Saving Knowledge: A Conversation Between Jonathan Haidt and Jonathan Rauch

we tend to think the system kind of takes care of itself that once it gets up and running it's self-maintaining and it's not we need to be very consciously aware of the system it was built by actual humans who did that consciously as on the political side the founding fathers did we need to understand the principles and the institutions that they set up in the reality-based community the big four academia journalism law and government and then we need to defend those principles so we can't let magic do the solve the problem for us we've got to be on top of it [Music] all right well good evening everyone welcome to this hedera heterodox academy uh discussion with jonathan rauch about his his new book the constitution of knowledge um i'm jonathan height i'm a professor uh of ethical leadership at new york university stern school of business i study moral psychology and and wrote the book the righteous mind and in 2015 i was a co-founder of heterodox academy with about 15 other professors for those of you who are new to heterodox academy we are a non-partisan nonprofit organization committed to improving research and education by increasing open inquiry viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement in higher ed we have about 5 300 members now uh relatively evenly spread out across the political spectrum i don't know if there's any other organization that can say that um our members are mostly professors but we also have other stakeholders in the university including university presidents administrators uh graduate students who are in a sense apprentices to to our guild if you're interested if you're if you are a stakeholder in the academy if you're a professor if you're a high school teacher or if you're just curious about ideas and and where they come from and how we separate good ones from bad ones please join us you can go to heterodoxacademy.org join we have a lot of resources at the site we have a lot of events and workshops that we put on such as this one i'm really pleased to be able to introduce to you jonathan roush john is a senior fellow at the brookings institution uh it's the author most recently of the constitution of knowledge a defense of truth uh he's written seven other books on on surprisingly varied themes including happiness after midnight after midlife john is a contributing writer for the atlantic i'm sure you've heard his name and and had his article sent to you by people saying you must read this he was the 2005 recipient of the national magazine award which is the magazine industries equivalent of the pulitzer prize john is one of my top five favorite intellectuals of all time because when i read his work i cheer i get so excited it's not just hmm that's interesting it's oh my god this is the key this is the rosetta stone this is the thing that explains this big thing that is so crazy um john has been writing about political reform about why our government and politics is so messed up uh and but his longest theme has probably more to do with knowledge uh wisdom how we know things he wrote a very important book called kindly inquisitors which my friend greg lucianov says is one of his favorite books a very important book for anyone who cares about about free speech and free inquiry i've been a part of many events and group discussions with john and it is a pleasure to to see him in action if you will tonight rather than just getting to know him through his uh through his writing he has an extraordinary breadth of knowledge he has a depth of insight and he has he has a kind of social skill that uh is is not necessarily common among uh among professors well i guess the best seminar teachers have it um and he he has a real kind of humility he really understands just how hard it is to know anything and just how much we need to hold our conclusions tentatively and send them out for social testing um so um with that welcome john welcome to heterodox academy what a pleasure to be talking with you tonight what a privilege your your work has been such an inspiration for this book quite literally your manhattan institution speech of a few years ago your model has been my model and i see i turned on my camera too early because now you're seeing me blush at that overly generous introduction hardly um okay well i guess it is a problem that we like and admire each other too much we'll have to get outside views from others who can uh who can shake this up um what i'd like to do to approach the book uh um is let's go back let's go back to the 1990s here because as many scholars have observed there have been three waves of of political ferment coming into the university and this conflict between those who think wait we're here to do research we're here to find the truth we're here to talk to each other we're the descendants of plato's academy that's a view that we've had of ourselves in the academy on and off for thousands of years and at other times the universities are are seen to be right there in the center of social affirmative their agents of change they're places where knowledge can be applied to make the world better as many university mission statements uh now say in the last few years so there was a huge wave of of this in the 1960s of course and then it kind of quieted down um in the in the 1980s the university seemed to get more more commercial let's say but then there was another wave more faculty driven in the ninth late 1980s and the early 1990s and then that dies down the in the late 90s and it doesn't come back until around maybe 2013 2014 that's the way that we're in now let's go back to that wave in the in the 1990s when you wrote kindly inquisitors can you tell us why did you write that book first tell us just very briefly what was your point there what was uh what was it you were contributing to our understanding of knowledge at the time so as shorthand i tell people kindly inquisitors is a free speech book but it's really not in 1989 we saw a couple things the first was the emergence of what quickly became known as political correctness which you just described and the second was the thoughtwa against salman rushdie by the ayatollah khomeini and i thought both of them revealed a flawed and shallow understanding of not the constitutional case for free speech but the underlying reasons we have it to begin with because it seemed to me that the complaints against it especially coming out of academia at the time law schools people like marie matsuda richard delgado and so forth were more fundamental they weren't arguing the constitution they were saying this is a destructive way to run a society they were saying it's inhumane it's oppressive it's unegalitarian and i thought our side was not responding at that level we were just quoting the first amendment in john stewart mill so i thought i'd write a book that tried to start from the beginning the the real mission of kindly inquisitors is to define what i called at the time liberal science which i said is an analog to markets in economics and liberal democracy in politics it's a social system for deciding what's true and what's false i said the opponents were correct to say that all knowledge producing systems are fundamentally political what they were wrong was to say that their system which is fundamentally authoritarian was the best system i said no our system's the best system and here's why and that's that's the case kindly inquisitors made it identified several opponents both are still alive and well one was egalitarian though that's the notion that the open contest of ideas is fundamentally oppressive to certain groups and that all groups knowledge is inherently equal except that some are more equal than others and the second claim was humanitarian and that was the defensive and hurtful speech is the equivalent of violence now both of those are alive and well and i felt obliged alas to come back now what 28 years later perfect so so right reading you and at heterox academy we've had a lot of writing from musa algarve he's really gone back into intellectual history going back to the 1910s and 1920s showing a lot of these arguments we have and the counter arguments of the two you just mentioned have been around for decades or in some cases more than a century so you so you laid out