Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest who will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today.
Speaker 1: It's great to have Noam Chomsky on the podcast. Gnome
Speaker 1: is a public intellectual, linguist, and political activist. He's the
Speaker 1: author of many influential books, including Manufacturing Consent, The Political
Speaker 1: Economy of the Mass Media, and his latest with Robert Pohlan,
Speaker 1: Climate Crisis and The Green New Deal, The Political Economy
Speaker 1: of Saving the Planet. Chomsky is also known for helping
Speaker 1: initiate and sustain the cognitive revolution. He is Laureate Professor
Speaker 1: of Linguistics the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Maritis
Speaker 1: at MIT. Thanks so much for making time to chat
Speaker 1: with me today. Now glead to be with you. Just
Speaker 1: had to take care of a dog. Is the dog okay? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Just trying to horn in. I'm trying to shut them up,
Speaker 1: down down, It's okay. If if if he or she
Speaker 1: wants to participate in the podcast, that's fine with me.
Speaker 1: Usually she usually calms down and gets under the desk. Excellent. Well,
Speaker 1: so I'm a cognitive scientist by training, so i'm and
Speaker 1: I'm One of the things I'm really fascinated with is
Speaker 1: the is the history of the field that I work in.
Speaker 1: And I had the great pleasure of working with and
Speaker 1: being mentored by Herb Simon, for instance, who was one
Speaker 1: of the ones who helped form this cognitive revolution as well.
Speaker 1: And I was wondering, if you could we could trace
Speaker 1: a little bit, you know, in the sixties fifties, how
Speaker 1: did your work, you know, in linguistics intersect with the
Speaker 1: other work going on during that cognitive revolution, the time
Speaker 1: decision making and Marvin Minsky's work. How did all this
Speaker 1: stuff call ask that that epic? Can you take me
Speaker 1: back to the fifties sixties right now? Well, I knew
Speaker 1: Herb Simon and Marv Minsky mark most of my life.
Speaker 1: We were colleagues. So the it was one of the
Speaker 1: strains that one of the core elements of the what's
Speaker 1: called the cognitive Revolution I don't like the term particularly,
Speaker 1: but one of the core elements, of course, was language.
Speaker 1: The other core element was visioned a couple of other things,
Speaker 1: and so we all knew each other. Of my own
Speaker 1: work was on trying to construct theoretical accounts that would
Speaker 1: account for the capacity of humans to do what we're
Speaker 1: now doing. Its core problem of the cognitive sciences. What's
Speaker 1: the name? Sure the capacity? How can an individual acquire
Speaker 1: it during their lifetimes, in fact, during their early childhood,
Speaker 1: and ultimately how could such a system evolve? Those are
Speaker 1: the core problems of study of linguistics beginning around nineteen fifty.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty sharp break from structural linguistics, which had
Speaker 1: quite different goals and aspirations. Sure, oh yes, go on, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've actually written some about these years. If you want
Speaker 1: me to send you something, that'd be great. Yeah, just
Speaker 1: I have your email, so that'd be really great. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So when did you first make contact with behaviorism and
Speaker 1: what was your immediate gut reaction when you first encountered
Speaker 1: that body of work and the notions of sort of
Speaker 1: the stimulus response way of thinking about behavior. Knew about
Speaker 1: it from childhood, but the real encounter was when I
Speaker 1: moved to Cambridge. I came to Harvard as a grad
Speaker 1: student in nineteen fifty one that I was basically studying philosophy.
Speaker 1: So I was a student of Fan Coins mainly, and
Speaker 1: he was one of the chief exponents of Skinner and
Speaker 1: Opper and conditioning this party rigid form of behavior, and
Speaker 1: Skinner's William James Lectures had just appeared a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago. Later became his book on language, and the
Speaker 1: drafts were very widely read, and it was influential, in
Speaker 1: part because of coins advocacy and part coagu. It fits
Speaker 1: the tenor of the times very well, so it was
Speaker 1: kind of a bible when I got there. You look
Speaker 1: at say George Miller's first early books, out of the
Speaker 1: later ones, they're pretty strict behaviors. It was even you know,
Speaker 1: some of his early experiments were considered rather shocking and
Speaker 1: sounds kind of obvious, showing that you could understand a
Speaker 1: word better if it was in a sentence, then if
Speaker 1: it was in isolation, which shouldn't happen on what should
Speaker 1: happen on rigid behavior, as Browns is that you here
Speaker 1: the first word of a sentence, then there's a certain
Speaker 1: probability for the next one, and kind of like what's
Speaker 1: done with deep learning today. And by the time you
Speaker 1: got to the end of the sentence, you can barely
Speaker 1: guess what the word is because the probabilities go down.
Speaker 1: But of course the results are exactly the opposite. As
Speaker 1: you hear the sentence, he can just the last work.
Speaker 1: None of this works. But that was some of his
Speaker 1: early work and it was considered quite surprising. By the
Speaker 1: mid fifties, George had significantly changed and became one of
Speaker 1: the founders of cognitive science. But when I got there
Speaker 1: in fifty one, this was orthodoxy. With a couple other
Speaker 1: things that happened. Claude Shannon had come along with information theory,
Speaker 1: the Shannon and Weaver book with Weavers kind of popularization
Speaker 1: and extension of the technical ideas was another bible. Cybernetics
Speaker 1: was another. Signal detection radio engineering was another, and they
Speaker 1: all kind of converged into a euphoria of which Scinerian
Speaker 1: behaviorism was a central part, a sense that we're cracking
Speaker 1: the last frontiers. When Brick and Watson came along fifty three,
Speaker 1: that enhanced the idea that we're now moving to a
Speaker 1: new era. It was called unified science in which we'd
Speaker 1: be able to we had the tools to deal with
Speaker 1: the problems that were called problems of mind and psychology.
Speaker 1: There were a couple of us who thought this was
Speaker 1: all nonsense. Three in fact, to three grad students, my
Speaker 1: friend Mars Halle, who I worked with till the end
Speaker 1: of his life, and Eric Leneberg, who also a grad student.
Speaker 1: He went on in later years to found modern biology
Speaker 1: of language. But the three of us just didn't believe
Speaker 1: any of it. We thought it made no sense. We
Speaker 1: began reading European comparative the college, Tenberg and Lawrence others
Speaker 1: looked at comparative psychology work, and I was introduced by
Speaker 1: a friend, my Shapiro and art historian suggested that I
Speaker 1: should read Carl A. Ashley's Serial Order and Behavior, which
Speaker 1: was a very important article back in around nineteen fifty,
Speaker 1: which just knocked the props out of the whole behavior system.
