In this episode, we talk about the alt-right and its impact on our understanding of the world. We also discuss the implications of the New York Times article on women and gender differences, and the reaction to it by the media and academics. We also talk about what it means to be "intelligent" in the 21st century, and why it's important to recognize differences between men and women. And, of course, we have a special guest on the show this week, our good friend Steve Kamb, who is a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Daily News. Thanks to Steve for joining us, and we hope you enjoy listening to this episode of Thick & Thin. The opinions expressed in this episode are our own, not those of our employers, and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies we work for. We do not endorse any of the views expressed in the article. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment of any medical or mental health problem. It is not meant to be intended to diagnose, treat, prevent, or prevent any medical, mental or other medical problem, diagnosis or treatment. If you have a problem you are experiencing, seek professional help. Please talk to a doctor if you are having trouble. or are experiencing a difficult time, or are in need of it. Thank you for listening to our podcast, we understand that this episode is a difficult listening experience. We appreciate the feedback. and appreciate the support we have received so far. - we appreciate it greatly. Tweet us and share your thoughts and support us in this podcast. Timestamps: Tweet Meghan or . Text Me! of the podcast if you have any questions or suggestions or thoughts or suggestions? or thoughts on the podcast? Please tweet us on any of your thoughts or concerns about the podcast or concerns we ll get them in the next episode on the next week's episode or your voice memo in the comments section , and we ll be listening to the next one :) <3 - Timestream: , tweet me ;) -Timestamps : & of this episode: . . and : of that episode
00:01:27.000It was also that because of the various taboos in mainstream intellectual culture, because of political correctness, there are certain things that are just kind of not discussable.
00:01:38.000But then when people in the alt-right discover them, they feel tremendously empowered.
00:01:42.000Like we are now privy to the truth that the establishment can't handle.
00:02:17.000Now, if that's – and that's often quite taboo in intellectual circles for, I think, bizarre reasons.
00:02:24.000I think there are people who think that somehow women's rights depend on men and women being indistinguishable, which I think is a bad equation in the first place.
00:02:32.000But as soon as you come across the fact that men and women on average are different, you also come across the fact that men and women overlap in a lot of these traits, that whatever trait you name that men on average are – I think we're good to go.
00:03:13.000What are your thoughts on how the subject got out of bounds?
00:03:16.000Because it's very confusing to me that certain subjects like the differences between genders are so taboo when they seem so obvious.
00:03:26.000I mean, you just could go to a mall and just look at the way the men dress and the women dress, and you go, well, there's some obvious distinctions here.
00:04:06.000So if you say that there are differences between men and women, you're sending women back to the kitchen and the nursery.
00:04:12.000So this is a total non sequitur because fairness is not the same as sameness.
00:04:18.000So obviously women should have equal rights to men whether or not they're exact copies of men or have a distinctive profile as men have a distinct profile.
00:04:26.000So I think it was just a mistake to conflate the issue of women's rights with men and women being identical.
00:04:34.000But that's the way it kind of shook out and it became kind of an article of faith in a lot of – in some feminists, some kind of left liberal circles that men and women have to be identical.
00:04:45.000And if they aren't, that means you're a traitor to women's equality.
00:04:49.000Yeah, and articles of faith are always dangerous.
00:05:00.000That's right, and not assuming that any difference is a deficiency.
00:05:03.000If you're really doing an honest comparison of the differences between men and women, men wouldn't come out looking so good.
00:05:10.000Yeah, I have a whole bit about that in my act.
00:05:14.000When we're looking at the reaction to this though, what was strange to me was how many people seemed like they wanted to jump on board and criticize you and I think a lot of it is almost like to take away some of the potential criticism of themselves.
00:05:30.000Like, it's instant claiming of the moral high ground, virtue signaling, and it's just very disappointing when you see this from intellectuals and college professors and people that should know better.
00:05:41.000I mean, to be fair, I did not get into much trouble from my peers and among professors and grad students and so on.
00:05:48.000There are a couple of trolls who ran with it, but by and large, the mainstream reaction was that this is almost a sign of, as the New York Times put it, that social media is making us stupid.
00:05:58.000Yeah, that was the title of the article in the Times.
00:06:02.000Yeah, so by and large, I came out of it okay, but it was a real indication of how These mobs of outrage can corrupt any kind of intelligent discourse.
00:06:12.000Yeah, well, subtle discussions, discussions that involve nuance, like complicated issues that are – they're complex.
00:06:20.000They require a long sort of description of the issue and a very – It's a complex sort of take on these various differences between men and women and the alt-right and the left and political correct—these are long discussions.
00:06:40.000I mean, these aren't something that you can smash into a very short soundbite and completely cover your take on things.
00:06:48.000All the more reason that they shouldn't be taboo, because if you can't discuss them, then the only interpretation you're going to have is the simplistic one.
00:06:54.000If you bring them out in the open, then you can start to have that discussion.
00:06:57.000I'm hoping that this is turning around.
00:07:00.000I'm hoping that what's happened is the outrage culture has become almost a parody of itself.
00:07:06.000It's gotten so ridiculous that people will sort of shy away from outrage.
00:07:11.000Seemingly like the same reason why people are terrified of talking about the differences between men and women is because they don't want to Be grouped into the people that legitimately, rather, were sexist in the 1900s and the 1800s and these people that did have these terrible ideas.
00:07:33.000So now we're trying to go so far away from that that we've become a little bit ridiculous.
00:07:37.000And I'm hoping it's a swing and it'll just kind of bounce back towards the middle again.
00:07:42.000Yeah, and in fact, there's some hope that just when any medium is new, there'll be these excesses, and it takes a while for the system to kind of re-equilibrate, to have an immune response that damps down the worst of it.
00:07:58.000I mean, I've been on the Internet a long time, and in the 80s, when it was mainly academics and computer scientists who were on the Internet, there were these discussion groups.
00:08:06.000This was before the World Wide Web, so it was all text.
00:08:09.000And there was this concept of flaming.
00:08:45.000As people became aware of flaming as a phenomenon, in the discussion groups, it was, well, let's not turn this into a flame war or enough flames.
00:08:53.000And when people kind of realized that this was a thing, then they could push back against it.
00:08:58.000And let's hope that that happens with the social media again.
00:09:17.000There was very few people, relatively speaking, involved in discussion groups back then, in terms of the mass amount of people that are on social media now.
00:09:26.000It's seemingly like everyone is in some form, or most people, are in some form of social media now.
00:09:32.000Whereas back then, the number of people that were on message boards was so small.
00:11:32.000When you see social media today, like as a psychologist, and you see this thing that people do when they can behave anonymously in the absence of social cues, not in front of each other, not seeing how the cruel things hurt each other,
00:11:49.000how does that make you, do you think that this is just an unnatural way of communicating?
00:11:57.000The anonymity is certainly unnatural and the lack of face-to-face contact.
00:12:01.000And I think one of the big discoveries of psychology over the last couple of decades is that we're moral animals to the extent that we have reputations.
00:12:12.000Going back to Richard Dawkins' famous book, The Selfish Gene, where he posed the question, how could niceness and generosity and cooperation evolve, given that in Darwinian competition, you'd expect the most aggressive, the most selfish to predominate?
00:12:27.000And there's an answer to that question, and Dawkins worked it out back in 19...
00:12:45.000You do something that harms me and I threaten revenge.
00:12:48.000Then people can kind of settle into cooperation because we really are better off if we extend favors to each other that do a lot of good to the other in response to a fairly minor inconvenience to the self.
00:13:02.000If everyone does that, everyone is better off.
00:13:04.000And that's only stable, though, if everyone has a memory for what everyone else did.
00:13:09.000Therefore, that sets up a pressure to cultivate your reputation as someone who is trustworthy and will reciprocate.
00:13:18.000But without the reputation, without the memory of who did what and how...
00:13:59.000It's a big deal to insult someone to their face and people do it, but you've got to do it very carefully.
00:14:06.000You take that away and it's just typing a bunch of characters at a keyboard and especially if the person doing the typing has a handle, they're just anonymous, then that kind of eliminates some of the constraints on civility and generosity and maintaining a reputation as a credible co-operator.
00:14:23.000I also feel that there's a selfishness in being nice and being generous, because the way I describe it, I think it feels good.
00:14:51.000The irony is that it can't just really be calculating.
00:14:54.000If it's really that I just do exactly as much that gets me gratitude and recognition, then other people see through that.
00:15:02.000And so the paradox is that it's kind of got to be sincere for it to be credible to someone else.
00:15:09.000So the most effective way to prove to someone else that you're a nice guy is to actually be a nice guy.
00:15:14.000Because if you're just calculating, if you're just doing the bare minimum you can get away with, then since we're all pretty good intuitive psychologists, we're always kind of thinking, did he really mean it?