the case for quote our side or the case for for free speech being a benefit um back in the 1990s what has changed since then are you just making the case more explicit what has changed what brought you back in and what's the basic argument of constitutional knowledge well the attack morphed but also i came to see that people like me and like my friends in the free speech world and for that matter john stuart mill had missed something important and the first clue was the speech that you gave at the manhattan institute i urge everyone to listen to it it was formative for me a guy named jonathan height argues that in order to get liberal democracy you can't just assume the best about people you got to get a lot of complicated social settings right it's a sweet spot and it's hard to maintain and i said well that's right and the problem with books like kindly inquisitor is it assumes a marketplace of ideas that's healthy in which truth emerges from this contest and all you need is free speech and open inquiry and i said that's wrong because the latest attacks on this system aren't attacking free speech per se necessarily they're like trolls they're polluting the entire ecosystem they're undermining the rules they're claiming to be on the side of free speech i said so we need to understand what are the settings the social settings that we depend on in order to make knowledge in a way that's productive and peaceful and that led me to the concept of the constitution of knowledge the one of i think three big takeaways of this book is is there is a constitution of knowledge just free speech in an unstructured environment is not enough for reasons that social psychologists have taught us all about in fact in those environments you get tribalism and chaos and warfare and ignorance and authoritarianism and the first 200 000 years of human history so the constitution of knowledge is about what are the things we've got to get right in order to convert information into knowledge a very hard thing to do beautiful because there's always been pressure since we founded heterodox academy just as as the new wave of culture wars was heating up there's always been pressure to be a free speech organization or to champion free speech and and i've always felt like well yes it's important in the united states i'm glad we have that in the constitution but what we're trying to do on campus it's not about people need to be able to say whatever they want whenever they want i always felt there was something else we're trying to do and so actually it's kind of like nice ping-pong here you know i i got some ideas from you you take them you improve them you send it back to me um so um okay so let's go into it what so uh universities are these unique institutions they are one of three or four major institutions in the book that are the foundations of this constitution of knowledge uh can you lay out for us what exactly is this analogy to the constitution what are the other pillars and and how are they doing well this this takes a minute because there's there's a bit to unpack um but yeah but i'll try not to make i'll try not to make it take too long the so the constitution of knowledge is not just a metaphor it's not just a simile it's an actual thing and the argument of my book is that in many ways it's very similar to the us constitution the main difference being in fact one is political the other is epistemic one happens to be written down and the other doesn't but they're both mechanisms to do fundamentally the same thing which is compel social negotiation which is a very difficult thing to do and then get people to agree with the results of social negotiation well social negotiation is not something humans love um in the political sphere that's why we have you know mostly civil war and authoritarianism and same thing in the epistemic sphere so what's the constitution of knowledge well it sets up the norms and institutions that we rely on to keep us socially collectively moored to reality and to settle disputes in a civil way in a peaceful way both breakthrough ideas and it says that there are two things that you got to do if you want to make knowledge um the first is epistemically i call it the fallibleist rule which is anyone could be wrong so no one gets to shut everybody else up and say we've reached the right answer everyone go home second is the empirical rule which says uh the way you make truth the way you make knowledge i should say objective knowledge is not by yourself in a room or not because you've had a divine revelation you're going to have to check with other people and do it in a very specific way which is anyone can participate on more or less the same terms humans are interchangeable so if height proposes something some spanish-speaking psychologists in argentina can read it and bring in a whole different perspective on it and that allows you to create the community of millions of minds around the world creating this hive-like mind that's producing objective knowledge which is height says takes humans a species capability far above our design capacity but those two rules translate in everyday life into first freedom of speech you can't shut people down just because you don't like what they have to say or because you think they're wrong but second just as important the discipline of fact there's a lot of stuff you have to do to make knowledge anyone can say anything but if you want to be in the textbooks if you want to be in the curriculum if you want to be the basis of government policy if you want to be the basis of a supreme court decision if you want to be in the newspaper you're going to have to go through a very disciplined process through institutions with other trained people mostly professionals a lot of protocols a lot of learning in order to establish that what you're saying is actually true most of the time you'll lose actually someone else will be right or some combination will be right so the trick isn't goes to heterodox academy it's not just free speech it's what are the disciplines of fact that get people to behave incentivize in this rigorous way so that they're effectively persuading each other that's the analogy to compromise in the us constitution so that they're willing to lose an argument and keep going that's the analogy to losing an election keep going so that no one is claiming sole authority that's the equivalent to not having dictators or despots in the political world um so that um they're disciplined about sticking to facts which is the equivalent of being disciplined about obeying the law factfulness and lawfulness so you've got to inculcate all that values and you need a third thing which is fundamental to the root of the system it's the ingredient you need you need diversity of viewpoint both of these systems us constitution and constitutional knowledge depend on as madison said enlarging the sphere having enough different factions so that factions can check each other having enough different viewpoints so that viewpoints can check each other and that's where heterodox comes in that is john that is just gorgeous the the feeling that you often get in free speech debates is free speech is a right i have a right to say this thing but what you're describing is really much more locked in with obligations it's do you want to play the game welcome but this is more about your duties than it is about your rights and you're going to have to listen to people you're going to have to respond and you're going to have to persuade um so that is a that is a beautiful concise presentation of of why free speech is not enough and of how yes you have to get settings right just as the founding fathers thought endlessly and wrote endlessly about tinkering with this machine to faction against faction and the magic of having one person's confirmation bias cancel out another person's confirmation bias because as we know in psychology the only cure for confirmation bias is other people with different confirmation biases i'd only if i may push back on the word magic which isn't to say that you're wrong but we tend to think the system kind of takes care of itself that once it gets up and running it's self-maintaining and it's not we need to be very consciously aware of the system it was built by actual humans who did that consciously as on the political side