"Two incompatible sacred values in American universities" Jon Haidt, Hayek Lecture Series

well thanks so much Bruce and thanks to all of you for that warm warm welcome so 2016 is a very very strange year it feels very strange around the world extraordinary violence in Syria and Iraq driving political events in Europe novel events the likes of which nobody expected of course in the United States our political season is producing something that nobody ever expected many people on both right and left feel that the apocalypse is coming if the other side wins in fact things are so bad that many people around the country are going to be writing in third party candidates such as giant meteor now it's a very strange time for Humanity but it is a wonderful time to be studying moral psychology because all of these conflicts all of this division this is all driven mostly driven by people who think that they are pursuing the good they are fighting what they think is the good fight moral psychology can help explain almost all the conflicts I would say all the conflicts that we are having around the world and around the country in other talks I apply moral psychology to the American situation but today what I want to do here here with you at Duke is to apply it to the University this is the institution that we are in extraordinary turmoil began last fall on universities around the campus and there's been obviously turmoil and political conflict on this campus as well as at most of our top schools now what I'd like to do is look at universities from the perspective of moral psychology and I'm going to show you two different ways of looking at a university I'm going to open with two quotations from dead dead white men writing in London in the 1840s so a very very narrow range of human thought here but extraordinarily far apart and what they said is resonating and playing out today so John Stuart Mill in on Liberty John Stuart Mill is so wise about human frailties foibles biases the the awfulness of our thinking in many cases and how it is that we we need each other to think better too correct our our thinking so as he wrote he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that his reasons may be good and no one may have been able to refute them but if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side if he does not so much as know what they are he has no ground for preferring either opinion now contrast that or think of university based on million or Mills principles and it's going to clearly be one that strives to represent diverse views it's going to reach out for viewpoint diversity and encourage a culture of debate and challenge and only in that way can we find truth together on the other hand Karl Marx writing right around the same time this is a quote that I've heard a lot and when I googled it what I found the exact words that they're pretty similar he wrote the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways the point is to change it now you can hear his frustration with the professors the academics who will talk endlessly about this or that distinction and he's saying no we need a revolution we need to change and so if we imagine a university based on a more Marxist approach to intellectual life it's going to look extremely different now what kind of university do do you want do you want one focused on finding truth through debate or one focused ultimately on changing the world and I'll ask you to vote at the end of this talk when I arrived at Yale in 1981 it this is what it said over the gate over the main gate to to the old campus Lux at Veritas it's written right there in stone Veritas truth I was inducted into an institution with a long sense of tradition going back clearly to the medieval universities like Oxford and Cambridge and going back all the way to Plato's Academy 2,500 years before it was really thrilling to feel that I was joining a fraternity especially as a philosophy major you really feel that that link back to the Academy and the debates and the symposium and the ways that that these early philosophers would argue and in that way improve each other's thinking Yale did not live up to its mission perfectly no institution does the faculty clearly leaned to the left I leaned to the left but it had a very very active culture of debate and argumentation and it was so much fun I've made my home in the Academy ever since but beginning in the 1990s I believe universities began to change what was written over their doorway began to change and I think they began to adopt change itself as more of the motto the mantra and not just any change not just change for the sake of change but social justice particularly social justice becomes much more important in the life of universities I believe in the 1990s first of course from the the very studies departments the Gender Studies race studies all the different different ethnic studies departments and areas but then also the humanities more broadly now let me make clear that many of the changes these brought about by these forces 1990s were for the good to the extent that the faculty became diversified that's all to the good to the extent that the areas studied you know why study just the the leaders and the kings and the presidents why not study the common people the people who are oppressed so the the to extent that this was broadening what we study broadening the people studying broadening the Canon that undergrads read the books that they read this is all to the good I'm very happy about those changes but I think this set in motion in the 90s a set of changes that are resonating today and that can help explain what happened last fall all around the country and the very rapid transformation that's occurring this year and last year now okay so in my talk I'm going to argue that no university can pursue both individuals can in their own lives but a university needs to have a central mission and has to be either truth or social justice it can't it can't be both and so I'm going to argue that we need a schism we need our universities to clearly declare which way you going you can go either way it's free country you got to go one way the other you have to be explicit about it advertise that and then students can choose which kind of university to go to so here's why I believe that such a radical course radical separation is actually needed so in my talk I'm going to make eight points now the first is the topic of Talos so Talos is a very important word in in ancient Greek very important in the philosophy of Aristotle in particular the Talos is the end purpose or goal of an object or a thing so you know the Greeks they'd sit around say well what is the Talos of a knife the tailless of a knife is to cut and therefore if this knife does not cut well it is not a good knife so what's the tailless of a physician but we can ask that about any profession what is the Talos of a doctor or a scholar or a judge or a lawyer and I think it's pretty clear the Talos of medicine is health and if a physician does not bring about health and his patients then he is no good physician if a if a judge does not deliver justice then she is no good judge now there are other professions these here are not closed guilds like the ones on top but they certainly strive for some sort of a purpose business we might say the purpose of business is profit well now that I teach in a business school I have a bit more of a nuanced view that the purpose of business is ultimately to create value to create some sort of good or service that people need so you create value but of course a businessman who creates value for others and doesn't make any money for him or herself is not a very good business person so we can speak of that as the talos and there are many people who join organizations that work for social justice and I think the tailless of social justice I'm recording it here is racial equality because that's the most passionate one in this country at this time but that is meant to include gender equality LGBT rights environmental issues of the whole set of issues that are pursued by by social justice activists now these different fields interact they each have their own excellence their own expertise and as they go about their business they make life better for others so it's very easy to see this that business helps us all you cannot be a doctor scholar lawyer or judge without relying on hundreds or thousands of businesses to do your job so here are three of my favorite companies because boy do they save me time boy do they make me a better scholar I could not imagine doing my work you know as I did in grad school without these companies so the these companies helped me achieve my Talos and of course all these other fields return the favor obviously businesses rely on doctors to keep their costs low on research of all sorts especially in the sciences and on justice and lawyers and judges so each field helps the other to be excellent by using its own excellence we can say the same thing about social justice when social justice activists point out that black and white patients are not treated the same that maybe black patients are not recommended as much for an expensive treatment whatever it is if doctors are treating people differently based on their category for no good medical reason it's not just a violation of racial equality it's also a violation of their Telos they're not healing as well as they could so social justice activists hold people's feet to the