#198 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom
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Summary
In this episode, I speak with my friend Paul Bloom about his experience with being locked up in his apartment for a year and a half. We talk about how important it is to go outside and get some fresh air, and why we should put a price on human life if we want to re-open society. And then we talk about the problem of how much money we should spend to resurrect someone who's been dead for a long time, and how much it would cost to do so. Sam Harris' new book, "The Dark Side of Death," is out now, and it's available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. It's available in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover, and Audio Book format. You can also get a copy of the book for free at amazon.co.uk/Making Sense by clicking the link below. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends! if you can t afford a subscription, there's an option at Samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. If you can't afford it, you'll need to subscribe to our premium tier, where you'll get access to full episodes of the podcast, unlimited access to the podcast and access to all the podcast's newest episodes, plus access to our most popular shows, including the latest podcasts, original books, books, and more. and much more. Thanks again for listening to Making Sense. -Sam Harris and as always, thank you, again and again, again, for listening, for making sense of it all. -- your support is so you can be a part of the Making Sense of it. Timestamps: 5:00 - What's good? 6:30 - How do you feel about it? 7:15 - What kind of life is better than that? 8:40 - What do you think of it? / Is it better? 9: What are you looking for? 11:20 - What does it mean to you? 12: What is a good day? 13:00 15:00 | Can we be a better human being? 16:30 | Is it possible to be free? 17:10 | Is there a price for life? 18:40 | How do we know that we can be better than other people?
Transcript
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It seems like in Earth time, it hasn't been that long since we've spoken, but in pandemic
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time, it has been, I don't know, a year, a year and a half?
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Since we spoke last, absolutely nothing has happened to me.
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I go for walks and for runs, and I sit in front of my computer and watch.
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Absolutely nothing interesting has happened to me.
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I mean, actually more locked down than I even sometimes intend.
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I notice that there are days where I can actually just sort of forget to go outside, which doesn't
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Yeah, I've learned from this that I really would not like prison.
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It was kind of overdetermined, but yet another reason is I got to go outside a bit.
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And it's just, it's really, it really taught me that I got to avoid finding myself in prison
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Okay, well, let's talk about this situation and what, what of interest we can glean from
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There's a bunch of questions I've gotten from Twitter, and we won't be entirely on COVID
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as a topic, but let's just get all the COVID stuff out of the way first, because I want
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people to, everyone to have access to it, and hopefully some of it will be useful.
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But there's this one idea that has been circulating as people struggle to figure out how and when
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And it's this difficult equivalence between economic cost and lives lost, or the risk of
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And people seem anchored to what appear to me to be patently false claims and false comparisons
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And so you have someone like Andrew Cuomo, who's been a superstar through this, but even
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he will say patently absurd things like, you can't put a price on human life, right?
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Like as though we are thinking about when to reopen society or whether or not to close it and
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fully locked down as we have, it's obscene and impossible to even attempt to put a price
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on human life, which is, which is obviously not true.
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I mean, we put a price on human life all the time.
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We know companies and governments do that explicitly sometimes, but even when it's not
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And it's there whenever we decline to spend all the money in the world on the project of
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We could make every car cost a million dollars by engineering maximum safety into them.
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We could treat every plane flight like it was a rocket launch, right?
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We could check and recheck everything prior to takeoff.
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And the reason why we don't do this is that we've put a price on human life.
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The fact that it's implicit really doesn't matter.
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We've weighed some implicit price against the time and the money required to guarantee
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And this opens on to kind of an interesting ethical question because there's an obvious
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price disparity when you look at a country like the United States and the developing world.
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A human life is obviously and even necessarily worth less in the developing world because
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And the trade-offs in the use of wealth translate into different kinds of lives lost.
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I mean, when you think about what we would spend to resurrect someone from the dead, if
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we could, let's say we had the power of resurrection, but it cost a billion dollars to resurrect somebody.
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Well, we would do that in the United States at least once to prove that we could do it and
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see if it works, and there'd be a few billionaires who would probably resurrect their mothers
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But even in the U.S., there's no way we would spend a billion dollars per life.
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We wouldn't spend 300 billion dollars to bring back 300 people and then 301 and then 302.
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There's no way that would happen, even in the richest country on earth.
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But when you look at the developing world, if it cost a billion dollars to resurrect someone
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in Kenya, well, there's no way you would spend that even once because you can spend $5,000
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So it's literally something like a two million fold difference in the wise allocation of resources
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So I just wanted to kind of open with that reflection that we're putting a price on life all the
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And this is just a very uncomfortable fact when you spell it out, especially in a global
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context where it's just obvious that we can't help but put less of a price on lives in the
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developing world, where this pandemic is going to land and is certainly landing now with very
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likely much greater consequence in well over 100 countries.
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We often have to deal with this trade-off, particularly in this case.
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Now, to some extent right now in America and Canada and other countries, there really isn't
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such a trade-off in that what a lot of economists would say is that the goal of helping out the
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economy and the goal of saving lives, they actually lead to the same action at this point.
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So pretty much every economist is saying, look, the lockdown is actually an end.
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If all you care is about is business and money, the lockdown is still good for that.
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And so you have a convergence of people on the right and the left agreeing that some degree
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of lockdown, there's going to be disagreements at the margins, is right.
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Later on, there's going to be trade-offs of exactly what you're saying.
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I don't think anybody would say we should keep locked up in our houses until the virus is entirely
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gone, until we have a vaccine that puts everybody out of risk.
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No, they're going to say we're going to open things up a bit.
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And if they're honest, they'll say, yeah, a few more people will die.
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And one way to think about it is it's a mistake to think of this inherently as money versus lives.
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What it ultimately is, is human flourishing versus human flourishing.