the founding fathers did we need to understand the principles and the institutions that they set up in the reality-based community the big four academia journalism law and government and then we need to defend those principles so we can't let magic do solve the problem for us we've got to be on top of it and and this brings up the the sense of professional duty that is just as with the constitution there's a sense in which this was passed on to us and each generation has an obligation to tune up the machine keep it running take account of new situations we there's an amendment mechanism for the constitution which we rarely use but there are other ways of of doing political innovation and this system that changes gradually or the political reality changes fairly gradually over the course of several hundred years we have a sense that we are the heirs of this democracy again our audience is international apologies to those of you outside the united states i know we do an awful lot of naval gazing and we act as though we're the only country in the world um but at least our constitution and our new form of of democracy was an inspiration for many other liberal democracies around the world and so the analogy to the the actual us constitution now we switch that over to the epistemic or the constitutional knowledge or the area of epistemology and we don't have that sense of that we've been bequeathed this amazing complicated contraption that what didn't exist 400 years ago and it was invented over over the course of time by specific individuals as you described in the book um uh i think we don't have that sense of of duty to maintain this thing and who does the duty fall to well it def it falls to anyone who is a professional in those four areas that you just mentioned and so there's a beautiful part of your book where you talk about how you were inducted into the guild as it were of journalism could you talk about that how you know you're a college student interested in all these ideas you're still an intellectual interest in all these ideas how were you changed by becoming a journalist and do you have the sense that journalists today have a sense of guarding this this valuable tradition well as you know john from your work in psychology in some ways institutions and norms work best when people are least aware of them when they're just out there in the air shaping us to be who we are we take them for granted um the problem with that is after a while we get lazy and we just assume you know as we did in iraq the natural state of the world is liberal democracy saddam hussein will go away and out will come the flowering of civil society the long repressed and they'll have elections and we'll go home that turns out to be wrong because we took it too easy for for too long so i was trained as a journalist back in the 80s at the winston-salem journal and national journal and among the things i learned was excuse the french no one gives a about your opinion so keep it out of print um fact check everything two sources for everything editors would stop me all the time um david broder's famous uh exhortation to journalism was if your mother says she loves you check it you know i i went through this process and it took a number of years and i don't think i was really aware that i was being changed as a person that my standards of knowledge were being changed but that's what was happening and that's what's happening in theory in principle we hope every time someone goes through college and then graduate school and then conferences and paper submissions defenses becoming a professor it's being inculcated in these norms the problem is if we take them for granted if we assume it's all automatic and that the right norms will just be inculcated automatically then we lose because there are some very real very immediate very sophisticated threats to these norms and many of them are coming from within the institutions so yeah i'm worried that's why i wrote this book um yeah and and i have to say when i when i was a graduate student at penn i i arrived in 1987 and i was there until 1992. i did have a sense that there were giants who walked the world of psychology and they were mostly pretty old by that point but i did have a sense that there was a tradition stretching you know back to pavlov and wilhelm bondin and that i was that i was being inducted into it uh but by the time i was an assistant professor the culture war had heated up i got much more the sense that psychologists were involved in fighting against the republican party and conservatism and anti-immigration and fighting racism just much more a sense that our mission is to improve the world in a particular in a particular way and in fact that's why i began to study political psychology um in 2004 i decided to i got so frustrated that the democrats kept blowing at least in 2000 2004. i thought they should have won both presidential elections and i thought i could do better as a speechwriter and i really started thinking my work can help the democrats so i fell into that i would now call it a professional irresponsibility um i would call it a betrayal of of of my obligations as a professor and researcher and i became a partisan and i wanted i wasn't going to warp my research but i was doing it to help one political team and i now see as as the culture war is eating everything and as as politics is infecting even restaurants is it okay to scream at someone if you see them in a restaurant if you know that they're evil well many people think yes you should it's all at war all the time because so much is at stake um and so so let's so let's let's zoom out now a bit to the national situation uh and and congress but then we'll just briefly and then we'll try to bring it down specifically to to university because i think that the larger culture war which is is is really destroying the constitution of knowledge in so many domains the destruction is coming apart from the national culture war and then we'll see what we can do in universities so now the um so let's talk we'll have to talk about left right here and i'll just put it on the table that a couple of people emailed me you know i have friends from all over the spectrum that writes me so you're interviewing jonathan roush you know sure he you know he he talks a lot about the left having problems but boy is he biased politically he you know he seems to think that these um these uh progressive uh you know newspapers and these gatekeepers of the uh you know the constitutional knowledge that they're actually doing a good job or they could do a good job so i'm just wondering tell us you know what are you seeing in terms of you know the left-right cultural war has it affect government and and uh journalism there's other pillars and then we'll move on to the university pillar well again that's going to be hard to do in a minute because there's so much there so i'll take the liberty of of going up one level um and sketching a few a few ideas as a way to get there and i'll try to do it again very succinctly so we've discussed one of the big themes in my book which is that there is a constitution of knowledge marketplace of ideas is not enough second big thing is you're being manipulated that there are a lot of cognitive and social flaws in humans which lead us away from objective reality two big ones are confirmation bias and conformity bias and you've written eloquently about these and i have a chapter summarizing them and they make it very easy for us to individually believe things that aren't true because they make us feel more prestigious or help us with our social group and then we lead each other further and further down these rabbit holes into spirals of epistemic secession cultism all kinds of things it's very hard to break that that's why we have a constitutional knowledge to force us into structured contestation with different views but some smart people came along not by the way just yesterday this goes back to the time of tocqueville who complained about cancel culture and hitler and lenin who were very good at using techniques like trolling and disinformation they saw that the vulnerability of this system is to weaponize those cognitive defects and they developed a whole suite of instruments to do that they're very powerful in a liberal democracy really the best way