Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “We’re Going to be Okay” with social psychologist Adam Mastroianni

Transcript

“We’re Going to be Okay” with social psychologist Adam Mastroianni · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  It can feel a little bit overwhelming reading the news these days, thinking about the fate
• 0:13
  of democracy and of civilization and ourselves and our loved ones and our children.
• 0:19
  The uncomfortable conversation we're having today, the dangerous idea we are considering
• 0:25
  is the possibility that every generation believes that things are falling apart.
• 0:30
  And we're not really in a position to know whether or not they are.
• 0:35
  But the best way for us to be constructive and sane is to assume that they're not falling
• 0:40
  apart and that there's something that we can do.
• 0:42
  It's the basic idea behind the writing of Adam Mastriani.
• 0:47
  He is a psychologist, a social psychologist.
• 0:50
  He has a PhD from Harvard and he studies how people think about each other, their group
• 0:56
  dynamics and how knowledge and ideas spread.
• 1:00
  He has a fabulous sub-stack newsletter called Experimental History, which is a sort of
• 1:05
  contrarian take on psychology and philosophy and cultural criticism.
• 1:10
  And I wanted to get him on the show to discuss why things may not be as bad as they feel
• 1:15
  and even if they are, why they're more likely to be solved and you are more likely to be
• 1:20
  constructive if we assume that things are not beyond the pale and that the world still
• 1:26
  has some hope left within it.
• 1:28
  I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did with the one on the Adam Mastriani.
• 1:37
  I must say going back to the States recently last month, I noticed something that you're
• 1:43
  pointing to in your recent blog of yours, which was this sense of almost joyful fatalism
• 1:49
  that people had.
• 1:50
  When I was there in Trin Trump's first term, everyone was all my colleagues on the left
• 1:55
  where shocked and horrified and there was this sense of trauma and PTSD kind of.
• 2:01
  Now I was like, everyone's just getting on with it and I couldn't tell if that's healthy
• 2:06
  or if that's the Titanic's going down so we might as well play along with the band.
• 2:12
  What do you make of the current mood?
• 2:15
  Yeah, I don't know which stage of grief it is, but maybe it's acceptance.
• 2:20
  Maybe it's the last one, but I think it's a peculiar kind of acceptance that's also a rejection
• 2:25
  of responsibility that goes like, well, this is all happening, but it's got nothing to do with me.
• 2:31
  I didn't vote for this reality and therefore I also don't have to participate in it.
• 2:35
  But to be clear, it's very bad.
• 2:37
  Is kind of the sense among my peer group that I have?
• 2:43
  I don't think it's a good one.
• 2:44
  I mean, I understand why we end up there, but that's also why we stay there, I think.
• 2:50
  What would you prefer?
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  I think some sense of, look, a lot of bad things in the world always have been,
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  and here's the slice of the world that I'm trying to make better,
• 3:00
  because it's the part that I understand or that I like or that I have some kind of connection to,
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  and I really hope that everybody else tries to take care of their slice of the world.
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  That doesn't just mean like the local environment around me, although it can be
• 3:12
  that, it can mean this is the domain that I understand and that I can improve.
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  And for me, that is science and the way it's done and communicated.
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  And there's lots of other things that I think are worthy, but I don't understand them as well.
• 3:24
  I don't know how to make them better, but this one I feel like I do.
• 3:27
  What about people who don't feel like they have a field of expertise, though?
• 3:30
  Like you can lean into science.
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  I can lean into the art of making conversations better.
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  But some people, if you're in data entry and your job's about to get taken away by AI,
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  and you're worried about the cost of healthcare and rent and the coming climate chaos,
• 3:47
  what are you supposed to focus on other than just feeling paralyzed?
• 3:51
  Yeah, I mean, I think I wish I could answer that question for everyone,
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  but I think each person part of the work of being alive is to figure out that answer for yourself,
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  because it's going to be really idiosyncratic.
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  Like there is a niche that each person inhabits that no one else does,
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  right? People that you can affect that no one else can,
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  even if it's just by the virtue of the fact that you are their son or their father or their
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  neighbor or their teacher or whatever, and those are responsibilities that you have that no one
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  else has that if you don't discharge them, if you don't show up to your job, whatever it might
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  be, broadly construed, then it doesn't get done.
