507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim

Speaker 1 So, the podcast today took a turn back to the psychological, which is an improvement over the political, as far as I'm concerned, generally speaking.

Speaker 1 Likely because the topic of concentration has more long-lasting significance, all things considered.

Speaker 1 So in any case, I spoke today with Lee Jussum, and Lee is the distinguished, a distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers, and he's been the chair there of the Department of Psychology and separately of anthropology, which is a peculiar happenstance that we discuss in the podcast.

Speaker 1 I was interested in Lee's work because there's a lot of trouble in the field of social psychology.

Speaker 1 A lot of the claims of the field are not true. Now, you got to expect that in scientific inquiry because

Speaker 1 a lot of the things we believe are false, and the whole reason that we practice as scientists is to correct those falsehoods. And it's also the case that

Speaker 1 much of what's published is not going to be true because the alternative would be that everything that was published was a discovery that was true. And we'd be overwhelmed by novelty so fast

Speaker 1 that it would be untenable if that ever happened. Lee is one of the rarer social psychologists who's actually a scientist.
And

Speaker 1 he's done a lot of interesting and also controversial work. That's partly how you can tell it's interesting and valid because it also is controversial.

Speaker 1 One of the things he's established, which is of cardinal importance, is that our perceptions of other people are not mostly biased. Right.
This is

Speaker 1 the contrary claim is rather preposterous, which is that all of the categories that we use to structure our interactions with other people are based on the power distortion of our perceptions, let's say, which is essentially a Marxist and postmodern claim.

Speaker 1 And Lee became infamous, at least in part, because he showed that our perceptions, our stereotypes, if you will, are mostly accurate.

Speaker 1 There are sources of bias and they do enter into the process, and they're relevant, but that's a very different claim than that the foundations of our perceptions themselves are indistinguishable from the biases we hold as motivated agents.

Speaker 1 And so his work is extremely important. It's core to the culture war that is tearing us apart.
So

Speaker 1 if you're interested in the

Speaker 1 definition of perception,

Speaker 1 the relationship between perception and and reality, and the analysis of bias in a manner that's credible, then pay attention to this podcast and get things cleared up.

Speaker 1 So, I guess we might as well get right to the point.

Speaker 1 And the first thing I'm curious about is, and this is something I think that can be like fairly definitively laid at the feet of social psychologists, was that there was an absolute denial that anything like left-wing authoritarianism existed, even conceptually, literally until 2016.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's right. It was like

Speaker 1 I came across that and I thought, well, what do you mean there's no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism? We know there's like, that's

Speaker 1 insane. It's insane.
Absolutely. It's insane.
It's insane. It's insane.

Speaker 1 And then there were a couple of papers published in 2016 on left-wing authoritarianism in the Soviet Union. That was the first

Speaker 1 breaking of that dam. I did a master's.
I supervised a master's thesis at that time. It's a very good thesis on left-wing authoritarianism.

Speaker 1 And because we showed that there were statistical clumps of reliably

Speaker 1 characterizable left-wing authoritarian beliefs that did, in fact, associate statistically and that identifiable groups of people with identifiable temperamental proclivities did hold.

Speaker 1 I really wanted to follow up on that because it was very rich. potential source of new information, but my academic career exploded at that point.
It became impossible. So people have

Speaker 1 taken that ball and run with it. Yeah, yeah.
So, well,

Speaker 1 tell us about it. What have you found? Well, okay, how do you let's let's start with some definitions, like what constitutes left-wing as opposed to right-wing authoritarianism, let's say.
Right. So

Speaker 1 there are measurement issues across the board, but they...

Speaker 1 That is with respect to both left and right-wing authoritarianism.

Speaker 1 There are questionnaires,

Speaker 1 commonly used questionnaires to assess right assess right-wing authoritarianism and to assess left-wing authoritarianism they're different

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 reason

Speaker 1 let me give a little context

Speaker 1 for a long time people tried to develop a political

Speaker 1 a party non-partisan

Speaker 1 authoritarianism scale as if authoritarianism was a psychological construct rather than a political one right and then it couldn't really do it right because one of the core toxic elements of authoritarianism is a motivation to crush deprive of humanity and human rights one's political opponents so you need to assess either right or left-wing authoritarianism vis-a-vis the attitudes towards one's opponents in order to measure the construct okay so that's the okay that's a very interesting that's that's a very interesting definition, though, because you're pointing to the fact that

Speaker 1 arguably, and tell me if you think this is right, the core of authoritarianism, which, as you said, can't be measured outside the political, isn't precisely political.

Speaker 1 It's your attitude towards those who don't agree with you. Yes, it is.
But you have to have some beliefs.

Speaker 1 I didn't say can't. I say they have not succeeded.
Actually, one of my current graduate students is, for her master's thesis, in the process of trying to develop a non-partisan authoritarianism.

Speaker 1 Based on that idea. Yes, based on that idea.
I don't actually

Speaker 1 think about that clinically. It's like,

Speaker 1 well, that's where you'd start to look at overlap between cluster B personality psychopathology, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, histrionic, because those are the people who are very likely to elevate their own status at the cost of other people, including their children and those they purport to love.

Speaker 1 So the first step to do that is to develop scales that adequately survey questions that adequately get at left or right-wing authoritarianism and then correlate them with things measuring narcissism or sadism or whatever.

Speaker 1 People have done that on the left, and it does correlate with left-wing authoritarianism.

Speaker 1 I don't know, you know, you never know for sure the limits of your own knowledge.

Speaker 1 So I don't know if anyone has even tried to do this on the right, or maybe they have, and it doesn't actually correspond with narcissism on the right.

Speaker 1 It corresponds with other things on the right, but it's not so much with no, well,

Speaker 1 if there's evidence on narcissism correlating with right-wing authoritarianism, I don't know it.

Speaker 1 Nothing at the moment comes to mind.

Speaker 1 I have a memory of a memory of something associated with that because I've tried to follow the literature, but I've definitely seen it emerge on

Speaker 1 the left. Yeah.
Correlations on the right. Well, from what I remember,

Speaker 1 and I'm vague about this because I can't give you sources, is that dark tetrad traits stand out quite markedly as associated with authoritarianism.

Speaker 1 And I thought that was somewhat independent of whether it was left or right. But I can't provide the sources out there.

Speaker 1 I review them in this new book I wrote on We Who Wrestle with God.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of reference to the dark tetrad personality constellations and its and the political manifestations but okay but you've been studying it okay so when we looked at the way we developed our measure because i'd like to know how you developed yours is we took we took a very large sample of political opinions and then factor analyzed them to find out if we could identify first clumps of left-wing and clumps of right-wing belief which you can clearly identify and then to look within the left-wing constellation to see if there is a reliable subcategory of clearly authoritarian proclivities.

Speaker 1 And we found, you know, we found the biggest predictor of left-wing authoritarianism was low verbal IQ. It was a walloping predictor, negative 0.40.

Speaker 1 Immense predictor.

Speaker 1 So that's something to continue. Because one of the things we talked about at the beginning of the podcast was that some of these ideas sound good in the absence of further critical evaluation.

Speaker 1 So then you might say, well, if you lack the capacity for deep verbal critical evaluation, what apparently moral ideas would appeal to you?

Speaker 1 And, well, you can imagine that there might be a set of them, and one of them would be, well, don't be mean to people who aren't like you, you know, which is a perfectly good rule of thumb.

Speaker 1 Yes, but that doesn't mean it's the, it doesn't mean that everyone who says that's what they're for are in fact agitating on behalf of the political.

Speaker 1 Okay, so back to your research. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay. So first of all, let me be clear.
We're

Speaker 1 other than my student Sonia, who is trying to develop a non-partisan authoritarianism scale, the work that we have done using either left-wing or right-wing authoritarianism scales are scales developed by other people.

Speaker 1 We haven't developed the scales. So for left-wing...
And do you think there are good scales now for left- and right-wing authoritarianism?

Speaker 1 Adequate scales?

Speaker 1 Adequate for right,

Speaker 1 yes. And pretty good for left.
Even though the research on left is much more recent, you might think it would be therefore less well established.

Speaker 1 There's two teams, one led by Luke Conway and a different one led by Tom Costello,

Speaker 1 have done a lot of very good both psychometric, sort of statistical assessment of how things hang together, and also validity assessment of their two slightly different, somewhat different scales.

Speaker 1 You can tell if someone's belief is part of a set of identifiable beliefs. If they hold that belief, the fact they hold that belief predicts reliably that they hold another belief, right?

Speaker 1 And then you want to see a pattern like that emerge across a lot of people. Then you see that there are associations of ideas, right? Those would be something like

Speaker 1 the manifestation of an ideology. You want to see if that's identifiable, what its boundaries are, that it can be distinguished from other clumps of ideas.
So left could be distinguished from right.

Speaker 1 This can all be done statistically and very reliably.

Speaker 1 Now, it wasn't done by social psychologists from the end of World War II till 2016.

Speaker 1 Shameful lacuna in the history of political analysis within the psychological community.

Speaker 1 It shocked me when I first discovered it. Me too.
Me too. It was shocking.

Speaker 1 Really? They're talking about blind spots. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, do you guys miss Mao and Stalin? Yeah, I know, right? How many of you have

Speaker 1 missed that? It's fairly obvious. And then they're denied it.

Speaker 1 Social psychologists, the biggest social movements of the 20th century, the biggest pathological social movements of the 20th century had their existence denied for 70 years. Yes, right.

Speaker 1 Mind-boggling. It's mind-boggling.
It's mine.

Speaker 1 I've never recovered from discovery. Yes.
It took me like a year to even believe it was true. Okay, so you're using other people's questions.
Yes. So what's your approach? What are you, how are you?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 it does depend on the study. So, so

Speaker 1 this is one good one that I think I can describe shortly, quickly. the the um uh we administered

Speaker 1 cartoons like political cartoons

Speaker 1 as if they were memes like social media memes to an online sample about a thousand people um and

Speaker 1 asked them how much they liked the cartoons and memes and which and we we told them uh

Speaker 1 to vote for the one for one, their favorite, because the one that received the most votes, we would actually post on social media. Now, that was a lie.