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In that, you know, the people who want the lockdown to be alleviated are not just saying
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It's because they want, you know, they want people to get their jobs back.
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They want people to be able to get married and attend funerals and be present when their
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loved one is having birth and have elected medical procedures and all of that.
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There's no easy answer, but you're trading off different things.
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They all revolve around what you've been most interested in, human happiness and human flourishing.
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So you bring up what has struck me as a second fallacy here, which, you know, I'm hearing
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many people resist the lockdown even now, suggesting that this cure is worse than the
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disease, you know, that the economic costs are too high.
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And these costs will translate, if not immediately, into lives lost.
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There will be, you know, livelihood lost and sanity lost.
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And the cost to human well-being is just too excruciating and will be in very short order,
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such that we should just roll the dice and open everything up and realize everyone's going
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And the reason why this seems to be a fallacy to me is these people are not properly comparing
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They're comparing the economic costs of lockdown to the way the world used to be, right, before
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They're not comparing the costs of lockdown to even just the economic costs of doing nothing
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or doing much less than we are now in terms of social distancing and letting the contagion
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So you just have to imagine, what does the economy look like when literally everyone
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you know has a story about a friend who went to a restaurant or to the mall or to a movie
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When we've basically just ridden the exponential curve as far as we can with contagion, people
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They're comparing the obviously scary and depressing effects, I'm sure they're only going to increase
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now in the coming months, of lockdown to the way they remember the world of yesteryear.
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But that world, there's no scenario under which that world exists before we get to a place
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where we've got a vaccine or a truly effective treatment for COVID-19, where the risk of getting
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this thing by living normally is absolutely tolerable and economic behavior can return to normal.
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I think some people have a fantasy where you say, well, look, let's make a hard choice
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We snap our fingers and life goes on exactly as it had.
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We go to sporting events and restaurants and everybody keeps their jobs.
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And then just magically, some fairly small percentage, 1%, half of 1%, whatever, of humans disappear
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Every projection done by a serious person, for instance, points out that the fact is as
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people got sick, they would flood the hospitals.
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And that would cause enormous collateral damage.
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And so, besides being incredibly cold-blooded, because often this comes in with saying, well,
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just the old people will get it, which isn't true.
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And to the extent it is true that they're proportionally more likely to get it.
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It doesn't take into account that economic damage cannot be disentangled from all the
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What do you do with the moral non-equivalence between this kind of real-world decision and
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a thought experiment we could easily cook up that could leverage the empathy module in
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So, like, obviously, people are willing to accept some number of deaths here for life to
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And given the way we're anchored to certain figures, I mean, given that people have accepted
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that in the worst year, the normal flu can kill 80,000 people in the U.S., right?
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Like, well, it was sort of 80,000 people died in, I think it was 2017 or 2018, by the flu.
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That's the worst influenza year in recent memory.
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And more or less nobody noticed unless they happen to have had a loved one killed by the
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And so we're sort of anchored to a figure like that.
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And if COVID-19 only kills 80,000 of us, many people will be saying we overreacted and it
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But when you picture it killing 80,000 people in any other way, I mean, what if we were given
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a choice that we could just perform a human sacrifice of, you know, 18 people in order
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The identifiable human life sacrificed is intolerable.
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And yet the statistical life, I mean, this sort of brings us back to the, I guess it's
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the Lenin quote, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.
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How do you think about our failure to reconcile the moral arithmetic there?
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There is a framing issue, which is how you put it.
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I heard Rudy Giuliani say something to the effect of, you know, well, that many thousands
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And imagine after 9-11 and, you know, the planes, you know, crash into Twin Towers and
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you say to Rudy Giuliani, you know, only about 2,800 people died.
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That's a rounding error when it comes to the flu.
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You would be looked at rightfully as a monster.
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And so the framing serves a rhetorical purpose.
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You connect the deaths due to COVID due to some large number of things that we accept and
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not something else in order to calm people down and get them to think this is a minor
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But if it was any other thing, we would not think of it as minor.
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And then, of course, this is something which utterly enrages me.
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And I've seen this more than once, including by William Bennett on Fox News, where he says,
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well, 60,000 Americans, we were told it was going to be much more.
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We did all this, and for 60,000, for, you know, 60,000 deaths is not such a terrible thing.
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Ignoring the fact that it's a number as low as 60,000, if that's what it's going to converge
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on, precisely because we spent a damn month in quarantine.
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You know, it's like I'm saying, I'm some guy saying, you know, we really need fire extinguishers
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for the fire, the fire comes, I use the fire extinguishers, there's not much damage.
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He says, you idiot, you thought we needed fire extinguishers, look, there's not much
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Yeah, that's what I referred to on Twitter as the first paradox of quarantine.
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If social distancing works exactly as intended by lessening the contagion, the people who were
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against social distancing will feel vindicated that we overreacted.
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So it is a, it's a paradox or a seeming paradox, but it's, you can knock your brain against it
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And the counterfactual is pretty clear and it's being advertised to us and will be continually
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advertised to us in other countries that have not or cannot affect an actual lockdown.
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We'll see what exponential spread looks like and what its consequences are in some places,
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And you raised before something which really is a genuine moral problem, which is a problem
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of how to, um, how to compare things that aren't naturally comparable.
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So it's terrible for people to lose their jobs.
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It could lead to, you know, in this country, another country, you know, starvation, loss of
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How many jobs lost equals one life or one death actually?
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And that's a strange question, you know, you know, but, but it's a strange question, but
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it's one that people actually have to wrestle with.
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I mean, if, if you knew that you could, you know, save the jobs of 10,000 people, but five
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people had to die, and this isn't science fiction, this actually could be just a policy
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We'll open up these restaurants and these bars and these stores.
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And, you know, you look at the numbers, five people will probably die because of it.