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  And so I don't think it's just the fact that like, oh, if you work a really important job,
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  then you're really important. It's like, no, to a few people, to a few people, everybody is very
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  important. And I think that gets diluted when everyone's like, oh, the most important thing
• 4:38
  is the fact that the world is going to warm by two degrees. Like that is very important,
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  and that can be the thing that you're working on. But like, for most people, it's not going to
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  be the main thing. When you say that you're working on it, what you really mean is that you're
• 4:50
  posting on Instagram about it or about cars or whatever it might be, not that you're actually
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  doing something constructive. But I mean, I think your critique is larger than that, which is not
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  just to focus on the micro, which is like, you know, control what you can, go and tend to the
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  garden for your own mental sanity, you know, feel productive in the ways that you can kiss your
• 5:09
  children and tell them you love them at night. But also a macro interpretation of the citizenry
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  and the demos, like you are a part of civilization. You're a part of this society. You are a
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  voter in a democracy. And we all have tools at our disposal, like I've sort of shocked some
• 5:28
  friends lately by feeling like I'm rather strangely chipper about the current moment,
• 5:34
  simply because I've changed the way that I'm thinking about it and now I'm thinking, you know,
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  what my grandparents generation and their parents generation certainly lived during a time where
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  they had real stakes. Like there were really things up for grabs, like the future of civilization
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  was on the line and they had purpose. And ever since like, I guess basically the end of World War
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  to maybe the 1960s and the civil rights movement there, everyone's been kind of just floating
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  along. Bill Clinton's been playing his saxophone. So it felt been making TV shows about nothing,
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  the Cold War ended, end of history, you know, sure, a few wars in the Middle East and whatever.
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  But like nothing was existential and now I've kind of got like a fire in my belly about,
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  okay, so our generation and my kids generation are is actually going to be pivotal in saving
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  liberal democracy, figuring out what to do about artificial intelligence and the climate.
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  That now's our chance to step up. We've got meaning and purpose. But a lot of it, that is not,
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  it seems to me obviously have a strange brain and maybe you do too. That is not the way that it
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  is landing for most people. What's the journey from here, from where people currently are,
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  it's sort of in doom thinking to there. Yeah, I mean, I think this very normal way to think,
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  the doom thinking bit or the this is an opportunity bit. This is an opportunity bit. I mean,
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  I think it is the right way. I think it's a way that should be normal. I think descriptively,
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  it's obviously not. But like how do you get there? I think it's by realizing that like the future
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  civilizations always on the line, just often not in the way that fits your preferred aesthetic,
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  right? That we now wax nostalgic about the idea of being, you know, shipped over to Berlin to fight
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  Hitler, which at the time I'm sure it was romantic as it might have seemed, you know, I think about
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  the fact that both of my grandfather's were were drafted to fight in the Korean War. I went there
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  on my honeymoon to barbecue and like I do prefer my reality, even though it comes with a lot more
• 7:32
  on we than they had to deal with. But like also many fewer bullets flying around me. Yeah,
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  it's a like I have a different job to do. And like I think my job is is harder in some ways in
• 7:43
  that I first said to figure out what that job is, right? It's not delivered to me. I didn't
• 7:46
  receive marching orders to tell me what it is. But like we're all trying to make the project of
• 7:52
  civilization work. And that means that our part in that civilization like is not just between us
• 7:57
  and ourselves. Like that's part of our public duties to figure out like what can I do? How can I
• 8:02
  contribute? What's weird about me that I can work on? That's everything we get there. You just
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  said something really really interesting, which is that we don't have marching orders now. And
• 8:15
  yeah, we don't have military marching orders. But one thing that I notice on the left is that
• 8:19
  is a true sense of not having marching orders and a fear that actually the right does. That
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  you know, at the moment the momentum and the wind is at the sales of the right. I think they
• 8:30
  do feel like they have clear marching orders. They're going to reverse the overreaches of, you know,
• 8:34
  left-wing neo-Marxist social justice work craziness. And they're going to, you know, it's time to put
• 8:41
  the gloves on and fight. And if cancel culture was good enough for the left, then God damn it,
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  it's going to be good enough for us. And we're going to reassert like, you know, kind of an
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  unapologetic nationalism, maybe even edging towards white nationalism. But certainly an unapologetic
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  boldness after what they perceive as years of co-option of institutions and Hollywood and the media
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  and elite, you know, institutions by left-wing, foggy-headed, you know, black-arm band view of history
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  thinking. Driving meaning on the left at the moment feels to me a little bit like pulling
• 9:18
  ourselves up by our bootstraps because we're not exactly sure what we are except in opposition to
• 9:22
  this thing that is itself in opposition to what we were three seconds ago. Yeah, yeah, save me.
• 9:28
  Yeah, I mean, everything you just described, like, it's not the banner that I want to get behind,
• 9:33
  but you can see how it is a banner. The right-wing one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, I don't know what
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  the banner should be, but I do know that like, ostensibly, we should be able to figure it out, like
• 9:47
  that is supposed to be what we're good at is thinking about things, right? That like, more so,
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  I think than ever, the people who like to think and the people who like don't care that much for
• 9:56
  thinking have been separated pretty clearly into distinct political parties. And the problem,
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  I think, when that happens is that the people who are like very into heavy intellectualism forget
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  that part of the mission of that is like to figure out how, like, which way we should be heading and
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  how we should be getting there in a way that doesn't require every single person to do the homework.