Speaker 1 It was deception, and we explained that at the end.

Speaker 1 But we wanted them to believe that when they were selecting something, that this was as close as we could get to a behavior. It was close to them posting it.

Speaker 1 They believed their vote could influence what we were posting. So it was

Speaker 1 a real world quasi-behavior

Speaker 1 rather than just like liking or disliking

Speaker 1 or self-report that they believe something. That's right.
So two of the, I'm going to describe two of the cartoons, which were quite a contrast to each other.

Speaker 1 We actually had a set kind of like the first and a set like the second.

Speaker 1 But I can describe the two quickly enough.

Speaker 1 The first was actually

Speaker 1 a political propaganda cartoon from the Soviet Union. We didn't tell them that from the 1930s, 1940s, anti-American propaganda.
But we didn't tell them that.

Speaker 1 We just presented the cartoon, which showed a long-distance shot of this. In the top panel was a long-distance shot of the Statue of Liberty.

Speaker 1 The bottom panel was a close-up of her head and her crown. And the spires of the crown were KKK members.

Speaker 1 People dressed in KKK, whatever.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right.

Speaker 1 So the true nature of American liberty.

Speaker 1 American liberty.

Speaker 1 It's It's a typical Marxist troll. Yeah, yes, right.
Okay. That was one.

Speaker 1 And then the second

Speaker 1 was

Speaker 1 an image

Speaker 1 of

Speaker 1 a diverse group of people,

Speaker 1 people,

Speaker 1 different racial and ethnic groups wearing clothes for different professions. So it might be a bus driver or a businessman or a secretary or a teacher or whatever.

Speaker 1 There were a whole bunch of different kinds of people in obviously different roles

Speaker 1 kind of in a crowd with their arms around each other under an american flag sort of pluralistic diversity that's kind of our humanistic form of diversity and then we simply ask people you know we ask them which ones you like the most which ones do you want to share on social media

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 so and so is that a benevolent left view yeah sort of a benevolent left view yes exactly right right that's right it's right demon is demonizing america versus you know we did find in our analysis that there were there's a liberal left left that's that's clear and there's a authoritarian left and

Speaker 1 the liberal left this is part of our investigation the liberal left isn't now did we figure that out

Speaker 1 the liberal left doesn't partake of the attitudes of the radical authoritarian leftists but they're the ones that i also think that the sort of oblivion denies yeah they're oblivious yes i think that's true

Speaker 1 and that is what we found here's what we found in the study i got a research idea yes that yes that's relevant to this well with regards to these questionnaires, it's something that I wanted to do.

Speaker 1 You know, the large language models track statistical probability. So you can take those left-wing questionnaire sets and you can ask ChatGPT, here's an item, or here's three items, generate 30 more.

Speaker 1 And it does it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right. So if you wanted to improve the statistical reliability of the measures, so you can imagine take the measures that already exist,

Speaker 1 put them in clumps of three in ChatGPT, have it expanded out to like 300 items, administer it to 1,000 people and distill it. Because the thing,

Speaker 1 this will speed things up radically, because the thing about the large language models is they already have the statistical correlations built in.

Speaker 1 When you ask ChatGP to generate 40 items that are conceptually like these four, that's what it does. It's not an opinion.

Speaker 1 So you can use ChatGP to purify the questionnaires, and you can do that on the left and on the right. And it takes like 10 minutes instead of two years I'm gonna bring this back to Sonia

Speaker 1 Sonia's a fan of your podcast she's I'm sure she's gonna see this okay I'll probably talk to her before but hi Sonia

Speaker 1 like it's the same with narcissism if you put see the other thing you could do with chat GPT is you could say here's 20 items significant of narcissism okay

Speaker 1 Which is the central item? And can you generate 20 items that are better markers of that central tendency? And the the thing is, it can do it because it's mapped the linguistic representations.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. So all the factor structures already built into the chat GPT systems.
Like that's great.

Speaker 1 That's great. Yeah.
So, okay, so let I, this is one of the things I would pursue if I still had a research lab, right? These things are hard to pursue without having that structure in place.

Speaker 1 But I think this would radically

Speaker 1 radically speed up the process of

Speaker 1 and also make it much more reliable and valid. Yeah.
Right. So I think that's right.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Well, we'll have to try it.
We'll have to try it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Try it out.

Speaker 1 Okay. Absolutely.
All right. So back to.
Yeah. Yeah.
All right. So now you've got people voting for one

Speaker 1 comic or the other. And it was exactly as you described before we went down the large language model path that liberals who are not, so we use statistical regression.
We can separate out.

Speaker 1 being liberal but not authoritarian from being a left-wing authoritarian but not liberal. Liberalism predicted endorsement of the sort of humanistic diversity image.

Speaker 1 The people together are under an American flag.

Speaker 1 We're all different, but we're all in it together. We love America, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 It was left-wing authoritarianism powerfully predicted endorsement of the Soviet propaganda.

Speaker 1 The Statue of Liberty is KKK. And so the questionnaires predicted that.
Yes, yes. Oh, that's good.
That's good. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a great study.

Speaker 1 Another thing you might want to do is take that questionnaire, do an item analysis with regards to preference and rank order the items in terms of their predictive validity in relationship to the cartoon because you might be able to see which of the items are central.

Speaker 1 Yeah, especially if you saw that pattern across multiple cartoons. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Okay. Okay.
Yeah. So that's one.
That's, yeah. Yeah.
We did this kind of thing.

Speaker 1 Well, how many studies have you done now on left-wing authoritarianism? Well, it's a lot. I mean, it's a lot.
And we include it in almost everything.

Speaker 1 And we include measures of left and right-wing authoritarianism in most of the studies we've been conducting. Right, right, right.
So

Speaker 1 tell me, let's go more. Okay, well, so

Speaker 1 the most recent splash, and I think that's what got your staff member interested in having me on here, were three

Speaker 1 experimental studies assessing the psychological impacts of common DEI rhetoric and headaches. Right, right.

Speaker 1 And we did it with three types of three different kinds of DEI programs. Yeah, those are probably studies that I'd run across of years.
I remember that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's one of the fairly recent and they've made

Speaker 1 more of a splash than I would have expected. Well, it's one thing to say that DEI programs work.
It's another thing to say they don't work.

Speaker 1 And it's a completely different thing to say they do the opposite of what

Speaker 1 that's not good. And it seems to me highly probable.
So

Speaker 1 suicide prevention programs, the kind the government's always running, they make suicide rates go up. Well, because why?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 you're advertising and normalizing suicide.

Speaker 1 Right. And you think, well, we're going to put up a prevention program.
It's like, first,

Speaker 1 are you clinically trained? Second, did you do the research? Third, did you ever stop to consider that your conceptualization of the problem might be inadequate in relationship to its solution?

Speaker 1 There's so many things like this that happen.

Speaker 1 Clinicians have become, the research-oriented clinicians have become very, very sensitive to such things because it's frequently the case that a well-meaning intervention will make things worse.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 And then you might ask why. It's like, well, there's 50,000 ways something could be worse and like one way it could be better.

Speaker 1 And so just, it's an overwhelmingly high probability that whatever you do to change something that works makes it worse. Yeah.
Right. Okay.

Speaker 1 So now, so do you, what was your evidence that the DEI interventions made, what was made worse, what interventions, and what was your evidence linking them? Yes, okay. So

Speaker 1 let me walk through.

Speaker 1 Let me qualify this a little bit.

Speaker 1 We examined the rhetoric that is common to many DEI interventions. Chat GPT could do a very good job of that, by the way.
Kind of.

Speaker 1 The problem is a lot of the materials used in DEI trainings aren't publicly available. So it's actually hard.

Speaker 1 I mean, we can say they're common to things we had access to, but we don't, a lot is not publicly available. So that's an important limitation.
Well, hold on.

Speaker 1 That's an important limitation that your listeners and viewers should understand.

Speaker 1 It's not like we evaluated the effectiveness of the DEI training program instituted by the HR department of the city of Milwaukee. We didn't do that.

Speaker 1 We took the intellectual ideas from three different kinds of sources, anti-racism rhetoric, anti-Islamophobia rhetoric, and anti-caste, the Hindu caste system, anti-caste oppression rhetoric.

Speaker 1 And there are,

Speaker 1 for race,

Speaker 1 we used

Speaker 1 passages from Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist and from D'Angelo's White Fragility. These books were widely required throughout colleges.

Speaker 1 You know, there's sometimes she is paid $40,000

Speaker 1 a session to come in and give her training. So

Speaker 1 we also actually used

Speaker 1 this sort of large language model, sort of language network analysis to examine the extent to which this type of rhetoric was common throughout the training materials we had access to.

Speaker 1 And it was very common. Yeah, okay, okay, fine.
Fine. So you use that as a validation.
You know what I have on my, so just so i i have this here so let me give an example

Speaker 1 from from the race um

Speaker 1 and and this is just a short excerpt so people would read so they would read say an anti-racist passage or a control passage the control passage in these studies and two out of the three was about how to grow corn on the farm it was completely separate

Speaker 1 and this is only a short excerpt of a longer passage yeah okay white people this is the the anti-racism White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview.

Speaker 1 Racism is the norm. It is not unusual.

Speaker 1 This went on for a full paragraph. And it was quotes smoothed together with a little writing by us of Kendi and D'Angelo.

Speaker 1 All right. So

Speaker 1 they then

Speaker 1 were presented with a very brief scenario in which

Speaker 1 a college admissions officer interviews an applicant,

Speaker 1 and ultimately the applicant is rejected from admission.

Speaker 1 That's the whole scenario. I mean, the words are slightly different because I'm doing that piece from memory, but that's basically the whole scenario.

Speaker 1 They were then asked a series of questions assessing how much perceived racism and bias was. It was the causal factor.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 On the part of the admissions officer.