Speaker 1: Nobody knew it. I mean, neurologists knew it. It was
Speaker 1: in the neuroscience literature, but psychologists and I think others
Speaker 1: were totally unaware of it. When I wrote about it
Speaker 1: for the first time in a review of Skinner's herb
Speaker 1: Behavior went to Press nineteen fifty seven, but that I
Speaker 1: think was the first mention of it in the general
Speaker 1: coology and cognitive science literature, so that these were things
Speaker 1: that we were Eric went on to start writing articles
Speaker 1: on He was doing a good deal of work at
Speaker 1: the time on various a variant forms of linguistic behavior,
Speaker 1: studying pathologies, early studies on use of SNIGN, cognitive deficiencies,
Speaker 1: and language and neural deficiencies. And this went on to
Speaker 1: become his Biology of Language book, very very important book,
Speaker 1: Biological Foundations of Language. But at first it was essentially
Speaker 1: the three of us. Then George Miller got interested in
Speaker 1: lin linked up with Jerry Brunner, who was formed the
Speaker 1: Cognitive Science group at Harvard, spent a year there. I
Speaker 1: was working quite a lot with George Miller in the
Speaker 1: mid fifties, books a couple of arrables together, taught together,
Speaker 1: and so on, and then it just kind of expanded,
Speaker 1: linked up to some extent with the early work and
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence Simon Simon and Newell, Marvinsky and McCarthy, and
Speaker 1: by the early sixties it become kind of a fairly
Speaker 1: I can't say integrated, because there are a lot of
Speaker 1: internal disputes, but interlinked approach to many questions the euphoria,
Speaker 1: but then had pretty much anticipated you get it. You
Speaker 1: can get a good sense of it by reading the
Speaker 1: Yoshu of Barholal's essays around nineteen sixty five. He's an Israeli,
Speaker 1: a logician who was a regular visitor to Porlely Research
Speaker 1: Level Electronics MIT, which was kind of the center of
Speaker 1: most of it. And at first he was very much
Speaker 1: a partisan of the euphoric hopes. But by the mid
Speaker 1: sixties he was a close personal friend also back from
Speaker 1: about nineteen fifty, but he had pretty much come around
Speaker 1: to agree with the skeptical approach and wrote some retrospectives
Speaker 1: about it which are quite interesting and knowledgeable. Around the
Speaker 1: mid sixties. I can get a sense from his work
Speaker 1: that's kind of what it was like in the early
Speaker 1: days in Cambridge. There was no linguistics. I was practically
Speaker 1: the only linguist. The romaniocopsin was there, but from the
Speaker 1: European tradition, but there were no American linguists. In fact,
Speaker 1: about the only person it was an American linguistics tradition
Speaker 1: factor consensus, but it was quite different in character. It
Speaker 1: was it was described its proponents described as a taxonomic
Speaker 1: science set of procedures which you could apply to any
Speaker 1: purpose of data. It would identify the elements and their
Speaker 1: distributional arrangement. That was linguistics. That's basically my own background.
Speaker 1: This was quite different. So what was it like? You know,
Speaker 1: was there a great excitement in the air. Did you
Speaker 1: feel like you were you were leading a revolution at
Speaker 1: the time or was it only in retrospect that you
Speaker 1: realized it was a revolution? Well, myself, I thought it
Speaker 1: was just a personal hobby. I took for granted that
Speaker 1: the consensus of American linguists had to be on the
Speaker 1: right track, and this was a totally different approach. But
Speaker 1: it was my own. A couple of others got interested
Speaker 1: in it. By by the mid fifties, we felt that
Speaker 1: we were pursuing something that should displace the I think
Speaker 1: it was the consensus, and as I say, none of
Speaker 1: us agreed with the None of us means three or
Speaker 1: three of us with the behaviors, the dogmas that were
Speaker 1: rampant at the time, But never the question wasn't is
Speaker 1: it a revolution? But is this the right way to
Speaker 1: pursue things? Gradually I learned that there were anti students.
Speaker 1: As I say, we were reading European ethology, which had
Speaker 1: some similarities, and I began looking into the history a
Speaker 1: little further learned that there were much earlier tradition that
Speaker 1: had been totally forgotten some of that. So my own
Speaker 1: view in retrospect that you might call this the second
Speaker 1: cognitive Revolution. Turns out, in the seventeenth century, the time
Speaker 1: of the origin of modern science, a lot of things
Speaker 1: of this kind were happening. They didn't have what they lacked,
Speaker 1: and what we had was the period of computation didn't
Speaker 1: come along till mid twentieth century, so there were no
Speaker 1: tools for trying to explore the kinds of questions that
Speaker 1: they were raising. But I look back to Galileo as contemporary,
Speaker 1: as they recognized something very significant wasn't discovered later until
Speaker 1: I wrote about it the mid sixties, and almost nobody
Speaker 1: knows it now. But in fact, if you look back,
Speaker 1: the early founders of modern science, like Galileo, were just
Speaker 1: amazed by what they regarded as the most astonishing, remarkable
Speaker 1: fact in the world that with a few dozen symbols
Speaker 1: we could construct in our minds infinitely many thoughts and
Speaker 1: even convey to others who have no access to our minds,
Speaker 1: the innermost workings of our minds. The galileo, for example,
Speaker 1: alphabet was the most stupendous of human inventions because it
Speaker 1: enabled this miracle to take place. And of course it
Speaker 1: was understood that the alphabet was just representing some system
Speaker 1: in the mind which does the same thing, and that
Speaker 1: didn't develop. The tradition of what was called general and
Speaker 1: rational grammar through the eighteenth seventeenth eighteenth centuries, which tried
Speaker 1: to develop these ideas, but lacking the theory of computation,
Speaker 1: there was no way to formulate it. How do you
Speaker 1: formulate a computational process that captures these capacities. By the
Speaker 1: mid twentieth century, when I was a student, I was
Speaker 1: studying logic and recursive function theory, and you could see
Speaker 1: that that offered modern recursive function theory and theory of
Speaker 1: computation provided the tools in which you could proceed to
Speaker 1: develop computational systems which gave a recursive enumeration of the
Speaker 1: expressions of a language, basically expressions of thought. And you
Speaker 1: could find also provided means by which this could be
Speaker 1: translated into the map, into sensor, remote motor outputs and inputs,
Speaker 1: so you could link it to perception, production, learnability, how
Speaker 1: can it be acquired? All these questions on the agenda
Speaker 1: as soon as the skill together. Yeah, I'd love to
Speaker 1: double click there for a second on this idea of
Speaker 1: a neatness and this idea of learnability. What was unique
Speaker 1: about what you did was it was certainly not saying
Speaker 1: that learning doesn't matter at all in the process, but
Speaker 1: the learning of the language seemed to operate in a
Speaker 1: way that almost the language of the word learning doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to really conform to what psychologists tend to think
Speaker 1: of as learning during that time, it didn't seem to
Speaker 1: operate by those same sort of principles. I was wondering
Speaker 1: how your thoughts on this have evolved over the years,
Speaker 1: especially in light of Arthur Reeber's work, for instance, on
Speaker 1: implicit learning, showing that artificial grammars can be learned, that
Speaker 1: we are not sort of hardwired. I'm not a big
Speaker 1: fan of that phrase, but you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: hardwired to have that specific rule structure. But we perhaps
Speaker 1: maybe like through to statistical learning, we can learn languages,
Speaker 1: and so there's a lot less built in than maybe
Speaker 1: we once thought. And I'm wondering how you're current thinking
Speaker 1: of that is, all of these results are negative. They
Speaker 1: show you can't do anything. You can do it. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you have a bunch of supercomputers running and huge
Speaker 1: amounts of data and do a lot of statistical analysis,
Speaker 1: you can come close to approximating a set of phenomena,
Speaker 1: like you can come pretty close to approximating the sentences
Speaker 1: in the Wall Street Journal. That's a zero scientist interest.
