#359 — Getting Used to It
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
155.11562
Summary
Cass Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor and the co-author of several interesting books, including Nudge, Noise, and the latest, The Power of Noticing What Was Always There. In this episode, Cass and I discuss the problem of habituation and its consequences, and what we can do about it. We discuss how we tend to habituate to both good and bad things, and how this can affect our perception of the world and our ability to make sense of it. And we talk about the potential benefits of this habituation, including how it can be harnessed to make us more aware of things we don t want to be aware of, like the noise in the room where we are in order to be more sensitive to things we do want to experience. We don t run ads on the podcast and therefore, therefore, are made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. If you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of what we're doing here. You'll get access to our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford a full-time college education. There's no ads, and you'll get free accounts, and access to all the benefits that come with the scholarship programs, including early-bird pricing, early access to the podcast, and much more! Thanks for listening to the Making Sense Podcast! -Sam Harris This is a note to say that if you're not currently on our subscriber feed, you'll need to subscribe to our podcast and we'll only be hearing the first part of this episode of the podcast by becoming a member of our podcasting program, so you won't miss out on the second part of the second half of the conversation. . In order to access full episodes of the making sense Podcast? , you'll also find our scholarship Program, where you'll be able to access the full episode. , where we'll also get a discount code: "Making Sense Podcast." and so on. ...and so on and so much more... (Make Sense Podcasts) - The Making Sense Podcasts! -- Samharris -- ... And so on is the most cited legal scholar in the U.S. Law School Podcast The most cited author in the US Supreme Court professor in the world, and from 2009 to 2012, the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if
00:00:11.640
you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be
00:00:15.580
hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making
00:00:19.840
Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our
00:00:24.960
scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one.
00:00:28.340
We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
00:00:32.860
of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
00:00:45.220
Today I'm speaking with Cass Sunstein. Cass is the most cited legal scholar in the U.S.,
00:00:52.600
and from 2009 to 2012, he served as the administrator of the White House Office of
00:00:59.180
Information and Regulatory Affairs. Since then, he's served in various capacities in the U.S.
00:01:04.720
government and advised many nations, as well as the United Nations, the Asian Development Bank,
00:01:10.740
and the World Health Organization. He is a professor at Harvard Law School and the co-author
00:01:17.240
of several interesting books, Nudge, Noise, and his latest, which he wrote with Tali Sharot,
00:01:26.120
is Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Always There. And today Cass and I speak about the book.
00:01:33.320
We talk about habituation and its consequences, the way we habituate to positive and negative experiences.
00:01:39.660
We discuss things like marriage and happiness and meaning and variety, doing good versus feeling
00:01:48.000
good, midlife crises, having kids, wealth and happiness, things versus experience, and we pivot to
00:01:57.900
topics of more political relevance. We talk about the illusory truth effect, misinformation and social
00:02:04.880
media, echo chambers and extremism, what governments can do to respond to misinformation, free speech
00:02:12.280
on college campuses, the 2024 presidential election, and other topics. And now I bring you Cass Sunstein.
00:02:26.760
I'm here with Cass Sunstein. Cass, thanks for joining me again.
00:02:32.060
So there's a lot to talk about, some of which is contained in your new book. So I think we'll start
00:02:37.660
there. The book which you wrote with Tali Sharot is Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Always
00:02:45.840
There, which is focused on this fascinating problem. And I mean, in some ways, it's a problem. I guess in
00:02:54.600
other ways, it's an advantage. But the problem of habituation and what to do about it. I mean,
00:03:01.340
we habituate to both good and bad things. And you'd think that habituating to bad things would be good,
00:03:07.040
but certainly not always. How do you think about this? First, what is habituation?
00:03:12.540
Okay. So suppose you're going into the ocean, and in the first seconds, it's horrible. It's really cold.
00:03:20.880
And you're thinking, why am I going into the ocean to freeze myself? And then after a few seconds,
00:03:28.280
it's cold. And then a little while later, it's okay. And then a little while later, come on in,
00:03:35.580
the water's fine. Many things are like that, meaning we have showed diminishing sensitivity to stimuli.