00:15:41.000I mean, it's kind of like the marketplace of reputations kind of can select for true niceness and goodness if you've got enough information and enough interactions.
00:15:55.000So in the business world, you can have cutthroat fly-by-night businesses that just try to squeeze everything out of the customers and then take off as soon as the cheating is discovered.
00:16:07.000They don't actually make a lot of money.
00:16:09.000It's often the companies that will take back the product, no questions asked, even if they lose a little bit of money, but they earn the loyalty of their customers.
00:16:17.000Those are the companies that often do the best and stick around the longest.
00:16:20.000That's kind of an analogy to the way that being honorable, even if you have little losses, well, I did a little bit more for him than he did for me.
00:16:28.000But over the long run, that's what makes you desirable as someone that other people want to hang out with, if the reputations can spread.
00:16:35.000Yeah, it's kind of amazing if you think about how cherished true generosity and kindness, how cherished they are.
00:17:07.000And there's a misunderstanding of the evolutionary explanation of the appearance of altruism and generosity, a misunderstanding of The message that Dawkins conveyed in that book that it predicts that we're all just kind of calculating favor traders,
00:17:26.000that we do just enough to get a favor in return and if we don't think someone could help us in return, then we just cut them off.
00:17:35.000But it's actually – the reason that that's not true is that as soon as the game begins, you kind of get to higher and higher levels of people psyching each other out, seeing through them.
00:17:45.000Because if I have a choice between – I'm going to befriend.
00:17:50.000There's one person who's going to do exactly for me what will help him in the long run.
00:17:56.000There's someone else who really is generous and he's really going to help me and he's not going to keep a long memory of who did what for whom.
00:18:02.000Well, I'm going to pick the second guy.
00:18:03.000And so he's going to actually be better off for being the better person.
00:18:07.000Now that – I mean you can take that to an extreme and predict that it means that we're all infinitely generous, which of course we're not.
00:18:14.000And so there's kind of a tradeoff, an equilibrium between not being a total sucker or not giving so much away that you just harm yourself in the long run and being the kind of person who is generous and honest enough that other people want to affiliate with them.
00:18:31.000And the reality is that all of us are probably mixtures.
00:18:34.000I mean, we're not cutthroat sociopaths, most of us, although some of us are, nor are we total saints, self-sacrificing saints.
00:18:45.000We're somewhere in between and different people are at different points in that continuum.
00:18:49.000When you look at social media and you look at the nastiness that's so common, and obviously, in some ways, it's got to be connected to the ability to be anonymous.
00:19:04.000I've thought of this more and more lately, that this negativity is probably a temporary thing.
00:19:11.000I feel like people are realizing that this is an unnatural way of communicating and that it's so relatively recent in human history and such a small window.
00:19:22.000I mean, 1994 is essentially when people started getting online and here we are in 2018 and you're seeing people switching to flip phones.
00:20:12.000Staring at the screen like zombies, and you'd never have a conversation over the dinner table ever again.
00:20:17.000Even before that, when telephones were invented, families would never sit down together because the phone would constantly be ringing and attention spans would be disrupted because the phone could ring any time.
00:20:29.000Wasn't there a similar conversation about books?
00:21:01.000And also a lot of the adjustments that you were just talking about, you know, you can't really predict them beforehand.
00:21:07.000A lot of what happens in a society is there are like hundreds of little adjustments that people make, like not spend too much time on Facebook or email and Facebook.
00:21:17.000Leave this platform for that platform.
00:21:19.000Where if you were starting from scratch and asked to kind of imagine how it's going to play out, you can't really anticipate these things.
00:21:26.000It's like thousands of adjustments that people make.
00:21:29.000They happen when they happen with millions of people making decisions.
00:21:34.000But you can't just deduce them beforehand like a logical proof.
00:21:42.000We don't know what society's response is going to be.
00:21:44.000Well, this is a fascinating time when it comes to social media and just human interaction because this is so new and because it's uncharted territory.
00:21:52.000I mean, I think this is one of the reasons why so many people have so many concerns about it.
00:22:03.000I said this, that imagine if there was a drug that came along, that this drug made you only think about the drug, you were more likely to get into car accidents because of this drug, you were more likely to sleep late, cause more anxiety,
00:22:18.000and soak up immense amounts of your time with very little reward for it.
00:22:23.000You would go, wow, what kind of crazy drug is this?
00:22:32.000I mean, if you use it correctly, most of the time I try to spend on social media, I try to spend, or most of the time on my phone, I try to spend off social media but reading things.
00:22:42.000I try to read articles, and I try to in some way justify, like, oh, I'm doing something productive on my phone.
00:24:11.000When you see so much negativity, though, and this is a big problem with anonymous accounts in particular, you see it in Facebook, but in Facebook, there seems to be repercussions.
00:24:23.000Like if you're Tom Smith, and Tom Smith writes something horrible, like Tom Smith could get fired from his job for it.
00:24:31.000People write something racist or sexist or whatever, and we'll see them get fired from their job because of something that they put on Facebook because your profile represents the actual you.
00:24:48.000Where someone will post something and it's taken out of context and they didn't realize, well, they meant it as a joke.
00:24:53.000Like the woman who took that trip to Africa and made a kind of a self-effacing comment kind of about racism and people thought it was racist, but she was actually making fun of racism.
00:25:04.000I think she was drunk and she was being racist.
00:26:04.000We were talking about this before without getting into details about who we're talking about, but there are certain people that are very flawed individuals that look to find people and attack them to take away some of the spotlight on their own flaws.
00:26:35.000Trevor Burrus There's an interesting question over history is how do some of these – sometimes called extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds.
00:26:45.000Tulip bulb mania in Holland in the 17th century.
00:26:50.000Oh, there's this kind of bubble where people started to outbid each other on tulip bulbs and the price of a single tulip bulb went like through the roof and then it suddenly crashed.
00:27:03.000People lost fortunes because everyone was expecting everyone else to keep bidding up the price.
00:27:12.000But then there were also witch hunts where a woman would be accused of sinking a ship or causing a crop failure or making someone's child get sick.
00:27:22.000There are the pogroms in Europe where Jews were accused of poisoning the wells or killing Christian boys to make matzah out of their blood.
00:27:29.000There are the lynchings in the American South where African Americans were accused of There's the McCarthy era.
00:27:44.000There's the daycare satanic ritual abuse, a mania of the 1980s, where these daycare workers were accused basically by coaching kids to embellish I think we're good to go.
00:29:15.000It's a combination of a kind of human trait and a kind of dynamic when you have kind of a network of people and they all are kind of trapped and no one can be the first person to escape from this vicious circle because they don't want to be the one who is denounced and imprisoned and tortured or whatever the consequence may be.
00:29:36.000Where do you think, if you think at all about this, where do you think this is all headed?
00:29:43.000It's hard to tell, but you mentioned the possibility that there's been such growing recognition of the problem that we will mount a response, that it'll just seem ridiculous.
00:29:55.000The outrage mob, once it's recognized that there are outrage mobs and virtual signaling fanatics, once we have a label for them, once we know that it's a thing, it'll seem so ridiculous that people will be less tempted to do it.
00:30:14.000There's a real issue in writing things.
00:30:17.000And one of the issues, especially if you're writing about a subject where there's a lot of people involved, or perhaps even an individual, is that you're the only one that's writing.
00:30:28.000Like, if you were having a conversation with that person, they would be able to say something back.
00:30:32.000You'd be able to say something, and they would go, well, that's not exactly how I was thinking.
00:30:35.000Actually, I was looking at it this way.
00:30:37.000And the other person would go, oh, okay.
00:30:39.000So your take on it was, you know, and they would go back and forth and exchange information, hopefully come to some sort of an understanding of what's going on in each person's mind.
00:33:02.000And there's another kind of psychological problem that we all have.
00:33:06.000It's just part of being human called the curse of knowledge.
00:33:10.000Namely, when you know something, it's really, really hard to imagine what it's like not to know it.
00:33:16.000You just assume that everyone knows it, that your understanding is everyone's understanding.
00:33:21.000And so you write away, you know, write, write, write, write, write.
00:33:24.000And it never occurs to you that the I think we're good to go.
00:33:43.000And a lot of the cure is either to at least know that it's a problem and think, what can my reader be reasonably expected to know?
00:33:51.000And because we're not even that good at that, I mean, none of us are mind readers, just showing someone a draft of what you've written, you're often surprised at how often they'll say, I don't know what you're talking about.
00:34:01.000Maybe that's what we should force people to do at Twitter.
00:34:04.000Maybe we should have a team of people that you send your tweet to, like a circle of confidants.
00:34:12.000Well, I mean, that's the way it works in publishing.
00:34:17.000Before it's published, they send it out to other people just like you, and they write a little review, and you've got to modify it if it doesn't make any sense.
