The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:46.280 So the podcast today took a turn back to the psychological, which is an improvement over

00:00:52.580 the political, as far as I'm concerned, generally speaking. Likely because the topic of

00:00:59.460 concentration has more long-lasting significance, all things considered. So in any case, I spoke

00:01:06.380 today with Lee Jossam. And Lee is a distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers. And he's been

00:01:13.500 the chair there of the Department of Psychology and separately of anthropology, which is a peculiar

00:01:20.420 happenstance that we discuss in the podcast. I was interested in Lee's work because there's a lot of

00:01:26.880 trouble in the field of social psychology. A lot of the claims of the field are not true. Now,

00:01:33.340 you got to expect that in scientific inquiry because a lot of the things we believe are false. And the

00:01:39.980 whole reason that we practice as scientists is to correct those falsehoods. And it's also the case

00:01:45.940 that much of what's published is not going to be true because the alternative would be that everything

00:01:52.060 that was published was a discovery that was true. And we'd be overwhelmed by novelty so fast

00:01:58.740 that it would be untenable if that ever happened. Lee is one of the rarer social psychologists who's

00:02:07.200 actually a scientist. And he's done a lot of interesting and also controversial work. That's

00:02:15.360 partly how you can tell it's interesting and valid because it also is controversial. One of the things

00:02:21.480 he's established, which is of cardinal importance, is that our perceptions of other people are not

00:02:29.040 mostly biased, right? The contrary claim is rather preposterous, which is that all of the categories

00:02:36.500 that we use to structure our interactions with other people are based on the power distortion of

00:02:45.100 our perceptions, let's say, which is essentially a Marxist and postmodern claim. And Lee became

00:02:51.980 infamous, at least in part, because he showed that our perceptions, our stereotypes, if you will,

00:02:58.080 are mostly accurate. There are sources of bias and they do enter into the process and they're relevant,

00:03:05.140 but that's a very different claim than that the foundations of our perceptions themselves

00:03:09.940 are indistinguishable from the biases we hold as motivated agents. And so his work is extremely

00:03:17.320 important. It's core to the culture war that is tearing us apart. So if you're interested in the

00:03:25.960 definition of perception, the relationship between perception and reality, and the analysis of bias

00:03:36.160 in a manner that's credible, then pay attention to this podcast and get things cleared up.

00:03:44.160 So I guess we might as well get right to the point. And the first thing I'm curious about is,

00:03:49.160 and this is something I think that can be like fairly definitively laid at the feet of social

00:03:54.480 psychologists, was that there was an absolute denial that anything like left-wing authoritarianism

00:03:58.960 existed, even conceptually, literally until 2016. Yeah, that's right. For 60 years. I came across

00:04:06.440 that and I thought, well, what do you mean there's no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism? We know

00:04:11.380 that. It's like, that's insane. It's insane. It's insane. And then there were a couple of papers

00:04:18.300 published in 2016 on left-wing authoritarianism in the Soviet Union. That was the first breaking of

00:04:25.840 that. Damn, I did a master's. I supervised a master's thesis at that time. It was a very good

00:04:30.420 thesis on left-wing authoritarianism. And because we showed that there were statistical clumps of

00:04:37.940 reliably characterizable left-wing authoritarian beliefs that did in fact associate statistically

00:04:46.100 and that identifiable groups of people with identifiable temperamental proclivities did hold.

00:04:51.980 So I really wanted to follow up on that because it was very rich potential source of new

00:04:58.140 information. But my academic career exploded at that point. It became impossible.

00:05:03.660 So people have taken that, have taken that ball and run with it.

00:05:06.540 Yeah, yeah. So, well, tell us about it. What have you found?

00:05:10.280 Well, okay.

00:05:10.760 How do you, let's, let's start with some definitions. Like what constitutes left-wing

00:05:14.760 as opposed to right-wing authoritarianism, let's say.

00:05:17.120 Right. So there are measurement, there are measurement issues across the board, but they,

00:05:23.840 that is on both, with respect to both left and right-wing authoritarianism. They're both,

00:05:27.680 there are questionnaires, commonly used questionnaires to assess right, assess right-wing

00:05:33.960 authoritarianism and to assess left-wing authoritarianism. They're different. The

00:05:40.380 reason, let me give a little context. For a long time, people tried to develop a non-partisan

00:05:56.220 authoritarianism scale. So if authoritarianism was a psychological construct rather than a political

00:06:02.960 one. And they couldn't really do it because one of the core toxic elements of authoritarianism

00:06:10.960 is a motivation to crush, deprive of humanity and human rights, one's political opponents.

00:06:19.040 So you need to assess either right- or left-wing authoritarianism vis-a-vis the attitudes towards

00:06:26.800 one's opponents in order to measure the construct.

00:06:29.080 Okay. So that's the, okay. That's a very interesting, that's a very interesting definition

00:06:33.600 though, because you're pointing to the fact that arguably, and tell me if you think this is right,

00:06:40.040 the core of authoritarianism, which as you said, can't be measured outside the political,

00:06:45.880 isn't precisely political. It's your attitude towards those who don't agree with you.

00:06:51.140 Yes, it is.

00:06:51.540 But you have to have some beliefs for that to be.

00:06:53.460 I didn't say can't. I say they have not succeeded. Actually, one of my current graduate students,

00:06:59.020 is for her master's thesis, in the process of trying to develop a non-partisan authoritarianism

00:07:05.880 based on that idea.

00:07:06.700 Yes, based on that idea. I don't know if she's going to succeed.

00:07:08.940 Okay, so I'm thinking about that clinically. It's like, well, that's where you'd start to

00:07:13.380 look at overlap between cluster B personality psychopathology, narcissism, borderline personality

00:07:20.760 disorder, histrionic, because those are the people who are very likely to elevate their own

00:07:26.960 status at the cost of other people, including their children, and those they purport to love.

00:07:34.280 So the first step to do that is to develop scales that adequate, survey questions that

00:07:42.440 adequately get at left or right-wing authoritarianism, and then correlate them with things measuring

00:07:47.500 narcissism or sadism or whatever. People have done that on the left, and it does correlate

00:07:53.780 with left-wing authoritarianism. I don't know, you know, you never know for sure the limits

00:08:00.640 of your own knowledge. So I don't know if anyone has even tried to do this on the right,

00:08:05.100 or maybe they have, and it doesn't actually correspond with narcissism on the right.

00:08:10.700 You know, it corresponds with other things on the right, but not so much with, well, if there's

00:08:16.400 evidence on narcissism correlating with right-wing authoritarianism, I don't know it.

00:08:20.660 Nothing at the moment comes to mind. I have a memory of a memory of something associated with

00:08:28.280 that, because I've tried to follow the literature, but I've definitely seen it emerge on the left.

00:08:35.240 Correlations on the right. Well, from what I remember, and I'm vague about this because I can't

00:08:41.600 give you sources, is that dark tetrad traits stand out quite markedly as associated with

00:08:48.120 authoritarianism. And I thought that was somewhat independent of whether it was left or right,

00:08:53.200 but I can't provide the sources out there. I review them in this new book I wrote on

00:08:57.540 We Who Wrestle With God. There's a lot of reference to the dark tetrad personality constellations and

00:09:03.480 the political manifestations. But okay, but you've been studying it. Okay, so when we looked at

00:09:09.160 the way we developed our measure, because I'd like to know how you developed yours, is we took

00:09:13.580 we took a very large sample of political opinions and then factor analyzed them to find out if we

00:09:20.520 could identify first clumps of left-wing and clumps of right-wing belief, which you can clearly

00:09:25.780 identify. And then to look within the left-wing constellation to see if there is a reliable

00:09:31.500 subcategory of clearly authoritarian proclivities. And we found, you know, we found the biggest predictor

00:09:37.160 of left-wing authoritarianism was low verb like you. It was a walloping predictor, negative 0.40.

00:09:45.420 Immense predictor. Yeah. So that's something to, because you know, one of the things we talked

00:09:50.600 about at the beginning of the podcast was that some of these ideas sound good in the absence of further

00:09:57.220 critical evaluation. So that you might say, well, if you lack the capacity for deep verbal critical

00:10:02.840 evaluation, what apparently moral ideas would appeal to you? And, well, you can imagine that

00:10:10.120 there might be a set of them, and one of them would be, well, don't be mean to people who aren't

00:10:14.220 like you. You know, which is a perfectly good rule of thumb. Yes, absolutely. That doesn't mean it's the,

00:10:18.940 it doesn't mean that everyone who says that's what they're for are, in fact, agitating on behalf of

00:10:24.160 that principle. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, so back to your research. Yeah, yeah, okay. So first of all,

00:10:27.620 let me be clear. Other than my student Sonia, who is trying to develop a nonpartisan authoritarianism

00:10:35.260 scale, the work that we have done using either left-wing or right-wing authoritarianism scales

00:10:41.400 are scales developed by other people. We haven't developed the scales. So for left- And do you think

00:10:45.700 there are good scales now for left and right-wing authoritarianism? Adequate scales?

00:10:52.340 Adequate for right, yes. And pretty good for left. Even though left, the research on left

00:10:59.900 is much more recent, you might think it would be therefore less well-established. There's two

00:11:06.080 teams, one led by Luke Conway and a different one led by Tom Costello, have done a lot of very good,

00:11:14.160 both psychometric, sort of statistical assessment of how things hang together, and also validity

00:11:21.100 assessment of their two slightly different, somewhat different scales. You can tell if someone's

00:11:26.720 belief is part of a set of identifiable beliefs. If they hold that belief, the fact they hold that

00:11:33.840 belief predicts reliably that they hold another belief, right? And then you want to see a pattern

00:11:38.620 like that emerge across a lot of people. Then you see that there are associations of ideas, right?

00:11:44.220 Those would be something like the manifestation of an ideology. You want to see if that's identifiable,

00:11:50.380 what its boundaries are, that it can be distinguished from other clumps of ideas. So left could be

00:11:55.120 distinguished from right. This can all be done statistically and very reliably, right? Now,

00:12:00.320 it wasn't done by social psychologists from the end of World War II till 2016, right? Shameful

00:12:06.960 lacuna in the history of political analysis within the psychological community. It shocked me when I

00:12:14.020 first discovered it. Me too. Me too. It was shocking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really?

00:12:17.920 Talk about blind spots. Oh my God. I mean, I know. It's like, oh, do you guys miss Mao

00:12:22.660 and Stalin? I know, right? How do you miss that? I don't know. How do you miss that? It's fairly

00:12:26.240 obvious. You're a social psychologist. The biggest pathological social movements of the 20th century

00:12:36.860 had their existence denied for 70 years. Right, right.

00:12:41.400 Mind-boggling. It's mind-boggling. It's mind-boggling. It just, I've never recovered from

00:12:46.040 discovery. Yes. It took me like a year to even believe it was true. Okay, so you're using other

00:12:51.220 people's questions. Yes. So what's your approach? What are you, how are you? Well, it does depend on

00:12:55.660 the study. So this is one good one that I think I can describe shortly, quickly. We administered

00:13:05.920 cartoons, like political cartoons, as if they were memes, like social media memes, to an online

00:13:15.980 sample, about 1,000 people, and asked them how much they liked the cartoons and memes, and

00:13:26.300 which, and we told them to vote for the one, for one, their favorite, because the one that received

00:13:36.840 the most votes, we would actually post on social media. Now, that was a lie. It was a deception,

00:13:42.120 and we explained that at the end. But we wanted them to believe that when they were selecting

00:13:48.020 something, that this was as close as we could get to a behavior. It was close to them posting it.

00:13:53.900 They believed their vote could influence what would be posted. Right, right. So it was a real

00:13:57.420 world outcome. A real world quasi-behavioral. Of something that would be promoted. Rather than

00:14:00.840 just like liking or disliking. Right, right. Okay. Or self-report that they believe something.

00:14:05.380 That's right. So two of the, I'm going to describe two of the cartoons, which were quite a contrast to

00:14:10.400 each other. We actually had a set kind of like the first and a set like the second. Okay. But I can

00:14:15.200 describe the two quickly enough. The first was actually a political propaganda cartoon from the

00:14:23.880 Soviet Union. We didn't tell them that from the 1930s, 1940s, anti-American propaganda. But we

00:14:29.140 didn't tell them that. We just presented the cartoon, which showed a long-distance shot of this.

00:14:36.280 In the top panel was a long-distance shot of the Statue of Liberty. The bottom panel was a close-up

00:14:44.700 of her head and her crown. And the spires of the crown were KKK members. People dressed in KKK,

00:14:55.340 whatever. Right, right, right. So the true nature of American liberty. Right, right. American liberty is just...

00:15:01.640 So that's a power, right? It's typical Marxist rule.

00:15:03.800 Yes, right. Okay. That was one. Yeah. And then the second was an image of a diverse group of people.

00:15:15.180 People, different racial and ethnic groups, wearing clothes for different professions.

00:15:21.940 So it might be a bus driver or a businessman or a secretary or a teacher or whatever. There were a whole bunch

00:15:27.540 of different kinds of people in obviously different roles, kind of in a crowd with their arms around

00:15:34.460 each other under an American flag. Sort of pluralistic diversity. That's kind of a humanistic

00:15:40.260 form of diversity. And then we simply asked people, you know, we asked them, which ones do you like

00:15:44.680 the most? Which ones do you want to share on social media? And... So is that a benevolent left view?