to cope with them is not to deploy them in the first place and we pretty much didn't actually until a few years ago certainly not in politics the way trump has done so what am i talking about specifically the book addresses kind of two big aspects on the national scene they're both however i argue forms of information warfare which is to say manipulating the social and media and information environments for political gains specifically to demoralize silence uh de-platform ultimately and disorient your opponent so what are we talking about primarily deployed at the moment could be the left right now it's the right uh that's just so russian-style disinformation tactics that's conspiracy trafficking conspiracy bootlegging that's trump saying well i hear people you know people are saying that jonathan height is a murderer i don't know could that be true creates the impossible dilemma of covering it repeating it in order to debunk it or ignoring it letting it spread very sophisticated fire hose of falsehood a russian tactic putin is a master at it trump is even better that's putting out so many lies half truths exaggeration and conspiracy theories so half so fast that as steve bannon trump's advisor said you flood the zone with that's free speech all right but it creates a toxic information environment then on the left you have a different suite of instruments they're deploying social coercion not so much disinformation and they're doing it with a couple goals in mind the first is of course just making people reluctant to speak out because they're afraid of so-called canceling social ramifications the kinds of ostracism shaming losing their reputation losing maybe their jobs certainly their friends so they dive for cover so that's the first order problem but then you have a second order problem which goes to some really sophisticated psychology that you understand better than i do which is if you can begin to silence people you can begin to falsify the consensus so actually comparatively small groups of people with comparatively unrepresentative opinions if they can quash the larger conversation can make it look as though they're actually the dominant viewpoint and that plays with our psychology by making us respect take seriously repeat ideas that we actually don't believe or maybe thinking we should believe them pioneers at this were anti-vaxxers renee duress at stanford has mapped how in 2014 they started making it look so if you googled vaccination you'd see what looked like lots of scientific evidence that the anti-vaxxers were right this has been picked up in a big way by campus activists who are using intimidation to create a sense of consensus that there is kind of theirs is the overwhelming viewpoint and it's futile to resist makes people feel ashamed and isolated unwilling to defend the opinions they do have or just sometimes they abandon those opinions so these i argue have in common although they're deployed differently by different actors for different ends they have in common that they're sophisticated forms of information warfare they're hard to beat you really need to focus on them and understand what they're doing and then really fight back okay good that that's a really helpful framing uh because we so easily fall into into the binary thinking of of you know it's you know it's one side versus the other one side is right and each side is can point to so much that the other side is really doing wrong or manipulatively um but i think you know what what i get from the book and from my talks with you is there's a broad community of people center left center right center libertarian often libertarian and just non-non-aligned that really you can call liberal that is that these two extremes are illiberal in different ways using different tactics and most of us you know the the more in common report found called it the the exhausted majority most of us were not on the extremes um actually are part of the liberal tradition we want to be able to talk about ideas we want to be able to search collectively for truth but there are these intimidation tactics going on on the two sides using different forms of intimidation um okay so let's um so i think i'll open up for a question about 10 minutes let's let's uh uh let's go down to the university level uh you talked about these forms of intimidation um what what can we do what should we do we have a community of people most of our most of our audience i presume is made up either of academics or graduate students or others who uh are interested in in education um what can we do on well let's okay let's start with systemically what can universities do what changes or policies or norms should heterox academy push for and then we'll bring it down to individual professors in their classes or individual students in their classes who are feeling intimidation uh for for speaking up so systemically what can we do with to strengthen universities so i should just say by way of a preface i'm not an academic i'm a journalist i don't know your world the way you do and i prefer to be asking you that question the second however i'll do my best second broad point is it is important you need action on both the individual side and the institutional side they've got to support each other because neither will work without the other you got to work both ends of the problem so on the institutional side um there's a bunch of things one is you need clear and strong leadership emanating from the top that you're going to have a culture of open inquiry on campus and that there will be no investigations of people who are simply exercising what is accepted by the courts as first amendment protected speech unless it violates a professional norm like plagiarism or like abusing students in a classroom and those standards should be pretty precise as you know john the investigation is the punishment no one wants to go through it i heard justice for months and months and then it stains reputation forever i heard just last week from a political scientist at a at a public university saying he was summoned for two and a half hour interrogation by a mid-level human resources bureaucrat not another professor not someone who's ever taught a class because a student had complained that he was too conservative and that he was using words like black and african americans as as nouns instead of adjectives among other things now the answer to this should have been on its face no violation was committed uh go away nothing should happen instead he was grilled for two and a half hours i said what next he said i don't know i think no investigation i hope i don't have to hire a lawyer who can teach in those circumstances this is about intimidation you need clear leadership from the top saying enough of that i'd like to see the chicago principles adopted and followed up i'd like to see the american association of university professors and other professional groups get more active why when these things happen to professors you know when they're grilled by mid-level bureaucrats because someone doesn't like the way they're teaching that day why is that happening i mean you know what does it mean to be a professor if you can't teach your class without this kind of thing very important i mentioned the the crucial importance of diverse viewpoint diversity you can't have science you can't have politics none of these systems work without diversity even economics the foundations trade different preferences so you can't go out and have quotas to hire republican professors but right now as you know it's very possible in a lot of fields for someone to go through their entire career pretty much without encountering a conservative that they're accountable to well that limits uh their exposure it means they're doing probably faulty science and it also means that universities are losing credibility so there's now why there's now increasingly well documented it's it's increasingly well documented that discrimination against conservatives centrist libertarians is a real thing that needs to be put on a par by universities with other forms of diversity they need to to actively look for discrimination a viewpoint actively work against it and they need to elevate ideological and viewpoint diversity to be co-equal with the other forms of dursa of diversity those are some things