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  This is like a very half-baked idea that I have, but like, I think on the left people expect
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  everybody to do the reading. And I think this was like a big mistake that we made that actually,
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  you need to come up with a political ideology that does not require people to think about it all.
• 10:32
  Yeah, telling them to do the work is not really enough, telling them that you're not going to
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  win us to the labor of explaining to them why they're wrong. And they have to conclude their own
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  wrongness from first principles was turned out to not be that great an idea. Yeah. And like, I think
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  we should be really good at looking at what we've done and understanding what worked and what
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  didn't work. Like, if you are, if you are people who are interested in thinking and reflecting
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  about things and reading, we should be reading our own tea leaves, like looking at our own performance
• 11:02
  and reviewing it and getting better. And I think right now, instead, we're just kind of hoping
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  that the future is going to turn out differently because we're right about things.
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  And that's not going to happen anymore. I mean, I think five or ten years ago, that was true,
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  that we just thought, obviously Trump is and the far right our own aberration, but history is
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  on our side. And the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. So we're on the right
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  side of history. And I think one reason why everyone's feeling so doomed at the moment is we're
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  like maybe when maybe we were the blip, maybe they're not the blip, maybe like the ascendancy of
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  the cultural left since the basically the 1960s was a half century blip and we're going back
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  towards the same tribalism and militarism that defined human civilization for millennia.
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  Coming to grips with that and then going, okay, so that's a possibility. Now what are we going to
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  do about it is proving to be a tricky challenge. Just to pick you up on one thing that you just
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  said about intellectuals, that the brainy side of politics is the left and then I'm thinking
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  side is the right. What do you make of the galaxy-brained Silicon Valley types that like you listen
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  to Peter Till talk or you listen to some of these other guys, Mark Andreessen talk,
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  even Elon Musk. These are not dummies, right? These are people or even like Curtis Yavin who thinks
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  that you know democracy was a mistake and America should have a a tech overlord monarch.
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  He's got very sophisticated sounding reasons for that and I wonder if part of the problem
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  is that we haven't been very good on the left at really defending from first principles the
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  things that we believe about for a while because we've had the luxury of sort of having one.
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  Yeah, I think that's certainly true. I think that thinking can be a victim of its own success
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  and it's certainly not that there's zero people on the right who are interested in thinking deeply
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  about things, but I'd be interested if you can link them that list by another 10 or another 20
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  that I think. Well, I may not know of them, but I think I must be there. I mean, the first
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  president is a smart guy, Tucker Carlson's a smart guy, you know, like they may be cropped
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  but they're wily. They're brave. Yeah, no, it's not about being dumb. I think it's actually about
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  appreciating a certain kind of culture that is self-reflective, that it's interested in
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  reducing its own error. That is, in its ideal form, open to changing its mind, these are supposedly
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  values that we teach in the academy or that we're supposed to embody in the academy. Obviously,
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  we don't always, but that is what we're shooting for. And I don't think that it happened by accident
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  that basically everybody in the academy is on the left. I think part of that was purity and
• 13:57
  rooting people out, but I think part of it is right now, if you are interested in really getting
• 14:03
  to the truth of things, would you vote for Donald Trump? It's unclear to me, like the case for that,
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  unless you are, you know, galaxy brain, like actually the best thing is for us all to be ruled
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  by a king. And it's not impossible for someone who's really into thinking to end up there. I just
• 14:25
  think it's a pretty rare route because I also think it's a wrong one. Yeah, right. Yeah, that's
• 14:30
  interesting. I mean, one way that you make an analogy here to the sort of doom rut that a lot of
• 14:37
  us are in emotionally is by comparing it to the hero's journey and saying that like in the classic
• 14:43
  formulation of the hero's journey, step one is the call to adventure. And then step two is
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  the rejection of the call. And we're still stuck for quite a long time now in step two without
• 14:55
  moving on. Can you remind people of the concept of the hero's journey and why that's applicable?
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  Yeah, this is the idea that every story in folklore across different cultures has sort of this
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  or structure that they all generally fit into. And the first step, like you said, is that the
• 15:15
  hero gets called to action. And then, curiously, often, they hear some reason why now it's not
• 15:21
  the right time. You know, Gandalf is at the door, but I just made lunch. Now I don't really want to
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  march to board door. They're pretty scary. They've got orcs. What do I have? And I think that not
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  only are we stuck there, I think there's a sort of glorification of the idea of being stuck there
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  right now that we don't have any urgency to move forward. And I think that's actually the thing
• 15:44
  that comes before you figure out which way to march is the idea that we should march at all.