00:15:51.920 Yeah, sort of a benevolent left view. Yes, exactly. Right, right. That's right.

00:15:55.740 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Demonizing America versus...

00:15:58.840 We did find in our analysis that there were, there's a liberal left that's clear and there's

00:16:04.040 an authoritarian left. And the liberal left, this is part of our investigation, the liberal left

00:16:10.360 isn't... How did we figure that out? The liberal left doesn't partake of the attitudes of the

00:16:17.980 radical authoritarian leftists. Yes. But they're the ones that I also think that they're...

00:16:23.160 Sort of oblivious. ...denied. Yes. They're oblivious.

00:16:25.280 Yes, I think that's true. And that is what we found. That's what we found in the study.

00:16:29.120 I got a research idea. Yes, yes.

00:16:31.180 That's relevant to this. Well, with regards to these questionnaires, it's something that I wanted

00:16:34.220 to do. You know, the large language models track statistical probability. So you can take those

00:16:39.320 left-wing questionnaire sets and you can ask ChatGPT, here's an item or here's three items,

00:16:45.540 generate 30 more. And it does it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? So if you wanted to improve the

00:16:51.340 statistical reliability of the measures, so you can imagine, take the measures that already exist,

00:16:57.800 put them in clumps of three in ChatGPT, have it expanded out to like 300 items, administer it to

00:17:04.740 1,000 people and distill it. Because the thing... That's a great idea.

00:17:08.480 This will speed things up radically. Because the thing about the large language models is

00:17:12.220 they already have the statistical correlations built in. When you ask ChatGP to generate

00:17:17.680 40 items that are conceptually like these four, that's what it does. Yeah. It's not an opinion.

00:17:25.280 This is great. So you can use ChatGPT to purify the

00:17:27.900 questionnaires. And you can do that on the left and on the right. And you can... It takes like 10

00:17:32.420 minutes instead of two years. I'm going to bring this back to Sonia. This is great.

00:17:36.300 Sonia is a fan of your podcast. I'm sure she's going to see this.

00:17:40.060 Okay. I'll probably talk to her before, but... Hi, Sonia.

00:17:43.380 Yeah, you should be doing this with all the questionnaires. Like, it's the same with

00:17:46.740 narcissism. Yeah, yeah. If you put... See, the other thing you could do with ChatGPT is you could

00:17:51.280 say, here's 20 items significant of narcissism. Okay. Which is the central item? And can you generate

00:17:58.520 20 items that are better markers of that central tendency? And the thing is, it can do it because

00:18:03.620 it's mapped the linguistic representations. Yeah, yeah.

00:18:06.860 So all the factor structure is already built into the ChatGPT systems.

00:18:10.960 Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah. So, okay. So let... This is one of the things I would

00:18:16.860 pursue if I still had a research lab, right? These things are hard to pursue without having that

00:18:21.460 structure in place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think this would radically speed up the...

00:18:26.200 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Radically speed up the process of...

00:18:28.380 I totally see that. And also make it much more reliable and valid.

00:18:31.380 Yeah. Right? So...

00:18:32.140 I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

00:18:34.180 We'll have to try it. We'll have to try it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Try it out.

00:18:37.440 Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely.

00:18:38.480 All right. So back to... Yeah, yeah.

00:18:39.900 All right. So now you've got people voting for one comic or the other.

00:18:43.860 And it was exactly as you described before we went down the large language model path

00:18:48.500 that liberals who are not... So we use statistical regression. We can separate out

00:18:53.920 being liberal but not authoritarian from being a left-wing authoritarian but not liberal.

00:19:00.000 Yeah.

00:19:00.140 Like, liberalism predicted endorsement of the sort of humanistic diversity image.

00:19:04.320 Right, right.

00:19:04.540 The people together are under an American flag. We're all, you know, we're all different

00:19:07.660 but we're all in it together. We love America. Blah, blah, blah.

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00:20:05.180 It was left-wing authoritarianism, powerfully predicted endorsement of the Soviet propaganda.

00:20:11.180 The Statue of Liberty is KKK.

00:20:13.700 And so the questionnaires predicted that?

00:20:15.500 Yes, yes.

00:20:16.280 Oh, that's good.

00:20:17.060 That's good.

00:20:17.400 Yeah, yeah.

00:20:17.780 It was, it was, it's a great study, so.

00:20:19.660 Another thing you might want to do is take that questionnaire, do an item analysis with

00:20:24.960 regards to preference, and rank order the items in terms of their predictive validity

00:20:28.820 in relationship to the cartoon, because you might be able to see which of the items are

00:20:33.320 central.

00:20:33.820 Are the most, yeah, yeah.

00:20:34.320 Yeah, especially if you saw that pattern across multiple cartoons.

00:20:37.340 Yeah, yeah.

00:20:37.860 Yeah, yeah.

00:20:38.360 Okay, okay, okay.

00:20:40.140 Yeah, so that's one.

00:20:40.960 That's, yeah.

00:20:41.620 Yeah, we did this kind of thing.

00:20:42.900 Well, how many studies have you done now on left-wing authoritarianism?

00:20:45.780 Well, it's a lot, I mean, it's a lot, and we include it in almost everything, and we

00:20:50.880 include measures of left- and right-wing authoritarianism in most of the studies we've

00:20:55.540 been conducting.

00:20:55.780 Right, right, right.

00:20:56.600 So, well, so tell us what you found.

00:20:59.240 So, the most recent splash, and I think that's what got your staff member interested in having

00:21:07.720 me on here, were three experimental studies assessing the psychological impacts of common

00:21:17.940 DEI rhetoric and headagogy.

00:21:20.340 Right, right.

00:21:22.080 And we did it with three types of, three different kinds of DEI rhetoric.

00:21:27.300 Yeah, those are probably studies that I'd run across of years.

00:21:30.780 I remember that now.

00:21:31.440 Yeah, yeah, that's well, it's fairly recent, and they've made more of a splash than I would

00:21:35.400 have expected.

00:21:36.680 Well, it's one thing to say that DEI programs work.

00:21:39.820 It's another thing to say they don't work, and it's a completely different thing to say

00:21:43.460 they do the opposite of what, yeah, that's not good, and it seems to me highly probable.

00:21:49.260 So, you know, suicide prevention programs, the kind the government's always running, they

00:21:53.160 make suicide rates go up.

00:21:54.540 Well, because, why?

00:21:57.160 Well, you're advertising and normalizing suicide, right?

00:22:03.080 And you think, well, we're going to put up a prevention program.

00:22:06.040 It's like, first, are you clinically trained?

00:22:09.840 Second, did you do the research?

00:22:12.760 Third, did you ever stop to consider that your conceptualization of the problem might be

00:22:17.340 inadequate in relationship to its solution?

00:22:20.000 Yeah.

00:22:20.080 There's so many things like this that happen, clinicians have become, the research-oriented

00:22:24.560 clinicians have become very, very sensitive to such things, because it's frequently the

00:22:28.840 case that a well-meaning intervention will make things worse.

00:22:31.880 Right.

00:22:33.060 And then you might ask why.

00:22:35.460 It's like, well, there's 50,000 ways something could be worse, and like one way it could be

00:22:40.640 better.

00:22:40.920 And so just, it's an overwhelmingly high probability that whatever you do to change something that

00:22:47.120 works, makes it worse.

00:22:48.460 Yeah.

00:22:48.800 Right.

00:22:49.360 Okay.

00:22:49.760 So now, so do you, what was your evidence that the DEI interventions made?

00:22:56.460 What was made worse?

00:22:58.620 What interventions and what was your evidence linking them?

00:23:01.400 Yes.

00:23:01.860 Okay.

00:23:02.220 So let me walk through, let me qualify this a little bit.

00:23:10.380 We examined the rhetoric that is common to many DEI interventions.

00:23:18.320 ChatGPD could do a very good job of that, by the way.

00:23:21.160 Kind of.

00:23:21.860 The problem is a lot of the materials used in DEI trainings aren't publicly available.

00:23:28.880 So it's actually hard, and we can say they're common to things we had access to, but we

00:23:34.640 don't, a lot is not publicly available.

00:23:37.580 Okay.

00:23:37.840 So where do you find it?

00:23:38.640 And that's an important limitation, well, hold on, that's an important limitation that

00:23:42.000 your listeners, viewers should understand.

00:23:44.700 It's not like we evaluated the effectiveness of the DEI training program instituted by the

00:23:50.960 HR department of the city of Milwaukee.

00:23:53.400 We didn't do that.

00:23:54.260 We took the intellectual ideas from three different kinds of sources, anti-racism rhetoric, anti-Islamophobia

00:24:02.980 rhetoric, and anti-caste, the Hindu caste system, anti-caste oppression rhetoric.

00:24:09.400 And there are, for race, we used passages from Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist and from

00:24:19.900 D'Angelo's White Fragility.

00:24:21.440 These books were widely required for our colleges.

00:24:25.400 You know, there's sometimes, she is paid $40,000 a session to come in and give her training.

00:24:34.100 So we also actually used this sort of large language model, this sort of language network

00:24:41.780 analysis to examine the extent to which this type of rhetoric was common throughout the

00:24:48.220 training materials we had access to.

00:24:50.600 And it was very common.

00:24:52.040 Yeah, okay, okay, fine, fine.

00:24:53.580 So you used that as a validation technique.

00:24:54.920 You know what, just so, I have this here.

00:24:58.060 So let me give an example from the race, and this is just a short excerpt.

00:25:07.140 So people would read, so they would read, say, an anti-racist passage or a control passage.

00:25:14.180 The control passage in these studies, in two out of the three, was about how to grow corn

00:25:18.480 on the farm.

00:25:19.220 It was completely separate.

00:25:20.920 And this is only a short excerpt of a longer passage.

00:25:23.640 Yeah, okay.

00:25:24.100 White people, this is the anti-racism.

00:25:26.800 White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview.

00:25:32.460 Racism is the norm.

00:25:33.900 It is not unusual.

00:25:35.400 Okay.

00:25:35.620 So this went on for a full paragraph.

00:25:37.300 And it was quotes smooth together with a little writing by us of Kendi and D'Angelo.

00:25:43.520 Okay, all right, so they then were presented with a very brief scenario in which a college

00:25:54.780 admissions officer interviews an applicant, and ultimately the applicant is rejected from

00:26:02.320 admission.

00:26:03.460 Okay.

00:26:04.160 That's the whole scenario.

00:26:05.120 Yeah.

00:26:05.460 I mean, the words are slightly different because I'm doing that piece from memory, but that's

00:26:08.600 basically the whole scenario.

00:26:11.580 They were then asked a series of questions assessing how much perceived racism and bias

00:26:18.360 was-

00:26:19.760 Was the causal factor.

00:26:20.560 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:26:21.380 You know, on the part of the admissions officer.

00:26:23.480 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:26:23.980 Okay.

00:26:24.520 And what we found is when they got the Kendi-D'Angelo essay, they claimed to have seen or observed

00:26:35.820 the admissions officer committing more microaggressions, treating the applicant more unfairly, and that

00:26:46.780 the admissions officer was more biased.

00:26:49.780 Okay, so I'm going to put on my devil's advocate hat.

00:26:53.520 Yes.

00:26:53.800 And I'm going to play Robin D'Angelo, despite wearing this Trump badge, and I'm going to

00:27:02.760 say, well, the effects of institutional racism are so pervasive that they even invaded your

00:27:10.140 experimental material.

00:27:12.140 And the consequence of being exposed to the contents of my writing, speaking as Robin D'Angelo,

00:27:17.920 was that the scales fell from the eyes of your experimental subjects, and they were able

00:27:22.740 to perceive the racism that we claimed was there in a manner they couldn't before.

00:27:28.220 Yes, that is probably what D'Angelo would say.

00:27:32.460 Actually, I can tell you a little bit what Kendi did say, because he was asked about it.

00:27:35.960 He did not say that.

00:27:38.260 If someone said that, I would say, well, in our scenario, none of that was evident.

00:27:42.420 You had to read that into the scenario.

00:27:43.940 And that is the point.

00:27:45.700 How do you know that your own implicit bias didn't stop you from seeing the bias that

00:27:51.760 was there?

00:27:52.920 Because anyone can look at the scenario.

00:27:55.660 People didn't even have racial information about the admissions officer and the applicant.

00:28:01.080 So you don't-

00:28:01.980 Okay, so you regarded it as highly improbable that what they were reading into the situation,

00:28:07.980 that what they were, you regarded as highly probable that they were reading into the situation.

00:28:12.960 Okay, let me ask you a couple more technical questions, okay?

00:28:16.760 How much of this material were they exposed to before they did the evaluation?

00:28:20.460 About a paragraph.

00:28:21.720 Just a paragraph.

00:28:22.640 Just a paragraph.

00:28:22.920 How soon before the evaluation?

00:28:25.160 Pretty soon.

00:28:25.820 Okay, do you have any idea what the lag time, like if you did a dose response study, so to

00:28:32.100 speak, is there a decay?

00:28:34.800 Like how permanent are the effects?

00:28:36.700 I know I couldn't expect you to do all that in one study, but it's germane, right?

00:28:40.420 Well, it is kind of.

00:28:44.440 So on the narrow issue of how long do the effects we observed in the study last, we didn't study

00:28:52.660 that.

00:28:52.960 Right, right.

