In this episode of The Happiness Hypothesis, we talk about Peter Boghossian and the "Grievance Studies" hoax at Portland State University, and how the university is now investigating him for data fabrication. We also talk about the "Homoeroticism" and "Rape Culture" hoax, and whether or not they were really a hoax at all. This episode is brought to you by SeatGeek, and edited by Alex Blumberg and Sarah Abdurrahmanova. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our employers, and do not necessarily reflect those of any company, organization, or person affiliated with our employer. We do not own the rights to any of the music used in this episode. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment of any medical or mental health problem. If you are not a physician, or have not received appropriate medical care, do not listen to this podcast. Please contact your physician if you are having trouble with your mental health, or are experiencing anxiety, insomnia, or another medical problem, or other medical problem that needs immediate attention. I understand that being able to see a doctor is a privilege that not everyone has. Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast with your friends, family, colleagues, or loved ones. You are a valued member of the podcast community and we appreciate your support. Peace, Blessings, Cheers, Joe and Sarah "The Happiness Hyphesis" - EJ. - Alyssa and Sarah "The HAPPY DAILY! ( ) Joe & Sarah "Josie" ( Sarah ( ) ( ) ( ( . ) ( ) Joe ( ) and Sarah ( . ( ). Jake ( ) - Jon ( , & Sarah ( . ) ( ), John ( ) & ( ) discuss the Boghosian Case ( ) Podcast, and discuss The Grit Theory Podcast. Joe ( ), and Sarah's article, and the GRIEVANCE ( ) on The GRAGE Project ( ) about the GRAVY Studies Hoax ( ) by Peter Boohans ( ) , and what it means, and why it's important to have a sense of humor about it. , and how it's a hoax? What do you think about it?
00:00:22.000But one thing I wanted to talk about, because we were talking about it right before we got started, was what's happening with Peter Boghossian at Portland State University.
00:00:29.000For folks who don't know the story, he and, I forget, his two colleagues, James Lindsay, they released these fake papers on homoeroticism and rape culture in dog parks and just really preposterous.
00:00:49.000Papers that are almost like an article from The Onion.
00:00:52.000And some of them, not only did they get peer-reviewed and accepted into these journals, but they got lauded as being these amazing pieces of one did, one got no word.
00:01:11.000Yeah, so, you know, for those who don't know, I guess most of your listeners probably do, but, you know, it was called the grievance studies hoax.
00:01:18.000Because, and this is one of the big issues going on in the academy, which I hope we'll talk about, is, you know, what does it take to have good scholarship?
00:01:27.000And the argument is that in some fields, as long as you hate the right things and use the right words, you'll get published.
00:01:32.000And that's not scholarship, that's activism.
00:01:34.000And so these three people who did this hoax, they were trying to show that that's the case.
00:02:08.000They submitted these papers, they made up fake names, and a lot of them got accepted.
00:02:14.000And now what's happening is that Portland State University, which is only one of the three, is an assistant professor, so he's not tenured.
00:02:25.000You know, of course, he has a lot of enemies.
00:02:27.000And of course, I don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
00:02:29.000But it looks like some of them wanted him investigated for violating the IRB, the Internal Review Board, because the claim is they fabricated data.
00:02:39.000Because one of the papers says, I inspected the genitals of 10,000 dogs in the dog park.
00:02:47.000And he said, you know, and 63% of the attempted humping, because the thing of the article was the idea that, you know, you go to a dog park and you see dogs humping each other, and they were interpreting this as rape, as doggy rape.
00:02:58.000And so he's got all these, you know, fake numbers in there.
00:03:11.000But if you read, at his university, a committee was impaneled, and they looked at the literal definition of data fabrication.
00:03:20.000And it's possible that he does fall under that.
00:03:23.000But the point of this whole thing, I can't weigh in on whether or not technically, but these rules are put in place to prevent the corruption of the scientific record.
00:03:37.000And what he was doing was not going to corrupt the scientific record.
00:03:42.000They were doing it to show that there's a huge problem, and then they were going to unveil it.
00:03:45.000So the question is, is the university going to interpret this in the worst possible way, the narrowest possible way, and thereby make fools of themselves look like laughingstocks?
00:03:55.000Or are they going to use some common sense and recognize this for what it was?
00:04:04.000And I hope that they come to their senses.
00:04:07.000And they do have a point, if I'm going to be completely objective, about data fabrication.
00:04:12.000I mean, technically, maybe they could have written that paper without saying that they actually Tested 10,000 genitals of different dogs.
00:04:20.000But what's really important, I think, is that they recognize that regular people are paying attention to this now.
00:04:27.000People that aren't involved in this very insulated world, and they're going, this is crazy.
00:04:33.000Imagine if your children are going there, and your children are being taught At this school that's willing to accept this kind of nonsense.
00:04:45.000What happened at Evergreen State University is another example of that.
00:04:48.000It's incredibly damaging to them as a university.
00:05:42.000We're very good at forming teams to fight the other side.
00:05:45.000And we love that so much we create sports and video game battles with team versus team.
00:05:50.000So there's all these different games you can play.
00:05:52.000And the truth-seeking game is a really special one and a weird one, and we're not very good at it as individuals.
00:05:59.000And in my view, the genius of a university is that it takes people and puts them together in ways where each person, each, like scientists aren't these super rational creatures that are, you know, looking to disconfirm their own ideas.
00:07:07.000No, no, but they're playing football, you see.
00:07:09.000And in football, it's a much rougher game, and you're trying to destroy the others.
00:07:12.000I mean, not really in football, but I'm saying.
00:07:15.000And so as norms of combat come in, and what I mean by that is political combat.
00:07:21.000As some people within universities see that what we're doing here is not seeking truth.
00:07:27.000We're trying to fight fascism or we're trying to defeat conservatism or we're trying to fight racism or whatever, some sort of political goal.
00:07:35.000And these games are completely incompatible.
00:07:37.000And so that's why this madness has erupted where you see professors saying something.
00:07:44.000I mean, going back to Socrates, that was kind of the point was to provoke fascism.
00:07:48.000And you see these bizarre reactions, emotional reactions, groups organized to demand that a professor be fired because we're playing different games.
00:08:03.000Because it seems like there has to be an event or something or a trend.
00:08:08.000Well, so the book that I just put out in September with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, I read the first chapter of that as well.
00:08:19.000Okay, well, thank you for admitting that it was only one chapter.
00:08:21.000Usually, you know, you're- Well, I dove into that one, because unfortunately, I was reading that, and then I got on a flight, and I just wanted to zone out, so I listened to this one on tape.
00:08:31.000Okay, well, I'll tell you all about it.
00:08:33.000But the key thing is that that book, The Coddling of the American Mind, was something that we wrote because Greg began observing this weird stuff happening in universities in 2014. It all starts in 2014. Most of your listeners have heard about safe spaces, microaggressions,
00:08:49.000bias response teams, trigger warnings, all that stuff.
00:08:52.000That stuff didn't exist before 2014. It just begins creeping in then, and then it kind of blows up in 2015. And so our whole book is an exploration of why.
00:09:37.000So left and right never particularly liked each other.
00:09:40.000But in the 70s and 80s, if you look at surveys done of how much you hate people on the other side, it's not that intense.
00:09:46.000It begins going up in the 80s and then especially after 2000. It's going up very steeply.
00:09:53.000At the same time, university faculty, who've always leaned left throughout the 20th century, but was only a lean.
00:10:00.000And in the 90s, it begins shifting much further left so that now, faculties, especially in the social sciences and humanities, are pretty purified.
00:10:10.000So you have a more left-leaning university.
00:10:13.000At a time when left-right hostility is getting more and more intense, and so any question that has a political valence, now there's a lot more people who want to do the football game, not the truth-seeking game, but that we've got to defeat the other side.
00:10:27.000We know what we believe, and damn it, we're going to, you know.
00:10:31.000So you've got this changing political situation, and then you've got a couple of threads about what we've done to kids.
00:10:39.000This is a whole other area of conversation for us, but we basically took away free play and gave them social media.
00:10:46.000Basically, kids who were born in 1995 and after Gen Z, they had really different childhoods, and they're not as prepared for conflict and college.
00:10:57.000But you put all these things together, you get kids who are much more anxious and fragile, much more depressed.