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  And because I think there's this idea that like all participation in the world is inherently
• 15:57
  draining. Like it's actually bad to be like out there trying to make things better. Like that's
• 16:03
  something you can only do for a limited time. Then you need to retreat and regenerate. And I
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  actually think that if you find the thing that you should be doing, that's actually the regenerative
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  part. You know, you also have to spend some time doing your own thing. But if whatever you're doing
• 16:17
  to try to make the world better, you find like tiresome and tedious. I think you picked the wrong
• 16:22
  thing. This is I think what people don't understand is that like actually I find most of the people
• 16:27
  who are most energized by doing something good. They're really annoyed by it most of the time. Like
• 16:32
  it's not that but they're annoyed in a good way. It's not that they're like always filled with this
• 16:37
  like glow of altruism. It's that they see something that they don't like and they enjoy making it
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  better. I was talking with some friends of mine recently about like they had had everyone that
• 16:47
  had a weird experience with a good Samaritan recently. And every single one of those good Samaritans
• 16:51
  had acted out of annoyance. Like one of my friends was at a at a stoplight on her bike and the
• 16:56
  chain fell off. And this construction worker came over and he's like, I just can't bear to see you
• 17:01
  like struggling to put this chain on. He puts it on or like I was helping some friends move and
• 17:04
  we're trying to get this couch up the steps. And the guy looks at it and he's like, I cannot
• 17:08
  stand watching you guys like you guys with a horrible upper body strength. And he's like,
• 17:13
  let me help you. Or another one of my friends like found some money on the ground. I was like, I
• 17:18
  couldn't be the kind of person who just like takes his home. So I'm going to take it to the local
• 17:23
  police station. None of those people were like, I feel so wonderful doing this. It's like I
• 17:28
  actually feel kind of bad not doing it. And the good feeling comes later after you've done it.
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  And I think that dynamic people forget and so they don't do it. Yeah. I mean, when I hear you speak
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  like that, I think there are two components to those analogies that are complicated right now
• 17:42
  that are complicating things. One is that you need proficiency in order to step in and help.
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  And not everybody has like the you need to actually know something about bicycles to be able to
• 17:52
  fix the bike chain better than other people. And some people don't feel they have a real proficiency
• 17:56
  and social media certainly encourages us not to develop proficiencies but to shout as loudly as
• 18:01
  we can about how terrible it is that bike chains fall off and that big bicycle is behind,
• 18:06
  you know, manufacturing bad bikes. So the bike chains are of lower quality and they shouldn't
• 18:11
  be made in Vietnamese sweatshops which are polluting the planet. But there's another thing which is
• 18:17
  those analogies they depend on a shared respect for assistance and for expert assistance and for
• 18:28
  expertise and for problem solving. And we find ourselves at the moment in an environment in which a
• 18:34
  lot of the incentives run against that when you have the director of human health and services
• 18:40
  talking about how, you know, Tylenol is going to give you autism, you know, give pregnant women
• 18:46
  babies autism and vaccines don't work. And the hollowing out of sort of expert institutions like
• 18:55
  USAID or whatever it might be, it is a bit hard for people who favor proficiency and expertise
• 19:00
  to know how to win cred in an environment in which there's a wrecking ball on, you know, that very
• 19:08
  sort of act, the stepping in to help the couch get through. It's like it's as if the people who
• 19:12
  were moving the couch told you to fuck off every time you tried to help them move the couch like
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  how many times do you keep trying and what do you do with your, you know, expensive fancy PhD
• 19:24
  and couch maneuvering when there's no call for it? Yeah, I mean, I think this is actually the
• 19:32
  perfect time to realize that our understanding of expertise has been totally wrong all this time
• 19:36
  that we thought that you can make an argument for expertise and it goes like this, you should
• 19:40
  listen to me because I'm an expert and it just turns out that that's not actually the way expertise
• 19:45
  is supposed to work, being an expert is supposed to make you better at making the correct argument.
• 19:50
  So it doesn't matter if someone is, you know, the chair of health and human services, it doesn't
• 19:54
  matter if someone has a PhD like the proof is in, can they show me proof? Like can they make a good
• 19:59
  argument to me relying on a credential or on a position or on an office that someone occupies is
• 20:06
  just asking someone else to do your homework for you. If that's what we have to do,
• 20:09
  you're trusting someone. We have to complicate it society, Adam. I mean, we don't have time to
• 20:12
  be gone around doing my own research. I always hated it during COVID when people were like,
• 20:15
  do your research. I'm like, I'm not fucking doing my own research and I'm a journalist. I'm
• 20:18
  supposed to do the research. I'm only going to do the minimum amount of research necessary
• 20:22
  in order for me to outsource the research to people who I have reason to trust.