that will help another thing that will help is exactly what you're doing that's counter-mobilizing that's creating an infrastructure of support both for individuals who get hit with this kind of problem and for the culture that we're trying to defend so that's hxa foundation for individual rights and education the new academic freedom alliance more more reforming that's very important because a lot of what's happening on campus is just good old-fashioned lobbying small groups that are organized and mount pressure campaigns can out vote so to speak large disorganized majorities every time that's why we have farm subsidies right farmers make millions of a piece and no one else notices so when you start counter organizing so that these pressure groups meet resistance groups that say oh no you don't equal and opposite pressure they'll back off we saw that at university of chicago recently there was a campaign to defenistrate a professor president of the university issued a statement saying sorry he's exercising free speech there's no violation nothing to investigate and that was that they went away to look for softer targets so hxa is very important great thank you john so so it's the three three structural features one is you must have leadership from the top and i've seen this over and over again when there is leadership from the top then people people find courage but when they expect that the top won't back them up which is usually the case there are very few presidents who've actually stood up against against this stuff um then the the collapse radiates down down the ladder all the way down two is viewpoint diversity which we actually have more of one thing i realized in running header apps academy is we actually have much more viewpoint diversity than we realized it's just that because of the spiral of silence which you described so well in your book because the spiral of science you wouldn't know that they're off they're actually a lot of of centrists and center left people well you know central left but you wouldn't know that there's a lot of centrists and people who just aren't aren't politically aligned but because they don't make themselves known you think you have a false consensus effect you think that the range of viewpoint is very very narrow and the third is is counter mobilizing uh yes we've seen this with some friends of mine where the investigation was brewing and you know me and a few other people sent a letter uh to the to the president and the and the the various other people saying you know if you do this you know there's going to be a lot of publicity about about this and you're going to look just like all those other presidents who went along uh with this once they realized that actually the cost of submitting to pressure is it might feel like it's the easy thing to do today but you're going to pay for it tomorrow so uh so counter mobilizing counter pressure great okay so now what about i know you say that of course you're not a professor you don't know our world as well but you talk to a lot of people the book has great coverage of the academic world you talk to a lot of professors and a lot of students you've spoken a lot of universities and colleges too um what do you say to a professor who doesn't have doesn't have all this leadership and and might face some consequences um for for not towing the line for for questioning things what do you say to that professor about whether they should speak up or question things question policies uh one of the clearest and fastest ways to get an investigation it seems is not to say something that is offensive is to question a dei policy uh going back to uh this goes back to erica christakis brett weinstein so many of the big cases from the beginning in 2015 so many of them were not that someone said something offensive it's that they questioned a dei policy and then the hammer comes down on them uh and i get emails about this my you know we're having mandatory uh implicit bias training mandatory this and that what should i do um do you have anything to say about individual actions or how to find the courage or what well it's hard john because there's strongly positive social externalities if even a relatively small group of professors on a campus speak up against abuse robbie george at princeton likes to say i don't know the exact quote but it's the effect that it doesn't take 500 professors to change the culture on a campus it takes five the problem is there's also a large internalized cost of going first or going second or going third these professors aren't just imagining that it's a world of trouble for them if they're the first to stick their head up above the parapet so i'm caught in this conflict of saying on the one hand unmute yourself especially if you're a student by the way students i think are more immune to the kinds of professional retaliation that professors face for a whole bunch of reasons if i've heard one thing again and again from students it's students who feel intimidated by pressure to be silent because of their privilege or their race they say what should we do and i say unmute yourself it doesn't matter what you say it's that you say continue your speech stand your ground you will be surprised how many people there are in that room who ultimately will agree with you that's why you're dangerous from the point of view of those trying to silence you and the consequences will generally not be nearly as bad as you think in fact they might well be good for professors it's a little harder especially junior professors but there i would say you know what at some point especially if you have tenure it's very important that you not hide under the furniture find some allies push back be willing to go first call hxa call fire call the the uh academic freedom alliance find other allies but put your voice out there there is likely going to be a cost but it's going to be worth it um even more important is you know these letters that people sign all the time where you know hundreds of academic pronunciations yes they have a very standard form yeah yeah that's right it's almost kind of a trope now so don't sign those letters uh when you see a colleague who is being mobbed go and help that person do it privately do it publicly too i keep hearing people who've been attacked by these things their colleagues will come to them in private and say gee i'm really sorry about what's happening to you there's no justification for it i wish i could speak up well speak the f up it's it's important that people defend each other and form alliances the ultimate goal of all of these forms of information warfare that we're talking about on the left and right is demoralization it's to make you feel helpless that there's nothing you can do to fight back because politically demoralization is demobilization that's how you get people to sit home and just take it and that's how factions uh demagogues uh oppressive oppressive factions cults that's how they take over so it's on all of us as members of the reality-based community to do our job and that's pushed back now i don't know if that's really good answer in your world though right am i asking people to do something that's just too hard yeah um i think that if even if you do it in a small way i think what you're pointing to so i urge everyone on this call to buy john's book the constitution of knowledge read it you'll understand what's going on you'll understand why we really have a sacred obligation to defend this constitution to defend this system this amazing system that has brought us so much knowledge so quickly and you'll see that there are different games going on and stand up for the game that we the system that we are playing which is is designed to bring us to knowledge and um i'll just offer the i'll add on to john's advice and meet yourself he says it's it's it's not important what you say it's important that you say it i'll just add a little qualification to that how you say it is actually very very important because i think john is absolutely right that most people will agree with you most people and heterodox academy surveys show this fire survey show this most people feel afraid to speak up most people are pretty reasonable and so if you come out angry and using words words uh that would be used in the culture war you know by the right