00:03:43.280
So if you go into a room and there's some smell, maybe someone smoking, maybe there's a dog who had
00:03:51.200
a moment, you will smell the smell and think, this is really stinky. And then after 20 minutes,
00:03:58.380
chances are you won't notice it. Right now, there may be a noise in the room where you are,
00:04:04.160
and you're not noticing it because you've habituated to it. And that's kind of how our species
00:04:09.940
is. And in fact, that's how all living creatures are. The more we're exposed to things, the less
00:04:16.280
sensitive we are to them. Yeah. So just neurologically speaking, we have these internal
00:04:21.880
models of how our perceptual state should be, is expected to be. It's just a predictive coding
00:04:29.720
routine, both with respect to perception and our behavioral engagement with the world. And when
00:04:36.640
things conform to our predictions, our responses to them, their salience becomes inhibited and things
00:04:43.540
just begin to fade. And we tend to notice errors and prediction errors. And again, this can be to
00:04:51.440
positive or negative stimuli. On the face of it, habituation to negative things sounds like it would
00:04:59.080
be good. What's the potential problem with that?
00:05:01.760
Well, it's good in many ways. I can't fly. I don't have wings. And I also can't make the Olympic
00:05:09.340
basketball team. And neither of those is making me suffer. I've habituated.
00:05:16.720
Never could I make the Olympic basketball team. And I never thought, oh my gosh, surprise,
00:05:22.400
I'm not going to make it. I habituated early to the fact that I can't fly and I can't do what
00:05:28.780
Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant and LeBron James can do. So to habituate to something that just you
00:05:35.920
can't do has many advantages. It means you're not having a surprise signal that deflates and
00:05:42.120
demoralizes you every moment that your winglessness attaches you to the ground. But with respect to
00:05:49.260
something bad, it may be that there's something that can be changed and that is kind of not good in
00:05:56.200
the world or in your life that you habituate yourself to, that you live with and don't even
00:06:02.620
form a sour face. You just think it is what it is. My nominee for the worst phrase in the English
00:06:09.900
language, it's terrible. But it's the phrase of the habituating creature. It is what it is.
00:06:16.460
And if you're living with, let's say, someone who's really mean at the workplace, you might get used
00:06:22.180
to it. So after a couple of weeks, you don't notice it so much. But still, the person is really
00:06:26.900
mean. Or if you're in a town that has dirty water or a high level of crime, or let's say corruption,
00:06:33.460
something that is bad for you and bad for the community, the fact that it's a little like cold
00:06:39.180
water whose coldness you don't notice after a while, that means it's going to stay there when it
00:06:45.280
may not be inevitable. Yeah. Well, there are some things that I fear we're habituating to
00:06:50.340
in our politics and public life that I will bring up in a while with you because you're an expert on
00:06:57.840
those topics. But before we get there, what are you, so having written this book, are you doing
00:07:04.600
anything differently in your life or is it born of anything you have been doing differently in your
00:07:09.720
life so as to increase the sense of novelty and accentuate your pleasures and minimize your
00:07:16.660
pains? How are you applying this to your actual experience? Well, the most immediate thing is I'm
00:07:21.420
on book tour. And the book produced a book tour, and that's new for me. And incredibly painful?
00:07:28.300
No, I'm loving it. And I get to talk to you. So thank you. It's a fantastic stroke of luck that
00:07:36.240
people want to hear about this or are willing to hear about this. So that's an experience that
00:07:42.820
doesn't have habituation in it. But in terms of my own life, I look at my children and my dogs
00:07:49.800
since I've been working on this book with a sense of discovery and amazement. And while I adored my
00:07:58.040
children and my dogs too since the day I first got to see all four of them, and my bigger daughter,
00:08:05.420
so five of them, the fact that I can see them as a miracle rather than just part of life
00:08:12.220
is occasioned by the book. So Julia Roberts, the actor, is a hero of the book. She said in an
00:08:19.560
interview pretty recently while we were in the midst of writing the book that her favorite day,
00:08:24.120
her best day, is when she makes food for her kids, she makes the breakfast, and she has lunch with her
00:08:29.160
husband. And she stops herself and says, it's boring. But then she adds, because of my job,
00:08:35.620
I go away, I come back to my family life, and it's surrounded by pixie dust. It re-sparkles.
00:08:43.140
And that notion of re-sparkling with respect to, you know, I get to have a place to live that's
00:08:49.240
nice enough, and I get to, my job is mostly teaching. I see these things with more a sense
00:08:57.300
of amazement than, you know, that's life, partly because of the book.
