The Death Of Conversation with Jonathan Haidt

[Music] welcome to another episode of conversations with coleman if you're hearing this then you're on the public feed which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements you can get access to the subscriber feed by going to colemanhughes.org and becoming a supporter this means you'll have access to episodes a week early you'll never hear ads and you'll get access to bonus q a episodes you can also support me by liking and subscribing on youtube and sharing the show with friends and family as always thank you so much for your support my guest today is jonathan height i just had jonathan on a few weeks ago with greg lucianov and ricky schlott but i wanted to get him back for a one-on-one and i'm glad i did because this turned out to be a really great conversation it actually felt more like a private phone call than an interview which i thought was really cool john brought up the first email that i ever sent to him back when i was just a random columbia undergraduate trying to understand why some of my professors seemed totally insane so that was really cool we also talked about humor and offensive jokes we discussed reasons why social media sucks so much as a forum for serious conversations we talk about the pros and cons of the internet we talk about the progress america has made on issues like racism and we talk about whether protest movements are still a useful practice we talk about elon musk potentially buying twitter and much more so without further ado jonathan height all right jonathan hyde thanks so much for coming on my show well coleman what a pleasure what a pleasure to see you all grown up because i'm thinking because just before this podcast i looked up the first email you ever sent me why did i read it to you yes i'm i'm very this is yes i'm i have no idea what to expect i remember sending this email i hope there are no typos and this is how many years ago this was oh i shouldn't find the date on this uh where here it is it's december 7th 2017. wow okay i'm ready okay headline a tale of two columbia classes hi professor height i'm a second year undergrad philosophy major at columbia and a fan of your work on moral psychology i've just finished watching your conversation with jordan peterson and couldn't help but share the following anecdote two of my courses this semester differ from one another greatly one is an intro philosophy course required by all philosophy majors in which we read classic papers in the philosophy of mind identity and morality the other is called philosophy and feminism in which we learn the core principles of intersectional feminism and queer theory okay standard opening two courses i remember those courses yep okay now leaving aside the differences in content the course is different how they're run in the intro class we'll read a philosopher say thomas nagel learn his arguments well enough uh uh well enough to repeat them and then spend the majority of the class exposing any weaknesses enables argument we deem no philosophers views sacred or even special we even debate one another i disagree with the professor all the time it's lively good natured and fun every monday and wednesday i leave that class and go straight to philosophy and feminism where the social mood is very different we read some thinker say foucault and not a single person even asks a question to say nothing of a critique what few comments are made invariably reify the ideas of the thinker and if someone does make a critique the professor has a hand-waving way of answering without ever suggesting that the argument could have a weakness some highlights of the course okay you the professor once said that all students of color are victims of oppression and then you say i'm black and i view myself in no such way but i didn't say that in a moment because it would have felt combative in that room she once suggested that people not come to class so that they could attend a protest that was happening elsewhere on campus she once compared privilege to sin and remarked about how nice it would be if we could cleanse ourselves of it um and then you say of course i'm cherry-picking the most bizarre examples um uh but you say the class is church-like in two ways one it feels mean to disagree even politely so nobody does and two it's boring to sit through uh if you don't already agree with what's being taught anyway i thought it was just so remarkable for a sophomore in it's just a sophomore or college student um and you had no typos everything was perfectly uh you know i mean so i read this and i thought oh my god this should be i think my first thought was i need to use this example in my talks my second example is wait a second everyone needs to read this so that's why i invited you to just submit it for the heterodox academy blog and that that email became the first thing i ever wrote that was ever published anywhere and um you know now i'm putting myself back in the mind space i was in when i sent that i think i must have been sitting on my futon that i was sleeping on with no mattress frame i was sleeping on a futon on the ground in my apartment with that was like my dirty disgusting apartment with three other guys on 140th and amsterdam typing probably late at night um and yeah you know what was so interesting about that was i basically got to participate in an experiment of a course being run in two different ways sometimes with the same material so i remember at one point i was reading foucault uh i was reading the same foucault book in both of those classes at the same time just by chance so i would which was nice because i had to do less homework but you know i could see just how it's possible to take an idea no matter how radical and treat it without any sacredness and then go right to the next class where no one can talk about it right it's like everyone and i think to listening back to what i wrote there the part of it that's most interesting to me and a lot of university students will resonate with this and you know ironically now i get these emails you know it's like uh um so it's a chain exactly what's most interesting to me that i said there is that it feels mean to disagree in the one class and it doesn't feel mean to disagree in the other class which is such an interesting comment on how the same person an hour apart like my own feeling of who i am to say something will change just depending on the feeling that's created in a room i i would have felt like an to to disagree in the one class versus the other that's right because what you put your finger on there is that we play different games in different spaces and the professor defines the game um and the norms and the rules and one of the games is like tennis where you know i hit the button this is the way it's always felt to me i should point out i was a philosophy major too as an undergrad um i majored in philosophy and wrote my senior essay on free will and determinism and then from that went on to study moral psychology but in my entire time in the academy i started graduate school in 1987. i i've always loved the game and the game is sort of like tennis like someone hits a ball someone says you know or or a philosopher or a books you know asserts something you know they hit it to you and then you hit it back and either you know you say you know yes you say like no and here's why or what about this and then they hit it back you go back and forth and it's a game and you know i guess you kind of want to win but but it doesn't really matter like you really want it's just fun to play the game so that's one kind of game and that's what you had in your more traditional philosophy course um and no one's views were sacred you know the professor knows more than you but you could catch the professor in a mistake or point something out that he hadn't seen so that's the game that we know and a different game had been nurtured in certain departments of the university all along certainly