Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is
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Speaker 1: Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior,
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Speaker 1: episode I have a conversation with a guest who will
Speaker 1: stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and.
Speaker 2: The world to live in.
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Speaker 1: have Noam Chomsky on the podcast. Gnome is a public intellectual, linguist,
Speaker 1: and political activist. He's the author of many influential books,
Speaker 1: including Manufacturing Consent, The Political Economy of the Mass Media,
Speaker 1: and his latest with Robert Polm on Climate Crisis and
Speaker 1: the Green New Deal, The Political Economy of Saving the Planet.
Speaker 1: Chomsky is also known for helping initiate and sustain the
Speaker 1: cognitive revolution. He's Laureate Professor of Linguistics the University of Arizona,
Speaker 1: and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT. Thanks so much for
Speaker 1: meking time to chat with me today.
Speaker 2: Now, plead to be with you. Just had to take
Speaker 2: care of a dog.
Speaker 1: Is the dog okay?
Speaker 2: Yeah, just trying to horn in. I'm trying to shut
Speaker 2: him up. Down down, It's okay.
Speaker 1: If if he or she wants to participate in the podcast,
Speaker 1: that's fine with me.
Speaker 2: Usually she usually calms down and gets under the desk.
Speaker 1: Excellent. Well, so I'm a cognitive scientist by training, so
Speaker 1: i'm and I'm one of the things I'm really fascinated
Speaker 1: with 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 the Herb Simon, for instance, who was
Speaker 1: one of the ones who helped form this cognitive revolution
Speaker 1: as well. And I was wondering if you could we
Speaker 1: could trace a little bit, you know, in the sixties fifties,
Speaker 1: how did your work, you know, when linguistics intersect with
Speaker 1: the other work going on during that cognitive revolution at
Speaker 1: the time, the work on decision making and Marvin Minsky's work,
Speaker 1: How did all this stuff call ask that that epic?
Speaker 1: Can you take me back to the fifties sixties right now.
Speaker 2: Well, I knew Herb Simon and Marv Minsky Marv most
Speaker 2: of my life. We were colleagues. So the it was
Speaker 2: one of the strange that one of the core elements
Speaker 2: of the what's called the cognitive revolution, I don't like
Speaker 2: the term particularly, but one of the core elements, of course,
Speaker 2: was language. The other core element was visioned a couple
Speaker 2: of other things, and so we all knew each other.
Speaker 2: Of my own work was trying to construct theoretical accounts
Speaker 2: that would account for the capacity of humans to do
Speaker 2: what we're now doing. This core problem of the cognitive sciences.
Speaker 2: What's the nature of the capacity, how can an individual
Speaker 2: acquire it during their lifetimes, in fact, during their early childhood,
Speaker 2: and ultimately how could such a system evolve? Those are
Speaker 2: the core problems of the study of linguistics beginning around
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty. It's a pretty sharp break from structural linguistics,
Speaker 2: which had quite different goals and aspirations. I've actually written
Speaker 2: some about these years. If you want me to send
Speaker 2: you something, that'd be great, Yeah, just I have your email,
Speaker 2: so to do that'd.
Speaker 1: Be really great.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 2: Knew about it from childhood. But the real encounter was
Speaker 2: when I moved to Cambridge. I came to Harvard as
Speaker 2: a grad student in nineteen fifty one that I was
Speaker 2: basically studying philosophy. So I was a student of Fan
Speaker 2: Coins mainly, and he was one of the chief exponents
Speaker 2: of Skinner and Hawker and conditioning partent rigid form of behaviors,
Speaker 2: and Skinner's William James Lectures had just appeared a couple
Speaker 2: of years ago. Later became his book on language, and
Speaker 2: the drafts were very widely read, and it was influential,
Speaker 2: in part because of Coin's advocacy, and part it just
Speaker 2: did fit the tenor of the times very well. So
Speaker 2: it was kind of a bible when I got there.
Speaker 2: You look at say, George Miller's first early books. Out
Speaker 2: of the later ones, they're pretty strict behaviors. It was
Speaker 2: even you know, some of his early experiments were considered
Speaker 2: rather shocking and sounds kind of obvious, showing that you
Speaker 2: could understand a word better if it was in a sentence,
Speaker 2: then if it was in isolation, which shouldn't happen on
Speaker 2: what should happen on rigid behavior, as Browns is that
Speaker 2: you're the first word of a sentence, then there's a
Speaker 2: certain probability for the next one, and kind of like
Speaker 2: what's done with deep learning today. And by the time
Speaker 2: you got to the end of the sentence, you can
Speaker 2: barely guess what the word is because the probably is
Speaker 2: go down. But of course the results are exactly the opposite.
Speaker 2: As you hear the sentence, you can just the last work.
Speaker 2: None of this works, But that was some of his
Speaker 2: early work and it was considered quite surprising. By the
Speaker 2: mid fifties, George had significantly changed and became one of
Speaker 2: the founders of cognitive science. But when I got there
Speaker 2: in fifty one, this was orthodox with a couple other
Speaker 2: things that happened. Claude Shannon had come along with information theory.