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It would be monstrous to say that there's no amount of death that's worth people getting
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their jobs back, businesses flourishing and so on.
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That, that sanctifies human life in such a way that, that, that it treats it separately
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And I think to some extent we have to make these comparisons, but they're very difficult
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But they may be impossible to do when made explicit, right?
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I mean, just like the example that's always come to mind in this context for me is the
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None of us have committed ourselves, you know, or very few people, I'm sure there's someone
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out there, but very few of us have committed ourselves to getting the government to pass
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speeding laws so as to bring the risk of death down on our highways as low as possible, right?
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So the lowest possible speed limit that's still compatible with the functioning of society
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None of us is wanting that and yet are not wanting that is just paid for in blood every
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So the reasons why we don't want that, because we just, we like the freedom to drive more or
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less as fast as we want, or, you know, it would just be too boring to spend that much
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time in a car because it takes three times as long to get anywhere.
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These are incredibly callous when held up against even a single death in a given year,
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And we know we reliably have something like 40,000 of them every year.
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So like when it's spelled out, if you had to opt in rather than find yourself in this system
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by default, but like if every time you got in your car, you had to, you know, sign a waiver
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saying, yes, I consent to put the lives of my neighbors at intolerable risk or at needless
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If made explicit, it would be somehow unsustainable.
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I'm not quite sure I know how to think about it beyond just flagging the problem.
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But if you just had to honestly assess real risk and your choice to embrace it, you know,
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There, you know, Phil Tetlock calls them taboo trade-offs.
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And, and the paradox we're in is we have to do this all the time.
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We have to have some sort of speed limit and any speed limit we have, if it were lower,
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If you had a speed limit, 10 miles per hour, 40,000 people won't die on the roads.
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It had just, well, what happened is you'd have millions of very pissed off people.
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We say, well, that much inconvenience, that much waiting and sitting in your car and getting
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bored out of your skull and not getting there on time.
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And it's, it sounds psychopathic to say this, but if you don't say it, you're stuck with
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absurdities where you demand a two mile per hour speed limit, or you're stuck with absurdities
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where you say, we will not open up business and restaurants and bars and so on until the
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coronavirus is entirely gone, entirely eradicated, which would be a ridiculous decision.
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Yeah, although it'll be a decision that you can't make for everyone, right?
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So we could decide to open restaurants tomorrow by fiat, but no one would go, you know, or few
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sane people would go under the current conditions.
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We know we're just bailing water as fast as we can and the boat is still filling up,
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So if you flip the switch and turn the economy back on, there would still be whole sectors
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And the only thing that's going to change that is the mass and hopefully veridical perception
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that the risk has been diminished to a tolerable level.
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So I, the easiest, we'll talk later about some predictions we want to make, but the
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easiest prediction in the world is we will end the lockdown before we end coronavirus.
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We will, it'll be a presence and we'll worry about it and we'll try to block it.
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But if we're honest with ourselves, we will all take some risk.
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So, so what do you think in terms of the, the complexion of life changing, what do you
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anticipate in terms of new norms around greeting people, you know, just, where does the handshake
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So, so, so let's, so let's look at a few things.
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You know, I could imagine, first thing, the handshake's going to stay.
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There's enough people who shake hands, but I could imagine among certain elite groups,
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people who travel a lot, people who worry a lot, people who are wealthy, maybe Hollywood,
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It could be replaced by the fist bump, the bow, other options.
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I don't think it's going to entirely go away, but it wouldn't surprise me if five years from
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now, there are some people who had, did handshaking, don't do it anymore.
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I could see it actually bifurcating along the typical political lines in the United States,
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where the Dems, many Democrats give it up and Republicans doggedly hold on to it.
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And the fact that each one of them, each group is doing it makes the other one more extreme.
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Where, you know, you and I shaking hands, we saw each other be like wearing MAGA hats.
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And, you know, while, you know, some Trump supporters bowing to each other, that's just
00:21:51.960
getting a fistfight for trying to do that shit.
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So, real Americans shake hands and the latte-sipping coastal elites namaste each other?
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What could be more of a cosmopolitan tree-hugging bullshit than namaste?
00:22:17.240
So, I might be too quick to say that the handshake will go away among any group, because people
00:22:29.000
But people like the contact, the hug, the kiss on both cheeks, the handshake.
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It's a natural human expression of solidarity and friendship and love.
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But I don't think things are going to go exactly the same.
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And I can imagine some groups moving to other options, particularly if a threat of infection
00:22:53.780
Well, I got to think that once we have a vaccine, you know, assuming we get a vaccine that works
00:23:01.040
like a normal vaccine, that offers a hard reset where we just go back to who we used
00:23:08.040
to be, hopefully with a few durable changes, just in terms of our being poised to respond
00:23:16.260
I think one thing we might get out of this, there's a phrase that the philosopher Nick
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Bostrom uses in talking about how we could respond to various existential risks.
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And I guess he would apply to the risk of pandemic as well, but we were talking about it in a different
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context, but he has this phrase that, you know, one path of mitigating risk is developing
00:23:38.740
something which he calls turnkey totalitarianism, where you can just, you just know how on a
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moment's notice to turn society into, you know, the maximally defensible project.
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And that entails, you know, mass surveillance and, you know, in this case, you know, impeccable
00:24:00.140
social distancing and the abrogation of all the rights that we have come to expect.
00:24:06.840
And it's the temporary abrogation of these rights, but it's, you know, we've all signed
00:24:11.500
up to survive for this period of a fortnight or a month or six months or whatever it is where
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I got to think this has been a dress rehearsal for something that could be quite a bit more
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deadly and we can learn something from this and become truly adept at pivoting to the everyone
00:24:33.980
get into your spaceship and seal the airlock scenario.