00:11:04.000Coming onto campus at a time of much greater political activism, and now these grievance studies ideas about America as a matrix of oppression and look at the world in terms of good versus evil, it's more appealing to them.
00:11:15.000And it's that minority of students, they're the ones who are initiating a lot of the movements.
00:11:21.000It's such a strange time to be on the outside and watch this because a person like myself is always counted on intellectuals and professors and people like yourself to sort of make sense of things and to reinforce the idea that freedom of speech and free debate are critical aspects to knowledge.
00:11:42.000And one of the things that's most disturbing when you see in schools is people that Are even marginally right-leaning or centrist, being called Nazis and being silenced and they're pulling fire alarms when they're speaking.
00:11:57.000Even people like Christina Hoff Summers, who's a feminist, gets shouted down and people are yelling at her and calling her a fascist.
00:12:05.000It's very strange to watch from the outside, and it's also very strange to not see any pushback by the professors.
00:12:10.000So sitting here and seeing this happen and thinking, well, these poor kids, they're going to have to go into the workplace.
00:12:16.000Right now, they're in this very insulated environment.
00:12:19.000They're going to escape that environment when they graduate, and then they're either going to push this ideology into the workforce, which you do see now, especially with tech companies.
00:12:31.000I know it's strange to look at it from the outside, and believe me, it's stranger from the inside.
00:12:36.000But one thing I can say that might be helpful here is that from the outside, what you see is the news reports, and the news reports are going to be very selective.
00:12:47.000And so especially what happens is because, you know, universities have always leaned left, and so the right-leaning media have always been suspicious.
00:12:54.000So the right-leaning media has huge coverage of every little thing.
00:12:57.000And sometimes it's exaggerated, sometimes it's misinterpreted.
00:13:01.000For the most time, there was something there.
00:13:04.000Left-leaning media tends to ignore it.
00:13:06.000And so I go around the country and people on the right expect that, oh my god, it's chaos and mob violence on campus, which isn't true.
00:13:45.000We have as many people on the left as on the right.
00:13:48.000We created a map of where all the shout-downs have taken place.
00:13:51.000And they're all right in the Northeast or along the Pacific Coast, like from Evergreen down to Berkeley and all that, and then a couple in Chicago.
00:13:59.000So in most of the country, this stuff is not happening.
00:14:02.000Most schools, the culture hasn't really changed much.
00:14:05.000But at the top schools, in general, it has.
00:14:08.000So that's one thing to just keep in mind.
00:14:10.000There is a moral panic on the right about this, which doesn't mean that there's not something real.
00:14:56.000The situation on campus is not like that.
00:14:59.000Your odds of being nailed are much higher than that.
00:15:02.000And so I hear every day, or at least every week, I get an email from a professor who says, you know, I used a metaphor in class and somebody reported me.
00:15:12.000And so once this happens to you, you pull back.
00:16:30.000But for this generation, raised with call-out culture and social media, you almost never hear of a student coming to someone else in private.
00:16:39.000Because you don't get credit for that.
00:16:41.000So you only get credit when you call them out publicly.
00:16:43.000And so that's why we're all walking on eggshells.
00:16:46.000Because most of our students are great.
00:16:48.000But if I have a class of 300 students, a lecture class, I know that some of them subscribe to this new call-out culture, safetyism, morality.
00:16:57.000And so if I say one thing, it's not a reasonable person standard.
00:17:00.000It's a most sensitive person standard.
00:17:02.000I have to teach to the most sensitive person in the class.
00:17:05.000It's also that person has the opportunity to score, right?
00:17:22.000And so that's really what is messing us up at so many levels of society.
00:17:26.000And the fact that a lot of these problems, the difficulties of democracy, the rise of authoritarian populism, there are a lot of weird trends that are happening in multiple countries.
00:17:36.000And I think it's the rise of devices and social media is the main way we can explain why it's so similar across countries.
00:17:44.000Do you think that this is, is this some sort of a trend that will eventually correct itself when these kids get out into the real world and then go through a whole generation of that and then people realize the error of their ways and the disastrous results of having these unprepared or emotionally unprepared kids?
00:18:01.000No, I'm pretty confident that it will not correct itself.
00:18:04.000I think that once we understand it, I think there are a variety of things we can do to change it.
00:18:09.000But I think here's the way to understand and why it's not going to change itself.
00:18:13.000So I'm a social psychologist is my main area.
00:18:17.000But I love all of the social sciences.
00:18:19.000I love thinking about complex systems and systems composed of people are really different from systems composed of stars or neutrons or anything else.
00:18:28.000And so if you have a complex system composed of people, these people are primarily working to increase their prestige.
00:18:38.000So, I mean, once we have our needs for, you know, food and things like that are set, we're always interacting in ways to make ourselves look good and to protect ourselves from being nailed, you know, or accused of something.
00:20:18.000Now, call-out culture is not quite that bad, but it's the same logic, okay?
00:20:24.000So if you have a group of teenagers or college students who are all struggling for prestige, as we all are, And if you get a subculture in which the way you get prestige is by calling someone out, showing that they're racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic,
00:20:39.000Islamophobic, whatever it is, if you can catch them, you get the points.
00:20:43.000What you're doing here is you're imposing external cost on others.
00:20:47.000And that's what makes you so insufferable, because you are playing your game, but I'm paying the cost of your game.
00:20:55.000And so that, I think, it's hard to—people aren't going to break out of that themselves.
00:21:00.000But once we understand what's happening, I think, in a sense, we can all come together and call out culture and say, stop!
00:21:09.000But how are we going to reach those kids if professors are so terrified to speak out and to cause controversy in class and no one wants to criticize them because if you do, you risk your job, you risk them organizing against you?
00:21:59.000That I think if we can raise kids or encourage them to see the games that social media makes them do and give them a vocabulary, I don't know if we should come up with some catchy terms for it, but give them a vocabulary so that they can be like, oh, you're a calling out or,
00:22:16.000I don't know, that's clunky, but we can help them label this behavior.
00:23:31.000They've been measuring attitudes of Americans since the 80s or 90s.
00:23:35.000But they've been publishing this series on polarization in which they show that in the 90s, if you knew somebody's attitude on, say, gun control, that would only predict their attitude on abortion a certain percent.
00:23:45.000And a lot of people on the left, let's say, would hold six of the 10 leftist attitudes and same on the right.
00:23:52.000But gradually, by the time you get to around 2010, it's like if you know one attitude, you know them all.
00:23:58.000And that's in part just because if you turn up the volume.
00:24:03.000And the more we see, you know, if it's us, America versus them, communist Russia or Nazi Germany, well, you know, then we all come together and that's great for social cohesion and trust.
00:24:14.000But as that fades away and as us versus them became increasingly left versus right, And as we lost the liberal Republicans and the conservative Democrats, those used to exist until the 80s or 90s, as we lost them, once it becomes us versus them is left versus right,
00:24:30.000now if you only hold your team's position on six out of ten items, you're a traitor.
00:24:35.000And so you better get with the program.
00:24:36.000And so the pressures for conformity, the pressures to agree with your team on everything, have been steadily rising.
00:24:54.000Maybe they do have a point on this thing.
00:24:57.000And that's one of the reasons why it looks so weird from the outside and why it's getting so unpleasant from the inside.
00:25:02.000When you're teaching classes and a subject comes up that may be controversial, do you have this overwhelming feeling that you're treading on dangerous ground?
00:25:19.000So I taught Psych 101 at the University of Virginia, and I would take them into, you know, sex differences, the origin of sexual orientation.
00:26:05.000You know, MBA students have to know where the lines are, what the law is.
00:26:08.000And yeah, I'm kind of scared when I teach that because I'd like to get into all sorts of things.
00:26:14.000I'd like to get into, well, what do numerical disparities mean if there's a gender difference in the percentage of tech but not in the percentage of non-tech employees in Silicon Valley?
00:27:04.000And there's an incentive to this, what we were talking about before, this incentive that gives them attention, they get Prestige, they get value from it, and this culture encourages these things.
00:27:19.000And this is a terrible lesson to teach them.