Speaker 1: If you did a ton of statistical analysis of chemical experiments,
Speaker 1: let say you know, people mixing things in the laboratory
Speaker 1: and so on, you could get a fair approximation to
Speaker 1: what they're actually doing. Would I tell you anything about chemistry. Nothing.
Speaker 1: It's a game. It's a way of selling a propaganda
Speaker 1: for IBM, you know, or for Google these days. But
Speaker 1: it tells you absolutely nothing about the nature of the
Speaker 1: system and the way it's acquired and learned that human
Speaker 1: beings don't. A two or three year old child has
Speaker 1: mastered the basis of the language. We now know from
Speaker 1: statistical analysis the data available to a child that it's
Speaker 1: extremely empoverished. I mean sounds like the child is hearing
Speaker 1: millions of sentences. But when you take into account such
Speaker 1: elementary facts as Zip's law. You know this the rank
Speaker 1: frequency distribution, And it turns out that almost everything you
Speaker 1: barely hearing bigrams, let alone trigrams. So from the what's
Speaker 1: back in this is what's there is a problem that
Speaker 1: was understood in the early fifties called poverty of stimulus.
Speaker 1: How do you go from the empoverished stimuli available to
Speaker 1: the rich knowledge attained? It was obvious in the early
Speaker 1: fifties is a major problem. By now we know it's
Speaker 1: a much worse problem, far worse than was assumed, because
Speaker 1: because by now we have extensive studies, first of all
Speaker 1: of the data available, we don't have to guess anymore,
Speaker 1: and extensive studies of acquisition of language. None of that existed.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that not about the earliest age
Speaker 1: you can start testing that kids already have very rich
Speaker 1: knowledge which goes way beyond what they produce. This is
Speaker 1: work that's going on for fifteen sixty years. So the
Speaker 1: problem of poverty stimulus is overwhelming. Now. The deep learning
Speaker 1: approaches have no problem. That they have basically as much
Speaker 1: data as you want, vast amounts of data, huge amounts
Speaker 1: of computing capacity. And with that, what they get is
Speaker 1: kind of what you get if you did what I
Speaker 1: just suggested, looked at or takes an example closer to
Speaker 1: the language. I suppose that you did deep learning studies
Speaker 1: of the communication system of bees. You could get a
Speaker 1: fair prediction, probably pretty good predictions of what bees do.
Speaker 1: You know, bes start going out of the hive, they
Speaker 1: wander around, they find a flower, they they have the
Speaker 1: capacity of dead reckonings, or they go straight back to
Speaker 1: the hive. They waggle their wings and the other bees
Speaker 1: start fluttering around when they go to the flower. But
Speaker 1: they'll tell you anything about bee communication. Nothing. You know,
Speaker 1: It's not what when Frish was doing. It's not what
Speaker 1: other bee scientists do. They want to find that how
Speaker 1: it works. The fact that you can kind of approximate
Speaker 1: the phenomena just tells you a nothing. You can look
Speaker 1: at the phenomena without approximating, well, you know, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: of these implicit learning paradigms that I administered in my dissertation,
Speaker 1: like action time learning or artificial grammar learning. This formed
Speaker 1: a core basis of my dissertation. I was really interested
Speaker 1: to the extent to which there's individual differences where people
Speaker 1: can soak up the probabilistic rule structure of something unconsciously,
Speaker 1: you know, without their conscious awareness. And I found that
Speaker 1: people or some people are better at it than others,
Speaker 1: but overall, you know, most people. I debriefed them afterwards,
Speaker 1: I said, did he notice that fifteen percent of the
Speaker 1: time this sequence it followed this sequence? Eighty five percent
Speaker 1: of the time it followed that sequence, and that you
Speaker 1: got faster at the reaction time for the eighty five percent.
Speaker 1: And they had no idea, you know, consciously that they
Speaker 1: learned these things. And these were artificial you know, languages,
Speaker 1: These are not, you know, something that we evolved. And
Speaker 1: so do you think that's telling us anything about how
Speaker 1: much is build in versus how much is not building?
Speaker 1: Because I think it might. I think it does tell
Speaker 1: us something tells you something about human cognition. But I
Speaker 1: think it's a mistake to use the word artificial. Languages
Speaker 1: nothing to do with languages. I mean, these are data
Speaker 1: sets that have may are constructed to share some of
Speaker 1: the superficial properties of languages. But it tells you absolutely
Speaker 1: nothing about how language is acquired, certainly not acquired this way.
Speaker 1: I mean, as I say, if you take a look
Speaker 1: at the actual data available to children. You don't even
Speaker 1: get a lot of biagrams, let alone trigrams. And this
Speaker 1: is not there because what you're what the kid is
Speaker 1: hearing mostly is the function words, the end of and
Speaker 1: so on. And then you look at the rank frequency distribution,
Speaker 1: it goes very sharply down in tails, often to a
Speaker 1: long tail. So I mean there's some statistical learning, but
Speaker 1: very much at the margins, you know. So there's nothing
Speaker 1: wrong with the experiments they're studying. They're interesting things to
Speaker 1: study about cognition. And of course everything goes on unconsciously,
Speaker 1: like you and I have absolutely no awareness of the
Speaker 1: rules that we're following in this conversation, way beyond the
Speaker 1: levels of consciousness. I mean, people are deluded to think
Speaker 1: that what we call inner speech is somehow our thinking processes.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not. What we call inner speech is a pale
Speaker 1: reflection of the externalized form of what's going on in
Speaker 1: our minds. And if you actually think about it's just
Speaker 1: bits and pieces of fragments. Our construction of sentences in
Speaker 1: our minds is vastly more quipped than what we call
Speaker 1: inner speech, and you can see it very simply by
Speaker 1: just doing things like reading out loud, which is much
Speaker 1: slower than reading. You can read a page in a
Speaker 1: fraction of the time and understand it of reading it,
Speaker 1: because the externalization is just very much slowing everything down.
Speaker 1: There's all kind of stuff going on in our minds.