00:28:53.060 So I have no answer to that.

00:28:54.360 Yeah, of course.

00:28:54.960 Okay.

00:28:55.140 But given that we observed the effects that we did, the sort of people concocting racism

00:29:04.740 where there was no evidence of it, on the basis of a very minor intervention, that's like

00:29:11.720 reading a single paragraph, it at least raises the possibility that when people are in a culture

00:29:20.760 or organizational context in which this type of rhetoric is pervasive, that they are constantly

00:29:28.400 being exposed or primed to think about race in these terms.

00:29:35.380 And because of the steady diet of this kind of rhetoric, the effects are likely to be

00:29:42.000 more enduring than anything we could possibly observe.

00:29:45.700 Right, right.

00:29:46.000 Fair enough.

00:29:46.720 Well, I would also say probably you evaluated some of the weaker systemic effects of that

00:29:53.500 kind of rhetoric because it isn't merely exposure to the rhetoric.

00:29:56.960 It's the fact that post hoc detection of such things as microaggressions, let's say, are

00:30:03.760 radically rewarded by the participants in those ideological systems.

00:30:07.960 Absolutely.

00:30:08.220 That being even more, that's a more powerful effect.

00:30:10.820 So you got it with weak exposure fundamentally.

00:30:13.980 Okay, so what again-

00:30:14.840 Right, and no reward, right?

00:30:15.620 Right, no reward.

00:30:16.140 I mean, you're peeking to the social reward.

00:30:17.540 Exactly.

00:30:18.120 Yes, exactly.

00:30:19.180 Yes.

00:30:19.440 So I would say, the weakness of your intervention demonstrated the power of the rhetoric.

00:30:28.800 Okay, what did Kendi have to say about this?

00:30:30.900 He described us as racist pseudoscientists.

00:30:34.140 Oh, yeah.

00:30:34.600 Oh, yeah.

00:30:34.960 Okay, well, that pretty much covers the territory.

00:30:37.560 Did he say why?

00:30:39.880 Or was that unnecessary?

00:30:41.460 You know, that quote-

00:30:43.520 How are you at wasting money?

00:30:45.100 My sense is that he was particularly good at that.

00:30:47.720 So, yeah, university money, counterproductively.

00:30:51.220 Well, I think most of his was from actually, what's his name?

00:30:53.600 Jack Dorsey from Twitter.

00:30:56.780 Yeah, I think gave him $10 million.

00:30:58.480 So at least it wasn't state money, right?

00:31:00.420 Yeah, right, right, right.

00:31:01.580 Okay, well, then we can just let it go.

00:31:04.320 So, okay, okay.

00:31:08.260 Okay, you said that produced quite a splash.

00:31:10.480 Yes.

00:31:11.180 Including enhanced probability of being on this podcast, for example.

00:31:14.660 Yes, yes.

00:31:15.000 So I'd followed your work for a long time before coming across that.

00:31:18.260 So what effect has it had?

00:31:21.900 When was the study published, first of all?

00:31:23.780 Well, so-

00:31:24.600 And is it a sequence?

00:31:25.620 Is it a single study?

00:31:26.660 No, it's three studies.

00:31:27.580 Three studies.

00:31:28.040 So it's essentially the same structure for an anti-Islamophobia intervention and an anti-caste oppression.

00:31:36.380 And it's essentially the same results.

00:31:37.900 There's little minor differences.

00:31:39.280 But it's essentially the same pattern of results.

00:31:41.600 They're not published.

00:31:43.140 So these studies I conducted in collaboration with the NCRI.

00:31:49.400 NCRI is the Network Contagion Research Institute.

00:31:52.740 They are a freestanding research institute that started out mostly doing research along the lines of this sort of large language model stuff that you were talking about earlier.

00:32:03.680 They're analysis of social media, an analysis of radicalism, conspiracy theories, hate, sort of groups and individuals mobilizing online.

00:32:18.300 And they've done it with all sorts of stuff.

00:32:19.980 They've done it with COVID conspiracies.

00:32:22.400 They've done it with QAnon.

00:32:23.440 They've done it with Islamophobia.

00:32:25.560 They've done it with anti-Hindu hate.

00:32:27.160 They've done it with anti-Semitism.

00:32:28.180 They were the first group of any kind, as far as I know, in the summer of 2020, the height of the George Floyd social justice protests, which, as you remember, the rhetoric on the left, this is sort of consistent with what you were talking about earlier, about how the reasonable left is in complete denial of the far left.

00:32:52.980 It is literally true that most of the protests were peaceful.

00:32:56.800 Whenever someone would present evidence of some protests not being peaceful at all, like firebombing a police station or capturing downtown Seattle or all sorts of, you know, setting – by creating – sort of setting the stage for lawlessness, you would have looting and robberies that weren't really part of the protests.

00:33:22.740 But people were taking advantage of the sort of police-free zones and stuff.

00:33:27.700 When you would talk about that, the response was, this is all just right-wing.

00:33:32.340 Of course.

00:33:32.940 Right.

00:33:33.260 Oh, yeah.

00:33:33.520 I talked to moderate Democrats who told me that Antifa was a figment of the right-wing imagination.

00:33:40.000 Yes, right.

00:33:40.420 I thought – but, you know, there's something weird about that that's very much worth pointing out, I believe, is that we radically underestimate the effect a very small minority of people who are organized can have in destabilizing a society.

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00:35:38.820 And that's seriously wrong.

00:35:41.400 Okay, so this, enter the NCRI.

00:35:44.340 So, in summer of 2020, when this was all the record, most of the protests on people, complete denial, mainstream media, that there was violence and bombings and all sorts of other stuff.

00:35:58.900 The NCRI, this is the first project I did with them, produces an analysis finding that the far-left groups, not conventional liberals or Democrats, but these far-left radical groups,

00:36:18.580 were exploiting the earnest commitment to anti-racism or the social justice on the part of people justifiably upset about George Floyd's murder and the implications about that for racism beyond that.

00:36:37.720 But these far-left groups were exploiting that to both gin up supporters and to mobilize online, this is all occurring on social media, to capture protests, to ratchet up and inspire more aggressive violence at the protests.

00:36:59.060 So this, you know—

00:36:59.720 Yeah, that's exactly what you'd expect.

00:37:01.460 Yes.

00:37:01.760 Of course that's going to happen.

00:37:02.760 I know, right.

00:37:03.440 Clearly.

00:37:03.860 Yes, right.

00:37:04.340 If you believe in criminals.

00:37:05.800 Yeah, right.

00:37:06.520 Right.

00:37:06.720 Right.

00:37:07.000 Okay.

00:37:07.500 So, and then—so, and NCRI would, in this report, would then link the increased online activity.

00:37:18.300 You know, there would be memes like ACAB, All Cops Are Bastards.

00:37:21.320 You know, so there'd be things like that.

00:37:24.680 And some of the groups were actually using social media to coordinate their, you know, the sort of violent protest activities.

00:37:33.960 So, live, I'm making this up, but it was this kind of thing.

00:37:41.200 People would be, you know, at these protests on their phones.

00:37:44.580 They would get instructions from some sort of central place that the cops were over here, so everybody needs to go over there.

00:37:53.780 And that's how they would have—so, they were getting tactical instructions live via social media in addition to sort of ginning up the rhetoric to garner support and adherence.

00:38:06.200 Okay.

00:38:06.840 Okay.

00:38:07.120 So, before they brought me on, maybe two or three months before, the NCRI had posted a report on how far-right groups do essentially the same thing.

00:38:18.700 You know, sort of mobilize online using memes and catchphrases and, you know, garner adherence, you know, gain adherence and stuff.

00:38:27.840 So, they bring me on, we do this thing, and this paper on the far-left, which really looks to me—it looked to me like the far-left groups were seeking to ignite an actual revolution.

00:38:43.780 Well, that is what they do.

00:38:45.560 I know, right.

00:38:46.080 Yes, this doesn't seem far-fetched, right?

00:38:48.280 They can dance in the ashes that way.

00:38:50.500 Yes.

00:38:50.720 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:38:51.580 The real criminal psychopaths, the short-term guys, the narcissists, they thrive in chaos.

00:38:57.240 Yeah.

00:38:57.660 Because their niche is chaos, right?

00:39:03.120 Yes.

00:39:03.860 I was kind of new to that at the time, but in hindsight, yes, absolutely.

00:39:08.620 Yeah, well, it's a shocking thing to know.

00:39:10.420 So, the NCRI, to no credit to me, I'm an academic, I'm a professor, I don't do this kind of thing, had access to journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post who ran stories on this report.

00:39:26.780 And it was the first time there was any acknowledgment in the mainstream media that there was any level of violence and danger in the protests.

00:39:39.340 I felt really good about it.

00:39:40.360 This was like September 2020.

00:39:42.260 We did the work over the summer.

00:39:43.700 The thing came—but that report is not published in a peer-reviewed journal.

00:39:48.760 NCRI has its own website.

00:39:50.640 And they publish these reports kind of like old times—

00:39:52.940 And that's where your studies were, were what?

00:39:55.560 Yes and no.

00:39:56.180 So, as of right now, that's where they are.

00:39:58.620 They're available on the NCRI website.

00:40:00.560 Okay, and who did that?

00:40:01.620 Was it a postdoc, a doctoral student?

00:40:03.580 It was a bunch of—well, it was—so, it was me, two of my grad students.

00:40:09.840 Although, one of my—both of my grad students also work closely with the NCRI.

00:40:14.860 Yeah.

00:40:15.140 And then there were a series of analysts at the NCRI, including their head researcher.

00:40:19.000 Okay.

00:40:19.220 So, a bunch of us are co-authors on this.

00:40:20.940 We have this—so, I've not been working with them for several years.

00:40:25.080 And it took a while for us to get used to each other.

00:40:27.740 You know, their strength is this online, social media, large language model, topic network stuff.

00:40:35.160 You know, with an eye towards threats and conspiracy theories and hate.

00:40:39.620 And my strength is conventional social science surveys.

00:40:42.020 Yeah, that's a nice overlap, though.

00:40:43.440 It is.

00:40:43.800 Yeah, it's a nice overlap.

00:40:44.660 It is.

00:40:44.740 We needed to figure out the best synergies.

00:40:47.100 Yeah, yeah, no doubt.

00:40:47.600 It took a while, but we have this rhythm.

00:40:49.720 So, why that approach with regards to the dissemination of this information, this particular experiment

00:40:55.500 of information, rather than the more standard journal approach?

00:40:58.980 Yeah.

00:40:59.260 So, one of the things—first, let me give context.

00:41:03.960 Yeah.

00:41:04.080 A little more context.

00:41:05.540 So, our rhythm is first we post stuff essentially as a white paper, as a report on the NCRI site.

00:41:11.820 It gets some attention, some public vetting, we get some feedback on it, and then we scale it up for peer review.

00:41:17.520 Well, that's not unlike doing a pre-release on it in a convention.

00:41:22.160 Yes, okay.

00:41:23.020 Now, it's a little different.

00:41:25.380 It's different.

00:41:26.260 It is like a—I have taken to calling it a homespun preprint.

00:41:30.220 And here's why I call it a homespun preprint.

00:41:33.080 It's like a preprint in that it's a report of empirical studies that is posted online that

00:41:38.940 haven't been peer reviewed.

00:41:40.520 It is unlike a conventional preprint in that it is—and this is the answer to your question,

00:41:46.340 why did we do it this way rather than make it for peer review?

00:41:48.520 This is part of the answer.

00:41:50.180 It is—even though some of it is highly technical, a lot of the worst of the technical stuff is

00:41:58.000 stripped down so that it is comprehensible to the lay-intelligent audience.

00:42:04.600 And that has a value in and of its own right because the problem with peer review is that

00:42:12.340 it could easily—well, there are many problems with peer review, especially now.

00:42:15.480 Many.

00:42:15.580 You're right.

00:42:15.920 There's many.

00:42:16.380 Yeah, right?

00:42:16.800 Okay, but one of them is that it could take a year and a few years.

00:42:20.820 Oh, no, lagged public.

00:42:21.720 Right.

00:42:22.200 It's horrible.

00:42:24.000 It's unforgivable.

00:42:26.120 Yeah, that's right.

00:42:27.320 It needs to be that whole system I've been thinking about.

00:42:30.340 It needs to be upended.

00:42:31.500 Completely.

00:42:32.260 Yeah.

00:42:32.400 It's like in this day and age, a two-year lagged publication—

00:42:36.360 Right.

00:42:36.620 It's crazy.

00:42:37.360 It's completely insane.

00:42:38.700 It's crazy.

00:42:39.380 That's right.

00:42:39.800 You spend 30% of your time writing grant applications that go nowhere, and two years to

00:42:45.260 lag to publication that almost no one is likely—

00:42:48.460 That's right.

00:42:48.980 Yeah, no one does.

00:42:49.560 That's right.

00:42:50.340 How the hell have you not been canceled?

00:42:53.800 Why is that?

00:42:54.840 Because it's weird.

00:42:55.920 There have been repeat attempts to cancel me that have failed.

00:42:59.660 Okay.

00:43:00.280 Well, so why don't you tell me and everybody else, first of all, why you're—what would

00:43:06.840 you say, why you so richly deserve canceling?

00:43:09.620 That's the first issue.

00:43:12.240 And then the next issue, which is of equal importance, is how you've managed to not have

00:43:17.800 that happen, because that's actually really hard.