Speaker 2: The Shannon and Weaver book, with Weaver's kind of popularization
Speaker 2: and extension of the technical ideas, was another bible. Cybernetics
Speaker 2: was another. Signal detection radio engineering was another, and they
Speaker 2: all kind of converged into a four area of which
Speaker 2: Scinierian behaviorism was a central part a sense that we're
Speaker 2: cracking the last frontiers. When Krick and Watson came along
Speaker 2: fifty three, that enhanced the idea that we're now moving
Speaker 2: to a new era. It was called unified science, and
Speaker 2: which we'd be able to we had the tools to
Speaker 2: deal with the problems that were called problems of mind
Speaker 2: and psychology. There were a couple of us who thought
Speaker 2: this was all nonsense. Three in fact, to three grad students,
Speaker 2: my friend Mars Halle, who I worked with till the
Speaker 2: end of his life, and Eric Lenneberg, who also a
Speaker 2: grad student. He went on in later years to found
Speaker 2: modern biology of language. But the three of us just
Speaker 2: didn't believe any of it. We thought it made no sense.
Speaker 2: We began reading European comparative pathology, Tinberg and Lawrence others
Speaker 2: looked at comparative psychology work, and I was introduced by
Speaker 2: a friend, Mar Shapiro, and art historian suggests that I
Speaker 2: should read Carl A. Ashley's Serial Order and Behavior, which
Speaker 2: was a very important article back in around nineteen fifty,
Speaker 2: which just knocked the props out of the whole behavior system.
Speaker 2: Nobody knew it. I mean, neurologists knew it. It was
Speaker 2: in the neuroscience literature, but psychologists and I think and
Speaker 2: others were totally unaware of it when I wrote about
Speaker 2: it for the first time in a review of Skinner's
Speaker 2: or Behavior the Press nineteen fifty seven, But that, I
Speaker 2: think was the first mention of it in the general
Speaker 2: psychology cognitive science literature, so that these were things that
Speaker 2: we were Eric went on to start writing articles on
Speaker 2: He was doing a good deal of work at the
Speaker 2: time on various a variant forms of linguistic behavior, studying pathologies,
Speaker 2: early studies on use of SNIGN, cognitive deficiencies in language,
Speaker 2: and neural deficiencies, and this went on to become his
Speaker 2: Biology of Language book, very very important book, Biological Foundations
Speaker 2: of Language. But at first it was essentially the three
Speaker 2: of us. Then George Miller interested link, linked up with
Speaker 2: Jerry Brunner, who was injured, formed the Cognitive Science Group
Speaker 2: at Harvard, spent a year there. I was working quite
Speaker 2: a lot with George Miller in the mid fifties, books,
Speaker 2: a couple of articles together, taught together, and so on,
Speaker 2: and then it just kind of expanded, linked up to
Speaker 2: some extent with the early work and artificial intelligence Simon
Speaker 2: Simon and Newell, har Minsky and McCarthy, and by the
Speaker 2: early sixties it become kind of a fairly i can't
Speaker 2: say integrated because there are a lot of internal disputes,
Speaker 2: but interlinked approach to many questions the euphoria, but then
Speaker 2: had pretty much anticipated you get it. You can get
Speaker 2: a good sense of it by reading theoshu of Barhelil's
Speaker 2: essays around nineteen sixty five. He's an Israeli, a logician
Speaker 2: who was a regular visitor to Pralely Research Level Electronics MIT,
Speaker 2: which was kind of the center of most of it.
Speaker 2: And at first he was very much a partisan of
Speaker 2: the euphoric hopes, but by the mid sixties he was
Speaker 2: a close personal friend also back from about nineteen fifty,
Speaker 2: but he had pretty much come around to agree with
Speaker 2: the skeptical approach and wrote some retrospectives about it which
Speaker 2: are quite interesting and knowledgeable around the mid sixties. You
Speaker 2: can get a sense from his work that's kind of
Speaker 2: what it was like in the early days in Cambridge.
Speaker 2: There was no linguistics. Practically the only linguist, the romaniocopsin
Speaker 2: was there. But from the European tradition, but there were
Speaker 2: no American linguists, so I was, in fact about the
Speaker 2: only person there was an American linguistics tradition factor consensus,
Speaker 2: but it was quite different in character. It was it
Speaker 2: was described its proponents described as a taxonomic science set
Speaker 2: of procedures, but you could apply to any purpose of data.
Speaker 2: It would identify the elements and their distributional arrangement. That
Speaker 2: was linguistics. That's basically my own background. This was quite different.
Speaker 1: So what was it like? You know, was there a
Speaker 1: great excitement in the air. Did you feel like you
Speaker 1: were you were leading a revolution at the time or
Speaker 1: was it only in retrospect that you realized it was
Speaker 1: a revolution?
Speaker 2: Well, myself, I thought it was just a personal hobby.
Speaker 2: I took for granted that the consensus of American linguists
Speaker 2: had to be on the right track, and this was
Speaker 2: a totally different approach. But it was my own. A
Speaker 2: couple of others got interested in it. By by the
Speaker 2: mid fifties, we felt that we were pursuing something that
Speaker 2: should displace the I think it was the consensus, and
Speaker 2: as I say, none of us agreed with the None
Speaker 2: of us means three or three of us with the
Speaker 2: behaviors dogmas that were rampant at the time, but never
Speaker 2: the question wasn't is it a revolution? But is this
Speaker 2: the right way to pursue things. Gradually I learned that
Speaker 2: there were ant of students, I say, we were reading
Speaker 2: European ethology, which had some similarities, and I began looking
Speaker 2: into the history a little further. Learned that there were
Speaker 2: much earlier tradition that had been totally forgotten some of that.