Speaker 1 Okay. And

Speaker 1 what we found is when they got the Kendi D'Angelo essay, they claimed to have seen or observed the admissions officer committing more microaggressions,

Speaker 1 treating

Speaker 1 the applicant more unfairly, and that the admissions officer was more biased.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I'm going to put on my devil's advocate hat. Yes.
And I'm going to play Robin d'Angelo

Speaker 1 um despite wearing this trump badge and um i'm going to say well

Speaker 1 the effects of institutional racism are so pervasive that they even invaded your experimental material and the consequence of being exposed to the contents of my writing speaking as robin d'Angelo was that the scales fell from the eyes of your experimental subjects and they were able to perceive the racism that we claimed was there in a manner they couldn't before.

Speaker 1 Yes, that is probably what D'Angelo would say.

Speaker 1 Actually, I can tell you a little bit what Kendi did say because he was asked about it. He did not say that.

Speaker 1 If someone said that, I would say, well, in our scenario, none of that was evident. You had to read that into the scenario.
And that is the point.

Speaker 1 How do you know that your own implicit bias didn't stop you from seeing the bias that was there?

Speaker 1 Because anyone can look at the scenario. People didn't even have racial information about the admissions officer and the applicant.
So you know. Okay, so you regarded as highly improbable that

Speaker 1 what they were reading into the situation, that what they were, you regarded as highly probable that they were reading into the situation. Okay, let me ask you a couple more technical questions.

Speaker 1 How much of this material were they exposed to before they did the evaluation? About a paragraph.

Speaker 1 Just a paragraph.

Speaker 1 How soon before the evaluation? Pretty soon. Okay.
Do you have any any idea what the lag time, like if you did a dose response study, so to speak? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Is there a decay? Like, how permanent are the effects? I know I couldn't expect you to do all that in one study, but it's germane, right?

Speaker 1 Well, it is

Speaker 1 kind of.

Speaker 1 So on the narrow issue of how long do the effects we observed in the study last, we didn't study that. So there's no answer to that.
Yeah, of course. Okay.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 given that we observed the effects that we did, the sort of people concocting racism where there was no evidence of it, on the basis of a very minor intervention, this like reading a single paragraph.

Speaker 1 It at least raises the possibility that when people are in a culture or organizational context in which this type of rhetoric is pervasive, that they are constantly being exposed

Speaker 1 or

Speaker 1 primed to think about race in these terms. And because of the steady diet of this kind of rhetoric,

Speaker 1 the effects are likely to be

Speaker 1 more enduring than anything we could possibly expect. Right, fair enough.

Speaker 1 Well, I would also say probably you evaluated some of the weaker systemic effects of that kind of rhetoric, because it isn't merely exposure to the the rhetoric, it's the fact that post hoc detection of such things as microaggressions, let's say, are radically rewarded by the participants in those ideological systems.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. And that'd be an even more, yes, that's a more powerful effect.
So you got it with weak exposure fundamentally. Okay, so we're going to be able to do that.
Right, and no rewards, right?

Speaker 1 And you're rewarding.

Speaker 1 That's social rewards. Exactly.
Yeah, yes, yes. Yes.
So I would say, and that's a

Speaker 1 the weakness of your intervention demonstrated the power of the, of the rhetoric. Okay, what did Kendi have to say about this? Uh, he described us as racist pseudoscientists.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Well, that, that pretty much covers the territory. Did he say why?

Speaker 1 Or was that a necessity?

Speaker 1 You know, it, the, that question. How are you at wasting money? My sense is that he was particularly good at that.
So, yeah, university money counterproductively. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, I think most of his was from actually, what's his name? Jack,

Speaker 1 Jack Dorsey from Twitter.

Speaker 1 i think gave him ten million dollars so at least it wasn't state money right yeah right right right okay well then we can just let it go so

Speaker 1 okay okay

Speaker 1 okay you said that produced quite a splash yes um including enhanced probability of being on this podcast for example yes so i'd followed your work for a long time before coming across that so um

Speaker 1 What effect has it had? When was the study published, first of all? Well, so. And is it a sequence? Is it a single study? No, it's three studies.

Speaker 1 So it's essentially the same structure for an anti-Islamophobia intervention

Speaker 1 and an anti-caste oppression. And it's essentially the same results.
There's little minor differences, but it's essentially the same pattern of results. They're not published.

Speaker 1 So these studies I conducted in collaboration with the NCRI. NCRI is the Network Contagion Research Institute.
They are a freestanding research institute that

Speaker 1 started out mostly doing research along the lines of this sort of large language model stuff that you were talking about earlier, analysis of social media and analysis of

Speaker 1 radicalism, conspiracy theories, hate

Speaker 1 sort of groups and individuals mobilizing online. And they've done it with all sorts of stuff.
They've done it with COVID conspiracies. They've done it with QAnon.
They've done it with Islamophobia.

Speaker 1 They've done it with anti-Hindu hate, they've done it with anti-Semitism.

Speaker 1 They were the first

Speaker 1 group of any kind, as far as I know,

Speaker 1 in the summer of 2020, the height of the George Floyd social justice protests, which, as you remember, the rhetoric on the left, this is consistent with what you were talking about earlier, about how the left is in the reasonable left is in complete denial of the far left.

Speaker 1 It is literally true that most of the protests were peaceful.

Speaker 1 Whenever someone would present evidence of some protests not being peaceful at all, like firebombing a police station or

Speaker 1 capturing downtown Seattle or all sorts of, you know, setting by

Speaker 1 creating sort of setting the stage for lawlessness, you would have looting and robberies that weren't really part of the protests, but people were taking advantage of the sort of police-free zones and stuff.

Speaker 1 When you would talk about that, the response was, this is all just right-wing space. Of course.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 I talked to moderate Democrats who told me that Antifa was a figment of the right-wing imagination. Yes, right.

Speaker 1 I thought, but you know, there's something weird about that that's very much worth pointing out, I believe, is that

Speaker 1 we radically underestimate the effect a very small minority of people who are organized can have in destabilizing a society.

Speaker 1 So, for example, in the flux of the aftermath of World War I, Russia was chaotic enough so that a very small minority of people, that would be the Bolsheviks, destabilized and captured the entire country.

Speaker 1 So, even if

Speaker 1 the true radicals on the left are 3%,

Speaker 1 say, well, 97% of them are peaceful, it's like, Fair enough, but

Speaker 1 you're suffering from the delusion that a demented minority is harmless and that's yes that's seriously right

Speaker 1 so this enter the ncri

Speaker 1 so in summer of 20 uh 2020 when this was all the record most of the protests that case will

Speaker 1 complete denial mainstream media that there was violence and and and and and and bombings and all sorts of other stuff

Speaker 1 the ncri

Speaker 1 This is the first project I did with them,

Speaker 1 produces

Speaker 1 an analysis

Speaker 1 finding that the far left groups,

Speaker 1 not conventional liberals or Democrats, but these far left radical groups

Speaker 1 were exploiting

Speaker 1 the earnest commitment to anti-racism or the social justice on the part of people

Speaker 1 justifiably upset about George Floyd's murder and the implications about that for racism beyond that.

Speaker 1 But these far-left groups were exploiting that to both gin up supporters and to mobilize online.

Speaker 1 This is all occurring on social media to capture protests to ratchet up and inspire more aggressive violence at the protests. So this is

Speaker 1 exactly what you'd expect.

Speaker 1 Of course that's going to happen. Yeah, I'm not right.
Clearly. Yes.
If you believe in criminals. You're right.
Right. Okay.

Speaker 1 So, and then, so, and NCR would, in this report, would then link the increased online activity.

Speaker 1 You know, there would be memes like ACAB, all cops are bastards, you know, so there'd be things like that.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 and some of the groups were actually using social media to coordinate their,

Speaker 1 you know, the sort of violent protest activities. So,

Speaker 1 live,

Speaker 1 I'm making this up, but it was this kind of thing.

Speaker 1 People would be, you know, at these protests on their phones.

Speaker 1 They would get instructions from

Speaker 1 some sort of central place that the cops were over here. So everybody needs to go over there.
And that's how they would avoid it. So they were getting tactical instructions live.

Speaker 1 via social media in addition to sort of ginning up the rhetoric to garner support and and and adherence okay

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 before they brought me on, maybe two or three months before, the NCRI had posted a report on how far-right groups do essentially the same thing, you know, sort of mobilize online using memes and catchphrases and, you know, garner adherence,

Speaker 1 you know, gain adherence and stuff. So

Speaker 1 they bring me on, we do this thing, and

Speaker 1 this paper on the far left, which really looks to me, it looked to me like the far left groups were seeking to ignite an actual revolution. Well, that is what they do.
I know, right?

Speaker 1 Yes, this doesn't seem far-fetched, right? They can dance in the ashes that way. Right, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 The real criminal psychopaths, the short-term guys, the narcissists, they thrive in chaos

Speaker 1 because their

Speaker 1 niche is chaos. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 So I was kind of new to that at the time, but in hindsight, yes, absolutely yeah well it's a shocking thing to know the ncri this to no credit to me i'm an academic i'm a professor i don't do this kind of thing had access to journalists that i at the new york times and washington post who ran stories on this report

Speaker 1 And it was the first time there was any acknowledgement in the mainstream media that

Speaker 1 there was any level of violence and danger in the protests. I felt really good about this.
This was like September 2020. We did the work over the summer.

Speaker 1 The thing came, but what, but that report is not published in a peer-reviewed journal. NCRI has its own website, and they publish these reports kind of like older.
That's where your studies were

Speaker 1 what? Yes, and no. So, as of right now, that's where they are.
They're available on the NCRI website. Okay, and who did that? Was it postdoc, a doctoral student? It was a bunch of, well, it was

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 it was me two two of my grad students although one of my both of my grad students also work closely with the ncri yeah and then there were a series of analysts at the ncri including their head researcher okay so a bunch of us are co-authors on this we have this

Speaker 1 so i've now been working with them for several years and it took a while for us to get used to each other you know their strength is this online social media, large language model, topic network stuff,

Speaker 1 you know, with an eye towards threats and conspiracy theories and hate. And my strength is conventional social science.
That's a nice overlap. It is.
Yeah, it's a nice story. It is.

Speaker 1 We needed to figure out the best synergies. No doubt.
It took a while, but we have this rhythm.