Speaker 1: We can study it the way we study be communication
Speaker 1: from the outside. Can't introspect into it totally beyond the
Speaker 1: level of consciousness. How do you link some of this
Speaker 1: to modern day behavioral genetics? What do you think of
Speaker 1: the field of modern day behavioral genetics? And you know,
Speaker 1: obviously those tools weren't available to you when you first
Speaker 1: when you first started in the field, and I was
Speaker 1: worrying sort of what your your own sort of thinking
Speaker 1: about about that is in terms of what tells us
Speaker 1: about a neatness? Well, now it tells us. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's an important field. It's an important field for biology,
Speaker 1: but it's very far from accounting for even much simpler
Speaker 1: traits than language. There was a lot of enthusiasm when
Speaker 1: the genome project came along about all the things that
Speaker 1: were going to follow from it. But what we've mainly
Speaker 1: learned is do you have a clue how instructions in
Speaker 1: the DNA turn into an organism. I mean, even just
Speaker 1: figuring out how you get protein folding you can barely
Speaker 1: do by Now that's an area where AI has made
Speaker 1: some contributions. But that's remember the bare beginning of what
Speaker 1: makes an organism. It's good to study these things, but
Speaker 1: you should study simple traits, not a very complex trait
Speaker 1: like language, which is going to be way out of
Speaker 1: sight for any such investigations, or intelligence, whatever intelligence is.
Speaker 1: What do you think intelligence is? Well, all I can
Speaker 1: tell you is that I, for about sixty years was
Speaker 1: on admissions committees for graduate courses at MIT, which has
Speaker 1: pretty high standards. You can pick maybe five percent of
Speaker 1: the applicants and they're all very highly qualified. I can't
Speaker 1: remember once when anybody ever suggested looking at IQ. Nobody cares.
Speaker 1: It's totally irrelevant. That's not the kind of thing you look.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you find the same thing. I mean, you've
Speaker 1: been on commission on admissions commissions. We'll ever look at IQ. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, SAT is a is correlated with IQ, very
Speaker 1: very highly, right, So it's subconsciously if we look at
Speaker 1: SAT or indirectly, or are we select for IQ. I
Speaker 1: don't know about you, but we looked at SAT as
Speaker 1: a kind of a marginal phenomenon enough some interest. For example,
Speaker 1: if some kid an applicant is just all as you know,
Speaker 1: top flight in every area, and the SAT we regarded
Speaker 1: that as kind of negative, probably means he has no
Speaker 1: special interests and no ingenuity and creativity. If you get
Speaker 1: somebody who does very well in some areas and very
Speaker 1: poorly in others, you want to take a second look.
Speaker 1: Maybe there's some maybe there's some spark here that makes
Speaker 1: him do creative work and put aside things he's not
Speaker 1: interested in. So it's something, but I don't think it's
Speaker 1: much of a criterion. Of course, if somebody's score is
Speaker 1: very low in everything, you think, well, probably not qualified. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it sounds like you're challenging this idea of general
Speaker 1: intelligence as being the most important or even important at
Speaker 1: all for college admissions and what about life more broadly?
Speaker 1: You know you can find something, Okay, I don't think
Speaker 1: it's a very interesting characteristic. Well what's interesting or for
Speaker 1: you think take a look at I mean, I've had
Speaker 1: many years to look back. I'm sure you have to,
Speaker 1: not as many as you, yeah, not as many as
Speaker 1: But when you look back and you ask all of
Speaker 1: these kids who came into mi T were very highly qualified.
Speaker 1: Some of them had very distinguished careers, did a lot
Speaker 1: of exciting work. Others just did routine, uh technical work,
Speaker 1: you know, perfectly competent, but like it adds a brick
Speaker 1: here and there to which you know, if you look back,
Speaker 1: it's pretty hard to find the distinguishing characteristics. Actually, I
Speaker 1: was in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is
Speaker 1: a very highly selective of three or four year research
Speaker 1: graduate fellowship, no duties or responsibilities, and that they tried
Speaker 1: to have very high standards for selection and occasionally look
Speaker 1: back and try to do the same judgments and the
Speaker 1: same story. You can't tell. These are really matters of
Speaker 1: character in many ways, more than technical more than mental ability.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're going to have somebody who's a you know,
Speaker 1: a math genius, but will never discover anything. It just
Speaker 1: doesn't have the right right characteristics. Yeah, I really, I
Speaker 1: really appreciate that. You know, even creativity, we you know,
Speaker 1: we find a distinctionary research between creativity and intelligence. You know,
Speaker 1: I'd like to talk about creativity a little bit because
Speaker 1: this is a topic that you've talked about in other
Speaker 1: you know, sort of even a political sort of way
Speaker 1: in terms of what societies can help us thrive and
Speaker 1: are most likely in conducive to autonomy and human freedom
Speaker 1: and creativity. How do you define creativity? Like, how do
Speaker 1: you even conceptualize that such a word? I wouldn't try
Speaker 1: to define it. The only terms you can really define
Speaker 1: are within well grounded explanatory theories. So if you're working
Speaker 1: in physics, you can give a technical definition of energy
Speaker 1: within the framework. But if you were to ask me
Speaker 1: how I define energy, ordinary life can give you something
Speaker 1: descriptive description, but no definition. There are definitions outside of
Speaker 1: very narrow sectors of carefully constructed theoretical systems. But creativity
Speaker 1: is the ability to First of all, it's the ability
Speaker 1: to be puzzled by things. You have to start with that.
Speaker 1: There are infants have that capacity. They're puzzled by everything.
Speaker 1: They're constantly asking questions that can't stop. Is annoying. You know,
Speaker 1: how what's this? How does that work? You know? If
Speaker 1: you're a parent, drive you bananas. They want to the
Speaker 1: world's very puzzling, strange. They want to understand it. That's
Speaker 1: driven out of people's heads in many ways, parked by
Speaker 1: the educational system part in other ways, But there are
Speaker 1: some people who retain it, and in fact, if you
Speaker 1: look at the great moments of history of science, pretty
Speaker 1: much what they were. So take say, the Scientific Revolution
Speaker 1: seventeenth century, the great science that really changed science practically,
Speaker 1: it basically was based on being puzzled. Galileo's contemporaries were
Speaker 1: just dissatisfied with the what we're called explanations of things.
Speaker 1: So why do balls fall to the ground, Well, it
Speaker 1: was an explanation, that's their natural place. They're attracted to
Speaker 1: the earth. They didn't regard that as an explanation. As
Speaker 1: soon as they began looking at it, they found that
Speaker 1: we don't really understand and in fact all that was
Speaker 1: believed turns out to be wrong, Like it was universally
Speaker 1: taken for granted that a heavy lead ball full faster
Speaker 1: than a small lead ball. Galileo showed by thought experiments incidentally,
Speaker 1: never carry any experiments by thought experiments ingenious thought experiments,
Speaker 1: so this can't be the case. And that's what happens
Speaker 1: when you're puzzled. A pillion people are willing to question orthodoxy,
Speaker 1: not as to accept it because that's what everybody says,
Speaker 1: but to be to want an argument for it, to
Speaker 1: challenge it. Sometimes it's right, you get convinced. Sometimes you see,
Speaker 1: it's just dogma. And behaviorism was like that. It was
Speaker 1: just dogma. It's soon as it began to look at
Speaker 1: it carefully, totally fell apart. But it's hard to do that.
Speaker 1: There were people who did like lashly for example, and
Speaker 1: wore ignored. But if enough people do it, they began
Speaker 1: to interact, They start to try to work out real answers.