since the 1990s um and that was more the activist game uh which has sort of as as many people as john mcguard has been arguing he was one of the first to say that wokeness is a religion so this is kind of an activist game where we're here to fight evil and we have certain key thinkers who are our gods and we treat them with reverence and respect and we worship their words and we are on a noble mission and philosophy doesn't do that well uh that if you take that into the philosophy classroom it's just bizarre but you put your finger on exactly what it was more of a church-like atmosphere of a well you tell me is looking back on it now that you know everything you know would you add anything to that analysis yeah well i guess the the you know i i was paying attention to people like yourself at the time that were blowing the whistle about this culture of uh sensoriousness and cancellation and call out culture um but what i think my first-hand experience taught me on top of all those critiques was that it was a boring environment it was actually there was it's like all these kids who i was i was actually very curious what they were thinking and the reason i was curious is because no one raised their hands to say what they were thinking there would sometimes be two to three comments towards the end of an hour and a half lecture class and they would be very timid and just you know sort of cautiously agreeing and i was so curious what people thought because we were discussing fascinating ideas right like if foucault is right that is that is a radical it's it's it's the kind of idea someone has when they're on lsd or mushrooms and it's it would be super fun to bounce it around um but there was no bouncing and that's really what struck me most is that why aren't the kids complaining that this culture makes it more boring yeah tell me about humor um was there looking back on your education were there jokes were the professors who made jokes where there was laughter in the classroom or was that not part of college for you that's a good question um [Music] i would say there was not that much humor that i can recall um occasionally you would have it from from like the first professor that i i discussed she was she could be funny sometimes okay because um what i'm this is a new thing i'm thinking about you know how i should go back and look at this uh you know was it that birds were disappearing and ddt was the culprit or there's a or so yeah silent spring of course that's the the racial crisis silent spring um because i've been realizing you know i think there's humor is gone from academic life like when i got in 1987 like there were a lot of jokes classrooms academic conferences it's just sort of normal like you'd find humor somebody would tell us joke that has a punch line i mean um academics was fun and funny and because everyone is so smart they don't give up high iqs they know a lot they've got quick minds and so there was a lot of humor and and i'm just realizing i haven't really heard many jokes since about 2014 2015 it's like you know this new the new way of being you know now we call it the great awoken and the great awakening came in it was like oh no more jokes you know the uh the committee on morality has ruled against jokes so no more of those yeah it did feel like that there was uh there were occasional bright spots i remember one intro philosophy class i had a professor that would make some funny puns and some kind of philosophy jokes but it really does not encourage pushing boundaries that kind of a culture because jokes by nature are you know often transgressive i i just did a a public event with at the comedy cellar with glenn lowry roland fryer and four comics oh my god how did i miss this that sounds like yeah you check it out on youtube there's andrew schultz great comic was there shane gillis sam j and the the comics ended up dominating um the conversation as is their trademark but you know the the point of the conversation was to ask the question are there certain topics now that are more uh adequately addressed in a comedic setting than in an academic setting on a podcast in a paper at a conference and that was sort of the launching point of the conversation cool i will definitely check that out i hope you can put in the show notes that sounds like an amazing conversation and and that fits with something i've been thinking about something i started thinking about when this all this stuff started coming in is that what we should do at orientation like here at nyu um you know we have an incredibly tolerant university uh you know it's always been very very progress very concerned with identity issues and inclusion and yet i'm told that many students feel that they're in danger that there's there's verbal violence um and and it just it seemed to me that if part of our freshman orientation was you have to you have to spend nine hours in a comedy club and the reason why is because you will see comedians who are black white male female gay and straight telling jokes about blacks and whites men and women gays and straights and if if you just said like you know what you know we're all different and there are foibles and you know you can take offense or not but um if you did that and then you come into a class at nyu if somebody uses a word that isn't the exact right word like you're not gonna you're not gonna freak out about it so yes let we need more comedy in our lives and we certainly need it in our undergraduate students no doubt and i think part of my background that ended up clashing with the culture at columbia was that i grew up in you know my memory of my childhood in suburban new jersey very diverse town i had black friends white friends jewish friends and my experience growing up was that i would often make black jokes with my black friends like jokes that maybe if they came out of the mouth of a white comic out of context might seem offensive uh i learned jewish jokes from my jewish friends i learned asian jokes from my asian friends and there was a there was a kind of good faith to the whole thing because we were friends to begin with yeah and we we knew these differences were not we didn't feel these differences matter deeply to begin with so there was a harmlessness about it and then to import that attitude into colombia i just felt like people are afraid to make any kind of joke because people now assume the worst that's right that's right and yeah so you know we spend so much time thinking about inclusion how to make people feel included um and you know if we could just foster an attitude of playfulness assuming good intention or assuming the best about people and um something like a willingness to make mistakes or forgiveness i mean i can't there's a small set of interlocked concepts that would humanize relationships and that would automatically reduce racism fear uh any any overt or covert acts of exclusion so yeah there are ways we could solve these problems and so many times it just seems we're doing the opposite of what we should be doing yeah um you know one thing i i notice a lot is my conversations even about controversial topics they always go well when it's one-on-one and face-to-face even after i published that blog post at heterodox academy i started writing for colette and i was viewed as contrarian on issues of race and racism i don't think everything is all about racism which was a contrarian take for many um but what i noticed is that even once i was known as this guy on campus that thinks the wrong things my conversations one-on-one with quote-unquote social justice warriors were always really good if there's no one else around right no one to perform for no reputation at stake people suddenly became quite reasonable and um and so i never had a problem with that i the problems came with social media with a group conversation with a classroom conversation which is a kind of stage exactly and there's something to be learned from that as well that's right so the