00:24:38.320
I mean, the idea of the stickiness of this sort of response is interesting.
00:24:43.120
To some extent, we've seen that with 9-11 where, you know, our security theater at airport
00:24:48.060
is right now indistinguishable from that, like three months after 9-11 in many regards.
00:24:57.280
We've shaken the etch-a-sketch pretty hard with respect to travel.
00:25:05.100
You can imagine this kind of a restart where maybe, you know, maybe TSA is going to let
00:25:10.220
me carry my liquids on the plane because what the hell?
00:25:16.940
And this is, you know, my prediction about handshaking and the like, you know, if two
00:25:22.280
months from now, we're kind of back into normal, I doubt it.
00:25:25.860
But if that were the case, we'd probably go back to our normal habits.
00:25:29.100
But if we go a long period of time, then I think our habits might change.
00:25:35.700
You know, you had somebody on your podcast, doctor.
00:25:38.960
I'm trying to think of positive implications of this event.
00:25:42.260
And if it were to turn out that, as you're saying now, that what we've learned from COVID
00:25:48.680
will prepare us for the big one, the one where 60% of people die and spreads like wildfire
00:25:58.560
Then, you know, as horrible as this is to say, this was a godsend.
00:26:02.860
No, there is a—it's amazing that once you take consequentialism seriously, you're left—whatever
00:26:11.900
judgment you have about the negativity of a given experience or a given outcome, it always
00:26:19.860
has to be bracketed by your uncertainty around how things will look once you get further out
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So this is—it's like, when do you actually do the math on whether something was bad?
00:26:35.120
Is it too early to say that Chernobyl was definitively a bad thing for the world?
00:26:40.920
Well, if something about Chernobyl leads us to become truly safe around the next generation
00:26:48.040
of, you know, nuclear reactors, which save us from the greater evil of climate change,
00:26:53.640
well, then Chernobyl was, again, another thing that actually we used to our advantage and
00:27:01.240
Or worse, if Chernobyl scared us away from nuclear power, thereby hastening climate change
00:27:08.360
because we lost a really important form of energy, it might have been, you know, a thousand
00:27:14.800
And for reasons that no one is even thinking about, yeah.
00:27:18.340
There's a Taoist parable to this, which I won't repeat because it takes too long, but
00:27:24.140
basically it's about this farmer and something bad happens to him.
00:27:27.280
And he says, yeah, but, you know, and everybody says, oh, it's too bad.
00:27:31.040
And then it turns out the bad thing turns out a good thing.
00:27:38.300
I have a fun variant of a more R-rated variant of your question.
00:27:43.740
I've heard two people, two very smart people, argue about this and come to different conclusions.
00:27:47.680
Pretty soon, this is going to release and people are going to be dating and, you know, dating
00:27:59.060
Do you imagine a release of pent-up sexuality, I've never said that phrase before, that will
00:28:05.880
immediately throw everybody into the arms of strangers and this explosion of promiscuous
00:28:10.780
Or do you imagine a period of reticence where for a little while people kind of holding back
00:28:16.760
Yeah, I guess this could be very different in different age cohorts.
00:28:22.680
I think the, you know, people under 30 probably even now consider themselves more or less immune
00:28:31.000
to this thing or that the consequences of getting it will be trivial or extremely likely
00:28:37.640
And that still seems to be sort of true, although you can find examples of people in their 20s
00:28:43.660
dying or being brought pretty close to death from this.
00:28:47.900
So it's not something that really anyone at any age should be eager to get.
00:28:51.880
But I think the perception could be very different there.
00:28:55.800
You know, as you get older, I mean, as you're, you know, you get into your 30s and 40s, I
00:29:01.180
have to think it's going to seem more like the AIDS crisis for people.
00:29:07.080
I mean, I think you're going to want some testing prior to hooking up.
00:29:12.420
Otherwise, you know, it just, it's going to seem like Russian roulette.
00:29:16.240
But the world after a vaccine and the world after, you know, in nearer terms, probably
00:29:22.980
the world after a truly effective antiviral treatment for COVID, I think those are very
00:29:29.620
different worlds than the one we're in or the one we'll be in when we stumble out of
00:29:34.020
our isolation with a regime of very arduous testing and tracing, keeping us safer than
00:29:44.320
Though this may happen sooner than a vaccine where they could test you, you could turn
00:29:50.000
out to have the antibodies suggesting that you've had COVID and you'll be immune.
00:29:53.880
And then I think they were doing this in China or something on their, on your smartphone.
00:29:57.540
You can get a little, uh, you know, a little red flower or something, something glowing,
00:30:02.060
a little orange flashing light that you could happily hold up to people saying, I'm clean.
00:30:07.240
That person will be Axel Rose in wherever, wherever he is in China or elsewhere.
00:30:11.560
Or is that, is that really the, the, the, the sort of avatar of unfettered sexuality?
00:30:17.500
Probably Axel Rose 20 years ago, 30 years ago when I'm dating myself and Axel Rose.
00:30:26.540
I, I, I, your listeners will never forgive us if we don't mention Trump.
00:30:29.680
Is this going to, is this going to help Trump or hurt Trump come, come election time?
00:30:34.680
Well, there are so many things that are conspiring to help and hurt Trump that it's, it's hard
00:30:40.020
to analyze this in isolation, but it should have destroyed his presidency already.
00:30:45.780
I mean, I just think the level of incompetence and dishonesty on display should be something
00:30:50.380
that for those who, for whom he had a good reputation, his reputation should never recover
00:30:55.660
from what happened in the month of March and what we've since learned about the month of
00:31:02.340
But I mean, so it's just, you know, he, he missed every opportunity to avoid distinguishing
00:31:07.100
our country as the country in which the contagion did the most damage.