against the left if people can tag you instantly and put you in a category then they can dismiss you but if you start off by often by acknowledging something about what is right about this policy or the need for it or what is right about that person this is the lesson i i always try to give my talk about the righteous mind um know what the person holds sacred and say something to show that you actually understand and respect something about their beliefs and values and then say however um you know here is a contrary fact or opinion or view or value uh so so it matters a lot that you speak up you can learn to speak up in ways that will maximize your effectiveness read dale carnegie how to win friends and influence people but the larger point that i think that you're making here john is that is that it's not about numbers it's about numbers greater than one so yes it's hard to do it alone but if you find three or four other people then it actually becomes much much easier and i think we all have an obligation to do this we have an obligation to not sit silently when we see injustice when we see someone chipping away at the constitution of knowledge someone trying to win not by persuasion and evidence but by intimidation ad hominem slandering slurring we do have a moral obligation to stand up and that's why we created rocks academy well originally it was just for we were going to write about it and just study it but it quickly became clear no actually we need a community of people who will support each other and we'll be doing a lot more of that in the future especially creating chapters or bringing people together on each campus or within each discipline but we have a huge number of heterodox academy communities if you're in new zealand or australia if you're a sociologist if you're in new york city we have all kinds of heterox academy communities uh that where people get together and and learn from each other and when necessary support each other so that was a great note to end on john that call to that call to courage by end i mean end our part of discussion uh let's go to the audience q a we have some questions coming in here uh so i'm going to um um okay i'll start with this one it might be a geek a geekier one but i'll let's start with this uh in ancient greece the universities or at least the academic community ended up with a kind of anti-total relationship to society ceding political unrest through radical thinking our universities seem to be tending that way what's the idea how should we imagine universities in relationship to broader cultural knowledge-making that's kind of a tricky question but what do you have a response well my response is you should go first on that question i i do have a response which is that questioning authority and sacred principles is part of why we have universities i don't have a problem with critical race theory as a set of ideas if they're propounded in an environment where people feel completely free to challenge and criticize them in a structured organized way i do have a problem with any idea whether it's radical or conservative or just just boring which is enforced by using information warfare tactics like intimidation and consensus falsification and so on so it's not so much about the kinds of ideas in universities it's about the environment the information environment the epistemic environment into which the ideas are introduced okay greece the greeks might have gotten that wrong yeah and yeah you know right you know socrates considered himself a gadfly he thought it was his obligation to question prejudice as pre-judged conclusions i don't think socrates would ever have said hey fellow drinking and talking buddies you know the what became the academy we collectively need to put our collective force behind this proposition hell no he would never have said that think for yourself let's debate it let's argue it and to extend that and of course they did a lot of teaching to extend that our students that their minds are sharpened by this debate this dialectical dialogue process they will go out and become better orators senators uh leaders okay there's a question about uh about journalism for you how can we incentivize the duty of journalists to uphold the constitution of knowledge when the market incentives are to produce low quality click bait so please do tell us what you're seeing in in journalism are journalists they're subject to many pressures not just monetary but political and social um what's either your diagnosis or your suggestion for for this crucial pillar of the constitution namely journalism so the first thing to say is we've got boy do we have our share of problems in journalism and the biggest one is not for example liberal bias or wokeness the biggest one is the collapse of the business model because that supported all of the very expensive work that needs to be done to maintain the rigorous standards and as the questionnaire implies it's much cheaper to sit on your couch and make stuff up and you know higher algorithms to develop quick bait with headlines like to begin you wouldn't believe this dot dot dot the in journalism there is still a ton of good work being done in fact to me more than i might expect given how the economic incentives are declining and a lot of the good incentives are still in place things like like pulitzer prizes say what you want about the new york times award for 16 19 most of the stuff that gets that is outstanding most young journalists i talk to are still trying to do the right thing they're having trouble getting the resources to do it but i i met one guy who to cover at trial was was filing from his car every night so there's a there's still a lot of integrity there what it needs is a business model to support it and second as in academia though it's not as big a problem in journalism as in academia we need to do a better job of ensuring that there's enough viewpoint diversity in the newsrooms especially at the elite centers of journalism so that uh so we get challenged before stuff goes in the paper so someone can say you know i really i'm not sure that that story is really fair so we need more of that can you go a little further on that uh in the academy we have a lot of data on the political viewpoints of professors uh heteroxy academy we've published a lot of data on that uh and we found i think mussolgarby has an article where he looks at the relative under-representation and conservatives are vastly more under-represented than any other any other group of any racial group do we we have the general sense that journalism is the same and part of that is for perfectly fine reasons that liberals and conservatives have different interests they choose different careers what is what do you say what do you think is the ratio among elite journalists or at the new york times i mean are there any conservatives that are contributing ideas oh yeah other than sure uh the numbers on this that i know of are not very good i haven't looked just lately and if you gave me a second guide i could go to my notes and give you what i do know they certainly show that in so-called traditional or mainstream journalism um that uh the numbers lean left but they don't show the kind of exclusivity that you're starting to see in feels like anthropology sociology maybe psychology um so but we do see problems with viewpoint diversity as i said i could get you some numbers i don't have them off the top of my head a specific problem in modern american journalism here sorry uh overseas friends doing american naval gazing is that a lot of conservative journalism has effectively seceded it's gone and formed its own news and information environment we're talking about fox news newsmax oan oan conservative talk radio um so that has several effects one is it isolates conservative media in a world where it's having an echo chamber effect and some very empirical um data-heavy research has discovered that that that section of the media does tend to act as an echo chamber it will amplify for example conspiracy thing theories that are amenable to the audience whereas mainstream journalism will tend to suppress them after only a news cycle someone else will come along and say it's not true people stop publishing so they're operating in a different epistemic environment one that's more about bias