Speaker 1: They keep finding flaws in their own end answers, address those.
Speaker 1: Then you get creative work. But how to pick it
Speaker 1: up among people? I can't say yeah or pick it up.
Speaker 1: But the other interesting question is how can we bring
Speaker 1: it out of people in a society. I really, you know,
Speaker 1: do you remember that that conversation you have with Fuco?
Speaker 1: Does that? Does that ring a bell? That that legendary
Speaker 1: conversation you know? I remember it? Of course? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm obviously you do. I'm joking. But it's
Speaker 1: a it's a very uh well watched video and and debate.
Speaker 1: But I'm just very interested in the discussion you had
Speaker 1: with them about about creativity. You too, seem to have
Speaker 1: very differing views of what the essential question there is
Speaker 1: for for how society should be organized and UH and
Speaker 1: and issues of the role of justice for creativity. I
Speaker 1: was wondering a few thoughts about that have have changed
Speaker 1: over the year. I mean, as I understand Fucau's position,
Speaker 1: at least from what I got out of the discussion
Speaker 1: and reading his work. He doesn't seem to think seems
Speaker 1: to think that everything just as a matter of who
Speaker 1: has more power than others. So it's a matter of
Speaker 1: distribution of power. And if you want to take a
Speaker 1: political position, say, at that time he was pretty committed
Speaker 1: sort of French style Marxist malice. So we're on the
Speaker 1: side of the proletariat and we want them to win.
Speaker 1: And if you ask, as I did, ask, if you
Speaker 1: look back at the they suppose it turns out that
Speaker 1: what the proletariat will institute is inhuman, destructive, cruel and
Speaker 1: so on, does that mean we oppose it? He said, no,
Speaker 1: it's just a matter of which side you're on. There's
Speaker 1: no right or wrong, there's no questions of justice, there's
Speaker 1: no basic human nature, just which power system it takes control.
Speaker 1: That may be a caricature, I'm not sure, but that's
Speaker 1: what I understood is position to be what I understood
Speaker 1: it as well, I totally reject it. I think there's
Speaker 1: a fundamental human nature. We don't understand much about it,
Speaker 1: but we can try to discover it. My guess, partly
Speaker 1: from experience, partly from study, partly from wish fulfillment, is
Speaker 1: that the goal of human beings is to be free
Speaker 1: and independent, the creative, not controlled by others, under pursuing
Speaker 1: their own free and independent interests. This is the basic
Speaker 1: Enlightenment position. So what you find they're so humble, the
Speaker 1: other great figures of the Enlightenment, and it's the origins
Speaker 1: of classical liberalism just won't have been forgotten. That's the reason,
Speaker 1: for example, why working people in the nineteenth century early
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution were bitterly opposed to the wage labor, regarded
Speaker 1: as a fundamental assault on human dignity and human rights.
Speaker 1: In fact, that was a very standard position at the time,
Speaker 1: because in fact, the slogan of the Republican Party that
Speaker 1: wage wage labor, what they called wage slavery, is no
Speaker 1: different from slavery except that it's temporary at the magram Lincoln,
Speaker 1: And in fact that's the whole classical liberal tradition, there's
Speaker 1: way back to the Greeks and the Romans. That's a
Speaker 1: modern idea that having a job is a good thing. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that the tradition is probably right that people
Speaker 1: don't want to be subject to masters. I don't care
Speaker 1: whether the masters are the Central Committee or the corporate
Speaker 1: fact about the same thing. But that's a guess about
Speaker 1: human nature. I can't demonstrate it today. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: really good point. I'm trying to think a lot about
Speaker 1: the modern day. You know, these social justice movements we're
Speaker 1: seeing today with Black Lives Matter, and there's I don't
Speaker 1: know if you're familiar with the term woke or wokeness,
Speaker 1: and there are some people criticize wokeness, And then I'm
Speaker 1: trying to think, you know, do you ever hear anything
Speaker 1: from some of the arguments coming from what some would
Speaker 1: call woke sort of denying a human nature? And you know,
Speaker 1: because a lot of them really are big fans of Foco,
Speaker 1: you know, do you ever do you have any criticize,
Speaker 1: criticisms of maybe some of the methods used in modern
Speaker 1: day social justice movements that have moved us away from
Speaker 1: the classical liberal sort of ideal. Well, I think they
Speaker 1: don't understand the classical liberal ideal. They regard the classical
Speaker 1: liberal ideal as modern capitalism, very far from that they
Speaker 1: do and even sometimes maybe viewed as modern day conservatism.
Speaker 1: You know what modern day conservatism, in my view, is
Speaker 1: extreme authoritarianism. Well, libertarian in the United States is almost fascism.
Speaker 1: It's the most extreme form of subordination to power. It's
Speaker 1: just subordination to private power, and that's even worse than
Speaker 1: subordination to the state. I mean, if you're like, if
Speaker 1: you have a job in a factory, say, let alone
Speaker 1: an Amazon warehouse, you're under for most of your waking life.
Speaker 1: You're under the kind of control that Stalin couldn't have
Speaker 1: dreamt of. Like Stalin couldn't tell you that at three
Speaker 1: o'clock in the afternoon, you have five minutes to go
Speaker 1: to the bathroom, and you got to wear these clothes
Speaker 1: and on some other clothes, and this is the path
Speaker 1: you have to take when you're moving from here to there.
Speaker 1: I mean, people that lit alone an assembly line, which
Speaker 1: is kind of control that no dictator could even dream of,
Speaker 1: or a person working at a cash register just totally
Speaker 1: turned totally into an automaton under total control of an authority.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's extreme form of authoritarian control. We know
Speaker 1: one of those dogs. Mesh want question, kind of like
Speaker 1: behaviorism in nineteen fifty, is that this is a good thing.
Speaker 1: As I say, in the early Industrial Revolution, this was
Speaker 1: regarded as totally intolerable, built on basic human rights. Now
Speaker 1: it's considered the highest thing in life. I can get
Speaker 1: a job flipping Hamburg. That's it. I think that's so
Speaker 1: what you're saying about, there's no There are a lot
Speaker 1: of people like Fucoh and many others who say there's
Speaker 1: no human nature. That's first of all, it's insanity. It's
Speaker 1: like saying we're no different from cats. I mean, it's insane.
Speaker 1: You know, of course there's a human nature. What they
Speaker 1: mean is something different. They mean what they've probably mean,
Speaker 1: which makes sense, is that the particular social forms and
Speaker 1: arrangements in which we are integrated are subject to change.
