Episode 95: On Morality, Moralizing, and Elephant Jockeys (Round Table)

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:00]  Peter: Hello out there. This time on the Theory of Anything podcast, I invited some of the coolest and smartest people I know to have a freewheeling discussion on morality, loosely centered on Jonathan Haidt's Rider and the Elephant metaphor. We take a deep dive into this idea that reason is a slave to our passions. Three hours flew by with these humans, and I appreciated their diverse perspectives so much, and I hope someone out there gets something out of this. We may be a self-indulgent podcast, but we have a lot of fun.

[00:00:44]  Peter: Welcome to The Theory of Anything Podcast. Hey, everyone.

[00:00:49]  Unidentified speaker: Howdy.

[00:00:50]  Unidentified speaker: Hello. Hi there.

[00:00:51]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:00:54]  Ray: We're here for the party.

[00:00:56]  Peter: Today, we are going to talk about morality versus moralizing. This is a roundtable discussion, so we've got, let's see, five people here, six people here, including myself, I think. I can't tell you how exciting this is to me. This is a strange, strange life, and I've got some imposter syndrome here. To get this many smart people in one room to talk about whatever I want to talk about, I just, and these are all my first choices, I should say. None of you are our second choices. So before we get started into our discussion on morality, I'd like to first introduce each of these wonderful guests. first up, in no particular order, we've got Lulie Tanett from the Reason is Fun podcast. Please stop what you're doing and go listen to that. It's probably one of the coolest things. Online, in my opinion, they are all of the episodes, if I'm not mistaken, are conversations with David Deutsch.

[00:02:03]  Unidentified speaker: That's correct.

[00:02:04]  Peter: I can't wait to go and binge it again. Listen again. It seems like the kind of thing you want to listen to two or three times at least. Lulie, it seems like a central theme of the podcast is relating to sort of a friendly disagreement you have with David Deutsch about the nature of feelings. I think you've described it as something like an epistemic crisis or something similar on your part.

[00:02:35]  Lulie: I would say that how I described it for myself was an epistemology crisis. I didn't necessarily describe the disagreement, but yeah.

[00:02:45]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:02:45]  Peter: Well, perhaps you could describe the nature of the disagreement if that's possible to easily summarize for us.

[00:02:53]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:02:54]  Lulie: I don't know how much we actually disagree as opposed to just coming from different places on the same thing. But in general, David's view tends to be coming from this, how do we understand the world intellectually? How do we understand the abstracts, the most fundamental things about the world? And I found—and so... But what I'm interested in, especially anyway, is the inexplicit ideas, the emotional ideas, this embodied wisdom or whatever you want to call it. And so I've been trying to understand, how does that sphere of knowledge work? Because it seems to work in a somewhat different way from the more intellectual abstract, but maybe it doesn't work in a different way. And maybe it is exactly the same in everything. And that's part of the thing that I'm working through with him about when we're talking about Conjectures and Refutations, how much is that we have in our minds these propositions and everything that we're thinking about is sort of, how do I call it? Like arguing about these intellectual objects, these propositional things. Or is there a type of knowledge that is not in the form of like words and theories, and it's something more like in how an organism reacts to something? Or, and what are emotions? And which category do they fall into? Are they emotions basically ideas, or are emotions more like biological responses, or some kind of weird mixture? And yeah, sorry, I'm going on a lot from your question, and I know this is just introductions, but that's the basic thing that I'm wondering about.

[00:04:55]  Peter: Well, no, that's a very cool perspective, and I think it will apply to what we talk about here, and we'll hope to get into that a little more. Thank you, Lulie.

[00:05:05]  Unidentified speaker: Appreciate that.

[00:05:07]  Peter: Next up, we have Ivan Phillips, third time on the podcast. Really excited to talk to you again, Ivan. Ivan has written a book, in case anyone doesn't know, called Textbook Rationality, Rationality and Why We Should Teach It in School. Ivan, can you explain the thesis of the book, and how do you teach someone to be rational?

[00:05:37]  Unidentified speaker: I will do my best to squeeze the idea.

[00:05:40]  Unidentified speaker: Big question, I'm sure.

[00:05:41]  Unidentified speaker: Into a couple of minutes. Yeah, I know. So I've been involved in critical thinking outreach in the Chicago area for a couple of decades, and when I came across ideas about Bayesian inference and cognitive bias, I was pretty shocked.

[00:06:04]  Ivan: I have a background in physics, and I was not taught this in high school or college or graduate school. Now, I was a theoretician, so that would be one reason why maybe I wouldn't have seen all of these methods before. But it seemed like if I'm interested in critical thinking and I hadn't heard of these things, then how is anybody else supposed to get access to this? And I guess what I realized is that there seems to be this cultural deficit where we don't talk about rationality. For most people, I think, being rational means they have a reason why they did something, or they can point to a reason why they believe something. But that's not really what rationality is. I mean, I think that, obviously, rationality is a word, and we can get into essentialism, like Bruce has done on the podcast before.

[00:07:00]  Unidentified speaker: But to me, rationality should be more, there should be something more normative about it.

[00:07:06]  Ivan: Like we know something about rationality that we're not communicating to the general public. And so it's not that I think that if we were to teach rationality in schools, everybody would suddenly become epistemically rational overnight. But they would at least know something more about what the process is supposed to look like. And it seems that we know enough that there's something there to teach. I think that my approach to rationality is probably not as compatible with critical rationalism as you guys would like.

[00:07:41]  Unidentified speaker: But that's the general gist of the book.

[00:07:43]  Bruce: I was going to say we recently did an excellent video podcast with Ivan where he went over his Bayesian epistemology for critical rationalism and tried to put it into terms that I could understand.

[00:07:55]  Peter: I was just going to say that's why we want you here, Ivan. We want diverse voices. It keeps a much more interesting conversation.

[00:08:04]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you, Ivan.

[00:08:05]  Peter: And next up, we have Vaden Masrani from the Increments podcast. Vaden, your podcast is so awesome. I love your series on conjectures and refutation. You're one on recycling. You get into the so-called patriarchy on another one and so many other great topics. Tell me, do you ever get sick of hitting home runs? Does winning at life day after day ever become repetitive?

[00:08:37]  Vaden: It's burdensome. Yeah, it is tough. We all do have a cross to bear and you got to struggle through.

[00:08:45]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, I'm sure.

[00:08:46]  Peter: No, a more serious question though. After you finish your series on Conjectures and Refutations, which I love and I've gone and reread all the essays after I listened to your podcasts on them, is there another book you might consider moving on to? Open Society or something else?

[00:09:05]  Vaden: Yeah, well, we haven't actually announced that, but we're definitely going to do Open Society next. That is probably going to take us a decade.

[00:09:11]  Unidentified speaker: So, hold on to your hats, listeners.

[00:09:13]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, so I got it right.

[00:09:15]  Unidentified speaker: Wow, very cool.

[00:09:17]  Vaden: Yeah, Conjectures and Refutations, I think, has taken us four years and we're about 75% of the way through. And Open Society is at least 2x the size of Conjectures and Refutations. And we're going to do it linearly, too. So, Open Society, you can't just skip around in the same way that you can with Conjectures and Refutations. So, we're planning on going chapter by chapter and just walking through Plato, Hegel, and Marx.

[00:09:42]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, it'll be great.

[00:09:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yay.

[00:09:44]  Peter: Well, there's so many hidden gems in both of those books. So many essays that you don't really like, or passages of Open Society that kind of don't hit you the first time, but then you go back and you read it and you're like, wow, this is just...

[00:09:57]  Vaden: Well, and the footnotes, oh my god, the footnotes are so packed with insights and wisdom, but you just could tell the man is just overflowing with things to say, and he can't squeeze it all into a central narrative, and so he has to have these footnotes that are just like emissions of interesting thoughts that go off the main trunk. So yeah, we're really excited to go into that, and that's the next one.

[00:10:17]  Peter: Okay, well, that's something to look forward to, wow. Next up, Ray Scott Percival. I think of you as the enigmatic renegade of optimistic philosophy. You wrote a book, which is just excellent, just read it for the second time, called Myth of the Closed Mind, where you make the provocative, but very sensible, I think, case that humans are essentially rational creatures. I don't know why that's so controversial, but even people who are religious or might seem to be immune from reason in certain ways.

[00:11:01]  Unidentified speaker: I just loved it.

[00:11:02]  Peter: There's so many books out there that are, the premise seems to be more like denigrating humans in a way, making the case that we're not really that great, we're nothing that special. And sometimes some of these books make a pretty good case on there, but I just love how in your book, you just turn it upside down and examine all the ways that even normal humans with our paleolithic minds might actually be rational creatures who care about truth seeking. It's just, I find it, it's brilliant, the way you turn that around, and I thank you for that. Do you think you could summarize your thesis for us in your own words?

[00:11:47]  Ray: Yes, I'll try.

[00:11:50]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:11:51]  Ray: Thank you very much for that evaluation of my book.

[00:11:57]  Unidentified speaker: It means a lot to me. Thank you, Peter.

[00:12:01]  Ray: Like Popper, I like to start with a problem. When I'm talking about some issue, I want to anchor it to an interesting problem.

[00:12:14]  Unidentified speaker: So my problem of rationality, as we all know, we know that the word reason or rationality or irrationality, they have a plethora of meanings.

[00:12:31]  Ray: But if I can tie my problem or my theory to a particular problem, or give it a context, a historical problematic context, then I can feel that I'm saying something more substantial, that something that has information content, that may well be open to critical argument itself.

[00:13:00]  Unidentified speaker: So, I know I'm [unclear].

[00:13:02]  Ray: It must seem like I'm skirting around here. But so if I say that rationality for me is not so much about getting things right, and irrationality is not so much about getting things wrong. It's about the question of the enlightenment project.

[00:13:31]  Unidentified speaker: The problem of the enlightenment project is, is it possible for human beings to progress indefinitely, principally through the growth of knowledge? My answer is yes.

[00:13:46]  Ray: But how, but what, how do I answer that? In the context of the, the question or rather, the, the nihilism, the common nihilism about people's rationality is that we are infested, as it were, with systematic biases, which continually trip us up, make us clumsy. We're making mistakes all of the time.

[00:14:18]  Unidentified speaker: My answer to that, my thesis is that despite the fact that we are infinitely stupid, we're also infinitely capable or in principle of correcting, always correcting, in principle, always capable of correcting our, our errors and then making progress.

[00:14:44]  Ray: This is quite different from, if you were looking at systematic biases, say, in animals, the beasts, it's quite different because they would revisit the systematic errors.

[00:15:01]  Unidentified speaker: Whereas we can make a study, an explicit scientific study of our systematic tendency to fall into error. And then we can design heuristics and institutions, which will correct, more than correct that, but more than compensate for that, enabling us to continually grow knowledge.

[00:15:29]  Ray: In other words, to continually progress. So that's where I overlap with David Deutsch's very wonderful conception of infinite progress. So that in a nutshell is where I'm coming from.

[00:15:48]  Peter: Well, that's very cool. And I have a couple of questions, other questions that relate to your books. So I hope we can come back to that more.

[00:15:57]  Unidentified speaker: And like I said, it's a wonderful book.

[00:15:59]  Peter: I would encourage everyone to read that. Okay, so thank you guys. Morality vs. Moralizing. Why are we talking about this? I don't know. I'm just following the fun, really. But it seems somehow, I thought that a good way to frame this conversation, to kick it off, would be to look at Jonathan Haidt's book. I, geez, I forgot to write down the year, but I think it was 2014 or something like that. The Righteous Mind. When I first read that book, I thought it was, I mean, that book made really an impact on me. I thought this guy's got it right. I saw him—

[00:16:51]  Unidentified speaker: 2012, by the way, just to—

[00:16:52]  Unidentified speaker: 2012.

[00:16:53]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:16:54]  Peter: I saw him speak then at a Jewish temple, I believe in 2018 or so, where he gave his lecture on the Righteous Mind, which was very, very cool to see him in person. And I loved the way he expressed himself. And even into a Seattle audience, he asked them, okay, who agrees with Trump on anything or something? I think there's like, you know, five percent of the audience [unclear] their hand or something. But yeah, that was it was very cool to see that over time. I guess I have. Sort of come away from his way of thinking about humans. I guess I've just wondered if it is a little bit too pessimistic, which I'll get into that in a sec. I'm thinking about the elephant and the rider hypothesis in particular. I assume everyone is kind of familiar with that. What that is, even if they have not read the book. The idea is that behind his version of moral psychology, is that we have an elephant which really makes our moral decisions for us. And then the rider who kind of does post-hoc reasoning, I guess, to justify what the elephant wants to do. I mean, I can't quite say that there's not a lot of truth in that. I think that, and I think that at least Bruce and probably others here will agree that humans like to do a lot of moralizing. We're very tribal creatures. We like to feel superior to other people and to feel like part of a tribe. And perhaps we still have some of the same kinds of feelings that led our chimpanzee ancestors to tear apart limb from limb the other chimps who wander into their territory.

[00:19:07]  Peter: And I just find that to be somewhat, I can't escape that there seems to be a lot of truth to this view of of humans and morality that Haidt hypothesized, hypothesizes. I don't know, but maybe it's just related to my overly active BS detector, overly active, according to my wife. But, you know, rightly or wrongly, I just can't stand to be in a room where I agree with with everyone and maybe I it's why I'm not more popular.

[00:19:49]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[00:19:50]  Peter: But anyway, I wanted to get some some voices, divergent voices together and let's talk about this. Let's talk about morality and moralizing and explore these ideas.

[00:20:06]  Bruce: Could I just maybe quickly summarize his view on the elephant?

[00:20:10]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, please.

[00:20:11]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, please.

[00:20:11]  Bruce: So I actually looked it up so I could get it in his words. So the elephant rider is obviously a metaphor and you kind of latched on to the idea that it's post hoc reasoning for what the elephant wants to do and that is a part of his theory. But really, he's talking of using metaphor for the existence of what he says is two processes, controlled processes and automatic processes, where controlled processes is limited, it's consciousness, it's one thing at a time. He says requires language, then he walks that back a little bit and says, well, sometimes you can do it with just images if you don't have language. Then he lays out three principles of moral psychology. One is intuitions comes first, strategic reasoning second. Obviously, the intuitions come from the automatic processes, which are the feelings and things like that that you feel, similar to what Lulie was talking about, the inexplicit knowledge. He also points out that it happens in parallel. So your whole body deals with the automatic processes, what he's calling automatic processes, whereas the controlled reasoning is something that's purely conscious. Then the second principle is there is more to morality than harm and fairness. Note here, he doesn't actually mean morality itself, he means moral feelings in context. And then the third is morality binds and blinds. So that was what I pulled out as a summary of his view.

[00:21:39]  Peter: Thank you, Bruce.