00:09:03.760
Yeah, one of your experts in the book, Esther Perel, sounds like she's recommending that
00:09:09.500
people actually strategically take some separation from one another, you know, romantically,
00:09:16.040
so as to revivify the connection. I mean, whether it's a night or a weekend or, you know, a business
00:09:22.700
trip or whatever it is, there's something about, you know, there's the obvious cliche, you know,
00:09:28.620
absence makes the heart grow fonder. But she's claiming that it does, and we sort of ignore that
00:09:34.620
at our peril. She has something very specific to say, and I should say that I met Esther Perel because
00:09:41.080
we were, I was, at a wedding, and to see her at a wedding is pretty remarkable because she writes
00:09:49.740
about marriage and some of the... It's like seeing the Grim Reaper at a wedding.
00:09:54.040
That's right, a little ominous. She's a very nice and upbeat person. And at the dinner,
00:09:58.920
we talked a bit about marriage, and her focus is on the deadening of romantic sparks. And so her
00:10:07.000
great line is, fire needs air. And that's because people habituate to everything, including an amazing
00:10:14.540
person you get to live with. So she says when members of couples are most attracted to each
00:10:20.760
other, and this is based on her experience, it's often they see each other across a crowded room
00:10:26.580
talking to somebody else. And that's because that dishabituates you. The person isn't just the
00:10:32.520
person you live with. The person is, in some respects, a stranger. And then you think, my gosh,
00:10:38.120
that's amazing. And this is true of general things in life, good things, which may be there's no air
00:10:45.040
between us and them. And that makes us like them. They can be comfortable and pleasant, but they don't
00:10:51.120
have a sense of sparkle. There's no pixie dust around them.
00:10:56.380
How do you apply these insights, if you do, to your conception of your own life, your career at
00:11:04.900
this point, and whatever goals you have, or explicit or implicit? I mean, there's certainly
00:11:12.480
some wisdom to be extracted here with respect to how we think about human flourishing and the
00:11:19.120
relationship of things like wealth and success to that ambition. If you could go back in time and
00:11:27.640
talk to your, whatever, 20-year-old self, at some point where you probably were not as informed as
00:11:34.120
you are now, what would you say about the importance of wealth and success and having a career that not
00:11:43.060
only brought you those two things, but something that was more in line with a vocation, something that
00:11:48.520
was directly tapping you into meaning, you know, because you have a, you know, I will have properly
00:11:53.380
introduced you before we started talking here, but you have a many, many irons in the fire. You know,
00:11:59.200
you have, you, I think are often described as the most cited legal scholar in the country. And you've
00:12:07.220
served in government. You have been a creature of the university. You have written and co-written a
00:12:13.720
number of books on diverse topics that would seem to be just you following your intellectual
00:12:19.940
interests into, into fun spaces. So you're, you're doing a lot and you have experienced a lot of
00:12:26.240
success. You have been surrounded by successful, powerful people. What lessons can you draw about
00:12:32.640
all that? Well, I think I'd be very cautious talking to my younger self on the ground that my younger
00:12:39.780
self would have a perspective that I lack and I might kind of screw him up. But if he would listen
00:12:46.160
to me, and since he is me, he probably would, though with a sense of the surreal science fictional
00:12:52.340
quality of it, I'd say follow the path you think best. You probably will make some not terrible choices.
00:13:01.000
But I guess I'd add something I know, which is that there are three things that people really care
00:13:06.720
about. One is that they're happy, meaning that the days are smile-producing rather than tear-producing,
00:13:15.240
that they're enjoying days, they're not feeling scared or anxious. But that's not the only thing.
00:13:22.220
People also want to have a sense of meaning. So if you have a day where you're, you know,
00:13:27.680
scowling a fair bit, not smiling a whole lot, but you're doing something that you consider
00:13:32.760
valuable and honorable and makes you feel you're contributing, that might be not a very happy day,
00:13:40.260
but it might be a super meaningful day. And the idea of trying to seek both happiness and meaning
00:13:46.720
is when I think my younger self didn't get that well. I think my younger self probably was
00:13:53.020
a little low on the meaning side and a little higher on the happiness side.
00:13:58.240
That person happened to luck into meaning, but it wasn't sought. Maybe there's a lesson there.
00:14:04.380
But there's a third thing, which I think your question gets at, which recent data puts in a big
00:14:12.180
font, which is that people need psychological richness too, meaning variety in their life.
00:14:19.080
So if you have someone who has really happy life and it's full of meaning, if it's the same thing
00:14:24.660
over and over again, both the happiness and the meaning are going to get less colorful over time.
00:14:32.040
So if you spend 10 years, let's say, doing cancer research, which is incredibly meaningful,
00:14:38.520
you may think I'm going to do 11 and 12 and 13 and 14 years also on that. But it may be that the
00:14:46.280
sense of amazement that you have that you get to do it diminishes and even evaporates.