00:27:21.000So, you know, the subtitle of our book is called The Coddling of the American Mind, How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
00:27:30.000And so these microaggression reporting systems, that's basically what it is, a microaggression reporting system It has a good intention behind it.
00:27:40.000There are cases of professors who make ethnic jokes.
00:27:44.000I mean, maybe that was okay 30 years ago.
00:27:46.000You know, there are legitimate complaints, and faculty do – there should be some accountability, some responsibility.
00:27:52.000So there's a good intention behind it.
00:27:53.000But it's usually based on no empirical evidence and because it's based on pressure applied to a bureaucracy, not by a committee thinking, hmm, how can we improve the climate for everyone?
00:28:05.000No, no, it's like we make these demands and we demand 10 things and the administration says, okay, we'll give you five of them.
00:28:12.000There's not thought put into what would happen if we give the students an East German-style anonymous reporting system, and so everybody's on notice that they can be reported at any point.
00:28:21.000What might happen to the social dynamics?
00:28:26.000So the net effect, again, is the spectacular collapse of trust on campus.
00:28:31.000God, to be in the middle of that, it's got to be so bizarre having taught for so many years before that and to watch almost like this virus overtake the institutions.
00:28:55.000They defend free speech rights on campus.
00:28:58.000And they were always pushing back against administrators who would say, oh, you know, we need a free speech zone.
00:29:04.000And they're always afraid of liability.
00:29:06.000And so – but suddenly in 2014, Greg starts seeing students pushing back on speech rights, saying, we want – you know, ban that speaker, you know – We need a safe space if a debate is going to be held.
00:29:48.000And then in 2014, he sees students saying, oh, if, you know, if Christina Hoff Summers comes to campus, you know, people will die or there'll be, you know, people will be harmed, injured.
00:29:58.000And so there's this new way of thinking and Greg thinks, wow, how are students learning to do this?
00:30:05.000Like, are we teaching them on campus to think in these distorted ways?
00:30:09.000And if we are, isn't that going to make them depressed?
00:30:12.000So Greg comes to talk to me in May of 2014 to tell me this idea.
00:30:19.000I think it's a great idea because I'd begun to see this, you know, the safe spaces, the microaggressions, the trigger warning requests.
00:30:27.000So we wrote up our essay, submitted to The Atlantic.
00:30:31.000It came out in August of 2015. And it was like we were just seeing the first outbreaks of a virus.
00:30:37.000And then in the fall of 2015, it becomes an epidemic.
00:30:40.000And so many of your listeners will have heard of or seen the videos of what happened at Yale in November 2015 when Erika Christakis wrote an email saying, now, wait a second, Yale is telling you how to do your Halloween costumes.
00:30:55.000Maybe we should think this through ourselves.
00:30:57.000Maybe you're old enough to make your own decisions.
00:31:42.000It's almost like the whole room is almost at combustion temperature, and then Yale was the spark that sent it national.
00:31:49.000What's crazy about Yale is anybody that's objective that's watching from the outside is like, these students are out of control.
00:31:54.000They're screaming at this professor like, this is supposed to be a safe place, and you know, you've fucked this up, and they're being incredibly hostile and aggressive towards him and surrounding him.
00:32:07.000When you watch that from the outside, you think, well, obviously they've got to punish these students.
00:32:22.000I graduated from there in 1985. I loved it.
00:32:25.000I was in Davenport College, one of the 12 residential colleges.
00:32:28.000And there were a lot of intellectual events that would happen in the colleges.
00:32:32.000It's like the master of the college or the dean of the college would bring in all kinds of people to speak.
00:32:36.000So they were intellectual spaces as well as sort of home-like or not exactly home-like, like transitional places where they were places that you lived.
00:32:46.000So the Yale that I knew was a place that taught me to think in lots of different ways.
00:32:51.000And it just was constantly blowing my mind.
00:32:53.000Like when I took my first economics course, it was like, Wow!
00:32:57.000Here's a new pair of spectacles that I can put on and suddenly I see all these prices and supply and I never learned to think that way.
00:33:06.000I learned about Freud and psychology or sociology.
00:33:09.000So a good education is one that lets you look at our complicated world through multiple perspectives and that makes you smart.
00:33:18.000That's what a liberal arts education should do.
00:33:21.000But what I see increasingly happening, especially at elite schools, It's a zero sum game.
00:33:46.000Is to fight the bad groups, bring them down, create equality.
00:33:51.000And this is a terrible way to think in a free society.
00:33:54.000I mean, that might have worked, you know, in biblical days when you got the Moabites killing the Jebusites or whatever.
00:34:00.000But, you know, we live in an era in which we've discovered that the pie can be grown a million-fold.
00:34:08.000And so to teach students to see society as a zero-sum competition between groups is primitive and destructive.
00:34:16.000Now, in your book, you actually identify the moment where these microaggressions sort of made their appearance.
00:34:24.000And they were initially a racist thing?
00:34:27.000So, the idea of a microaggression, it goes back to – I forget the scholars and African-American sociologists in the 70s first coined the term – But it really becomes popular in a 2007 article by Derald Wing Sue at Teachers College.
00:34:43.000And so he talks about this concept of microaggressions.
00:34:47.000And there are two things that are good about the concept that are useful.
00:34:51.000And so one is as racism, as explicit racism has clearly gone down by any measure, explicit racism has plummeted in America and across the West.
00:35:18.000I would just say that if you're a member of a culture, you can tell when someone is saying something to insult, to put down, or to express hostility.
00:36:07.000Certainly, I mean, when you do surveys of people's experience, people of every race, when they report how often this happens to them every year, the numbers are actually fairly low.
00:36:19.000So there are ways of measuring experiences of racism.
00:36:24.000Because, like, first of all, I used to have a joke about this, but the idea is that the problem with surveys is You're only getting information from people so stupid they take surveys.
00:36:36.000Some surveys are subject to that, but in general, if you approach a question from multiple perspectives and say in one condition you pay them for an accurate answer or not, or in one condition they're anonymous or they're not, so you can get a sense of how much the answer moves around depending on external conditions.
00:36:55.000And so, anyway, the point I just wanted to make is that the acceptability of using the N-word or other things, you know, if a bunch of white people are talking, the acceptability of using the N-word, I think, has gone way down in general.
00:37:22.000I'm not an expert in that area, so I'm assuming it's surveys and analysis of discourse.
00:37:28.000Ultimately, for everyone's sake, I mean, even for the sake of the people that are embroiled in all this controversy and chaos, it would be fantastic across the board if there was no more sexism, there was no more racism, there was no more any of these things.
00:38:02.000I mean, that's what the 20th century was about.
00:38:06.000So you and I are shaped by—I don't know how old you are.
00:38:09.000I'm 51. Okay, I'm 55. We were shaped by the late 20th century.
00:38:13.000And the late 20th century was a time in America in which, you know, earlier on, there was all kinds of prejudice.
00:38:20.000I mean, when I was—so when I was born, just right before you were born, it was legal to say, you can't eat here because you're black.
00:38:26.000And so, you know, that changed in 1964, 65. But— It used to be that we had legal differentiations by race, and then those were knocked down, but we still had social.
00:38:37.000And it used to be that if you were gay, there was something humiliating that had to be hidden.
00:38:42.000So if you look at where we were in 1960 or 63 when I was born, and then you look at where we got by 2000, I mean, the progress is fantastic on every front.
00:38:52.000So that's all I mean when I say we were moving in that direction.
00:38:56.000And to your point about, you know, wouldn't it be great if there was none of this?
00:39:33.000Well, it's also the differences between us are really fascinating.
00:39:37.000The differences between men and women, I think, are some of the more interesting Explanations for human behavior.
00:39:47.000And I'm not meaning that people must be defined by their gender, defined by their sex, but it is interesting when you look at these gigantic groups, like why certain people tend to gravitate towards certain occupations or certain types of behavior or certain hobbies.
00:40:07.000And if we were playing the truth-seeking game, if all we cared about is trying to understand things, we would do the research and we'd figure out what do people like?
00:40:14.000And do left-handers versus right-handers have different preferences?
00:42:35.000This wonderful woman, Pauli Murray, she was a gay, black, possibly trans Civil rights leader, beginning in the 40s, she says, when my opponents draw a small circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them.
00:42:52.000I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.
00:42:54.000And this is again what Martin Luther King did.