confirmation than biased disconfirmation but second if you think about it they're also sucking that conservative talent out of mainstream media and unfortunately a lot of mainstream media is happy to see that talent go so we get in this spiral where the two increasingly separate um and and here we are so this is really this is terrifying i mean this sounds like a much worse situation even than what we have in the academy i mean if we you know if we form uh you know if some disciplines are almost entirely left-leaning and and a few right-leaning scholars go work in the think tanks okay they turn out their white papers but they don't necessarily have a lot of effect on society but as we're seeing journalism go from you know it's always leaned left but if you segment off into entirely different ecosystems and i believe there is research on how fox news has had a radicalizing effect in the republican party this strikes me as possibly much scarier than what's happening at universities would you agree um yes and no universities are the very very heart of the reality-based community if they lose credibility if they lose objectivity if they lose the goal of objectivity if they become political politicized if they engage in indoctrination trust in them collapses which means trust in the whole happening yeah and the whole epistemic the whole constitution of knowledge collapses and also you could get so that universities are to the left what fox news is to the right right where they are in a segmented world they're just not aware of it because they're all on the left um second it's important for all of what i just said it's important not to exaggerate it most conservatives um they're heavily reliant on fox news but they're not only reliant on fox news there's still a fair amount of inner penetration we don't see total secession on either side we do see that centrists and people on the left people whose diet includes things like npr and the new york times have more varied news diets than people on the right who are significantly more focused and concentrated on fox news specifically but also breitbart and some of the others so they're behaving asymmetry but we're not talking about an impenetrable chinese wall and that's our opportunity right to figure out how to begin creating more interaction between those walls or across that wall i guess yeah um so question here and i encourage uh those in the audience uh send in send in more questions we'll be able to do several more um so there's a question here um one was about business i thought was interesting where's that um oh the question got got moved from my from my document here uh let's see what does the constitutional knowledge look like beyond the four major institutions you identify how do intellectual elites divers how do intellectual elites diversity diversify your potentially diversify your message um to meet the ends and realities of ordinary americans uh well let's see let's just so first let's start with it beyond the four major institutions are there others and there was previously somebody put up your question about business does business have a role to play here is business a part of the constitution of knowledge or are they in some ways a difficulty for it yeah so there are aspects of it in all kinds of places of society museums for example they'll fact check what goes up on the exhibit that'll be a point of pride libraries will usually partake of a certain set of ethical norms about putting all kinds of books on the shelves but not nonsense crazy books if they're you know you know of certain types um certain businesses like consultancies uh accountancies have very rigorous standards for truth so yeah you see elements of this sprinkled all through society what they have in common is that they tend to be professionals the reality-based community is fundamentally a professional network amateurs can have input and do all the time there's more access to amateurs in this system than in any other system but the bulk of the work is done by trained people in many cases who spent five years ten years learning their craft their trade mastering the jargon the depth of knowledge that they're going to need and and those are the people throughout society who are doing this work of trying to keep us in touch with facts and in touch with the disciplines of fact their product helps ordinary people by finding truth and settling differences of opinion in ways that don't involve for example civil war oppression throwing people in jail or killing them which is the traditional way of settling differences of opinion right this is great this um this suggests that any any professional community that has boundaries in which they police professional standards um is at least a potential candidate here for being a part of it i teach a professional responsibility course here at stern i teach mba students and it's always interesting to contrast the professional responsibility of course over in the law school or in the medical school those are professions in which you have to qualify and you can be kicked out and you have a license to practice or not um and they have very clear boundaries who's in who's out whereas business it's open to anyone anyone can start a business there is no professional association that you have to be in the good graces of um so it's much harder to teach a professional responsibility course in business in general but as you point out there are sub areas so accountants uh certainly engineers the rating agencies there are there are parts and that others are depending on them to do their job with accuracy uh and so again seeing it as a constitution as a system of pitting incentives and people and and and and bringing in diverse viewpoints to challenge uh gets us to a result that an individual rarely can get to by him or herself yeah that's right a simple way to say it is that if you're in a business which is uh which is a business of trying to get the right answer and if you're accountable to others in your profession for any mistakes you may make then you're in a reality-based profession got it good good okay uh let's see okay here's a question for you one of the most profoundly and profoundly beautiful arguments i have read was your case for free expression in the service of moral progress on gay rights in kindly inquisitors are there good ways to illuminate this important insight in the current context why we need open expression including challenge and disagreement to make moral progress on racial inequality trans rights reproductive rights and other current debates wow thank you whoever wrote this question that is a beautiful question and that really goes to the heart of some of the difficulties we're having john what say you well yeah thank you this is of all the things i write about in this book in my previous book and speak about on campus this is the most personal and passionate for me we in the gay rights struggle did not think that we were seeking rights and equality for ourselves at the expense of others we thought we were trying to transform society so that it would respect the rights of all it it breaks and we did that by using the constitutional knowledge we did not have votes we did not have money we did not have troops all we had was our voices and people like frank cammony trained as a scientist who was one of these people who refused to go quietly he spoke out again and again and again and he was a pariah for much of his life but wound up winning the highest award of the office of personnel management the government agency that had fired him 50 years ago getting accommodation from president obama seeing gay marriage this can happen but he did it by using his voice by using the power of argument by using not only free speech but the rigor of facts again and again he just he would shred the bad arguments of people on the other side so it breaks my heart to hear minority rights activists who are demanding protection from free speech as if minorities are fragile and will will that's just patronizing it's just condescending but but even worse the moral pro project of liberal society of greater equality greater inclusivity including more and more people in the circle of humanity liberal societies are the only type that drive that process steadily forward over time in others it's a random walk and