extent that we're going to talk about my atlantic article my uh article published in the atlantic on april 11th of why the last 10 years of american life have become uniquely stupid at least there's the illustration from the print edition um that's the key what you just said is is the key idea now you put it as people suddenly became reasonable in person implying that the normal state is on social media but if you can take them off of social media and talk to them they'll become reasonable now of course for the last you know million two million years or whenever we got language we've been having conversations not on social media and people are mostly pretty reasonable um and it's only this weird innovation of saying here's a way that you can talk now there's already 500 ways you can talk there's already you know telephones and the postal service and texting and and and you know skype and facetime and zoom there's you know there's a thousand ways you can talk but here's a new way that you can talk in front of others and it's not really that you're talking in front of others you're actually just emitting stuff you emit stuff others can respond to your stuff it's all done on a stage um and so facebook comes out 2004 and around there was myspace and friendster and all those other platforms and you just you post stuff on your wall or your room or whatever it is and people come and they look at that's all perfectly nice no problem there it's performative but it's just like you know here's me here my photos um and once facebook makes it much more about the news feed which it gets from twitter once it's much more about like not here's what i'm doing but like can you believe this and look at this outrageous thing and then once you get the like and the retweet buttons now it's about everyone's reactions to it and then something i learned only after i published the article was threaded comments comes out in 2013. threaded comments is not only do you get to say nasty snarky things to any person who posts something but now it says after each snarky comment respond to joe smith and so now you know you can have like barack obama will post something and lots of people say nasty things but after each one is do you want to fight with joe smith and then yes you do and then before you know it you've got a bunch of people with seven followers are now visible to anybody who sees obama's post that happened in 2013 and there's a lot of things closing in on how 2014 is really the year that everything kind of really blew up things really went insane beginning 2014. but to go back to your point the metaphor that i'm using i didn't put in the piece but i'm thinking about it is it's like imagine if you know we wanted to communicate more we wanted new ways to talk and someone said i've got a new way for you to talk it's free it's fun come start talking start posting start performing and you do that and then you realize wait a second wait a second there's like we're in the roman coliseum here and there's a hundred thousand people around us cheering for blood and they want us to fight to the death uh and if someone stabs someone they cheer and so we start stabbing each other more like this is what this is the situation we're in so it's not that you know what if people if you talk to them they become normal it's like most people are pretty reasonable i always have been but you put them in front of the roman coliseum um you give them weapons yeah some people become complete yeah this is an enormous problem i mean when facebook started out it was you know i'm just old enough to remember facebook when it was i just want to post something random so that my friends at school like know what i'm up to on like a saturday afternoon like really innocent and like a like a like the proverbial frog boiling in in water we just inched into this totally different situation and is like each one of these things you're noting was a part of that story the the ability to reply the ability to like each of which seemed totally innocent on its own yeah and and increased engagement no doubt but then all together we're now in this situation where i'm arguing with people i barely know yeah in you know 200 word volleys about political issues that people have been debating for thousands of years at in 500 page books and couldn't possibly be sorted out at such a length um i mean it's amazing where it started and where it ended up that's right and the fact that we didn't realize we we no one really made a conscious choice to say actually let's make facebook way more vitriolic they were just market incentives that slowly pushed it that way that's right um facebook literally gave bonuses to engineers who would increase engagement if you could think of a way to keep people on longer then you got a bigger bonus and um and they did all this this is one of my big you know uh it's an incredible time to be a social scientist especially a sociologist or a social psychologist um and i look back on those years and the story that i tell in the article that i'm writing up the book is really trying to get the sense of like the long human arc of of coming together cooperating more finding ways to communicate building larger societies building nations building transnational institutions like the eu and the u.n and um you know cooperation goes goes on and on as many like robert right many have pointed out um but but we're we're doing it it's now going so fast and being driven by people who have no knowledge or concern for emergent properties of this complex dynamical system and so yeah i'm sure that mark zuckerberg didn't intend to bring about what he's brought about um and many of these people were techno utopians they really thought if we just you know information wants to be free put people together good things will happen but had there been some social conservatives in the mix this is the interesting thing to me if you read a lot of the writing of the techno utopians they're almost all uh libertarian or progressive they share what um what thomas soul calls the um the unconstrained vision of human nature this is the john lennon vision imagine there's no countries imagine no gods no possess just all the people living life in peace it'll be amazing knock down all the walls just put people together it would be great that's the unconstrained vision that guided the french revolutionaries russian revolutionaries though um and then the opposite vision soul says is the constrained vision of human nature which is more sigmund freud um it's more uh you know edmund burke it's just the idea that actually uh we do need constraints we need structure and constraints that we don't have them what comes out is our sexual aggressive nature so it's actually civilization it doesn't repress us and make us bad it actually gives us structure and constrains us and actually makes us good makes us do our duty makes us be law abiding good to people so the internet i don't think there was any social conservative involved anywhere in the creation of the internet it was a dream of progressives and libertarians god blessed them you know many of my friends are progressive libertarians and you know what i've learned is it's really helpful to listen to all three of those groups progressives libertarians and social conservatives but if you take any one of them out of the mix what the other two would build is not really fit for human habitation that's the internet that we have you've looked at your businesses hiring from every angle but there's something you feel like you're missing in your core you know it could be faster you're right you need indeed indeed is the hiring platform where you can attract interview and hire all in one place instead of spending hours on multiple job sites searching for candidates with the right 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site where you only pay for applications that meet your must have requirements indeed is the number one source of hires in the us