00:43:21.060 So, because if people try to cancel you, especially given the things that you've researched and have

00:43:27.440 insisted upon and said, if people try to cancel you, there's an overwhelming probability in academia

00:43:35.180 in particular that that will be successful.

00:43:38.140 So, let's start by talking about the sorts of things that you've been pointing to in, well,

00:43:44.080 in academia in general, and then more specifically in psychology and social psychology.

00:43:50.520 Sure.

00:43:52.360 There are probably too many of these attempts for me to go through, so I'm going to pick

00:43:56.120 one—

00:43:57.380 Yeah, pick the cream of the crop.

00:43:58.460 Yeah, this is probably the cream of the crop.

00:44:00.000 Okay.

00:44:01.900 It is—I refer to—so I have a very active Substack site, Unsafe Science, and I have several

00:44:12.160 posts on this.

00:44:13.040 You can find it under the POPs Fiasco Racist Mule Trope.

00:44:19.560 There's a whole series on this.

00:44:20.900 Okay, so what is POPs?

00:44:22.380 POPs is Perspectives on Psych Science.

00:44:24.620 One of the very prestigious journals within the field of psychology for publishing reviews

00:44:30.520 and commentaries and the like.

00:44:32.980 The short version is that I was invited by the editor to do a commentary on a main paper

00:44:45.560 that was critical.

00:44:47.960 Well, the main paper by a psychologist named Hamel, Bernard Hamel, was critical of prior

00:44:56.760 work in psychology advocating for diversity in a variety of ways.

00:45:01.220 The nature of his critique was that much of the rhetoric in psychological scholarship around

00:45:11.180 diversity was narrowly focused on—and the terms are constantly changing—underrepresented,

00:45:19.120 minority, minoritized, disadvantaged, oppressed groups.

00:45:24.340 And that from a scientific standpoint—

00:45:26.740 Intersectionally—

00:45:27.940 Yeah, yeah, right.

00:45:29.940 Exactly.

00:45:30.400 That's right.

00:45:31.240 And so—

00:45:32.240 Intersectionally deprived.

00:45:33.700 And there was a recent article which argued that on scientific grounds, we need to do exactly

00:45:40.500 that.

00:45:41.340 Hamel's critique was that—was really multiple.

00:45:44.920 But two of his key points were that, well, there are some types of things we—it's irrelevant.

00:45:50.080 Diversity is irrelevant for certain kind of theoretical scientific tests.

00:45:53.180 Yeah.

00:45:53.620 And then the other point is that if diversity matters, it matters for scientific purposes.

00:46:00.140 It matters extremely broadly, and it's not restricted to underrepresented groups.

00:46:05.660 And a very simple example would be if you could—would compare a study based on undergraduate

00:46:11.560 psychology students versus one based on a nationally representative sample, the research based

00:46:16.740 on the nationally representative sample is going to be broader and more generalizable

00:46:20.640 and more credible.

00:46:22.620 A nationally representative sample represents the population.

00:46:27.520 It's not focused entirely on any subset of the population.

00:46:30.480 That would be a very simple example of Hamel's point.

00:46:33.420 I was asked to do a commentary.

00:46:35.800 I did.

00:46:37.260 And there's—okay, there's a distinction there, too, that we should draw.

00:46:39.940 Now, clearly, it's the case that if you want to draw generalizable conclusions about human

00:46:45.580 beings from a study, that the study participants should be a randomly selected and representative

00:46:51.720 sample of the population to whom you're attempting to generalize, obviously, because otherwise

00:46:58.480 it doesn't generalize.

00:46:59.460 That's very different than making the case that underrepresented groups should be preferentially

00:47:05.820 hired or employed or promoted or specifed.

00:47:11.460 Yes, completely different, completely different, completely different.

00:47:13.900 That was sort of part of Hamel's critique.

00:47:16.060 Yeah, yeah.

00:47:17.000 But I guess so, again, the editor invited me to publish a commentary on this exchange.

00:47:22.960 And the title of my commentary was—it eventually got published—is Diversity is Diverse.

00:47:32.020 Because there's lots of different kinds of diversity.

00:47:33.740 And if we're arguing for diversity on scientific grounds, then what the science needs to be

00:47:39.480 is fully representative of the—whether it's the participants or the topics, or it goes way

00:47:47.980 beyond oppression.

00:47:50.080 I mean, oppression is a part of that and shouldn't be excluded, but it's only one piece of that.

00:47:55.820 So I basically was in agreement with Hamel's critique and augmented it.

00:48:00.040 As part of that, I critiqued progressive academic rhetoric around diversity as disingenuous and

00:48:13.120 hypocritical.

00:48:14.440 And the way I framed that, the way I captured it, was using a quote from Fiddler on the Roof.

00:48:21.080 So in Fiddler on the Roof, which is what, early 20th century Jewish life in the—

00:48:27.180 One of the great movies of all time.

00:48:28.960 Right, yeah, yeah.

00:48:29.360 Everyone should watch it.

00:48:30.280 And probably its most famous song is Tradition, which is about the importance of tradition and

00:48:36.040 keeping the community together.

00:48:37.600 But then there were exceptions.

00:48:38.860 So there's an interlude in the song Tradition where the—whatever—the villagers get into

00:48:48.400 an argument because one chimes in, there was the time he sold him a horse but delivered

00:48:53.740 a mule.

00:48:55.640 And I use that to frame my discussion of progressive disingenuousness around—

00:49:02.920 They all disintegrate into fractions.

00:49:04.660 He's arguing in the middle of this song about unity to know when that comes up.

00:49:09.080 Yeah, when that comes up.

00:49:10.120 That's right.

00:49:10.440 Yeah, yeah.

00:49:10.820 That's right.

00:49:11.520 And I argued in this paper that the way and the reason that's a good metaphor for progressive

00:49:18.120 rhetoric around diversity is that diversity sound—you know, superficially, it sounds good

00:49:23.440 to a lot of people, right?

00:49:24.840 Because who doesn't want to be included?

00:49:26.480 No matter what group you're a member of, the idea that someone is advocating for diversity,

00:49:32.940 you—you know, it's kind of appealing.

00:49:35.880 And so, for example—

00:49:37.360 Yes, with two seconds of thought, it's a positive thing.

00:49:40.040 Yes, with two seconds of thought, it's a positive thing.

00:49:41.880 Or that people should be free of arbitrary exclusion.

00:49:45.580 Yeah, of arbitrary exclusion.

00:49:46.440 That's right.

00:49:47.220 That's right.

00:49:47.720 And, for example, one thing you might think—one might think if one had a little bit of knowledge

00:49:52.980 is that, especially in the social sciences and humanities, but really in academia writ

00:49:57.960 large, there's hardly anyone who is not left of center.

00:50:01.740 I mean, the range goes from sort of center-left to the far, far left.

00:50:05.980 I have a former—

00:50:07.960 Yes, and that's very well documented.

00:50:09.540 It's very—

00:50:10.040 Yes.

00:50:10.460 No one disagrees with that claim.

00:50:12.920 Well, so, Nate Honeycutt, my former student, he's now a research scientist at FIRE, the

00:50:18.480 Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, did a dissertation on this, surveyed almost

00:50:23.660 2,000 faculty nationwide at top colleges and universities, and found that 40% self-identified—not

00:50:36.540 just as on the left, that not on the left was about 90, 95%, but 40% self-identified as

00:50:42.840 radicals, activists, Marxists, or socialists.

00:50:46.640 Yeah.

00:50:47.620 40%.

00:50:48.060 So this is the extreme left.

00:50:50.260 This is no longer just like Democrats or liberals.

00:50:53.660 This is nearly half on the far left.

00:50:56.560 And that was a sample of how many people?

00:50:58.100 It was almost 2,000.

00:50:59.200 Yeah.

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00:51:59.080 Now, how many faculty members at colleges and universities do you suppose there are in

00:52:06.480 the United States approximately?

00:52:07.940 Do you have any idea?

00:52:09.020 I have looked into this.

00:52:10.360 It's hundreds of thousands.

00:52:12.080 I don't know the number.

00:52:13.220 Okay, so let's assume 200,000.

00:52:17.080 So that means there's 80,000 academic activists who are being employed full-time in the United

00:52:22.140 States.

00:52:22.460 I don't know if you could go that far because he looked at the top colleges and universities.

00:52:26.920 If you wanted to generalize to all colleges and universities, you would have to include

00:52:31.660 community colleges and, you know, primarily liberal arts.

00:52:34.700 Do you think they'd be less?

00:52:38.720 I don't know.

00:52:39.820 Biased?

00:52:40.200 Okay, we don't know.

00:52:41.100 I don't know.

00:52:41.560 Okay, so it's not 80,000, but it could easily be 50,000.

00:52:45.260 Yes, yes.

00:52:46.220 Okay, so that's a number I want to return to.

00:52:48.500 Okay, okay.

00:52:49.500 Yeah, because there's implications.

00:52:51.460 So one might think for if someone is advocating for diversity, given the extreme political skew

00:52:56.900 and given the extent to which academia deals with politicized topics, that there would

00:53:01.400 be an embrace of people, an attempt to bring into academia professors, researchers, scholars,

00:53:09.280 teachers from across the political spectrum.

00:53:11.780 That has never gotten any traction in academia.

00:53:14.460 And in fact, it's gone in the complete opposite direction.

00:53:16.960 If you go back 50, 60 years, I think it's fair to describe the way academia has functioned

00:53:22.040 is to produce a slow-moving purge of conservatives and even people center and libertarians from

00:53:28.320 its ranks.

00:53:29.740 So my point in this commentary was using things like that as examples of the disingenuousness

00:53:38.640 of progressive rhetoric around diversity, that it wasn't really diversity in the broadest

00:53:44.440 sense.

00:53:45.300 It was a very narrow...

00:53:47.220 See, that's actually the fundamental flaw of intersectionality, is intersectionality

00:53:52.020 intersectionality devolves into combinatorial explosion almost immediately, right?

00:53:56.920 Because once you start combining the categories of oppression, you don't have to make...

00:54:02.940 You don't have...

00:54:03.340 Your list of combinations, black, women, gay, etc., every time you add another variable

00:54:11.380 to that multiplicative list, you decrease the pool of people that occupy that list radically,

00:54:16.980 right?

00:54:17.380 Right.

00:54:17.600 But there's also an infinite...

00:54:18.740 There's literally an indefinite...

00:54:20.860 This is your point.

00:54:21.560 An indefinite number of potentially relevant group categories.

00:54:27.440 Yes.

00:54:28.020 Oh, yes, yes.

00:54:28.640 So how in the world are you going to ensure that every possible combination of every possible

00:54:33.600 group category is...

00:54:35.840 You can't even measure it, much less ensure it.

00:54:38.660 Yeah, you can't do that.

00:54:39.380 Right.

00:54:39.660 So there's this underlying insistence, which you're pointing to, I believe, that there are

00:54:43.720 privileged categories of oppressed people, right?

00:54:48.300 And it's a weird thing, right?

00:54:50.360 It's like, why is it that it's race and sex?

00:54:54.500 And you might think, well, those are the most obvious differences between people, and maybe

00:54:58.260 you can make that case.

00:54:59.620 But then it's also gender, which is a very weird insistence because whether the idea of

00:55:06.300 gender is a valid...

00:55:07.220 I don't think the idea of gender is a valid idea at all.

00:55:09.500 I think it's super...

00:55:11.500 It's...

00:55:11.820 What would you say?

00:55:12.520 It's a warped misconceptualization of everything that's captured by temperament much more accurately

00:55:19.000 and precisely.

00:55:19.880 We can talk about that.

00:55:21.020 Yeah.

00:55:21.180 But also, sexual orientation, I can't see at all why that would emerge as a privileged

00:55:26.980 category of oppression alongside something like sex, like it could, but it's not obvious

00:55:31.640 why.

00:55:32.480 Okay, so you're pointing some of...

00:55:34.540 And then you said, well, there's important elements of diversity, especially intellectually,

00:55:40.080 like adequate distribution of political or ethical views across the spectrum that's

00:55:47.560 completely off the table.

00:55:48.700 Yeah, it's completely off the table.

00:55:49.680 It's like rejected.

00:55:50.920 It's worse than off the table.

00:55:52.420 So, that was my paper.

00:55:56.160 And there's more to the story than this, but to keep this succinct, eventually what happened

00:56:06.360 was almost 1,400 academics, probably mostly psychologists, signed an open letter denouncing...

00:56:17.680 So, my paper was one of several commentaries.

00:56:22.560 All of the commentaries were critical of this oppression framing of diversity.

00:56:28.400 All of them.

00:56:29.340 All of them were.

00:56:30.000 Okay.

00:56:30.260 And this was in POPS?

00:56:31.640 It was in, yeah, Perspectives on Psych Science.

00:56:33.660 Okay, so I just want to provide people some background on this, and correct me if I get any of this

00:56:38.060 wrong.

00:56:38.760 So, scientists publish in research journals, and they generally publish articles of two

00:56:44.960 types.

00:56:45.920 One type would be a research study, an actual experiment, let's say, or a sequence of experiments,

00:56:52.340 and the other, I guess there's two other types.

00:56:55.380 There's reviews, and there's commentaries.

00:56:57.680 And so, and then there's a variety of different journals that scientists publish in, and some

00:57:02.900 of those cover all scientific topics, science and nature.