• 20:27
  So that's fine. Eventually you're going to have to trust somebody, but you have to realize the
• 20:32
  extent to which you're trusting somebody that like even readings say a peer reviewed paper,
• 20:37
  you are trusting that those people accurately reported their results. They didn't make them up,
• 20:41
  that the peer review actually meant something, all these things are tenuous. And the thing is like
• 20:45
  you just can't actually get homework for free. So like you don't have to do it, but you can't
• 20:51
  have the commensurate amount of conviction if you don't do it. And that's I think where people
• 20:55
  make the mistake is that they think that they can speed around this. They're like, I don't actually
• 20:59
  need to do the work in order to believe something strongly. Like yeah, there's plenty of things I
• 21:04
  would like to be certain about, but I'm not going to be, I can't look into them enough to be
• 21:08
  certain. And so I have to remain uncertain about them. So like, what's the truth? Man, I have my
• 21:14
  suspicions, but I don't actually get to know until I do the work. And there's literally no way around
• 21:18
  that. How do you reconcile that admirable, that laudable scientific skepticism with the fact that
• 21:25
  widespread skepticism throughout a society or a culture can lead to everybody finding their own
• 21:31
  justifications, doing their own research, coming up to their own with their own cookie conclusions.
• 21:36
  And the default setting, if I'm not sure, is presumably not to vaccinate my children,
• 21:42
  because I'm taking a precautionary principle. You know, I worry about the erosion. How do you
• 21:50
  how do you map that onto the downsides of an erosion of trust in authority? I think it's that's
• 21:59
  I think what you actually just described is still an excess of conviction, because if you're
• 22:05
  if you're like, well, you know, this person is telling me that vaccines are harmful, like you're
• 22:08
  still trusting somebody. So if you start from I know nothing about vaccines, and then you let
• 22:14
  the evidence in bit by bit, and you try to evaluate that evidence as it comes, I just think it's
• 22:19
  going to be so clear, which way that evidence leans. And if you're skeptical, even of this precautionary
• 22:26
  principle, like, well, why would it be better to do nothing? Think about the fact that like this is
• 22:32
  the thing that most people do, do most people die, do most people get autism? No, like it's like this
• 22:39
  is the first piece of evidence that one of these sides is probably more right than the other.
• 22:43
  And this is like, I don't actually think this is easy, but I do think it is incumbent upon all of us,
• 22:48
  like you have to make this decision regardless. Like this is part of the work of being human.
• 22:52
  It's to try to make your best guess. But I think most of the people who are like, yeah,
• 22:55
  vaccines harm you actually have way too little skepticism rather than too much, because if they
• 23:00
  applied it to the things that they believed, they'd see like, these studies aren't good, these people
• 23:05
  aren't trustworthy. Like they're trying to sell you something. They don't make good arguments.
• 23:11
  Whereas like, where do the better arguments come from? By and large, it's the people who say like,
• 23:15
  look, these have saved millions of lives. Right. I mean, then we come back to a question about the
• 23:19
  problems of the information ecosystem because it is probably unreasonable of us to expect every
• 23:25
  individual human being to know how to pass scholarly papers and the evidence about vaccines.
• 23:35
  We have availability biases where we will see the things that are placed in front of us and we
• 23:40
  won't necessarily go hunting for a counter example. So PJ vote, who's an excellent
• 23:45
  podcast, who recently had an episode about the phenomenon of Hashtag died suddenly. So
• 23:50
  yeah, yeah, I highly recommend PJ's podcast. And you know, this was during COVID, where
• 23:59
  and I remember this phenomenon, I remember seeing a lot of things on social media of just,
• 24:04
  you know, there would be a newsreader in Brazil or something like that who's reading the news and
• 24:08
  they would just drop dead and you would see it on camera and there were all these instances of
• 24:13
  people dying mysteriously and the anti-COVID jab people were saying like, isn't it a bit weird that
• 24:19
  we suddenly have all of these people just randomly dying from heart disease? This wasn't happening
• 24:24
  before. Of course, it was happening before, but there was no organized incentive for people to
• 24:29
  corral and collate all of those examples and get them from all over the world and all over the
• 24:34
  web and show weird examples of people just dropping dead. People just dropped dead for no reason
• 24:38
  all the time. There are billions of people and some of them just randomly dropped dead.