00:34:35.000Well, this is – one of the big themes in my new book, Enlightenment Now, is how is it that we're simultaneously in many ways getting smarter but also seem to be getting stupider as a society?
00:34:48.000So I think part of it is that none of us individually are that smart.
00:34:54.000We all – and cognitive psychologists have shown that humans have all kinds of biases and fallacies.
00:35:41.000We're part of a kind of collective brain that works by rules where all of the excesses of one person get kind of balanced out by other people.
00:35:50.000And that's why you have, you know, things like I think we're good to go.
00:36:12.000Announcing the way the world works, he or she has to subject himself to peer review and let other scientists criticize him or her.
00:36:22.000And whenever you get people acting intelligently, it's often because they belong to these institutions with rules that are designed to make up for the idiocies of any individual person.
00:37:04.000Human beings have a need for adversity and complexity and problem solving and all these things that are less present today than ever before.
00:37:17.000I think things are just almost too simple.
00:37:22.000And in doing so, it's easier to just kind of be dull-minded and drift through and follow the herd.
00:37:29.000The herd is so big, and there's so many people in the herd If you just do what most of the people are doing, wear what most of the people are wearing, say the things most of the people say, you'll survive.
00:37:41.000And you'll survive, and you'll find some other dim-witted person to breed with, and you'll make dim-witted children.
00:37:48.000I think there's a certain – when you're dealing with this massive pack of humans, 300-plus million on a continent, there's just – there's so much – I've always said, like, If you have a group of people, if you're being very generous, and you have 100 people in a room,
00:38:03.000what are the odds that one of those people is a moron?
00:38:06.000It's 100% that one is going to be a moron.
00:38:09.000That leaves you with 3 million morons in the United States of America, if you're being really kind.
00:38:23.000My book is often described as a book on optimism and enlightenment now because I have 75 graphs, almost all of which show the world getting better, including what some people think of the most incredible graph in the book on a phenomenon called the Flynn effect,
00:38:40.000which is that, believe it or not, and I know most people do not, IQ scores have been rising for most of the last 100 years, about three points a decade.
00:38:49.000Now this, I know it seems totally unbelievable.
00:38:52.000But yeah, they discovered it when Flynn, a philosopher, discovered it when he realized that the people who make IQ tests had to keep re-norming the tests to keep 100 as the average because the average kept creeping up.
00:39:04.000And it was like, gee, 110, well, that's what most people score.
00:39:08.000We say that the average is 100. We've got to adjust the scale downward.
00:39:11.000And Flynn realized, hey, wait a second.
00:39:13.000They keep doing this over and over again.
00:39:14.000That must mean the population is getting smarter.
00:39:18.000It's not that people's brain power has somehow magically been increasing, although probably a little bit of that through better nutrition, better sanitation and healthcare and so on.
00:39:29.000But a lot of it is just that ideas that used to be kind of sophisticated and restricted to professors and scientists and statisticians kind of trickle down to the population and so we – things like – Placebo effect or trade-off or cost-benefit analysis or win-win situation.
00:39:52.000All these things that actually came from pretty fancy-schmancy theory originally, but they kind of are loosed on the whole population and they become part of everyone's conventional wisdom.
00:40:02.000Also, we have to think more and more in abstract ways just to deal with things like a subway map or a smartphone, watching TV. It used to be you'd turn on the knob and your TV would be on.
00:40:15.000Now you've got to kind of program the bloody thing.
00:40:17.000So the demands of life have become more sophisticated and ideas spread more quickly.
00:40:24.000And so we are quite literally getting smarter up to a point.
00:40:27.000Things that can't go on forever don't.
00:40:29.000And the Flynn effect is starting to level off.
00:40:32.000But there has been this drift upward in intelligence.
00:41:05.000You know, there's a lot of nonsense in there.
00:41:07.000But the sheer amount of interesting information, like those newly discovered Mayan ruins in Guatemala and things along those lines, or, you know, there was some interesting new information on the history of human beings,
00:41:23.000because they found some new teeth and some The throwback, the date of modern humans, and they keep moving that back.
00:41:30.000The point is, we're constantly getting more information, more data, more things to think about, and I've just got to assume that the amount of information that comes to a person in 2018 is just vastly larger than the amount that came to them in 1978. Absolutely.
00:41:47.000And there are – as idiotic as a lot of public debate is today, there's a lot of idiocy in the past too.
00:41:53.000I mean in the – as recently as the 1960s, there's that movie on the first interracial couple in Virginia where there was a court, a judge who said God – It didn't mean for the racist to intermarry.
00:42:08.000That's why he put black people in Africa and yellow people in Asia and white people in Europe.
00:42:29.000And people on the left made some pretty stupid arguments as well when Castro— Sent all of the gay people to concentration camps in Cuba.
00:42:38.000You had Susan Sontag, a respected left-wing intellectual, saying, well, this is, you know, you've got to forgive them because Latin America was such a sexualized culture and there were prostitutes and there was decadence that, of course, it was a little bit of an overreaction.
00:42:53.000Now, today, I don't think anyone on the left or the right would say it's okay to send gay people to concentration camps because there were a lot of prostitutes in Havana.
00:43:01.000But that's the kind of idiotic statement that we kind of forget that people used to make in the past too.
00:43:08.000So it's a way of reassuring ourselves whenever we see debate getting – seemingly getting stupider and stupider.
00:43:15.000You've got to remember there's a lot of stupidity in the past too.
00:43:20.000And I think you're right that the – you know, it's hard to tell day by day, especially when your attention is concentrated by the worst things that happen.
00:43:28.000And again, this is a big theme of enlightenment now, that your picture of the world when it's – because the human mind really is driven by anecdotes and images and stories, and that's what the news gives us.
00:43:41.000But if you look at trends, if you follow the trend lines and not the headlines, you see that a lot of things really are getting better gradually, but that kind of accumulates over time.
00:43:51.000And one of the things, with the flow of information, we are actually getting more, we meaning Americans, but also worldwide, there is this trend of getting more liberal, more tolerant, more progressive.
00:44:06.000Day by day, but when you think that in the 1960s, there was a debate over whether there should be racial segregation, whether African-Americans should drink out of different water fountains or stay in different motels.
00:44:16.000There's debate over whether women should be allowed in the workplace, that what's going to happen to all the kids if they I think?
00:44:44.000There is this gradual trend toward more tolerance, even in parts of the world where it seems to be totally absent, like in a lot of the Islamic world, which world surveys show this is the least progressive part of the world in terms of attitudes towards women,
00:45:00.000attitudes towards gays, attitudes towards child-rearing.
00:45:03.000But even in the Islamic world, there's been a drift in the liberal direction.
00:45:06.000We just saw it two weeks ago when Saudi Arabia allowed women to drive.
00:45:39.000Yeah, I think that if you look at just the overall human race, one of the best indications of that is go and look at media representations of life from the 1950s and 1960s.
00:45:50.000Watch movies, especially, from the 50s, and just see how people behaved.
00:45:55.000I mean, you're getting sort of a time stamp Of human interaction from 1950. I mean, it's obviously an artistic representation of that time, but you get a sense of how people thought it was okay to behave.
00:46:51.000You know, I think that's one of the things that's happening with this Me Too movement, is that all this mass public shaming of sexual harassers and sexual assaulters and all this different thing, it's like forcing human beings to reassess the way they interact with each other.
00:47:06.000And like this really radical, very quick sort of a movement over just a short period of time has had a giant impact on culture.
00:47:15.000Yeah, and like a lot of social changes, it happens really quickly.
00:47:19.000It probably mixes some good things and some not so good things.
00:47:22.000And it's really good that men no longer have a license to just expose themselves or harass women who work for them and treat them in these crude and ugly ways.
00:47:37.000And there's also a legitimate concern that You just can't really believe all accusers.
00:47:44.000I mean we kind of learned that through history from witch hunts and lynchings and pogroms.
00:47:51.000And there's got to be proportionality.
00:47:56.000So we haven't quite settled in how to balance the very necessary corrective to men harassing women with rule of law and standards of justice.
00:48:08.000Correct me if I'm wrong about this, but this is one of my theories, is our brains, our capacity, and our understanding is relative to what's necessary at the time.
00:48:19.000And one of the things that I use is Dunbar's number.
00:48:24.000So that Dunbar's number is this idea that you could only have these intimate relationships with 150 or so people, or in terms of intimacy of understanding who they are, knowing their name, knowing things about them.
00:48:36.000But as our circle of people that we interact with grows and expands, I wonder if that's going to expand as well.
00:48:44.000When you think about the amount of information that people can hold in their brain and what people are used to knowing about, this is a radically different world in 2018 than it was in 1960. The amount of things that you were aware of in 1960, just by virtue of not having social media,
00:49:02.000the internet, Google, all these different ways that you could get information from, it's just so different.