Speaker 1: That's correct, that seems reasonable. But it's not going to
Speaker 1: turn us into into insects. It's not going to give
Speaker 1: us an insect visual system. It's not going to turn
Speaker 1: us into creatures that are incapable of language. I mean,
Speaker 1: we have a nature, and in fact it's very rigid
Speaker 1: and strict. Within it are variations and social and cultural
Speaker 1: and other arrangements that lead to variations. I mean, take
Speaker 1: say the visual system. Since we just think of the
Speaker 1: classical experimental work Hubil and Weasel, for example on human
Speaker 1: un vision a male vision. I mean, what they show
Speaker 1: is that early, early modification of the visual system, story
Speaker 1: cortex can lead to radical changes in the phenotype and
Speaker 1: the outcome that appears. It doesn't happen with us because
Speaker 1: we all have about the same visual experience. But if
Speaker 1: there was a mangle around who could stick electrodes into
Speaker 1: our visual cortex or control the stimuli that we see,
Speaker 1: we'd have totally different visual systems that the as adults
Speaker 1: maybe no visual system a cat. As they showed, if
Speaker 1: you deprive a kitten of structured visual stimuli for the
Speaker 1: first couple of weeks of life, it's essentially blind. The
Speaker 1: analytics systems just degenerate. Okay, that means and it's kind
Speaker 1: of the same as speaking different languages. But the point
Speaker 1: is you can't change an mammalian visual system into an
Speaker 1: insect visual system with compound eyes. That's mammalian nature. Within
Speaker 1: mammalian nature, there's a lot of possible options within human nature.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of possible options, and it's the options
Speaker 1: that interest us as human beings. We take for granted
Speaker 1: what's common to us, kind of like sports, Like when
Speaker 1: you go to the Olympic, you don't see a competition
Speaker 1: and walking across the room has anybody to do that?
Speaker 1: You see competitions and things that humans are no good
Speaker 1: at all, like pole holding. So if you go way
Speaker 1: to the edges of human competence and start to find
Speaker 1: differences among people, but the overwhelming mass of competence is
Speaker 1: just shared, well, I agree. I mean this idea of
Speaker 1: there being a common human nature and a shared common
Speaker 1: humanity sometimes I feel like gets at odds with the
Speaker 1: massive divisions we see today through identity, you know, political
Speaker 1: identity is being the first and foremost thing that is
Speaker 1: the most important thing about a person these days, or
Speaker 1: or or gender identity, you know, you know, the use
Speaker 1: of linguistics right now is very interesting in how we
Speaker 1: see a proliferation of gender pronouns, you know, far beyond
Speaker 1: the sex biological sex binary you know, what what do you?
Speaker 1: What do you uh? What are your thoughts on on
Speaker 1: this and how we can balance the need to want
Speaker 1: to appreciate someone's personal identity and the things that divide us,
Speaker 1: but while at the same time not forgetting that there
Speaker 1: is a common humanity, there is a common human nature
Speaker 1: that that you're talking about. Well, first of all, let's
Speaker 1: let's try to take the standpoint of uh an an
Speaker 1: observer who looks at us the way we look at frogs. Okay,
Speaker 1: that an observer would say they're all identical. There are
Speaker 1: minor variations between them right around the extreme periphery. Just
Speaker 1: as if we look at frogs, we say frogs frog,
Speaker 1: But if you really started looking closely at different frogs,
Speaker 1: you find slight differences in the way they do things. Well,
Speaker 1: as a frog, you're interested in the differences. They don't
Speaker 1: care about the fact that we're all frogs that you
Speaker 1: just take for granted. Yea interested in what's a little
Speaker 1: bit different between this frog and that frog. But from
Speaker 1: the point of view of us looking at frogs so
Speaker 1: minor you can't even see it. That's the same with
Speaker 1: this what pronoun you use. From the point of view,
Speaker 1: the nature of humans is so marginal you need a
Speaker 1: microscope to be detected. But for human life, that's what matters.
Speaker 1: We don't care. We don't even pay attention to the
Speaker 1: fact that we're all fundamentally humans that we just take
Speaker 1: for granted. What's interesting to us in our lives is
Speaker 1: these very slight differences around the edges. Do you say
Speaker 1: everyone thought he was here, or do you say everyone
Speaker 1: thought they were here? Or something? It's worth thinking about
Speaker 1: for human life, and it's important. So for example, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't like it if people called me a kite. Let's say,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't think there should be a law
Speaker 1: against it, but I certainly wouldn't like it. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: like it either. I wouldn't like it either. And it's
Speaker 1: the same. And if some woman feels she's being slighted,
Speaker 1: if you say when you mean anybody, okay, I can
Speaker 1: understand that too. Can you adjust to it? So you
Speaker 1: don't expect people to walk around talking about kikes and
Speaker 1: niggers and walps and so on. That's already internalized pretty recently. Incidentally,
Speaker 1: you go back not very long it was normal speech.
Speaker 1: Even even writing one of my favorite articles from I
Speaker 1: think it's Forbes magazine, the main business journal back in
Speaker 1: around nineteen thirty was thirty two early thirties When I
Speaker 1: was a kid, that was it was Fortune magazine had
Speaker 1: a front page cover saying the wasps are unwhopping themselves,
Speaker 1: meaning Mussolini's doing a good job. So the wops are
Speaker 1: unwhopping themselves. I don't think you say that now, I
Speaker 1: don't think so. So there's a positive, you know, the
Speaker 1: use of linguistics to help us with an appreciation of
Speaker 1: differences and respecting the uniqueness of an identity. Is it
Speaker 1: can be a positive thing in changing, you know, in
Speaker 1: quality in a society. Is that what you're saying, except
Speaker 1: that I would call it linguistics, just like I wouldn't
Speaker 1: call it physics. If I adjust the books on my
Speaker 1: desk so they don't fall, it's true it's physics, but
Speaker 1: I don't have to go to a physicist to find
Speaker 1: out about it. And it's the same in this case.
Speaker 1: Linguistics isn't going to tell you anything about whether they
Speaker 1: should say the walks are unwhelping themselves. Okay, I can
Speaker 1: describe it, but don't give the rules for it. It's
Speaker 1: not going to tell you whether to do it or not.
Speaker 1: But just like a physicist, I'm going to tell me
Speaker 1: how to adjust the books. These are parts of human life,
Speaker 1: which are way beyond the sciences of their comprehension. But yes,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a topic you have to be concerned about. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I think you have to have to ask yourself seriously,
Speaker 1: should we burn down the city of Washington because George
Speaker 1: Washington was a slave owner? Okay, I'm sure you can
Speaker 1: find some people to say we should. I don't think.
Speaker 1: So these are the judgments you have to make as
Speaker 1: a human being living in a complex society. So what
Speaker 1: do you think of the Black Lives Matter movement right now?