• 24:44
  You know, I mean, I'm doing my little bit in the information ecosystem to try to help people
• 24:49
  think through things in a more reasonable fashion, but do you have any meta thoughts about the way
• 24:54
  we're having conversations that can nudge people towards being more open? Yeah, I mean, I actually,
• 25:02
  I think that the experts or the aspiring experts are the ones who could do a lot more work here that
• 25:07
  part of the job of being someone who say works in public health is to make the right answer easier
• 25:14
  to think. And I think what we've relied on recently is like, you should listen to me because of
• 25:19
  who I am or credential that I have, but like actually, their job should be to make the argument
• 25:25
  good enough that people don't have to do much work to get the right answer. I think of this like
• 25:29
  fractal way of thinking about the truth. We're like, the truth is actually very complicated,
• 25:33
  but what's the easiest version of it that you can give to people who can't spend all of their
• 25:37
  time reading papers who like don't even have access to the papers that like if you are working
• 25:42
  in one of these fields, the end of your job is not the publication of a paper, which most people
• 25:46
  don't have access to or can't understand. It is making some other version of this that people
• 25:51
  might have access to or that they can understand. And like that your job isn't done until you've done
• 25:57
  that even if you don't get some professional incentive for it. And if we're good at thinking
• 26:02
  like we should be good at helping other people think the correct thing like that's what expertise
• 26:07
  means. And I think vaccines are an unfortunate case where like doing the right thing requires
• 26:12
  someone to make this conscious and complicated decision. A lot of technological progress doesn't
• 26:17
  do this right. No one needs to know how an internal combustion engine works in order to drive a car.
• 26:22
  That's actually the point that we want to get to where we figured this out so well that you really
• 26:27
  don't even have to understand it in order to benefit from it. And like unfortunately vaccines
• 26:32
  aren't there yet. And I don't know how to get them there, but that's the goal because like this
• 26:37
  this step where we have to convince each person individually is really inefficient and is never
• 26:41
  going to work perfectly. There's always going to be people who don't believe it in part because
• 26:45
  there's always people who want to be contrarian no matter what or there's always some incentive
• 26:49
  to go against the grain. There's always going to be that 20% or something that doesn't believe it.
• 26:54
  I mean one of the one of the alternatives to convincing people is to coerce them. And then you run
• 26:59
  into problems of individualism and human rights. If you want to get on a plane, you don't have a
• 27:05
  choice to go through TSA security. That's just what you have to do. And during the you know
• 27:10
  Australia is one of the countries that opted for coercion more than almost any other rich democracy
• 27:14
  in the vaccine question. If you wanted to go into any public place, then you had to have been
• 27:19
  vaccinated. And it was just like getting on a plane with the TSA. It was not, you know, you were
• 27:23
  basically excluded from public society for quite a long time unless you were unless you were vaccinated.
• 27:31
  In an ideal world, we wouldn't do that. In the real world, it's entirely possible that
• 27:36
  we need more of that for some time. And I will get lots of hate from my libertarian
• 27:42
  listeners for saying that, but I'm not sure that it's possible when you're talking about something
• 27:47
  like public health or like the return of measles or polio to do it other than through, I don't
• 27:53
  maybe coercion is too harsh a word, but inducements should be said, like you're not going to go to a
• 27:56
  public childcare center if you're not vaccinated. Yeah. I mean, I think those should always be
• 28:04
  the last resort. And you need really good evidence to do them, right? Because if you force people
• 28:08
  to do something or induce them to do something and you're wrong, you've permanently lost trust
• 28:13
  with people. And I think we are really comfortable telling people to do things without commensurate
• 28:19
  evidence. I mean, this is so much lower stakes, but I think it's emblematic that the American
• 28:23
  Dental Association has a blanket recommendation that everyone should floss. They don't have good
• 28:27
  evidence that flossing does anything like they will admit straight up that like the the the
• 28:32
  the Cochrane collaboration systematic review, the gold standard of evidence, like does not produce
• 28:38
  strong evidence one way or the other as to whether flossing your teeth improves your dental health.
• 28:42
  However, they say you should do it. And like that's fine. If every dentist was like, look,
• 28:48
  this is kind of just a gut feeling like there's no reason why I should hurt you. I think it helps you
• 28:53
  in my experience. I know the evidence isn't there. That's a totally reasonable way to deal with that
• 28:57
  level of information. But like don't look at the evidence and just do this thing because we say
• 29:03
  you should, I think is a great way to lose trust with people that you then don't have when you
• 29:08
  really do need it. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, there's also a problem of scientists who are
• 29:14
  trying to explain things when you're saying that scientists should explain things to the public in
• 29:18
  ways that don't rely on their authority, but rather on persuasion. It's a little bit tricky because
• 29:25
  the way that scientists talk to each other about uncertainty and doubt is different from the way
• 29:29
  that lay people talk about uncertainty and doubt. So just to bang on about vaccines forever.