[00:21:40]  Unidentified speaker: That's perfect.

[00:21:41]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:21:42]  Peter: The other thing I want to mention before I get on to my questions is that I think one of the other reasons I wanted to talk about this is that, you know, Haidt has become a really prominent intellectual where a lot of just very normal people I know, so-called normies, know about his arguments about phones in school. It's this big thing right now, video games and free-range parenting as well. I mean, he seems to think that our democracy is in peril by social media and these phones and all this, and it just seems to me that I think that the righteous mind is a pretty clear distillation of his view of humans, where maybe a lot of these ideas stemmed from, that I think that are agreed, I think largely by the right and the left. It's really just a few crazies on the fringes who might want to poke holes in his hypothesis, but maybe we have a few crazies here. I hope. I might be one of them. I don't know. But anyway, let's start off with my first question here, and hopefully we'll find at least some of these questions compelling. Like I said, I've got 17 of them, and I think that Bruce has some too, and if anyone else wants to jump in with a question, please feel free. So rather than start out with a definition of morality, I'd like to start with a definition of humans. [unclear] “height.” Did I say “hate” before? I hope I didn't. Haidt says, many times in the book that we are 90% chimp and 10% bee. So meaning that the 10% bee comes into the tribal, I guess, part of the way we organize our societies and all this. But is this definition leaving something out?

[00:23:52]  Peter: How does this square with Deutsch's conception of humans as universal explainers? I mean, you could say, well, we're a bit of both, but I don't know. That doesn't seem quite satisfying to me. I want to know what humans are. Are we just another animal or are we some are we something special in the known universe? I want to know what my children are. So what are we? Are we are we 90% chimp and 10% bee or universal explainers?

[00:24:25]  Unidentified speaker: What do you guys think?

[00:24:27]  Unidentified speaker: Why not both?

[00:24:29]  Unidentified speaker: Okay. We're featherless bipeds. Okay.

[00:24:37]  Lulie: I mean, this is at the heart of my epistemology crisis. So I don't claim to have answers. That said, it seems very clear to me that we have partly this sort of animal stuff of, like, I don't know, when you're hungry, then you might get kind of irritated and sort of more whatever. And when you're in this state and whatever. And so your biology does affect thinking and ideas and decisions. And it doesn't affect it, like, ultimately, in the sense that if you have the right knowledge, then usually you can think your way around whatever biological default interpretation, if there is such a thing. So, yeah, why not both?

[00:25:27]  Peter: Well, it sounds like you kind of agree with some of what we've talked about on this podcast before. I kind of agree. I think there's room for something like evolutionary psychology and a universal explainer hypothesis.

[00:25:43]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, there's some truth to both, maybe.

[00:25:47]  Lulie: I'm not sure about evolutionary psychology in particular.

[00:25:50]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, okay.

[00:25:51]  Unidentified speaker: You're more sceptical.

[00:25:52]  Lulie: Similar kinds of like...

[00:25:54]  Peter: Maybe a very light version of it.

[00:25:57]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:26:00]  Ivan: I wonder if there's one distinction that might be helpful in framing the discussion has to do with, I guess, contrasting my view with Ray's is that when you talked about this pessimism about human reason, right? And you might think of this, looking at humans as 90% chimp and 10% bee, as saying that humans are nothing more than that.

[00:26:28]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:26:28]  Ivan: Or like saying that because we have these, because we are predictably irrational in these ways, that we are therefore irrational beings.

[00:26:40]  Unidentified speaker: And I think I would disagree with that.

[00:26:46]  Ivan: I see actually a lot of alignment with what Ray said, is that these are things that can be overcome, right? And I think that overcoming them, in understanding those biases, in understanding the processes when we think, allows us to see, you know, to overcome these barriers. And I think that a lot of the pessimism that I hear in these discussions, it's almost like a reaction like, oh, I don't like this talk of cognitive biases because it's like doom saying, like we will never be rational, we'll never be able to think our way past this.

[00:27:25]  Unidentified speaker: But I don't think that's the case.

[00:27:26]  Ivan: I think it's really more like, as individuals, it's difficult for us to overcome bias. It's difficult for a single individual, I think, to be a universal explainer. But I think we can create institutions or we can create groups of people, we can create processes whereby we can reach that state. So I think that chimpanzees are not universal explainers as individuals or as a group, but humans, there may be rare individuals who might be considered universal explainers. There might be rare individuals who are highly rational. But I think most individuals have like zone, they have tasks on which they can be rational, especially when they get feedback. their intuitions become rational. But I think that it's difficult for humans to be rational across many spheres, especially if you start bringing in emotions and politics and that sort of thing.

[00:28:30]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:28:31]  Peter: So it's just a subset of humans that are universal explainers. Is that fair?

[00:28:37]  Bruce: I think he's saying, well, Ivan, tell me if I'm wrong here. But what you're really saying is, is that we're collectively universal explainers.

[00:28:43]  Peter: Okay, collectively.

[00:28:45]  Unidentified speaker: I think that's right.

[00:28:47]  Ivan: I think that there are areas where I can perform a task that you would say, yeah, that's an example of a universal explainer solving this problem. But I think that it's also preposterous to think that I would be a universal explainer across every domain.

[00:29:05]  Vaden: Yeah, maybe I'll just make a few comments, kind of echoing some of what Lulie said. So I totally agree that with her, why not both comment. Maybe one reason is that, when you compare any two things, you have to look at a subset of the properties of those things and depending on which properties you're looking at, things will either be similar or different. And so, yeah, you can talk about how humans are completely different from the animals, in that we can create explanations and computers and all that. That's one way to say that we're different and that we would absolutely not be a chimp in that context. But you could look at other properties and you could say, we're products of evolution, we tend to our close kin, we have ten fingers, et cetera, et cetera. And then in that context, we are similar to chimpanzees. But I think that we haven't fully captured what Haidt means when he talks about the 90% chimp and 10% bee thing, because there he's making a claim about group selection compared to like individual selection. So he's making a group selectionist argument with his claim about the 10% bee thing. Because when he's talking about chimpanzees, he's talking about how chimpanzees evolve to basically protect the gene and work for what's best for the individual, whereas bees work for the collective. Bees are a collective species.

[00:30:29]  Vaden: And so when he says that we're 10% bee, he's making the claim that not only are we products of like neo-Dartwinian, like the Selfish Gene Theory, that's the 90%, but there's also a 10% group selection thing that means that there's reasons why we've evolved as groups to evolve religion and evolve civilizations and stuff. The group selection thing, I think, has been completely refuted. Group selectionism, I would refer people to Stephen Pinker's excellent essay On Edge. Group selection is just wrong. So to the extent that Haidt is positively advocating for a group selectionist view, I think he's just wrong about that. And he is, in fact, arguing for a group selectionist view because when Pinker wrote his essay, Haidt responded to it, and so Haidt is very much in the pro-group selection camp. So just to add that to the conversation, that when he says we're 10% B, that is another way of saying he is a pro advocate of group selectionism, and that's right.

[00:31:32]  Ray: Astonishing.

[00:31:34]  Lulie: I'm wondering whether that's necessary for his theory because when I watched the video that Peter sent, which I assume will be in the show notes, the focus was a lot more on the human level stuff rather than talking about it biologically. Like he was talking about, oh, if you've got synchronized movement, then this does activate some kind of thing. But then if we've got synchronized movement and then that makes us more B-like, what percentage of B are chimps? In any case, it seems like there are these two different things. There's the biological stuff, like the knowledge in the genes, and then there's the sort of emergent human factors. And I thought that when he was talking about the emergent human factors, a lot of that did sound a lot more plausible, maybe the group selection less so.

[00:32:24]  Vaden: Yeah, I think he makes a number of different claims in his book. The first part is largely advocating for this elephant and rider thing, which I'm actually totally in favor of. I like that metaphor.

[00:32:34]  Unidentified speaker: I think it's pretty close to true.

[00:32:36]  Vaden: And just maybe to comment on something that Peter said earlier, it's not the case that the elephant is entirely in control and the rider is just along for the quote ride. There is some role for the rider. The rider does guide the elephant in some sense, so it's not just a unidirectional phenomenon. So I like that component of his thesis. But then when he goes to explain why we're moral creatures and why we have a refined sense of morality, then he has to talk about psychology, and that's where he starts leaning on the group selection stuff, because the group selection claims to be an explanation for why our psychology is what our psychology is. We've evolved, because of group selectionist reasons, to favor the well-being of the group over the individual. And that's how these kind of themes are related. So I sign off on the first half of his thesis, but not the second half.

[00:33:25]  Lulie: Are the arguments against group selection, do they also apply to memetic group selection?

[00:33:31]  Unidentified speaker: I was going to ask that.

[00:33:33]  Vaden: No, they don't. So I think memetic group selection is very interesting. And let's just be clear about what we're talking about when we're talking about group selection. So group selection is essentially taking the idea of, like, genes are replicators, like the fundamental property of evolution, as we all understand it, and then just making all of those properties very vague. So you don't have a concrete thing that is a replicator, like a gene, you have these more nebulous groups that split off and fracture. You don't have this... Yeah, but so memes is like a separate, it's a separate thing. So I like the idea of memes as being an explanatory reason why humans aggregate and do stuff in groups. And I'm pro-memes stuff, but group selection is not that. So if you like memes, then you shouldn't like group selection, essentially.

[00:34:25]  Bruce: So let me just disagree with Vaden here a little bit.

[00:34:27]  Unidentified speaker: Nice.

[00:34:27]  Unidentified speaker: Excellent.

[00:34:28]  Bruce: So I agree with the way Vaden is understanding group selection. I completely agree with Vaden. So I haven't really found anything he's saying I disagree with. But when I read Haidt, I do not take him as advocating for the kind of group selection that Vaden is saying is wrong. I think Haidt's theories don't interact well with meme theory. That's part of the problem, right? That he believes in some sort of group selection and he's a little unclear what it is. But I think that you could easily, as someone who, if you believe strongly in group selection through memes, I think that actually fits with what Haidt is saying very well.

[00:35:11]  Peter: I interpreted the 10% B thing as more saying that that's how the humans think about morality at the level of the tribe or the group rather than the individual. But maybe that's very related to the whole group selection.

[00:35:34]  Unidentified speaker: It is.

[00:35:34]  Bruce: And it's related to memes too, right?

[00:35:38]  Vaden: Yeah, let me just read a quote from the book. So on page, I don't have the page numbers, unfortunately. No, page 13, he says, but human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups. As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. Darwin's ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s. But recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play, and the implications are profound. So this is in the first couple of pages, and then he expounds upon this in the later half of the book. The major difference between group selection and meme theory is that group selection posits that the reason we have the psychology that we do is because of groups competing with other groups, not ideas competing with other ideas. That's a major distinction. It's actual groups of people competing with other groups of people. So it's very much on the tribal group stuff. They don't talk about the power of ideas or memes at all.

[00:36:34]  Unidentified speaker: And that's, I think, one of the big problems with group selection.

[00:36:38]  Unidentified speaker: There's many more.

[00:36:39]  Unidentified speaker: No, that's interesting.

[00:36:40]  Peter: So you're saying that the whole idea of memes is in conflict, direct conflict, with the idea of group selection, and that this is something that, like you said, Pinker and Haidt disagree on?

[00:36:57]  Vaden: Yeah, well, you can go to the source. So the concept of memes was invented by Dawkins. And Dawkins is also one of the foremost critics of group selectionism. So he wrote an excellent essay critiquing EO. Wilson, actually, that listeners can look up. Because group selectionism attacks the very core of the selfish gene theory. It says that it's not about genes as replicators, it's groups as replicators. Dawkins, when he talks about memes, doesn't oppose memes with genes. He just says, let's take the same idea that we've come up with genes and apply that to ideas as well. And that can be very fruitful. But it does come into direct conflict when you say that it's not the fundamental unit of replication isn't ideas or genes, it's groups of people, groups. That's the core idea of group selectionism. And that's why they come into conflict.

[00:37:50]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:37:51]  Unidentified speaker: That's interesting.

[00:37:52]  Peter: What do you think, Ray? Are you a meme guy or a group selection guy?

[00:37:57]  Ray: Oh, I'm totally pro-meme.

[00:38:00]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:38:00]  Ray: Well, I think Popper beat Dawkins to it with his concept of World 3.

[00:38:08]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:38:09]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:38:09]  Ray: And it's a much more powerful analytical tool as well, because it brings in logic.

[00:38:17]  Unidentified speaker: And I thought Bruce made a good point about how Haidt's psychological approach doesn't interact well with the existence or behaviour of memes in a population.

[00:38:33]  Ray: Memes, not genes.

[00:38:36]  Unidentified speaker: And that's one of the things I've tried to bring on board in my analysis, is treating the evolution of memes, or systems of memes.

[00:38:54]  Unidentified speaker: And looking at, in my treatment of whether we can overcome our errors, not only on an individual psychological basis, but can so-called irrational systems of ideas or memes be corrected?

[00:39:14]  Ray: And, because there's a competition going on in that level of existence, or world three.

[00:39:28]  Ray: Why, why does Haidt's approach not address that? And it can't, because it can't bring in the psychological effectiveness of psychology. But psychology isn't reducible to psychology. It is something separate with autonomous properties and relations. It's something that the human mind on a psychological level interacts with. And this is something that's missing from, well, most accounts of rationality versus irrationality.

[00:40:12]  Bruce: I really feel like his theory, the way he writes it out, I can't really disagree with Vaden. Technically speaking, there's no such thing as group selection because you're not really selecting the group. But there's often not a lot of difference between group selection, sorry, between a meme and a group. And so meme selection may look like group selection in certain circumstances. And I kind of suspect that's what's going on here. And I think it goes a little deeper than that. So if you were to try to understand, why do humans even have moral feelings in the first place? I mean, you could make a case for, there's just no reason for us to using regular neo-Darwinian evolution, that we would care about people who aren't we aren't related to. And that doesn't really happen in the animal world. You can find cases of that, but it's almost always because there's been some sort of selection that's taken place, where normally in that group, that would be their own genes that they're defending, because it would be a group where the genes are all similar within that group. They're all siblings or cousins or something like that.

[00:41:24]  Ray: Kin selection.

[00:41:25]  Unidentified speaker: Exactly.

[00:41:25]  Bruce: Kin selection. So there is something weird going on with humans. Now, I would say that that's meme selection. That is what's going on weird with humans. Animals do have memes, but the human memes are so much more complicated because we're universal explainers. But the way that's played out in real life has happened because we have some genes that have evolved to allow for these memes to happen, and exactly how that happened, I don't know. It's not too hard to make a few good theory guesses. But I think that's, at least to me, that's what he's talking about. His theory is missing this meme component that's necessary to make sense of it. And so you end up talking about group selection, which is the closest you can get to talking about it, if you haven't really refined your theory into a meme theory.