according to talent nest eighty-one percent of us online job seekers search for jobs on on indeed each month according to comscore join the more than three million businesses worldwide that use indeed to hire great talent fast sign up for indeed now and get a 75 credit towards your first sponsored job plus earn up to 500 extra in sponsored job credits with indeed's virtual interviews visit indeed.com conversations to learn more you can also claim your credits at indeed.com conversations once again that's indeed.com conversations terms and conditions apply need to hire you need indeed one part of the internet that i've i've often felt is a good thing is i guess the flip side of the fragmentation problem so you you use this analogy of the tower of babel and it comes down and everyone's speaking a different language no one can understand each other uh which is you know a great analogy for what social media feels like just like everyone is in these tiny echo chambers and bubbles even my podcast audience like that sees my tweets and sees follows related podcasts is part of a much smaller world than most people realize right so like on the rare occasion i meet someone who knows me recognizes me doesn't happen that often usually they think that i'm getting recognized all the time because you know because they care about you're so famous everyone i know knows you right i'm really not um at all and so it's the insight there is people think the bubble that they're in is is much larger and more representative than it is and everyone's in a bubble and and the bubbles have multiplied and the bubbles are getting they get smaller every day the news you consume gets more linked to your sub sub sub culture and all the other sub sub subcultures make no sense to you because you know it would have required so much buy-in and years of context understanding that you can't possibly have had so so so so that's the fragmentation problem but it seems like there's a flip side to that which is the more subcultures there are the more the easier it is to find a subculture where you really fit right it's like if the the only way of measuring whether you're a cool person is like whether you're good at baseball or sports like a monoculture of the 1950s and you're good at sports you're cool you're not you suck um that leaves a lot of people out whereas nowadays someone who sucks at sports they can go on reddit and like get into playing the accordion and get really good and now that's their world so how do you how do you think about the pros and cons of the fracturing of culture now that is a that's a great that is a great observation and this okay i'd love to answer this to address this because i've got notes in my evernote i have all kinds of ideas for essays i want to write some day and one of them is called something like the moral progress essay or or you know the you know what we lost when we you know what we the moral progress we lost uh in the 21st century uh so first let's imagine two worlds one of which there's a single story everybody shares it and that's all there is there's one big community we all share the same narrative that's and it's all one community um this sounds kind of like a fascist dream like this is like not a human society let's imagine another where it's just fragments everything is with small groups and you can find a smoker you can move from group to group but you know it's just lots of small groups and that's what we have now fragmentation this is the post babel world that we have now and i think what what i think is the most humane world which was actually the liberal fantasy and by liberal i don't mean left i mean like john stuart mill you know experiments in living we want a liberal society someone in which we use minimum force on people and people can live the way they want but we still have a sense of community we have shared meanings we have a a we have shared facts so in other words imagine that there was some sort of overarching understanding that was going on but underneath that there were also lots of pockets of meaning and to me this is actually the this is the great moral progress of the 20th century um is a world in which there is a dominant culture and the world that you and i were born interested with me um was the one in which it was the wasp culture was the dominant culture but it sort of ruled with a very light hand that is it um there was plenty of room for minority groups to live the ways they wanted my grandparents all came from russia and belarus and poland and jewish immigration around 1907 and the jews could live the way they wanted and have their rituals and their synagogues and and jews did incredibly well in this country and my wife's family is from korea same thing very similar uh her her dad came over in 1954 55 right after the war and um so you have there was a sense of being an american and there was an assimilationist ethos that is everyone's welcome in america uh but we're not a country of blood and soil we are a country of shared belief in a certain set of ideas uh and and and holy objects so you have to have some reverence for the constitution the declaration of independence those are holy documents you ideally should you know should feel something when you see the american flag and purple mountain's majesty so if you have some shared sense of being american that leaves plenty of room for differences and now you could have versions of it to say america is great where the greatest and don't you dare talk about are flaws and there were people who said that but the america i was raised in was one of which like you'd always say like whenever you say america's big you always also said now of course we had the abomination of slavery and we did a lot of things wrong so you always say you know warts and all we are not you know no country's perfect we're far from perfect but there's a recognition that america played a role in the world of course yes we film it but you can see me doing it you always say yes of course we overthrew governments in central we did a lot of bad things but you know we beat the nazis and the soviets and we invented you know so anyway you see i'm getting all enthusiastic because i think the the late 20th century was actually a time of incredible moral progress and on point after point it's reversing so here i just have here's my list of the eight things let me see if they work they still make sense these things are all moral progress let's see whether they still apply today in 2022 or we've lost them one due process no rush to judgment we don't lynch people we have process i think we're losing that two equality before the law not a quality of outcome so something like a quality of process again due process uh we don't guarantee equality about can we guarantee you'll be treated fairly three um it's intent that matters not impact in human relationships so if you bump into me accidentally i say oh okay you know you apologize we're done um but uh but now of course we have its impact not intent um four is the constitution of knowledge this is jonathan roush's work that we had these incredible epistemic institutions like universities the new york times we had other things that really had professional standards by getting to the truth five is we treat people as individuals who have rights not as members of a group to be praised damned or fined as members of that group six no magic words or spells um in our in our daily life we you know like you know muslims don't get to say you can't say allah and jews don't get to say you can't say yahweh you know there's no magic magic words but now increasingly words that are seen as offensive by some are taboo even to discuss the word itself not of course to use it seven overcoming purity um a lot of traditional societies have purity laws and we were overcoming them uh and then last i have on my list data over anecdote that is what mattered was like are we getting more or less racist well let's look at the surveys let's