fire they find discrepancies they point them out they help scholars do better work here the areas you're not studying here so you've been studying it wrong so again each field pursuing its own Talos helps others achieve their so that's great that's constructive interaction you might just call it the division of labor and of course the other fields return the favor and help justice social justice activists to be effective but there's another kind of interaction this is what really concerns me it happens it happens often that one field injects its talos into another so I teach a business ethics course at NYU and a lot of our cases are cases whatever business rubs up against professors researchers doctors lawyers you know what's going to happen people get corrupted and they stop pursuing their Talos they start pursuing profit doctors increasingly in this country are running businesses are looking at patients as profit centers and are thinking how can i bill for more now this is a direct violation of their talos this is corruption the most dramatic case I've seen recently with with the really historical effects is this one a couple weeks ago in the New York Times we learned that you know you were all raised thinking that fat was bad for you right you're all when you're kids you were told cut out the fat well that was never true there was never good evidence for that the reason why you were taught that is because in the 1960s there was a research a trade group the sugar Research Foundation yeah you know I'm sure they were full of very careful researchers and they they basically bribed or paid they bought some Harvard scientists to write a review they didn't just say here please write review and said well here are the studies we want you to review now that is such a violation of the scholars talos to do a lit review where you say you tell me which studies you your industry wants to review will write favorably done give us the money that is such corruption and that led to the government adopting policies saying the food pyramid have lots of starches and only a little bit of fat which is exactly backwards fat isn't bad for you fat isn't even fattening starches and sugars are what's fattening they create a big insulin reaction then you store the fat but if you eat fat you get full quickly and you don't eat that much so fat was never fattening it was never bad for you complete myth led to explosion of there other factors but this error this scientific error is one of the reasons why we had an explosion of obesity in the United States and it especially affected black women black woman's obesity rates shot up more than any other group so even racial injustice racial inequalities came about because these three scholars betrayed their talos so that is a destructive interaction and I'd like to argue now is that the same thing can happen when social justice injects its talos into other fields when everybody is thinking about how to improve racial equality rather than their talos that is corruption now you may not think that it's as bad it doesn't seem as bad it seems good compared to profit as your motive but as I'll show it can lead to disastrous consequences especially for the very people you're trying to help so that's tailless now the reason the reason why any other motive other than say truth is bad for scholarship is because reasoning is very very heavily motivated so this is the major psychological point I want to make to you today human reasoning is motivated we're not very good at objective careful balanced reasoning when we evaluate a proposition anything that that that is good for you that Obama was born in Hawaii or Indonesia wherever any proposition you evaluate it we don't say what's the evidence on one side what's the evidence on the other which one we don't do that their brains are not set up to do that we start with a feeling we want to believe X or we want to doubt X we ask can I believe it I want to believe this can I believe it and then we send our reasoning off on a search to find evidence if we find one piece of evidence we can stop because we're now if someone holds us accountable is it why do you think that you pull out the piece of evidence you say here this is why so this is what the research shows we have motivated reasoning let me show it to you in action so in one study subjects come into the lab they're in a psychology course they're learning about experimental methods and they're given a study it looks like it's from the journal Science and it shows that caffeine consumption is associated associated with breast cancer and your job is to evaluate the study and just critique it it does it look like a well-done study so who do you think finds a lot of flaws in that study coffee drinkers yeah coffee drinkers hate it right all coffee drinkers female coffee drinkers are asking must i Paula I don't want to believe this must I believe it and so they look really critically and they can pick it apart the sample size is too small they didn't control for this or that or age or whatever they really don't want to believe it and they don't have to they don't have to let me show you another study sub just come into the lab they sit in front of a computer and they're told lots of stuff is going to flash up on the screen if you press this button within half a second of seeing a letter then you get a nickel added to your account and so lots of stuff flashes up you press the button okay what what was that what did I put up anyways get okay so so if you were paid to spot letters you saw that as a B but half the people were told you get a nickel every time there's a number and they see it as a 13 so note that nobody is crazy nobody there is ambiguity nobody sees it as an L or a fish or something it's you know it's either a B or a 13 and as long as there's ambiguity we see what we want to see can I believe that's a letter yes click so this is the way our minds work we see what we want to see now this has enormous implications for scholarship because in scholarship sometimes maybe we really don't know and really have no opinion but usually we have an idea we want to believe it if only because it's our idea or maybe we want to believe it because it supports our politics whatever we're not indifferent to anything or whatever we are indifferent to very few things in the world whatever you say that so if you if you start by wanting to believe one side of something you're going to find evidence for it and you're generally going to conclude that that it's true so scholarship to support a political agenda almost always succeeds in supporting it the scholar as she goes along rarely if ever believes that she was biased this is just the fact this is what my research is uncovered a motivated scholarship often propagates pleasing falsehoods once something is published that is politically pleasing to the majority of scholars it's almost impossible to recall it because it'll get cited not you know you can sort of issue a retraction within your field but it's going to spread fields and it'll it'll live for decades as a falsehood there's only one major protection against motivated scholarship and that is institutionalized disconfirmation that means if you participate in an institution that institutionalizes critique and dis confirmation then the bad ideas the bad research gets caught and and filtered out and that's the way the Academy's supposed to work this is the genius of science it's not the scientist is so rational it's that science is a community of scholars that critique each other's work that's great and it used to work but it stopped working in the 90s here's the data so this is a representative sample data of American professors all over the country and as late as as late as the mid 1990s this is people on the Left left or far left this is right or far right these are moderates as late as the 1990s the left/right ratio in the Academy was only two to one just two to one left to right but after about 15 years this is the transformative peer period mid-90s to about 2010 we have a radical change in the American professorial as the baby as the the greatest generation and Silent Generation they retire replaced by baby boomers and gen-x almost everybody is on the left because even this five to one this is everybody this includes the professors in the dental school and the engineering school in the agriculture school if you focus just on the humanities and Social Sciences it's well varies we do study just came out between seventeen to one and 62 one depends on the department so here's my department here's psychology I published a paper on this problem with some of my colleagues we found every bit of data we could on the politics of American psychology professors so in 1960 it was four to one voting Kennedy over Nixon and then they were asked to recall who did they vote for previously so about two to one so in 1960 professors were mostly Democrats not surprising as late as 1996 it was the same about four to one but look at what happens by every measure afterwards whether you look at where you are left right or who you voted for it shoots up and the data just came out last week a new paper by Lang Bert Mitchell Lambert is 17 to 1 for this year so it's skyrocketing up very few people understand this there are a few people in this country know just how radically the professorial has changed in the last 20 years and what this means is that you undergrads here you are exposed to less political diversity than ever before in