Speaker 1 Why that approach with regards to the dissemination of this information, this particular experiment of information, rather than the more standard journal approach? Yeah, so

Speaker 1 one of the things First, let me give context. Yeah.
A little more context. So our rhythm is first we post stuff as a, essentially as a white paper, as a report on the NCRI site.

Speaker 1 It gets some attention, some public vetting. We get some feedback on it.
And then we scale it up for peer review. Well, that's not unlike doing a pre-printing.
It's like doing a convention. Yes, okay.

Speaker 1 Now, it's a little different.

Speaker 1 It's different. It is like a, it's, I have taken to calling it a homespun preprint.
And here is why I call it a homespun preprint.

Speaker 1 It's like a preprint in that it's a report of empirical studies that is posted online that haven't been peer-reviewed.

Speaker 1 It is unlike a conventional preprint in that it is perpet, and this is the answer to your question, why did we do it this way rather than wait for it? This is part of the answer.

Speaker 1 It is, even though some of it is highly technical,

Speaker 1 a lot of the worst of the technical stuff is stripped down so that it is comprehensible to the lay intelligent audience.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that has a value in and of its own right, because the problem with peer review is that it could easily, well, there are many problems with peer review, especially now.

Speaker 1 You write this many, yeah, right? Okay. But one of them is that it could take a year.
Length of the year. Oh, no, length publication.

Speaker 1 It's horrible.

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 1 unforgivable. Yeah.
It's unforgivable. That's right.
It needs to be.

Speaker 1 That whole system I've been thinking needs to be undead. Completely.
It's like in this day and age, a two-year-length publication. Right.
It's crazy. It's completely insane.
It's crazy. That's right.

Speaker 1 You spend 30% of your time writing grand applications that go nowhere and two years to lag to publication that almost no one is likely to. That's right.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 How the hell have you not been canceled?

Speaker 1 Why is that? Because it's weird. There have been repeat attempts to cancel me that have failed.
Okay. Well, so why don't you tell me and everybody else, first of all, why you're,

Speaker 1 what would you say, why you so richly deserve canceling.

Speaker 1 That's the first issue. And then the next issue, which is of equal importance, is how you've managed to not have that happen, because that's actually really hard.

Speaker 1 So, because if people try to cancel you, especially given the things that you've researched and have insisted upon and said,

Speaker 1 if people try to cancel you, there's an overwhelming probability in academia in particular that that will be successful.

Speaker 1 So, let's start by talking about the sorts of things that you've been pointing to in,

Speaker 1 well, in academia in general, and then more specifically in psychology and social psychology.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 1 There are probably too many of these attempts for me to go through, so I'm going to pick one. Yeah, pick the cream of the crop.
This is probably the cream of the crop. Okay.

Speaker 1 It is,

Speaker 1 I refer to it. So, I have a

Speaker 1 very active sub-stack site, Unsafe Science, and I have several posts on this. You can find it under the Pops Fiasco Racist Mule Trope.
There's a whole series on this. Okay, so what is Pops?

Speaker 1 Pops is Perspectives on Psych Science, one of the very prestigious journals within the field of psychology for publishing reviews and commentaries and the like.

Speaker 1 The short version is that

Speaker 1 I was invited by the editor to do a commentary on a main paper that was critical. The main paper by a psychologist named Humel, Bernard Hummel,

Speaker 1 was critical of prior work in psychology advocating for diversity in a variety of ways.

Speaker 1 The nature of his critique was that much of the rhetoric in psychological scholarship around diversity was narrowly focused on, and the terms are constantly changing, underrepresented,

Speaker 1 minority, minoritized, disadvantaged, oppressed groups. And that from a scientific perspective.
Intersectionally,

Speaker 1 right, exactly. That's right.

Speaker 1 Intersectionally deprived.

Speaker 1 And there was a recent article which argued that on scientific grounds, we need to do exactly that.

Speaker 1 Hummel's critique was that was really multiple, but two of his key points were that, well, there are some types of things it's irrelevant.

Speaker 1 Diversity is irrelevant for certain kinds of theoretical scientific tests.

Speaker 1 And then the other point is that if diversity matters, it matters for scientific purposes. It matters extremely broadly, and it's not restricted to underrepresented groups.

Speaker 1 And a very simple example would be if you could compare a study based on undergraduate psychology students versus one based on a nationally representative sample.

Speaker 1 The research based on the nationally representative sample is going to be broader and more generalizable and more credible. A nationally representative sample represents the population.

Speaker 1 It's not focused entirely on any subset of the population. That would be a very simple example of Homel's point.
I was asked to do a commentary.

Speaker 1 I did.

Speaker 1 And there's, okay, there's a distinction there, too, that we should draw.

Speaker 1 Clearly, it's the case that if you want to draw generalizable conclusions about human beings from a study, that the study participants should be a randomly selected and representative sample of the population to whom you're attempting to generalize, obviously, because otherwise it doesn't generalize.

Speaker 1 That's very different than making the case that underrepresented groups should be preferentially hired or employed or or promoted or

Speaker 1 completely differently different completely different completely different that was sort of part of hummel's critique yeah yeah but i guess so again the editor invited me to uh publish a commentary on this exchange and

Speaker 1 uh the title of my commentary um it was is it eventually got published is diversity is diverse There's lots of different kinds of diversity.

Speaker 1 And if we're arguing for diversity on scientific grounds, then then what the science needs to be is fully representative of the, whether it's the participants or

Speaker 1 the topics, or it goes way beyond oppression. I mean, oppression is a part of that and shouldn't be excluded, but it's only one piece of that.

Speaker 1 So I basically was in agreement with Hommel's critique and augmented it. As part of that,

Speaker 1 I critiqued progressive academic rhetoric around diversity as disingenuous and hypocritical.

Speaker 1 And the way I framed that, the way I captured it, was using a quote from Fiddler on the Roof. So in Fiddler on the Roof, which is early 20th century Jewish life in the

Speaker 1 great movies of all time.

Speaker 1 Everyone should watch it. And

Speaker 1 probably its most famous song is Tradition, which is about the importance of tradition and keeping the community together. But then there were exceptions.
So there's an interlude in the song Tradition

Speaker 1 where

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 whatever, the villagers get into an argument because one chimes in. There was the time he sold him a horse, but delivered a mule.

Speaker 1 And I use that to frame my discussion of progressive disingenuousness.

Speaker 1 They all disintegrate into fractions

Speaker 1 in the middle of this song about unity too

Speaker 1 when that comes out when that comes out that's right yeah yeah that's right and and i argued in this paper that that the way in which the reason that's a good metaphor for progressive rhetoric around diversity is that diversity sound you know superficially it sounds good to a lot of people right because who doesn't want to be included no matter what group you're a member of the idea that someone is advocating for diversity

Speaker 1 you you know it's kind of appealing and uh for so for example yes

Speaker 1 yes, with two seconds of thought, it's a positive thing. Or that people should be free of arbitrary exclusion.
Yeah, of arbitrary exclusion. That's right.
That's right. And for example, one thing

Speaker 1 one might think if one had a little bit of knowledge is that

Speaker 1 especially in the social sciences and humanities, but really in academia writ large, there's hardly anyone who is not left of center.

Speaker 1 I mean, the range goes from sort of center left to the far, far left. I have a

Speaker 1 formula.

Speaker 1 That's very well documented. It's very formal.
No one disagrees with that claim.

Speaker 1 Well, so Nate Honeycutt, my former student, he's now a research scientist at FHIR, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, did a dissertation on this.

Speaker 1 Surveyed almost 2,000 faculty nationwide at the top colleges and universities

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 found that

Speaker 1 40%

Speaker 1 self-identified, not just as on the left, amount on the left was about 90, 95%,

Speaker 1 but 40% self-identified as radicals, activists, Marxists, or socialists. Yeah.
40%. So this is the extreme left.
This is no longer just like Democrats or liberals. This is nearly half on the far left.

Speaker 1 And that was a sample of how many people? It was almost 2,000. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, how many...

Speaker 1 faculty members at colleges and universities do you suppose there are in in the United States approximately? Do you have any idea? I have looked into this. It's hundreds of thousands.

Speaker 1 I don't know the number. Okay, so I don't remember.
I have looked into it. It's very large.

Speaker 1 So that means there's 80,000 academic activists who are being employed full-time in the United States. I don't know if you could go that far because he looked at the top colleges and universities.

Speaker 1 If you wanted to generalize to all colleges and universities, you would have to include community colleges and, you know, primarily liberal ones.

Speaker 1 Do you think they'd be less?

Speaker 1 I don't know. Biased? Okay, we don't know.
I don't know. Okay, so it's not 80,000, but it could easily be 50,000.
Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so that's a number I want to return to.
Okay, okay. Okay.

Speaker 1 Because there's implications.

Speaker 1 So one might think, for if someone is advocating for diversity, given the extreme political skew and given the extent to which academia deals with politicized topics, that there would be an embrace of people,

Speaker 1 an attempt to bring into academia

Speaker 1 professors, researchers, scholars, teachers from across the political spectrum. That has never gotten any traction in academia.
And in fact, it's gone in the complete opposite direction.

Speaker 1 If you go back 50, 60 years, I think it's fair to describe the way academia has functioned is to produce a slow-moving purge of conservatives and even people-center and libertarians from its ranks. So

Speaker 1 My point in this commentary was using things like that as examples of the disingenuousness of progressive rhetoric around diversity, that it wasn't really diversity in the broadest sense.

Speaker 1 It was a very narrow-

Speaker 1 See, that's actually the fundamental flaw of intersectionality, is intersectionality devolves into combinatorial explosion almost immediately, right? Because

Speaker 1 once you start combining the categories of oppression, you don't have to make, you don't have your list of combinations, black, women gay etc

Speaker 1 every time you add another variable to that multiplicative list you decrease the pool of people that occupy that list radically right right but there's also an infinite there's literally an indefinite this is your point an indefinite number of potentially relevant group categories Yes.