that's because of this system which allows minorities and others to make their case and defend it and prove themselves right and by god we do that is our strongest weapon and to hear minority rights activists turn against it it's bad for minorities it's bad for science it's bad for society and it's it breaks my heart there's more of that for your questioner and more of that in the constitutional knowledge in this book if you want it i really appreciate the question yeah can you so we're we're seeing a lot more i'm seeing a lot more arguments around trauma informed this and that the idea that students are traumatized there's so much trauma and this is why we have to be so careful with speech and as you say to assume that to assume that members of certain groups are traumatized and therefore fragile is patronizing um do i you do you have any thoughts on on gen z and how we do have a generation that has much higher rates of anxiety and depression um that believes that it's more fragile that might be more fragile um you know in the colleen american mind greg luciano and i developed the idea of anti-fragility and you know sometimes it's hard to say well we actually need to be exposed to things that upset us in order to have make them have less power over us in order to to dull their power um do you have just advice for you know advice for a freshman starting out in college uh lgbtq or or african american who's hearing different arguments about speech and and speech laws my advice is is understand that this makes you stronger understand that hatred is usually motivated by ignorance and fear not by a desire to hate someone and that the way you correct it is by getting rid of the ignorance and fear and the way you do that is by showing that there is nothing to fear i tell them that when i encounter an idea that seems hostile or defamatory or wrong-headed or hurtful that i have some agency there this is not regardless of what people say the same as being clubbed over the head or gassed in the face because i don't really have much choice about the outcome of that but when i encounter what i think is a hostile or bad idea i do have a choice between dialing my reaction down to annoyance or up to outrage and the social incentives right now seem to be dial it up to outrage because you'll get something for it you can tell me john i don't know to what extent is the the so-called traumatization that people talk about you know when when they hit an idea that they that they don't like to what extent is that psychological trauma and to what extent is it a politicized claim to trauma what it what to what extent are people believing it because they're told that it's what you should expect to happen to you and and i don't know the difference um but i would ask people to work on changing those social incentives and to start with themselves um another thing i hit is why should i have to defend my existence go get yourself educated we shouldn't even have that conversation and i'm i'm thinking you know the greatest privilege of my entire life is being born in 1960 and being able to be a moral leader being able to be an educator changing the minds of i think ultimately many many thousands probably millions of people because i had the opportunity to do that work so i say embrace it explain it talk about it show them that you're right and i would i would add to that look up daryl davis a brilliant blues musician who found himself talking to a member of the ku klux klan while performing one night ended up listening to him befriending him and ultimately getting him to turn over his robes and leave the clan and then he did it over and over again i think more than 100 times and so the idea that somebody who has ideas that you think are hateful means that you will be harmed by them and you should avoid them is self-handicapping it is counterproductive it is not good for your cause it is not good for you and to see it instead as an opportunity to actually win someone over you don't win them over by intimidating them or yelling at them you win them over by listening and showing them where that you understand them so you understand them and then showing them where they're wrong and that's daryl davis's formula and that was your formula and then the struggle for gay marriage and that's what works if you want to be an activist if you want to actually make the world better along the lines of a concern you have about it you'll do much better to understand people and persuade them than you will to hate them shame them and try to get them punished yeah and also remember even if you don't persuade that person because it's very hard to persuade people remember that your real audience is those quiet people in the room who are listening in probably not talking but those are the people we persuaded with gay marriage those are the people kind of listening who the more they listened the more they thought well maybe roush is on to something maybe it's not so crazy i'll never forget the day the first time it occurred to me that we might actually would it's 2004 i was on a radio show you know the usual talk radio kind of thing making the case for gay marriage i'd written a book about it and someone calls in and says to the host i believe that your guest today is the most dangerous man in america and the host says and why is that caller and the caller says because he makes it so sounds so damn reasonable and i thought yes yes there you go john that's beautiful uh something i i read stoic writings in the morning and i try to reflect on how to live in this crazy time and one phrase that i formulated for myself is something about how i'm so lucky that i get to live in this in this confusing time and to try to apply moral psychology to making things better life is challenging society is always seemed chaotic and often threatening our time is no different but if we commit to finding the truth if we commit to understanding society and each other then we're in better better shape to actually change things in a way that will work that won't backfire that won't just be expression or running around making noise that will actually change things as you and so many others did in bringing what seemed like an impossibility 15 20 years ago to now it's just like it's just like that's just the way things are people get married it doesn't matter what the sex of the person you marry um so there are extraordinary possibilities if you really want to change the world for the better if you really want to be a social justice warrior and actually make it dent in things find a piece of wrong knowledge or bad knowledge bad belief i should say find something that's wrong and correct it don't silence it correct it because when you enter that new moral knowledge that new scientific knowledge whatever kind of knowledge it is when it becomes knowledge it changes the world forever and i cannot find a better way to end our conversation than that i urge everyone to buy john's book the constitution of knowledge i believe and i've said this i might even say it on the back of the book that this is going to be recognized as one of the 10 most important books of the 2020s because we have an epistemic crisis which is morphing into an epistemic catastrophe and the constitution of knowledge is the best book i have ever seen it's it's the book that got me cheering about understanding so this is what's happening to us i urge everyone to read it uh and as you see uh john has that combination of broad knowledge passionate commitment uh to to to what he does into professional norms and a humanity that opens your heart so john thank you so much for spending this time with us uh you're an inspiration to all of us at header docs academy um and it's been a pleasure a pleasure talking with you and learning from you thank you so much for letting me be here it's it's a privilege to have the opportunity to make my case all right well welcome everyone thanks for spending this time with us check out john's book and check out heterodoxacademy.org goodnight [Music]

Channel: Heterodox Academy

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Keywords: jonathan haidt, jonathan rauch, heterodox academy, constitution of knowledge

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Length: 70min 0sec (4200 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021