00:42:56.000He's relentlessly appealing to our white brothers and sisters.
00:43:00.000He's using the language of America, of Christianity.
00:43:03.000Start by saying what we have in common.
00:43:08.000Now we can talk about our difficulties.
00:43:11.000So it's the rise of common enemy identity politics on campus, in the grievance studies departments especially, that I think is an alarming trend.
00:43:21.000Another thing that's alarming to me is the redefining of terms like sexism and racism, where sexism against men is impossible, racism against white people is impossible.
00:43:30.000This redefining as these prejudices only exist if you're coming from a position of power.
00:43:39.000And it also, it opens up the door to treating people as an other.
00:43:45.000Literally, the people that are the victims of racism are now using racism against other people and feeling justified because of it and having a bunch of people that will agree with them that this is in fact not racism and this is pushing back on white privilege and saying all these different weird things that You know,
00:44:05.000and they feel really comfortable in saying these open, racist, generalizing things about white people or about white men or about, you know, fill in the blank of whatever group that you're attacking.
00:44:21.000But again, it makes sense if you look at the different games.
00:44:24.000So if you're on a university and you think you're playing the truth game, and philosophers are great at this, they're always unpacking terms.
00:44:31.000And so you might try to define racism or any sort of ism, and a common sense view would be an expression of hostility or resentment or limitation on a group based on their identity.
00:44:43.000But that's if you're playing the truth seeking game.
00:44:45.000If you're playing the politics game or the warfare game, You want to define the terms to give your side maximum advantage.
00:44:54.000So there's a wonderful social psychologist named Phil Tetlock at Penn, at Wharton, and he talks about these different mindsets we get into.
00:45:01.000And one of them he calls the intuitive prosecutor.
00:45:04.000So if my goal as a scholar is to prosecute my enemies and maximally convict them, and I am always trying to defend seven different identity groups against the straight white men, they're the accused, I want to define my terms to make it maximally easy to convict.
00:45:23.000And so I'm going to say racism, microaggressions, it doesn't matter what the intent was.
00:46:25.000Can you imagine giving your daughters a cloak of invulnerability, where you say, you put this on, now, you get to attack others, but no one can touch you.
00:46:36.000This is going to warp their development.
00:46:38.000Power corrupts, and even moral or rhetorical power corrupts as well.
00:46:45.000How is this accepted as a part of a curriculum?
00:46:48.000So, because the goal is not truth, the goal is victory over racism, let's say.
00:46:52.000And so if that's the case, you're going to focus on educating kids about their white privilege.
00:46:58.000And so that's what a lot of these privilege exercises are.
00:47:03.000You know, you line kids up by their privilege and your goal is to make the straight white boys feel bad about their privilege and therefore talk less, take up less space.
00:47:13.000This is what we were talking about earlier about the goal is no racism.
00:47:17.000The privilege only exists if there's racism.
00:47:20.000Like, instead of concentrating on the privilege, it only exists if people do preferentially treat certain – preferential treatment towards certain races.
00:47:29.000If that doesn't exist at all, then white privilege doesn't exist.
00:47:33.000Well, I'm not sure I'd agree with you on that.
00:48:39.000That's a sexism one, but that's also a physical danger one.
00:48:43.000There is a difference between just the way women have to go out into the world being vulnerable and also being the target of Just a male sexual attention.
00:49:40.000Yes, but, okay, so look, I think it's helpful to always try to look at it from the other person's point of view and to listen to their arguments.
00:49:48.000And so, for example, when you and I go into any social encounter, it never occurs to me Right.
00:50:16.000And that, whereas if we were black or other identities or visibly gay, there would be the risk of spoiling of a social interaction.
00:50:24.000So I'm totally comfortable saying we should be telling our kids about this, but what follows from it?
00:50:50.000But what I'm getting at is pointing at someone and saying you have white privilege if they are not racist.
00:51:00.000You're giving this person, you're putting this person in a category that really only exists in the face of racism, where the real problem is racism.
00:51:10.000The male-female thing is a very different thing.
00:51:13.000Male privilege, I think, is way more slippery, because it's biologically based.
00:51:17.000There's a creepiness to men, and there is.
00:51:21.000As much as a nice guy as I'm sure you are, and I try very hard to be a nice guy, Jamie's a little slippery.
00:51:51.000Until there's some sort of new way that we interface with each other that eliminates lies and deception and allows each other to completely understand each other's feelings and appreciate them, which may happen someday, probably technologically driven.
00:52:03.000Until that happens, there's going to be a certain amount of it.
00:52:29.000But I think what we need to call attention to is that if you lower the threshold faster than the reality changes, then you make progress, but yet people feel worse and worse.
00:52:39.000And so I think that's part of what's happening on campus.
00:52:45.000So the loudest protests tend to happen at the most progressive schools.
00:52:48.000It's places like Middlebury and Yale and Berkeley.
00:52:52.000And so I think that if you bring in a diverse student body, and we're all trying to diversify.
00:53:00.000Every school I know of is trying very hard to create a very diverse student body.
00:53:05.000So if we do that and we bring people in and we give them a common humanity approach, it's going to work great.
00:53:10.000Diversity, if you handle it well, it can confer many benefits.
00:53:15.000But if you handle it wrong, if you try to make people see race and other groups more and you attach moral valences to it and you give them a lot of the stuff that they get in the grievance studies, of course they're going to be angry and of course they're going to feel that people hate them.
00:53:29.000It's a terrible thing to bring people into a university and to teach them, you know what?
00:53:33.000This institution is white supremacist.
00:53:35.000People have implicit bias against you.
00:53:37.000Wherever you go, people are going to hate you.
00:53:38.000Like, no, this is a really bad thing to do to create an open, trusting, inclusive, diverse environment.
00:53:43.000The right thing to do would be to emphasize how foolish racism really is and about how damaging it is not just to our culture but to you as an individual to look at people in that way and not open your heart and your mind to all these different races.
00:53:56.000And I think one of the worst examples of modern racism that's gone unchecked is what's going on at Harvard with Asian students, where Asian students are instead of Instead of being completely neutral in terms of how they approach all these races,
00:54:14.000Asian students actually have to try harder to get into Harvard because there's so many of them.
00:55:01.000Moral cultures evolve, and they don't always evolve in a positive way.
00:55:05.000And so I think the evolution of the late 20th century was incredibly positive.
00:55:10.000And I think young people are losing touch with some of the hard-won lessons of the past.
00:55:18.000So I'm not going to say, oh, we have to just accept whatever morality is here.
00:55:21.000I still am ultimately illiberal in the sense that What I dream of is a society in which people are free to create lives that they want to live, and they're not forced to do things, they're not shamed, there's a minimum of conflict, and we make room for each other.
00:55:35.000If we're going to have a diverse society, we've really got to be tolerant and make room for each other.
00:55:40.000And I think in the last five or ten years, we've gotten really far from that.
00:55:45.000I mean, you know, my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, was about ten ancient ideas.
00:55:50.000And, you know, one is that we're too judgmental.
00:55:52.000You know, judge not, lest ye be judged.
00:55:55.000But I think the new version of that, if there was a 21st century Jesus, he'd say, judge a lot more, judge all the time, judge harshly, don't give anyone the benefit of the doubt, and don't let anyone judge you.
00:56:04.000Like, that is not going to be a recipe for a functioning society.
00:56:08.000So no, I do not accept this aspect of 21st century morality.
00:56:12.000Well, you're obviously much more entrenched in it than I am.
00:56:15.000My hope, and this might be naive, is that what these far left and far, like the real extreme, what it represents is the extreme poles of this shifting thing.
00:56:29.000So that the whole thing is going to move closer to a better place, and you're always going to have really extreme, but you're always going to have...
00:57:12.000But there are certain things that happen with progress that lead to certain countervailing trends that are not like pendula.
00:57:21.000And so, for example, okay, here's one.
00:57:27.000It seems pretty clear that human beings need a certain amount of hardship, stress, and challenge in order to develop basic human abilities.
00:57:38.000Kids who are neglected and abused are damaged.
00:57:42.000I mean, if it goes beyond certain limits, you have chronic stress, you can have brain damage.
00:57:47.000So as we've gotten rid of a lot of the worst things, that's great.