look at the overall numbers oh we're getting less racist on every criteria less sexist less homophobic everything so the numbers are going down but in the 2010s what matters that doesn't matter anymore but matters is the anecdote and if you if you've seen a video of racism or homophobia well look it's all over the place that's terrible we need a complete tear down so i guess i should write this up as a paper my point is my point is i think the late 20th century was a time of incredible moral progress from the time i was born in 1963 when black people couldn't vote couldn't use the same bathrooms in much of the country um to 20 uh 2012 when obama was re-elected and a lot of gay marriage proposals passed that 50-year run was an incredible sprint of progress and a lot of it is reversing since 2012. what do you think that's a i mean that's a great that's a great way of provoking the the thought in me well i i think that span is pretty much exactly the span between my grandfather's life and mine and so i was born in 96 and i you know whenever i visit my grandfather he tells me stories of growing up in jim crow right and he was he was in the army he was born in the 30s or or maybe even the late 20s so he uh you know he would tell stories about the actual challenges of segregation like the practical challenges of segregation he got invited to you know a dance party as part of the army on the base he was in but he couldn't possibly ask a white girl to dance so he had to drive my grandma in from hours away to be his date so that he didn't not have a date you know like these kinds of things you uh you know story gives me chills actually just to remember how deeply unrecognizable those stories are to me is a mark of how quickly we made progress in the second half of the 20th century economic progress to the post-world war ii boom and just cultural progress and and i look at all of the eight things you just listed and i think definitely six or seven of them seem to be backsliding at least in the elite parts of the culture yeah yeah that's true do you think it's not yeah oh yeah so maybe it's not in the non-elite parts um well yeah i'm i'm always hesitant to i mean obviously what elites do often trickles into the rest of society but like certainly at columbia university at harvard university at yale university at conferences at journalistic institutions everything you're talking about is backsliding there's there's no doubt about that yeah yeah hey you mentioned you mentioned your grandfather and what his life was like that actually that actually helps the way i was thinking of framing this essay was like this so i was born in 1963 in october 1963 which is two months uh two months after martin luther king gave his famous i have a dream speech and that speech of course was on the 100th anniversary of lincoln's emancipation proclamation so i was born 100 years and two months after the emancipation proclamation and if we ask how much progress did we make on on racial justice racial equality on rights for african-americans how much progress do we make in that hundred years i think the answer would be it was you know jim crow is better than slavery but like not nearly as much progress as people would have hoped back then and not a lot of progress in a lot of ways so that hundred years not a lot happened uh i mean there was material progress and but but in terms of rights and dignity uh very disappointing um then we go decade by decade in my life and we look at the progress on civil rights women's rights gay rights animal rights environmentalism on almost anything you would care about if you're progressive if you care about rights and and the reduction of racism and sexism um if you go follow this out to as i said the year 2012 is key here to look at because obama is re-elected we have a black president who's re-elected um who's popular um and if there's a wave of even a bunch of gay marriage proposals that failed in 2008 a lot of them passed in 2012 and of course two or three years later we get a supreme court ruling saying this is the law of the land so again in 2012 december 2012 if you're progressive you should be jumping up and down celebrating you should say yay america whatever it is we were doing let's keep doing it because that was working like wow you know there's never been i don't think there's ever been a history a period a 50-year period in history of any country in human history that has much moral progress as much progress on these issues that progressives would care about that everyone should care about um as those 50 years my first 50 years of life and then since 2012 and as i say in the essay that's really when everything turned around 2011 2012 is the high point of techno democratic optimism at that point that social media begins to fragment everything and there's a lot more to the backstory it's not just social media cable news it plays a big role in polarization there are a lot of other factors but but the technology really begins turning us all against each other and allowing room for these these sort of bizarre not bizarre but these what's the word so moral ideas that are corrosive they're incompatible with liberalism incompatible with with progress they come come in and then everything reverses that's lead me to the thought and this i suppose the first time i'll i'll air this if you talk to me is a good place my hypothesis is that gay marriage um was the last will be the last successful rights revolution and the reason i say that is because it's the last rights revolution that was fought by persuasion um that is you know when jonathan when when andrew sullivan and jonathan roush in the 1990s began talking about this and arguing for it they advocated what they gave reasons now there was some intimidation in some social circles if you were against gay marriage you'd be fired so it's not that it was zero intimidation but the movement really tried to win people over make the case that you know why shouldn't i be able to marry the person i love and and it went through not just on state ballots but it then went through in the supreme court and amazingly it wasn't resisted or i'd rather i should say it was very quickly accepted republicans now as far as i know are generally very much in favor of gay marriage they certainly are not fighting it um it was widely accepted and my concern is that some of the some of the current stuff around gender especially the trans movement because they're not making the case with persuasion you know what we see happens if we know if you know if you write a book critical of it your book will be banned by amazon if you say as jk rowling did if you if you say you know that you support trans rights but yet you think that a woman and a trans woman are not exactly the same whatever it is the point is if you diverge from the orthodox line you will not be persuaded you will be destroyed and what that means is that is that rights movements nowadays in the post-babble world that is after about 2012 in the post-bible world they may have victories but i think there will be purity victories that is a victory in which you win the battle but you win it at such a cost that you lose the war and so if you get bills passed you're not persuading people um so if you if you get your company or your school to change its policies heavy-handedly and you destroy anyone who criticizes you what you might find then is that you're pushing so many people to vote republican that they are going to reverse whatever gains you made so i could be wrong about this but that's my something i'm thinking about whether this incredible period this 50-year period of social transformation all in the good direction whether that might be over now and it might not be repeated that's fascinating i mean i've had so i've had a similar version of this thought which is that you know the way that young americans you know i would say both of our generations come up is with this deep almost unconscious reverence for the