Speaker 1: And and and uh? And race being the topic of
Speaker 1: consciousness because I saw an interview you did about five
Speaker 1: years ago where you made a really good point about
Speaker 1: how races and slavery it's a core part human of
Speaker 1: our history as a country Americans, but it's not as
Speaker 1: big a part of our consciousness. And now it's becoming,
Speaker 1: you know, and now it's really in our consciousness. And
Speaker 1: I was wondering some of your thoughts on that. Now
Speaker 1: five years later, there's been a big change in the
Speaker 1: last few years among certain parts of the society, not
Speaker 1: the society in general. Society in general is very racist,
Speaker 1: shows up in all kinds of ways. A large part
Speaker 1: of the Trump volts, for example, is coming from deeply
Speaker 1: white supremacist circles, circles that don't feel themselves as racist,
Speaker 1: like I have black friends, you know, but just think
Speaker 1: the country is a white Christian country and it has
Speaker 1: to stay that way. That kind of white supremacy is
Speaker 1: very widespread. But on the other hand, there is a
Speaker 1: change in consciousness many circles. You can see it in
Speaker 1: the reaction to the George Floyd murder. Blacks have been
Speaker 1: murdered for a long time. This reaction was quite different, spontaneous,
Speaker 1: enormous in scale, way beyond anything in American history, and
Speaker 1: have widely supported at around sixty percent support, a lot
Speaker 1: of solidarity, sensible goals. It was a very striking phenomenon,
Speaker 1: led by Black Lives Matter organizers, but many others coming in. Well,
Speaker 1: that's one sign of serious changes. I want to see
Speaker 1: another sign. Take a look at this morning's New York Times.
Speaker 1: There's a very good op ed by Eric Fohner, fine
Speaker 1: historian calling for abolition, and what he's calling for is
Speaker 1: abolition of criminal labor, mostly black. He's a historian of abolitionism, reconstruction,
Speaker 1: the Civil War, and so on. He points out that
Speaker 1: the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery had a qualif patient it
Speaker 1: said forced labor is legitimate as a punishment that, as
Speaker 1: he discusses, was the opening that the South used to
Speaker 1: He says, we still have it today in private prisons
Speaker 1: where convicts are forced to work for ridiculously low wages
Speaker 1: for profit. Says we should really move on to abolition.
Speaker 1: He wouldn't have had that up a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1: It's a sign of the increasing consciousness and awareness of
Speaker 1: the really black history that is our actual dark, cruel history,
Speaker 1: its history that's part of our legacy. Now we've never
Speaker 1: grown out of it. Part of it the extermination of
Speaker 1: the indigenous populations and other part of it. And these
Speaker 1: are things that are gradually seeping into consciousness, not anywhere
Speaker 1: near enough. So there are holocaust museums all over the country.
Speaker 1: Try to find out how many museums there are for
Speaker 1: slavery of Nation of Indians. Yeah, I thought that was
Speaker 1: a good point. You made that point in that interview
Speaker 1: five years ago. There that you don't see, and I
Speaker 1: don't think we There has been many more slavery museums
Speaker 1: in that five years so that thought that was a
Speaker 1: really good point. So in some sense we're making progress
Speaker 1: and social progress in lots of ways. You're very pessimistic
Speaker 1: about the future. You've called Trump, you know, our current
Speaker 1: president right now, the worst criminal in human history. That's
Speaker 1: a pretty big that's a pretty big deal. Why more
Speaker 1: so than like Hitler did Hitler devote his energies to
Speaker 1: trying to destroy the possibility of human life on earth,
Speaker 1: to try to maximize the use of fossil fuels and
Speaker 1: to eliminate the regulatory system that provides some mitigation. Is
Speaker 1: condemning the human species to extinction? Are we going to
Speaker 1: survive another couple of if in the next few decades
Speaker 1: if we don't deal with the elimination of fossil fuels,
Speaker 1: we can be very confident that will have passed irreversible
Speaker 1: tipping points. Practically one hundred percent of climate scientists agree
Speaker 1: on this. I think it's a good point. But you
Speaker 1: know what I'm concerned about is, you know, Trump did win.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of people who didn't vote for
Speaker 1: him their primary The people that vote for him their
Speaker 1: primary concern You know, a lot of them were poor.
Speaker 1: You know, they were concerned about their own lives, they're
Speaker 1: concerned about what they're going to do, and I think,
Speaker 1: you know, i'd love to get your thoughts how we
Speaker 1: can get the Democrats to actually focus on reducing economic
Speaker 1: inequality and meaningful ways so they can bring on board
Speaker 1: and convince the poor and uneducated people to stop voting
Speaker 1: for you know, the next Trump, you know, or even
Speaker 1: Trump four years from now. You know, what can what
Speaker 1: can we do as Democrats? Well, I think that's right,
Speaker 1: but we should separate it from the former question. Is
Speaker 1: Trump the most dangerous criminal in human history? I think
Speaker 1: that's worth considering, and I think the evidence for it
Speaker 1: is overwhelming. Every time I say it, I say, here's
Speaker 1: an outrageous statement, very outrageous statement. Ask yourself if it's true. Okay,
Speaker 1: and nobody wants to think about it, so we turned
Speaker 1: to something else. But I think it's pretty important. Okay,
Speaker 1: but let's put it aside. So what can the Democrats do? Well,
Speaker 1: that's a very pertinent question. In fact, we've just seen
Speaker 1: what happens when they don't do anything. So take the
Speaker 1: November election. There's been a lot of There are areas
Speaker 1: of the country that voted for Trump that haven't voted
Speaker 1: for a Republican for one hundred years, and there's been
Speaker 1: a good deal of discussion of it. Like South Texas,
Speaker 1: Mexican American area, it's an oil economy, hadn't voted Republican
Speaker 1: since Harding. A lot of them voted for Trump, even
Speaker 1: some counties went for him. The reason. What they heard
Speaker 1: from their sources, Fox News, the White House, whatever they
Speaker 1: get their information from. What they heard is Biden wants
Speaker 1: to take away your job, destroy your community, destroy your businesses,
Speaker 1: devastate your families. Don't vote for him. Vote for Trump,
Speaker 1: who says I'm going to keep your jobs, keep your families,
Speaker 1: keep the oil production working, and so on. That's what
Speaker 1: they heard. Now, if the Democrats were a political party
Speaker 1: that had any concern for the general population instead of
Speaker 1: being committed to Wall Street and rich donors and the
Speaker 1: wealthy professional classes. If that were the case, they'd have
Speaker 1: had organizers down in South Texas saying, look, it's a
Speaker 1: fact that we're going to have to get off the
Speaker 1: oil based economy. There's just no debating that. That's like
Speaker 1: debating the weather. It's a fact. We have to face it. Now.
Speaker 1: Here's the way we can face it. We can face
Speaker 1: it with feasible, sustainable measures which will give you better jobs,
Speaker 1: better lives, better communities, happier existence. Here's the way to
Speaker 1: do it. But they didn't do that. Okay, so there's
Speaker 1: the answer your question. You don't you don't break through
Speaker 1: the propaganda. Yeah, that's what's going to happen. That's definitely
Speaker 1: one answer. Do you see any potential backlash from focusing
Speaker 1: too much, going too far left and that kind of
Speaker 1: being the main democratic talking points, you know, in terms
Speaker 1: of race and gender. Do you see any any potential
Speaker 1: problems with making that too much the central focus you
Speaker 1: can I'm in the atmosphere and many universities is by
Speaker 1: now toxic. Cancel culture. Are your trying to cancel culture?