Speaker 1 So how in the world are you going to ensure that every possible combination of every possible group category is

Speaker 1 you can't even measure it right much less insure it yeah you can't do that right and so there's this underlying insistence which you're pointing to i believe that there are privileged categories of oppressed people right and and it's a weird thing right it's like why is it that it's race and sex and you might think well those are the most obvious differences between people and maybe you can make that case but then it's also gender which is a very weird insistence because whether the idea of gender is a valid idea, I don't think the idea of gender is a valid idea at all.

Speaker 1 I think it's super, it's, what would you say? It's, it's a warped misconceptualization of everything that's captured by temperament, much more accurately and precisely.

Speaker 1 We could talk about that, but also sexual orientation. I can't see at all why that would emerge as a privileged category of oppression alongside something like sex.

Speaker 1 Like it could, but it's not obvious why. Okay, so you're pointing some of them.
And then you said, well, there's important elements of diversity, especially intellectually,

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 adequate distribution of political or ethical views across the spectrum. That's completely off the table.
Yeah, it's completely off the table. It's like rejected.
It's worse than off the table.

Speaker 1 So that was my paper.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there's more to the story than this, but to keep this succinct,

Speaker 1 eventually what happened was almost 1,400 academics, probably mostly psychologists, signed an open letter denouncing.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 my paper was one of several commentaries. All of the commentaries were critical of this oppression framing of diversity.

Speaker 1 All of them.

Speaker 1 All of them.

Speaker 1 And this was in POPS? It was in, yeah, perspectives on psych science. Okay, so I just want to provide people some background on this and correct me if I get any of this wrong.
So

Speaker 1 scientists publish in research journals and they generally publish articles of two types. One type would be a research study, an actual experiment, let's say, or a sequence of experiments.

Speaker 1 And the other, I guess there's two other types. There's reviews and there's commentaries.
And so...

Speaker 1 And then there's a variety of different journals that scientists publish in, and

Speaker 1 some of those cover all scientific topics, science and nature. The world's premier scientific journals used to do that before they became woke institutions.

Speaker 1 And then there are specialized journals that cover fields like psychology. And then there are sub-specialized journals.

Speaker 1 And the less specialized the journal, all things considered, the more prestigious it is. Anyways, that's where scientists publish.

Speaker 1 And they do publish commentaries on each other's material, especially if it's a review of something contentious or something that's emerging in a field.

Speaker 1 And now, this journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science, there's also an interesting backstory here because that's an American Psychological Society journal. Yes.

Speaker 1 Okay, so there's two major organizations for psychologists,

Speaker 1 especially research-oriented psychologists in North America.

Speaker 1 There's the American Psychological Association, which has its journals, and then a newer organization, which is now a couple of decades old, American Psychological Society.

Speaker 1 And the American Psychological Society was actually set up, at least in part, because the American Psychological Association had started to become ideologically dominated, particularly in the leftist and progressive direction, and that that was having a arguably negative effect on research, reliability, accuracy, and probability of publication.

Speaker 1 That was set up. 25 okay so that's a little off kilton okay okay so yeah i do know this history okay

Speaker 1 the first place, APS started out as the American Psychological Society. They changed their name to the Association for Psychological Science

Speaker 1 in an attempt to be broader.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 what triggered the breakaway of APS from APA in the 90s, maybe? 90s? Yes, I think

Speaker 1 it wasn't political. It was the scientists who formed APS believed that APA was too focused on clinical practice and practitioner issues.
Right.

Speaker 1 And it was becoming unscientific, but not because of the politics. Well, okay, so yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough.

Speaker 1 But see, I was watching that happen because I knew some of the people who were setting up the APS at the time.

Speaker 1 And my sense, though, also was that Part of the reason that the APA was tilting in a more and more clinical direction was because there was an underlying political ethos that was increasingly skeptical of science as the privileged mode of obtaining valid information.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that's fair.

Speaker 1 So the proximal cause was the overemphasis on the clinical.

Speaker 1 But you know, it's also the case that, as you've seen, is that certainly the clinical psychology has and the whole therapeutic enterprise has taken a cataclysmic turn towards the woke direction in the last, especially in the last 10 years.

Speaker 1 It's been absolutely devastating. And I don't know, is social psychology?

Speaker 1 I think you could probably say the same thing about social psychology. Maybe you could say it deep.
Maybe that's even worse. Anyways, we can get into it.

Speaker 1 It's probably worse politically, but it's probably not worse practically because social psychologists don't really aren't responsible for helping anybody get on with their lives.

Speaker 1 I mean, they're responsible for teaching and students and things. They're not in typically, they're not.
They are responsible for implicit bias. That's all we can.

Speaker 1 get me. You are going to get me distracted.
You started by asking me. Yeah, tell the story of my cat.
Let's continue with this.

Speaker 1 That's that. Okay, so now you're there's 1,400 people who write a letter.
Yes,

Speaker 1 declaring all of us,

Speaker 1 me as well as the other commentators, we're all racists. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The editor should be fired and our articles should be taken down. They should be

Speaker 1 that these 1,400 are a subset of the 50,000 activists.

Speaker 1 Yes, right now.

Speaker 1 I'm curious about the 1,400 too, because you often see legacy media headline news that 1,400 scientists have signed some petition.

Speaker 1 But then when you look into it, you know, it's often,

Speaker 1 I know the distinction between graduate student and let's say full-fledged scientist is

Speaker 1 murky. But

Speaker 1 part of the issue is always, well, exactly, who were these 1,400 people, right? And out from under which rocks did they climb?

Speaker 1 And so who were the 1400 like roughly speaking who were these people that so there was 1400 I mean I didn't recognize many of the names okay but if you assume the first five or ten names are the likely organizers those were all well-established psychologists especially social psychologists okay social okay yeah okay okay there were social so you got a backlash and part of the backlash from huge backlash and part of the accurate accusation for me in particular was that by using this uh line from fiddler on the roof there was a time he sold him a horse but delivered a mule as a frame as a frame for progressive disingenuousness around diversity i was comparing black people to mules oh yeah oh yeah i see i see and so that drove that was your subject

Speaker 1 yeah that i was explicit in part of the denunciation right right um and so

Speaker 1 This created, it was an immediate fire story. This was when

Speaker 1 what year did this happen? 2022. Oh yeah.
2022. Very new.
There is a actually part of this backstory is very interesting.

Speaker 1 The editor of the journal at the time

Speaker 1 is a European psychologist named Klaus Fiedler. Klaus Fiedler is very accomplished.
He's an unbelievably honored hundreds of journal articles, multiple

Speaker 1 editorships and awards. He was the editor overseeing all this.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 my and the other commentaries that he eventually accepted started out as simple reviews. So when Homel submitted his paper, it was subjected to peer review.
I was one of the peer reviewers.

Speaker 1 So with one of the other.

Speaker 1 Fiedler so liked the reviews that he asked all of us to scale them up to full-length articles.

Speaker 1 Scientists publish their research findings and their reviews of the literature in scientific journals.

Speaker 1 And it's one of the ways that the quality of these articles is vetted is by submitting the manuscripts before they're published to,

Speaker 1 well, first of all, the editor reviews them to see if they're even vaguely possibly suitable for publication in that particular journal on the basis of, let's say, topic and quality and apparent integrity of research.

Speaker 1 Then they're sent out to experts. in that area, multiple experts, for analysis.
And that's part of the quality control process.

Speaker 1 And that's worked, that worked pretty well up until about 2015, I would say, or maybe even spectacularly well, all things considered. So that's the peer review process.
And

Speaker 1 what happened in this case was the reviews of this, the peer reviews of this particular article were of sufficient quality so that the editor decided that they might

Speaker 1 turn into standalone pieces with some development.

Speaker 1 But I warned Fiedler, the editor, in my review, before anyone had the idea that a version of my review would get published, that if he accepted Hommel's critique of the way in which psychologists write and think about diversity, what they've been advocating with respect to diversity, that he would be at heightened risk of people coming after him, demanding the papers be retracted and coming after his job.

Speaker 1 This is in my review.

Speaker 1 And Jordan, that is exactly what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 Was that included when it was published or was that? I don't remember. I'd have to go by, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I think I may have taken it out because it wasn't really appropriate because the commentary wasn't,

Speaker 1 it was about the exchange. It wasn't the message to the end.
No, fine. I mean, it's

Speaker 1 the case that you stick. Yeah.
So, so Firestorm,

Speaker 1 APS,

Speaker 1 the like executive director committee of APS, whatever that group is, of committee, put an immediate kibosh on this.

Speaker 1 It was going to be all published as a as a discussion forum. That's how Fiedler framed it.
It's a discussion forum about diversity issues. They put the

Speaker 1 immediate halt. Okay, who is they?

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 1 the officers of the American, of the Association for Psychological Science. Okay, so now they're broadly overseeing the group of journals that publish under their ages.
That's right.

Speaker 1 Okay, but they generally don't have an an editorial say. No, they don't.
Right. And shouldn't.
And shouldn't. Right.
But the editor is to some extent beholden. I mean, that's who he's working for.

Speaker 1 So they. Right.
But it's still the case that generally they don't do this. Yeah, they don't do this.
Right. Right.
Partly because often,

Speaker 1 well, they don't have the specialized expertise, at least in part, which is partly why they hire the editors to begin with, who then they give pretty much carte blanche. Yes.
Right.

Speaker 1 As they should, because that's part of academic freedom. That's right.
Right. Yes.
Okay, but they decided that they were not going to proceed with the publication. Well, or.

Speaker 1 So the open letter had two main demands. They weren't even demands.
That Fiedler be fired and the papers be retracted. Okay.

Speaker 1 They conducted what looks to me, what looked to me, and really to all of us involved, like a kangaroo court, you know,

Speaker 1 into what happened.

Speaker 1 They concluded that Fiedler had somehow violated editorial ethics and norms.

Speaker 1 Which is a serious accusation. Yes.
Like a career-ending accusation.

Speaker 1 If it's true. Yes.

Speaker 1 Well, he's had a very nice career since, so it did not succeed. Well, that's good, but that doesn't

Speaker 1 detract from the seriousness of

Speaker 1 the fact that he was able to successfully wend his way through the thicket. Yes, exactly.
That's right. So he was ousted almost immediately.