[00:42:12]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:42:14]  Vaden: No, I think kin selection can get you pretty far too. I think both kin selection and meme selection offer some explanatory insight into what's going on. Like, there's the subset of bugs. I forgot what they're called.

[00:42:28]  Unidentified speaker: I think it starts with an H.

[00:42:29]  Vaden: But bees and termites and wasps and ant colonies. They all fit into this, where you have one queen and then a whole bunch of drones, like worker bugs. And the reason you have this strange dynamic is just due to how the genes propagate. So, it turns out that you have as much care. I can get my genes into my sister in this circumstance, the same way that humans get their genes into their kids. So, you have this effect where you want your mom to make as many sisters as possible. And that's how you propagate your genes. And it's a very funny thing, because it would be like going to the bar and picking up somebody to impregnate your mom so that you get another sister. But that's the drive for this species of bug. And this is kin selection. And this is a way to explain why worker bees and drones tend to the group in that sense. And why I'm talking about this is that there's no mimetic explanation here. We don't posit that bees have ideas, but yet we can still explain certain kinds of behaviors through kin selection. And so too with some kinds of behaviors in human beings as well, where you'll do some nice things for your brother, and then you'll do maybe half as many nice things for your cousin, and then an eighth as many nice things for your second cousin, etc., etc. That doesn't go all the way. I think you need a meme theory as well. But I don't think that one is necessarily the be-all end-all that can explain everything. I think kin selection goes some of the way. Mimetics goes further, but group selection doesn't take us anywhere.

[00:44:08]  Peter: So kin selection is valid, and group selection not.

[00:44:13]  Unidentified speaker: Correct.

[00:44:14]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:44:15]  Vaden: I'm kind of stating that without giving me any reasons for that, so I'll just put a pointer. So listeners should Google Stephen Pinker, the false allure of group selection for an excellent essay, and then many responses to that essay to see why I'm coming out so strongly against group selection.

[00:44:33]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:44:34]  Peter: Well, maybe I'll move on to the next question then, unless anyone else has anything to add. So in Haidt's Rider and the Elephant Hypothesis, he says the rider's job is to serve the elephant. This goes back to what Vaden was saying about how it's a two-way street. Or in Hume's words, reason is the slave of the passions. So moral reasoning is not about a debate between platonic ideas, but about something post-hoc after the elephant has made up its mind. He has numerous examples to illustrate this. One of the most memorable is the twin, or not twins, but brother and sister who decide to sleep together. And then everyone says, oh, that's so wrong. But then, you know, no one can, people kind of have to make post-hoc explanations for why it's so wrong. And he makes a big deal about those kinds of studies. But anyway, he places morality in the context of moral foundations theory, where we base our moral thinking on innate psychological foundations, thinking of six of them, such as care, harm, fairness, cheating, et cetera. It seems to me there's a lot of truth in this, but I can't believe it's the whole story. What is Haidt even doing when he's writing the book? Is he the rider controlling the elephant? How do we control our elephants?

[00:46:20]  Unidentified speaker: What do you guys think?

[00:46:22]  Lulie: Why do we want to control the elephant? What do you get out of controlling it?

[00:46:28]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:46:30]  Lulie: It's an actual question.

[00:46:31]  Vaden: I think there's all sorts of emotions that need to be bridled and controlled. I think anger, jealousy, rage, if uncontrolled can-

[00:46:40]  Unidentified speaker: I disagree.

[00:46:41]  Unidentified speaker: Really?

[00:46:42]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, very strongly.

[00:46:44]  Lulie: I think the bad thing about those emotions is not the emotions themselves, it's what you do with it or the way that you use it to control other people. But the emotion itself is like good.

[00:46:59]  Vaden: Yeah, that's what I mean when I say it has to be controlled.

[00:47:01]  Unidentified speaker: The consequences of the emotion have to be controlled.

[00:47:04]  Vaden: I want Georgia to know what to do when she's feeling angry. That's appropriate. I don't want her to not feel that, but I don't want her to punch her kid in daycare, for example.

[00:47:17]  Lulie: My sense is that the problems with emotions, and this might be too far away from the original topic, but the problem with emotions usually comes from the impacts of trying to control them. But whereas when they are uncontrolled, then that allows your ideas around them to meet reality and then update. There's a way of having emotions that doesn't require controlling them in order for the appropriate thing to happen.

[00:47:51]  Vaden: I mean, I pride myself on emotional control, frankly. I want to be able to not spin off into a rage whenever I feel angry. I want to be able to recognize that emotion, feel it, that's okay, but then act calmly and appropriately. And I think arguably part of what we mean by the word civilization is controlling our emotions collectively so that we act in a civilized, decent way that is mutually beneficial rather than mutually destructive. That doesn't mean that we don't have to feel them or we don't have to pretend like they're not there. It just means that we don't have to let them bring out the absolute worst in us, which I think takes effort. I don't think that just comes naturally.

[00:48:37]  Lulie: So while I would love to have a whole podcast on this topic, maybe just you and me. But actually, it ties into the more fundamental thing of what Haidt is talking about. Haidt, now you guys confuse me.

[00:48:50]  Unidentified speaker: I think it's Haidt, but I don't know.

[00:48:56]  Lulie: Also relating to the Popperian way of thinking about things is this idea of control and whether that is effectively authoritarianism, or does this count as not authoritarianism because, oh, the emotions aren't ideas anyway, or they don't count in the discussion. Because if you're saying like, yeah, if you talk about like, oh, I'm trying to control my ideas about doubting God, then it becomes quite clear that trying to control them, that's not how the rational process of weighing up different ideas is. And so, it's not about controlling, it's about like trying to understand it, and trying to understand the merits of the different things. And so, to draw this back to Haidt, this is the question that I'm asking, which is, is the thing that we want to do to control the elephant, or is the thing that we want to do to better understand the elephant, to help introduce the elephant to new information such that its impulses can function?

[00:50:06]  Peter: Would you say the elephant is synonymous with inexplicit ideas?

[00:50:11]  Lulie: That's how I'm understanding it, not having read the book.

[00:50:14]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:50:16]  Bruce: Having read the book, I actually think that that fits pretty well.

[00:50:20]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:50:21]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:50:21]  Peter: So, I mean, I think kind of what I kept thinking is, well, maybe there's some really, there's nothing necessarily wrong with inexplicit ideas. I mean, if you have an inner voice telling you not to sleep with your sister and you can't really articulate exactly why, well, maybe there's some pretty good reasons in that inner voice.

[00:50:44]  Unidentified speaker: Maybe you should listen.

[00:50:45]  Peter: I don't know. I mean, but.

[00:50:50]  Ivan: I was just going to say one of my favorite books on cognitive bias is Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson. And it's about this process of rationalization, where you have inexplicit ideas or emotions that cause you to leap to a belief. Or maybe you just at random advocated for one side of a debate. And this causes you to then sort of commit. Like I've made this idea public, now I have to defend it. And so it's like you fell off one side of a pyramid and it's like the slippery slope. And so you end up reinforcing an idea just because you had made the idea in the past, right?

[00:51:41]  Unidentified speaker: So to me, when I think of the elephant and the rider, that's what I'm thinking about, is that for whatever reason, it could be something that's, maybe it's an instinct, maybe it's something that's due to my evolutionary history, maybe it's something from my upbringing or some traumatic experience causes me to hold some belief.

[00:52:05]  Ivan: And then the rider then is just someone who's going, oh, well, I have to justify this to everyone else. Like it's behaving as a mechanism for explaining why I hold this view or why other people should not blame me for this choice.

[00:52:27]  Unidentified speaker: And I think that everyone does this to some degree and that it's not something that you cannot overcome, right?

[00:52:42]  Ivan: I think that having the right attitude to this is more important. In regard to what Lulie said about whether we should control the elephant, at some point, the way I think of things, I like to make a sharp distinction between epistemic rationality, like what is it rational to believe about the world given the evidence you have, and instrumental rationality, like how do I win?

[00:53:14]  Ivan: And my feeling is that we should try to be as realistic about the world as possible, and have the most accurate picture of the world that we can. But when it comes to like how do I win, I don't know that there's an objective answer to that, and that if you were to ask, well, what is winning? Maybe that is just saying, hey, what does the elephant want?

[00:53:40]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[00:53:41]  Ivan: Is there a better answer than the elephant wants what it wants? But what I'm most concerned about is you shouldn't have what the elephant wants lead you to be delusional about the way the world really is.

[00:53:58]  Vaden: I just want to read another quote from Haidt. I feel like we're not maybe fully doing his thesis justice. So one thing that he says is why he chose the, sorry, one thing he says with regards to why he chose the rider and the elephant metaphor and why he didn't choose the master and slave metaphor, which I think is interesting thing is the following. So a slave is not supposed to question his master, but most of us can think of times when we questioned and revised our first intuitive judgment. The rider and the elephant metaphor work well here. The rider evolved to serve the client, but it's a dignified partnership and I like this. It's much more like a lawyer serving a client than a slave serving a master. So good lawyers do what they can to help their clients, but they sometimes refuse to go along with requests. Perhaps the request is impossible. Perhaps the request is self-destructive, and the elephant is more powerful than the rider, but it's not an absolute dictator. So I just think it's important to think about metaphors he didn't choose and why. Because when he says the rider and the elephant, he's not saying the elephant is entirely and absolutely in control and the rider is just a flea on the back of the elephant, trying to get a powerless flea. It's more like a lawyer-client relationship. So just with that added context, I think it's important to include that.

[00:55:20]  Ray: Yeah, I thought that I think we can learn something from the stoics here.

[00:55:26]  Unidentified speaker: I think we can bring the stoical idea to bear on what is the elephant, the tendencies within the elephant are.

[00:55:41]  Ray: But also framing that from a critical rationalist point of view as well. So, what we would...

[00:55:52]  Unidentified speaker: So, the Stoics had the idea that all our emotions were full of ideas, and our ideas are full of emotion.

[00:56:03]  Ray: So, they're intimately woven together in every moment of our waking cognitive life. Now, the critical rationalist comes in, and we then frame those ideas as conjectural theories.

[00:56:22]  Unidentified speaker: So, there are theories that frame or make sense of, if you like, what we are feeling. So, we're angry at something or someone for some reason in a given circumstance.

[00:56:40]  Ray: But all of that, the someone, the circumstance, are all or must be interpreted through a conjectural net.

[00:56:55]  Unidentified speaker: That's where theory comes in.

[00:57:01]  Ray: I thought that, I made a few notes with regard to Haidt's points about empathy.

[00:57:13]  Unidentified speaker: I think he places too much weight on empathy in his assessment of the effectiveness of sound argument and reason.

[00:57:24]  Ray: So, if we are coming at the idea that the elephant's emotions are filled, they are replete with reason, because they are replete with conjectural theories, then I don't see why Haidt should emphasize empathy, for example, as a way, a sufficient and necessary way in which sound argument can have, well, can convince our audience, if you like. So, I made a couple of points. One was that good arguments by our enemies are accepted nevertheless. I mean, in treaties on war, for example, it's well known that one of the first principles is don't underestimate your enemy.

[00:58:27]  Unidentified speaker: You should pay attention to their strategy.

[00:58:32]  Ray: What are they thinking?

[00:58:34]  Unidentified speaker: What are they saying? What's their plan? And their assessment of the relative strength of you vis-a-vis them, your enemy, could very well cause you to revise, to correct your errors, your hubris in going into battle, and make you more susceptible to accepting terms of peace or surrender. Another one—another point I thought was relevant here was that it takes reason to identify who—and who is, sorry, who is showing empathy and how someone is being empathic. So, again, we're using the stoical stroke critical rationalist way of framing what we understand to be the passions of the elephant. That was the point I wanted to make.

[00:59:44]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[00:59:45]  Peter: I'm curious how this contrasts with David Deutsch's ideas about morality from the optimism chapter of Beginning of Infinity. He seems to really tie in morality with problem solving, I think, in a very, very sensible way. I mean, all evils are due to insufficient knowledge. It doesn't really matter. I mean, kind of going back to Lulie's point a little bit, it doesn't really matter what you're feeling inside, I suppose. I mean, it does matter, but it matters from the perspective of solving problems is what really, really matters rather than intent.

[01:00:35]  Peter: Do people see that as opposed to Haidt's ideas about morality or can these be rectified, I guess?

[01:00:50]  Bruce: I understand Haidt as talking about only, and he says this, the psychology of moral feelings, right? He actually makes a distinction between true morality and moral feelings, that they aren't the same thing. He's trying to work out how do people actually interact with their moral feelings. He's not trying to work out what's actually the right thing to do. You know, what is the actual morally correct thing to do. Because of that, I guess I don't see Deutsch's ideas or, and Hayat's ideas about morality as, at odds with each other, because I see them as talking about different things.

[01:01:31]  Unidentified speaker: That would be my view.

[01:01:33]  Unidentified speaker: fair point.

[01:01:35]  Unidentified speaker: Agreed.

[01:01:35]  Vaden: Yeah, maybe just to echo that, I totally agree with Bruce on that point. Yeah, Haidt doesn't talk too much about objective morality, but it is kind of baked into his thought experiments though, right? Because his thought experiments are set up such that they're fundamentally icky and we all have like an intuitive, that's wrong, reaction. So maybe just for the listener, one example that he gives is a scenario where a brother and sister go out to a cabin and then end up making passionate love for a whole weekend with no kids and no negative consequences. And he asks a bunch of people, what do you think about this? And a lot of them say it's wrong. But then upon probing, they can't really give a reason why they think it's wrong. Because he set up all these thought experiments to not have any negative consequences. That's the main reason why the reader and the people upon being argued with can't really give a good justification. So the very fact that he set it up such that nobody gets hurt and there's no negative consequences presupposes a consequentialist objective morality. And that I think just shows that even though he doesn't talk directly about where objective morality comes from, as Deutsch tends to deal with, he still kind of takes it as a given even if he doesn't spell it out explicitly. But yeah, I just want to echo what Bruce said, which is I don't think these are in conflict.

[01:02:58]  Unidentified speaker: I think they're just studying different aspects of the phenomenon.

[01:03:03]  Vaden: I completely hate John, good old Johnny's thesis here. In the sense that I think when people think about the word emotions, they tend to think about things like love, fear, anger, jealousy, et cetera. And then the relationship between those emotions and reason is maybe a bit hard to see. But I think that's just because we're not thinking about the full suite of emotions. I think more epistemologically relevant emotions are ones such as a confusion or curiosity or obsession, obsession with a problem in particular, or just interest in general. These are all feelings first, right? These are fundamentally feelings, these are fundamentally emotions. But they're so unbelievably epistemologically relevant because I go based on those feelings, what I'm interested in, what I'm curious about, what I'm confused about, what I want to make sense. Those are all feelings first. And then that determines what I put the rider towards, what I start putting my more logical, rational, more conscious processing towards. But that's entirely my little rider sitting on top of my elephant of confusion, right? And so I just think that when we think about the word emotions, we should make sure to keep in mind those other emotions as well, which are far more epistemologically relevant than the ones we tend to think of.