Speaker 2: So my own view in retrospect that you might call
Speaker 2: this the second cognitive revolution. Turns out, in the seventeenth century,
Speaker 2: the time of the origin of modern science, a lot
Speaker 2: of things of this kind were happening. They didn't have
Speaker 2: what they lacked, and what we had was the poria
Speaker 2: of computation didn't come along till mid twentieth century, so
Speaker 2: there were no tools for trying to explore the kinds
Speaker 2: of questions that they were raising. But I look back
Speaker 2: to Galileo as contemporary as they recognized something very significant
Speaker 2: wasn't discovered later until I wrote about it in the
Speaker 2: mid sixties, and almost nobody knows it now. In fact,
Speaker 2: if you look back, the early founders of modern science
Speaker 2: like Galileo, were just amazed by what they regarded was
Speaker 2: the most astonishing, remarkable fact in the world, that with
Speaker 2: a few dozen symbols we could construct in our minds
Speaker 2: infinitely many thoughts and even convey to others who have
Speaker 2: no access to our minds the innermost workings of our minds.
Speaker 2: The Galileo, for example, alphabet was the most stupendous of
Speaker 2: human inventions because it enabled this miracle to take place.
Speaker 2: Of course, it was understood that the alphabet was just
Speaker 2: representing some system in the mind which does the same thing,
Speaker 2: and that didn't develop. The tradition of what was called
Speaker 2: general and rational grammar through the eighteenth seventeenth eighteenth centuries,
Speaker 2: which tried to develop these ideas, but lacking the theory
Speaker 2: of computation, there was no way to formulate it. How
Speaker 2: do you formulate a computational process that captures these capacities.
Speaker 2: By the mid twentieth century, when I was a student,
Speaker 2: I was studying logic and recursive function theory, and you
Speaker 2: could see that that offered that modern recursive function theory
Speaker 2: and theory of computation provided the tools in which you
Speaker 2: could proceed to develop computational systems which a recursive enumeration
Speaker 2: of the expressions of the language basically expressions of thought,
Speaker 2: and you could find also provided means by which this
Speaker 2: could be translated into the map into sensor remote motor
Speaker 2: outputs and inputs, so you could link it to perception production, learnability,
Speaker 2: How can it be acquired? All these questions on the
Speaker 2: agenda as soon as this fell together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd love to double click there for a second
Speaker 1: on this idea of a neatness and this idea of learnability.
Speaker 1: What was unique about what you did was it was
Speaker 1: certainly not saying that learning doesn't matter at all in
Speaker 1: the process, but the learning of the language seemed to
Speaker 1: operate in a way that almost the language of the
Speaker 1: word learning doesn't seem to really conform to what psychologists
Speaker 1: tend to think of as learning. During that time, it
Speaker 1: didn't seem to operate by those same sort of principles.
Speaker 1: I was wondering how your thoughts on this have evolved
Speaker 1: over the years, especially in light of Arthur Reeber's work,
Speaker 1: for instance, on implicit learning, showing that artificial grammars can
Speaker 1: be learned that we are not sort of hardwired. I'm
Speaker 1: not a big fan of that phrase. But you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, hardwired to have that specific rule structure.
Speaker 1: But we perhaps maybe like through to statistical learning, we
Speaker 1: can learn languages, and so there's a lot less built
Speaker 1: in than maybe we once thought. And I'm wondering how
Speaker 1: you're current thinking of that is.
Speaker 2: All of these results are negative. They show you can't
Speaker 2: do anything you can do. I mean, if you have
Speaker 2: a bunch of supercomputers running and huge amounts of data
Speaker 2: and do a lot of statistical analysis, you can come
Speaker 2: close to approximating a set of phenomena, like you can
Speaker 2: come pretty close to approximating the sentences in the Wall
Speaker 2: Street Journal that's of zero scientific interest. If you did
Speaker 2: a ton of statistical analysis of chemical experiments that say,
Speaker 2: you know, people mixing things in the laboratory and so on,
Speaker 2: you could get a fair approximation to what they're actually doing.
Speaker 2: Would I tell you anything about chemistry. Nothing. It's a game.
Speaker 2: It's a way of selling a propaganda for IBM, you know,
Speaker 2: or for Google these days. But it tells you absolutely
Speaker 2: nothing about the nature of the system and the way
Speaker 2: it's acquired and learned that human beings don't. A two
Speaker 2: or three year old child has mastered the basis of
Speaker 2: the language. We now know from statistical analysis the data
Speaker 2: available to each child that it's extremely empoverished. I mean,
Speaker 2: sounds like the child is hearing millions of sentences. But
Speaker 2: when you take into account such elementary facts as Zip's law,
Speaker 2: you know this the rank frequency distribution, and it turns
Speaker 2: out that almost everything you barely in hearing bigrams, let
Speaker 2: alone trigrams. So from the what's back in this is
Speaker 2: what's there is a problem that was understood in the
Speaker 2: early fifties called poverty of stimulus. How do you go
Speaker 2: from the impoverished stimuli available to the rich knowledge attained?
Speaker 2: It was obvious in the early fifties is a major problem.
