending you to prison so sometimes the error costs at you are

Channel: The Aspen Institute

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Id: 0SVF6htpcsA

Length: 82min 36sec (4956 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2017