00:14:53.760
And so people will sacrifice happiness and meaning for the sake of variety. And I've been lucky to
00:15:02.080
have a fair bit of variety that even now I have some role in government as well as some role as an
00:15:10.800
academic. And so on Monday, I might be trying to figure out something about the Constitution.
00:15:16.200
And on Thursday, I might be able to participate in the process where we're trying to solve some very
00:15:21.360
concrete problem. And one's theoretical and abstract and the other is intensely in the next two days,
00:15:28.780
how we're going to handle this. And they're very different mindsets. And I'm smiling because
00:15:34.240
the skill set is so different. But it may be that I'm thrilled to do both because I get to do both.
00:15:41.240
Yeah, I'm struck by the distinction between the good we do in the world and the way it feels to do
00:15:50.300
such good or to do anything. And those are often not at all coupled to one another, which is you can
00:15:58.400
write a very large check to an organization that's saving lives in the most efficient way possible.
00:16:04.020
And your experience of writing that check could be one of just total distraction and a lack of
00:16:12.760
salience, right? You've decided to write the check. You know in the abstract you support this
00:16:18.180
organization. But you're just dashing off this philanthropy as you go about your day. And you
00:16:24.740
never really take the time to reflect on the place you now occupy in a causal chain of goodness that
00:16:31.480
really is saving lots of lives. Whereas maybe in that same day, and I kind of speak from experience
00:16:38.380
now, having compared these things in my life a lot, you might be on a walk and, you know, someone's got
00:16:46.620
a flat tire on their bicycle and you help them fix it, right? And so it's a 10-minute exchange with a
00:16:53.460
stranger, which is wholly positive. But when you look at what gladdens your mind at the end of the day,
00:17:01.480
it's going to be the fixed bicycle tire and that exchange much more than the check to the
00:17:07.780
organization that might have actually saved thousands of lives. And, you know, I'm obviously
00:17:14.000
not suggesting we should make a choice between those things because we're not forced to. But
00:17:18.620
it would be nice if the most meaningful things we did were almost by definition, the most rewarding
00:17:26.520
things we did. I mean, that's the kind of circle of incentives you wish you could achieve
00:17:34.760
It's a great point. So what I'm thinking is the relationship between what you said and habituation.
00:17:40.480
So making out a check isn't something that sends a surprise signal to the human mind.
00:17:46.320
So it's something that people do, make out a check. So if you make out a check to pay your electricity
00:17:51.920
bill, that's the same act as making out a check, let's say, that will transform some number of
00:17:58.620
lives. And the act doesn't make you think, oh my gosh. And everything depends in terms of
00:18:05.960
our brain's alertness on whether there's a surprise signal or not. If you go and help some stranger
00:18:13.340
who's having a struggle with a bicycle or a struggle getting into a building or something,
00:18:17.680
that's probably the only time you did that that day or maybe that week or that decade.
00:18:23.380
Yeah, or that decade. And so the surprise signal is just a jolt of the best way. So if someone
00:18:31.740
says something that really amazes you that either hurts your feelings a lot or that makes you feel
00:18:39.800
great, then that's big in terms of your head. Not like you're going to get conceited,
00:18:46.780
but you're going to get rewarded. And that's part of it. It's also part of it is that there's
00:18:52.160
the personal, of course, we're wired to react to. So if you just send some check,
00:18:59.720
piece of paper that goes to 17 people, let's say you'll never meet, that's not going to
00:19:05.020
generate the same reaction as if you do something with one human being who looks you in the eye and
00:19:10.960
says, you know, thanks or I'm glad you're here.
00:19:14.480
Do you have any thoughts specific to midlife? I mean, if you're talking not to your 20-year-old
00:19:20.840
self, but to your mid-career self or your, let's say your 40, 45-year-old self, is there anything
00:19:26.560
that would have been important to communicate at that point?
00:19:30.440
Well, of course, I'm much younger than 40. So when I think of my 40-year-old self, I think that's
00:19:35.980
really an old guy, and I hope he can still run. I'm still waiting to see you in the NBA.
00:19:41.360
But I do know something about midlife crisis because we studied it for purposes of the book.
00:19:47.540
There are midlife crises all over the world, not everywhere, but in many nations. It's kind
00:19:54.500
of shocking. It's generality. And it happens at different ages, but it's the same phenomenon.