Speaker 2: By now we know it's a much worse problem, far
Speaker 2: worse than was assumed, because because by now we have
Speaker 2: extensive studies, first of all of the data available, we
Speaker 2: don't have to guess anymore, and extensive studies of acquisition
Speaker 2: of language. None of that existed at a time. And
Speaker 2: it turns out that at about the earliest age you
Speaker 2: can start testing that kids already have very rich knowledge,
Speaker 2: which goes way beyond what they produce. This is work
Speaker 2: that's going on for fifteen sixty years. So the problem
Speaker 2: of poverty stimulus is overwhelming. Now the deep learning approaches
Speaker 2: have no problem. That they have basically as much data
Speaker 2: as you want, vast amounts of data, huge amounts of
Speaker 2: computing capacity, and with that what they get is kind
Speaker 2: of what you get if you did what I just suggested, looked,
Speaker 2: looked at or takes an example closer to the language.
Speaker 2: Suppose that you did deep learning studies of the communication
Speaker 2: system of bees. Okay, you could get a fair prediction,
Speaker 2: probably pretty good predictions of what bees do. You know,
Speaker 2: bees start going out of the hive, they wander around,
Speaker 2: they find a flower, they right, they have the capacity
Speaker 2: of dead reckonings, or they go straight back to the hive.
Speaker 2: They waggle their wings and the other bees start fluttering
Speaker 2: around when they go to the flower. But they'll tell
Speaker 2: you anything about bee communication. Nothing. You know, it's not
Speaker 2: what when Frish was doing. It's not what other bee
Speaker 2: scientists do. They want to find that it works. The
Speaker 2: fact that you can kind of approximate to phenomena just
Speaker 2: tells you another thing. You can look at the phenomena
Speaker 2: without a activating.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I'm thinking of these implicit learning paradigms
Speaker 1: that I administered in my dissertation, like serial reaction time
Speaker 1: learning or artificial grammar learning. This formed a core basis
Speaker 1: of my dissertation. I was really interested to the extent
Speaker 1: to which there's individual differences where people can soak up
Speaker 1: the probabilistic rule structure of something unconsciously, you know, without
Speaker 1: their conscious awareness. And I found that people are some
Speaker 1: people are better at it than others, but overall, you know,
Speaker 1: most people. I debriefed them afterwards, I said, did he
Speaker 1: notice that fifteen percent of the time this sequence it
Speaker 1: followed this sequence, eighty five percent of the time it
Speaker 1: followed that sequence, and that you got faster at the
Speaker 1: reaction time for the eighty five percent. And they had
Speaker 1: no idea, you know, consciously that they learned these things.
Speaker 1: And these were artificial you know, languages, These are not,
Speaker 1: you know, something that we evolved. And so do you
Speaker 1: think that's telling us anything about how much is build
Speaker 1: in versus how much is not building? Because I think
Speaker 1: it might. I think it does tell us something tells.
Speaker 2: You something about human cognition. But I think it's a
Speaker 2: mistake to use the word artificial languages. Nothing to do
Speaker 2: with languages I mean, these are data sets that have
Speaker 2: may are constructed to share some of the superficial properties
Speaker 2: of languages, but it tells you absolutely nothing about how
Speaker 2: language is acquired, certainly not acquired this way. I mean,
Speaker 2: as I say, if you take a look at the
Speaker 2: actual data available to children, you don't even get a
Speaker 2: lot of biagrams, let alone trigrams. And this is not
Speaker 2: there because what the kid is hearing mostly is the
Speaker 2: function words, the end of and so on. And then
Speaker 2: you look at the rank frequency distribution, it goes very
Speaker 2: sharply down and tails often to a long tail. So
Speaker 2: I mean there's some statistical learning, but very much at
Speaker 2: the margins. So there's nothing wrong with the experiments they're studying.
Speaker 2: They're interesting things to study of cognition, and of course
Speaker 2: everything goes on unconsciously, like you and I have absolutely
Speaker 2: no awareness of the rules that we're following in this conversation,
Speaker 2: way beyond the levels of consciousness. I mean, people are
Speaker 2: deluded to think that what we call inner speech is
Speaker 2: somehow our thinking processes. Absolutely not. What we call inner
Speaker 2: speech is a pale reflection of the externalized form of
Speaker 2: what's going on in our minds. And if you actually
Speaker 2: think about it, it's just bits and pieces of fragments.
Speaker 2: Our construction of sentences in our minds is vastly more
Speaker 2: equipped than what we call in our speech, and you
Speaker 2: can see it very simply by just doing things like
Speaker 2: reading out loud, which is much slower than reading. You
Speaker 2: can read a page in a fraction at the time
Speaker 2: and understand it of reading it all because the externalization
Speaker 2: is just very much slowing everything down. There's all kind
Speaker 2: of stuff going on in our minds. We can study
Speaker 2: it the way we study becommunication from the outside that
Speaker 2: can't introspect into it totally beyond the level of consciousness.
Speaker 1: How do you link some of this to modern day
Speaker 1: behavioral genetics? What do you think of the field of
Speaker 1: modern day behavior genetics? And you know, obviously those tools
Speaker 1: weren't available to you when you first when you first
Speaker 1: started in the field, and I was worrying sort of
Speaker 1: what your own sort of thinking about about that is
Speaker 1: in terms of what tells us about a neatness.