the history of this country except maybe for the 18th century when they were divinity schools but since they became research universities that has never been as homogeneous as politically homogeneous and professorial as we have this year and it's all very very recent this is not a slow change it's a very rapid change with profound consequences for everything that happens at the university now what are those consequences for students I think those consequences are that Orthodox view is whatever is politically pleasing to the left become much more strongly held now than they were 10 or 20 years ago but much less weakly supported people don't know the reasons for their beliefs because they've never been challenged nobody dares challenge them and this was Mills concern that if you're not even exposed to anybody who believes the opposite can't know what you think you know secondly students walk on eggshells in class discussions and this isn't only the problem of the shifting balance this is also social media but what I'm finding as I speak around the country students are complaining and private that in their seminar classes someone says something and nobody dares to disagree there's just not the kind of give-and-take and argument people are afraid they're afraid they'll be crucified on social media they're afraid they say mostly of each other not so much the professors as each other but the point is students are walking on eggshells and that means in your classes I hope it's better here at Duke but what I'm seeing around the country is in classes students are much more afraid to speak up and disagree than they were 10 or 20 years ago they're walking on eggshells many become intellectually fragile I'll talk about fragility in a few minutes because if you've never had to defend your ideas and then suddenly you're challenged then it feels like a phrase that some uses you have invalidated my existence students now say that if you challenge a core conviction it's you have invalidated my existence and that's a form of violence and so we can't allow that we can't allow a speaker on campus who might do that the consequences for faculty are almost as profound certainly there's a misallocation of effort as many people flood into the trendy topics I read recently almost nobody that almost nobody is studying or teaching or there's a huge decline in teaching military history and even political history everybody's focused on the trendy topics so Mis allocation of effort loss of rigor fear of dissent and fear of students the professor's are increasingly afraid of students everybody is on the Left but they're increasingly being hauled up for some charge of racism or sexism and they don't know why but professors all over the country are pulling videos pulling material they're not presenting things that might be provocative because what if a student feels somehow victimized by hearing that they take you in front of the Equal Opportunity Commission it takes weeks or months is horrible so you again you are being exposed to far less provocative which I can't know that for sure about Duke but nationally undergrads are being exposed to far less provocative material in 2016 than they were even in 2014 just the last two years professors all over the country are changing their teaching because they were afraid of the students so that's motivated reasoning and the reason why political orthodoxy becomes so dangerous you get all this strange stuff happening is because political orthodoxy then Renken orthodoxy activates psychology of sacredness so I study morality and the origins of morality I'm very interested in cooperation the origins of cooperation there are almost no species on earth that are able to cooperate in large groups bees are great at it of course their trick is that they're all sisters they're all in the same boat genetically this is a termite mound in Australia again same trick so nature discovered this way of creating ultra social species where millions can work together to build something huge there's only one species on earth that can do it without being siblings and that's humans so this is Babylon and this is a this is Tenochtitlan and what we find in the archaeological record is that wherever wherever there is civilization it starts with temples or at least the record begins with temples and the reason I believe we always start with temples is that humanity's great trick our evolutionary trick over the last million or so years half million or so years I'd say is we evolved a psychology of sacredness we evolved to be religious and that means if we circle around something we then make that thing sacred and then we can trust each other so this is straight from Emile Durkheim I take the straight from Emile Durkheim the sociologist I think one of the greatest social scientists ever and so these are Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca and as they circle you know if you take a if you take a wire and you move it through a magnetic field you generate electricity the capacity to do work a polarity and Durkheim used that metaphor to he said that social rituals generates social electricity and then the group can function as one they can work together they can fight against other groups that's our great trick and we do this all the time it's not just not just a gods and and manifestations of God so the flag the flag becomes sacred especially during war time soldiers circle around it and then they will risk their lives for each other so what is sacred at a university I mean what do we circle around is a Rafael's School of Athens what are they what are they trying to do there well obviously I mean it's right there on the crest Veritas that's right isn't that that's what's sacred at a university right that's the most important thing for us right we circle around that but my argument is that what has been happening since the 1990s is there's been a change the most sacred thing at a university is the victim not in all departments not in the sciences but in the social science and especially the humanities the victim is the most sacred thing now you can see this especially here there are six groups of victims traditionally since the 90s so most went whenever there are big political blow ups and controversies they tend to be around around race issues gender issues or LGBT issues those are the big three there are three other groups that are sacred to but there just seems to be less controversy around Latinos Native Americans and disability status they all matter but but these are I believe the six sacred groups since I joined the Academy in the in the night in the 90s now the last two years have been so extraordinary again studying moral psychology it's like I go back and forth between my god the world is going to hell and I'm scared out of my mind to saying oh my god this is so unbelievably interesting I can't believe that moral psychology helps us understand everything so the last two years has been extraordinary because there's been a revolution just in two years we've added a seventh group so now Muslims and many it depends on the school but at some schools Muslims are now in the sacred category so any criticism of Islam or Muslims is equivalent to is what can't be done transgender issues have rocketed from from obscurity a couple years ago to the frontline of campus politics now and of course black lives matter since we all saw those horrible videos beginning 2014 of unarmed black men being killed so there's a huge amount of moral passion and it comes onto campus and it is transforming the life of the university you know you're in the presence of sacredness when any little thing any little affront or insult elicits a huge reaction so if somebody on campus were to use an American flag or a Bible in an art project maybe they put it on the floor maybe they mix it with something do you think that would be okay well you know it happens but for people on the right very easy to see this for conservatives the flag and the Bible are sacred any little thing is blasphemy is is treason those are sacred objects you can also see it on the left obviously civil rights leaders Martin Luther King is a hero well so each side has their sacred objects people images ideas and again this is just normal human group ashiness this is what groups do but as you circle it on your sacred objects on your team and you generate this electricity you get a polarizing effect so that our side is on the side of the angels our motives are good our motives are pure even if we're wrong about things here and there we meant well where the good people they their motives are so evil even if they ever were accidentally right it doesn't matter because their intentions are so bad and the the clearest expression of this what this has given us this polarizing has given us what some sociologists call victimhood culture this is the key to understanding the new moral culture on campus just in the last few years so these two sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning wrote this wonderful essay two years ago they were what they were trying to understand they started hearing about microaggressions and they were wondering why why do some campuses talk about microaggressions and why only some campuses and this is two years ago before most of us had ever heard the term and their analysis is that there's a long term change cultures change their moral culture changes and many cultures including American culture long ago had elements of an honor