00:49:10.000I don't know how many times more information you're getting, but it must be much more.
00:49:16.000And over an incredibly small period of time, when you think about the relative time span that human beings have been here, a few hundred thousand years or whatever, I wonder if this is...
00:49:30.000I wonder if we're changing, and I wonder what we're going to be like if this continues to grow and continues to be a part of our life, if we're going to adapt our abilities.
00:49:45.000We're not going to change the neurobiological structure of the brain very much because even though we all learn through our lives, there are limits as to what our brain can do.
00:49:56.000But what I think happens is there's a back and forth between our brains and the technology.
00:50:02.000So the technology adjusts to take into account how our brains work.
00:50:06.000So the restriction of you can't know or feel that you know more than 100 or 150 people Kind of that helps define the set of top We're top-ranked friends in a social network.
00:50:22.000The fact that we're visual creatures, you know, we're primates.
00:50:25.000We get a lot of our information through our eyeballs.
00:50:28.000It's one of the reasons why computer technology has changed so much since the 80s and 70s.
00:50:34.000Like when I first learned to program a computer, it was just all text or use a computer.
00:50:39.000I mean, there are just 80 characters in a line and you have the letters of the alphabet and that's all there was.
00:50:44.000And it soon became clear that that's not a very efficient way of getting ideas into a brain.
00:51:12.000It takes a huge amount of programming to get a We're good to go.
00:51:32.000I'm thinking in terms of the actual capability of the human mind.
00:51:37.000And when you read about modern human brains, like there was an article that was published recently that was trying to remap the timeline of the modern human brain.
00:51:49.000And I think they were pointing to about 35,000 years ago now.
00:52:07.000I would have guessed a little bit older than that, but yeah.
00:52:10.000But, you know, in the tens of thousands of years, yeah.
00:52:12.000So, one of the big mysteries, right, is the doubling of the human brain size over a period of, what, it was like two million years.
00:52:20.000Something had to happen to cause that, like some change in our environment, some change in our behavior, and our...
00:52:26.000What has been a bigger change than the internet?
00:52:28.000What has been a bigger change than the access to information that people have today?
00:52:31.000And I'm wondering if we're not experiencing, when you're talking about these steady rise of IQs, obviously it's not just the internet, it's education, the cumulative data that people just keep piling onto, and more people learn more things, and people get wiser, and The way we interface with information is better than it's ever been before.
00:52:49.000But I wonder about the capacity and the capabilities of the human mind.
00:52:53.000If it's happening right now, it's just a very gradual thing, this 10% tick or 10-point tick per decade.
00:53:02.000If this is going to lead, you extrapolate.
00:53:05.000You go 100 years from now, 200 years from now.
00:53:09.000Well, the thing is that what happened over the last few tens of thousands of years It's not going to be replicated anytime soon because that a lot was driven by Darwinian natural selection, which just meant that smarter people had more surviving babies.
00:53:23.000That's a process that happened as a speed limit measured in generations.
00:53:28.000And it may not be that Coping in a modern society makes you have more babies, maybe the other way around.
00:53:35.000You know, as you're more educated, you have fewer children.
00:54:02.000There are only so many hours in the day and there's only so many neurons in your brain.
00:54:06.000But in conjunction with that, the technology becomes more human-friendly and there are new ways of getting information into the brain.
00:54:15.000We've gone from just lines of characters to graphic user interfaces and video and more like creative data graphics where you see moving colored graphs as a way of getting a bunch of variables into a human head more efficiently.
00:54:30.000And virtual reality might be the next step where we've got 3D environments that we can explore and that may be a way of getting our puny brains to experience more information.
00:54:43.000Yeah, I was going to bring that up to you next, because that's one of the things that concerns me the most, is how good virtual reality is now, but how relatively crude it is in comparison to the potential.
00:55:16.000I think my friend Duncan Trussell had one two or three years ago that I used, and I was blown away by that, where you're underwater and there's a whale that swims up to you, and it seems so real.
00:55:29.000No, I didn't, but it's obviously fake.
00:55:33.000Like, I'm looking at it and I can make a distinction quickly.
00:55:37.000Like, when you see a movie, and in the movie there's like fake...
00:55:58.000I'm really concerned that there's gonna be a Just a giant section of our population that completely checks out of the regular world and lives in some strange fantasy land most of the time.
00:56:10.000They just consume food and water and figure out a way to feed themselves and spend most of their time locked into a helmet living in some fantastic artificial environment that people have created.
00:56:59.000As much as we're seduced by just sensory experiences, we also – we have a sense of reality and we value it.
00:57:06.000And we don't like being fooled too much and the question is what balance will we find between the desire for authentic experience and the pleasure of these cheap artificial ones.
00:57:20.000When you chose to write a book about enlightenment and you chose to write a book that's showing all these positive graphs and all these trends that seem to be optimistic, are you writing that, obviously you feel this way and this is the data and this is your interpretation of where we're headed,
00:57:41.000but are you also kind of like Encouraging people in a way to have a more rose-colored view of the world and just understand that.
00:58:45.000Art of history or dialectic or any mystical stuff that just makes us better and better.
00:58:50.000There's recognizing problems and figuring out how the world works and doing our best to solve them.
00:58:57.000So that was the message and the fact that we have had progress, contrary to the impressions you get from the headlines, shows that this is not a crazy, idealistic, optimistic pipe dream.
00:59:08.000It's happened and so more of it can happen.
00:59:10.000Yeah, that's where I was going with this.
00:59:12.000Why do we have this desire to concentrate on the negative?
00:59:16.000I have a friend, my friend Ian Edwards, has this bit about the news, about renaming it to the bad news.
00:59:23.000He goes on this whole rant about the news.
00:59:27.000But he's right, and it is a thing that we, is it because we have this concern, like we have to recognize danger and we want to know what's happening so that we know that we're safe, but the reality is we're dealing with a world of 7 billion people with 7 billion stories.
00:59:43.000You know, so you're going to be able to see negative stuff all day long if you so choose to do that, if you so choose to concentrate on negativity.
00:59:52.000And it gives you this bizarre portrait of the world that the world is just this horrible place.
00:59:57.000And Bill Hicks used to have a bit about CNN, about watching CNN and it'd be death, AIDS, pitbulls.
01:00:14.000What is our desire to concentrate only on the negative or mostly on the negative?
01:00:19.000Well, there is a phenomenon in psychology called the negativity bias.
01:00:23.000That bad is psychologically stronger than good.
01:00:26.000So we dread losses more than we enjoy gains and criticism hurts much more than praise makes you feel better.
01:00:36.000We're – our minds are attracted to possibilities of death and danger and so on.
01:00:42.000I think it's because we are really – as you say, we are vulnerable.
01:00:46.000There are many more things that can go wrong than can go right and that's kind of an implication of the law of entropy.
01:00:51.000There's a tiny fraction of the way – That the world could work that works out well for you in an awful lot of ways that things can go wrong.
01:00:59.000And so our minds are attuned to things that can go wrong, and that kind of opens up a market for experts to remind us of things that can go wrong that we may have forgotten.
01:01:08.000And so the news It tends to gravitate to the negative and there are actually studies that show this.
01:01:14.000You give editors two different framings of an event, an optimistic one and a pessimistic one.
01:01:20.000They pick the pessimistic one and that's a trend that's actually increased.
01:01:23.000I have a graph in the book, one of the 75 graphs that shows an automatic analysis of the tone of the news.
01:01:31.000How often are there positive words like improve, better?
01:01:35.000How often are there negative words like crisis, disaster, catastrophe?
01:01:38.000The news has been getting more and more negative for about 70 years.
01:01:42.000Is it uniform on both sides, right and left?
01:01:52.000There are ups and downs, but overall the trend has been downward.
01:01:54.000So partly it's all – even though, by the way, all the other graphs in the book show that – In reality, the world has actually been getting better.
01:02:26.000And it's also because of the timescale that it's very easy to destroy something really quickly.
01:02:32.000I mean, something blows up and that's news.
01:02:35.000Improvements tend to be gradual, day by day.
01:02:37.000And there's never a Thursday in March in which something happens that...
01:02:42.000As Max Roser, an economist, pointed out, newspapers could run the headline, 138,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday, every day for the last 30 years.
01:02:53.000But they never ran that headline even once because there's never a particular day in which the 138,000 people were different than the 138,000 people the day before.
01:03:03.000And so a lot of the good things kind of creep up on us and they're never reported in headlines.
01:03:08.000Whereas it's easy to blow something up and that does happen on a Thursday.
01:03:12.000So you have a very positive view of the future of humans.
01:03:16.000Well, it's – as the great Swedish doctor and TED talk star Hans Rosling put it when he was asked, are you an optimist?