00:31:13.740
We're, we're winning in the, in a very Trumpian sense now, and we should be tired of it, but
00:31:20.420
he is only going to get stronger as our response to this becomes more effective, right?
00:31:28.360
So he's now getting credit for, or will get credit if, you know, there's only 60,000 lives
00:31:37.880
He'll get credit for anything short of an absolute Holocaust, right?
00:31:43.780
You know, if there's 2 million lives lost because we come rushing out of our houses and
00:31:48.840
hit the exponential again in 50 states simultaneously and can't figure out how to get back in in
00:31:54.380
time, we've got nothing effective in terms of testing and we tip over into something horrific,
00:32:02.600
But I think anything short of this is the worst thing that's happened on American soil
00:32:08.480
in a century and a half, I think he looks like the guy who, however, ineptly solved the
00:32:17.540
It's his name on the checks that are going out to people, however, belatedly.
00:32:21.780
And part of this makes sense in that everyone wants him to succeed on some level.
00:32:28.760
Everyone wants to put politics behind them in an emergency.
00:32:33.580
So the default is to give him mulligan after mulligan after mulligan just to try to get
00:32:41.960
And he just benefits from that in a way that, you know, that Biden can't, right?
00:32:46.440
And so any criticism of him, as I've noticed, sounds to the ears of anyone who supports him
00:32:52.540
like mere partisanship, you know, however, however appropriately targeted it is to his
00:32:58.880
So I do think he's, I'm very depressed by our political prospects.
00:33:04.020
And this is, couple that with the fact that Biden seems like he's in the twilight of some
00:33:10.520
twilight and can barely complete a sentence without advertising the threat of old age,
00:33:19.020
I just think it's, it's a bad political season if you're hoping Trump is not going to be given
00:33:24.720
four more years to rampage through human history.
00:33:30.580
I've been watching his press conferences out of a kind of masochistic delight and, you know,
00:33:35.300
he's endlessly preening, declaring victory, boasting.
00:33:39.920
And, and I try to see this from somebody who hasn't been otherwise following it.
00:33:46.940
And because I think things are going to go well, I'm kind of an optimist.
00:33:50.340
And I think that the governors and, and the people in charge and the CDC are doing pretty
00:33:56.600
I think this is going to turn out not as bad as it could have.
00:33:59.860
And we're going to come out in the fall and Trump is going to be declaring victory over
00:34:04.860
And then people, presumably Biden, will point out, and I'll be exactly right, that he, he
00:34:13.280
It was a disaster, but they're going to come off as, as nitpicking as, as, you know, saying,
00:34:22.280
And you're complaining that very early on, there were some missteps.
00:34:30.740
There's one question that came in from Twitter, which seems appropriately targeted to you.
00:34:36.640
What do you think about the impact on children of this whole ordeal?
00:34:42.460
I mean, you know, both the, I mean, I guess, you know, most relevantly, just the experience
00:34:49.260
And what do you think about the impact on education?
00:34:54.380
I'll talk, we'll talk a bit about the first, see if we get to the second, but we have a
00:34:59.760
mutual friend and he, he sent me some stuff that Freeman Dyson wrote about the blitz.
00:35:04.320
So in the blitz, you know, this, this, what a 60 day long barrage of bombs over London by
00:35:10.380
Germany and the kids, of course, were sent off to the country.
00:35:13.400
I think about half of them were sent off to the country.
00:35:17.420
The kids in the country basically went feral and would just spend each day running around
00:35:21.580
And, and, and Dyson talks about this with great nostalgia and points out, Hey, we're
00:35:27.900
There's a lot of evidence suggesting that kids are alarmingly, strikingly, wonderfully
00:35:36.880
There's certain things that are really awful for a kid.
00:35:39.920
I think the worst things turn around, you know, cruelty by parents and stuff like that
00:35:45.940
But when it comes to this sort of thing, kids are great.
00:35:50.240
And so I have every reason to believe that at the end of all of this, there will be no,
00:35:55.760
you know, we won't have some sort of generation of the Corona traumatized, the Corona kids who,
00:36:00.420
you know, have to be under special medication and so on.
00:36:05.080
Does pulling the brakes at a fourth hour of continuous FaceTiming with one's friends count
00:36:10.460
Cause I'm sure there'll be some debate in my house about that.
00:36:13.520
Well, well, everything people so confidently said about screen time has gone out the window.
00:36:19.360
You know, and, and, and I think when it comes to implication, maybe we'll learn that we
00:36:23.180
worried a little bit too much about screen time and other things.
00:36:26.420
Maybe worried a little bit too much about that extra hour of school and so on.
00:36:33.060
When it comes to education in general, I'll sort of shift from, from kids to, to, to college
00:36:41.260
So every university, every college I know has gone online and Yale has gone online and I'm
00:36:48.040
And if you ask professors about this, what do you think of teaching online?
00:36:57.160
So, so the mechanics are twofold and this is, this is similar to what a lot of people
00:37:02.520
are doing for intro psych, which is what I teach.
00:37:05.300
The lecture component of the class has been replaced by online lectures.
00:37:09.680
I already had some up as part of a Coursera online system.
00:37:15.900
I refer them to, to some YouTube videos and some other things I've done and ask the lectures.
00:37:20.660
They watch the lectures online, but then we also have, have sections and we do that by
00:37:33.680
The lectures are not the same and professors will complain about it justifiably so.
00:37:39.960
But I can't help but think there are some positive features of this.
00:37:47.260
It's egalitarian at the level that you see everybody's faces at once, exactly the same
00:37:51.600
You're not sort of trapped by the structure of a seminar room or the distance of a lecture
00:37:56.660
But it's also egalitarian in that you can take a Yale course and you don't have to be in
00:38:04.120
And, you know, there was a big push for these MOOCs, these massive online courses many years
00:38:11.620
I don't think very few universities shifted to them and so on.