• 29:34
  But if you think about the way that scientists were communicating uncertainty about
• 29:39
  vaccines, the people who sounded the most wishy washy were the most authoritative and trustworthy
• 29:45
  experts. The people who sounded the most certain were the Brett Weinstein's and so on who were,
• 29:51
  you know, banging on about it being a deadly conspiracy and a plot. I don't know if we have to
• 29:56
  rethink how we train the scientists. I mean, sometimes I also just won't talk about things like
• 30:02
  I remember I was hosting my public radio show that I no longer have during COVID and there was
• 30:08
  this uptick in all cause mortality. There was, had people scratching their heads and a lot of the
• 30:13
  anti-vaxxers were saying, see, this is evidence that like, yes, people aren't dying as much of COVID
• 30:19
  if now that we're vaccinated, but they're dying of these other mysterious things. And it took a
• 30:23
  long, long time for my producer to find an expert who was actually willing to come on the air and
• 30:28
  try to spitball some of this. And it turns out that most of the all cause mortality increases were
• 30:34
  from dementia and cancer, which have too long a tale to be explicable by the vaccines. But it
• 30:41
  had something to do with, you know, the lack of hospitalization and treatments during the lockdowns
• 30:45
  and so on and so forth. But it was very hard to persuade people because they didn't know and
• 30:51
  scientists don't like just going out there and like spitballing with me, even though they know
• 30:56
  more about a subject than I do. And I wonder if that norm should change.
• 31:02
  Yeah, I mean, that norm could change. I also think this is part of what a scientific education
• 31:07
  should be is being acquainted with the fact that like, these things are always really complicated.
• 31:11
  They almost always take a long time to figure out anyone who's telling you that they've
• 31:16
  done a speed run around the truth and now they know it is instantly less trustworthy than someone else
• 31:21
  that like a lot of the arguments we were having about a kin disease spread indoors and how does
• 31:26
  it happen? Is it droplets? Is it aerosols? We've been having this debate for a hundred years.
• 31:29
  Like we've been trying to figure that out for a really long time and like we're not actually going
• 31:34
  to come to a conclusion today because it would be extremely convenient. So anyone who thinks that
• 31:39
  we're done figuring this out, it probably has the wrong answer or if they do the right answer,
• 31:43
  it's just by luck. And so I think rather than like going through chemistry labs where it's like,
• 31:48
  can you get this reaction again to understand that like really smart people can try for a long time
• 31:54
  and get it wrong. And anyone who's given you the quick answer is like probably cutting that
• 32:01
  process off before it completes. And so people who are throwing around extremely strong convictions
• 32:06
  with extremely thin evidence, like they're just charlatans. I'm still worried about how that maps
• 32:11
  on to public health advisories though, which by definition have to be a little bit blunt and a
• 32:16
  little bit overly certain. It's tricky, right? Yeah, I don't know if they do because like the
• 32:24
  what if they're overly certain and then they're wrong? Right, we saw this with masks that in March,
• 32:29
  it was don't wear a mask you idiots. And then a couple months later, it was wear a mask you idiots.
• 32:34
  And like the second message just isn't going to hit what you've said the first one. If the first
• 32:39
  one was we don't have good evidence that masks work. And the second one was we now have good
• 32:44
  evidence that masks masks work. I think you radicalize many fewer people. Even though the first one
• 32:50
  was much more effective at getting people to not wear masks, I imagine some people probably did it
• 32:53
  because they were more suspicious. But now the second one is definitely going to be less effective.
• 32:57
  Yeah, but you may also have run out of masks in the first case. I mean, I'm not defending the
• 33:03
  untruth, but even when they were saying don't wear masks, I was thinking to myself, well,
• 33:08
  doctors wear masks in surgery. I mean, I don't quite buy this. And I think if more people had,
• 33:15
  I mean, we realized that the thing was they want a lot of masks and they needed them for the important
• 33:21
  people they needed, they needed them for doctors and nurses. And it's possible that there would have
• 33:26
  been an externality there of being more ambiguous. Maybe more people would have bought masks and
• 33:30
  there wouldn't have been enough. So it is, but you're right that I mean, I'm sort of quibbling,
• 33:34
  but I agree fundamentally that the long game is to engender trust. And you can probably cop some
• 33:41
  short term downsides if the long term, if in the long term, you have a more cohesive society with
• 33:46
  a greater appreciation for the truth. Let's take an off ramp from vaccines and science and talk
• 33:51
  about the mood of go back to where we started with the mood of the population. Because I think it's
• 33:56
  interesting that you talk about this phenomenon of self-handicapping. You know, just explain what you
• 34:03
  mean by self-handicapping. So this is a strategy that people use consciously or not when they think
• 34:10
  that failure is assured or when there's some cost to trying and failing and when there's some cost
• 34:16
  to trying not at all. You're sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place. How do you get out of it?