01:04:01.000That's a great way of looking at it, too, to be realistic about it, because the possibility of positive things is a real—that's real, but also there's a reason why we find those ruins in Guatemala.
01:04:31.000I mean there is – I think there is a difference between modern – all modern societies and all of the ones that did collapse.
01:04:38.000Namely that after the enlightenment, we developed a kind of a scientific network and community.
01:04:46.000We developed the habit of free speech and open debate and Accumulation of information in written and electronic records.
01:04:56.000I mean, it is not the same now, which doesn't mean that we're out of danger because we've created new dangers, like nuclear war, like climate change.
01:05:05.000But there are mechanisms in place that if we concentrate them, if we are determined to keep doing it, then there's a reasonable expectation of success.
01:05:21.000Yeah, the history of the human race is so weird in terms of the rise and fall of these civilizations and cultures that we're always, at least I am, always looking at, like, how long is this going to last?
01:05:36.000Like, how long is this one particular nation going to keep it together?
01:05:40.000And if you look at how many different countries have been around, that just, how many, you know, dominant cultures, Rome, for instance, Now it's just Italy.
01:05:56.000How long can we kind of keep this thing up?
01:06:00.000What are your thoughts on the future of Just even the idea of nations, it seems like our boundaries, our borders, the way we have online, this ability to communicate with people all over the place, everywhere, it seems to me to lessen the necessary,
01:06:19.000or the need, rather, for borders and for these walls that we're now literally and figuratively talking about putting up.
01:06:29.000Yeah, I think there's going to be a kind of balance.
01:06:32.000I mean, an interesting thing about nation-states now is that there's a sense in which they're treated as immortal.
01:06:40.000Whereas, as you mentioned, for most of history, they were conquering emperors and And nations were wiped off the map and engulfed and conquered.
01:06:51.000And now you look at a map of the world, and it's actually not that different from what it was 70 years ago.
01:06:56.000I mean, there are colonies that achieved independence.
01:06:59.000There are some big states like Soviet Union that fragmented.
01:07:03.000But the borders in between the Soviet republics are now borders between nation states.
01:07:09.000And no nation has gone out of existence through conquest since 1945, at least internationally recognized state by the UN. So there's this norm, even though the borders are often crazy and they're arbitrary lines drawn on a map.
01:07:25.000But one of the reasons that, again, this is counterintuitive, that wars have gone down and deaths in wars have gone down is that borders are now treated as sacrosanct.
01:07:35.000By the kind of international community, not 100% of the time.
01:07:43.000And by and large, unlike, say, in the past, in the 19th century, where the U.S. had an unpaid debt from Mexico, so it conquered Texas and Colorado and Nevada and California, that doesn't happen anymore.
01:07:57.000And so the borders have kind of been grandfathered in, and that's one of the reasons why the The world has been more stable in terms of the map.
01:08:06.000On the other hand, as you mentioned, there's another sense in which we have this global community that transcends borders.
01:08:12.000We have things like the European Union.
01:08:16.000We have trade agreements like NAFTA, which try to get simultaneously the grandfathered borders, but this extra layer of cooperation that transcends the borders.
01:08:29.000And we need them more and more despite the fact that our current president is pushing back against the global community.
01:08:36.000But because there are problems that are global, migration, terrorism, climate, pollution, rogue states, and the fact that people – even if you grow up in France and you consider yourself a French citizen, you want to be able to spend a summer in Italy or in England or in Belgium if that's where – There's a good job and there's a desire among people to be able to move to wherever the opportunities are best.
01:09:02.000So there's going to be some kind of compromise, I think, between keeping the nation-state borders just so you don't have constant wars of conquest and border disputes but allowing the world and allowing the people of the world to take advantage of a true global community.
01:09:18.000Yeah, I feel like that's one of the things that people were most upset about, Brexit, was that this is, even though the people that were pro-Brexit felt like this was in the interest of the UK and the interest of England to be separate from all this because they were doing better and because they didn't want all the negative possibilities from all these other places coming into their environment.
01:09:42.000But What I think that people, what they didn't like about it was the idea that this is a regressive move and that the progressive move is that we would all move towards this idea of a global community,
01:09:59.000of this entire world being free and connected.
01:10:04.000We've talked about Some of the problems that Paris has with immigration.
01:10:10.000We showed some of the videos of these immigrants that had just littered all over the street and taking this place apart.
01:10:17.000And we're looking at it going, man, that is a real tragedy.
01:10:21.000What it represents is a bunch of people that really don't have anything.
01:10:25.000Like, the real tragedy is that these people live like this.
01:10:28.000The real tragedy is not that they've done it to Paris.
01:10:30.000The real tragedy is that these people exist at all, and that they moved to Paris looking for a better life, and now they're stuck in this situation where there's not a lot of sanitation, and the garbage is all over the place, they're littering everywhere, and...
01:10:44.000I wonder if we ever will have a world where there isn't a place where you can go and ship a factory and pay people a dollar an hour because they don't need a dollar an hour because it's just like living in Los Angeles or just like living in Phoenix.
01:11:01.000You would never be able to pay someone a dollar an hour because there's too much opportunity.
01:11:05.000The world has caught up and surpassed it.
01:11:09.000Yeah, there are a number of really complicated issues.
01:11:15.000Mobility is, in general, a good thing and countries do well when they welcome in immigrants, but not too many too fast, faster than they can be assimilated and integrated into the new country.
01:11:28.000So just opening the doors probably is not a good idea.
01:11:32.000No country really does that, but building the wall is a terrible idea too.
01:11:37.000And of course, the best way to prevent massive amounts of migration is to make life better in the countries of origin.
01:11:45.000That is happening slowly and unevenly.
01:11:49.000But it's been noted that even in the United States and Mexico, more people are going – or the same number of people are going – Doing the reverse migration from the U.S. back to Mexico now that the economy of Mexico is so much better than the last 25 years.
01:12:06.000And there is a – hard to detect, but there is a huge improvement in the standard of living in what used to be called the third world, the developing world, where – If you look at the cutoff for extreme poverty, it's kind of defined somewhat arbitrarily as $1.90 per person per day,
01:12:25.000kind of the bare, bare, bare minimum to feed your family.
01:12:30.000It's down now from 50% a few decades ago to 10% now.
01:12:35.000And the United Nations has set the goal of bringing it to zero by the year 2030. And what is causing that?
01:13:06.000When you have people integrated to the economy selling their products on a world stage, they can get richer.
01:13:12.000And so a lot – also better policies.
01:13:15.000We have governments that are no longer communist or really heavy-handed forms of socialism where everything is – Right.
01:13:48.000And leaders that think of their mandate as how do I get my country to be richer?
01:13:54.000And the most dramatic case was China where Mao had these harebrained schemes of huge collective farms and people smelting iron in their backyards and anything that occurred to him in the middle of the night, he would force on hundreds of millions of people and it caused these massive famines.
01:14:11.000Then Deng Xiaoping took over and he said, getting rich is good.
01:14:16.000And he said, black cat, white cat, as long as it catches mice, it's a good cat.
01:14:21.000So much more pragmatic, much more concerned with the welfare of their citizens.
01:14:25.000When you have leaders who have that mindset, then their country can get wealthier and their citizens better off.
01:14:36.000I mean, I agree with you that it probably is one of the reasons why these people are experiencing this greater quality of life is because of globalization, because these factories are moving in.
01:14:48.000But they're living lives that are very different, and maybe perhaps it's by our standards that their lives are better.
01:14:54.000That maybe if these indigenous people were living this sort of subsistence lifestyle, that even though on paper they would be existing in extreme poverty, but if they're perhaps like living in the jungle or somewhere along those lines where you have access to all these natural resources,
01:15:11.000That even though they'd be living in extreme poverty, they'd be living maybe perhaps even a better life by just eating the fish and eating the plants and hunting and fishing and doing what they had normally done for thousands and thousands of years rather than making a dollar an hour in a Nike factory.
01:15:26.000And it's certainly true that of indigenous peoples who are living in hunter and horticultural lifestyles that there are real crimes in displacing them Welcome to my show!
01:15:48.000The vast majority of poor people are peasants, not horticulturalists.
01:15:55.000And they're kind of agricultural laborers.
01:15:59.000And for them, just based on their own choices, often the factory life is an improvement.
01:16:06.000It's an improvement not just because they're not kind of in the fields, knee-deep in muck, pulling up seedlings and getting bitten by bees.
01:16:41.000So this is not to say there isn't exploitation and cruelty, which ought to be opposed, and in the case of native peoples, often criminal displacements.
01:16:52.000But on the whole, globalization has led to this escape from grinding poverty for literally hundreds of millions of people.