[01:04:27]  Bruce: I wanted to actually go back to Lulie's question, because I wanted to see if I could maybe reframe it a little bit and see if I could put it back out there again. So if I understand Lulie's question, she was asking, do we actually need to bridle the elephant? Here meaning the inexplicit ideas or the feelings, however you want to try to frame it here. And Vaden initially said yes, but upon a little closer inspection, what Vaden really meant was you should bridle what you do with those emotions, not necessarily bridle the emotions. It's natural to feel angry, etc. I would actually like to maybe ask the question a little more directly using a thought experiment that comes from Philip K. Dick's book, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep, which was the basis for Blade Runner. Imagine in the future we have a device, and I see no reason why this device couldn't exist. You can actually dial in whatever emotions you want. So if you're feeling an emotion and you find it objectionable, you don't need to accept the emotion and then find something productive to do with it. You can change the emotion if you so choose. So let's say that I'm feeling very jealous, and that's an emotion I don't want to have. I reason about it. I decide, you know what? I don't want to feel jealous anymore. So I use this device and I make the jealousy just go away. I've literally suppressed it and I've replaced it with something else using this advanced technology. Would that be a good or a bad thing? Should we bridle emotions if we could?

[01:06:02]  Bruce: So I'm not asking about bridling our reaction to the emotions, I'm asking about the emotion itself now.

[01:06:10]  Ivan: So it's a Chesterton's Fence Deactivator? Is that what this device is?

[01:06:14]  Unidentified speaker: That's exactly what I was thinking.

[01:06:19]  Unidentified speaker: I guess, yeah, just what's your thoughts about that?

[01:06:23]  Vaden: Or an activator, I guess, right? To turn emotions on if you don't have them?

[01:06:26]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:06:28]  Bruce: I don't know if you guys have actually read the book, but in the book, the wife of, I forget the main character's name, but the wife feels upset and depressed because of the state of the world and how pessimistic it is. And so many people had died in something. And so was it Decker? Who's the main character?

[01:06:51]  Unidentified speaker: But he-

[01:06:51]  Peter: Decker.

[01:06:52]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:06:52]  Bruce: He says to her, well, just dial yourself happy because they have this little, it's literally a little dial like a phone, the old skit style phones. And she says, no, this is an appropriate emotion for this circumstance. I should feel depressed over the fact that so many people have died and that we're in a bad state. So she actually chose not to change her emotions because she had reasoned this wasn't an appropriate emotion. But it's really the device itself I'm asking about. Could there be emotions where, so in this case, maybe that was the appropriate emotion. So she didn't, she was right not to change it. But could there be circumstances where we have emotions that actually are inappropriate and it would make sense to change them?

[01:07:31]  Peter: Well, it seems to me emotions are so intertwined with who we are as people that I'm not sure that I would want to mess with that. I guess that's my initial thought.

[01:07:47]  Lulie: Either emotions have epistemological content as in they are some kind of reflection of our models of the world, in which case changing them sounds somewhat horrific to me, because you're just sort of changing. It's basically a mind control device. If we think of emotions as just products of the inexplicit ideas or related to inexplicit ideas in some way, then it's just a mind control device. So that seems weird to me. Then if emotions are something else, then I would want to look at, okay, well, what is that something else and what does that mean? My current guess is that actually it is a mixture of these things. So there are some feelings you get, like physical feelings that you get, that are more biological or low-level or something like hunger or PMFs or something that affects your thinking, because of how we interpret what happens. If I'm hungry, I have a problem.

[01:08:58]  Lulie: And so there's the raw sensation. So do we want to change our raw sensations?

[01:09:03]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[01:09:04]  Lulie: It depends what we're doing with them. Like if you don't mind your raw sensations and you don't mind being hungry and you can think well without it, then maybe that's fine. I think there's a genuine question of how could it possibly be that these physical, biological processes affect our abstract reasoning and decisions? What is the mechanism there? And that's the thing that I'm quite curious about. But it certainly seems to me that there is some relationship between those two.

[01:09:38]  Vaden: Yeah, I guess I just want to say, first of all, that this hypothetical device is not hypothetical. We already have it for certain emotions. So, for example, I was going to say that actually.

[01:09:49]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:09:51]  Vaden: For example, 3, 4-methylene-dioxy-methamphetamine, aka MDMA, aka ecstasy, is a great device for triggering a certain subset of emotions, such as love and empathy and joy. And as a frequent practitioner of said device, I think it's great. And I think that there's nothing wrong with putting yourself in environments and states where you artificially or technologically kindle certain emotions. Because one, it's just fun, not in the Deutsch sense, in the raving at 2 o'clock in the morning sense.

[01:10:25]  Unidentified speaker: It's a lot of fun.

[01:10:27]  Vaden: And two, after the technology dissipates, you retain a lot of those skills. You retain a lot of the memories of what it felt like to feel that way. And that's why it's often used in PTSD treatment, for example. But I guess I would just want to... The reason I'm saying that is I think that we're being a little bit too broad when we talk about emotions in general. Different emotions have different values and different purposes and different reasons why you may want to feel more of it or feel less of it. And I think that, yeah, I'll talk about MDMAKES is clear, but meditation is a bit of a slower technology, but it does work as well. There's, I believe, meta-loving-kindness, where you can actually just bring about the feeling of love just through the practice of meditation. And I think that's great. I would love it if everybody around me felt more love all the time. I wouldn't love it if everybody around me felt more jealous and angry all the time. So I think we need to distinguish between different kinds of emotions. And I know saying that is what's going to ping Lulie a little bit. But I think different emotions have different value, different purposes, different uses. Some of them I want to feel more, some of them I want to feel less, some of them I want to feel in particular circumstances, etc. And so I don't think one size fits all solution to this question.

[01:11:47]  Bruce: So let me just throw out, there's actually a second part to my question. Probably the most extreme example of this case would be like someone who has OCD. Where they have feelings that control them, that if they're going to step on a crack, then they're going to break their mother's back. So they have to step over every single crack or whatever. And they logically, their universal explainer knows it's not true. And yet they find that they just have to keep doing this. And we really don't take such impulses. We see them as something that you should be rid of basically. And then a lot of the technologies around learning to try to change those circuits in the brain so that they lessen and become less strong, so that it's not such a strong impulse anymore. So I actually feel like I agree with the way Lulie framed this, that it's kind of somewhere in between. That I think we can find extreme examples where, yeah, you absolutely do want to overcome the elephant. And you want to bridle the elephant directly, not just the consequences. The elephant itself needs to be changed. But I think that the elephant is so valuable in so many things that it would be a wildly dangerous thing to just decide, I'm going to decide what my emotions are for every single moment. That would probably be very poor survival value for you. So I think I have to agree with the way Lulie framed that, that it is somewhere in between is kind of where I've come to myself.

[01:13:18]  Lulie: I don't know if I would frame it like that. To me, this is just exactly the same question as, is coercion ever justified? Is it ever okay to have an authoritarian way of deciding between ideas? So if you say it's something in between, it means yes, then sometimes.

[01:13:39]  Bruce: That is what I'm saying. So in the case of OCD, I'm saying, yes, you should absolutely coerce those feelings away if you've got a way to do that. But that's a fairly extreme case. Like I'm not advocating in general for this. But I think that you can pick really extreme cases like OCD where it would make sense to, if you had a way to, a technology where you could turn it off, you would. You would be able to reason, this is not good, that I am this way, that I've got this problem, and I need to overcome it. I need to change it in some way.

[01:14:10]  Lulie: To me, this sounds like before when we had slaves, then people were saying, oh, if we stop having slaves, then this is going to harm the economy and so on and so forth. But then we actually found solutions and actually the economy is better without some proportion of the population as slaves. And so I think to me, this is more of a, how do we solve the problem? Like if I had OCD, maybe I would want to push the button to get rid of it, but only because it's a practical problem and I can't think of the solution. But if it were the case that actually doing this coercing thing is slower, is less effective, is less moral, like it's more unpleasant and so on, then I wouldn't push the button. I would do the fast, moral, effective thing instead. And I think that, yeah, so maybe we haven't found the solution to all of that. So yeah, I think maybe sometimes coercing allows a less coercion overall because now you have a functional life and so on, and so it's sort of surface level. But ultimately, and I want to put in mind, ultimately, because we are talking about morality here, there is a solution to this problem. Problems are soluble. There is a way forward that doesn't suck.

[01:15:35]  Ivan: I have a question for Lulie about coercion. Like what counts as coercion here? So if I have OCD, isn't my OCD coercing me?

[01:15:46]  Lulie: Yeah, which is why.

[01:15:48]  Vaden: But then treating it would be doing away with coercion, not coercing, right?

[01:15:53]  Lulie: I think there are different types of treatment and it depends on the exact details. So first of all, yes, like I could imagine that the OCD is coercive to an individual. I'm sure that not all people with OCD find it coercive, but I'm sure a great deal of them do because that's why we have this label for it in the first place. And I could imagine there's like treating these symptoms and then there's addressing the sort of the underlying whatever, maybe there's some kind of psychological structure. I don't know, it depends whether it's biological primarily or whether it's idea-based primarily. I'm kind of inclined to think that a lot of these biological things can also be affected by ideas. So I would like to think that if I had OCD, then I would find the underlying idea-based thing and address that, because I have a misconception. There is a misconception that I'm holding, and it's not the surface level, because the surface level, I know that if I step on the cracks, everything is going to be fine, but there's some inexplicit world model there that is mistaken. I don't know if this answers your question.

[01:17:06]  Ivan: I guess I'm wondering if coercion means that instead of being reflective across a range of different motivations and ideas, that we're just being dominated by one of them instead. Is that what you mean by coercion? Because something's going to win, and then how do I describe the winner without saying the winner was coercive?

[01:17:36]  Lulie: Something like true persuasion or looking at all of the ideas and then actually preferring one thing.

[01:17:46]  Lulie: Not having any part of you that is objecting, not having an unaddressed criticism perhaps.

[01:17:53]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:17:55]  Vaden: Without going on a fricking long round about how much I hate the word coercion, I like this example because I think it indicates nicely this elephant in the rider phenomenon in the sense that many people intrinsically view coercion as a bad thing.

[01:18:11]  Unidentified speaker: Bad, bad, bad.

[01:18:11]  Vaden: It's just a bad, negative word. And so Lulie had a strong, I don't want to speak for you, but strong view against treating OCD and you're, I'm going to claim that was the elephant and then your rider then started using the coercion language as a means of justifying why treatment of OCD is a bad thing. And then upon Ivan's question of, well, actually could you view OCD as the coercive force? Then the elephant shifted a little bit and now the rider switched. And now the rider says, well actually maybe it isn't coercive in that sense. So the word coercion I think can be used by the rider to justify any movement of the elephant, I guess, which is why I find that word to be unhelpful.

[01:18:56]  Unidentified speaker: Rant over, sorry.

[01:18:58]  Vaden: We're talking about morality, not vain, stupid opinions on coercion.

[01:19:01]  Unidentified speaker: I recognize that.

[01:19:01]  Unidentified speaker: Well, since we're...

[01:19:03]  Unidentified speaker: This might...

[01:19:04]  Peter: The coercion conversation might segue into another question I had that I know that Ray has written about a little bit. So if we are studying moral psychology and we're becoming more moral, I suppose, by it, should we install the heights of the world, experts in morality, as philosopher kings, to help us follow the science? Is there something a little bit authoritarian and elitist about these kinds of hypotheses? Is it fair to say at the bottom of this kind of thinking, it always leads to justification for something like coercive state intervention, thinking about his arguments against social media?

[01:19:57]  Unidentified speaker: Isn't it true that just regular people can go on social media and learn from their mistakes and stop the doom scrolling or whatever?

[01:20:12]  Peter: I know that you, Ray, have written about Haidt, maybe not Haidt in particular, but Haidt and some of these other guys, and criticized some of the authoritarianism involved with that. Do you see some of that in his hypothesis here?

[01:20:33]  Ray: Well, I don't know if I've read enough of him to detect such a move, but I've noticed with these other people, they do seem to be positioning themselves for selection for the council, some kind of opinion council that the state might fund, in which case I would be—I wouldn't be in favor of that.

[01:21:09]  Unidentified speaker: Wait, who are you referring to?

[01:21:10]  Bruce: I think I lost who we were referring to here.

[01:21:13]  Unidentified speaker: Harari.

[01:21:14]  Vaden: You've all known Harari.

[01:21:16]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, okay.

[01:21:18]  Bruce: Now I know who you're talking about.

[01:21:18]  Ray: The historian who seems to be-

[01:21:22]  Vaden: The historian in quotations.

[01:21:24]  Unidentified speaker: Exactly.

[01:21:25]  Ray: He seems to be presenting himself as an expert on everything.

[01:21:31]  Vaden: More of a historicist in all of his future stuff after he wrote the kids, but yeah.

[01:21:36]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah. So yeah, I would be- I'm suspicious of that. Yeah.

[01:21:41]  Ray: I know I think it would be a bit better. But my suspicion is kind of, that's just not very useful.

[01:21:50]  Unidentified speaker: But a more substantial point would be to point out that even on discussions of morality, a plurality of competing positions, arguments on morality is very important to enable and to sustain for humanity's continued progress. To be even more explicit about that, it's not just a plurality of positions, which you could get from a council set up by a state, which has by definition a monopoly on coercion.

[01:22:42]  Ray: To be more explicit, it ought to be a market of ideas that is open to new entrants.

[01:22:56]  Unidentified speaker: And those entrants to the competition are not vetted by a special council set up by the state.

[01:23:08]  Ray: So I think I probably stated it quite explicitly there.

[01:23:13]  Peter: Ivan asked kind of a similar question when we were discussing this. He said, is it moralizing when you tell people to avoid cognitive biases, think critically and beware of conspiracy theories? Is that more could be a form of moralizing there?

[01:23:36]  Vaden: sir, could you define moralizing for me?

[01:23:38]  Unidentified speaker: Do you mind?

[01:23:40]  Peter: Well, yeah, I tried to do that a little bit. I think it's more associated with sort of this tribal-like thinking, that it's more associated with, you know, which can't be good or bad. I mean, I think it's important to care about what other people think, and Haidt actually makes that case in the book a little bit, as he says, well, the best way to control your elephant is just to surround yourself with people who disagree with you, which I think is perfectly in line with critical rationalism. And that's actually one conclusion I really liked from the book. But yeah, the moralizing, I think, is associated with maybe feeling part of a tribe and superior to other people who don't have these ideas. I think it's quite common, actually.