00:38:15.400
But having tasted this, I wonder whether it's going to change the way universities work.
00:38:20.700
I think maybe to the better, to some extent, where more stuff will be made online and more
00:38:25.440
stuff will be available to the 99% of humans who don't get to be, you know, close to a great
00:38:33.740
But wasn't the issue with MOOCs, and again, I don't know this firsthand, but my sense was
00:38:38.520
always that the lesson learned was that it's just harder to be motivated in solitude interacting
00:38:45.940
with screen-based content and being asked to do a lot of hard work to get through a course.
00:38:52.540
There's something about physically showing up with other people, even if it's only the
00:38:56.120
ritual of moving your body from one place to another, that makes it easier to just actually
00:39:07.520
You know, my office is right next to a large lecture hall on Yale campus.
00:39:12.540
And, you know, suppose Solomon Rushdie was coming to give a talk.
00:39:28.300
But in defense of the MOOCs, the experiment has never been properly done because you're
00:39:33.220
comparing kids who are at a university, say, or a college, and they have to take courses.
00:39:43.340
Versus people who are taking MOOCs, like they're picking up a paperback book they bought,
00:39:48.900
which is, you know, they look through it and then toss it aside if it's boring.
00:39:52.820
So the proper experiment would have a university course with the same requirements and grades
00:40:03.620
And I agree with you that the in-person matters.
00:40:08.660
I've been talking to a lot of friends over Zoom and having occasional drinks, regular drinks
00:40:14.260
You know, I'm not kissing them, but when I'm in person, we're not touching, but it's
00:40:22.300
So I don't think that there'll be a full replacement.
00:40:26.160
But I also think that this might really transform higher education, maybe in a good way.
00:40:33.020
So now if I want to see my doctor, I'll FaceTime with him.
00:40:36.440
He sent her an email saying, you want to meet with me?
00:40:41.860
And it occurs to me, for a lot of things, that's actually really efficient.
00:40:48.140
You know, some things he has, some things you got to touch, you got to touch the person,
00:40:51.960
But if I tell him, you know, look, I needed a, I'd like a renewal for this prescription.
00:41:00.700
Do you think there are many universities that might not survive a long hiatus here?
00:41:08.400
If this drags on into next year, I mean, I know there are.
00:41:12.060
Major ones have endowments that I would imagine make them bulletproof over a much longer time
00:41:18.260
But is there talk about just the failure of colleges in the near term?
00:41:23.380
There's always been smaller colleges that are on the brink and that rely on tuition money,
00:41:28.020
and they don't have million or billion dollar endowments.
00:41:33.160
We don't know what's going to happen in the fall.
00:41:35.920
Enrollment's definitely going to go down for many of them.
00:41:39.200
Whatever endowments these colleges have been, you know, damaged by the financial downturn,
00:41:47.900
And even, you know, and so nobody's going to cry for the Yales or the Princeton's and everything,
00:41:57.520
And I know at Yale School of Management, the tenure faculty are actually devoting some of
00:42:02.940
their salaries and shifting it to help out untenured faculty and staff who might lose
00:42:07.220
So even at a higher level, so very, very rich places are hurting.
00:42:12.700
This is really going to damage the smaller and less financially flexible places.
00:42:19.260
So do you even at a place like Yale, untenured faculty are losing their jobs or at risk of
00:42:27.640
No, they wouldn't be at risk of losing their jobs.
00:42:30.120
This is, in some way, the School of Management works differently.
00:42:33.160
And I think the money might actually go to staff who may get laid off.
00:42:35.840
But the untenured faculty here are not going to lose their jobs.
00:42:39.700
They are, we're not going to tenure fewer people or anything like that.
00:42:44.340
But I think a lot of people who work for Yale are at risk.
00:42:48.220
I think the graduate program is going to be maybe taking fewer graduate students.
00:42:56.540
I mean, you know, I feel awkward saying this because, you know, I know people have lost their
00:43:03.180
So, but I have students who have research projects and their research careers have been
00:43:13.300
It's just when you think about the economic environment into which people graduating now
00:43:19.660
or soon to graduate will be seeking to start their careers and how long it takes for us
00:43:25.460
to dig out from this, strangely to watch the stock market respond with, with a rally as it did
00:43:33.980
I think it went down again today, but yeah, you'd think there's been good news that decides,
00:43:40.020
you know, the winds of the economy have shifted.
00:43:42.320
But I mean, we're just at the very beginning of understanding how bad this is and will be
00:43:49.000
economically and it just seems like, you know, it could be years before people get back to
00:43:56.100
Certainly in some sectors, it's, I don't see how it could be anything other than years.
00:44:00.900
It could be, it could be devastating for people early in their careers for a lot of different
00:44:05.500
And, you know, more generally, I, you know, I've heard economists talk about it and nobody's
00:44:13.700
You know, everybody, all these people lost their jobs, but in some way, the jobs will
00:44:18.760
be waiting for them or waiting for somebody when, when lockdown ends, you know, you don't
00:44:24.080
expect this, this, this huge leap in unemployment to remain once this is over.
00:44:29.780
Except when you picture all of the small or smallish businesses that have failed in the
00:44:36.540
meantime, you turn the lights back on, but some significant percentage of restaurants
00:44:44.720
You know, there's just space now available for rent as a restaurant, you know, to reboot
00:44:51.080
You know, I don't know what the time course of that is, but.
00:44:54.020
And we talked before about, you know, how do you compare death to misery?
00:44:57.880
And, and each of these stories of a person losing their job, a business doesn't get started
00:45:03.300
You could spend your whole life trying to create something and have it dashed.