01:17:01.000So even when they move these factories into these places and charge or pay them a dollar an hour rather, it's still a dollar more an hour than they would have gotten if the factory had been there.
01:17:17.000My grandparents worked in a clothing factory when they emigrated from Poland to Canada.
01:17:24.000And it often is a route of upward mobility.
01:17:28.000Yeah, it's hard for us to accept that or even think about it that way because we're saying, well, why – how come they don't have to pay these Mexican folks minimum wage just like they do in America?
01:17:37.000Like, well, why don't they have the same sort of setup that we do here?
01:17:44.000But the relevant comparison is not so much the difference between working in a factory there and working in an office in Berkeley or Manhattan.
01:17:54.000It's the difference between working in a factory there and laboring in the fields there.
01:18:01.000And the people often given that choice, they line up to the factory jobs.
01:18:05.000Do you anticipate a time where there is no third world and there is no like a massive economic disparity?
01:18:18.000But it's happened in huge parts of the world.
01:18:20.000I mean, we forget that places like South Korea now, you know, this rich upper middle class society, not so long ago, that was the third world.
01:19:09.000The most remote, poorest parts of the world are going to be the hardest to bring up to middle-class standards, like Congo, like Haiti, like Afghanistan.
01:19:19.000But in large parts of the world, there's been a huge increase in the standard of living.
01:19:24.000You talked recently about the dangers of overly politically correct thinking, just politically correct thinking of sort of a rebound effect, where politically correct thinking is actually causing more extremism,
01:19:42.000more radical thinking in terms of response to that.
01:19:49.000So at the top of our conversation, we talked about the possibility of sex differences as being kind of taboo from polite company.
01:19:58.000I'll give another example, and this kind of connects to this conversation, is in a lot of academia, capitalism is just a dirty word.
01:20:07.000I know – or something now called neoliberalism.
01:20:11.000And a certain percentage, surprisingly large percentage of academics are actually Marxists, probably about 15 percent in the social sciences.
01:20:19.000And to say the obvious fact that capitalism is better than communism, I mean that's just a fact.
01:20:27.000I mean just compare – would you rather live in South Korea or North Korea?
01:20:30.000Would you rather live in the old East Germany or West Germany?
01:20:33.000Would you rather live now in Venezuela or in Chile?
01:20:37.000It's just obvious that capitalism makes people richer and freer and better off in pretty much every way.
01:20:45.000Now, that's a fact that's almost unmentionable in academia.
01:20:49.000Now, but if you say it by itself and suddenly people discover it for the first time, then you can get the extreme right-wing position that any amount of regulation is bad, any amount of social spending is bad.
01:21:04.000We need the most extreme form of almost anarcho-capitalism, like radical libertarianism.
01:21:11.000That's because I argue that if you never have a discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of different economic systems, you never hear the arguments for why some mixture of a free market with regulation of things that have to be regulated because the market won't take care of them,
01:22:07.000Opening up the possibility that someone discovers, hey, capitalism isn't so bad, then they leap to the strongest possible conclusion.
01:22:15.000Well, as soon as you have social security, then we're going to be like Venezuela or carbon pricing.
01:22:24.000And the rational way of organizing society with just the right balance of free markets, regulation, social spending is just something that doesn't get discussed out in the open.
01:22:36.000Anyway, that's the argument that I made.
01:22:37.000What's the origin of that thought process in academia?
01:22:40.000Like, why has capitalism been demonized and socialism been praised despite all the evidence that, especially Marxist socialism or Marxism, it's never been shown to be effective and it's been shown to be very dangerous?
01:22:55.000One theory from Thomas Sowell, an economist at the Hoover Institution, is that intellectuals tend to like systems where you can articulate a theory in a bunch of verbal propositions and the government kind of implements them.
01:23:42.000I mean there's no committee that designed the English language.
01:23:45.000There's no theory of how the English language ought to work.
01:23:47.000It's like hundreds of millions of people just talking and they invent new slang and they slur and they emphasize and they borrow from other languages and the language changes and it works pretty well.
01:24:00.000Here we are speaking in English and no committee ever designed it.
01:24:03.000So according to Sowell's theory, I think he was influenced by Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist.
01:24:11.000That systems of distributed intelligence, where no one genius ever designed it, but millions of people cooperating give rise to a collective intelligence, kind of run against the grain of the way intellectuals often think.
01:24:24.000Not all intellectuals, because of course you could do what Hayek and Sowell did and realize there is this phenomenon of collective intelligence.
01:24:33.000But if your first impulse is, what's the theory?
01:24:41.000Hyper-planned systems and be a little bit oblivious to distributed systems.
01:24:48.000But in academia, for whatever reason, looking at things in terms of, from a socialist standpoint, looking at things as a distribution of wealth is a big, a common subject that keeps getting brought up, and class structures.
01:25:05.000That there's going to be a time, if everything works out correctly, if we continue to evolve our culture, where we will no longer have classes, and we'll be able to distribute wealth completely equally across the board.
01:25:20.000But it's sort of denying the motivation that human beings have to succeed.
01:25:25.000It's designing the Denying this desire that people have to stand out and to overachieve or to be an outlier in terms of performance, which is just a natural part of human beings.
01:25:44.000And without competition, you don't have iPhones.
01:25:47.000You don't have most of the technological innovation that we have...
01:25:51.000That's been funded by these companies.
01:25:54.000They've done it in order to make money.
01:25:56.000There's got to be some sort of a reason why they've pushed all these things.
01:25:59.000It's so ironic when someone is talking about how capitalism sucks on an iPhone.
01:26:06.000Jesus Christ, that is one of the more bizarre ironies that is unexposed.
01:26:12.000Well, you know, I think you put your finger on another phenomenon and I discuss this in my book, The Blank Slate, where I also discuss the kind of the politics of gender, that part of it is there's a history to it.
01:26:22.000So there was an idea sometimes called social Darwinism.
01:26:25.000It wasn't – it had nothing to do with Darwin, ironically.
01:26:28.000But the idea that the only way societies progress is through ruthless cutthroat competition and poor people are just dragging the species down and screw them and if we're bleeding hearts – Then we'll retard the progress of society and we need just everyone against everyone else to advance.
01:26:47.000Now, that's really not a very good way to organize a society, but there's such a reaction against that in the 20th century.
01:26:55.000That you got the opposite extreme, that we are all blank slates.
01:26:59.000That is, we all start off identical and that any kind of competition is bad.
01:27:05.000You need kind of the benevolent government to distribute everything in the fairest possible manner.
01:27:11.000Now, the reality is something in between.
01:27:14.000We are – there's going to be inequality in any fair system simply because some people really are smarter than others and some people have more discipline and more self-control.
01:27:24.000And it's good to harness that so that our competitive impulses have some people – I think?
01:27:46.000You also don't want a central committee to decide that everyone has to have the same amount and parcel out every reward because that just gives too much power to a government.
01:27:58.000But it also doesn't mean that you have the opposite extreme where the – if the poor people die, then it's their own fault because they're lazy and stupid.
01:30:20.000And I think we do need better outreach.
01:30:21.000But in fact, and I talk about this in Enlightenment Now, if you actually do surveys of how well people understand climate science, there's virtually no correlation between acknowledgement of human-made climate change and sophistication in climate science.
01:30:37.000So you get people who do believe in human-made climate change, which I think is an incontrovertible fact at this point, but they don't really understand it.
01:30:45.000I mean, they may even think, oh, it's caused by a hole in the ozone layer and we can fix it by cleaning up toxic waste dumps.
01:30:52.000I mean, like crazy beliefs, but they're still on what I would consider the right side.
01:30:57.000What happens is that in some politicized debates, Right.
01:31:17.000And what we need both in the left-wing academic departments and the right-wing think tanks is kind of recognition.
01:31:24.000We're probably all wrong about a lot of things, especially if we talk to each other and act like kind of litigators, like lawyers who mount the best possible case for our side to prosecute it against the other side.
01:31:37.000That's just not a good way of arriving at the truth.
01:31:40.000You've got to kind of check the tendencies in yourself and To just want more and more evidence for your belief and force other people to be as open-minded as possible.
01:31:55.000These sort of mindsets that you see on the left and on the right, that there's certain subjects that if you support that subject, you are automatically thought of as a left winger.
01:32:06.000If you support this subject, you're automatically thought of as a right.
01:32:09.000If you're on the right, you probably think in some way, like if someone says to me that they think that climate change is probably an overblown thing and it's a cycle that the world has been going through forever, I go, oh, you're a right winger.
01:33:39.000Opinions on whether you trust Russia just because of the influence of Donald Trump have shifted so the people on the right are more sympathetic to Russia, something that would have been almost unthinkable even 10 years ago.
01:35:43.000And that it gives people comfort to be in these weird little groups where everybody has groupthink.