[01:24:34]  Bruce: If I were to say that's moralizing, what does that mean in your minds? Is that a positive connotation or a negative connotation? Like, I'm not even sure I can answer this question. I'm pretty sure it's a negative connotation to me.

[01:24:47]  Unidentified speaker: Negative, yeah.

[01:24:47]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:24:48]  Bruce: But like, I'm not even sure I could define it for you, right? And yet I know what it is.

[01:24:55]  Ray: I may be able to help a little.

[01:24:57]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, thank you.

[01:24:58]  Ray: I think Pete, I was going to say earlier, I think this choice of topic is actually brilliant because it does bring up this issue of the psychology versus world three difference, and also between moralizing, which is a psychological state or process, or social process, and morality as in standards or proposals for morals.

[01:25:39]  Unidentified speaker: And I would urge, you mentioned the Open Society earlier, I would highly recommend to read the chapter on the standards in that book, because I keep going back to it, because it's absolutely brilliant. It doesn't actually mention World Three in that book, but it feels like a precursor in some respects.

[01:26:10]  Unidentified speaker: It's the morality section, if you like, of World Three that he's beginning to talk about.

[01:26:17]  Bruce: Define the worlds briefly, just in case somebody in the audience doesn't know what we're talking about.

[01:26:21]  Ray: Right, sorry. World, so Popper had this tentative theory of division of the universe into three worlds or domains, overlapping to some degree, but useful for analysis.

[01:26:41]  Unidentified speaker: World One is the domain of physical processes and objects, you know, stars, magnetic field variation, human beings walking down the street. And then there is this domain of psychology, which includes things like expectations, dreams, beliefs. And then this other division, world three, which consists of their products of the human mind or psychology or world two.

[01:27:23]  Ray: But once they are produced, they kind of have their own autonomous properties. So an author of a story, for example, Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn.

[01:27:43]  Unidentified speaker: The story of Huckleberry Finn existed just as a psychological state or maybe a dream or a daydream.

[01:27:52]  Ray: But once written, it assumes an objective existence and it continues to exist today.

[01:28:00]  Unidentified speaker: Despite the fact that obviously Mark Twain no longer exists, his psychological processes and states no longer exist.

[01:28:14]  Ray: Once you have these objective or autonomous products or abstract products of the human mind out there, then you can start analyzing them in terms of the logical relationships between parts of those objects. For example, books can contradict one another. But that's not a psychological process, is it? And yet, that has an indirect feedback effect on our psychology, because we are interested to know, and it will affect our psychology when we find that a book that we've come to love, and we think it's a great account of the moral foundations, the psychological foundations of morality. And then we find that it's in contradictory relationship with another book that we also love.

[01:29:15]  Vaden: May I just add a few details? So world two is the psychological states that you were referring to. I don't know if you labeled that as world two, but Popper tends to use the framing of subjective experience as characterizing world two. So why that's morally relevant is that's where conversations about suffering and love and joy reside. So morality is firmly anchored in world two, because without entities that can suffer, then you wouldn't have moral considerations at all. So that's how that kind of ties into the subject. I just want to add that detail.

[01:29:57]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:29:58]  Ray: But I'm sorry, I need to come back on that, because of course, our moral feelings are anchored in our psychology in world too. But with the power of the tools of language, we are able to formulate universal principles, or not necessarily universal, but anyway, principles, more general principles that may capture some of the psychological wisdom that we have garnered through the moral dilemmas that we have faced as a challenge in our life and conquered or at least found some, at least partial solution for. And then we can put those proposals for standards on the table and discuss them.

[01:31:04]  Peter: So just to summarize, because I always get confused about this, but I think I've got it now. World one, physical reality. World two, consciousness. And then world three is basically the memes that are created by consciousness.

[01:31:20]  Ray: Yeah, yeah.

[01:31:21]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, absolutely. And Popper said he wasn't trying to create, people coming to it for the first time tend to think that Popper was creating these exclusive domains. But really the tools of analysis. So there's a lot of overlap.

[01:31:44]  Ray: I mean, for example, this book by David Hume. I mean, it exists in world one. It's made of paper, wood. But it's also overlapping with world three.

[01:32:03]  Unidentified speaker: It's the abstract information content of David Hume's analysis of induction and so on.

[01:32:12]  Vaden: Can I just add one comment? It's not exactly accurate to say that world three consists of memes, because memes are ideas that replicate and spread, but not all ideas replicate and spread.

[01:32:24]  Peter: Even really bad memes are in there.

[01:32:29]  Vaden: World three is the product of human cognition, and it's ideas. A bad meme, a meme that doesn't spread, isn't a meme.

[01:32:36]  Unidentified speaker: It's just an idea.

[01:32:37]  Vaden: If I tell a bad joke, it's not replicating. It just falls flat and it doesn't spread anywhere. A meme is, by definition, ideas that replicate and spread and move from mind to mind to mind. But not all inhabitants of world three have that property.

[01:32:50]  Bruce: Well, like a trade secret may not ever become a meme, precisely because it's such valuable knowledge. You want to keep it to yourself because it gives you a competitive advantage or something like that.

[01:33:01]  Lulie: Didn't you say that morality is also a product of world two? What do you mean by that?

[01:33:07]  Vaden: Morality is anchored in world two, so morality is... We can say objective things about how to reduce suffering in the world, so we can talk objectively about how best to reduce suffering. But the suffering component is a discussion about subjective experience. So the relationship between these things is slightly tricky. If you read a book, you have the subjective experience of love and laughter and joy. Then there's the objective contents of said book. If you come up with a theory about how to reduce poverty, then that is an objective thing about the world. But then it's objectively referring to subjective human experience.

[01:33:46]  Lulie: So your theories about morality are world three, but the theories themselves refer to world two phenomena.

[01:33:54]  Unidentified speaker: Exactly.

[01:33:56]  Bruce: By the way, I feel like I totally maybe derailed Ray by asking him to explain the worlds. He was just starting to talk about how open society and its enemies was a world three product of morality. I can't remember exactly what you were saying, Ray, but I want to make sure that you got that thought out.

[01:34:17]  Ray: Yeah, I think I was recommending to look at Popper's Open Society book because there is a section in it on standards.

[01:34:33]  Unidentified speaker: So it talks about the difference between say a society actually going along with certain standards, as in its conventions or institutions, which is a sociological thing, and the standard itself, which is a world, it doesn't say world three there, it just says that it's an autonomous, it's autonomous from sociology, because the standard, you can talk about how that standard, as formulated on the table, conflicts with logically with say other, or may be coherent with other standards, or logically indifferent with other standards.

[01:35:22]  Ray: But you can't talk about how those institutions are logically, so two institutions can't be logically incompatible, but two standards can be. So they are, they must be different.

[01:35:42]  Unidentified speaker: May I?

[01:35:43]  Ray: I would highly recommend, because I keep going back to, because when you first read it, you think, no, surely they're the same thing, but no, you can't put them, they're not the same thing, a moral standard is not the same as a morally, sorry, an accepted institutional embodiment of the moral standard.

[01:36:09]  Vaden: Yeah, may I comment on that and then ask a question to the group? So yes, I totally agree with what you're saying. This whole notion of logical relationships between ideas is entirely a world three. Because world three deals with the products of the human mind, so ideas. Ideas have logical content and it's the logical content which can agree or contradict within each other. But that's only in the realm of the third world and ideas. You can't have feelings contradicting each other in a logical sense. Nor can you have blueberries contradicting batteries, say. It doesn't make sense to talk about contradictions of physical stuff or feelings, but it does make sense to talk about contradictions in the space of ideas. And so I, just to echo that. But the question I want to get back to is just the difference between moralizing and morality. And can I give two examples? And I'm curious if these count as moralizing. So one example is in our tribe, we don't eat shellfish or pork. But these other guys, they do eat shellfish and they do eat pork. And that's bad. That's immoral. Boo, boo, this other team. So that's maybe one example, I think, of moralizing, but I open, that's a question to the group, if I'm correct. But the second example would be in our tribe, we don't kill women if they're not virgins on their wedding day. These other guys do kill women if they're not virgins on their wedding day. That's bad. Boo, these other guys. Do both of these things count as moralizing?

[01:37:47]  Bruce: I'm not answering this one. I came here to find out what people were going to say to some form of this question. So I'm going to be quiet here, but I would really like to hear people try to think, you don't necessarily have to answer Vaden's question directly, but try to explain how you see morality versus moralizing.

[01:38:06]  Lulie: To me, moralizing just seems like using the claims of morality in order to try to pressure or coerce or something. It's a little bit like moralizing is the equivalent in morality to scientism in science, where in scientism, you're taking the claims of or you're using the form of science to try and justify some non-scientific thing. Moralizing is using the form of morality to actually just be pressuring.

[01:38:42]  Unidentified speaker: That makes some sense.

[01:38:43]  Lulie: Both of those could be, depending on exactly how you say it and what the social context is and so on.

[01:38:50]  Vaden: I'm realizing I have no idea what people mean by the word moralizing anymore, so this is fascinating.

[01:38:57]  Bruce: I kind of feel the same way. I mean, I know what it means, but I don't know what it means. And so I am really curious what other people thought about it.

[01:39:05]  Lulie: And like true Popperians, we will argue the definition of the word.

[01:39:15]  Vaden: Yeah, I mean, if no one else has a comment, I can maybe explain why I use those two examples, just to...

[01:39:20]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, please.

[01:39:21]  Vaden: Yeah, so when I think about moralizing, I thought of it as having strong moral convictions and then telling other people what to do. It's kind of just like, I know what's right, and that's immoral, that is immoral, that's not moral. And when framed that way, okay, sure, yeah, it's a bad thing because we're presupposing we know what's right and the other guys don't and we can be wrong. And that's why I used the shellfish example, because obviously that's maybe once upon a time when there was a lot of bacteria and stuff, it made sense, but now it doesn't make sense to call people who eat shellfish immoral, EA and vegans aside. But then the second one is a place where I think we absolutely have objective knowledge about what's moral and what isn't moral. And I think that it is fundamentally an immoral thing to do, to kill a woman if she's not a virgin on her wedding day. And I will happily go to bat for that and argue with whoever wants to be argued with on that point. But absolutely I'm going to tell people who are advocating the opposite that they're wrong, that they shouldn't do it, and I'm going to be pretty steadfast in my conviction that I'm right on that particular subject. But I bring that up as an example because now if that also counts as moralizing, then moralizing isn't intrinsically a bad thing, right? Especially when it overlaps with what we take to be our best objective, moral knowledge. So I put that to the team because I get the impression, could be wrong, that Lulie and I have some really fundamental disagreements in this space, which is exciting.

[01:40:48]  Vaden: And so if Lulie, I don't want to speak for you, but if your view is that anytime you try to persuade anyone, that is tantamount to coercion and thus wrong. I'm curious how you square the circle.

[01:40:59]  Unidentified speaker: There.

[01:41:00]  Lulie: Yeah, I mean, I feel like a broken record because it turns out today all of my opinions are through this coercion lens because yeah, I was thinking like, oh yeah, you're doing what you're doing to that other tribe, what you're also advocating that we do towards our emotions. And I think in both cases, like yes, like have your views, try to persuade people. And then I don't know, maybe this is like a tactics thing or something. Just because I don't think being like the sort of the pressuring or the coercive thing is actually a route to persuasion because in order for persuasion to work, you need to hear what their ideas are and you need to reply to them. And doing this according to the other person's view of things, like you need to make arguments that fit with the way that they think about things instead of are just like completely based on premises that they don't even agree with. And so even just on a practical level, yeah.

[01:42:01]  Vaden: In the case of honor killings, I would be happy to use the state to prevent it.

[01:42:07]  Lulie: Yeah, well, so I'm in favor of coercion in some situations that basically allows for less coercion overall.

[01:42:14]  Unidentified speaker: And principle is coercion.

[01:42:17]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:42:18]  Lulie: But I do want to just like highlight again and again, this is some authoritarian mechanism being used. And like very sometimes we want that. Sometimes we want to kill people who are killing us. But it is quite an intense thing.

[01:42:37]  Vaden: I personally think we should blacklist words like coercion and authoritarianism in this particular conversation. I feel like it's, Muddy's more than clarifies, but.

[01:42:46]  Ray: Can I just make a point? I mean, this, the concept of coercion crops up in discussions of liberty.

[01:42:56]  Ivan: You know, how do we define liberty as well?

[01:42:59]  Unidentified speaker: And, it's too vague.

[01:43:04]  Ray: Well, I think it's, it's, it's too.

[01:43:06]  Vaden: It's vague and morally loaded. And that combination is dangerous, I think.

[01:43:10]  Ray: Yeah, but also, it's also completely innocent sometimes, because think of boxing. Mike Tyson did not win by non coercion.

[01:43:25]  Unidentified speaker: I would argue that he did.

[01:43:25]  Ray: I mean, to me, that just blows the concept out of the water.

[01:43:29]  Lulie: I think that boxing is consensual and completely non-coercive.

[01:43:34]  Unidentified speaker: That's it.

[01:43:35]  Ray: The consensualness, the mutual reciprocal contract or agreement, that's what's crucial, not coercion.

[01:43:44]  Bruce: So, let me, so I've talked with Vaden about this quite a bit. So, I know I probably agree with Vaden entirely. And yet, I really don't feel like I misunderstood anything Lulie said. Like, everything Lulie said, I think I agreed with, right? I don't really like the word coercion either. But when she used it, she conveyed a concept to me. And I suspect I agree with her on that concept, you know, even if maybe I would choose different words to try to go about it. So, I honestly don't feel like I disagree with either Vaden or Lulie on this, is my honest opinion.

[01:44:17]  Vaden: Maybe I might be the one who's the problem here talking about coercion, because morality and moralizing is potentially more the subject matter, I guess. So, I apologize if I derailed to do yet another rant on coercion.

[01:44:31]  Peter: We're a very self-indulgent podcast.

[01:44:33]  Unidentified speaker: No problem.

[01:44:34]  Bruce: Can I actually grab your point though, Vaden, and maybe pull it back to morality versus moralizing? So, one of the reasons why I dislike the word coercion, although I'm not necessarily against other people using it, I think in some context, it just makes perfect sense and it might be the best word to convey what you mean. And I felt like Lulie was doing that very well. The issue I think I have with the word coercion is that I do feel like there is people not in this conversation who do use the term as an outright moralizing of all sorts of things and to shut down conversations. And I guess that's really, I'm struggling to explain what I mean by moralizing, right? But if you were to ask me, Bruce, do you think that in political discussion today, there is too much moralizing, there's over-moralizing and that's a bad thing? I'd answer yes, like absolutely, I believe that. And then if you pushed me and said, what do you even mean by that? I'd struggle to explain exactly what I mean. I would probably say something similar to what I just did. I feel like people tried to use morality to shut down completely legitimate conversations, which is what I felt like Lulie was talking about. In fact, I think that's a massive problem today. Probably it's always been a massive problem. We always have these kind of rose-colored glasses about how great things were a few decades ago or whatever. There probably are some things that are worse today than a few decades ago. I think Haidt makes some good points about that. But I don't really believe that things are going to hell in a handbasket.