00:57:08.020 The world's premier scientific journals used to do that before they became woke institutions.

00:57:12.700 And then there are specialized journals that cover fields like psychology, and then there

00:57:18.380 are sub-specialized journals.

00:57:20.140 And the less specialized the journal, all things considered, the more prestigious it is.

00:57:26.360 Anyways, that's where scientists publish.

00:57:29.400 And they do publish commentaries on each other's material, especially if it's a review of something

00:57:34.940 contentious or something that's emerging in a field.

00:57:37.380 And now, this journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science, there's also an interesting

00:57:42.140 backstory here, because that's an American Psychological Society journal.

00:57:46.880 Yes.

00:57:47.320 Okay, so there's two major organizations for psychologists, especially research-oriented

00:57:53.960 psychologists in North America.

00:57:56.360 There's the American Psychological Association, which has its journals, and then a newer organization,

00:58:02.620 which is now a couple of decades old, American Psychological Society.

00:58:06.260 And the American Psychological Society was actually set up, at least in part, because the

00:58:11.900 American Psychological Association had started to become ideologically dominated, particularly

00:58:18.420 in the leftist and progressive direction, and that that was having an arguably negative effect

00:58:24.940 on research, reliability, accuracy, and probability of publication.

00:58:29.640 That was set up 25-

00:58:30.640 25-

00:58:31.640 Okay, so that's a little off-kilter.

00:58:33.140 Okay, okay.

00:58:33.720 Yes, yeah, I do know this history.

00:58:35.040 Okay, okay.

00:58:36.000 So, in first place, APS started out as the American Psychological Society.

00:58:40.800 They changed their name to the Association for Psychological Science in an attempt to be broader.

00:58:45.860 And what triggered the breakaway of APS from APA in the 90s, maybe?

00:58:56.000 90s, yeah, I think so.

00:58:57.240 Yeah, wasn't political.

00:58:59.300 It was the scientists who formed APS believed that APA was too focused on clinical practice

00:59:08.960 and practitioner issues, and it was becoming unscientific, but not because of the politics.

00:59:14.660 Well, okay, so, yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough.

00:59:17.700 But, see, I was watching that happen because I knew some of the people who were setting up

00:59:22.860 the APS at the time.

00:59:24.560 And my sense, though, also was that part of the reason that the APA was tilting in a more

00:59:30.240 and more clinical direction was because there was an underlying political ethos that was

00:59:36.100 increasingly skeptical of science as the privileged mode of obtaining valid information.

00:59:42.880 Yeah, I think that's fair.

00:59:43.780 I think that's fair, yes.

00:59:44.780 Okay, okay, so the proximal cause was the overemphasis on the clinical.

00:59:50.540 Yes.

00:59:50.780 But, you know, it's also the case that, as you've seen, is that certainly the clinical psychology

00:59:57.800 has, and the whole therapeutic enterprise, has taken a cataclysmic turn towards the woke

01:00:03.980 direction in the last, especially in the last 10 years.

01:00:06.840 Yeah.

01:00:07.060 It's been absolutely devastating.

01:00:09.160 And, I don't know, is social psychology, I think you could probably say the same thing

01:00:13.820 about social psychology.

01:00:15.120 Maybe you can say it, maybe that's even worse.

01:00:17.980 Anyways, we can get into that.

01:00:18.860 Well, it's probably worse politically, but it's probably not worse practically because

01:00:22.480 social psychologists don't really, aren't responsible for helping anybody get on with

01:00:26.400 their lives.

01:00:27.260 I mean, they're responsible for teaching and students and things.

01:00:29.920 Because they're not, typically, they're not-

01:00:32.320 You are responsible for implicit bias.

01:00:34.560 That's all.

01:00:35.740 You're going to get me, you are going to get me distracted.

01:00:38.360 You started by asking me to tell the story of my cancellation attack.

01:00:40.680 Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's continue with that.

01:00:42.060 Yes, that's that.

01:00:42.980 Okay, so now you're, there's 1,400 people who write a letter.

01:00:47.040 Yes, declaring all of us, me as well as the other commentators, we're all racists.

01:00:54.620 Yeah.

01:00:54.840 The editor should be fired and our articles should be taken down.

01:00:59.160 They shouldn't be published.

01:00:59.540 Right, so I presume that these 1,400 are a subset of the 50,000 activists that-

01:01:04.800 Yes, right, right.

01:01:05.980 Now, I'm curious about the 1,400 too, because you often see legacy media headline news that

01:01:13.120 1,400 scientists have signed some petition.

01:01:16.260 Yes.

01:01:16.600 But then when you look into it, you know, it's often, I know the distinction between

01:01:21.980 graduate student and, let's say, full-fledged scientist is murky.

01:01:26.340 Yeah.

01:01:26.740 But part of the issue is always, well, exactly, who were these 1,400 people, right?

01:01:31.780 And out from under, which rocks did they climb?

01:01:35.000 And so, who were the 1,400?

01:01:37.100 Like, roughly speaking, who were these people that signed them?

01:01:40.460 So, 1,400, I mean, I didn't recognize many of the names.

01:01:42.960 But if you assume the first five or 10 names are the likely organizers, those were all well-established

01:01:51.260 psychologists, especially social psychologists.

01:01:53.440 Okay, social, okay.

01:01:54.420 Yes.

01:01:54.880 Yeah, they were social psychologists.

01:01:55.480 So, you got a backlash from-

01:01:57.780 A huge backlash.

01:01:58.980 And part of the accusation, for me in particular, was that by using this line from Fiddler on

01:02:06.440 the Roof, there was the time he sold him a horse but delivered a mule, as a frame for

01:02:11.160 progressive disingenuousness around diversity, I was comparing black people to mules.

01:02:17.340 Oh, yeah.

01:02:17.980 Oh, yeah.

01:02:18.400 I see.

01:02:19.020 I see.

01:02:19.640 And so, that drove-

01:02:21.740 That was your subtext, wasn't it?

01:02:23.500 I was explicit in part of the denunciation.

01:02:26.340 Right, right.

01:02:27.500 And so, this is an immediate firestorm.

01:02:32.180 This was when?

01:02:33.700 What year did this happen?

01:02:35.380 2022.

01:02:36.500 Oh, yeah.

01:02:36.880 Okay, so this is very new.

01:02:38.500 Actually, part of this backstory is very interesting.

01:02:40.520 The editor of the journal at the time is a European psychologist named Klaus Fiedler.

01:02:48.480 Klaus Fiedler is very accomplished.

01:02:50.780 He's unbelievably honored.

01:02:52.360 Hundreds of journal articles, multiple editorships and awards.

01:02:56.880 He was the editor overseeing all this.

01:03:00.260 And my and the other commentaries that he eventually accepted started out as simple reviews.

01:03:09.380 So, when Hommel submitted his paper, it was subjected to peer review.

01:03:13.940 I was one of the peer reviewers.

01:03:15.800 Oh, yeah.

01:03:16.180 So, was one of the other.

01:03:17.880 Fiedler so liked the reviews that he asked all of us to scale them up to full-length articles.

01:03:24.620 Scientists publish their research findings and their reviews of the literature in scientific journals.

01:03:32.640 And it's one of the ways that the quality of these articles is vetted is by submitting the manuscripts before they're published to, well, first of all, the editor reviews them to see if they're even vaguely possibly suitable for publication in that particular journal on the basis of, let's say, topic and quality.

01:03:54.160 And apparent integrity of research.

01:03:57.280 Then they're sent out to experts in that area, multiple experts for analysis.

01:04:05.320 And that's part of the quality control process.

01:04:07.660 And that's worked.

01:04:08.600 That worked pretty well up until about 2015, I would say.

01:04:12.680 Or maybe even spectacularly well, all things considered.

01:04:16.240 So, that's the peer review process.

01:04:19.080 And what happened in this case was the reviews of this, the peer reviews of this particular article were of sufficient quality so that the editor decided that they might.

01:04:29.640 In fact, it was commentary.

01:04:30.720 Right.

01:04:31.000 They might turn into standalone pieces with some development.

01:04:34.620 But I warned Fiedler, the editor, in my review, before anyone had the idea that a version of my review would get published, that if he accepted Hamill's critique of the way in which psychologists write and think about diversity, what they've been advocating with respect to diversity, that he would be at heightened risk of people coming after him, demanding the papers be retracted, and coming after his job.

01:04:59.440 This is in my review.

01:05:00.840 And, Jordan, that is exactly—

01:05:04.840 Was that part of—was that included when it was published, or was that—

01:05:08.020 I don't remember.

01:05:08.800 I'd have to go by—I don't—I think I may have taken it out because it wasn't really appropriate because the commentary wasn't—it was about the exchange.

01:05:18.600 It wasn't the message to the editor.

01:05:19.960 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:05:20.180 No, fine.

01:05:20.820 I mean, it's not necessarily the case that it would stick.

01:05:23.560 Yeah, yeah.

01:05:23.720 Yeah.

01:05:23.960 So, so, Firestorm, APS, like, executive director.

01:05:30.840 The director, committee of APS, whatever that group is, of committee, put an immediate kibosh on this.

01:05:38.920 The—it was going to be all published as a discussion forum.

01:05:43.940 That's how Fiedler framed it.

01:05:45.580 It's a discussion forum about diversity issues.

01:05:47.900 They put an immediate halt.

01:05:51.120 Okay, who's they?

01:05:52.560 It's the officers of the American—of the Association for Psychological Psychologists.

01:05:58.300 Okay, so now they're broadly overseeing the group of journals that publish under their ages.

01:06:03.680 Yes, that's right.

01:06:04.320 Okay, but they generally don't have an editorial say.

01:06:07.480 No, they don't.

01:06:08.320 Right.

01:06:08.560 And shouldn't.

01:06:09.460 And shouldn't, right.

01:06:10.660 Right.

01:06:11.020 But the editor is, to some extent, beholden.

01:06:14.540 I mean, that's who he's working for.

01:06:16.860 So, the—

01:06:18.020 Right, but it's still the case that generally they don't do such things.

01:06:20.780 Yeah, they don't do this, right.

01:06:21.560 Right.

01:06:21.980 Partly because often, well, they don't have the specialized expertise, at least in part.

01:06:28.200 Right.

01:06:28.320 Which is partly why they hire the editors to begin with, who then they give pretty much carte blanche.

01:06:33.420 Yes.

01:06:33.800 Right.

01:06:34.060 As they should.

01:06:34.900 As they should.

01:06:35.380 Because that's part of academic freedom.

01:06:36.660 That's right.

01:06:37.220 Right.

01:06:37.740 Yes.

01:06:38.100 Okay, but they decided that they were not going to proceed with the publication.

01:06:41.480 Well, or—

01:06:42.800 So, the open letter had two main demands.

01:06:46.700 They weren't even required.

01:06:47.380 They were demands.

01:06:48.200 That Fiedler be fired and the papers be retracted.

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01:07:22.680 Okay.

01:07:24.020 They conducted what looks to me—what looked to me, and really to all of us involved, like a kangaroo court, you know, into what happened.

01:07:33.640 They concluded that Fiedler had somehow violated editorial ethics and norms and—

01:07:41.020 Which is a serious accusation.

01:07:43.160 Yes.

01:07:43.940 Like a career-ending accusation, if it's true.

01:07:46.880 Yes.

01:07:47.660 Well, he's had a very nice career since, so it did not succeed—

01:07:51.440 Well, that's good, but that doesn't detract from the seriousness of the allegation.

01:07:58.300 Yes.

01:07:58.480 The fact that he was able to successfully wend his way through the thicket.

01:08:02.680 Yes, exactly.

01:08:03.540 That's right.

01:08:03.920 So, he was ousted almost immediately, and then the papers, mine included, that were part of Fiedler's discussion forum—

01:08:12.900 And that had been published.

01:08:14.560 They had been accepted but not published.

01:08:15.860 Oh, I see.

01:08:16.460 Okay, okay.

01:08:17.000 They had been accepted but not published.

01:08:18.540 That's right.

01:08:18.600 So, how the hell did the complainants get access to the papers?

01:08:23.720 Like, how did they know what the papers were if they hadn't been published?

01:08:26.300 Well, someone must have, you know, maybe through the—the editorial process is largely online, so I'm sure they could have accessed the papers through the online editorial process.

01:08:38.400 I'm sure they could have asked Fiedler for the papers.

01:08:40.240 Had they asked us for the papers, I would have—

01:08:41.880 Well, they wouldn't be a secret.

01:08:42.780 They weren't secret.

01:08:43.420 Yeah, they weren't secret.

01:08:44.100 I mean, people weren't.

01:08:45.180 Yeah, yeah.

01:08:45.540 They were publishing their papers so that people would read them.

01:08:47.600 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:08:47.900 I was just curious because it's strange that a brouhaha of that sort would emerge prior to publication.

01:08:53.780 But it's—there was quasi-publication.

01:08:56.540 Yeah, well, there was—right, exactly.

01:08:58.080 It was accepted but not published.

01:08:59.960 Yeah, okay, got it, got it.

01:09:00.440 So, they ousted him almost immediately.

01:09:02.320 And then the papers—they brought in two special editors to figure out what to do with the papers accepted as part of the discussion forum.

01:09:13.220 And—

01:09:13.940 And who were these special editors and what made them special?