01:35:49.000Yeah, and I talk about this phenomenon in Enlightenment now because it's a book that argues for The importance of reason and how there has been progress thanks to application of reason.
01:36:04.000And a natural pushback is, well, you look at things like that, we don't seem so reasonable as a species.
01:36:10.000What's going on that we seem to be getting less reasonable?
01:36:14.000And I think the answer is reason can work for different goals.
01:36:19.000And here I'm using the ideas of a Yale scholar named Daniel Kahan.
01:36:24.000He notes a perverse way in which there actually is a kind of rationality to that kind of belief.
01:36:30.000Namely, when you vote, what are the chances that your vote is really going to swing the election?
01:36:37.000On the other hand, when you express an opinion in your peer group, the people you work with, your family, what are the chances that holding the wrong opinion will lead you to be kind of condemned and ostracized and treated as a real weirdo?
01:36:52.000So if everyone thinks what opinion is going to help my esteem and the people I care about, they can latch on to all kinds of beliefs if they've become kind of identity badges for their tribe.
01:37:08.000This is rational in terms of the world they live in.
01:37:11.000It's not so rational for the planet as a whole if people just subscribe to beliefs based on tribal loyalty instead of truth.
01:37:18.000And the challenge is how do we align beliefs more with truth and less with tribal loyalty?
01:37:24.000Now, it's not hopeless because there are a lot of beliefs that people used to have that have been overturned.
01:37:31.000People don't believe in unicorns anymore or alchemy and fewer people believe in astrology.
01:37:36.000And a lot of scientific issues are there's no controversy.
01:37:41.000I mean, it doesn't matter whether you're on the right or the left.
01:37:44.000So part of the challenge is how do we get more and more of our beliefs to have our social norms be such that if you believe something just because you're on the right or on the left, then you're an idiot.
01:37:56.000What you should be doing is looking at the best possible study with an open mind.
01:38:01.000That's what a cool person does and only an idiot just paradoxically.
01:38:59.000Because I've accepted Jesus Christ into my life, and that once you accept Jesus Christ, you are now a believer in Christ, and you're forgiven for all of your past sins.
01:39:11.000There's a giant percentage of the people that are on the right that subscribe to a religious Christian mindset.
01:39:20.000It is fascinating, especially when it comes to our current president, who by any standards is like the least Christian leader that we've ever had.
01:39:32.000Well, yeah, but he's still – I mean the Christian virtues include things like – Modesty, compassion for the weak, temperance, chivalry, gentlemanliness.
01:39:43.000And this guy is lewd and vainglorious and arrogant and contemptuous for losers.
01:39:49.000But which shows, again, kind of going back to our discussion, it's just amazing how much of loyalty doesn't have to do with the actual content of the beliefs.
01:40:00.000And, of course, he promised a lot of...
01:40:03.000Perks for the religious right like the repeal of the amendment that tax-exempt organizations can't engage in politics and in lobbying, the Johnson Amendment, which meant that if you're a church, if you don't pay taxes, you can't be politically active.
01:40:20.000Well, they didn't like that and he promised to repeal that amendment and so he got their loyalty.
01:40:25.000And so it's just raw political muscle kind of overcame Christian virtue.
01:40:33.000But it's fascinating to watch just these patterns, these tribal ideological patterns when you see these groups that have this sort of one mindset and this very clear… Not so long ago,
01:40:59.000Well, if you were a left-wing activist in the 60s, you would say, well, the only people concerned with the environment are rich people who like the view from their country estates and they don't want them to be spoiled by being cut down for apartments for poor people.
01:41:14.000Or they're duck hunters who want to be able to go and hunt ducks.
01:41:18.000And if you're really socially concerned, you should care about Vietnam and racism and poverty.
01:41:24.000It's just a luxury to worry about trees and flowers and ducks.
01:41:41.000Wasn't it – in the beginning of the forming of the political parties, it was – the Democrats were very different and Republicans were more like Democrats.
01:42:52.000So there's the remnant of that in Massachusetts.
01:42:54.000There used to be a little bit of that in New York where there were liberal Republicans.
01:42:58.000But yeah, that's a case where it's flipped and now Democrat equals Republican.
01:43:02.000Left of center, Republican right of center.
01:43:05.000Yeah, you've seen some of that also with some Republicans have tried to disingenuously connect the Democratic Party with the KKK because of the past.
01:43:29.000Yeah, it's just fascinating to me to watch these groups of people.
01:43:34.000And, you know, we've talked about political parties, the right versus the left.
01:43:39.000It's always weird to me that there are these two sides, and that people sort of take comfort in choosing this group that they identify with.
01:43:50.000These identity issues where, you know, I identify as a right wing, I identify as a left, I identify as this, that these things are very rigid in their structure and they don't allow for nuanced thinking and they don't allow for being objective about issues and considering the other side,
01:44:09.000considering other people's points of view and the way they're looking at things and thinking if maybe there's some common ground.
01:45:04.000One of the reasons that the crime rate has gone down so much, another positive development that I talk about that people aren't aware of, is that policing has gotten smarter.
01:45:14.000Every day, especially in New York, they would gather data as to where the homicides were, which neighborhoods, which blocks on which neighborhoods, and they would concentrate the police forces on that day to prevent things from getting out of control with cycles of revenge.
01:45:30.000Look at sports, Moneyball, where you've got kind of smarter teams that can beat richer teams.
01:45:36.000You look at policy and you've got evidence-based policy.
01:45:40.000So all these areas where it looks like the country is getting smarter, but then there are all these areas where it looks like the country is getting a lot stupider.
01:45:46.000And a lot of them are, I argue, cases where people – where issues get politicized and then people just go with their own coalition.
01:46:33.000Let's look at areas that have tried it and see what happens.
01:46:37.000Does too much welfare make people unambitious and lazy?
01:46:41.000Well, I can't figure this out from my armchair.
01:46:44.000Let's compare different countries, compare different states and cities.
01:46:49.000Issue after issue, I think we need to be much more pragmatic and open to evidence.
01:46:53.000But when you do deal with these issues, much like you were talking about the difference between genders, when you deal with the actual raw data, that raw data, a lot of it gets very problematic for people that hold these ideas very rigidly in their mind.
01:47:09.000And they don't want to accept certain facts and statistics and they come up with reasons why these things are either inaccurate or biased or racist or sexist or what have you.
01:47:22.000Because I think evolution didn't make us into intuitive scientists so much as into intuitive lawyers and preachers.
01:47:31.000So the natural tendency is to amass the strongest possible case for your own side and to boast that you are on the side of virtue, that people who disagree with you are idiots and evil.
01:47:49.000And we've got to push back against that tendency.
01:47:54.000Yeah, I try to recognize that in my own mind when it comes up, but it's so incredibly common, that tribalism that we see on the right and the left.
01:48:23.000I don't see patients, but I'm a cognitive scientist, so I'm interested in how the mind works.
01:48:27.000And so a lot of my ideas on which way we're going, how to keep going in a positive direction, are influenced by kind of a recognition of what makes us tick.
01:48:38.000And what are the pitfalls in having a human brain?
01:48:45.000For example, the American founders and framers, Madison and Jefferson and Adams and Hamilton, when they were arguing, well, how should we set up this new country, this new government?
01:48:58.000They were kind of intuitive psychologists and they pointed out that, well, if you just empower a leader, he's going to get drunk with his own power and he's going to be deluded.
01:49:40.000Especially in the world of weirdos and cult leaders and charlatans and people that are sort of promoting this idea that You can achieve this sort of zen state of bliss,
01:49:59.000of being above it all, of being wise to the point of being a sage.
01:50:05.000That's a weird concept, isn't it, in today's day and age?
01:50:09.000My editor actually was a little nervous about my choice of title.
01:50:14.000I went through a bunch of titles for it as I was writing it.
01:50:17.000He said, well, don't you think people are going to confuse it with Zen and Buddhism and a higher spiritual sense?
01:50:22.000And so there is that meaning for enlightenment.
01:50:25.000The meaning that I had in mind was the movement in the 18th century to apply reason to human betterment.
01:50:35.000The ideas of Hume and Adam Smith and the American founders like Jefferson and Madison and And John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and the 17th and 18th century.
01:50:47.000And I said, look, if some people are confused and they think this is a path toward – my book is going to be a path toward spiritual enlightenment, well, let them buy the book.
01:51:44.000Yeah, and I was in Davos the week before last and was on a panel with Mathieu Ricard, the French A Buddhist monk who I see eye to eye with in a lot of matters.
01:51:57.000He wrote the foreword to the French translation of The Better Angels of Our Nature.
01:52:00.000And he had me in the whole room meditating.
01:52:48.000And I try to sort of step back and Exert some discipline on this social media suck and email more than social media.