culture in an honor culture people will often shun reliance on law or any other authority even when available they refuse to lower their standing by depending on another to handle their affairs so in an honor culture a gentleman cannot tolerate any stain upon his honor and if you insult me in any public forum even in a small way I have to challenge you and get you to back down or I lose honor and that's why you get dueling so all the way up until the end of the 18th century in America we have dueling now gradually as our commercial system changes as we get more big more diverse challenging people to duels begins to look kind of stupid in the 19th century and it fades out and it's replaced they say by what is they call a dignity culture in a dignity culture dignity exists independently of what others think so a culture of dignity is one in which public reputation is less important it's even commendable to have thick skin parents might even teach children some version of sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me something I heard a lot growing up now obviously words do hurt it's not you know we all know that words hurt but the ideal is to say is to teach kids brush it off if you if you want to respond to every insult you're a fool and you're destined for a life of miseries just toughen up brush it off forget it but what man in Campbell say has been happening especially and it happens first on campuses the United States is the transition to a victimhood culture a culture of victimhood is one characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight so just like an honor culture any little thing can can cause it you have to react so people are intolerant of insults even if unintentional as in an honor culture but here they react differently they don't deal with themselves they bring it to the attention of the authorities if something happens you don't deal with yourself you report it you get the president University the Dean somebody some older persons some bureaucratic Authority you bring them in to punish the person who did this in such a culture you don't emphasize your strength rather the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and their social marginalization they also point out that the only way to gain status is not just to be a victim but to stand up for other victims and so even if you're not in a victim class you can gain status by aggressively pursuing those who you think have marginalized members of the victim class so for example at Emory back in I think January February when somebody wrote Trump 2016 not just once but maybe 20 or 30 times people wrote Trump on campus overnight what do you think happened ooh you think those tough Emory students got out their sweat sponges and paper towels and erased it hell no they were scared they were panicked they said they were fearing for their lives and they and they went on mass they gathered and then they went to the president they demanded that the president of the university take action can you imagine someone writing that during the election year so this is moral dependency the president at first was very sympathetic and then when the whole world mocked him he kind of backed off and said you know okay we have to you know let people have free speech but you know it so the British tabloid the Daily Mail students freaked out because someone Trump's chops Trump slogans so the whole world is laughing at Emory University and basically the laughing at American college students and this is not just the whole world it's most of America too is laughing at the stories they read about fragile college students not you guys you guys I'm sure are tougher you came to this lecture many of you are in the PPE program I don't mean you but the students at many other schools and the reason why this is so terrible for the students themselves is that once victimhood culture gets onto your campus and once it gets into the teaching students are literally literally taught to see people as members of good or bad groups there's the good race and the bad race the good gender and the bad gender good bad students are learning a Manichaean view of the world good versus evil this means that there is eternal conflict and grievance there can never be peace in a victimhood culture there is eternal conflict ingredients because that's what the struggle for status is all about students are walking on eggshells in a victimhood culture everyone is afraid everyone is self censoring and that's what leads them to implement or to demand safety culture the whole idea the very idea that a college campus is full of danger these are unbelievably safe places but the idea that words ideas and speakers could invalidate someone's existence is so threatening we need protections we need safe spaces we need trigger warnings the net effect is that the very people you're trying to help are rendered weaker and they become moral dependence they become morally dependent let me give you an example two weeks ago when there were that we have the Trump Clinton debate at Hofstra University and for the students of Hofstra students coming in it was a sign trigger warning because Donald Trump is there so you know he's triggering you know the so the event conducted may contain triggers sexual violence sexual assault if you feel triggered please know there are resources to support you and it lists five different organizations that you can go to for support if you feel upset by Donald Trump now this is textbook case of moral dependency so the reason why this is so bad for students is because of the other big psychological idea I want to share with you which is antifragility my first book the happiness hypothesis it was about ten great truths insights from around the world and across the millennia truth number seven is that people are anti fragile so as Friedrich Nietzsche put it what doesn't kill me makes me stronger and there's a lot of research it's not always true there is PTSD there are some things that can damage you but for the most part it's true it's a great truth because it was noticed by many many wise people in different cultures monks ooh or benches said when heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man it will exercise his mind with suffering subject his sinews and bones to hard work and place obstacles in the paths of his deeds so as to stimulate his mind hardened his nature and improve wherever he is incompetent you cannot be a great man or woman unless you have suffered faced adversity been banged around failed and come back gotten back up 50 100 500 times that's the only way to greatness there's a wonderful book by Nassim Taleb called anti fragile this is the key idea until AB I talking about this you know he wishes he could find a better word but there isn't one so he made this word anti fragile but it's exactly right and he describes anti fragility as systems that increase in capability resiliency robustness as a result of mistakes false attacks attacks or failures and he's very clear to say this is not resilience if something is resilient that means you can beat on it and it won't break but it doesn't get stronger no he means things that actually get better and so the examples that he gives that anyone can see so bone is this way bone will toughen in hardened to the extent that it's needed and so if you take it easy on your bones if you don't work them if you if you're in weightlessness for months they get weaker and weaker and weaker and then when you experience weight they'll break the immune system is the same way it is expecting experience if you if you raise your kids and you use a lot of antibacterial wipes you are crippling their immune system because the human immune system can't reach adulthood unless it experiences millions and billions of kinds of bacteria hookworm all sorts of parasites that it's expecting that it learns from so the immune system will be crippled if you protect your kids and of course children children be crippled if you protect them so the as we wrap our kids in bubble wrap and this is what we began doing so American parenting changed in the 1980s for a variety of historical reasons in the 1980s we began massively protecting our kids now it's true there was a crime wave that began so it wasn't imaginary and it was amplified by the arrival in 1980 of cable TV so we were afraid afraid for our children unnecessarily it turns out but we really sort of threw the blanket of protection over them beginning of the 1980s and it wasn't just as infants so helicopter parenting really takes off in the 1990s kids are raised for a variety of reasons parents are always there helping wait here you know you need a band-aid did you remember this so kids are not they're not having unsupervised time unsupervised time used to be a feature of childhood every child spent a lot of time unsupervised every day they work it out they'd have fights in the playground some would call them stupid they'd fight but these are the experiences that make you grow up and of course now it goes all the way through college I occasionally hear from business people tell me that when they turn someone down for a job it has happened that their parents the kid's parents call them so what do you think happened how did it happen that when Hofstra University has the great honor to host the first debate how on earth did it happen that Hofstra rather than saying to its students hurray goes in the front row how did it happen that they came swooping in saying now kids you know