00:57:52.000But as we're making life better and better and easier and easier for kids, as we're protecting them from more and more, we're preventing them from basically expanding their abilities.
00:58:01.000And so it's possible that as we get wealthier and safer and more humane and more caring and as we have smaller and smaller families as we get richer all over the world so that you have two parents spending all this time with one kid it's possible that we are interfering with kids development to the point where we might have an epidemic of anxiety and depression that could happen oh wait a second it has so you know I think that there are certain problems of progress
00:58:35.000They change things and those changes have some negative repercussions that we're going to have to actively fix.
00:58:41.000It's not going to swing back by itself.
00:58:43.000What concerns me when you're talking about all these ideas is that there's a restriction on how you are able to communicate to children or to students, I should say, to young people How their minds work and how these patterns can form and how this This pattern can be ultimately damaging to them,
00:59:08.000but yet it feels rewarding in the act of doing it, and that their own patterns that they're involved in right now might be incredibly problematic for them in the future, but if you bring it up, you're criticizing who they are as a human, you're disregarding your white privilege,
00:59:23.000you're doing all these different things you can't really do.
00:59:26.000You're doing all these things that could run into these problems with this sort of new paradigm.
00:59:34.000How do you mitigate that when you're teaching kids?
00:59:37.000How do you talk to them about the way the mind works when it's involving these critical things that are incredibly sensitive to discuss today?
00:59:46.000You might be talking about issues like race and sex.
00:59:55.000Let's start with what should we be doing with kids to make them tougher so that, you know, as they live in it, the world is safer and safer.
01:00:06.000The death rate for kids has been plummeting for all causes other than suicide, which has gone up.
01:00:13.000So as kids live in a safer and safer world, they also have the internet, which is going to expose them to virtual insults forever and ever.
01:00:21.000So how are we going to raise kids to be maximally effective in this new 21st century world, which is physically very safe, but virtually unsafe?
01:00:32.000And I think the key idea that we need to put on the table here and that I think everybody who works with kids needs to keep in mind every day is anti-fragility.
01:00:40.000I know you've talked about that on the show before.
01:00:43.000But I can just give a very brief explanation of it because it's such an important concept.
01:00:48.000So anti-fragility, a lot of listeners will know, is a word coined by Nassim Taleb, the guy who wrote The Black Swan.
01:00:55.000Because there are certain systems, and I think he was motivated by the collapse of the banking system.
01:00:59.000So he had predicted the collapse because he said, the banking system is really convoluted and it's never been tested.
01:01:06.000A system needs to be tested, challenged, shocked, in order to then develop defenses against it.
01:01:11.000And our system has not been tested, so if anything goes wrong, it's all going down.
01:01:15.000Yeah, you reference him quite a few times.
01:01:22.000And I find, as I talk about this around the country, once you explain this to people who work with kids, like, everybody gets it right away.
01:01:28.000All right, so Taleb says, there's no word for this property.
01:01:33.000He says, we know that some things are fragile, and so if you have a glass, you know, if you have a wine glass on the table and you knock it over, it breaks.
01:01:39.000Okay, it doesn't get better in any way.
01:01:42.000And so, you know, you don't give kids a wine glass, you give them a plastic sippy cup because plastic is resilient.
01:01:48.000But if a kid knocks over a sippy cup, it doesn't get better in any way.
01:01:51.000And Taleb wanted to know, what's the word for things that do get better when you knock them over?
01:01:57.000And the classic example is the immune system.
01:02:00.000So the immune system is an incomplete system.
01:02:03.000It's a miracle of evolution that we have this system for making antibodies.
01:02:08.000But it doesn't know exactly what to be reactive to.
01:02:10.000That has to be set by childhood experience.
01:02:13.000And so if you keep your kids in a bubble, And you use bacterial wipes and you don't let them be exposed to bacteria, you're crippling the system.
01:02:36.000Please explain that to people, the whole peanut allergy thing.
01:02:39.000Yeah, so peanut allergies used to be really rare.
01:02:42.000And most of us, you know, older folk, we brought peanut butter sandwiches to school.
01:02:46.000And when my son Max started preschool in 2008, you know, they went on and on about no nuts, nothing that touched a nut, nothing that looks like a nut, nothing that has the word nut.
01:02:56.000I mean, it was crazy how defensive they were about nuts.
01:02:59.000And as we were writing the book, I thought back on that.
01:03:04.000You know, we're freaking out about nuts.
01:03:06.000And the more we freak out about it, the higher the allergy rate goes.
01:03:09.000And it turns out there was a study done and published in 2015 where the researchers noticed that the allergy to nuts is only going up in countries that tell pregnant women to avoid nuts.
01:03:21.000And they thought, well, maybe that's why.
01:03:24.000And so they did a controlled experiment.
01:03:25.000They got about 600 women who had given birth recently.
01:03:31.000And whose kids were at higher risk of an allergy because they had eczema or some other immune system sort of issue.
01:03:38.000So about 300 of them are told, standard advice, your kid's at risk of a peanut allergy.
01:03:43.000So you should not eat peanuts while you're lactating and keep peanuts away from your kid.
01:03:48.000And the other half were told, here is an Israeli snack food.
01:03:52.000It's a puffed corn with a peanut powder dusting on the outside.
01:03:57.000Give it to your kids starting at three or four months whenever they're ready to eat.
01:05:10.000Because I was on a plane once and they informed us that they didn't want us to even eat peanuts on the plane because there was someone on the plane that was so allergic that if you eat peanuts and you chew it and it's in the air, it could adversely affect that person.
01:06:04.000But as we've cracked down on bullying, and as we've gotten more and more sensitive about harm in general, we're cracking down on any kind of teasing, cruelty, exclusion.
01:06:15.000So my kids go to New York City public schools, which are generally pretty good.
01:06:20.000But on the playground, there's a monitor, and the playground monitor, if there's conflict, he comes and checks it out.
01:06:28.000You know, seems like a good thing to do, but it's like treating kids like they're allergic to peanuts.
01:06:33.000Kids have to have thousands and thousands of conflicts.
01:06:36.000They have to be exposed to insults and exclusion and teasing.
01:06:39.000And if you can imagine, if you could keep your daughter in a protective tank where nobody would tease her or insult her or hurt her feelings for 18 years, would you do it?
01:07:36.000And if the suffering goes on day after day, so if their brain is bathed in cortisol, so cortisol is a normal stress hormone, you have to experience stress, you have to have cortisol and then it drops, goes up and down, up and down.
01:07:49.000But kids who are raised either in an environment where they're bullied or they're abused at home, they don't have a secure attachment relationship, then they get brain damage.
01:07:57.000Then you're hurting kids if it's chronic.
01:08:00.000So I'm in no way saying bullying is okay.
01:08:40.000We didn't put it in the book because while we suspect that anti-bullying policies that go too far and that ban conflict, while we suspect that those are harmful, we couldn't prove that.
01:11:35.000So look, in general, kids learn from experience, but adults want to teach them directly.
01:11:41.000And so there's all these efforts to teach compassion.
01:11:44.000I have no idea if they work, but I would think that doing things together, and this is a point made by Peter Gray, an expert on play who co-founded LetGrow.org, a wonderful organization that I hope we can talk about.
01:12:02.000One way that kids learn compassion is by playing with each other when there's no adult who can step in, where they have to look out for each other to keep the game going.
01:12:10.000But when there are adults present who are supervising, Then if there's a conflict, the skills that kids need to learn are how do you make your case to get the adult to come in on your side?
01:14:53.000And then the crime wave begins to end rapidly in the 1990s.
01:14:58.000And just as it's ending, we changed our norms to say, if a kid is outside and there's no adult watching him, that kid is likely to be abducted.
01:15:07.000And therefore, the parents are responsible, the parents can be arrested, or at least Child Protective Services should pay them a visit.
01:15:14.000So just as the crime rate was ending and rates of all kinds of crazy violence were plummeting, We locked our kids up and we said, you're not going to be able to have the kind of experience that you most need in order to become an independent functioning adult.
01:15:28.000And so we don't know why depression, anxiety, and suicide are skyrocketing for teenagers, especially teenage girls.
01:15:35.000But the combination of overprotection and then social media seems to be the main part of the example.