• 34:22
  You make failure guaranteed. So the classic example of this is I've got a map that's coming up.
• 34:28
  It'd be really embarrassing if I studied a lot and got a bad grade. It would also be embarrassing
• 34:32
  if I didn't study at all. A less bad way out is to get blackout drunk that before. And so the next day
• 34:38
  when I fail, like it's not because I'm bad at math, I might be stupid in kind of other ways that are
• 34:44
  maybe more fun and forgivable. And it's not because I didn't try. You know, it's because like
• 34:49
  awesome, the intervened and meant that I couldn't possibly succeed at getting a good score on the
• 34:54
  math test. And I think, I mean, this is admittedly a big idea that's part of what we're seeing right now
• 35:01
  in people feeling despondent or acting like all the problem in the world cannot be solved.
• 35:06
  Like this is one way out of feeling any responsibility for them that if it's embarrassing to like
• 35:11
  try to make the world better and fail or other people don't show up to do their part. And it's
• 35:15
  also embarrassing to be like, I'm just not going to try. Like that's someone else's problem.
• 35:20
  One canny way out of it is to go like, look, I'd love to help make the world better, but it's
• 35:25
  impossible. So like, I can't possibly be expected to, you know, show up and do my part.
• 35:30
  I wish it were otherwise, but like, it's too bad. That's where I am. That's what I mean myself.
• 35:34
  Yeah, you took it. You used an anecdote of a peer of yours in high school who was brilliant and
• 35:41
  forgot to apply to any colleges. Yeah. Yeah, I forgot. Yeah, literally one day we're like,
• 35:47
  date, did you get it anywhere? And it's like, oh, that already happened. And like, maybe he did
• 35:53
  forget he was kind of a spacey guy even though he was smart. But like, maybe some part of him
• 35:57
  deliberately or not was like, look, if I don't apply, I can't get rejected. And it's more
• 36:01
  embarrassing to be rejected than it is to forget. Yeah. Is this a flip side of perfectionism in some
• 36:06
  way? I mean, I struggle with this myself as a creative person who's a perfectionist. I've always
• 36:11
  got, you know, the almost finished script that never quite gets finished because the version
• 36:17
  in my head is perfect. And the one that's on the page is imperfect. So it's much better if it's
• 36:22
  still a hypothetical that isn't quite ready than if it's an actual thing that people have to
• 36:26
  scrutinize. Yeah, it's like somewhat embarrassing to work your whole life on your unpublished novel.
• 36:32
  It's even more embarrassing to finish it and for it to be bad. And so yeah, I think it's the
• 36:37
  same kind of calculus. It's like the interpersonal attributional calculus that play. And you write in
• 36:42
  this blog about self handicapping. I'll just quote you even though I hate doing that. But it's a
• 36:45
  good line. You write, it's actually very important to maintain the idea even subconsciously that
• 36:50
  democracy is unsalvable. AI is unstoppable. The Middle East is intractable. The climate
• 36:57
  apocalypse is literally baked in and so on. For the aspiring self handicapper, the best causes
• 37:02
  are lost causes. I think that's an interesting way of thinking about where our heads are at the
• 37:09
  moment. Like it's actually more comfortable for us to be fatalistic about the problems and
• 37:17
  be noble in our impotence than to strive and fail to fix it. Yeah, the scarier thing then certain
• 37:27
  doom is uncertain doom. Right. If you if we knew that the missiles were coming right now and we
• 37:34
  are all going to be wiped out, it would be frightening, but we actually know what people do in those
• 37:39
  moments because this happened in Hawaii a couple of years ago, right? We're everybody at this
• 37:42
  message that's like, oh, the missiles are coming to cover. What people did is they they sought out
• 37:46
  their loved ones. They held them close and they were certainly afraid, but I think not the kind of
• 37:51
  afraid that people feel when at any moment the missiles could come. And so I think people
• 37:57
  perversely feel more comfortable with the idea that like the world is going to hell in a hand
• 38:02
  basket and it cannot be turned back. And that's just the way it is. Then well, it could or couldn't
• 38:09
  and it's kind of up to you when it's up to everybody else to decide whether that happens or not.
• 38:13
  That's actually the most much scarier situation in the end. Yeah, right. How do you see that
• 38:18
  playing out? Like, can you put some flesh on the bones of this analysis of us actually favoring
• 38:23
  a lost cause over a hard cause? I mean, I think this shows up in a lot of conversations that I have
• 38:29
  where... Get a humans. Well, if you've listened to this much of the episode, then you must enjoy it
• 38:35
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• 38:39
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