Speaker 2: Well, now it tells us. It's an important field. It's
Speaker 2: an important field for biology, but it's very far from
Speaker 2: accounting for even much simpler traits than language. There was
Speaker 2: a lot of enthusiasm when the genome project came along
Speaker 2: about all the things that were going to follow from it.
Speaker 2: But what we've mainly learned is do you haven't a
Speaker 2: clue how instructions in the DNA turn into an organism?
Speaker 2: I mean, even just figuring out how you get protein
Speaker 2: folding you can barely do by Now that's an area
Speaker 2: where AI has made some contributions, but that's remember this
Speaker 2: the bare beginning of what makes an organism. It's good
Speaker 2: to study these things, but you should study simple traits,
Speaker 2: not a very complex trade life language which is going
Speaker 2: to be way out of sight for any such investigations.
Speaker 1: Or intelligence, whatever intelligence is. What do you think intelligence is?
Speaker 2: Well, all I can tell you is that I, for
Speaker 2: about sixty years was on admissions committees for graduate courses
Speaker 2: at MIT, which has pretty high standards. You can pick
Speaker 2: maybe five percent of the applicants and they're all very
Speaker 2: highly qualified. I can't remember once when anybody ever suggested
Speaker 2: looking at IQ. Nobody cares. It's totally irrelevant. That's not
Speaker 2: the kind of thing you look. I'm sure you find
Speaker 2: the same thing. I mean, you've been on commission on
Speaker 2: admissions commissions. Yeah, Ever look at IQ.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, sat is 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 selecting for IQ.
Speaker 2: I don't know about you, but we looked at SAT
Speaker 2: as a kind of a marginal phenomenon enough some interest.
Speaker 2: For example, if some kid an applicant is just all
Speaker 2: as you know, top flight in every area and the
Speaker 2: SAT we recorded that as kind of negative, probably means
Speaker 2: he has no special interests and no ingenuity and creativity.
Speaker 2: If you get somebody who does very well in some
Speaker 2: areas and very poorly in others, you want to take
Speaker 2: a second look. Maybe there's some maybe there's some sparks
Speaker 2: here that makes him do creative work and put aside
Speaker 2: things he's not interested in. So it's something, but I
Speaker 2: don't think it's much of a criterion. Of course, if
Speaker 2: somebody scores very low in everything, you think, well, probably
Speaker 2: not qualified.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it sounds like you're challenging this idea of
Speaker 1: general intelligence as being the most important or even important
Speaker 1: at all for college admissions and what about life more broadly?
Speaker 2: You know you can find something. Okay, I don't think
Speaker 2: it's a very interesting characteristic. Well, what's interesting or for
Speaker 2: you think, take a look at I mean, I've had
Speaker 2: many years to look back. I'm sure you have to,
Speaker 2: not as many as you, Yeah, not as many. But
Speaker 2: when you look back and you ask, all of these
Speaker 2: kids who came in MI t were very highly qualified.
Speaker 2: Some of them had very distinguished careers, did a lot
Speaker 2: of exciting work. Others just did routine technical work, you know,
Speaker 2: perfectly competent, but like it adds a brick here and
Speaker 2: there to which you know, if you look back, it's
Speaker 2: pretty hard to find the distinguishing characteristics. I was in
Speaker 2: the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is a very
Speaker 2: highly selective of three or four year research graduate fellowship,
Speaker 2: no duties or responsibilities, and that they tried to have
Speaker 2: very high standards for selection and occasionally look back and
Speaker 2: try to do the same judgments and the same story.
Speaker 2: You can't tell. These are really matters of character in
Speaker 2: many ways, more than technical more than mental ability. I mean,
Speaker 2: they're going to have somebody who's a you know, a
Speaker 2: math genius, but will never discover anything. This just doesn't
Speaker 2: have the right right characteristics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I really I really appreciate that, or you know,
Speaker 1: even creativity. We you know, we find a distinction oury
Speaker 1: research between creativity and intelligence. You know, I'd like to
Speaker 1: talk about creativity a little bit because this is a
Speaker 1: topic that you've talked about in in other you know,
Speaker 1: sort of even a political sort of way, in terms
Speaker 1: of what societies can help us thrive and are most
Speaker 1: likely in conducive to autonomy and human freedom and and creativity.
Speaker 1: How do you define creativity? Like, how do you even
Speaker 1: conceptualize that such a word?
Speaker 2: I wouldn't try to define it. The only terms you
Speaker 2: can really define are within well grounded explanatory theories. So
Speaker 2: if you're working in physics, you can give a technical
Speaker 2: definition of energy within the framework. But if you were
Speaker 2: to ask me how I define energy ordinary life, and
Speaker 2: can give you some descriptive description, but no definition. There
Speaker 2: aren't definitions outside of very narrow sectors of carefully constructed
Speaker 2: theoretical systems. But creativity, we is the ability to First
Speaker 2: of all, it's the ability to be puzzled by things.
Speaker 2: You have to start with that. There are infants have
Speaker 2: that capacity. They're puzzled by everything. They're constantly asking questions
Speaker 2: that can't stop. Is annoying, you know how what's this?
Speaker 2: How does that work? You know, if you're a parent,
Speaker 2: drive you bananas. They want to the world's very puzzling, strange.
Speaker 2: They want to understand it. That's driven out of people's
Speaker 2: heads in many ways worked by the educational system, part
Speaker 2: of another way. But there are some people who retain it.