01:15:40.000So I totally sympathize with the fact that there are risks out there.
01:15:44.000But the risk of overprotection kills a lot more kids.
01:15:48.000There was a story that I read about, I want to say the kids were 8 and 10, and they were walking home in New York City, and the police officer stopped them and talked to them, and then eventually interviewed their parents and said, why are your children walking home?
01:16:02.000He's like, because I taught them how to walk home.
01:16:07.000This is a valuable thing to give them the independence to leave school together, they look out for each other, and then they go home together.
01:16:14.000And the cops were making it like these people were negligent and criminal, and they were saying, no, I'm trying to prepare my child for the world.
01:16:22.000It's sort of a debate about the philosophy of raising human beings and exposing them to a certain amount of independence and a certain amount of personal sovereignty.
01:16:32.000And so this is, I think, the most important lesson that Greg and I hope will come from our book, Is that if you see the world as dangerous and threatening and you raise your kids accordingly, you're gonna raise emotionally stunted kids who are at much higher risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide.
01:17:13.000I sent in some graphs of depression and anxiety rates.
01:17:17.000So if we think that kids are at risk of harm from letting them out, but we don't see that they're at risk of harm from keeping them in, then we're going to make the wrong decision.
01:18:02.000You know, it's, well, I mean, the parents, I mean, we're pretty selective about the parents, but there's a lot of parents that don't pay attention to their kids at all.
01:18:10.000Meaning they just tune out and they get on the phone and the kids are sticking forks into the fucking outlets.
01:18:15.000And, you know, there's a lot of weirdness when it comes to the styles that people have in raising their children.
01:18:27.000Yeah, so I guess I'll just narrate it for people who are listening and not watching the video.
01:18:31.000You said before it's like a virus came out of nowhere, and that is sort of what it's been like.
01:18:36.000So what's happening in America, and I know it's happening the same in Britain and Canada.
01:18:40.000I haven't looked at other places yet, haven't dug into those stats.
01:18:43.000What's happening is that rates of depression and anxiety were fairly stable from the 90s through the early 2000s.
01:18:51.000And what you see here, and this is a graph that's in our book, is that the percentage of kids aged 12 to 17 in America who met the criteria for having a major depressive episode—that is, they're given a symptom checklist with nine symptoms, and if you say yes to five of them— You know,
01:19:07.000feeling hopeless and couldn't get out of bed.
01:19:10.000If you say yes to five or more, you're considered to have had a major depressive episode.
01:19:14.000And what you see is that the rate for boys is around 5%.
01:19:17.000And then around 2011, it starts going up, and now it's around 7%.
01:19:47.000And then right around 2011, 2012, it starts going up.
01:19:50.000And it goes way up to the point where it goes up from about 12% to now about 20% of American teenage girls have had a major depressive episode in the last year.
01:22:02.000So what this graph shows is the number of boys out of 100,000 who were admitted to a hospital every year because they deliberately harmed themselves to the point where they had to be hospitalized.
01:22:13.000And what you see here is that there's no change over time.
01:22:17.000So boys, these graphs from 2001 to 2015, the lines are flat for all the different age groups.
01:22:23.000And just notice that the highest rates are around 280 out of 100,000 per year.
01:22:46.000So if we look at self-harm, what you see here is that the rates were fairly stable up until 2009. And then, bang, just as in the last, same thing.
01:22:56.000So the rate for 15 to 19-year-old girls is up 62%.
01:23:00.000Since 2009. Now notice, the rate for the millennials, that is the rate for the oldest girls, age 20 to 24, that's only up 17%.
01:23:10.000So whatever happened, it's not affecting the millennials, it's affecting Gen Z. Hit the advance key because I think there's one number missing there.
01:23:43.000We don't know for sure, but because of the huge sex difference, the leading candidate and the timing, look at that timing, is social media.
01:23:53.000So if you look at what happened in this country and all around the world, Facebook opens up to the world in 2006. You don't have to be a college student, but very few teenagers have a Facebook account in 2006. 2007, the iPhone comes out, but it's very expensive and very few teenagers have one.
01:24:10.000By 2010, 2011, around half of American teenagers have an iPhone or Samsung.
01:24:17.000They have a smartphone and they have access to social media in middle school.
01:24:21.000Because even though for Facebook and Instagram, I think the minimum age is and was 13, I mean, my son is 12. A lot of his friends have Instagram.
01:25:09.000But girls' aggression, girls are actually as aggressive as boys.
01:25:12.000There's research from the 80s and 90s on this.
01:25:14.000If you include relational aggression, girls don't bully each other by threatening to punch each other in the face.
01:25:20.000Girls bully each other by damaging the other girls' social relationships, spreading rumors, spreading lies, spreading a doctored photograph, saying bad things, excluding them.
01:25:30.000And so it's always been really hard to be a middle school student.
01:25:33.000It's always been harder to be a middle school girl than a middle school boy, okay?
01:25:38.000So beginning around 2010-2011, we throw in this brand new thing into the mix.
01:25:42.000Okay, girls, here's this beautiful thing in your hand, and here's all these programs where you can damage anyone's social relationships any time of the day or night with deniability from an anonymous account.
01:26:04.000The other two mechanisms are the social comparison because it's always been hard to be a teen girl emerging with beauty standards and impossible beauty standards.
01:26:14.000And when we were kids, you had impossible beauty standards that these models...
01:26:18.000We're all doctored up and then Photoshop.
01:26:20.000Okay, so you've got these impossible beauty standards out there.
01:26:23.000But beginning with social media, especially in recent years, your own friends can put on a filter in Instagram to make their lips bigger, their skin cleaner, their eyes bigger.
01:26:33.000So your own friends are more beautiful than they are in real life.
01:26:52.000And so suddenly when everybody is tracking each other's who was invited, who's there, and especially any program in which a girl puts something out and then waits to see what other people say about it, that is what's really damaging, I think.
01:27:06.000Again, let me stress, we don't know for sure.
01:27:09.000There are some experiments on this, but it's mostly correlational stuff we're talking about here, correlational data.
01:27:14.000But the overall experience of being a girl who was born in 1995 or later and got this stuff in middle school is different from being a girl born in 1990, let's say, where you didn't get this stuff until college.
01:27:26.000Are you concerned that this is a trend that as technology becomes more and more invasive and with these new technologies as they emerge, that this is going to be worse?
01:28:00.000We should keep that in mind, that the makers of this are wary of it.
01:28:03.000Second, they've gotten more and more addictive as they've gotten better and better, as they've evolved.
01:28:08.000So they're getting more and more, and Fortnite is an example of an extremely addictive game.
01:28:17.000So if you've ever been to a casino and you've seen people sitting at those machines, like zombies, just hour after hour pulling that crank, because there were psychologists working out the variable reinforcement schedule for the gambling companies,
01:28:35.000Psychologists, they're helping companies manipulate users, and that's happening to our kids too.
01:28:40.000They're manipulated to stay on the device.
01:28:43.000So once we're beginning to realize this, the nature of these technologies, the fact that what is good for adults may be terrible for 12-year-olds, 10-year-olds...
01:28:54.000And once we realize that these things are so attractive that they crowd out all the other healthy activities like playing outside, playing with groups of friends, once we realize that, I think and I hope we'll get some reasonable norms.
01:29:08.000And what I'd like to propose, this is fantastic to be able to talk to so many people, what I'd like to propose is if you have kids, especially if you have kids under about 16, Please do what you can to talk with other parents, and especially with the principal of any schools you know,
01:29:23.000and say, we need some sensible norms because we can't solve this problem by ourselves.
01:29:28.000So I want to keep my kids off social media, but my son says, well, most of my friends have Instagram accounts.
01:29:34.000Now, if it was every friend and he was the only one who was excluded, it would be really hard for me to stick to my guns.
01:29:39.000I would do it, but it would be really hard.
01:29:41.000Whereas if it was only a few of his friends, and most of them weren't, it would be so easy.
01:29:45.000And I hear this from parents over and over.
01:29:47.000I don't want my kid on social media, but I don't want her to be left out.
01:29:51.000And so if the principal would just say, parents, please, this is getting out of hand.
01:31:49.000But there should be no social media till high school.