if you're upset here's five numbers you can call we're here to help this is not helping because safety culture is debilitating it is crippling it is a terrible terrible thing those who embrace it those who embrace as an identity my identity is that I am a victim I am a member of a marginalized or oppressed group I'm not denying that there's oppression I'm saying if the more you foster that as your core identity the weaker you get the more anger you get the less likely you are to thrive after leaving the bubble of safety who gets stronger from this straight white men straight white men are the only beneficiaries here because for four years they're told you're the bad guys you're the evil ones and they're no resource to support you in particular what does that sound like frequent criticism and no special support what does that sound like a job right that's what a job is okay so straight white men straight white men have four years of preparation for a job whereas anybody who grasps that identity has four years of dis preparation or whatever you might say and as I've been giving these talks and I talk with people and I meet business people at Stern and they say what is going on I mean what I don't want to hire these kids I mean they're going to sue they're going to cry like what I don't want these kids from the safety culture so again safety culture is debilitating if you see signs of it here at Duke run like hell or better yet argue against it now you might have some trouble arguing against it because point number five is the presence of blasphemy laws so I talked for 16 years at the University of Virginia a wonderful school I'm sorry she's not supposed to say that here am i it's a it's a school not too far away and on many parts of grounds are these words from Thomas Jefferson this institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind for here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it he's basically pointing to institutionalized disconfirmation that's the point of university so he's saying there will be no blasphemy laws at UV you can say anything you want and people will simply argue it down if you're wrong but at a social justice university there are many blasphemy laws I just listed a few off the top of my head racism and sexism are endemic victims play no role in arriving at their current state no difference of ability or interest and affirmative action is good and more is better so most universities if you disagree with any of these publicly you can expect a very severe response now how why does this matter there are lots of problems that we want to figure out that lots of things we want to think of there are lots of racial inequalities there lots of gender inequalities we need to understand what's going on right so a long-standing problem is that women are underrepresented on the Faculty of stem department science technology engineering so what should we do well at Harvard back in 2004 I think it was they had a conference on this was a closed-door conference no public no press to really air ideas they invited the president of the university who's an economist Lawrence Summers and asked him to give his thoughts he's the president of a major university does he have any thoughts on why we can't get the numbers up in our stem departments the numbers of women and so he gives a talk and you can find it online and well okay many people think that he said that women aren't as smart as men and that's not at all what he said in fact I urge you to google Lawrence Summers women in stem and if you read it's not that long it is a model of careful social science thinking social sciences teach you to think about multiple forms of causality it's hard to know what's what and what he does is he comes in and he says my guess is that there are many causes and he lists three one of them is discrimination but he says well as one them you know one of the three causes could be could be that there is a difference in the standard deviation of IQ scores he doesn't say that men are smarter because they're not the IQ is the same but the spread is different so that at four standard deviations above the mean they're going to be more men so this is statistically what he's talking about the IQ scores for women in the United States the same mean but the the standard deviation is is larger for males and so if we look for standard deviations above or below there are more men there are more men at the very top and the very bottom there's a lot of research showing that this is the case on measures of quantitative skills there are some studies that suggest that maybe it's lower in other countries maybe it's changing over time so this could be something that will change eventually but the point is that for recent history for many decades this has been true this is the population of people we're sampling from who are applying for jobs as professors of chemistry at Harvard it's going to come from the top so that could be one of the three reasons that's what he said one of the three yes discrimination but also maybe that's what economists do they draw graphs they you know figure out things from that's what they do what happens do people argue back with him that I don't know maybe somebody argued then but the point is there was such outrage outraged not just at Harvard but around the country that ultimately he was forced to resign now he he is a published guy who made a lot of enemies it's not just this but the fact that he was ultimate out because of this is such a black mark I think not just on Harvard but on all social scientists who did not stand up for him because this is just such simple obvious straightforward and quality social science thinking to raise that as a possibility because he committed blasphemy and in fact he violated three of those four rules he said he wasn't denying but he's just saying maybe the reason isn't just sexism maybe there's other reasons and he's blaming the victim he's saying has something to do with women that you can't do that and he said and and of course he's saying well maybe it's not an average difference but maybe the top end so again blasphemy committed three forms of blasphemy with that simple argument and that's why he got fired here's one other example so poverty in America affects children especially and especially children from black Native American and Latino families one of our biggest problems one that most undergraduates are concerned about one that most professors are concerned about so by a long process I ended up because I non-partisan on not on the left or the right I write about this stuff I ended up chairing a group of America's top poverty scholars from the left and the right we'd come together to try to reach consensus about inequality we failed but in those first meeting that first meeting we discovered that we all were very concerned about child poverty the transmission of poverty and so can we get together as a bipartisan group and and stand and make some recommendations based on the based on the research and the answer was yes and it was fascinating we worked together for a little over a year and right off the bat the left wanted to focus on those three causes the right wanted to focus on those three causes and the thing is they're all correct both sides are right it is economic and it is familial both sides are right you need all of it to do it and after a year we come up with what I think is the best analysis of American poverty in the last 30 30 years and and I think the only will add well the best plan out there I believe for actually addressing it because it was sight we got everybody to agree and we even got was amazing we got the right we got the the people on the left to actually agree that marriage is actually really really important for understanding poverty and inequality and we got the we got the right to actually agree to recommend birth control now you have to look in the footnote and read between the lines but it was really hard to get people to agree to violate their sacred values and people were really worried about what their colleagues were going to say but they did it and so we came up with a consensus report it was really thrilling to do now what would have happened if we had done this at a university there are well they're one guy one conservative was from University there's one at NYU but all the other conservatives were at think-tanks because they can't get jobs at universities so if this had happened just within sociology departments or economics to economics is different but had it happened just university we could not have considered those those are blasphemy you can't blame the victim so we would have knocked though now the situation is this social science is really really hard you're dealing with situations which you can't usually run true experiments and you're always dealing with multi causality about about things that think and move it's really hard stuff you need a lot of tools what happens at social justice university is they say one-third of the tools nope nope you cannot use them if you touch it we shoot you and now here's the most important statistical tool that you need to understand and that is universally understood except when social justice comes into play so here's a graph this is very recent data on the gender breakdown of jobs in Silicon Valley so here's some of the top Silicon Valley companies and as you see in green in the non tech jobs women are about 50% of the workforce in Silicon Valley but in the