style of the civil rights movement right like the the protest that is noble in its end that eventually wins that's right and you know we don't even realize how much that paradigm has an effect on us until you you know speak to someone from china right it's like that deep psychological imprint culturally is not a default right that's a that's a particular paradigm we have that what it means to be a good person or a lot of what it means to be a good person is to band together with people fight the the oppression of a vulnerable group of people and win in in the way that martin luther king did or perhaps even go further and be more radical however you want to do it but there are not an infinite number of issues on which that exact paradigm makes sense and and you know gay marriage it made a lot of sense like you go out and do a peaceful protest and persuade people and then you want you win with the the issue of trans we are running up against a more complicated issue with trade-offs it's like where we're witnessing the the western european countries like finland which we hardly see as backwards or bigoted places in fact we usually praise their approach to healthcare we're seeing them phase out uh you know puberty blockers for for kids under 18 um which at the very least one has to acknowledge this is not as morally clear-cut as an issue like gay marriage or or voting rights for for all races and obviously those didn't seem clear-cut at the time but really the arguments for them are very straightforward they don't involve these trade-offs and um i think you're you're possibly right i mean it's it's quite possible that we've reached the end of the issues on which that deeply conditioned hero's quest makes sense that's right and that would be a direct consequence of the post-babble era the idea of of once the tower of babel fell we should just point out for listeners who don't remember the key line the key line of the tower of babel story is after the people build this tower city in a tower and god is offended by the hubris god says let us go down and confound the confuse their language so that they may not understand one another so that's the metaphor i used in my article is that it's like you know it's like social media did this to us it destroyed the tower no possibility of shared meetings anymore all these micro communities of strangers temporary strangers little bubbles uh in the ocean uh no overarching no possibility of a shared story shared meaning shared understanding shared facts and never will be again i mean maybe 100 years but not in the next 10 or 20 years we're not going to have shared facts and shared understanding in the next 20 years um and so if that's our if that's the case then there is no possibility of a successful rights revolution anymore because you can't possibly persuade 80 of the people you can persuade 20 and you if you're very aggressive about it you're just gonna then create enemies so the further harder you push in a post-babel world in a country defined by negative partisanship but we don't vote for the person we want we vote against the other side because we hate them so much the harder you push on a rights movement here you can get 20 or 30 percent that's just going to cause the other side to be dead set against you and i think that might be the future of rights movements in this country what makes for a fulfilling career for lots of us the answer involves finding a path that helps make a positive difference in the world but how do we do that 80 000 hours the sponsor of this episode can help if you want advice that's based on evidence and careful research and comes from an impartial perspective check out 80 000 hours they're a non-profit that provides free research and support to help people have a positive impact with their career join their newsletter and they'll send you a free in-depth guide that aims to take you through the steps all the way to a concrete career plan they also host a job board with nearly 1 000 currently open high impact career opportunities and they offer free one-on-one advice to help you switch paths there's also the 80 000 hours podcast which hosts in-depth conversations with experts about how to best tackle pressing global problems you can check it out on your preferred podcast platforms if you join the newsletter now you'll get a free copy of their in-depth career guide sent to your inbox just sign up at eighty thousand hours dot org slash coleman to be clear they're a non-profit and provide everything for free they're philanthropically funded and their only goal is to help you find a fulfilling high impact career to get started planning a career that works on one of the world's most pressing problems sign up right now at eighty thousand hours dot org coleman once again that's eighty thousand hours dot org slash coleman so i wanna consider my grandkids right if i have them you know when i talk to my grandfather he can list five to ten things that are materially different now in my lifetime when it comes to rights like things i'm able to do that he was not able to do when he was my age i'm curious what that conversation will look like when i'm 80 and i'm talking to my grandkids that will be born in you know say like the 20 70s or something what are the things i'm going to be able to say in their lifetime that that have really changed for the better in these unambiguous ways that my my grandfather could point to okay well first what are the things that you cannot do today as a black man what are the things that are not open to you because you are black uh there are none that i'm aware of yeah i have encountered no serious obstacles to my success on account of my race you know if i've experienced racism it's been one-off incidents very rare and they've never represented a serious obstacle so the right so the rights revolution has succeeded now there's certainly has not been a quality of outcome there are all kinds of disparities uh but as you know and as you've said you can't just assume they're caused by racism we have it's a harder challenge we have to now do the hard work to figure out okay society is complicated how do we how do we help black kids how do we help hispanic kids whatever it is whenever there's a disparity we have to look for a solution but we can't blame the easy thing which is well someone is keeping them down or some law is keeping them down that's the way i think about it how about you it's like we need a new paradigm absolutely like the whole civil rights movement paradigm which was then copied successfully by many other groups it's possible that that is that is fading in relevance that paradigm for how to move the world forward is fading in relevance so or or or to put it another way it's reached that strategy has reached the point of diminishing returns right but yet it's deeply ingrained in us so we need a paradigm shift like what are the issues we're really facing right now as a country and how do so for example you know poverty and high crime neighborhoods they're inno they're they're disproportionately black and people of color but white as well there are neighborhoods that are energetic intergenerational poverty lots of crime chaos where it's a huge disadvantage to be born into um is solving that problem you know can we use the same techniques of protest movements and agitation to solve that problem i i would argue no we can't and yet so the problems we're left with are precisely the ones that can't be solved using this paradigm that is very popular that's right i think people a lot of people don't understand the degree to which our current political environment and a lot of the strategy and the concepts used by progressives come out of the civil rights movement and made perfect sense in the jim crow south they really made sense but they don't make sense now so i was very fortunate i was invited along congressman john lewis uh at the at the faith uh faith and something policy center um he would lead us a civil rights