01:09:17.420 Well, there was Samin Vazir and E.J. Wagenmacher.

01:09:20.860 And both of them—I think Samin is now the head editor at Psychological Science.

01:09:27.620 So, they both have had long careers advocating with some success for upgrading the quality and credibility and rigor of Psychological Science.

01:09:40.840 They both have made important contributions that way.

01:09:43.240 Okay, yeah, yeah.

01:09:43.700 And so, I think that's why they were brought in.

01:09:46.100 They had a certain cachet as able to figure out what to do.

01:09:50.120 I think that's what the APS directory believed.

01:09:53.860 On what grounds do you think this investigation was—how was the progression of this investigation justified?

01:10:03.880 I mean, there's no established precedent in the scientific community for re-evaluating an editorial decision based on political objection, right?

01:10:14.340 Like, there's no—we'll re-evaluate if 500 people sign a petition.

01:10:18.560 Like, this isn't the domain of rule or principle or tradition, right?

01:10:23.340 So, what's the fear here, do you think?

01:10:27.860 These 1,400 people signed this petition, which is something that takes like two seconds and costs you nothing and has no risk to you whatsoever.

01:10:35.380 And so, it's not an ethical statement of any profundity unless you're an activist.

01:10:39.520 So, what was it, do you think, that raised people's hackles about the mere fact that these complaints had been raised?

01:10:47.740 To this second, I don't really know.

01:10:50.560 Like, from their perspective—

01:10:51.520 Are you willing to speculate?

01:10:52.560 Well, so, sure.

01:10:56.840 The main object of Hummel's critique was a black or biracial social psychologist at Stanford, Stephen Roberts.

01:11:15.880 And Roberts denounced the whole process as racist.

01:11:20.840 Publicly.

01:11:22.760 Okay, okay.

01:11:23.840 Publicly.

01:11:24.520 And I do think that—

01:11:27.480 On what grounds?

01:11:29.780 The mere fact of questioning the diversity agenda constitutes racism.

01:11:35.000 He probably had three main grounds.

01:11:37.140 Yeah.

01:11:38.440 That was one of them, absolutely.

01:11:40.340 You know, you criticize this.

01:11:41.640 This shows that you're racist.

01:11:43.640 The racism that is pervasive throughout psychology.

01:11:46.600 Right.

01:11:46.980 That would be one grounds.

01:11:47.720 Second ground was my use of this, me comparing blacks to mules with the, you know, there was the time he sold them a horse and delivered a mule.

01:11:56.720 And then the third was there was a considerable—so, Fiedler offered—

01:12:01.640 I'm missing the point of that.

01:12:02.860 I know, yeah, right.

01:12:04.200 Fiedler offered Roberts the opportunity to respond to the full set of papers which were supporting—were generally supporting Hummel's critique, which was really about diversity in general.

01:12:18.680 But its jumping-off point was a prior paper by Roberts.

01:12:23.520 Okay, got it.

01:12:24.620 But it gave Roberts a chance to reply to the critiques.

01:12:27.460 But that—there was a considerable back and forth between Roberts and Fiedler about whether, when, and how to publish Roberts' response.

01:12:40.660 Okay.

01:12:42.340 Fiedler was probably kind of a pain in the ass.

01:12:44.240 But, I don't know, in my experience, editors—I don't know how many times—I don't have enough fingers and toes to count the number of times I have subjectively experienced editors' comments as pains in the ass.

01:12:57.420 Hmm.

01:12:58.680 But—

01:12:59.560 One—at least once per paper submitted.

01:13:02.860 Yeah, yeah, yeah, right?

01:13:04.540 But whatever.

01:13:05.220 So—but those were his grounds for denouncing all of us as racists.

01:13:10.100 Fiedler made his life difficult.

01:13:12.080 This whole critique of diversity is a testament to white supremacy, pervasive in psychology, and me comparing black people to mules.

01:13:19.900 Yeah, okay, got it.

01:13:20.560 Right, that was the grounds.

01:13:22.700 And you asked me to speculate.

01:13:25.060 I have no—I don't have—I have at best very circumstantial evidence.

01:13:29.540 I may not even have circumstantial evidence.

01:13:30.860 I strongly suspect—I would really like to test this in the lab or in surveys—that liberals, especially white liberals, are so wracked with guilt and shame over the bona fide history of white supremacy and discrimination and oppression in the United States, in Europe, and especially in the UK, it's more about colonialism, right?

01:13:52.140 I'm so wracked with guilt that there is a vulnerability to just believing anything a person from one of these oppressed, stigmatized groups says, denouncing others.

01:14:06.440 Yeah, well, it's a very quick and easy way to signify the fact that you're not part of the oppressor camp.

01:14:11.540 That's right.

01:14:11.820 Yes, well, that—has no one—has that not been formally tested as a hypothesis?

01:14:16.260 If it has, I don't know.

01:14:17.320 Well, it needs to be.

01:14:18.200 Yes, I agree.

01:14:19.180 It totally needs to be.

01:14:20.120 It's something like, from more broadly speaking, is that are there—it's a mechanism of gaming the reputation domain, right?

01:14:32.480 Because obviously our reputations are probably, arguably, the most valuable commodity, so to speak, that we possess.

01:14:40.640 And every system of value is susceptible to gaming in a variety of ways.

01:14:47.800 And one way of gaming the reputational game is to make claims of reputational virtue that are risk-free, broad, immediate, and cost-free, right?

01:15:00.180 And for me, if you're accused of something, and I can say—and accused of transgressing against a group towards whom I feel guilt, I can signify my valor as a moral agent by also denouncing you.

01:15:15.760 And it costs me nothing, right, which is a big problem, right?

01:15:19.860 It's like, maybe it's the problem of our time.

01:15:22.840 It's a very big problem.

01:15:24.040 It's a huge problem.

01:15:24.760 Well, especially now, because there's something else that's happened, right, is that groups of denunciators can get together with much greater ease than they ever could.

01:15:34.560 Yes, because of social media.

01:15:35.380 And the effort necessary to make a denunciation has plummeted to zero.

01:15:41.920 Right.

01:15:42.100 And the consequences of making a false denunciation are also zero.

01:15:46.500 Yes, zero.

01:15:47.240 This is not good.

01:15:48.360 Yes.

01:15:48.520 It's like denunciation firestorm time.

01:15:50.960 And that's certainly happening.

01:15:52.780 Well, so, you know, I mostly agree.

01:15:57.740 Certainly in the short term, the personal consequences of engaging in this sort of denunciation behavior are non-existent.

01:16:04.560 But the consequences are not non-existent.

01:16:10.040 So the credibility and trust and faith in academia has been in decline for a very long time.

01:16:18.860 People hate this kind of stuff.

01:16:21.480 So there was—

01:16:21.920 Yeah, well, just because something's advantageous for some people in the short run does not mean that it's good for the whole game in the medium to long run.

01:16:29.420 Right.

01:16:29.940 That's for sure.

01:16:30.760 Yes, that's right.

01:16:31.500 That's exactly right.

01:16:32.140 Well, that's actually, I think, in some ways, the definition of an impulsive moral error.

01:16:36.440 Like, if it accrues benefit to you in the short run but does you in in the medium run, that's not a very wise strategy.

01:16:43.060 Yes.

01:16:43.500 Right.

01:16:43.800 And that's what impulsive people do all the time.

01:16:46.440 So—

01:16:46.740 Yes.

01:16:47.200 Right, right.

01:16:48.000 That's even the definition of what constitutes a temptation.

01:16:51.580 I was recently listening to your interview for this podcast with Keith Campbell on narcissism.

01:16:59.820 Yes.

01:17:00.740 And that was one of the things you talked about, this sort of impulse control and short-term benefits versus long-term benefits, especially regarding social relations.

01:17:09.260 Yeah, yeah.

01:17:09.720 Right?

01:17:10.180 Yeah, yeah.

01:17:11.280 Reputation's a long-term game.

01:17:12.700 Oh, it's a long-term game.

01:17:13.960 Yeah, yeah.

01:17:14.520 And there has been emerging evidence that people high in left-wing authoritarianism, sort of extreme—

01:17:22.640 Now that we all agree that that exists.

01:17:24.540 It exists.

01:17:24.980 I know, right.

01:17:25.260 Which already started in 2016.

01:17:27.000 I know, I know.

01:17:28.020 Yeah.

01:17:28.380 That's a whole backstory.

01:17:29.480 That's for sure.

01:17:30.220 So—but it's correlated with narcissism.

01:17:33.980 Yeah.

01:17:34.580 And that this pleasure that people—that people on this sort of cancel culture that has emerged—I mean, the right is not immune to cancel culture-type activities, but it emerged primarily, originally, on the left.

01:17:48.740 Any place infiltrated by narcissists is going to be susceptible to exactly—

01:17:53.520 Yes.

01:17:53.900 Narcissists will use whatever political stance gains them the most immediate credibility.

01:17:58.880 That's right.

01:17:59.180 Completely independent of the validity of the ideological stance.

01:18:01.900 Yeah.

01:18:02.100 See, one of the things I—we'll get back to the story right away.

01:18:05.140 Yeah.

01:18:05.260 See, one of the things I've observed—this is very interesting, eh?

01:18:08.060 Because I've talked to—I've talked to a lot of moderate progressives, let's say, or moderate—or actually even genuine liberals within the Democrat.

01:18:18.560 Yeah, yeah.

01:18:18.900 Congressmen and senators, many of them.

01:18:21.300 And I've been struck by one thing, and I'm curious about what you think about this.

01:18:26.180 We know that a tilt towards empathy—so agreeableness, trade agreeableness—a tilt tilts you in a liberal direction and maybe in a progressive direction.

01:18:34.660 And there are concomitants of being more agreeable on the personality side.

01:18:39.260 But I think one of them is that the moderates that I've talked to always denied the existence of the pathological radicals on the left.

01:18:49.900 And I've really thought—I mean, this is to a man or a woman.

01:18:53.800 It's—yeah, yeah.

01:18:54.660 And I think what it is, I think it has something to do with the unwillingness or inability of the more liberal types to have imagination for evil.

01:19:04.900 Like, I would make the case that most criminals—you could validly interpret most criminals whose criminal history is sporadic and short as victims.

01:19:20.920 They're—they've come from abusive families, alcoholic families, often multigenerationally antisocial families, etc.

01:19:30.840 But there's a subset of criminals.

01:19:33.660 It's 1% of the criminals, 65% of the crimes.

01:19:36.660 There's a subset of criminals who are not victims.

01:19:38.940 They are really monsters.

01:19:40.320 And I don't think there's any imagination for the monstrous among the compassionate left.

01:19:46.440 It's all victims.

01:19:47.340 It doesn't matter how egregious the crime.

01:19:51.100 Now, I would have—that's something I would have tested as a social psychologist if I still had an active research lab, which I don't.

01:19:58.060 But the problem with what we know that—we know from simulations that networks of cooperators can establish themselves in a way that's mutually beneficial and productive.

01:20:08.880 But that if a shark is dropped into a tank of cooperators, then the shark takes everything.

01:20:14.800 So the problem with being agreeable and cooperative is that the monsters can get you.

01:20:20.020 And if you're temperamentally tilted towards denying the existence of the monster, so much the worse.

01:20:27.560 Now, I made that case because you talked about the relationship between narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism.

01:20:33.380 I mean, narcissism shades into sadism as well.

01:20:37.400 And so this is a—this is a very big problem, especially with online denunciation.

01:20:41.100 Okay, so back to 2022.

01:20:44.360 Hey, everyone.

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01:21:39.700 Now there's debate about whether these papers are going to proceed to publication.

01:21:44.440 Right, they were—

01:21:44.800 And there's allegations made against the people who—

01:21:46.880 Yes, absolutely.

01:21:47.540 We're all racist, and the whole thing is racist, and an abuse of editorial power, and all these accusations—

01:21:53.720 Right, and the editor loses his position.

01:21:55.280 He loses his position, and these two special editors are brought in.

01:21:58.600 Okay.

01:21:58.740 Negotiations go on for almost two years.

01:22:01.720 Like, what are they negotiating about?

01:22:03.860 Who's going to—

01:22:05.620 So part of Robert's denunciation, public denunciation of all of us, was he posted the draft of his commentary response that was headed for the discussion forum,

01:22:24.020 and the full set of emails he exchanged with Fiedler.

01:22:28.740 About publishing it.

01:22:30.720 And those are—you know, those are typically confidential communications between an editor and an author, and so—

01:22:38.620 Or at least typically private.

01:22:40.560 Yes, right, they're typically private.

01:22:42.060 So that added to the difficulty on the part of the special editors to decide what to do, because they didn't want to just publish those.

01:22:59.160 Roberts didn't agree not to at first.

01:23:01.760 Fiedler—they wanted Fiedler's permission to publish the correspondence.

01:23:09.340 He wouldn't grant it.

01:23:11.300 So why did Smith have such an outsized say in all this?

01:23:15.100 Like, that isn't how the scientific process generally works.

01:23:17.820 So they once—

01:23:20.820 APS blew up the journal by firing Fiedler.

01:23:26.440 So there was no—

01:23:27.040 Right, right, which is like an admission of fault.

01:23:28.860 So—and about two-thirds of the editorial board resigned when he was ousted.

01:23:37.400 So—

01:23:37.740 That was protest resignation.