01:31:51.000Because it's a social dilemma that we can't solve alone.
01:31:55.000We can only solve it if there's an agreement among parents and guidance from the principal.
01:31:59.000Please, parents, don't give your kid an Instagram account until they're in high school.
01:32:06.000If we say, nothing till high school, and then when they get into high school, then they're confronted with it, I would like them to have some skills or at least some understanding of what's going on.
01:32:55.000And she thinks that it's in part the nature of the bullying as such.
01:33:00.000So, you know, sure, we want them to know how to deal with this.
01:33:02.000But, you know, they can learn it pretty quickly when they're 15. It's not like they need a running start from 11 to 15. So I just see no good whatsoever coming from social media in middle school.
01:33:40.000I'm purely playing devil's advocate, and I'm on the same page with you.
01:33:43.000My kids don't have phones, and my 10-year-old, it's shocking how many girls in her class have phones, and Facebook accounts, and Instagram accounts.
01:33:53.000Her friends are at higher risk than she is of having an anxiety disorder, of being hospitalized because they're going to cut themselves, and ultimately of suicide.
01:36:33.000Someone calculated at present rates of abduction by strangers.
01:36:37.000If you put your kid in a car and you go into a store and you leave the windows open and your kid's sitting there in the parking lot, you'd have to stay in that store for 700,000 years before your kid is likely to be abducted.
01:36:48.000Well, it does not depend on what neighborhood you live in.
01:37:06.000I would hope that would be the least of your concerns.
01:37:08.000I hope your number one concern would be your children's safety.
01:37:10.000But you getting in trouble, I would hope, would be the least of your concerns.
01:37:14.000Not the least of them because I am selling something.
01:37:17.000I am selling the idea that the gigantic rise in mental illness of teenagers is caused in part because we've overprotected them.
01:37:26.000We have denied them the experiences of independence they need to develop their basic social sense.
01:37:31.000And so I am selling an idea that we've totally botched this and we need to undo it.
01:37:37.000And a big piece of that is we need to be removed from the fear of legal prosecution.
01:37:42.000And so Utah, the state of Utah, passed a year and a half ago, they passed the first free-range kids bill, which says, it puts into state law, it says, I forget the exact terms, but the gist of it is, A parent cannot be considered to be negligent just by having the kids be unsupervised.
01:38:01.000So if you send your kids out to the park, you have to use judgment.
01:38:04.000Obviously, if there's a pattern of neglect, that's a totally different story.
01:38:08.000But the mere effect, as you just said, the story about, well, I'm teaching my kids to go outside.
01:38:17.000And until we have legal protections, it's going to be very hard for anyone to do it because the risk is you could be drawn into months and months of supervision.
01:38:27.000Your kids can actually be taken away from you if you give them independence in some parts of the country.
01:38:31.000It's interesting that Utah would be so progressive about that.
01:38:35.000Yeah, I don't know the history behind it.
01:39:21.000There's a lot of people that seem to take this approach with antidepressants in particular, that they're over-prescribed, which I think they probably are, and that they do more harm than good, which is debatable.
01:39:33.000But the fact that they do do good, I have had two close friends that were in really bad places, and they got on an SSRI and it cleaned them up.
01:39:44.000And they eventually weaned themselves off of it and now very productive and very happy.
01:39:49.000But they were in a place in their life where they, like my friend Ari put it best.
01:40:47.000And from that behavior, you can predict, not with a lot of accuracy, but you can do better than chance, who's going to go to the high school prom, who is going to be successful in any sort of social endeavors, because some people's brains are set to fear and avoidance.
01:41:03.000When your brain is set to see more threats, you have a bias towards interpreting things negatively.
01:41:09.000And if the world is incredibly dangerous, well, that might be adaptive.
01:41:12.000But if the world's incredibly physically safe, as ours is, you're losing a lot of opportunities, you're going to be less successful.
01:41:20.000And so the point of that chapter was there are ways you can change your filter.
01:41:24.000Even though this is highly heritable, identical twins reared apart tend to be pretty similar on these traits.
01:42:53.000This is, I think, what you have with meditation.
01:42:55.000It's this procrastination, your brain tries to find ways to avoid whatever difficult, especially in some strange way if it's been shown to be beneficial.
01:43:08.000Things that have been shown to be beneficial, your brain wants to avoid.
01:44:12.000I mean, it's kind of amazing that we have done such a shitty job teaching kids that we make school out to be this dreary thing that they have like a deep avoidance of.
01:44:28.000Peter Gray, this wonderful developmental psychologist at Boston College, who thinks that schools are not designed with kids' learning in mind.
01:44:37.000Kids learn best from interacting with the world, from experience.
01:44:45.000And so an example would be, how do you learn to climb a tree?
01:44:50.000When we were kids, you'd climb a tree.
01:44:51.000Do you know that feeling when you go out on a branch and at a certain point you just get the sense that it's about to crack and you pull back?
01:44:59.000Now, imagine that you had 100 kids who learned how to climb trees by climbing trees.
01:45:03.000You take another 100 kids, you give them tree climbing class, but you never let them climb a tree.
01:45:07.000But you bring in the world's best experts on tree climbing and they teach these kids how to climb trees.
01:45:13.000And then you put them all out and you give them trees to climb.
01:45:16.000In general, I would put my money on the kids who actually learned from experience.
01:45:20.000And so, you know, the general principle, again, is that—well, actually, here, I'll bring up one other idea from the happiness hypothesis.
01:45:26.000I find it really helpful to think of the mind as being divided into parts like a rider on an elephant.
01:45:33.000And the rider is our conscious reasoning.
01:45:35.000It's the little guy up on top who has language, and it's what we're aware of.
01:45:39.000But the elephant is the other 99% of our minds, and that's almost all automatic processes.
01:45:44.000It's intuitions, it's emotions, it's habits, phobias, all sorts of things.
01:45:49.000And so child development can't be just training the rider for 18 years.
01:45:56.000Wisdom, knowledge, skill, competence, those have to involve training the elephant.
01:46:02.000And when the two work together, then you get the best results.
01:46:05.000And I think what we've done in America, especially, is we've said, we want our kids to be really good in math.
01:46:12.000So we're going to teach them math earlier.
01:46:47.000I mean, do you bring it to the teachers and say, hey, you guys are fucking up?
01:46:50.000Even though I've never taught anyone ever in class, I'm telling you you're doing it wrong.
01:46:54.000Yeah, so, you know, it's a case where you certainly need the research.
01:46:58.000And the research, we cover some of the research in chapters 8 and 9 of the Coddling of the American Mind.
01:47:06.000And as far as we can tell, the research seems to show that there are essentially no benefits to doing homework in kindergarten and first grade.
01:47:13.000Maybe a little bit of like, you know, they learn to organize their time, but barely any.
01:47:17.000By fifth or sixth grade, there's more evidence that homework is beneficial.
01:47:22.000But in between there, it really isn't clear.
01:47:24.000What's really clear is that play, free play, is beneficial.
01:47:27.000So it's hard for you as just one parent to say, hey, don't do this.
01:47:32.000But I think as part of a larger program to say...
01:48:06.000It's also, it's got to be so incredibly difficult to cater a lesson where you have, you know, 30 or 40 kids in the classroom with varying abilities and varying interests and you're sort of catering a lesson where you're trying to excite them about astronomy or whatever it is you're teaching and get it through into their heads and make it seem fun.
01:48:43.000And now you add to that the decline of authority of teachers and principals.
01:48:48.000And you add to that the sense of empowerment that parents have to fine-tune or control and be involved.
01:48:55.000There are stories now about parents who come to the lunchroom.
01:48:58.000Because they want to see their kid at lunch.
01:49:02.000Where, you know, principals and teachers, where once, you know, if the teacher gives a bad grade, the parents would assume that it was deserved.
01:49:11.000I think there's more of a tendency in the last decade or two of parents who are very competitive or concerned about getting their kid into college to complain.
01:49:19.000So if you have, I don't know how general these trends are.
01:50:39.000So actually, here I brought you a copy of a little book that I co-produced.
01:50:43.000So this is John Stuart Mill wrote one of the most important books in the Western tradition on liberty.
01:50:50.000Chapter 2 of On Liberty is the best set of arguments ever made for free speech, for why it is that we need to let people talk and challenge and criticize.