pilgrimage of congress people to the to the you know to the sites in in alabama um the museums and the the lynching memorial the the uh these really powerful powerful sites i i was invited to join along as i studied political psychology and polarization and this was the last one that he did this was in 2019 the 2020 was cancelled by coven that he passed away um and i'll never forget like in the museum there's this incredible museum in montgomery i believe it is um birmingham shoot which one um and you know exhibits on on on the life of you know of enslaved people at from the beginning all the way through the through the civil war and in one of them and this was this was in like the 1920s it was a headline in the newspaper and it said like you know joe ferg joe smith to be lynched tonight meaning here's an article in the newspaper here's a black man who is going to be lynched tonight at five o'clock little headline down at the bottom governor says he's powerless to intervene i mean this was unbelievable this was like the 1920s or 30s it was not you know 1840 and the idea that they're that everything everyone is either black or white because there was hardly anyone else everyone's black or white and the law tells you what you can do if you're black or white and if the law is designed to keep black people down and if you want about structural racism that's it it's everywhere it's in the law um and it's enforced in the state capital at the legislature um and you know so it's like like this was the situation and what is the what is the way to change that apply pressure to the legislators to change the law and if they won't do it then apply pressure in washington to get the federal government or the you know what whatever branches it took the justice department primarily applied pressure to get them to change the law to remove the structural obstacles the structural rate like it all made perfect sense when you take these ideas that were honed in the most successful civil rights movement of our history you take these ideas and you apply them at yale university in 2015 and you say what we're gonna have protests to what remove which law to end racism or you say we're going to protest about police killings and this is going to what stop police killings like so you know it's um you know we need to understand the the the i the concepts and the tactics that work based on the problem and i think a lot of the concepts and tactics being used in universities today and other progressive institutions which are mostly around social media are just not i mean they they often misdiagnose the problem they then misdiagnose the means to change the problem um and they are generally very low cost sorts of you know clicktivism or whatever it's called so yeah i think um i think we are in an era that is in which there are still rights movements but they're nothing like the older ones and i don't know if i don't think they can be very successful yeah i i worry that you're right and i i worry that people are going to be very slow to realize that um so i i guess to get a little bit back to this social media topic before i have to let you go are you how optimistic or pessimistic are you about an elon musk takeover of twitter do you think he is going to successfully address all the issues that you you've been pointing out with the virality of information and the fracturing of the media ecosystem and clickbait outrage do you think he he's going to be good for this problem or neutral or bad as a thought exercise so the way that i look at it is there are two things there's content moderation and then there's everything else content moderation is i mean you have to do it the question is do you do a little more a little less and if eli were to take over he would do it less you have to do some otherwise everything becomes porn and nazis and you you can't as a lot of early 1990s web platforms found yet you can't have no moderation you have to have some so the only question is is you know people on the left are horrified because elon's going to do less content moderation this is going to be horrible you know he's going to lower it and then people on the right like yay elon's i'm sorry that's yeah the people on the right like yay elon's going to lower it so of course we know so that's half that's that's that's half of that's 90 of the discussion it's 10 of the reality content moderation is actually not very important um the problem with the intel with the web with the internet especially social media is not that there is bad stuff it's not that someone can say that you know biden and pelosi are eating babies the problem is that someone can say that and we don't have a government agency to stop them the problem is someone can say that and it can get out to millions of people within a day or two because right now the incentives are the more of an you are and the more extreme what you say is the more successful you are and those incentives are insane like it's insane that this is our public square with these horrible horrible incentives so let's leave content moderation because that's hopeless republicans and democrats will never ever agree so unless we get unless one party gets 60 votes and 60 senators nothing will go through congress okay now let's move over let's look at everything that matters which is the architecture the dynamics it's all about the architecture that's what pushed us over the cliff that's why everything is going haywire it's the architecture and there are a bunch of things about the architecture one really important one which i talked about in my essay was verify users you can't just walk up to a bank with a paper bag full of money and say please open an account for john q smith you can't do that banks have duties to know their customers and while i'm not saying the internet should do that i do think that giant platforms that affect our society that have a huge impact on our politics so if you have i don't know 10 million people on your whatever you have some number of people you now are systemically important platform that affects our democracy and you can't just let a russian agent open a thousand accounts a day like we're not you know on a tiny platform we're not going to stop you russian agents can do what they want on small platforms but if your facebook twitter instagram tick tock you can't just let russian agents open a thousand accounts you have to actually say um not give me your driver's license but you say okay you've opened an account uh and that allows you to see what's going on you can do that with a fake name do whatever you want but if you want to post if you want to be able to put things out there to get amplified possibly to the moon possibly to millions of people if you want that privilege um then you have to get out and get verified so we're gonna kick you over to either a private company or a non-profit or maybe there's a network there can be because there's lots of different ways to verify identity you could show driver's license you could get networks of other people to vouch for you there's a there's a scheme right here at nyu i'll find the name an nyu grad student developed a scheme um about how you can get you can identify people and then you can erase the information so it's not held but you've authenticated them and you pass that back to say facebook to say yep you he's been verified he's old enough to use the platform you know because because we've got to keep 11 year olds off instagram this is insane that they can just get they can do anything they want if they live at their age so so user authentication and age verification those are incredibly important elon might do that he tweeted he was or whatever he said authenticate all humans so that that just means at least you know make sure they're no bots but i think if you go a step further and say at some point in the process you have to show that you're a real person and that you're old enough to use the platform if you just do that now you