01:23:39.280 Yeah, I don't know whether it was protest.

01:23:41.080 We know they resigned, whether it was protest or not.

01:23:44.000 So they were—

01:23:46.020 Maybe they also thought it was trouble they didn't need.

01:23:48.620 Yeah, right.

01:23:49.160 Right.

01:23:49.440 I mean, these are generally—

01:23:50.820 Right.

01:23:51.440 When you're working for a scientific journal, you're not doing it for the money, right?

01:23:55.940 It's a lot of work.

01:23:57.280 And the editors—was he paid?

01:23:59.720 Was that his full-time job?

01:24:00.940 It was not his full-time job, and I don't know whether he was paid.

01:24:03.160 Right, right.

01:24:03.640 Okay, so that just illustrates the point, is that people are doing this because that's

01:24:08.260 actually what you do as a scientist.

01:24:10.000 There's not a lot of—you know, it's a prestigious position, and you meet people.

01:24:14.980 You have a certain say over the direction the field might go, and those are perks.

01:24:19.880 But generally, people do this like they do peer review because it's part of the tradition

01:24:25.360 of scientific activity.

01:24:27.860 Right.

01:24:28.140 Right, right.

01:24:28.980 Right, that's right.

01:24:29.720 And so you can see why people might bail out if it was going to just be nothing but

01:24:34.460 reputation and catastrophe.

01:24:35.940 Right, exactly, right.

01:24:36.480 Because they'd be thinking, why the hell am I going to expose myself to, like, this

01:24:40.300 dismal risk when there's, like—it's already hard, and there's very little upside.

01:24:45.440 Right, exactly, right, okay.

01:24:46.760 So the journal was a mess for a long time, and these editors—and there was this exchange

01:24:55.480 between the editors, Roberts, Fiedler, and the other contributors, myself and the other

01:25:00.620 contributors—about whether and when to publish it.

01:25:05.240 And again, this went on for almost two years.

01:25:07.420 So there was, like, first a discussion, we're going to publish it.

01:25:10.820 Then there was radio silence.

01:25:12.480 Well, it turns out we've run into an obstacle.

01:25:14.520 Can we resolve—and it just went on for almost two years.

01:25:18.160 Eventually, that was resolved, and it was all published.

01:25:21.260 It's all published.

01:25:22.140 Right, and, you know, your original question was framed as, you can't believe I haven't

01:25:29.720 been subject to a cancellation.

01:25:30.660 In fact, I have.

01:25:31.680 I have.

01:25:32.480 You then asked, well, how did you survive it?

01:25:34.680 Yeah.

01:25:34.860 Let me add this little punchline.

01:25:36.440 Yeah.

01:25:37.020 At the time that all this was happening, my immediate associate dean—so I was chair of

01:25:44.860 the psychology department at Rutgers, and Rutgers is in the School of Arts and Sciences.

01:25:51.620 The School of Arts and Sciences has a dean.

01:25:54.240 Under the—but the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers is gigantic.

01:25:57.760 Even as chair, I had very little direct contact with the dean.

01:26:00.960 The dean was doing big deanly things.

01:26:03.480 But the department chairs have a lot of contact with an associate chair.

01:26:07.480 So there might be an associate chair for the sciences.

01:26:10.260 Associate dean?

01:26:11.160 Associate dean.

01:26:11.920 Yeah, sorry.

01:26:12.360 Yeah, that's okay.

01:26:12.880 Yeah, sorry.

01:26:13.680 Sorry.

01:26:14.000 Associate dean.

01:26:14.640 So there'd be an associate dean for math and for STEM, associate dean for social science

01:26:20.400 and associate dean for humanities.

01:26:22.200 I had a lot to do with the associate dean for social sciences, who was a psychologist

01:26:26.440 from the psychology department.

01:26:28.940 Okay.

01:26:29.540 So I never actually had this conversation exactly with him, but I'm pretty sure he knew about

01:26:34.740 the whole thing.

01:26:35.240 So a year—so at the end of my term, so this is now 2023, I go on sabbatical.

01:26:42.740 Remember, this event occurred—the POPs event occurred in 2022.

01:26:47.060 It's not until almost two years later that this stuff was published.

01:26:50.140 So I complete my term as department chair 2022.

01:26:53.780 2022-23, I go on sabbatical.

01:26:56.160 It's still not published.

01:26:57.180 Um, and then at the end of that sabbatical term, the associate dean approaches me with

01:27:07.160 an offer to chair the anthropology department.

01:27:10.980 Okay, so this is very weird.

01:27:12.620 Yeah, definitely.

01:27:13.540 It's very weird.

01:27:14.760 There was an internal political snafu, which is beyond the scope of this discussion, and

01:27:20.000 they couldn't appoint an internal chair, and they wanted an external—you know, the department

01:27:26.160 needed a chair.

01:27:27.600 The dean's office had a lot of faith and confidence in my ability because—

01:27:33.700 Despite this.

01:27:34.360 Despite the—

01:27:35.120 Because of it.

01:27:36.180 One of the things they said to me was, you know, this is going to be a difficult situation

01:27:41.660 because the department is not going to be happy about having an outside chair imposed

01:27:46.100 on them, but we know you have a thick skin.

01:27:49.800 Wow.

01:27:50.480 And I parlayed that into a very large raise.

01:27:53.440 Jordan, it was one of the best things I've ever done.

01:27:57.300 So not only did I escape cancellation, I parlayed it into an improvement in the quality of—

01:28:05.060 Well, this is a good thing for people to know, too.

01:28:07.380 You know, if you've watched my podcast, you know, because I say this all the time, that

01:28:12.440 mythologically speaking, that every treasure has a dragon, right?

01:28:17.480 And that's a representation of the world because the world is full of threat and opportunity.

01:28:23.300 And the co-association of the dragon and the treasure is a mythological trope indicating

01:28:31.000 that there's opportunity where there's peril.

01:28:34.240 But there's a corollary to that, which is a very interesting one, which is where there's

01:28:38.820 peril, there's opportunity.

01:28:40.620 And so you might think when something negative happens to you, let's say on the social side,

01:28:46.740 that you become the brunt of a cancellation attempt, you might think, oh my God, my life's

01:28:50.920 over.

01:28:51.280 It's like, yeah, that's one possible outcome.

01:28:54.060 That's the same outcome as, you know, ending up as dragon toast, let's say.

01:28:58.900 But the other outcome is that you find the treasure that's associated with the dragon, and that

01:29:03.700 can definitely happen.

01:29:04.980 And that's a good thing to know, because it means that when things become shaky around

01:29:10.000 you, one of the things you can validly ask yourself is, there's something positive lurking

01:29:15.100 here if I had the wisdom to see it and the, what would you say, the capacity for transformation

01:29:22.220 necessary to allow the challenge to change me.

01:29:27.220 Yeah, that's right.

01:29:28.180 Jordan, I wouldn't wish that, at the time that was happening, it was horrible.

01:29:33.340 Yeah.

01:29:33.540 I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

01:29:35.900 In hindsight, it has made me a better person, and I would not, I wouldn't undo it now if

01:29:43.620 I could.

01:29:44.340 Yeah.

01:29:44.620 Well, you know what Nietzsche said, if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger.

01:29:50.060 Now, unfortunately, there's an if.

01:29:52.480 Well, seriously, right?

01:29:53.580 Yes, absolutely.

01:29:54.000 And the if is that the dragon is real.

01:29:56.260 It's not a game.

01:29:57.220 Yeah.

01:29:57.620 Right.

01:29:57.800 Well, no, FIRE, the same outfit, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, keeps

01:30:02.680 a faculty under fire database of faculty who have been subject, usually to mobs, sometimes

01:30:09.640 administrative investigations, seeking to punish them for what should have been legitimate

01:30:14.380 academic speech protected by academic freedom or even free speech.

01:30:18.440 At U.S. state colleges, they're subject to the First Amendment, which means they shouldn't

01:30:23.720 be in the business.

01:30:24.740 However, hypothetically.

01:30:25.940 Well, yeah.

01:30:26.580 Well, yeah.

01:30:27.440 But they have documented that hundreds of faculty have been fired for what should have been

01:30:32.440 legitimately a protected speech.

01:30:34.860 Yeah.

01:30:34.920 So your point about the whole thing, conservatives, well, I will, so your metaphor about the dragon

01:30:41.800 is dead on, that there's no guarantee, you know, people have lost their livelihoods running

01:30:46.560 into these dragons.

01:30:47.880 So that's not how I'm fortunate about it.

01:30:50.620 So there's some concrete recommendations that can be brought out of that, too.

01:30:53.620 I would say, like, if you find yourself in serious trouble, this is one of the things

01:30:57.780 I learned about, I learned from dealing with, like, very dangerous people in my clinical

01:31:02.540 practice, let's say, dangerous and unstable people, it's a very bad idea to lie when you're

01:31:08.960 in trouble.

01:31:09.680 Like, it's a seriously bad idea.

01:31:11.220 And so if the mob or the monster comes for you, your best defense is extremely cautious,

01:31:20.520 plain truth.

01:31:21.940 Now, that's very different than trying to, what would you say, strategize and manipulate

01:31:27.640 your way out of a difficult situation.

01:31:29.780 It's also very different than apologizing.

01:31:31.720 And my experience on the woke mob cancellation side is, if you lie in your own defense or

01:31:39.780 falsify your speech, you're in serious trouble.

01:31:42.580 And if you apologize, a different mob will just come for you.

01:31:46.460 That'll be the post-apology mob that comes for you.

01:31:49.140 It's not a good idea.

01:31:50.800 So, you know, what we've been outlining here is the fact that if you're in serious social

01:31:56.560 peril, there's two outcomes.

01:31:58.100 One is that, perversely enough, in retrospect, it might turn out to be an opportunity and

01:32:05.560 one you wouldn't forego now that you know the consequences.

01:32:09.520 That's not impossible, but it's difficult.

01:32:12.140 The other one is, is you're seriously done.

01:32:14.700 And so then the question is, what can you do to maximize the possibility of the former

01:32:20.000 and minimize the latter?

01:32:21.120 And those are some things that I know.

01:32:23.380 So, okay.

01:32:24.460 Okay.

01:32:24.840 So let's back up a bit then.

01:32:28.680 We still haven't exactly described why the cancellation attempts weren't successful for

01:32:36.560 you.

01:32:37.200 Now, you said you demonstrated your ability to keep a calm head under fire and that you

01:32:43.160 did that well enough.

01:32:44.060 So the university actually recognized that and that turned out to be of substantive benefit

01:32:48.660 to you.

01:32:49.160 But we don't know why it was that you maintained a calm head under fire or how you did that

01:32:55.040 without, well, having the reputation damage that was certainly directly implied by the

01:33:02.660 accusation take you out.

01:33:05.040 Like, do you have, was it good fortune?

01:33:07.660 Were there things you did right?

01:33:08.920 Like, how do you, how do you assess that?

01:33:11.240 Yeah.

01:33:11.540 Yeah.

01:33:11.820 So that was not my first, as I mentioned at the beginning, I, this was not my first go

01:33:17.800 around with this kind of thing.

01:33:19.560 It helps to have some experience.

01:33:21.580 It helps to have done some reading that people have addressed.

01:33:25.640 There's some good articles and essays out there about what to do when you're subject to

01:33:29.880 these attacks.

01:33:30.540 Some of them have very good, make very good points.

01:33:33.220 Um, and so, so, get, get, um, uh, about six months ago, I, again, I posted an essay on

01:33:43.740 my sub stack.

01:33:45.380 What's the name of your sub stack?

01:33:46.520 Unsafe science.

01:33:47.600 Unsafe science.

01:33:48.260 It's called my Vita of denunciation.

01:33:50.640 Okay.

01:33:51.260 And it's called my Vita of denunciation because I've been, it goes through several of these

01:33:56.900 sorts of attacks that I have been through and how, first place, it also goes through the

01:34:02.200 tactics.

01:34:03.220 It's a short version.

01:34:04.320 I have a longer version in a different place, but it goes through a short version of how

01:34:08.360 to deal with these attacks.

01:34:09.560 So the very first piece is that if you're, if you find yourself in the midst of such

01:34:18.380 attack, such an attack, go silent, go silent, do not engage, do not engage with your attacker

01:34:26.740 us because nearly all of these cancellation type attacks are massive, brutal, and short.

01:34:34.800 Right, right, right.

01:34:35.680 Two weeks.

01:34:36.440 Yeah.

01:34:36.800 And most.

01:34:37.040 That's right.

01:34:37.680 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:34:38.680 And most.

01:34:38.900 And people forget.

01:34:39.760 That's the weird thing, eh?

01:34:40.740 Because the present is so large.

01:34:42.820 Yes.

01:34:43.180 You're going to panic.

01:34:44.160 Yes.

01:34:44.580 Yeah, yeah.

01:34:45.140 Don't panic.

01:34:45.980 Don't panic.

01:34:46.540 That's right.

01:34:47.060 Don't panic.

01:34:47.800 Don't assume that it's going to be successful.

01:34:49.940 That's right.

01:34:50.360 Yeah, because people, they might be interested in you today, but they weren't interested

01:34:55.220 in you yesterday.

01:34:56.060 Right.

01:34:56.340 They probably won't be interested in you tomorrow.