00:45:06.360
But I find myself struck by, by all of the small stories about, you know, women giving
00:45:15.520
Somebody's loved one dying and they can't be in a room with them.
00:45:19.480
Well, that one, that one's ubiquitous and that's really brutal.
00:45:23.120
I don't know if anyone, I'm sure in, in, in the context of some other pandemic or epidemic,
00:45:28.320
that's been a common experience, but that really is the, the experience now of people, anyone
00:45:34.760
who's going into a hospital, whether they're going to be there for weeks recovering or they're
00:45:40.160
going to die, it seems like it's the universal experience that they're waving goodbye to their
00:45:44.380
loved ones and hoping to see them at the end of all this.
00:45:48.000
I mean, this gets to the bigger question where a lot of my colleagues, a lot of people on social
00:45:52.060
media have been talking about what are the long-term psychological effects of this?
00:45:55.720
Will this cause a, you know, a sharp increase into depression and anxiety disorders?
00:46:00.980
Will it be sort of this collective trauma that a lot of people suffer from?
00:46:07.540
And I think the answer is yes, but not only yes, it gets complicated.
00:46:13.020
There there's, we also have psychological mechanisms that are protective against these
00:46:16.860
I said kids are resilient, but adults could be resilient too.
00:46:20.840
But one thing that strikes me, which is kind of, I'm trying to struggle my way home to think
00:46:25.580
about this, there's a literature on how we deal with, with sort of collective disasters
00:46:31.540
like hurricane Katrina or the September 11 bombing or the blitz.
00:46:38.740
And the answer typically is Rebecca Solnit has a great book called a paradise built in hell,
00:46:44.760
where she talks about this is it brings people together.
00:46:54.640
There's this, and there's a feeling of, of joy and bliss and a common purpose and a common
00:47:02.880
So, so you read about these cases and, and, and people talking back about what it was like
00:47:08.100
to be in a blitz, what it was like in these circumstances and saying, it was wondrous.
00:47:20.660
People will look back on the pandemic this way, but the cruel thing about the pandemic
00:47:28.260
We're getting together now over Skype, but you look at every other case and there are
00:47:32.580
people physically together in large groups, helping out, working together.
00:47:37.700
And, and, and the cruelty of this pandemic is it, it, it blocks us from, I think, a process
00:47:45.740
that would leave us far more resilient to the suffering that would make us better.
00:47:50.700
I mean, putting your shoulder to the wheel here is synonymous with social distancing.
00:47:58.520
It is the opposite of bringing people together.
00:48:01.320
And, and if what I can do is, is, is help pull the rocks from people who have been crushed
00:48:07.700
by an earthquake and I work on it day and night, it's horrible, but it's also such a thing
00:48:12.340
But if what I could do is sit at home and, and bake bread and watch Netflix, it doesn't
00:48:19.240
One thing that's interesting for me is the prospect of having one's perception of the
00:48:27.280
risk of contagion and its consequences permanently reset.
00:48:31.640
I really, I don't know if this is going to happen.
00:48:33.700
I do think that it's possible that once we have a vaccine, well, then the world essentially
00:48:41.160
And you and I never really were worried about Ebola and we're not going to worry about it
00:48:45.520
We're not going to worry about the next pandemic until it's sufficiently well advertised to
00:48:50.680
us that we're convinced we need to get back in our houses and hunker down.
00:48:57.920
But currently if I'm looking at a, a video, you know, shot in the distant past of six months
00:49:05.800
ago and you just see normal social behavior, right?
00:49:09.720
You see a crowd of people shoulder to shoulder.
00:49:12.100
You see a politician wading into that crowd and shaking hands.
00:49:16.960
And, you know, I feel like I now have the agoraphobia module in my brain fully installed
00:49:23.560
where I think that just looks fucking crazy, right?
00:49:32.880
That is the thing that is astonishing about the circumstances that this was not a maybe
00:49:38.540
this is something like this was more or less guaranteed to happen, right?
00:49:42.300
It's like we're open systems with respect to the rest of the world and it's novel viruses.
00:49:49.660
And once we solve this particular problem, we will be absolutely sure that the next one
00:49:55.480
Now, whether it's coming in four years or 40 years, we don't know.
00:49:58.360
But this is like the next tornado arriving in Tornado Alley.
00:50:02.220
You can't pretend you don't know about tornadoes if you live in Kansas.
00:50:08.500
And there's two possibilities for what happens when you get hit by a tornado.
00:50:13.380
One is it's always the safest bet when somebody says, how will this transform us to answer
00:50:20.740
And, you know, and I think this is true for some aspects of this.
00:50:23.940
I hear people say this will give us increased respect for the value of science.
00:50:30.080
You know, the people who care about science will care and then others will forget about
00:50:34.760
Even anti-vaxxers will come back, I bet, after a little while.
00:50:37.920
You don't think we can quash that one for good?
00:50:39.980
Well, I was thinking of the one group at risk is probably anti-vaxxers.
00:50:44.420
It's just it is very hard to be an anti-vaxxer to say.
00:50:47.560
But but wait, but wait, I I just think the most natural answer is the safest answer is always
00:50:57.300
You know, people shake hands because they always choke hands.
00:51:04.040
But but I have some sympathy for your kind of analysis to take it at an individual level.
00:51:11.860
You go for a nice walk around the neighborhood.
00:51:14.420
You know, every night you're all happy and everything.
00:51:16.840
And then one day you take a walk in the neighborhood and a vicious dog bites you and you're hospitalized.
00:51:23.420
For the rest of your life, walking around the neighborhood is different.
00:51:29.560
Maybe, you know, you do you do therapies, you work on it, but it's always there.
00:51:34.180
And in fact, the next time the dog bites you, it comes back like wildfire.