can still use a fake name you can still you don't have to use your real identity that solves a huge number of problems gets rid of almost all the bots and it reduces some of the troll-like behavior so would elon do that maybe and that would be a huge huge benefit then there's a lot of other stuff about reducing virality which i don't think elon would do i think he would use a very light touch he would get rid of bots and he would do less content moderation he would allow trump back on i think those are the three big things that he would do okay so i have to let you go just final question on that you know how do we get that because these companies always have an incentive to boost engagement because that's their that's their on the ad model they're not going to self-regulate um are we going to have a heavy hand with the law and make them do these things are we going to get out in the streets and protest until they feel culturally pressured to yeah so um so when people think you know regulation what's amazing what everybody thinks is a government agency that's going to look at what's posted they decide is this true ministry of truth like no no what what we mean by what i think what i argue for is that there needs to be a regulator right now there is no regulator there is no government agency that has the purview here there's the ftc which can rule on anti-trust issues but but anti-trust issues is a very small piece of what's going on here there's nothing nobody that can really look at what's happening and say what you're doing is really damaging kids um in the uk they have that it's called ofcom i forget what that stands for but in the uk there is a regulatory agency and so senator bennett of colorado has proposed a bill we first we need a regulatory agency that has enough specialization enough knowledge that they can actually look at the overall view and be the regulatory body now they have very severe limits by the first amendment that they can't ever say you know yes no yes no got posted they're not going to make decisions about who gets to say what everything has to be viewpoint neutral but there are certain things about the architecture that make us vulnerable on national security because it's an open book for russian agents and anyone else who wants to make us hate each other um there's no age verification which is we didn't even talk about what's happening to teens in this conversation but because there is no oversight body in the government that can make them do anything so i think we need a government regulator that can look at it decide what needs to be done and also what we need to do before we even know what can be done and so there are two bills one is the platform accountability transparency act written by nate priscilli at stanford that simply says um there has to be a mechanism by which these companies share their data it would go through the national science foundation they would designate the process by which de-identified data will come from the platforms through nsf or nsf certified researchers so that at least researchers can know what's going on we have no idea what's happening so our kids you know the depression suicide rates are doubling and we have no idea what they're doing we have to rely on self-report studies like how many hours of social media do you watch like we have these big studies that are with terrible data but instagram has the data they know exactly what my daughter watched and then how she found that what doug doesn't have instagram but you know they know exactly what a kid does and then they know how the kid's mood is in the minutes afterwards they have that information so we need um platform accountability uh we need to raise the age of uh the age of internet adulthood is now 13 and it's there's no enforcement you can just lie we need to raise it to 16 or 18 and have enforcement um uh and then we um so that's what we need to do at the federal at the federal level we probably will never get it because our congress is so dysfunctional and it's dysfunctional in part because social media has made it even more dysfunctional than it used to be um but uh but the uk parliament is actually doing some really good work they've actually already passed an age-appropriate design code so that's going to force the platforms not to age verify unfortunately but it is going to force them to just take account of the fact that you've got kids on your platform so like don't be paying them at midnight don't be sending them alerts at midnight to check you know oh somebody liked your photo so there'll be some little tweaks to make it more humane for kids um the state of california is considering passing the exact almost exact same uk code so if if uk and california pass it the platforms are going to have to do it globally they're not going to be able to have different platforms in you know colorado and california so um so there is a lot we can do to pressure the platforms i think there are a lot of lawsuits going ahead a lot of a lot of girls in particular um they were not depressed and anxious before they got on instagram and then within you know within a year they killed themselves so there are a lot of lawsuits going on of parents i know i've spoken to some of the lawyers uh parents who are suing facebook meta uh uh because of what it's not because of what they the key is it's not because of what they saw because section 230 protects the platforms it's section two that has been very broadly construed by the courts to give them you can't sue facebook because your kids saw something on facebook but i think you can or instagram but but but i'm hopeful that these suits will succeed because it's not the thing they saw it's the design the design is unsafe at any speed for children so there are a lot of ways to put pressure on the platforms through lawsuits through states attorneys general through federal legislation state legislation and at some point what we want is that the companies will actually think should we do this thing or if we're going to mess up kids even more are we going to get caught we're going to get in trouble for it and until now the answer is who's going to catch us what are they going to do to us tell us to stop so um so i am hopeful that it'll take a variety of kinds of pressure and eventually um the there will be pressure on the platforms and also for the employees if the employees will start standing up saying we shouldn't be doing this i hope so too this is a big big problem and we're going to be talking about this more on my podcast thank you so much jonathan height i will link to the article in the description and it's always a pleasure to talk to you thank you coleman and be sure to link to your article the thing you published in heterodox academy and uh if there are any listeners out there who are professors please join heterodox academy uh if there are any philanthropists out there who watch this please consider supporting heterodox academy uh and uh coleman what a joy it is to see the waves you're making in the world and you're growing up to be such a fine young man [Laughter] thank you john okay take care if you appreciate the work i do the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website colemanhughes.org and to subscribe to my youtube channel so you'll never miss my new content as always thanks for your support [Music] you

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 51,768

Keywords: politics, news, politicalupdates, policies, currentaffairs, americanpolitics, thisisamerica, political, whiteamerica, society, highsociety, bluecollar, modernsociety, contemporary, culture music, blackmusic, blackhistory, hiphop, intellectualproperty, debate, intellect thoughts, opinion, voice, public intellectual, intellect, dialogue, discourse, interview, motivational, speech, answers, Tim Shenk, Coleman Hughes, arthouse, arttiktok, talkshow, talks

Id: LsW7q12WJBs

Length: 67min 1sec (4021 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2022