Speaker 1: It's called cancel culture. It goes way beyond that. It's
Speaker 1: the disdain for people who use the wrong pronoun says
Speaker 1: a lot of young people in the universities feel they're
Speaker 1: walking on eggshells. If I say the wrong thing or
Speaker 1: do something that's slightly the wrong way, then it's the
Speaker 1: tragedy that'll be You know, I won't be killed, but
Speaker 1: you have to be expelled from the society. And if
Speaker 1: you go there far, you're doing completely the wrong thing totally.
Speaker 1: So it's possible to take important issues and to destroy
Speaker 1: them by just not handling them. Like what I said before,
Speaker 1: somebody came along and said, let's burn down Washington. That's
Speaker 1: you know, maybe you can make an argument for it.
Speaker 1: That's not the way to deal with the world. A
Speaker 1: lot of sensible way. What are your thoughts about defunding
Speaker 1: the police depends? Well, that's an interesting case use. If
Speaker 1: you just used the slogan defund the police, you're giving
Speaker 1: an enormous gift to the far right and pick it
Speaker 1: up and run with it. They love it. These guys
Speaker 1: want to take the police out of your community so
Speaker 1: that black criminals can come in and rob your house.
Speaker 1: I want that now. I suppose he did it insanely,
Speaker 1: the way many of the organizers did, the way Bernie
Speaker 1: Sanders did, the way Alexandria Causi Portes did. She was asked,
Speaker 1: what do you mean by defund the police, and her
Speaker 1: answer was, just go into any white suburb. That's what
Speaker 1: we mean by defund the police using drugs. You know,
Speaker 1: pick them up, beat them up, take them to jail, incarcerator.
Speaker 1: You deal with it sensibly through community services. You have
Speaker 1: the police when you need them, but they're not supposed
Speaker 1: to be involved in community service operations of family disputes, overdoses,
Speaker 1: mental health issues, because they're not these issues. That's community service.
Speaker 1: I think the police are in favor of that kind
Speaker 1: of defunded. Bernie Sanders did the same. He said, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what we want. We want police freed from publications
Speaker 1: that are none of their business and are just a burden.
Speaker 1: And in fact they are probably ninety percent of what
Speaker 1: they do. And let's fund let's have better pay for police,
Speaker 1: so it's more desirable, profession people, better trained, and have
Speaker 1: them focused on police work. But the things that should
Speaker 1: be done like they're done in a white soburb, they
Speaker 1: should be done everywhere. I lived in a suburb of Boston.
Speaker 1: Just give you an example. We were away for the
Speaker 1: summer and some neighbors called us up and said, somebody
Speaker 1: broke windows in your house. So we came back to
Speaker 1: see what happened. It turned out somebody had broken in
Speaker 1: so we called the Lexington police and it came over.
Speaker 1: The first thing they said is look in your medicine cabinet.
Speaker 1: We looked in our medicine cabinet, and yes, somebody had
Speaker 1: gone through it taking some stuff out, and they said,
Speaker 1: there is this kids in the neighborhood. We know who
Speaker 1: they are. We're not going to send them to jail.
Speaker 1: It's up to their parents and the community to discipline
Speaker 1: them and put them on the right path. That's the
Speaker 1: way to deal with it. I didn't want them to
Speaker 1: go to jail. I suppose it was a black community.
Speaker 1: You know what happened. Yeah, So when Cassio Cortez says,
Speaker 1: defund the police means make it look like a white server,
Speaker 1: that's a message that makes sense. Yeah, and that goes
Speaker 1: that transcends the slogan. You know, this just just just
Speaker 1: a superficial you know, just to fund the police, you know,
Speaker 1: without any nuance or yeah. Yeah, I agree. Well, thank
Speaker 1: you for giving me your point on that. You know,
Speaker 1: I am wondering, what's the biggest thing you were wrong
Speaker 1: about and change your mind over in your career A
Speaker 1: lot of things. I'm in in academy and professional work,
Speaker 1: scientific work all the time. Yeah. Right now I'm writing
Speaker 1: in the midst of an article which gets it, just
Speaker 1: works on problems that I didn't notice in earlier, things
Speaker 1: which are totally wrong enough to be fixed. That happens
Speaker 1: every day. So in scientific work, it's just that's what
Speaker 1: we're work. Is fine, mistakes, you direct them move on.
Speaker 1: In social political domains, not very much. I still believed
Speaker 1: pretty much when I believed as a young teenager. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are individual things that are wrong, like text day
Speaker 1: of the Vietnam War, which I devoted a lot of
Speaker 1: my life to. I started in the early sixties when
Speaker 1: it was very unpopular, but that was much too late.
Speaker 1: It started ten years earlier, but nobody even heard of it.
Speaker 1: By the early sixties, is already getting out of control.
Speaker 1: There are things like that. Well, do you have any regrets,
Speaker 1: like a big regret in terms of your academic work
Speaker 1: or your activism work something Maybe you've said that you regret.
Speaker 1: I can I mean an academic work, of course, says
Speaker 1: it's not really a matter of regrets. You made mistakes.
Speaker 1: You want to correct, not regret. That's discovery and learning
Speaker 1: and growing. In the general domain of life, of course,
Speaker 1: should have done differently. I have one final question. I
Speaker 1: want to be very respectful of your time. You have grandchildren, right,
Speaker 1: great great grandchildren. Okay, I can't see one of them's
Speaker 1: in Japan. I can't travel. Can you see them on
Speaker 1: Skype or on the screen anything like that? I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's me, you know, the world's you know. I was
Speaker 1: just wondering if you could give advice to your great grandchildren,
Speaker 1: you know, for the life that they're going to grow
Speaker 1: up to live in fifty years from now, you know,
Speaker 1: and when you probably won't be here. Who knows you
Speaker 1: may you may be here, but you know what sort
Speaker 1: of advice for them? And then you know that can
Speaker 1: that can just apply to to any young person listening
Speaker 1: to you right now, who really values and treasures your thoughts. Well,
Speaker 1: I never rate really gave any advice to my children.
Speaker 1: They didn't ask for it, then I didn't give it.
Speaker 1: I do get a lot of letters from young people
Speaker 1: these days asking for advice, and what I usually say
Speaker 1: is the only advice I know is if anybody tries
Speaker 1: to give you advice, put it aside. Figure it out
Speaker 1: for yourself, what kind of life you want, how to
Speaker 1: lead it. There's no general answers to you should live,
Speaker 1: no rules. There's cliches. You can give the cliches, but
Speaker 1: it's really up to you. You have to create your
Speaker 1: own life. But if you're an activist, if you're aspiring academic,
Speaker 1: you want to make the world a better place. You know,
Speaker 1: surely you have some bit of advice you could give
Speaker 1: to people hanging on your every word. Here I can
Speaker 1: repeat the cliches, they can figure them out for themselves. Okay,
Speaker 1: fair enough. I just want to thank you so much
Speaker 1: for this chat, but also just inspiring me in my
Speaker 1: own career and being such a legend. Good very Please
Speaker 1: talk to you bye, have a good one. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd
Speaker 1: like to react in some way to something you heard,
Speaker 1: I encourage you to join in on the discussion at
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