01:53:01.000I try to spend time with my wife, Rebecca Goldstein, a novelist and philosopher, and we have a lot in common, and it would be kind of wasting life if I didn't get to...
01:53:25.000Do you have a goal when you're writing a book like this, or is it just you have an interesting subject and you just sort of follow it through?
01:53:34.000I always begin a book when I come across some really deep, exciting, interesting idea that I think has not been made public enough.
01:53:48.000So in the case of the better angels of our nature, it was the fact that by all these measures, violence has been in historical decline.
01:54:23.000Why were our ancestors so violent and how come we're less violent?
01:54:26.000We're kind of the same animals that we were a couple hundred years ago.
01:54:30.000Likewise with the new book, with Enlightenment Now, then I discovered that there was even more good news that if you look at other measures of human well-being, like poverty, like illiteracy, like number of work hours, like disease,
01:54:46.000graph after graph, it looks like we've made improvements.
01:54:50.000Car safety, plane safety, workplace safety, pedestrian safety, death by fire, death by drowning, almost all of them are going down.
01:55:00.000And so that was a story that I thought.
01:55:02.000I was excited by it because I knew that when people came across it, they would find it interesting.
01:55:08.000And it was, again, an intellectual challenge.
01:55:30.000Always a possibility of nuclear war and we've got to be really careful not to do anything stupid and to, in fact, try to walk the world back from nuclear weapons in the future and climate change.
01:55:44.000Then there's some people who just don't believe it.
01:56:29.000Because this seems so strange that it could occur.
01:56:32.000It's a natural thing to have this reaction to this horrible tragedy, but we don't have a reaction to, you know, how many thousands of people die every day because of obesity.
01:56:44.000Or even if we concentrate on violence, we forget about, you know, the guy who shoots his wife because he thinks she's been flirting too much, or the two guys who I have a fight in a bar over who gets to use the pool table next and one of them is lying dead on the floor.
01:57:01.000And there are far more murders of that kind than there are terrorist killings.
01:57:07.000Every day there are something like 25 of those homicides.
01:57:12.000And so it's like a Sandy Hill massacre day after day after day after day.
01:57:17.000And they don't make the headlines because they occur bit by bit here and there.
01:57:22.000But it's still incredibly confusing to people when someone does do something like the Vegas shooting.
01:57:57.000But if I say to a typical person, what is the one thing you can do that's guaranteed to make you famous by tomorrow?
01:58:05.000And the answer is kill a bunch of innocent people.
01:58:08.000And that's just a perverse fact about the world.
01:58:11.000And so for people where fame and meaning and mattering are more important than anything, including life itself, we've kind of given this perverse opportunity to become a somebody because we just give them – Wall-to-wall news coverage.
01:58:51.000So there is that and so there is a suggested policy.
01:58:55.000I actually signed on to this from some criminologist that the news media should not publish the names or the faces of mass killers that – It may be newsworthy that it happened,
01:59:10.000but the particular name of the guy, why is that newsworthy?
01:59:17.000I mean, there's so many articles that you see today that you look at the title of the article, and it has very little to do with the actual article itself.
01:59:56.000And according to this movement, it's a case that's not so innocent.
02:00:01.000It's not like the kind of clickbait You wouldn't believe what happened to a 1970s actress so-and-so when they find a picture of her in her 70s, that kind of clickbait.
02:00:10.000But this is clickbait that does real harm.
02:00:12.000And you do have to balance it against, of course, freedom of the press.
02:00:17.000You don't want there to be governments to tell newspapers what they can publish.
02:00:21.000But there have been some precedents where the press has voluntarily imposed some standards that do nothing to abrogate freedom of the press but to make people better off.
02:00:30.000So I'll give you an example from sports.
02:01:30.000But journalists, especially in mainstream forums like the major networks and CNN and the USA Today and so on, they still have a huge readership.
02:01:42.000And they do – they have to look at themselves in the mirror.
02:01:46.000They do have journalistic codes of ethics.
02:01:48.000That's kind of one of the things that distinguishes them from the facts.
02:01:54.000That will always attract a large following.
02:01:57.000You want to be able to trust what you can read.
02:01:59.000So they've got to, I think, balance that against raw bottom line because if they lose their integrity, then that's not so good for the bottom line in the long run either.
02:02:09.000Trevor Burrus Do you think that there's a – I wonder if there's room for new media today in terms of, I mean, we obviously have these established places like the New York Times and like the Washington Post, but I wonder if these well-respected I wonder if that's really the right way to do it anymore.
02:03:12.000It's funny, almost inequality in intelligent media, where there's a lot of real crap at the bottom, but there's also room at the top for new voices.
02:03:22.000When you look at a guy like the President of the United States, who loves to use that term, fake news, it's one of the weirder times ever, his attacks on the media, and it seems to be very similar to, like...
02:03:37.000The way he reacted to Barack Obama mocking him during that speech.
02:03:43.000The media, when they criticize him and critique him, his response is to completely attack them and just say that they're useless and fake.
02:03:53.000And it's a weird time for news when it comes to that and for journalism.
02:04:00.000You know, I agree it is a very disturbing phenomenon because there is a phenomenon of fake news.
02:04:05.000But fake news is not the same thing as coverage that criticizes the president.
02:04:23.000We don't have a supreme divine leader that we consider infallible and omniscient and that we bow down in front of and anything he says goes.
02:04:36.000He's temporarily overseeing the government.
02:04:38.000But if he screws up, if he says something that's not true, the people have the right to criticize him and there better be that criticism.
02:04:46.000Otherwise, we're going to get a tyrant or a despot.
02:04:50.000And taking any criticism and – Labeling it fake news, which is a real problem, fake news, is a genuinely anti-democratic impulse, and it's really disturbing.
02:05:15.000You know, if you boil it all down and you look at it like, oh, what's going on?
02:05:18.000Oh, well, anyone that's after him, anyone that's attacking him, criticizing him, like, these people get demeaned and he uses his influence and his power to kind of shut down all these criticisms without any...
02:05:31.000Seemingly without any concern for the long-term consequences of diminishing the impact of these media companies.
02:06:05.000But we can set up rules and institutions that make the society as a whole better than any of the individuals that make it up and democratic government is the prime example and the whole – the difference between a democracy and a cult of personality like Mao in China or Stalin in Russia or Hitler in Germany or – Mugabe in Zimbabwe now or the Kims in North Korea is that we don't worship a
02:06:36.000supreme leader who kind of embodies the virtue of the people.
02:06:40.000That's the idea that the United States tried to get away from.
02:07:56.000And so it's not about, you know, that guy.
02:07:59.000There's also a way of behaving that we deem presidential.
02:08:02.000And Barack Obama, in my opinion, embodied that better than anybody.
02:08:05.000He was very composed, like one of the most composed leaders ever.
02:08:09.000In terms of leaders of the United States, the way he would communicate and the way he would respond to criticism, he just had a very sort of composed, higher level of his ability to communicate.
02:09:09.000It's not about me feeling really empowered.
02:09:12.000It's about me kind of serving the people that elected me.
02:09:15.000And that kind of self-restraint and respect for the office is a way of reaffirming that principle of democracy.
02:09:23.000What also concerns me is that the person who's in charge, this is how a lot of the rest of the country views the nation itself.
02:09:33.000And if you have a person who's measured and objective and well thought out and well spoken, and that when you would hear, especially Obama's speeches, agree with him or disagree with him, everything was very clean.
02:09:48.000Maybe I use the word clean too much, but...
02:10:36.000What the United States does matters to the rest of the world and to reassure the rest of the world that we're not just a bunch of cowboys who are going to do what makes us the most powerful, but we really think about our role.
02:10:49.000We don't do rash things that could really be bad for the world.
02:10:53.000That gets conveyed symbolically in the way that a leader comports himself or one day herself.
02:11:00.000Well, one of the things that I think of, though, when I see this whole thing going down, and I see also this reaction to this president, like the giant women's march.
02:11:09.000You can call it the women's march all day, and it is a women's march, but it's also a march against the president.
02:11:14.000I mean, that's a big part of what this is.
02:11:16.000It's like the idea is that he is kind of against women in their eyes, whether that's correct or not, but that this march is to sort of show solidarity that they disagree with the way things are going.
02:11:29.000Having a guy like this in power is going to, as we were talking about before, this sort of swing effect, gonna reignite more people to be politically active and more people to recognize the things they don't like.
02:11:46.000Like the calling the media fake news or like the attacks on the intelligence community, all these various things, these things that people deem to be racist, these things that people deem to be, you know, hostile or silly that he says,
02:12:02.000and that there'll be some sort of a powerful reaction in response to that.
02:12:09.000It's too soon to tell because there are two possibilities and one of them is that he's sort of shattered some norms, created a precedent that means that his successors could be even worse because norms can be fragile like what you just don't do if you're president.