01:34:58.540 And it's just like, as a kid, we used to go to the beach and body surf, and occasionally

01:35:03.120 like a wave that was way bigger than you could handle would, and there was nothing you could

01:35:07.260 do except let it wash over you and knock you around, and you come out, and it washes

01:35:11.020 you on shore, and you're fine.

01:35:11.820 As long as you don't do anything to make it worse.

01:35:13.680 Yeah, yeah.

01:35:14.920 Like apologize, for example.

01:35:16.360 Well, you know, I would add this, if you genuinely, in your heart of hearts, believe

01:35:22.280 you have done something wrong, then maybe you should apologize.

01:35:25.520 Yeah, yeah.

01:35:25.920 But you should not apologize.

01:35:27.900 Let me add something to that.

01:35:29.220 Yeah, yeah.

01:35:29.720 No, not if you genuinely believe it, because you might not be your own best defender.

01:35:35.640 That's why you have a Fifth Amendment.

01:35:37.740 No, seriously.

01:35:38.780 Yeah.

01:35:39.360 Conscientious, guilt-prone people will accuse themselves.

01:35:43.580 Yeah.

01:35:43.760 It's very, so then I would say, if you feel that you've done something wrong, remember

01:35:49.140 the presumption of innocence before provable guilt.

01:35:52.480 Remember that.

01:35:53.280 It applies to you, too.

01:35:54.320 And then go talk to five or six people that you trust, and lay out the argument on both

01:35:59.200 sides, and see if they think you're the bad guy.

01:36:02.400 Right.

01:36:02.720 That's good.

01:36:03.180 I agree with that.

01:36:03.820 You need that.

01:36:04.340 Yes, that's good.

01:36:05.380 Yeah.

01:36:05.840 I completely agree with that.

01:36:07.040 So don't assume that you're morally obligated to apologize.

01:36:09.480 That's right.

01:36:09.820 Even if you think, even if you feel guilty.

01:36:12.560 That's right.

01:36:12.920 Because your guilt feelings are not an unerring indication of your guilt.

01:36:17.520 That's right.

01:36:18.020 And may distort how you think about your culpability.

01:36:20.940 Yeah, no, that's a very good point.

01:36:22.580 That is, see, this is why I think, too, the council mob is particularly effective against

01:36:27.420 genuine conservatives, because genuine conservatives tilt towards higher conscientiousness, and

01:36:33.040 it's very easy to make conscientious people feel guilty.

01:36:36.440 Right, right.

01:36:37.260 So that could be weaponized.

01:36:38.820 Okay, so go silent.

01:36:40.620 Yeah, go silent.

01:36:41.840 Including, you can always apologize in a month after you've thought it through.

01:36:46.580 Absolutely.

01:36:47.100 If anyone still cares.

01:36:48.500 That's right.

01:36:48.920 Yeah.

01:36:49.620 Okay, go silent.

01:36:50.780 Go silent.

01:36:51.540 Yeah.

01:36:52.260 Record everything.

01:36:53.360 Yeah, that's for sure.

01:36:55.780 Right?

01:36:56.040 Yeah, everything.

01:36:57.760 Everything.

01:36:58.820 You don't know how you're going to use it.

01:37:01.980 You may use it to defend yourself going forward, depending on how things unfold.

01:37:08.060 You may decide, after the wave of the attack passes, that you want to counterattack.

01:37:16.760 Yeah, right.

01:37:17.520 You want some level—

01:37:18.880 Carefully and strategically.

01:37:19.700 Carefully and strategically.

01:37:21.080 And by recording everything, you have the raw material to damn your attackers.

01:37:27.260 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:37:27.700 So that's it, right?

01:37:28.940 So go silent.

01:37:30.180 Yeah, that's especially true if someone's interviewing you.

01:37:33.780 Yeah.

01:37:34.180 It's like, record all of it.

01:37:35.920 Record all of it.

01:37:36.740 Yeah.

01:37:37.060 Record all of it.

01:37:38.700 Seek allies.

01:37:40.020 Yeah.

01:37:40.320 Because you may feel alone.

01:37:44.900 Yeah.

01:37:45.160 Mobs are very good at coming after somebody who seems alone.

01:37:49.500 But if you can—if you have networks, support networks, activate those networks.

01:37:56.480 If you don't have them, and, you know, if you're in the intellectual type of professions,

01:38:00.340 whether it's academia or mainstream media, could be in something else, you probably have

01:38:04.860 a support network.

01:38:06.060 Let them know what's going on.

01:38:07.580 But most—my experience has been, at least the kind of networks that I have, they will—people

01:38:13.500 will stand up for you.

01:38:14.760 I mean, I had numbers of people writing essays that got posted in some pretty good places.

01:38:22.000 Real clear politics, I think, was one.

01:38:24.260 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:38:25.060 On this Pops fiasco.

01:38:27.200 So, actually, of all places, the Chronicle of Higher Ed did a great—some great reporting

01:38:34.760 on it.

01:38:35.320 And it really kind of damned the mob and the—

01:38:38.260 Right.

01:38:38.280 That's also why you need that time of silence, is to muster your resources.

01:38:43.080 Yes.

01:38:43.220 Right.

01:38:43.240 And you could also assume, even if people are nervous in the aftermath of the accusations

01:38:49.460 for two or three days or a week, even, they may come to their senses as the temperature

01:38:56.820 drops.

01:38:57.540 Yes.

01:38:57.940 That's right.

01:38:58.340 So, yeah.

01:38:58.800 That's absolutely right.

01:39:00.600 And then—right.

01:39:01.440 So, go silent, record everything, activate your support networks.

01:39:05.460 Yeah.

01:39:05.540 Yeah.

01:39:06.460 And then, if—again, it depends on the situation.

01:39:09.740 It's going to be—it's going to vary from person to person and situation to situation.

01:39:14.300 It depends in part on what your skills and resources are, but then you are ready to either

01:39:22.360 defend yourself and or counterattack.

01:39:24.760 And I don't—Jordan, I don't know how many essays I posted on unsafe science surrounding

01:39:30.720 this event.

01:39:31.520 One of them is titled, There Is No Racist Mule Trope.

01:39:35.140 So, the argument—the grounds for denouncing me as a racist for comparing black people to

01:39:40.400 mules was that there was a historical trope of making an equivalence between black people

01:39:48.700 and mules.

01:39:49.780 This—Roberts was the—presented this, and he had one reference to support this.

01:39:55.820 Right.

01:39:56.220 Which I was not familiar with.

01:39:57.420 Yeah.

01:39:57.820 So, I tracked it down.

01:39:59.280 That's what you say.

01:40:00.300 I know.

01:40:00.920 Let's see what the—let's see what the article actually says.

01:40:03.780 Yeah.

01:40:03.940 So, this article was a really good article, and what it documented was that there was

01:40:12.440 a historical linkage between black people and mules because originally American blacks

01:40:18.760 were overwhelmingly in the American South, in the agrarian South.

01:40:22.640 And so, the mule was a symbol of both the kind of work that was done in the South, this agricultural

01:40:32.980 work, and it was a symbol of the, you know, flawed liberation of black people from slavery

01:40:40.960 because one of the promises that they never delivered on was 40 acres and a mule.

01:40:45.400 Right.

01:40:45.640 And even though that was never delivered on for a very long time until you had the mass

01:40:51.400 migration into the North, the black people living in the American South, you know, aspired

01:40:58.040 to be successful farmers, and getting a mule was one way to have a successful farm.

01:41:03.560 And so, you would see images, paintings, even, you know, if you go to southern museums, there's

01:41:12.240 some very famous paintings of black people in fields with a mule pulling a wagon or a,

01:41:17.940 or a, I don't know, you know, a plow.

01:41:21.600 Yeah, yeah, like a plow or, yeah, yes, right.

01:41:24.000 That's very, very common.

01:41:25.640 And in fact, the mule figures fairly largely in African-American folk stories from the American

01:41:35.820 South.

01:41:36.200 So, he documents all this.

01:41:37.400 Yeah.

01:41:37.620 So much so that the mule really became a symbol of people who were oppressed and part of the

01:41:46.060 liberation of people who were oppressed.

01:41:48.020 So that when, after Martin Luther King's assassination, his casket was pulled in a wagon, pulled by mules.

01:41:58.540 Okay.

01:41:58.920 So, there is, is that a myth, right?

01:42:00.740 Oh, so it's, okay, so given all that, it's less surprising that that speculation might

01:42:06.780 have arisen in relationship to your analogy.

01:42:09.360 Right, right, right, right.

01:42:10.760 Things you find out too late.

01:42:12.520 I know, yes, right, right.

01:42:13.580 So, but it is ironic because the, you know, mule is the symbol of the liberation from the

01:42:20.420 oppression rather than the oppression.

01:42:22.560 Right, right, right.

01:42:23.120 You know, right, so.

01:42:23.860 Okay, so let me ask you a question about strategy there, too.

01:42:26.580 You know, like, I've spent a lot of time strategizing with people because that was a big part of

01:42:32.520 my clinical practice.

01:42:34.200 But in terms of silence and then mustering your support network, right, and then you said,

01:42:45.720 well, you can, you can start your defense.

01:42:49.240 It's like, my sense is that a good offense is a very strong defense.

01:42:57.020 Yes.

01:42:57.500 Right, because you can, if you're careful, now, you know, you can defend yourself or you can turn

01:43:03.280 the tables.

01:43:03.860 And I would say, if you're turning the tables because you're angry, that's not a good idea

01:43:09.400 because you're going to make mistakes and you're strategizing, right?

01:43:12.040 I think you can distinguish the search for justice and truth from the search for revenge

01:43:18.280 by the intermediating role of especially resentment.

01:43:22.540 If you're resentfully angry, your head isn't clear.

01:43:25.600 Yeah.

01:43:25.900 But if you can quell that and you want to establish the truth and you can do that with a certain

01:43:33.380 amount of detachment, then a good defensive strategy is offense.

01:43:37.720 It's like, what's actually, you can flip the table, so to speak.

01:43:42.140 And the problem with a defense is there's something, well, there's something defensive.

01:43:48.300 There's a better defensive.

01:43:49.100 Exactly.

01:43:49.340 Absolutely.

01:43:49.980 Exactly.

01:43:50.720 Well, I might've made a mistake.

01:43:52.120 Yes, right.

01:43:52.900 Absolutely.

01:43:53.660 Right.

01:43:53.900 No, no, you're, you're seriously wrong.

01:43:56.520 Yeah, yeah.

01:43:56.960 And in a manner that's actually detrimental to the cause you purport to be putting forward.

01:44:02.160 Yeah.

01:44:02.480 Okay.

01:44:02.760 Yeah, well, so that and some of the prior experiences fueled what my, what was then very

01:44:14.240 early interests in left-wing authoritarianism and far-left radicalization and its consequences.

01:44:25.500 And so I've been doing all sorts of studies on that.

01:44:29.720 All right, look, we have to stop this part of the discussion, even though there's like

01:44:34.620 50 other things I want to talk to you about, but we'll continue.

01:44:38.160 I'm going to, I think, focus the discussion on the Daily Wire side.

01:44:42.000 You guys listening on YouTube know about this, that we do another half an hour there.

01:44:46.000 I think I'm going to talk about categorization and implicit bias and delve a little bit more

01:44:52.980 into social psychology's role for better or worse in promoting many of the policies, the

01:45:01.300 DEI policies, for example, and justifying them hypothetically on scientific grounds.

01:45:06.300 I want to delve into that because it's definitely been social psychologists who've been particularly

01:45:12.280 interested in the issue of implicit bias, even though to some degree that notion came from

01:45:18.920 the clinical world, including from people like Carl Jung, who were very interested in

01:45:23.360 the idea of complex and implicit association back in the 1920s.

01:45:28.140 Anyways, there's a veneer of scientific respectability that's been laid over the diversity,

01:45:34.660 inclusivity, and equity claims, the notion of implicit and systemic bias.

01:45:38.960 And that's always bothered me because I think the social psychologists have done a terrible

01:45:43.620 job distinguishing between categorization, which is like the basis of perception itself,

01:45:50.100 bias, because you can't consider categorization bias.

01:45:55.080 It's like, that's insane.

01:45:56.600 That's insane.

01:45:57.600 Even though the postmodernists really do make that claim.

01:46:00.820 And Lee's done work too, looking at the accuracy of such things as so-called stereotypes, because

01:46:07.420 what's the difference between a stereotype and a category?

01:46:11.220 Like, that is a hard question.

01:46:13.060 You could spend a thousand years trying to figure that out.

01:46:16.280 Anyways, I think that's what we'll delve into if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side.

01:46:20.480 And so thank you very much, sir, for, well, for offering what you know and also your story

01:46:25.520 to the more general public.

01:46:27.840 And join us on the Daily Wire side if you want to continue with the discussion.

01:46:31.760 Thank you very much, sir.

01:46:39.600 Thank you.

01:46:39.720 Thank you.

01:46:40.460 Thank you.

01:46:40.760 Thank you.

01:46:49.260 Thank you.

01:46:49.700 Thank you.

01:46:50.840 Thank you.

01:46:51.240 Thank you.

01:46:51.480 Thank you.

01:46:53.000 Thank you.

01:46:53.300 Thank you.

01:46:54.180 Thank you.

01:46:55.520 Thank you.

01:46:57.220 Thank you.

01:46:57.480 Thank you.

01:46:59.200 Thank you.

506. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists ｜ Lee Jussim

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