Speaker 1 and then the the papers mine included that were part of feedler's discussion forum and that had been published they had been accepted but not published

Speaker 1 okay okay

Speaker 1 so how the hell did the complainants get access to the papers Like, how did they know what the papers were if they hadn't been published?

Speaker 1 Someone must have, you know, maybe through the,

Speaker 1 that editorial process is largely online. So I'm sure they could have accessed the papers through the online editorial process.
I'm sure they could have asked Fiedler for the papers.

Speaker 1 Had they asked us for the papers, they weren't. They weren't secret.
They weren't secret. Yeah, they weren't secretly.
I mean, people wanted publishing their papers so that people

Speaker 1 weren't. It was just curious because it's strange that a brouha of that sort would emerge prior to publication.
But there was quasi-publication. Yeah, well, it was right, exactly.

Speaker 1 It was accepted, but not published.

Speaker 1 So they ousted him almost immediately. And then the papers, they brought in two special editors to figure out what to do with the papers accepted as part of the discussion forum.

Speaker 1 And who were these special editors and made them special? Well, there was Same Vazir and E.J. Wagenmachers.
And both of them, I think Sameen is now the head editor at Psychological Science.

Speaker 1 So they both have had long careers.

Speaker 1 advocating with some success for upgrading the quality and credibility and rigor of psychological science. They both have made important contributions that way.

Speaker 1 And so I think that's why they were brought in. They had a certain cachet

Speaker 1 as able to figure out what to do. I think that's what the APS directory believed.
On what grounds do you think this investigation

Speaker 1 was

Speaker 1 justified?

Speaker 1 How was the progression of this investigation justified? I mean,

Speaker 1 there's no established precedent in the scientific community for re-evaluating an editorial decision based on political objection, right?

Speaker 1 Like, there's no, we'll re-evaluate if 500 people sign a petition. Like, this isn't the domain of rule or principle or tradition.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 what's the fear here, do you think? These 1,400 people signed this petition, which is something that takes like two seconds and costs you nothing and has no risk to you whatsoever.

Speaker 1 And so, it's not an ethical statement of any profundity unless you're an activist. So, what was it do you think that

Speaker 1 raised people's hackles about the mere fact that these complaints had been raised? To this second, I don't really know.

Speaker 1 Like, from their perspective, just speculate. Well, so

Speaker 1 sure.

Speaker 1 The main object of Hummel's critique

Speaker 1 was a

Speaker 1 black or biracial social psychologist at Stanford,

Speaker 1 Stephen Roberts.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Roberts denounced the whole process as racist.

Speaker 1 Publicly. Okay.
Okay. Publicly.
And I do think that

Speaker 1 on what grounds?

Speaker 1 The mere fact of questioning the diversity agenda

Speaker 1 constitutes racism. He probably had three main grounds.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That was one of them. Absolutely.
You know, you criticize this.

Speaker 1 This shows

Speaker 1 the racism and psychology is pervasive throughout psychology. Right.
That would be one grounds. Second ground was my use of this,

Speaker 1 me comparing blacks to mules with, you know, there was the time he sold a horse and delivered a mule. And then the third was there was a considerable.
So Fiedler offered.

Speaker 1 I'm not seeing the point of that.

Speaker 1 I know. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 Fiedler offered Roberts the opportunity to respond to the full set of papers uh which were supporting were generally supporting homel's critique which was really about diversity in general but it's its jumping off point was a prior paper by roberts okay so but but it gave roberts a chance to reply to the critiques but that there was a considerable back and forth between roberts and fiedler about

Speaker 1 whether when, and how to publish Roberts' response.

Speaker 1 Fiedler was probably kind of a pain in the ass. But

Speaker 1 in my experience, editors,

Speaker 1 I don't know how many times, I don't have enough fingers and toes to count the number of times I have subjectively experienced editors' comments as pains in the ass.

Speaker 1 But.

Speaker 1 One, at least once per paper submitted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
But whatever.

Speaker 1 So, but those were his grounds for denouncing all of us as racist. Fiedler made his life difficult.

Speaker 1 This whole critique of diversity is a testament to white supremacy, pervasive in psychology, and me comparing black people to mules.

Speaker 1 Right. That was the grounds.
And you asked me to speculate. I have no, I don't have,

Speaker 1 I have at best very circumstantial evidence. I may not even have circumstantial evidence.
I strongly suspect I would really like to test this in the lab or in surveys that

Speaker 1 liberals, especially white liberals, are so racked with guilt and shame over the bona fide history of white supremacy and discrimination and oppression in the United States, in Europe, and especially in the UK.

Speaker 1 It's more about colonialism, right? And so racked with guilt that there is a vulnerability to just believing

Speaker 1 anything a person

Speaker 1 from one of these oppressed, stigmatized groups says, denouncing others.

Speaker 1 a very quick and easy way to signify the fact that you're not part of the oppressor camp. That's right.
Yes, well, that has no one, has that not been formally tested as a hypothesis?

Speaker 1 If it has, I don't know. I don't know.
Well, it needs to be.

Speaker 1 It totally is something like, yes, it's something like,

Speaker 1 more broadly speaking, is that

Speaker 1 are there?

Speaker 1 It's a mechanism of gaming the reputation

Speaker 1 domain, right? Because obviously our reputations are probably, arguably, the most valuable commodity so to speak that we possess and

Speaker 1 every

Speaker 1 system of value is susceptible to gaming in a variety of ways and one way of gaming the reputational game is to make claims of reputational virtue that are risk-free broad right immediate right and cost-free right and for me if you're accused of something and i can say and accused of transgressing against a group towards whom I feel guilt, I can signify my valor as a moral agent by also denouncing you.

Speaker 1 And it costs me nothing, right? Which is a big problem.

Speaker 1 It's like maybe it's the problem of our time. It's a very big problem.
It's a huge problem. Well, especially now, because there's something else that's happened, right? Is that

Speaker 1 groups of denunciators can get together with much greater ease than they ever could. Yes, because of social media.
And the

Speaker 1 effort necessary to make a denunciation has plummeted to zero.

Speaker 1 And the consequences of making a false denunciation are also zero. Yes, right.

Speaker 1 This is not good. It's like denunciation firestorm.

Speaker 1 And that's certainly happening. Well, so, you know,

Speaker 1 I mostly agree.

Speaker 1 Certainly in the short term, the personal consequences of engaging in this sort of denunciation behavior are non-existent.

Speaker 1 But the consequences are not non-existent. So

Speaker 1 the credibility and trust and faith in academia has been in decline for a very long time. People hate this kind of stuff.
So there was.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, just because something's advantageous for some people in the short run does not mean that it's good for the whole game in the medium to long run. Right.
That's for sure. Yes, that's right.

Speaker 1 That's exactly right. Well, that's actually, I think, in some ways the definition of an impulsive moral error.

Speaker 1 Like, if it accrues benefit to you in the short run, but does you in in the medium run, that's not a very wise strategy. Yes.
Right. And that's what impulsive people do all the time.
So

Speaker 1 that's

Speaker 1 even the definition of what constitutes a temptation. I was recently listening to your interview for this podcast with Keith Campbell on narcissism.
Yes. And

Speaker 1 that was one of the things you talked about, this sort of impulse control and short-term benefits versus long-term benefits, especially regarding social relations, right? Right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, and reputation is a long-term gain.

Speaker 1 It's a long-term gain.

Speaker 1 And there has been emerging evidence

Speaker 1 that people high in left-wing authoritarianism, sort of extremely. Now that we all agree that that exists.

Speaker 1 I know, I know. That's a whole backstory.
That's for sure.

Speaker 1 So, but it's correlated with narcissism.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that this pleasure pleasure that people,

Speaker 1 that people on the this sort of cancel culture that has emerged, I mean, the right is not immune to cancel culture type activities, but it emerged primarily originally on the left.

Speaker 1 Any place infiltrated by narcissists is going to be susceptible to exactly

Speaker 1 narcissists will use whatever political stance gains them the most immediate credibility. That's right.
Completely independent of the validity of the ideological stance.

Speaker 1 See, one of the things I've we'll get back to the story right away. See, one of the things I've observed, this is very interesting, A, because

Speaker 1 I've talked to a lot of moderate progressives, let's say, or moderate, or actually even genuine liberals within the Democrat,

Speaker 1 congressmen and senators, many of them. And I've been struck by one thing, and I'm curious about what you think about this.

Speaker 1 We know that a tilt towards empathy, so agreeableness, trade agreeableness, a tilt, tilts you in a liberal direction and maybe in a progressive direction.

Speaker 1 And there are concomitants of being more agreeable on the personality side. But I think one of them is that

Speaker 1 the moderates that I've talked to always denied the existence of the pathological radicals on the left. And I've really thought, I mean, this is to a man or a woman.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And I think what it is, I think it has something to do with the unwillingness or inability of the more liberal types to have imagination for evil. Like

Speaker 1 I would make the case that most criminals,

Speaker 1 you could validly interpret most criminals whose criminal history is sporadic and short as victims.

Speaker 1 They've come from abusive families, alcoholic families, often multi-generationally antisocial families, etc.

Speaker 1 But there's a subset of criminals. It's 1% of the criminals, 65% of the crimes.
There's a a subset of criminals who are not victims. They are really monsters.

Speaker 1 And I don't think there's any imagination for the monstrous among the compassionate left. It's all victims.
It doesn't matter how egregious the crime.

Speaker 1 Now, I would have, that's something I would have tested as a social psychologist if I still had an active research lab, which I don't.

Speaker 1 But the problem with, well, we know that we know from simulations that networks of cooperators can establish themselves in a way that's mutually beneficial and productive.

Speaker 1 But that if a shark is dropped into a tank of cooperators, then the shark takes everything. So the problem with being agreeable and cooperative is that the monsters can get you.

Speaker 1 And if you're temperamentally

Speaker 1 tilted towards denying the existence of the monsters, so much the worse. Now, I made that case because you talked about the relationship between narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism.

Speaker 1 I mean, narcissism shades into sadism as well. And so, this is a

Speaker 1 very big problem, especially with online denunciation. Yeah, okay.
So, yeah, back to 2022.