00:20:00.480
And we have a theory of what accounts for the midlife crisis. It's that once you are, let's
00:20:08.320
say, 40, it may be that life is really good, but nothing's changing. It's gray. So you have maybe a
00:20:16.500
partner or maybe a community. It's the same. You have a job. It's good. It's steady. You have a place
00:20:23.780
where you're living. That's kind of where you live. And this is a little like, I'm going to phrase it
00:20:29.200
very strongly, but a little like being dead in terms of the mind. When you're 20, you can fall
00:20:35.660
in love tomorrow. You can have your heart broken that night. You can learn something that's going
00:20:42.700
to completely reorient where you're going. You can think, now I'm going to go to a place, maybe in
00:20:50.140
the United States, maybe elsewhere that I've never been before. And my gosh, what would it be like to
00:20:55.920
see Los Angeles? Whereas if you're 40 or 50, the chance that you've seen Los Angeles is higher.
00:21:02.380
And the idea that Los Angeles is going to make you amaze the very prospect of Los Angeles,
00:21:08.540
that's just lower. So for people in midlife crises, it's often like you're in a world where you have
00:21:16.620
what you want. And there might be happiness, there might be meaning, I hope so, but psychological
00:21:23.460
richness might not be present. People who are older, by the way, when their kids have left,
00:21:29.920
maybe, they're not sure where they're going to live. They might take up a hobby. They might retire
00:21:35.600
and do something different. They might stay in their job and do something different. No good life
00:21:44.500
Hmm. Well, how much of that has to do with kids? You just sounded like you were celebrating the
00:21:49.560
empty nester phase. Well, there are a couple of things to say. So it turns out that taking care
00:21:56.620
of small kids, people do take a happiness hit. They might have a meaning boost, but happiness goes
00:22:06.160
down. And one thing about taking care of kids is there are lots of surprises. And so habituation is
00:22:14.460
less likely. Keep in mind, habituation is diminished sensitivity to a stimuli that stays constant or
00:22:21.600
changes very slowly. I have an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old, and there are lots of surprises.
00:22:28.680
They're not like two-year-olds and four-year-olds, so it's not like that, but there are lots of
00:22:33.760
surprises. For people who have empty nest, there are, along one dimension, more surprises for many,
00:22:43.140
meaning you can do whatever you want now. You can travel. You can go to Munich if you want,
00:22:51.600
if you have the resources. And if you don't have the resources, you can take a little vacation an
00:22:56.800
hour away maybe and see a town that's charming and that you've never seen before. And the fact of
00:23:02.820
going and changing is in some ways more available to the empty nesters than to the nested.
00:23:10.280
Well, how does this relate to the connection between wealth and happiness? How do you think
00:23:16.000
about that? And there's a dichotomy, which at some point you discuss in your book, of experiences
00:23:22.760
versus things, being the things that one might get with wealth. What is wealth good for when we're
00:23:30.940
talking about human flourishing beyond, obviously, the basics of just not being poor and having to
00:23:36.740
deal with acute financial stress continuously? Okay. We know a lot about this, more probably than
00:23:44.260
humanity ever has. So as you say, being really poor is very bad. Everything gets worse. Weakens
00:23:54.220
that have stress in them are worse if you're poor. Something involving health is worse if you're poor.
00:24:00.780
Everything is worse, basically, population-wide if you're poor. The recent data suggests that
00:24:07.720
more money is just better. It's not hugely better, but it's definitely better, both in terms of how
00:24:15.020
well people evaluate their lives, asking how happy are you, and in terms of measured experience.
00:24:21.760
It keeps getting better up to, there may be a ceiling, but up to very large sums, people get happier.
00:24:30.100
Not a whole lot, but definitely happier with more money, except the bottom 20%. So the bottom 20%
00:24:38.660
in terms of happiness, they are not going to do better when they are earning $200,000 versus when
00:24:45.860
they're earning $90,000. They do do better, up to $70,000, by the way. But after that, if you're in
00:24:52.440
the bottom 20% in terms of happiness, the difference between $220,000 and $80,000 is basically zero.
00:24:59.880
And what's going on with them, we don't know exactly. But the most plausible account is if
00:25:05.760
you're suffering from, let's say, anxiety or bereavement or depression, to have $80,000 versus
00:25:13.720
$10,000, that's good. But to have $80,000 versus $200,000 doesn't matter a whole lot.
00:25:20.600
So wealth matters less to well-being, over $70,000 than one might think, but it is definitely a
00:25:29.100
positive. Having said that, suppose you have a pot of money you just get, some number of dollars,
00:25:36.380
let's say $500, do you want to spend that on getting a product, maybe a new laptop, maybe
00:25:43.500
a television, or do you want to spend it on an experience, maybe a night or two in some place?