Speaker 2: And in fact, if you look at the great moments
Speaker 2: of history of science, that's pretty much what they were.
Speaker 2: So take say, the scientific Revolution seventeenth century, the great
Speaker 2: science that really changed science practically, it basically was based
Speaker 2: on being puzzled. Galileo's contemporaries were just dissatisfied with the
Speaker 2: what we're called explanations of things. So why do alls
Speaker 2: fall to the ground, Well, it was an explanation, that's
Speaker 2: their natural place. They're attracted to the earth. They didn't
Speaker 2: regard that as an explanation. As soon as they began
Speaker 2: looking at it, they found that we don't really understand
Speaker 2: and in fact, all that was believed turns out to
Speaker 2: be wrong. Like it was versely taken for granted that
Speaker 2: a heavy lid ball full faster than a small lid
Speaker 2: ball until they showed by thought experiments incidentally, never carried
Speaker 2: any experiment by thought experiments, ingenious thought experiments. Should this
Speaker 2: can't be the case. And that's what happens when you're puzzled.
Speaker 2: Appillion people are willing to question orthodoxy, not as to
Speaker 2: accept it because that's what everybody says, but to be
Speaker 2: to want an argument for it, to challenge it. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it's right, you get convinced. Sometimes you see, it's just dogma.
Speaker 2: Behaviorism was like that, it was just dogma. It's soon
Speaker 2: as it began to look at it carefully, totally fell apart.
Speaker 2: But it's hard to do that. There were people who
Speaker 2: did like lastly, for example, and who were ignored. But
Speaker 2: if enough people do it begin to interact. Uh, they
Speaker 2: start to try to work out real answers. They keep
Speaker 2: finding flaws in their own answers, address those. Then you
Speaker 2: get creative work. But how to pick it out among people?
Speaker 1: I can't say or pick it up? But the other
Speaker 1: interesting question is how can we bring it out of
Speaker 1: people in a society? I really, you know, do you
Speaker 1: remember that that conversation you have with Fuco? Does that?
Speaker 1: Does that ring a bell? That that legendary conversation you know?
Speaker 2: I remember it? Of course? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I'm obviously you do I'm joking, but
Speaker 1: it's a it's a very 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 worrying a few thoughts about that have changed over
Speaker 1: the years.
Speaker 2: I mean, as I understand Fucau's position, at least from
Speaker 2: what I got out of the discussion and reading his work,
Speaker 2: he doesn't seem to think seems to think that everything
Speaker 2: just as a matter of who has more power than others.
Speaker 2: So it's a matter of distribution of power. And if
Speaker 2: you want to take a political position, say, at that
Speaker 2: time he was pretty committed sort of French style Marxist Maoist.
Speaker 2: So we're on the side of the proletariat and we
Speaker 2: want them to win. And if you ask, as I did, ask,
Speaker 2: if you look back at the they suppose it turns
Speaker 2: out that what the proletariat will institute is inhuman, destructive,
Speaker 2: cruel and so on, does that mean we oppose it?
Speaker 2: He said, no, it's just a matter of which side
Speaker 2: you're on, there's no right or wrong. There's no questions
Speaker 2: of justice, there's no basic human nature, just which power
Speaker 2: system it takes control. That may be a caricature, I'm
Speaker 2: not sure, but that's what I understood, is position to be.
Speaker 1: That's what I understood it as well.
Speaker 2: I totally reject it. I think there's a fundamental human nature.
Speaker 2: We don't understand much about it, but we can try
Speaker 2: to discover. My guess, partly from experience, partly from study,
Speaker 2: partly from wish fulfillment, is that the goal of human
Speaker 2: beings is to be free and independent, the creative, not
Speaker 2: controlled by others, under pursuing their own free and independent interests.
Speaker 2: This is the basic Enlightenment position which you find we're
Speaker 2: so humble other great figures of the Enlightenment, and it's
Speaker 2: the origins of classical liberalism just won't been forgotten. It's
Speaker 2: the reason, for example, why working people in the nineteenth
Speaker 2: century early Industrial Revolution were bitterly opposed to the wage
Speaker 2: labor regarded as a fundamental assault on human dignity and
Speaker 2: human rights. In fact, that was a very standard position
Speaker 2: at the time because, in fact, the slogan of the
Speaker 2: Republican Party that wage slavery, wage labor, what they called
Speaker 2: wage slavery, is no different from slavery, except that it's
Speaker 2: temporary on the program Lincoln. And in fact, that's the
Speaker 2: whole classical liberal tradition. There's way back to the Greeks
Speaker 2: and the Romans. That's a modern idea that having a
Speaker 2: job is a good thing. I think that the tradition
Speaker 2: is probably right that people don't want to be subject
Speaker 2: to masters. And I don't care whether the masters are
Speaker 2: the Central Committee or the the corporate sector about the
Speaker 2: same thing. But that's a guess about human nature. I
Speaker 2: can't demonstrate it today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a really good point. I'm trying to think
Speaker 1: a lot about the modern day. You know, these social
Speaker 1: justice movements we're seeing today with Black Lives Matter and theirs.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you're familiar with the term woke
Speaker 1: or wokeness, and there are some people criticize wokeness, and
Speaker 1: then I'm trying to think, you know, do you ever
Speaker 1: hear anything from some of the arguments coming from what
Speaker 1: some would call woke sort of denying a human nature,
Speaker 1: And and you know, because a lot of them really
Speaker 1: are big fans of foco. You know, do you ever,
Speaker 1: do you have any criticize, criticisms of maybe some of
Speaker 1: the methods used in modern day social justice movements that
Speaker 1: have moved us away from the classical liberal sort of ideal.