tech jobs it's below 20% you know averaging around 15 17 % so look at that look at that graph and tell me do you see evidence in that graph of institutional or systemic sexism raise your hand if you see evidence of institutional or systemic sexism please raise your hand high right now anyone what do you you must be a bunch of right-wing libertarian I can't believe it I can't believe because it cooks know me I've given I've shown this in a few schools and a lot of hands go up and this is the definition of institutional or systemic sexism typically a gender disparity okay so my next demonstration is going to flub because all right here does so this is the gender gap in PhDs last year so if you look at everybody in America earned a PhD the distribution is this in engineering it was about seventy-five percent men and then down to business about whatever that is 55 percent men so alright raise your hand if you see institutional sexism or systemic sexism here okay no hands well good couple okay couple hands okay actually bout some people sort of signaling to me because you all right so at other schools I've been at a lot of hands go up for this and that's look at the other fields so these are the other other major fields and in the other fields women dominate as they have for I've since the 90s women of course earn the vast well women earn the majority of undergraduate degrees master's degrees and PhDs in this country women are doing very well in school men's performance going down and down especially the less educated the bottom half of the income distribution so women dominate the Academy at the level of degrees and they are getting different they're getting PhDs in different fields than men now maybe this is systemic sexism or maybe it reflects something that we know with I think a fair degree of confidence now which is that prenatal testosterone when it when it goes into the uterus or was generated I'm sorry we all start off as girls in utero and then if there's a Y chromosome that triggers a cascade of events that lead to a little pulse of testosterone which changes the genitalia to the male pattern and changes the brain to the male pattern and as part of that transition from female to male brains become less good at empathizing reading emotion being sensitive and more good more good or better at at systemising is that is the one but it what comes out is that boys are more interested in playing with things and and girls more with people and this goes on to occupational choices so a major review in sight bowl found a lot of evidence for this and you can see it in high school students preferences for careers so this is a data from the US News Raytheon stem index and what this shows so when students are high school students are asked what do you want to go into as an adult what field you want to go into so this is line for women who say science and you can see that numbers actually been going up from 2000 to 2014 and actually this is the line for men here the line for men and women are basically indistinguishable if you just say science so that's great women's interest in science has has been rising but if so that's that's these lines here but if we look at specifically tech do you want to go into a technology the line for boys in high school is much higher several many times higher than the line for girls and actions that and the gap is increasing at we are increasing we're efforts to encourage women that's great but it's not having any effect and if you look at engineering it's even more stark so if you look at tech now and engineering high school boys really really want to do it and very few high school girls say that they want to do that now maybe you can argue that that is a kind of sexism maybe you can push it back further but at a certain point at a certain point I think you have to look at this graph and say women are getting most of the PhDs women are going into the sciences but they're electing different sciences and at what point do you say until women are 50% of everything it's sexism is that really a logical conclusion so the deeper problem here and the reason why I'm so concerned about this my I'm spending so much time on this is that there's a really really deep problem in the social sciences which is that every one of us everyone in every social science department knows that correlation does not imply causation we know this so deeply that and we never let each other get away with it if you're at a cocktail party and somebody is not a social scientist says something you know we can't stop ourselves like well but correlation doesn't apply across it and if we're dreaming and something in my dreamed I mean I correct them in my dreams like we all know this so here's a graph so autism as autism has been going up since the 90s so has organic food sales what do you think do you think that autism is caused by organic food or do you think that it's autistic people who buy organic food and that's why they go up which is it and if you're social scientist yet probably neither it's just a correlation there's a lot of ways to explain that here's another one I just found from googling more buck for your bank people have more sex make the most money so what do you think do you think that if you're currently in a relationship and you have more sex your income will go up do you think that's the way it works of course not there's a third variable so a social scientists would instantly say what's the third variable the third variable is extraversion and opens to experience people who have that trait have more sex and make more money okay third we know this we all know this but suddenly you present people with a disparity and they all say oh my god causation the fact that that person is a woman is why she wasn't hired all we have is a correlation between gender and outcomes but we impute causation and we know the causation is discrimination could be individual or it could be systemic but it's discrimination so at social justice you they teach you that if a group is underrepresented it proves or at least strongly suggests that there is systemic or structural discrimination against that group that is what you learn at SJ u now this is wrong this is just flat-out wrong there's no defense so I shouldn't say there's no defense I'm sure someone will have a defense and it but I believe this is wrong and that's I'm coming to that at truth University we teach you that correlation does not imply causation in fact this is such an important lesson I want you all to say it out loud with me right now what I'll say once you three and stage like one two three correlation does not imply causation thank so please remember that and spout that back to professors when they violate them now I do not want to deny that there is racism in sexist I do not want to deny the indignities that women and especially African Americans feel I read the stories from my students I'm not saying everything is fine but what I'm saying is to simply argue that a disparity shows systemic anything is wrong it's an invitation to look more closely by all means look more closely we need social justice activists to commit themselves to look more closely that's great that's necessary and sometimes they find it but you have to look for third variables and you have to ultimately the most powerful test is an experiment spera mental manipulation and so one was done will Williams in CC at Cornell they made up all kinds of resumes that showed equivalent levels of research success and productivity they sent them out to faculty in STEM fields and they looked figured and they found who was in who was selected shortlisted for an interview and what do you think happened yes there was bias which way do you think it went everybody is on the left everybody is really concerned about getting women into science everybody's really concerned about gender inequality racial inequality so of course these professors would prefer to bring the woman in they've been trying since the 90s to equalize things so of course if you're applying and you're a woman of course you have an advantage and I'm not saying that's wrong that's I understand that that's fine but to then say that the disparity is shows that the STEM fields are systemically sexist gets it exactly backwards they're systemically anti-sexist and so the next time anyone especially one of your professors tells you that some disparity shows shows a violation of social justice what I want you to say is disparate outcomes do not imply disparate treatment on the count of three please say it loud with me right now one two three disparate how it comes do not imply disparate treatment okay thank you okay so again it is an invitation it is invitation to get to work and to look but you know false accusations are bad things and in our society an academic society false accusations of racism sexism or virtues signaling people do it all the time because it's a good thing to accuse people of racism and sexism but I think that's wrong so my last major point on justice so what is justice the basic psychology of justice the main theory that helps us understand justice is called equity theory and it's a very simple proposition it's that we all keep track in our social relationships and think about your living situation if you have roommates or group house we all keep track and so what's the ratio of my inputs how much work am i doing and then what am I getting out of it that's a ratio and if Mary is getting more if her ratio is higher that's