Speaker 1 Now, there's debate about whether these papers are going to proceed to publication. Right, they were, and there's allegations made against the people who wrote them.

Speaker 1 Absolutely, we're all racist, and the whole thing was racist, and

Speaker 1 an abuse of editorial power, and it's all these accusations. Right, and the editor loses his position, he loses his position, and these two special editors are brought in.

Speaker 1 Okay, negotiations go on for almost two years. Like, what are they negotiating about?

Speaker 1 Who's going to

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 part of Robert's denunciation,

Speaker 1 public denunciation of all of us, was

Speaker 1 he posted the draft of his commentary response that was headed for the discussion forum and the full set of emails he exchanged with Fiedler

Speaker 1 about publishing it. And those are, you know, those are typically confidential communications between an editor and an author.
And so.

Speaker 1 Or at least typically private. Yes, right.
They're typically private. So

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 added to the difficulty on the part of

Speaker 1 the special editors to decide what to do. because

Speaker 1 they didn't want to just publish those. Roberts didn't agree not to at first.
Fiedler,

Speaker 1 they wanted Fiedler's permission to publish the correspondence. He wouldn't grant it.
So why did Smith have such an outsized say in all this?

Speaker 1 Like that isn't how the scientific process generally works. So they once

Speaker 1 APS

Speaker 1 blew up the journal by firing Fiedler. So there was a

Speaker 1 admission of fault.

Speaker 1 So and about two-thirds of the editorial board resigned

Speaker 1 when he was ousted. So Hops was

Speaker 1 resignation. Yeah, I don't know whether it was protest.

Speaker 1 We know they resigned, whether it was protest or not.

Speaker 1 So they were. Maybe they also thought it was trouble they didn't need.
Right. Right.

Speaker 1 I mean, these are generally, if you're, when you're working for a scientific journal, you're not doing it for the money. Right.
It's it's a lot of work. And the editors, was he paid?

Speaker 1 Was that his full-time job? It was not his full-time job. And I don't know whether he was paid.
Right, right. Okay.

Speaker 1 So that just illustrates the point is that people are doing this because that's actually what you do as a scientist. There's not a lot of, you know, it's a prestigious position and you meet people.

Speaker 1 You have a certain say over the direction the field might go.

Speaker 1 And those are perks. But generally, people do this like they do peer review because it's part of the tradition of scientific activity.
Right. Right, right.
And that's right.

Speaker 1 And so you can see why people might bail out if it was going to just be nothing but reputation catastrophe. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Because they'd be thinking, why the hell am I going to expose myself to like this dismal risk when there's like, it's already hard and there's very little upside. Right, exactly.
Right. Okay.

Speaker 1 So the journal was a mess for a long time. And

Speaker 1 these editors, and there was this exchange between the editors, Roberts, Fiedler, and the other contributors, myself and the other contributors,

Speaker 1 about

Speaker 1 whether and when to publish it. And they, again, this went on for almost two years.
So there was like, first a discussion, we're going to publish it. Then there was radio silence.

Speaker 1 Well, it turns out we've run into an obstacle. Can we resolve? And just went on for almost two years.
Eventually that was resolved and it was all published. It's all published.
And,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 Your original question was

Speaker 1 framed as, you can't believe I haven't been subject to cancellation. In fact, I have.
I have. You're then asked, well,

Speaker 1 how did you survive it? Yeah. So let me add this little punchline.

Speaker 1 At the time that all this was happening,

Speaker 1 my immediate associate dean, so I was chair of the psychology department at Rutgers.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Rutgers is in the School of Arts and Sciences. The School of Arts and Sciences has a dean.
Under the, but the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers is gigantic.

Speaker 1 Even as chair, I had very little direct contact with the dean. The dean was doing big, deanly things.

Speaker 1 But the department chairs have a lot of contact with an associate chair. So there might be an associate chair for the science.
Associate dean? Associate Dean. Yeah.
Sorry. Associate Dean.
Sorry.

Speaker 1 Sorry. Associate Dean.
So there'd be an associate dean

Speaker 1 for math, for STEM, associate dean for social science, and associate dean for humanities.

Speaker 1 I had a lot to do with the associate dean for social sciences, who was a psychologist from the psychology department. Okay, so

Speaker 1 I never actually had this conversation exactly with him, but I'm pretty sure he knew about the whole thing. A year, so at the end of my term, so

Speaker 1 this is now 2023, I go on sabbatical.

Speaker 1 Remember that this event occurred, the POPS event occurred in 2022. It's not till almost two years later that the stuff is published.

Speaker 1 So I complete my term as department chair in 2022, 2022, 23, I go on sabbatical, still not published.

Speaker 1 And then at the end of that sabbatical term,

Speaker 1 the associate dean approaches me

Speaker 1 with an offer to chair the anthropology department.

Speaker 1 Okay, so this is very weird. Yeah, definitely.
It's very weird. There was an internal political snefu, which is beyond the scope of this discussion, and they couldn't appoint an internal chair.

Speaker 1 And they wanted an external, you know, the department needed a chair. The dean's office had a lot of faith and confidence in my ability.

Speaker 1 Despite this, despite the because of it. One of the things they said to me was,

Speaker 1 you know, this is going to be a difficult situation because the department is not going to be happy about having an outside chair imposed on them, but we know you have a thick skin.

Speaker 1 Wow. And I parlayed that into a very large raise.
Jordan, it was one of the best things I've ever done. So not only did I escape cancellation, I parlayed it into an improvement in the quality of the.

Speaker 1 Well, this is a good thing for people to know, too.

Speaker 1 You know, if you've watched my podcast, you know, because I say this all the time, that

Speaker 1 mythologically speaking, that every treasure has a dragon, right? And that's a representation of the world, because the world is full of threat and opportunity. And

Speaker 1 the co-association of the dragon and the treasure is a mythological trope indicating that there's opportunity where there's peril.

Speaker 1 But there's a corollary to that, which is a very interesting one, which is where there's peril, there's opportunity. And so you might think when

Speaker 1 something negative happens to you, let's say on the social side, that you become the brunt of a cancellation attempt, you might think, oh my God, my life's over.

Speaker 1 It's like, yeah, that's one possible outcome. That's the same outcome as...
you know, ending up as dragon toast, let's say.

Speaker 1 But the other outcome is that you find the treasure that's associated with the dragon. And that can definitely happen.

Speaker 1 And that's a good thing to know because it means that when things become shaky around you, one of the things you can validly ask yourself is: there's something positive lurking here if I had the wisdom to see it and the,

Speaker 1 what would you say? The capacity for transformation necessary to allow the challenge to change me. Yeah, that's right.
Jordan,

Speaker 1 I wouldn't wish that experience. At the time that was happening, it was horrible.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Speaker 1 In hindsight, it has made me a better person,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 I wouldn't undo it now if I could. Yeah, well, you know what Nietzsche said.
If it doesn't kill you,

Speaker 1 it makes you stronger. Now, unfortunately, there's an if.
Well, seriously, right? Yes. So the if is that the dragon is real.
It's not a game. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 Well, the FHIR, the same outfit, Foundation for Individual Rights of Expression, keeps a faculty under FHIR

Speaker 1 database of faculty who have been subject usually to mob, sometimes administrative investigations, seeking to punish them for what should have been legitimate academic speech protected by academic freedom or even free speech.

Speaker 1 At U.S. state colleges, they're subject to the First Amendment, which means they shouldn't be in the business.
However, hypothetically. Well, yeah, well, yeah.

Speaker 1 But they have documented that hundreds of faculty have been fired for what should have been legitimately protected speech. So your point about

Speaker 1 training conservatives.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 your metaphor about the dragon is dead on, that there's no guarantee. You know, people have lost their livelihoods running into these dragons.
So that that's not how you can do that.

Speaker 1 And I don't think so that. There are some concrete recommendations that can be brought out of that, too.

Speaker 1 I would say, like, if you find yourself in serious trouble, this is one of the things I learned about, I learned from dealing with like very dangerous people in my clinical practice, let's say, dangerous and unstable people.

Speaker 1 It's a very bad idea to lie when you're in trouble. Like it's a seriously bad idea.
And so if the mob or the monster comes for you, your best defense is

Speaker 1 extremely cautious playing truth. Now, that's very different than trying to

Speaker 1 what would you say, strategize and manipulate your way out of a difficult situation. It's also very different than than apologizing.

Speaker 1 And my experience on the woke mob cancellation side is if you lie in your own defense or falsify your speech, you're in serious trouble.

Speaker 1 And if you apologize, a different mob will just come for you. That'll be the post-apology mob that comes for you.
It's not a good idea. So,

Speaker 1 you know, what we've been outlining here is the fact that if you're in serious social peril, there's two outcomes. One is that

Speaker 1 perversely enough, in retrospect, it might turn out to be an opportunity, and one you wouldn't forego now that you know the consequences. That's not impossible, but it's difficult.

Speaker 1 The other one is, you're seriously done. And so then the question is: what can you do to maximize the possibility of the former and minimize the latter? And those are some things that I know.

Speaker 1 So, okay, okay, so let's back up a bit then.

Speaker 1 We still haven't exactly

Speaker 1 described why the cancellation attempts weren't successful for you.

Speaker 1 Now, you said you demonstrated your ability to keep a calm head under fire, and that you did that well enough so the university actually recognized that, and that turned out to be of substantive benefit to you.

Speaker 1 But we don't know why it was that you maintained a calm head under fire or how you did that without, well, having the reputation damage that was certainly directly implied by the accusation take you out.

Speaker 1 Like, do you have, was it good fortune? Were there things you did right? Like, how do you, how do you assess that? Yeah, yeah. So that was not my first, as I mentioned at the beginning,

Speaker 1 this was not my first go-around with this kind of thing. It helps to have some experience.
It helps to have done some reading.

Speaker 1 People have addressed, there are some good articles and essays out there about what to do when you're subject to these attacks. Some of them have very good, make very good points.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 about six months ago, I

Speaker 1 again I posted an essay on my Substack. What's the name of your substack? Unsafe Science.
Unsafe Science. It's called my Vita of Denunciation.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And it's called my Vita of Denunciation because I've been, it goes through several of these sorts of attacks that I have been through. And how, first place, it also goes through the tactics.