Speaker 2: Well, I think they don't understand the classical liberal ideal.
Speaker 2: They regard the classical liberal ideal as modern capitalism, very
Speaker 2: far from that they.
Speaker 1: Do and even sometimes maybe viewed as modern day conservatism.
Speaker 2: You know what modern day conservatism, in my view is
Speaker 2: extreme authoritarianism. Well, libertarian in the United States is almost fascism.
Speaker 2: It's the most extreme form of sport to power. It's
Speaker 2: just subordination to private power, and that's even worse than
Speaker 2: subordination to the state. I mean, if you're like, if
Speaker 2: you have a job in a factory, say let alone
Speaker 2: an Amazon warehouse, you're under for most of your waking life.
Speaker 2: You're under the kind of control that Stalin couldn't have
Speaker 2: dreamt of. Like Stalin couldn't tell you that at three
Speaker 2: o'clock in the afternoon, you have five minutes to go
Speaker 2: to the bathroom, and you got to wear these clothes
Speaker 2: and on some other clothes, and this is the past
Speaker 2: you have to take when you're moving from here to there.
Speaker 2: I mean people that lit alone on an assembly line,
Speaker 2: which is kind of control that no dictator could even
Speaker 2: dream of. Or a person working at a cash register
Speaker 2: just totally turned totally into an automaton under total control of
Speaker 2: an authority. I mean, that's an extreme form of authoritarian control.
Speaker 2: We know. One of those dogmas question kind of like
Speaker 2: behaviorism in nineteen fifty, is that this is a good thing.
Speaker 2: As I say, in the early Industrial Revolution, this was
Speaker 2: regarded as totally intolerable, built on basic human rights. Now
Speaker 2: it's considered the highest thing in life. I can get
Speaker 2: a job flipping Hamburg. That's it. I think that's so
Speaker 2: what you're saying about. No, there are a lot of
Speaker 2: people like Fucoh and many others who say there's no
Speaker 2: human nature. That's first of all, it's insanity. It's like
Speaker 2: saying we're no different from cats. I mean, it's insane.
Speaker 2: You know, of course, the human nature. What they mean
Speaker 2: is something different. They mean. What they probably mean, which
Speaker 2: makes sense, is that the particular social forms and arrangements
Speaker 2: in which we are integrated are subject to change. That's correct,
Speaker 2: that seems reasonable, But it's not going to turn us
Speaker 2: into insects. It's not going to give us an insect
Speaker 2: visual system. It's not going to turn us into creatures
Speaker 2: that are incapable of language. I mean, we have a nature,
Speaker 2: and in fact it's very rigid and strict. Within it
Speaker 2: are variations and social and cultural and other arrangements that
Speaker 2: lead to variations. I mean, take say the visual system.
Speaker 2: Since we just think of the classical experimental work Hubil
Speaker 2: and Weasel, for example on human on vision a male
Speaker 2: en vision, I mean, what they show is that early,
Speaker 2: very early modification of the visual system, story cortex can
Speaker 2: lead to radical changes in the phenotype and the outcome
Speaker 2: that appears. It doesn't happen with us because we all
Speaker 2: have about the same visual experience. But if there was
Speaker 2: a mangle around who could stick electrodes into our visual
Speaker 2: cortex or control the stimuli that we see, we'd have
Speaker 2: totally different visual systems that the as adults maybe no
Speaker 2: visual system a cat. As they showed, if you deprive
Speaker 2: a kitten of structured visual stimuli for the first couple
Speaker 2: of weeks of life, it's essentially blind. The analytics systems
Speaker 2: just degenerate. Okay, that means and it's kind of the
Speaker 2: same as speaking different languages. But the point is you
Speaker 2: can't change an a mammalian visual system into an insect
Speaker 2: visual system with compound eyes. That's a mammalian nature. Within
Speaker 2: mammalian nature, there's a lot of possible options. Within human nature,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of possible options. And it's the options
Speaker 2: that interest us as human beings. We take for granted
Speaker 2: what's common to us, kind of like sports, Like when
Speaker 2: you go to the Olympics, you don't see a competition
Speaker 2: and walking across the room with anybody to do that.
Speaker 2: You see competitions and things that humans are no good
Speaker 2: at all, like pole holding. So if you go way
Speaker 2: to the edges of human competence, you start to find
Speaker 2: differences among people, but the overwhelming mass of competence is
Speaker 2: just shared.
Speaker 1: Well, I agree. I mean, this idea of there being
Speaker 1: a common human nature and a shared common humanity sometimes
Speaker 1: I feel like gets at odds with the massive divisions
Speaker 1: we see today through identity, you know, political identity is
Speaker 1: being the first and foremost thing that is the most
Speaker 1: important thing about a person these days, or or or
Speaker 1: gender identity, you know, you know, the use of linguistics
Speaker 1: right now is very interesting in how we see a
Speaker 1: proliferation of gender pronouns, you know, far beyond the sex
Speaker 1: biological sex binary you know, what do you?
Speaker 2: What do you?