upsetting so we keep track of each other's ratios and equality is a very important kind of fairness equality is a special case if our inputs are all equal well then of course of course our outcomes should be equal so if the bottom line holds and of course the top line points okay but what about the case where you're doing more work than Mary and Mary is doing more work than Bob but yet your outcomes are all the same now in a family we can tolerate that but those of you who have roommates we live in a group house what percentage of you think that you do more than your fair share of the work and the cleaning and the grocery buying raise your hand if you think you do more than your fair share okay and raise your hand if you think you do less than your fair share okay a few all right so but it in general people think that people are biased they do motivated reasoning they think they do more than their Fisher now I've read a lot of definitions of social justice it's very hard to understand exactly what the definition of social justice is but I think there two parts to it so social justice activists are very focused on disparate treatment of individuals and that is a subtype of justice that is good everybody should agree that that is that is a thing to focus on if people are treated differently because they are black or gay or female that is wrong that is an outrage that should stop somebody should stop it but there's another part of social justice social justice as I experience it as I hear it as I read about it it is not mostly about disparate treatment is mostly about disparate outcomes and when social justice is focused on achieving equal outcomes for all groups then it's no longer a subset of justice part of it is just as part of it is outside of justice and if you want to understand why we work through an example so in 2006 under george w bush the is the department of education began prosecuting title nine offenses and so one thing that they noticed is that in public schools around the country boys are disciplined expelled and suspended more often than girls and the ratios are gigantic I mean it's often ten to one or more and so the Bush administration thought this is unfair this is a violation of title nine you can't be discriminated against schools in this against boys in this way and so they told schools that they must eliminate gender disparities and punishment and so what did schools do well what are they going to do they have to now crackdown on the girls if a girl does anything wrong because girls are so much better behaved than boys so if a girl does anything wrong we have to suspend her and if a boy does anything that isn't violent we have to look the other way because we got it we gotta we've got our narrow that gap so think about that we know that boys have many more behavior problems and girls they have many more externalizing disorders they commit more violent crimes they don't get as their grades aren't as good we know that boys violation rate is way way above the girls and so if the goal is to make the suspension rates the same is that fair is that justice raise your hand if you think that is a fair or just goal raise your hand high okay nobody because that is an abomination of justice now thank God this didn't happen I made up the whole story okay that did not happen but but what did happen is this in 2014 the Obama administration Department of Education Office of Civil Rights noticed that punishment rates are very disparate by race this is true and so Civil Rights Act prohibits such discrimination and they tell schools that they must eliminate the disparities they send one of your infamous Dear Colleague letters warning schools you better even the rates out or we're coming after you and so the Minneapolis Public Schools the administrator the head of the public school comes up with a new plan that's going to make it much more difficult to spend children of color and of course they're going to try to crack down on the white and Asian kids because they got to get though rates equal so what do you think we know that the black Latino violation rate is higher not just from the corresponding crime rates outside of school but just from the fact that boy is raised without marriage boys raised with men cycling through the home have many more behavior problems so we know that the rates are different and if the goal is to equalize the rates of punishment is that fair raise your hand if you think that would be fair so this is an abomination from the point of view of fairness for justice to do that and that's why I say that when social justice as I see it as we practice in this country when social justice demands equal treatment it is justice it is right it is good and when it demands equal outcomes without concern for inputs or differences it is unjust and the only way to achieve those equal outcomes is through injustice if it would simply do this then most of the conflicts with truth would go away we wouldn't need the schism but that would involve committing blasphemy so don't hold your breath okay so that's the bulk of my presentation the the implication then is that these two are incompatible as the taylors of a university each must choose one fortunately the schism is under way Brown University has volunteered to lead it Christina Paxson had wrote to the faculty saying the brown is a bedrock commitment to social justice the faculty wrote back in the newspaper we applaud the call to unite around a university agenda of social justice unite around it circle around our sacred value that's what holds us together so Brown we just found out last week the left/right ratio in the human in the humanities and social sciences sixty to one it is the most left-leaning school of the major schools in the country sixty to one left/right ratio at Brown so Brown fine let them do it they're going to spend a hundred million dollars on diversity and inclusion that's their choice it's their is their money it's their donors money whatever they're going to spend a lot of money on diversity inclusion that they're so they're going that way Chicago has declared the opposite so University Chicago sent a rather clumsily worded letter it's foolish for them to say we don't allow safe spaces there's a right of association but what the Dean of Faculty Dean of Students meant was classrooms at Chicago are not safe spaces that's what he was trying to say so so they're going to leave the Schism and I think what I'm calling for is not actually very radical because it's already happened so these schools they used to be divinity schools and we still have schools that devote themselves to Jesus Christ so here's Wheaton College and they say right there on the website for Christ and his kingdom that's their Talos if you go to that school our mission is to serve Jesus Christ now you'll take English course in history courses of course but are there clear our Talos is to serve Jesus Christ so we've already had a schism where some schools they were all they were all Christian schools originally some went to Christ some went towards truth we've already had that schism all I'm saying is let's have one more we need one more we already have a place for people on the religious right they can go there people on the far left social justice left they can go to they can go to brown but shouldn't we have shouldn't we have some schools for people or not on the far right or far left and so that's my question for you for for Duke well I guess I have a hint at which what you're going to vote already but which way do you want to go raise your hand if you think Dukes talos should be serving Jesus Christ raise your hand okay we actually have four okay raise your hand if you think that gee Dukes Tilos talos should be social justice raise your hand high one okay and raise your hand if you think it should be truth all right okay well sorry got a little heads there answer rejecting all day huh I mean trichotomy 'he's no i know that some of you would reject it but it's i think we have a clearer show of sentiment okay so that's my point about schism what can Duke do to affirm its Talos if well I don't know if this is representative of the campus I imagine not but if this were what could you do I urge you all to go to header Knox Academy org it's an organization that I founded with some other professors trying to restore diversity of opinion viewpoint diversity on campus that's our goal so go there we have a lot of projects one is for students to introduce into student government a resolution calling for Duke to become a heterodox University all it means is you ask the administration to adopt the Chicago principles of free expression you want there to be a clear non obstruction policy for protest of course people can protest but never in a way that stops others from speaking or here that's intimidation and third you want the university to include viewpoint diversity in all of its stuff and all of its writing about that's it would you support that put it up for a vote let Duke talk about it and and see what comes of it so in conclusion there are two very different ways of thinking about intellectual life that go back 150 200 years they've led to two very different ways of thinking about universities and I'm thrilled that you have all identified or most of you have identified with John Stuart Mill's view in which the point of university is to understand the world because only if you commit to truth I believe can you actually achieve justice thank you you