01:51:00.000Even if we think they're wrong, we get smarter from having to rebut them.
01:51:04.000Whereas if we shut them down, if we have blasphemy laws, we get dumber because we never actually face tests of what we believe.
01:51:11.000So, this set of arguments in Chapter 2 of On Liberty is timeless.
01:51:15.000I mean, we need, like, Mill anticipated every argument that we hear now about why we need to shut that person down and not let that person talk.
01:51:22.000And so I thought, wow, we need to get this book back out because college students don't read this anymore.
01:51:28.000And it's a little bit difficult, the text.
01:51:30.000So I happened to be friends with Richard Reeves, who's a Mills scholar.
01:52:02.000And I said, well, actually, could you read this text, find Mill's metaphors, because Mill uses a lot of wonderful metaphors, and illustrate them.
01:52:09.000And so if you just pass it over, which is that camera?
01:52:14.000He took Mill's metaphors and we've got these amazing graphic cartoon type images of the dynamics of what happens when we shame people because Mill was not concerned about government censorship.
01:52:29.000That wasn't a big deal in London in 1859. It was social censorship just as it is today.
01:52:34.000So, you know, so Cicerelli made these beautiful illustrations of Mills Point.
01:52:39.000And so we think that this book, if this book was assigned in every high school for seniors or every incoming freshman class, we think that people would think a lot better.
01:52:49.000So you want to know how to do critical thinking?
01:52:56.000Seek out the people who can do for you what you can't do for yourself, which is challenge your ideas.
01:53:00.000Are you concerned with the trend that we're seeing now with social media of, I mean, I get removing blatant racism and sexism and certain really awful types of behavior from certain social media sites.
01:53:17.000But at a certain point in time, it becomes an ideological battle, and people that lean one way or another want that other side to be silenced.
01:53:26.000I'm seeing this way more from the left, which is very disturbing to me because growing up, my family was very liberal, you know, and I said my formative years in San Francisco, I was always around hippies and I always felt like the people that were on the left were the open-minded, educated ones who were concerned with the future of discourse and humans developing the ability to really flesh out ideas and work their way through them which only happens through real free speech.
01:53:55.000Giving people the ability to express themselves and then Deciding whether or not you agree with that and why you disagree or agree, and then speaking your mind, and then everybody works it out together.
01:54:08.000This is not necessarily the trend that we're seeing today.
01:54:12.000So first, let me just say, you can get this book for free, at least you can download the PDF, if you go to heterodoxacademy.org slash mill, or you can get a $3 Kindle.
01:54:23.000If you go to Amazon, look this up, it's $3 for the Kindle, or you can buy the art book there, too.
01:55:33.000The problem is any group that loses variety, that loses diversity, any group in which everybody thinks the same is at risk of turning it into an ideology, of turning it into a religion.
01:55:48.000And then you lose the ability to think straight.
01:55:51.000And now if somebody—so, you know, when I was in college at Yale, you know, everybody sort of leaned left.
01:56:53.000Confusing things about people that are pulling alarms on speakers and shouting them down while they're talking.
01:57:00.000You have an opportunity when that person's in front of you to listen to their idea and there should be an opportunity to To debate that idea, to form your own opinion and have a really good argument against it,
01:57:15.000and to present that argument, and to have people see both sides.
01:57:19.000This is what learning is supposed to be all about, especially recognizing the flaws in ideas, recognizing bias, recognizing the lack of critical thinking, or recognizing critical thinking and applauding it.
01:57:32.000I will agree with you depending on the context.
01:57:36.000What I mean is if you have a group of people interacting with certain norms or laws that ban intimidation and violence, that make people have some accountability for the style that they use to argue.
01:57:53.000If you lie, if you threaten, your reputation, something bad will come back to you.
01:58:03.000And so within a university, I totally agree with you.
01:58:06.000Now, if you look at the country as a whole or the internet as a whole, and you have a culture war going on or you have a sense of us versus them… And you have all kinds of bad actors.
01:58:20.000Before then, there was the fake news people who discovered they make fake articles on the left and the right, and it just turned out that actually the right would click on them more, so they went that way.
01:58:31.000If there are people who are gaming the system, then your idea, which is Mill's idea, I think there are conditions in which it wouldn't work.
01:58:39.000I'm not sure about that, but I think there are conditions in which that logic would not work.
01:58:44.000And so one thing that I'm very concerned about, I don't see why it is that we can ever let people start an account where there's no verification of who they are.
01:58:53.000I'm not saying you can't have anonymous accounts.
01:58:55.000I understand there are reasons why you'd want to be able to post without your real name.
01:59:00.000Or what happens a lot is like, you know, there's research showing if you post something as a woman versus a man, as a woman, you're going to get a lot more rape threats and things like that.
01:59:08.000If you post as a black person or a white person, you get a lot more racist stuff.
01:59:11.000So at least the platform should always know that you're a person and that your account can be shut down if you talk this way.
01:59:19.000Because I think that there are so many people saying such nasty stuff that it feeds back and changes people's willingness to speak up.
01:59:26.000My concern is not necessarily free speech per se.
01:59:29.000It's free speech as a means to an end.
01:59:31.000And that end is that we as individuals are kind of stupid and we only get smart if you put us together in the right way where we can challenge each other.
01:59:40.000And when we have a call-out culture, we're walking on eggshells, we can no longer do that.
01:59:44.000And in the marketplace of ideas, I think it's really interesting to see those two things play out.
01:59:51.000The one, the benefit of being anonymous, that you could talk about things without fear of retribution, you could talk about things without fear of losing your job, and controversial ideas, especially in this day and age, that, you know, might not really be that controversial to you, or at least...
02:00:06.000Arguable to you, but you could get shamed for it.
02:00:10.000People could take your words out of context and you could get in real trouble.
02:00:15.000But on the other hand, when you're looking at slurs, attacks, threats, stalking, all that stuff, it would be nice if we knew who is behind all this.
02:00:27.000So that's a case where, while I don't think it's a pendulum, I do think that there will be some technological solutions and maybe some social norms so that people who critique in a certain way, where it slurs and it's guilt by association, those people will in some sense lose points,
02:01:53.000That's a good definition of what you're saying.
02:01:55.000It's a screwy thing that people are doing by this alt-right adjacent thing.
02:02:01.000Well, you know, someone wrote a whole chart of, like, people interacting with people and connecting these people because they've had communication with these people and so that somehow or another these things are all related.
02:02:16.000No, but actually, this is the way the human mind works.
02:02:20.000What we have to see is that we evolved to do this kind of religion with witchcraft beliefs and voodoo.
02:02:26.000There's all these patterns that recur all around the world, and the miracle is that there have been societies such as ours that developed norms of science, norms of discourse, norms of civility, norms of toleration and free speech.
02:02:39.000We're the exceptions, and it's precious, and it's easily lost, I think.
02:02:44.000Do you think that it's also this newfound ability to communicate that we're experiencing because the internet leads us to a lot of this sort of sloppy Yes,
02:03:02.000but it's not—so I approach this as a social psychologist.
02:03:08.000So most of the commentary about this comes from cognitive psychologists or people who talk about the information bubbles, the filter bubbles, as though, you know, I have my ideas in my head, and if I'm exposed only to ideas from here, then I'm going to have an incorrect balance of ideas.
02:03:41.000I think the social dynamics problems are vastly bigger, vastly more dangerous.
02:03:45.000And they are that if whatever I say, or whether I will agree with you, or whether I'll even press the like button, I'm thinking, what's going to happen to me?
02:03:56.000And there are people who go through my Twitter feed and they look at what I liked months or years ago and they'll say, well, he liked this or he followed this.
02:04:03.000Yeah, I follow people on the alt-right and the far left and communists.
02:04:08.000But the idea that you could be somehow blamed for having some connection, this is what normal human people, normal human beings do, this guilt by association.
02:04:31.000That's what common sense will tell you.
02:04:33.000And if we have institutions that don't expose students to a variety of viewpoints, it's possible that they are making them less wise when they graduate than they were when they arrived.
02:04:43.000Well, listen, Jonathan, we just cranked through two hours, and I want to thank you for illuminating these ideas and for your great books, and thank you for coming on the podcast.