[01:46:12]  Bruce: I think I've heard him say that. That things are going to hell in a handbasket. He is too pessimistic for me in that regard. So I guess I'd like to know what other people think. Like if I were to ask you each, do you think that in political discussions today, we over-moralize and that is a bad thing? Give me a yes or no. Just even though those words could mean all sorts of different things, so you could probably safely answer yes or no. Just go with your gut, yes or no, and then what do you think you mean by that? What exactly is wrong with moralizing? If you answer that there's too much moralizing.

[01:46:50]  Unidentified speaker: No, I mean, so when Peter proposed this roundtable, he gave a couple of examples and set up.

[01:47:04]  Ivan: I was pretty confused about where the conversation was going to go. Because on the one hand, there was a conversation about rationality, which I usually take to be mostly a discussion about epistemic rationality, like what should we believe given the evidence? I think that's a lot easier problem in many ways than instrumental rationality, like how do I best satisfy my values? It's very difficult to satisfy values because values are a moving target. If you have opinions about animal welfare, and you study it more, it's going to change your values, but it's not clear to me that that change in values was inevitable or even correct. You can fall down a rabbit hole.

[01:47:58]  Ivan: There's this epistemic rationality, and then there's the question of morality and moralizing, and the two topics that Peter brought up were, one was about vaccination, and the other was about climate change.

[01:48:16]  Unidentified speaker: And so what I think the debate is really, like what I think that the topic is that we're not like being explicit about is, when scientists say that vaccines are safe, and that humans are causing climate change, and then people go on social media and say, neither of those things are true, how much should those ideas be censored?

[01:48:49]  Ivan: I think that obviously you'd like to have some balance. You don't want to suppress ideas.

[01:48:55]  Unidentified speaker: But at the same time, I think that people's lack of rationality can be gamed by people that have bad motives, and that there's some trade-off between these two things.

[01:49:12]  Peter: A couple of things I might push back on a little bit about that. I mean, I think that people who... Okay, so you're really talking about, without getting into a more of a debate about the politics of climate change or vaccines or something, you're really talking about people who are wrong, right? Or you perceive them to be wrong. But doesn't, in the, as we move closer to truth, don't people, in terms of truth-seeking, doesn't, don't wrong opinions have a very valuable place in that process? I mean, I want to, I want to hear wrong opinions. I mean, I think the, the answer is, to me, something more along the lines of free speech absolutism, or whatever you might call it. I think, I, I don't think that the kind of shutting down of opinions you're talking about has, has any place at all. I, I, I mean, part of this is my crazy optimistic view of humans. I, I like what, what I think that's why I like to Ray's book so much is that he really, really makes the case that even, even fanatics and, and weirdos, you can't convince them that the, the moon is, is made of cheese. You know, people, people, people do fundamentally care about what is, is true. So anyway, I guess that's my response to Ivan's comment there.

[01:50:57]  Vaden: Yeah, yeah, let me just echo what you said, but I'm going to take a few seconds to get there though, if you don't mind. I was kind of being tongue-in-cheek when I said I didn't know what moralizing meant. And let me give an example. So I think that in our lifetimes, we've seen the question about whether or not masks are effective, go from something that wasn't moralized to something that's pretty damn moralized now, in the sense that, that discussion, that debate, people feel very strongly about it. And if you are on the other side, you are the bad guy. It's a tribalistic thing because of just the nature of COVID. And the debate has now unfortunately fallen along political lines, et cetera, et cetera. So that is kind of what I think when I think about moralizing is, is taking a conversation and imbuing it with this sense of people who disagree with me are bad people and making it not just like what's effective and not is what's ineffective, but it is now a question of like goodness and badness. And that can be problematic because it can make conversations much more difficult, right? It can make it much more hard to actually figure out what is true when if you disagree with me, you're a bad person.

[01:52:16]  Unidentified speaker: That makes things harder.

[01:52:18]  Vaden: Then to get to the free speech stuff. My view of moralizing is kind of like it is an inevitable. I can't help but moralize certain conversations such as honor galing, for example, or the female genital mutilation. That is an intrinsically moralistic conversation to me. And I actually do think that people who disagree with me are bad people on that particular subject and I can't change that. But so if we take this fact that moralizing is kind of going to be inevitable, but it also is going to disable or make certain conversations more difficult, then the question of free speech kind of comes into play. So how, like, what should we do as a society given that this isn't necessarily going to flare up every one or two years with different kinds of conversations? And I'm not a free speech absolutist in the sense that I can absolutely imagine circumstances where we need to curtail free speech, in particular in emergency circumstances. So during World War II, when the United States was in a total war, they had a propaganda machine. And that propaganda machine made sure that everybody in the United States was very directionally aligned, rah rah rah Americans and down with fascism. But that is a necessary strategy of war because you need to have your whole populace in lockstep because we're in an extreme circumstance. So too with COVID, I believe. And so I kind of want to think about the fact that moralizing is going to be inevitable, makes things more difficult, but it's not always wrong.

[01:53:51]  Vaden: And then how do we build an edifice on top of that, that allows for the most rational discussions to take place, given that sometimes we're in emergency circumstances, but most of the time we're not. And in the second case, when we're not in emergency circumstances, then yeah, I think most ideas should flow most of the time. But you still need to have warning labels on YouTube videos, you still need to provide extra information because anti-rational memes are very potent beasts, right? And treating that naively is just let the anti-rational memes flow and the good ideas will win out in the end. Well, sometimes the good ideas involve recognizing that conspiracy theory videos needs to be accompanied with warning labels and extra information. And so, sometimes the best way to deal with anti-rational memes is to quote be coercive. Lulie, I know I'm saying certain things that are triggering and I want to be saying such things. But, yeah, sometimes the way that you battle these ideas is by limiting their spread. And I don't think that there's anything necessarily wrong with that. We just have to be freaking careful because it's so easy to do that unnecessarily. But I do want to limit the spread of trial pornography. I do want to limit the spread of ISIS videos, for example. Yeah, I do. And I don't think that a pure free speech approach, let everything just be completely free, is the right strategy there.

[01:55:18]  Unidentified speaker: May I just say it's worth repeating what Churchill said in The State of War, that George Orr is better than War War. So even in an emergency situation, we need to have some mechanism of ordinary conversation, whereby we can get out of conflict.

[01:55:42]  Lulie: I think there's a difference between having a law that prevents vile acts, and pointing to someone and saying, you are bad for doing that. And to me, the word moralizing, and maybe I'm just using it in a very particular way, is referring to the pressure of saying, you are bad and you should feel bad and you should have shame about this, and you are not allowed to have your views be exposed to actual criticism. Instead, you will be forced to, I'm trying to not use the word coercion, forced to, and it's not just forced to do a different action, because I don't think that's moralizing, that is just rule of law. The thing is being forced to not freely think yourself, which actually prevents you from coming to the ideas that we want these people to have. So, I think that there is a value in forcing people to do certain actions or to not do certain actions. And I don't, I haven't heard so far, what is the value of forcing them to think in a different way. And maybe there is a value to that, but that's what I would be interested in, because that's what it seems that moralizing is meant to do. Like, and if we draw this back to the hate thing, so because he talks about these tribes and tribalism. And so do we want to be tribalist because we have danced together and therefore we have a, we've synced up on something. And he gives the example of, of how Protestants are quite nice to people because they want to have converts to their religion.

[01:57:40]  Lulie: And, and then this other way of doing things where with the, with the more forcey coercive, forcey religions, and, and do we actually need this kind of forcing thing? Like, do we need to say, hey, you're bad, don't think about that and just like, do, do this other thing, but also like, don't look at what your current existing ideas on this are. I feel like that was slightly uncharitable to what Vaden was saying, but that's kind of...

[01:58:08]  Unidentified speaker: No, no, that's great.

[01:58:10]  Bruce: So, Vaden, actually, I was going to ask you about the mask thing, right? Because I actually think that I would agree with you. That's a good example of what I have in mind when I talk about over-moralizing, is the fact that that trying to discuss our masks effective, you know, should we wear masks or not, very quickly becomes tribal and moralized and people immediately start getting mad at each other and friendships break up. That certainly seems to me like an example of over-moralizing.

[01:58:40]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:58:41]  Bruce: What's the correct way to do this then though?

[01:58:43]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:58:43]  Bruce: Like what does it mean to... There is moral consequences to one way or the other with, let's at least say, mask laws.

[01:58:50]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:58:50]  Bruce: There's moral consequences. So how do we have that conversation without over-moralizing?

[01:58:57]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:58:57]  Vaden: Let me split the question into two parts. So I think that one conversation is, what is the best thing for one's self to do? And I think that one's self should resist moralizing as much as one can. With a mask conversation, I don't personally feel very moralized about it in the sense that I haven't looked into it too strongly. And if someone had really strong opinions on either side, I would just honestly just want to hear what they have to say. So I think that one's self should minimize it as much as possible, but I don't think one can get it to zero necessarily. But then the second component is what should we as a society do, given that such conversations will become moralized. And that second, or what should we do with our friends who are very moralized about masks? And that second one is obviously more difficult, but that's where I think the conversation now becomes questions of free speech and how do we best deal with the plurality of different views and angry, disagreements, et cetera, et cetera. So on that second conversation, that's where I think we firmly just switch into conversations about free speech and how much we should regulate different kinds of ideas. Maybe I should respond a bit to Lulie too, given that your comments were directed to me, which is great and fair. And taking my comments in a mediumly charitable sense is awesome.

[02:00:18]  Unidentified speaker: I love that.

[02:00:18]  Vaden: So totally do that more often. I don't think I'm in favor of ever forcing people to think anything. I can't actually think of an example where I'd want someone to buy... I know how you would do that, except using like North Korean propaganda style techniques, which I don't think are very effective. But in terms of, say, limiting certain information, that is a different... that's different to me than forcing people to think certain things. So, do we want, say, someone like Anom Chomsky to have a huge platform in 1942, 1943? Do we want them to be able to be spreading as much information about how bad and evil the United States is in that particular time? I would argue probably not. That's not the same as forcing Chomsky to think something else. But I think that, yeah, during wartime, it absolutely makes sense for even democratic governments to have some sort of influence over who has louder and quieter voices. I just think of that as different than forcing people to think any particular thing.

[02:01:26]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I totally agree.

[02:01:29]  Bruce: By the way, to relate this to Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, I don't know how to pronounce that name, is the president of FIRE, and he was also co-author with Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind. So The Coddling of American Mind is a book I have read. I didn't like it as much as the first two. But he was trying to dig into the question that Vaden is talking about here. And Greg Lukianoff with FIRE, obviously, he's not, in interviews, he'll say, I'm not a free-speech absolutist in the sense that you can have any speech, but I am an idea absolutist. So an opinion absolutist.

[02:02:13]  Peter: It seems like maybe there's a little bit of a conflict between Haidt's ideas about social media ruining.

[02:02:22]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, he literally says that social media is going to ruin our democracy unless we take steps to limit it, especially with children.

[02:02:35]  Peter: And then he's also seems to be quite pro-free speech.

[02:02:41]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[02:02:41]  Unidentified speaker: It just seems like there's a little bit of a conflict between those.

[02:02:44]  Vaden: You know what he seems to me? He seems to be a rather sloppy scholar, because I've been going through his most recent book. And when he cites studies that show causally that social media is bad for people, like I've started to go through the studies, and they, I'll give one example. So one of the studies consisted of 120 undergrads in the first and second week of school. And when he says that they limit social media and show that these undergrads were happier, all they did was limit Twitter and Facebook Messenger. But they didn't limit Instagram, they didn't limit Snapchat, they didn't limit a thousand other social medias. And from this he draws the conclusion that we should ban phones in schools everywhere. So he just, like, when Deutsch says so-and-so has said such-and-such, and I go and read the citation, it's rock-solid. I can trust anything that Deutsch cites. You can't do that. So you read it and then you're like, okay, well, the sample size is tiny. And he's making claims about all of social media, but they only study the effect of limiting Twitter and Facebook. And that isn't all of social media. And so Haidt's just sloppy. And that's something I've just noticed now that I'm doing a deeper dive into his most recent book. So I think all of that needs to be kept in mind. Yeah, I think that needs to be kept in mind when we're talking about Haidt because it's not, we're not dealing with a careful scholar. Pinker is a careful scholar, Deutsch is a careful scholar, Harris is careful, but Haidt isn't.

[02:04:10]  Vaden: And so all of that needs to be acknowledged when we're talking about what he thinks about stuff. It's just not as rock-solid as other people, no.

[02:04:20]  Peter: Yeah, I found especially a lot of that phone stuff to be just, I don't know, well, the BS detector just goes crazy.

[02:04:26]  Vaden: Just take anything, any study that he writes about, just spend two or three minutes scrolling through it and see if even the discussion section in the paper, if that accurately is reflected by Haidt and it's often not.

[02:04:41]  Bruce: So Jonathan Rausch, and I mentioned his book, The Constitution of Knowledge, is actually addressing the very same subject that Jonathan Haidt is trying to address. But his conclusion is that, so he actually does take the stance that social media is potentially a danger to democracy, but his stance is way more critical rationalist because he is a critical rationalist, and he's looking at it from the standpoint of, if you did nothing, it would be a danger, but of course, we're going to do something. And then the Constitution of Knowledge is this idea that you do tilt things so that it's not, how do I put this? That social media, if you don't do anything at all, then he takes the stance that what spreads through the nodes is going to be the bad stuff. It's going to be the stuff that's not true. But that with just some simple institutions that you put into place, that will no longer be true. And then he uses examples from science or journalism or whatever, where we have networks where truth spreads better than what's outrageous. So it's interesting that they're talking about the exact same thing, the potential danger of social media. But Haidt came away with this idea that we should keep children off of social media to save democracy. And Jonathan Rausch came away with this idea that we should, that social media should implement certain types of institutions, such as the ones that Vaden has mentioned, to be honest. Like where maybe you leave the video up, but you put the warning on it and say here's information about, to back check what's in this video.

[02:06:26]  Vaden: Can I add or just refine the last thing you said, which is I think that social media companies should continue to refine their product such that they dampen down the negatives and improve the positives. But it's not as if these platforms are static. They are constantly changing what they do to reflect the most recent round of criticism. For example, Tristan Harris, who's kind of gone off the deep end, but when he first started, he made some very fair observations about the addictive nature of some of these platforms and some of their more dirty tricks. One example is this like Snapstreak thing that Snapchat was doing. As far as I know, they're not doing it as much anymore.