Channel: Duke University Department of Political Science

Views: 472,641

Rating: 4.8440151 out of 5

Keywords: Jonathan Haidt, moral psychology, motivated reasoning, academic freedom, social justice, campus politics, trigger warning, safe spaces, multiculturalism, universities, campus life, orthodox, heterodox academy, justice, truth, Larry Summers, PPE, Philosophy Politics and Economics

Id: Gatn5ameRr8

Length: 66min 23sec (3983 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 15 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/partanimal]

I wholeheartedly agree.

I enthusiastically participated in the women's march, and will enthusiastically participate in other social justice and political marches.

But this is not that.

This needs a laser like focus on science-specific issues.

[u/potomac88]

We want to uphold the scientific consensus that:

-Vaccines are safe and have done immense good for public health.

-The concerns over methylmercury caused thiomersal to be removed from U.S. childhood vaccines, starting in 1999. Since then, it has been found that ethylmercury is eliminated from the body and the brain significantly faster than methylmercury, so the late-1990s risk assessments turned out to be overly conservative.

-Climate change is real. We have understood the mechanism of action (greenhouse effect) pretty well and have the upward trend correlation between CO2 and temperatures. Can mostly rule out the sun, etc.

-GMO plants are usually safe themselves. The danger comes from putting specific genes inside organisms (toxins to humans, etc). There are also dangers associated with the overuse of pesticides, but those aren't the GMOs themselves.

-No funding cuts for NIH, DOE, USDA etc. (edit: forgot to include NASA, DARPA)

-etc

What will sidetrack us. These are legitimate concerns, but this is not the appropriate platform and time:

-Identity politics

-Intersectionality

-Social justice concerns

[u/penguinland]

That was a fascinating video; thank you for sharing! I completely agree; I hope this march is nonpartisan and focused on science, but am worried that the leaders/organizers might have other plans for it.

[u/BomberMeansOK]

I was enjoying the talk, but I had to stop it at 12 minutes in to make this comment:

The speaker begins referencing Gary Taubes. Gary Taubes is not a respectable source of scientific or historic understanding. He is best known for his book Good Calories, Bad Calories, which argues that sugar is the cause of obesity (pretty much exclusive of the consumption of calories in other forms or exercise).

While there is a chance Taubes is actually correct, it does not appear that he has arrived there in a mannar consistent with scientific honesty, and so his propositions should only be held in slightly higher regard than that thing you heard at the gym that one time.

See: here

And: here

That said, this is a lecture on moral philosophy (ironically, a lecture on truth), and this was a factual error that a human who is not intimately familiar with the subject matter might be reasonably expected to make, and I don't think it otherwise should have a bearing on what he says. I look forward to seeing the rest of the talk.

[u/dannyboy101]

Stop cherry picking your science. I am a neuroscientist and I can tell you with 100% certainty that these issues are scientific now that we can and do research them