Speaker 1 It's a short version. I have a longer version in a different place, but it goes through a short version of how to deal with these attacks.
So

Speaker 1 the very first piece is that

Speaker 1 if you find yourself in the midst of

Speaker 1 such an attack, go silent.

Speaker 1 Go silent. Do not engage.
Do not engage with your attackers because nearly all of these cancellation type attacks are massive, brutal, and short. Right, right, right.
And two weeks. Yeah, and most.

Speaker 1 That's right. Yeah, yeah, and most.
And people forget, that's what I'm saying because the present is so large. Yes.
You're going to panic. Yes.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Don't panic. Don't panic.
That's right. Don't panic.
Don't assume that's going to be successful. That's right.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because people, they might be interested in you today, but they weren't interested in you yesterday. Right.
And they probably won't be interested in you tomorrow.

Speaker 1 And it's just like a giant, as a kid, we used to go to the beach and body surf, and occasionally like a wave that was way bigger than you could handle would.

Speaker 1 And there was nothing you could do except let it wash over you and knock you around. And you come out and it washes you on shore.
As long as you don't do anything to make it worse. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like apologize, for example.

Speaker 1 You know, I would add this.

Speaker 1 If you genuinely, in your heart of hearts, believe you have done something wrong, then maybe you should apologize. Yeah, yeah, but you should not apologize.

Speaker 1 Let me add something to that. Yeah.
No, not if you genuinely believe it, because you might not be your own best defender. That's why you have a Fifth Amendment.

Speaker 1 No, seriously, conscientious, guilt-prone people will accuse themselves.

Speaker 1 So then I would say, if you feel that you've done something wrong, remember the presumption of innocence before. prove provable guilt.
Remember that. It applies to you too.

Speaker 1 And then go talk to five or six people that you trust and lay out the argument on both sides and see if they think think you're the bad guy. Right.

Speaker 1 That's good. I agree with that.
You need that. Yes.
That's good. Yeah.
I'm completely on trouble with that.

Speaker 1 Don't assume that you're morally obligated to apologize, even if you think, even if you feel guilty. That's right.
Because your guilt

Speaker 1 feelings are not an unerring indication of your guilt. That's right.
And may distort how you think about your culpability. Yes.
Yeah, no, that's a very good point.

Speaker 1 That is, see, this is why I think, too, the council mob is particularly effective against genuine conservatives because genuine conservatives tilt towards higher conscientiousness, and it's very easy to make conscientious people feel guilty.

Speaker 1 Right, right. So, that could be weaponized.
Okay, all right. So, go silent.
Yeah, go silent. Including, you can always apologize in a month after you've thought it through.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 If anyone still cares, that's right. Yeah,

Speaker 1 okay, go silent. Go silent.
Yeah. Record everything.
Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And you're right. Everything.
Everything.

Speaker 1 You don't know how you're going to use it. You may use it to defend yourself going forward, depending on how things unfold.
You may decide

Speaker 1 after the wave of the attack passes

Speaker 1 that you want to counterattack. Yeah, right.
You want

Speaker 1 strategically. Carefully and strategically.
And by recording everything, you have the raw material to damn your attackers.

Speaker 1 So that's it, right? So go silent. Yeah, that's especially true if someone's interviewing you.
Yeah. It's like record all of it.
Record all of it. Yeah.
Record all of it. Seek allies.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 you may feel alone. Yeah.
Mobs are very good at coming after somebody who seems alone. But if you can, if you have

Speaker 1 networks, support networks, activate those networks.

Speaker 1 If you don't have them, and you know, if you're in the intellectual type of professions, whether it's academia or mainstream media, could be in something else, you probably have a support network.

Speaker 1 Let them know what's going on. Most my experience has been, at least the kind of networks that I have, they will, people will stand up for you.

Speaker 1 I mean, I had numbers of people writing essays that got posted in some pretty good places. Real clear politics, I think, was one

Speaker 1 on this pops fiasco.

Speaker 1 So, actually, of all places, the Chronicle of Higher Ed did a great,

Speaker 1 some great reporting on it. And it really kind of damned the mob.

Speaker 1 Right. That's also why you need that time of silence is to muster your resources.

Speaker 1 Yes. And you could also assume, even if people are nervous in the aftermath of the accusations for two or three days or a week, even they may come to their senses as the

Speaker 1 temperature drops. Yes.
That's right. Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And then, right. So go silent, record everything, activate your support networks.

Speaker 1 And then,

Speaker 1 if, again, it depends on the situation, it's going to be, it's going to vary from person to person and situation to situation. It depends in part on what your skills and resources are.

Speaker 1 But then you are ready to either defend yourself and or counterattack. And I don't, Jordan, I don't know how many essays I posted on unsafe science surrounding this event.

Speaker 1 One of them is titled, There Is No Racist Mule Trope. So the argument, the grounds for denouncing me as a racist for comparing black people to mules was that there was a historical trope

Speaker 1 of making an equivalence between black people and mules.

Speaker 1 Roberts

Speaker 1 presented this, and he had one reference. to support this, which I was not familiar with.

Speaker 1 So I tracked it. That's what you say.

Speaker 1 Let's see what the article actually says.

Speaker 1 This article was a really good article. And

Speaker 1 what it documented was that there was a historical linkage between black people and mules because originally American blacks were overwhelmingly in the American South.

Speaker 1 in the agrarian south and so the mule was a symbol of both the kind of work that was done in the south

Speaker 1 this agricultural work,

Speaker 1 and it was a symbol of the

Speaker 1 flawed liberation of black people from slavery because one of the promises that they never delivered on was 40 acres and a mule. And even though that was never delivered on

Speaker 1 for a very long time until you had the mass migration into the North,

Speaker 1 the black people living in the American South, you know, aspired to be successful farmers. And getting a mule was one way to have a successful farm.
And so you would see images, whether

Speaker 1 paintings, even, you know, if you go to southern museums,

Speaker 1 there's some very famous paintings of black people in fields with a mule pulling a wagon or a or a um i don't know you know uh

Speaker 1 yeah yeah like a plow or yeah yes right that's very very common and in fact the mule uh figures fairly largely in African-American folk stories from the American South. So he documents all this.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So much so that the mule really became a symbol of people who were oppressed and part of the liberation of people who were oppressed. So that when

Speaker 1 after Martin Luther King's assassination, his

Speaker 1 casket. was pulled in a wagon pulled by mules.
Okay, so there is, oh, is that America? So it's okay.

Speaker 1 So given all that, it's less surprising that that speculation might have arisen in relationship to your analogy. Right, right, right, right, right, right.
But things you find out too late.

Speaker 1 I know, yes, right, right. So, so,

Speaker 1 but, but it is ironic because the you know, mule is the symbol of the liberation from the oppression rather than the oppression. Right.

Speaker 1 You know, right. So, so let me ask you a question about strategy there, too.
You know, like what I've spent a lot of time strategizing with people because that was a big part of my clinical practice.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 in terms of

Speaker 1 silence and then mustering your support network, right?

Speaker 1 And then you said, well,

Speaker 1 you can start your defense. It's like

Speaker 1 my

Speaker 1 sense is that a good offense is a very strong defense. Yes.
Right. Because you can, if you're careful.
Now,

Speaker 1 you know, you can defend yourself or you can turn the tables.

Speaker 1 And I would say, if you're turning the tables because you're angry, that's not a good idea because you're going to make mistakes in your strategizing. Right.

Speaker 1 I think you can distinguish the

Speaker 1 search for justice and truth from the search for revenge by the intermediating role of especially resentment. If you're resentfully angry, your head isn't clear.

Speaker 1 But if you can quell that and you want to establish the truth and you can do that with a certain amount of detachment,

Speaker 1 then a good defensive strategy is offense. It's like what's actually,

Speaker 1 you can flip the table, so to speak. And

Speaker 1 the problem with a defense is there's something

Speaker 1 well, defense defensive. Defense are defensive.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Well, I might have made a mistake. Yes,

Speaker 1 absolutely. No, no, you're seriously wrong.
Yeah, yeah. And in a manner that's actually detrimental to the cause you purport to be putting forward.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. Well, so

Speaker 1 that and some of the prior experiences

Speaker 1 fueled what my, what was then very early

Speaker 1 interests

Speaker 1 in

Speaker 1 left-wing authoritarianism and far-left radicalization and its consequences.

Speaker 1 And so I've been doing all sorts of studies on that. All right.
Look, we have to stop this part of the discussion, even though there's like 50 other things I want to talk to you about.

Speaker 1 But we'll continue. I'm going to, I think, focus the discussion on the Daily Wire side.
You guys listening on YouTube know about this, that we do another half an hour there.

Speaker 1 I think I'm going to talk about

Speaker 1 categorization and implicit bias and delve a little bit more into social psychology's role, for better or worse, in promoting many of the policies, the DEI policies, for example, and justifying them hypothetically on scientific grounds.

Speaker 1 I want to delve into that because it's definitely been social psychologists who've been particularly interested in the issue of implicit bias, even though to some degree that notion came from the clinical world, including from people like Carl Jung, who were very interested in the idea of complex and implicit association back in the 1920s.

Speaker 1 Anyways, there's a veneer of scientific respectability that's been laid over the diversity, inclusivity, and equity claims, the notion of implicit and systemic bias.

Speaker 1 And that's always bothered me because I think the social psychologists have done a terrible job distinguishing between categorization, which is like the basis of perception itself, bias, because you can't consider categorization.

Speaker 1 bias. It's like that's insane.
That's insane. Even though the postmodernists really do make that claim.

Speaker 1 And And Lee's done work too looking at the accuracy of such things as stereo, so-called stereotypes. Because

Speaker 1 what's the difference between a stereotype and a category? Like, that's a

Speaker 1 hard question. You could spend a thousand years trying to figure that out.
Anyways, I think that's what we'll delve into if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side.

Speaker 1 And so, thank you very much, sir, for

Speaker 1 offering what you know and also your story to the more general public. And join us on the Daily Wire side if you want to continue continue with the discussion.