00:25:50.760
Experiences tend to produce more happiness than products. And this is a little startling,
00:25:57.780
because a product, if you get a new TV, you can have that forever. If you have one or two nights away,
00:26:03.780
you just have that for one or two nights. The reason appears to be that people habituate
00:26:09.160
to products. So I have a new and better TV now. This is actually an autobiographical statement,
00:26:16.260
I do, than I did two years ago. But is my life better, even in terms of TV watching,
00:26:23.300
than it was with the old, pretty good TV? Not much. I habituate to the new, better TV.
00:26:29.160
With the experience, you have it, if it's short-term particularly, it's a boost for you,
00:26:38.000
and you remember it. So people don't habituate to experiences that are short-term for sure,
00:26:44.800
and they remember them. So you think of products as the gift that keeps on giving,
00:26:50.420
it's less true than intuition suggests. And you think of experience as ephemeral,
00:26:55.560
that's also less true than intuition suggests. Experiences are actually the gift that keep on
00:27:03.360
Yeah. Yeah. I guess there are probably some material objects that bridge those two things. I'm thinking
00:27:10.180
of something like having a great gym or something, something you use a lot, which actually changes you
00:27:17.080
as a person on some level, and it gives you a new sense of well-being or competence. Let's say you get
00:27:23.580
into cycling. Getting the bike that allows you to get into cycling is probably more than just a
00:27:29.540
product. It becomes a new hobby. And so there's maybe corner conditions where it looked like
00:27:37.340
Completely. I'm thinking as you talk that I actually joined a gym in DC, which I dearly love. I didn't
00:27:44.100
take up a new sport. I do my usual sport, which is squash. But my first days visiting that gym,
00:27:51.040
it's a nice gym, were over the moon. I was in love with the gym. I wanted to marry the gym.
00:27:57.320
And now I just really like the gym, but I don't have the feeling of astonishment. And that's what
00:28:06.180
the book is about. That's about habituation. And our conversation will make me more amazed at the gym
00:28:13.360
next time I go, which I hope is tomorrow, by virtue of the fact that I've reminded myself
00:28:21.080
Well, again, the book is called Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Always There,
00:28:26.140
which you wrote with Talisha Rote. And she's quite a celebrated neuroscientist at, I believe,
00:28:32.860
both at MIT and University College London. So I want to just take a bridge from where we were to
00:28:39.420
some other concerns, which some of what you actually do, you do touch on some of this in
00:28:44.940
the book. There's a section on misinformation, and I think, conspiracy thinking. But one thing I'm
00:28:52.240
worried that we're getting habituated to is total dysfunction and toxic partisanship in our politics,
00:28:59.540
and just a failure to have a fact-based discussion about anything of consequence, given that our
00:29:09.480
entire population appears to be siloed into incompatible data sets with respect to, I mean,
00:29:15.840
most of this is happening on social media, but I guess it's even a bigger problem than that,
00:29:19.720
just in terms of the kinds of information sources that the various echo chambers consider to be
00:29:27.400
sources of information. And there's a very perverse effect here, where when you look at what
00:29:33.760
a government can do to respond to misinformation and conspiracy thinking, there's a kind of paradox,
00:29:41.780
because many of the most inflammatory pieces of misinformation, many of the most inflammatory
00:29:47.500
and polarizing conspiracy theories, relate to the government's very efforts to respond to
00:29:54.560
misinformation and conspiracy thinking. So anytime the government has reached out to a social media
00:30:00.400
organization trying to get them to dampen down some crackpot thesis that may well be getting people
00:30:06.200
killed, let's say during a pandemic, that is now exhibit A in the Orwellian overreach of our government
00:30:14.520
that suggests that the pandemic itself was entirely fake to some people, and just a pretext to seize
00:30:22.840
control of the levers of power. Give me your view of our current state of polarization and
00:30:30.620
discombobulation, and what are we going to do about it?
00:30:34.120
Okay, great. So let's talk about the habituation part. There's something called the illusory truth
00:30:40.420
effect, and I'm going to illustrate it right now. I'm not sure if you heard, Sam, that recently
00:30:46.520
Tom Brady announced he was going to cover it. If you'd like to continue listening to this
00:30:51.560
conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access
00:30:57.100
to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through
00:31:02.280
our scholarship program, so if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on
00:31:07.460
the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support,