[02:07:14]  Peter: My kids sure do it. They've got Snapstreaks with all their friends and I don't know.

[02:07:20]  Lulie: Which is, by the way, a wonderful feature, a wonderful feature which I use on Be Real.

[02:07:26]  Vaden: Okay, so I haven't used it. I can't comment and if that's a bad example, I'll just talk about more like the changes that-

[02:07:31]  Unidentified speaker: We just have to accept that Vaden is very sloppy in his scholarship on social media.

[02:07:37]  Unidentified speaker: Touché, my friend, touché.

[02:07:41]  Vaden: So, let me move off that example because clearly I don't know what I'm talking about there. And just say that after Tristan Harris came into the public eye, all of the big tech companies started putting in like, monitor your screen usage stuff and making it easier to disable certain apps. And they took on board a lot of his criticisms is my main point. And so too with, I have to say his name, but even Elon Musk has done something right in this particular space with his Community Notes feature.

[02:08:06]  Unidentified speaker: That's an excellent feature.

[02:08:08]  Vaden: And so the last plug is Scott Alexander wrote a piece, which I don't remember the title of it, but he basically said like, it is impossible to have a fully unregulated platform about anything. Like even 4chan moderates some of the content on 4chan. Because to have a completely neutral platform is an unusable platform. No one would use it, it just doesn't work. There is so much content out there, you have to triage somehow. So you can't just be neutral. And so just the pure free speech absolutist thing is a fiction. Because any product that is usable has some sort of triaging. And then you are just in the question of what are you going to elevate and what are you going to de-elevate, and you have to make a choice. And so there is no free speech absolute position that you can sensibly take if you want a product that anyone is going to use.

[02:08:59]  Unidentified speaker: That is my main point.

[02:09:01]  Lulie: At least when it gets big enough.

[02:09:06]  Unidentified speaker: Because otherwise you can do it by subculture.

[02:09:09]  Lulie: Does 8chan moderate? I thought that there were some websites out there.

[02:09:14]  Vaden: I used to be very active on 8chan, but I am not as active anymore.

[02:09:17]  Unidentified speaker: I have no idea how many.

[02:09:19]  Unidentified speaker: I have used it, so I don't know.

[02:09:22]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[02:09:23]  Peter: Well, I thought I'd move on just one more question. And then maybe Bruce has some questions too. It's a bit of a tangent here, but we're talking about morality and it's just what I'm curious about your thoughts on. So I'm just going to go here. It's probably the oldest and most cliche question amongst philosophers. Maybe not the oldest, but I don't know. I'm thinking of the whole utilitarian versus deontological question of ethics and morality. I used to be more of a, I guess, when Hitchens and Dawkins and all these people came out, I read all their books. I thought they were great. As I've gotten older, I guess I've just been more, even though I am an atheist, I guess I've got just, as I've gotten through more, have more life experiences, including some tough times in my life, I guess I've gotten, I will straight up say that I've become much more almost envious of people with a religion, like Bruce, maybe, or he's probably the only one here I would imagine. But just to have a moral code and a community to be a part of seems to me a really desirable thing until you actually start going to church and realizing how boring it is. But still, at least theoretically, I feel like I get it.

[02:11:09]  Vaden: It's theoretically boring.

[02:11:13]  Peter: I get it more and I found myself, what I'll do is in certain circumstances, we'll write down like a code, like a code to live by kind of a thing. And then I'll just make like a 10-point code and then keep that on my phone. And then just really get that in my brain when I'm in confusing situations. And it's just something that I found helpful. And so I'm curious, is this a false dichotomy, some kind of false dichotomy between utilitarian and deontological? Or should rational people avoid these kinds of religion or similar kinds of things? Or is there some value in living with a moral framework?

[02:12:12]  Ivan: I was just going to say that I think that I guess I would describe myself as a moral subjectivist, so I think that morality is in the same class as aesthetics in terms of epistemology. It's just that it's aesthetics that I'm willing to fight people about. I don't think that there's any one correct moral system.

[02:12:43]  Ivan: I'm sure some of my ethics would be considered deontological, some of it utilitarian. If utilitarianism says that something in my world is not right, I see that as a warning light on my moral dashboard. I don't think that it's necessarily true.

[02:13:03]  Unidentified speaker: I think that it's something that requires me to take a closer look at. As far as religion is concerned, I wonder if it's not so much having a moral code, but having an identity that asks something of you.

[02:13:34]  Ivan: One of the inspirations for this, I've been thinking about this a lot the last couple of years, was I read Jonathan Haidt's other book, The Happiness Hypothesis, where he talks about people being happier when they have a religious framework of some kind. And some of that appealed to me when I read about it.

[02:13:56]  Unidentified speaker: But the question is like, what, how would that work for me? I'm also an atheist.

[02:14:01]  Ivan: And so I had to start thinking about, well, what is the deepest value? Maybe if I had a deontological ethic, what would it be? And I think it's that it's the primacy of epistemic rationality over instrumental rationality. That I think that it's important to know what's true, that that in all but very extreme cases is more important than winning.

[02:14:31]  Unidentified speaker: Like, I would rather know than be happy.

[02:14:34]  Ivan: Now, I don't expect that other people should feel this way. I don't think that it's an objectively right thing.

[02:14:42]  Unidentified speaker: But I think that for me, it's a value.

[02:14:45]  Ivan: It's like, if I was going to create a sort of quote unquote religious identity around something, it would be around this. I mean, there are other things too, like an optimism about humanity, I think is important to have. And so I think that's part of an identity that I would better want. And it's not that I would have specific moral rules, but that I'd look at that identity and say, how can thinking about this make my life better? How can I live a better life in light of this identity?

[02:15:26]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[02:15:28]  Unidentified speaker: Lulie?

[02:15:31]  Lulie: I actually have a piece on my website answering this very question. And it's not just the ontological versus the utilitarianism, there's a ton of other different normative ethics systems. My view is that if you take Popperian epistemology really seriously, you can just think of all of these different versions of ethics and morality as things to criticize your moral theories by. And so you can kind of take, well, what we want is fallibilism and the correction of errors. And then what helps that? And then all of these systems are just ways of giving us hints about which of our ideas, our normative ideas will actually work. And then as for the religion question, it's hard to do it alone. If I imagine just writing out 10 to 12 principles to live by, and I'm doing that alone, yeah, there's a sort of a, because religion is more than just the morality of it, there's this whole system. And I would have thought you need to kind of replace more like the entire system for that to be satisfying.

[02:16:55]  Unidentified speaker: But I don't know.

[02:17:03]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I do resonate somewhat with what Lulie was saying, that we can use these general theories of morality to criticize our feelings. Is that what you were saying?

[02:17:27]  Ray: Yeah, I think that, but I would say that that's part of it.

[02:17:34]  Unidentified speaker: But under, let me show something with you, that for some years, well, when I wrote this chapter on Sam Harris, for the book, I wrote a chapter on Sam Harris' idea that you could come up with a scientific morality, which would mean that you were, you had a set of universal principles or laws of morality that you then could apply to each moral dilemma or problem that you face in life.

[02:18:19]  Ray: But my thought was that perhaps, just like we cannot achieve a unified final theory in science, perhaps that is also beyond our reach in morality, maybe we're always clumsily getting our way through our moral challenges more or less well. And this will always be the case.

[02:18:56]  Unidentified speaker: And it's not possible to...

[02:19:00]  Ray: And I, my guess, I'm still working on this because I think it's a fundamental problem. Is that life, the universe has both these two radically different things. It has particular events or processes. And then it also has these universal aspects or structures. And as moral beings we're constantly sort of bouncing between one and the other. So we were trying to, as deontologists, like Kant, we want to be able to just have a rule that covers each and every moral dilemma. And then we can just apply it. But I don't think we can't really do that. But I wouldn't scrap the deontological principles. Like Lulie, we can use them as tools to get by, as it were. But it's always going to be humans just getting by the best that they can.

[02:20:23]  Unidentified speaker: We can continually improve and get better, but I don't think we'll ever get to a unified theory of morality.

[02:20:33]  Vaden: Yeah, nice. So, I am 100% Sam Harris, moral landscape guy. That is, I'll defend that to the hilt, too. And I don't think that you accurately represented his thesis, if I dare say, Ray. Because he isn't advocating for deontology, nor does he say that there's a set of rules that we can apply to figure out all of our moral problems. He's just saying that moral questions are amenable to the scientific method in the same way that any other kinds of questions are. And so why he uses the metaphor of a moral landscape is that there are peaks, there are troughs. We don't necessarily know where we are, and we don't necessarily know how to get to where we want to be. It's just that that searching process is exactly the same as in science. So whatever tools we use for science, as Popper says, there's no one method. But there are ways to make progress. And because the brain is a physical object, we can understand it in the same way that we can understand anything else. But then back to Peter's comments, I wasn't entirely sure how we connect the thread of choosing a moral framework. So I'm a consequentialist, a Sam Harris style consequentialist. How that thread was connected to the comments about religion and community and frameworks, I guess, because, yeah, moral systems are... When I say I'm a consequentialist, that doesn't give me everything I need. That helps me in some kinds of problems. But I need other tools to solve other kinds of problems and to think about the world. And so I guess when you were talking about atheism and moral frameworks and stuff, it sounds more like...

[02:22:22]  Vaden: This may be a question to you, Peter. It sounds more like you're looking for like a world view or a set of values and are envious of Bruce and religious people more generally because they have that kind of given to them. By nature of being born into said community, that's already there. They don't have to find it themselves. Bruce, if I'm speaking for you or if I'm mischaracterizing your experience, yeah, then please, please correct me. But for me, ethical frameworks aren't the same as a world view, nor do they tell me what to do in every circumstance. It's just a way to think through ethical problems, but there's all sorts of other problems as well. And I absolutely agree that people need a world view and a value system, and without that, you're kind of just blowing in the wind. But maybe my question is, does not the international network of critical rationalists and the ideas of Popper, does that not kind of fill the hole that you're looking for? The community, there's six members of the community right here. And every two Saturdays, you and Bruce get together and discuss things that you're passionate about and interested in. And how is that different than every Sunday getting together and discussing things that you're interested in and passionate about? And so I guess my question is just how do the questions about ethical frameworks match or relates to the search for communities and worldviews and stuff in your mind?

[02:23:46]  Peter: Well, now that's an excellent point. And let's do this every week now.

[02:23:51]  Unidentified speaker: How about that?

[02:23:52]  Vaden: Well, Sundays are taken for Bruce, but we could do it every Saturday.

[02:23:55]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[02:24:00]  Bruce: We're kind of long on time, but once you're done with your questions, I was actually going to see if we still have time, which we may not. I was going to read a summary of Haidt's views from The Righteous Mind. I actually just wanted to get people's take on that summary.

[02:24:21]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[02:24:21]  Bruce: Here is his summary. It says, six areas of experimental research demonstrating that. Brains evaluate instantly and constantly. Social and political judgments depend heavily on quick intuitive flashes. Our bodily states sometimes influence our moral judgments. Bad smells and tastes can make people more judgmental, as can anything that makes people think about purity and cleanliness. Psychopaths reason but do not feel and are severely deficient morally. Babies feel but don't reason and have the beginnings of morality. Affective reactions, affective reactions with an A, are in the right place at the right time in the brain. I had to check what that actually meant, but it was referring to the fact that you instantly like or dislike something in a flash, even before you even know what that thing is. And that was his summary of the studies that he reviewed prior to that point in the book. I was curious, does anybody disagree with anything in here strongly, somewhat? Do you find much here that you actually agree with?

[02:25:36]  Vaden: I agree with all of that with the exception of the smell and taste stuff. I think that has been killed in the replication crisis. But you don't even necessarily need those examples, because I think it is generally true that your bodily state will determine what you view to be moral and not moral. This is a bit of a crude example, forgive me, but it's the only one I can think of at the moment. Another person I'm very influenced by is Dan Savage, is a name that doesn't come up too often in this circle. But when you are in a aroused state during sex, you will participate in behaviors that when you're not in that aroused state, you would find gross or icky. And that just shows that if there's a relationship between grossness and ickiness and morality, then there's absolutely a relationship between your physical body and your emotional judgment about certain activities, I guess. And so I sign off on everything with the exception of maybe tweaking his example, because I think that's dead down with the replication crisis.

[02:26:39]  Peter: Now, that was interesting to bring up the replication crisis, though, because I keep — you know, whenever I am reading something about education, I will oftentimes — it just doesn't sit right with me, the way they always want to bring everything back to neuroscience. And, oh, this — the studies indicate this and that. And, you know, I'm just — I just find myself thinking, this — that means nothing. The studies do — these random studies that they're using, it's — they're trying to — it's almost like they're trying to immune — immunize — immunize their — their arguments from criticism by making them sound more scientific than they are. And I guess I kind of found — this last time, reading The Righteous Mind, I kind of found myself triggered in a similar way how he — he's just making too much of these — these studies. And I would be curious how they would hold up to the replication crisis.

[02:27:44]  Vaden: To be fair to him, in 2012, I think that there was such — there are so many methodological errors in the field of psychology that everyone was just kind of taking these to be true. And I wouldn't necessarily fault him in particular for that. But a rough heuristic is any psychological thing you've heard in a TED Talk that came out between like 2012 and 2016, it's probably not true. Most of those have all died. But the entire field was confused about this because of just p-hacking and all this statistics stuff. So I can't necessarily fault him for that. Although it does indicate that he's not... Deutsch wouldn't have fallen for that because Deutsch and Pinker are careful scholars. But the majority of scholars in that field did...

[02:28:31]  Peter: Deutsch seems to doubt the whole... Of psychology. I mean, he doesn't...

[02:28:38]  Vaden: That's too strong from my perspective, yeah.

[02:28:39]  Unidentified speaker: But yeah, he does do that.

[02:28:42]  Vaden: I mean, so there are robust psychological findings. Well, an example I like to use is false memories. Very real thing and very relevant in the legal system. It's entirely changed the way that professionals, including my wife actually, elicit interviews from people because it's very easy to put false memories in. Very important finding from psychology absolutely has replicated, has massive ramifications in the legal and justice system. So it's not that all psychology is bunk, it's just that a lot of it suffered from these mistakes.

[02:29:16]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[02:29:17]  Unidentified speaker: That's an interesting perspective.

[02:29:21]  Ray: By the way, I was reading David Hume's book which I showed earlier. I just happened to read a section where he actually makes this point that passions, different passions, very different passions can reinforce one another, which is similar to the point that Haidt is making there, about smells, a revulsion, or disgust may heighten some other passions, in this case, a moral passion.