00:51:38.540
And I wonder whether this touch with disease and contagion, I guess I'm saying that there's
00:51:46.000
This touch with disease and contagion will forever reconfigure us where, you know, right
00:51:51.440
now you're fine and then, you know, a couple of years later, someone loudly sneezes at
00:51:57.840
We find ourselves washing our hands more often.
00:52:03.460
That has to be an irony of of anyone who's far along on that spectrum.
00:52:08.060
I mean, just this, you know, compulsive hand washing behavior is the order of the day now.
00:52:11.900
Yeah, it's like it's the introverts' revenge and also the obsessive washers' revenge.
00:52:17.900
I know a guy on, a friend of mine, and on Twitter he was saying, so this is another take on it,
00:52:22.480
saying that he's normally a very anxious person.
00:52:25.400
And I know him, and he self-medicates with marijuana and kind of, but he's basically an
00:52:30.280
He says, this has been the least anxious period of his life because, A, everything he worried
00:52:36.380
about has happened, and, B, everyone else is sharing his feelings, his experience, too.
00:52:46.720
The happiness of the paranoid person who finally sees the black helicopter circling his house
00:52:53.300
And, in fact, I mean, that's something which is just amazing.
00:52:56.600
I don't know if we talked about it last time or this time, but one of the things which
00:53:03.940
How we, for the first time in my life, and maybe I will never experience this again, I
00:53:08.820
am experiencing something that everyone else in the world is, in different ways, but pretty
00:53:15.600
Yeah, although I keep having to remind myself that, on the one hand, we're having a shared
00:53:22.760
Just take the United States, something like, I think it's 97% of us are under something
00:53:29.480
like lockdown orders, but they're very different experiences to be having in that context.
00:53:35.660
I mean, there are people like me who are extraordinarily fortunate to be, one, locked down in a condition
00:53:44.420
of relative comfort with family, who I'm experiencing the silver lining of, you know, lots of enforced
00:53:55.300
You know, there are people who are, even in my, in similar circumstances, but they're not
00:54:02.360
You know, they're figuring out how they can get divorced the moment the quarantine lifts.
00:54:07.080
But then they're, you know, just add all these other variables.
00:54:09.260
There are people like me who can continue working, and there are people who have just seen their
00:54:14.920
economic life completely implode, because, you know, work is synonymous with not being
00:54:21.800
And then there's just every other permutation of this in other contexts, like, you know,
00:54:26.140
what's going to happen in the developing world where you can't even lock down, right?
00:54:30.320
And there's so much crowding and kind of hand-to-mouth economic necessity where it's just,
00:54:37.040
you know, you just have to try to keep living normally because there's not much of a health
00:54:42.260
system that you're going to crash in the first place, right?
00:54:44.680
So people are just going to get this virus, and you can try to avoid it, but it's more
00:54:50.160
So it's just the range of experiences under this common condition is impressive.
00:54:55.540
And we don't have shared fates here, and that's...
00:55:00.440
I'm in Toronto now, and there's a lot of controversy about people.
00:55:03.820
People of wealth in Toronto typically have a summer cottage by the lake.
00:55:07.640
And so, because the mayors of these cottage communities are saying, don't come.
00:55:17.220
We don't have the resources and everything like that.
00:55:19.100
And then, you know, but if you say, well, I pay taxes, and I bought this place.
00:55:23.640
On the other hand, you know, I could walk down, you know, Queen Street, where I'm at, and I
00:55:30.620
And they're not obeying social distancing because they're homeless.
00:55:34.880
They don't have anybody, you know, they're protecting each other.
00:55:39.460
And so, but I'd still say, you know, I read something in New York Times, and the headline
00:55:44.240
was something to the effect of, half of the world under lockdown.
00:55:54.840
When have you thought about something and knew of some certainty that people in Kenya
00:55:59.760
and Tokyo and Saskatoon are thinking about the very same thing?
00:56:05.260
I can name those occasions, and they're impressively few.
00:56:09.240
But I think the first moment like that, that seemed like it was a truly a global moment where
00:56:15.160
everyone was paying attention to the same thing, or nearly everyone.
00:56:18.540
Strange to say it, that it was the first thing in my lifetime that seemed to rise to that level
00:56:27.960
That was just an order of magnitude bigger than anything else that had happened in terms of its, you know, media coverage.
00:56:34.140
And then you had 9-11, and then you had Trump's election, and then you have, you know, a fair amount of Trump,
00:56:41.380
And I don't know what, I'm sure there's something else on that list, but they're pretty few and far between these events.
00:56:48.280
But a lot of those things, I don't think they compare.
00:56:52.200
I think that, you know, when Trump was elected, there was probably a snapshot where the whole planet was going,
00:57:00.980
But then two days later, you know, if you're, you know, a real estate agent in Beijing,
00:57:06.520
you're probably not thinking about Trump, you know, and you weren't thinking about 9-11.
00:57:09.700
But people in New York thought about 9-11, but how much did people in Nebraska two months later think about 9-11?
00:57:15.840
But now we're thinking about this all the time.
00:57:18.920
And so on the one hand, it's this enormous collective communal thing.
00:57:25.940
And I'm worried that the aloneness is going to block any positivity that you might get from the shared experience.
00:57:35.700
People do, you know, and I don't want to diminish that.
00:57:39.140
And I'm fortunate as well to be to be stuck with somebody I love.
00:57:43.180
There's a lot of people, even people who aren't having terrible experiences are stuck with people they hate.
00:57:47.740
And imagine being stuck in a place and imagine it's not a big place with somebody who hates you and you hate them.
00:57:55.140
I mean, the people who are isolated and are not well designed for isolation.
00:58:03.320
We had a bunch of topics from Twitter related to the election, the prospect of Bernie supporters refusing to vote for Biden.
00:58:13.860
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