[02:30:07]  Peter: He seems to make a big deal about the left versus right thing, and his findings about that maybe conservatives are more disgusted by certain smells, or something like that.

[02:30:21]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[02:30:22]  Peter: What do you think, Vaden? Is that all BS, too, or?

[02:30:25]  Vaden: I haven't studied that one in particular, but it is... I've noticed that my left-leading friends and right-leading friends tend to have different things that they focus on with regards to core values, like purity, for example. So purity tends to be, on the left, more associated with food, unnatural GMOs, chemicals, and on the right tends to be more associated with sexual values, family, that kind of thing. And so, there's a number of different examples that Haidt gives with regards to these fundamental concepts that manifest in different ways on the left and the right, and that seems to jive decently well with my experience of talking to people on the left and the right, so, yeah.

[02:31:11]  Peter: Yeah, yeah, okay, fair enough.

[02:31:19]  Lulie: Well, I mean, I could answer, I could go through these, which is so. Brains evaluate instantly and constantly, seems legit. Social and political judgements depend heavily on quick intuitive flashes, yeah. Our bodily states sometimes influence our moral judgements, yes, but bad smells and tastes can make people more judgemental as can anything that can make people think about purity and cleanliness. So now we're starting to get to, it depends on what the individual and the society, how they interpret physical sensations and physical senses. Once we start talking about purity and cleanliness, and it's in this somewhat metaphorical way because you have dirty thoughts, like there's a sort of a, because that's what the moral judgmental thing is. So there, I think I would, I'd be like, hold on, let's get actually a lot more precise here to see if he's saying something that I would agree with or not. Psychopaths, reason but don't feel. So I don't know how much of a natural category of psychopaths is, like whether it's just a label that we put on some people who behave in a certain way or whether it is actually the case, like they must be able to feel because there's a condition where you actually don't feel anything physically, you know, and you can get a wound and then you don't feel it. They don't have that thing.

[02:32:53]  Unidentified speaker: They have a different thing.

[02:32:53]  Lulie: They have, they don't feel emotionally, but then how is that different?

[02:32:57]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, empathy.

[02:32:58]  Lulie: And so then how is that different from alexithymia and like, is it the same? And so what actually is a psychopath? And I don't know if that has a sharp thing or whether that is just a kind of very loose label that we use for practical reasons. I'm not sure that it is possible to reason and not feel in the limit. I think feeling is required for reasoning is my current guess of things. Then it says babies feel but don't reason. And that also seems to me to be a misunderstanding of what emotions and reasoning is. Because the feeling thing, the inexplicit ideas, that's where it all kind of starts. And then what are we calling reason? Are we calling it being able to verbally explain your thought process or...

[02:33:55]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, that's fair point.

[02:33:57]  Ray: It's asking too much.

[02:33:59]  Bruce: In context, he does sort of use the word reason to really mean the conscious reasoning with words. So yeah, I agree that the wording here is pretty vague and you could probably take it different ways.

[02:34:11]  Vaden: It's a big comment there. So I totally have observed with Georgia that her... Forgive me for saying the words EQ and IQ, but just bear with me for a second. Like her EQ was developed at like so fast in the sense that if I came home and had a bad day and just didn't have the same... It's just the vibe, man, you know, when someone just has like a prickly feel. Like the kids can pick up on that so quickly. And it was like eerie to see how she got that at like age like three months or something. And it's much, much later that language developed. And I think all of the difficulties with reason, the definition of reason aside, I think it's not unreasonable to say that you need some sort of linguistic way to represent your thoughts, to be able to reason about stuff. And so if we can use language development as a rough proxy, oh Ray's shaking his head so I'd love to hear your...

[02:35:05]  Unidentified speaker: Sorry.

[02:35:08]  Vaden: So I was going to go and say if we can use language development as a rough proxy that before you can reason you have to have some sort of primitive language, then this totally strikes is true, but Ray, if you disagree, I'd love to know where I went wrong.

[02:35:22]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[02:35:23]  Ray: And I would reference this great book by Allison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib.

[02:35:32]  Unidentified speaker: It's a great...

[02:35:32]  Vaden: Is this where she did the shapes?

[02:35:33]  Unidentified speaker: She did the shapes thing?

[02:35:35]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[02:35:35]  Ray: Especially for people who are already on board with Popper.

[02:35:40]  Vaden: She worked closely with Paul Bloom, right? Was she with Paul Bloom as a developmental psychologist?

[02:35:46]  Ray: Yeah. I didn't know about the personal connection there.

[02:35:50]  Unidentified speaker: Sorry.

[02:35:51]  Unidentified speaker: Sorry.

[02:35:51]  Unidentified speaker: I cut you off here.

[02:35:52]  Unidentified speaker: Sorry.

[02:35:53]  Ray: Yeah.

[02:35:54]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[02:35:54]  Ray: So with, you know, Popper's approach is that organisms, not all...

[02:36:01]  Unidentified speaker: Never mind babies.

[02:36:04]  Ray: All organisms seem to enter life at birth with expectations, which are kind of rudimentary theories. And they then, those expectations are modified by experience through what you might call rudimentary refutations. I'm saying rudimentary because obviously there's a difference between what a baby's expectations and refutations of their expectations and a scientist's explicitly linguistically formulated theories and then explicitly arranged experimental setups and refutations. But there's a gradation, isn't there? And I think that this is the best approach to looking at what reason is.

[02:37:08]  Vaden: Yeah, well, so reason is deliberate in the sense that I know when I'm in a state where I'm reasoning about stuff and I know when I'm just in a dream-like state where I'm just not thinking about anything or I'm ideating or I'm just in flow state, for example. And so if we use reason to mean something like consciously trying to think about something to work through a problem, then I would want to sharply distinguish between all of the innate non-blank slate stuff that we have, such as our ability to distinguish between objects, such as our ability to hear, taste, touch, feel, smell, such as our ability to have expectations about what's going to happen. I know that I think it was Gopnik that shows intuitive physics, like if you move a ball behind a wall and stuff that it doesn't disappear. So all of that definitely disproves the blank slate hypothesis. But I think that's sharply different than reasoning about things. Because you know when you're reasoning about something and when you're not reasoning about something. There's a very different psychological state of mind just in yourself when you're in the process of reasoning about stuff.

[02:38:10]  Ray: However, I think Popper's Darwinian approach to psychological development is dead on.

[02:38:18]  Unidentified speaker: Because it's psychological development of our cognitive abilities to reason, to know things, to test.

[02:38:27]  Ray: It's an incremental process.

[02:38:29]  Bruce: Ray, are you saying that you feel that even even though you're not, I don't hear you necessarily disagreeing with Vaden here. But I, what I think I hear you saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that there's some sort of commonality between the two processes. And it is still...

[02:38:43]  Ray: No, because it's not commonality.

[02:38:45]  Bruce: They are, you're saying they are the same process.

[02:38:47]  Ray: Remember, Darwin's point was there is no cut, there is no essence, there's no commonality.

[02:38:55]  Unidentified speaker: This is where we get misled by looking at, we tend to, and it's a natural thing that's actually evolved through a Darwinian process.

[02:39:03]  Ray: This is the irony of it. Our inclination to think about problems in terms of what is the essence of this?

[02:39:12]  Unidentified speaker: What is the essence behind this or this object or this type of object? Or what is the essence of this meaning to this word?

[02:39:20]  Ray: This comes naturally to us.

[02:39:21]  Unidentified speaker: It has, that's evolved.

[02:39:24]  Ray: But we now know that that's the wrong way of approaching these problems.

[02:39:32]  Unidentified speaker: I think that Darwin showed us that if we can apply that approach to human reasoning, we can think of it, think that there are rudimentary levels of reasoning developing to more self-conscious linguistic involving language and so on.

[02:39:57]  Vaden: In his book All of Life is Problem Solving, he fleshes out a lot about what he means when he talks about evolutionary epistemology and the through line between amoeba and Einstein, I think is his...

[02:40:08]  Ray: Exactly, that's what I'm saying.

[02:40:10]  Vaden: But he says that amoebas solve problems and they have expectations and disappointed expectations. But nowhere does he think that amoebas reason though. He thinks that Einstein reasons but amoebas don't. And so there's a difference between problem-solving and having expectations and inbuilt stuff. But he's never claimed that amoebas...

[02:40:32]  Unidentified speaker: You can monopolize that.

[02:40:33]  Ray: You can take that word, reason, take that. I'll use thinking instead. The word thinking. The problem is, it's not solving any problem, you're just making an arbitrary distinction, which is fine. But what problem are you actually solving with that?

[02:40:51]  Vaden: But he would claim that a plant solves problems when it has to figure out where to put its roots. But he wouldn't claim that a plant thinks.

[02:40:58]  Unidentified speaker: So that's the main thing I'm trying to emphasize.

[02:41:02]  Peter: Well, here's what Jonathan Haidt says about reason. Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. A little bit later, skilled arguers are not after the truth, but after arguments supporting their views. This explains why the confirmation bias is so powerful and so ineradicable. How hard could it be to teach students to look on the other side to look for evidence against their favorite view? In fact, it's very hard and no one has found a way to do it. It's hard because the confirmation bias is a built-in feature. Of an argumentative mind, not a bug that can be removed from a platonic mind. But I think I disagree. I think Reason is Fun, like Lulie says.

[02:41:58]  Lulie: Well, I have a different definition of Reason.

[02:42:00]  Unidentified speaker: To, to your [unclear]...

[02:42:02]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, okay, okay.

[02:42:02]  Lulie: I was actually agreeing with what he was saying up until the last bit where it then kind of went off the. This does feel like it brings us back to the moralizing thing.

[02:42:18]  Lulie: So what was his criticism of Reasoning?

[02:42:22]  Peter: Well, I think he thinks that Reasoning about morality is kind of pointless. So all you can really do is lead your elephant to other elephants.

[02:42:32]  Lulie: Yeah, no, I think it has a bidirectional thing. Like I think you can't say, ah, yes, only the elephant is in charge, or, ah, yes, only the rider is in charge. Like they both affect each other.

[02:42:45]  Peter: I think he would agree with that.

[02:42:48]  Vaden: Yeah, if we place ourselves back 12 years to the audience that he's writing to, he's writing primarily about people who don't think that emotions have any role to play whatsoever. And it's all about just this cold, logical, just think, think, think, and you'll get there. And I think he's doing a valuable thing to say that it's not just about cold, hard reasoned man. Like, your emotions are going to pull you in different directions. And until you fully understand that, you're maybe not going to be reasoning as objectively as you think you are. So when he says that reasoning doesn't do all of it, I think he means it's not just the rider, the elephant is there too. But if, as Lulie has done successfully, if you broaden your conception about what reasoning means to include the emotional side, then I don't think it's in contradiction. I think it's about who he's writing to and what time he's writing.

[02:43:38]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[02:43:39]  Peter: fair point. Well, it's been three hours. So I think that it went by really quickly. And unless anyone else has any final thoughts, perhaps we could wrap it up.

[02:43:50]  Unidentified speaker: Lulie?

[02:43:52]  Lulie: I have a final thing to submit to you all. I've just dropped it in the chat. It's related to the moralizing topic. So this is an editorial cartoon with two ships at war. And it says, our blessed homelands, their barbarous wastes, our glorious leaders, their wicked despot, our great religion, their primitive superstition, our noble populace, their backwards savages, our heroic adventurers, their brutish invaders. And when I first saw this, I was kind of like almost like feeling a bit nationalistic, like, yeah, our glorious leader. And then I thought, wait, hold on. And my view of this now is that basically this attitude is something that prevents us from actually hearing the other side and listening. And this even applies to the most horrific cases you can think of. Like, you know, Vaden was talking about people who produce child pornography, or you could think of terrorists or, you know, your favorite out group. And there is such an impulse to think of it in this way. And I just think that is a, there is something, like there's something kind of fun and nice about it, but there is also something mistaken about it, because it's sort of, it's blocking from really understanding in a kind of, in a deep way.

[02:45:27]  Vaden: Yeah, we're doing Concluding Thoughts?

[02:45:29]  Unidentified speaker: Is that right?

[02:45:29]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, please.

[02:45:30]  Vaden: Yeah, yeah, this is just maybe a nice opportunity to plug the work of Hugo Mercier, which is a name that doesn't get as much recognition as it should. But when Haidt was saying that no one's figured out how to do this yet, with regards to overcoming confirmation bias and what he calls my side bias, which I think is a slightly better way to think about it. He was writing before Mercier came out with his book, The Enigma of Reason, but I just want to absolutely plug that because, or if you don't want to read it, you can listen to our podcast where we go through it. But Mercier talks a lot about how we are absolutely terrible at evaluating arguments that come from our own side. That's where all of the cognitive biases stuff kicks in. We're not nearly as self-critical as we should be, but we're very, very, very good at evaluating the reasons coming from the other side. And in that way, we can start to overcome the problem that Haidt said was not possible to be overcome, in the sense that, let's just make that in. Okay, we're not going to evaluate our own arguments very well, but we're going to evaluate the other side's arguments pretty damn well. And so, talk to people who are different from you, and let them spot holes in your reasoning, and you do it to them. And in that way, we can actually overcome the problem that Haidt said is remarkable. So, just a plug for another name.

[02:46:49]  Peter: Seems very compatible with Karl Popper.

[02:46:51]  Unidentified speaker: It is.

[02:46:52]  Vaden: Yeah, what's just a side thing. What's cool is that I looked through all his citations. I don't think he is aware of Popper's work, but I think he's rediscovered a lot of the same ideas in a new way. And so, it's beautifully compatible with Popper's stuff. And it's nice that he, unlike myself, isn't so biased in quoting Popper every third sentence. And so, you get like a fresh insight, and so, a huge plug for Hugo Mercier, a brilliant, brilliant scholar.

[02:47:18]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[02:47:19]  Peter: Well, I really, really appreciate everyone showing up and answering all my weird, crazy, random questions about this. And I really appreciate that. And it's really been nice to connect with you all. And I hope we can do it again.

[02:47:38]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you. Thank you so much, Peter.

[02:47:42]  Ray: Thanks so much for creating this beautiful context for our discussion.

[02:47:48]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[02:47:49]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you, Ray.

[02:47:50]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you, thanks.

[02:47:51]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, thank you [unclear].

[02:47:52]  Unidentified speaker: Great to be here.

[02:47:54]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[02:47:55]  Unidentified speaker: Bye-bye, guys.

[02:47:56]  Unidentified speaker: Take care.

[02:47:56]  Unidentified speaker: Bye-bye.

[02:48:05]  Peter: Hello again. If you've made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use, or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper-Deutsch Theory of Knowledge. We believe David Deutsch's four strands tie everything together. So we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at BNielsen01 [handle spelling uncertain]. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[02:48:49]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.