Speaker 1: What are your thoughts on this and how we can
Speaker 1: balance the need to want to appreciate someone's personal identity
Speaker 1: and the things that divide us, but while at the
Speaker 1: same time not forgetting that there is a common human
Speaker 1: there is a common human nature that that you're talking about.
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, let's let's try to take the
Speaker 2: standpoint of an alien observer who looks at us the
Speaker 2: way we look at frogs. Okay, that alien observer would
Speaker 2: say they're all identical. There are minor variations between them
Speaker 2: right around the extreme periphery, just as if we look
Speaker 2: at frogs, we say frogs frog, But if you really
Speaker 2: started looking closely at different frogs, you find slight differences
Speaker 2: in the way they do things. Well, as a frog,
Speaker 2: you're interested in the differences. They don't care about the
Speaker 2: fact that we're all frogs that you just take for granted. Yeah,
Speaker 2: interested in what's a little bit different between this frog
Speaker 2: and that frog. But from the point of of us
Speaker 2: looking at frogs, it's so minor you can't even see it.
Speaker 2: It's the same with this what pronoun you use. From
Speaker 2: the point of view, the nature of humans is so
Speaker 2: marginally you need a microscope to detect it. But for
Speaker 2: human life, that's what matters. We don't care. We don't
Speaker 2: even pay attention to the fact that we're all fundamentally humans,
Speaker 2: that we just take for granted. What's interesting to us
Speaker 2: in our lives is these very slight differences around the edges.
Speaker 2: Do you say everyone thought he was here, or do
Speaker 2: you say everyone thought they were here or something? It's
Speaker 2: worth thinking about for human life, and it's important. So
Speaker 2: for example, I wouldn't like it if people called me
Speaker 2: a kit. Let's say, I mean, I don't think there
Speaker 2: should be a law against it, but I certainly wouldn't
Speaker 2: like it.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't like it either. I wouldn't like it either.
Speaker 2: And it's the same. And if some woman feels slighted,
Speaker 2: if you say when you mean anybody, okay, I can
Speaker 2: understand that too, and you adjust to it. So you
Speaker 2: don't expect people to walk around talking about kikes and
Speaker 2: niggers and wops and so on. That's already internalized pretty recently. Incidentally,
Speaker 2: you go back now very long it was normal speech,
Speaker 2: even even writing one of my favorite articles from I
Speaker 2: think it's Forbes magazine, the main business journal back in
Speaker 2: around nineteen thirty was thirty two, early thirties. When I
Speaker 2: was a kid that was a it was Fortune magazine
Speaker 2: had a front page cover saying the wasps are unwhopping themselves,
Speaker 2: meaning Mussolini's doing a good job. So the wops are
Speaker 2: unwhopping themselves. I don't think I can say that now,
Speaker 2: I don't think so.
Speaker 1: So there's a positive, you know, the use of linguistics
Speaker 1: to help us with an appreciation of differences and respecting
Speaker 1: the uniqueness of an identity, is it can be a
Speaker 1: positive thing in changing, you know, inequality in a society.
Speaker 1: Is that what you're.
Speaker 2: Saying, except that I would call it linguistics, just like
Speaker 2: I wouldn't call it physics. If I adjust the books
Speaker 2: on my desk so they don't fall, it's true it's physics,
Speaker 2: but I don't have to go to a physicist to
Speaker 2: find out about it. I mean, and it's the same
Speaker 2: in this case. Linguistics isn't going to tell you anything
Speaker 2: about whether you should say the walks are unwelthing themselves. Okay,
Speaker 2: I can describe it, but give the rules for it.
Speaker 2: It's not going to tell you whether to do it
Speaker 2: or not. But just like a physicist isn't going to
Speaker 2: tell me how to adjust the books. These are parts
Speaker 2: of human life which are way beyond the sciences of
Speaker 2: their comprehension. But yes, it's a it's a topic you
Speaker 2: have to be concerned about. And I think you have
Speaker 2: to have to ask yourself seriously, should we burn down
Speaker 2: the city of Washington because George Washington was a slave owner? Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm sure you can find some people to say we should.
Speaker 2: I don't think so. These are the judgments you have
Speaker 2: to make as a human being living in a complex society.
Speaker 1: So what do you think of the Black Lives Matter
Speaker 1: movement right now? And and and uh and race being
Speaker 1: the topic of consciousness because I saw an interviewed about
Speaker 1: five years ago where you made a really good point
Speaker 1: about how races and slavery it's a core part of
Speaker 1: human of our history as a country Americans, but it's
Speaker 1: not as big a part of our consciousness. And now
Speaker 1: it's becoming, you know, and now it's really in our consciousness.
Speaker 1: And I was wondering your some of your thoughts on
Speaker 1: that now five years later.
Speaker 2: There's been a big change in the last few years
Speaker 2: among certain parts of the society, not the society in general.
Speaker 2: Society in general is very racist, shows up in all
Speaker 2: kinds of ways. A large part of the Trump folks,
Speaker 2: for example, is coming from deeply white supremacist circles, circles
Speaker 2: that don't feel themselves as racist, like I have black friends,
Speaker 2: you know, but just think the country is a white
Speaker 2: Christian country and it has to stay that way. That
Speaker 2: kind of white supremacy is very wide spread. But on
Speaker 2: the other hand, there is a change in consciousness in
Speaker 2: many circles. You can see it in the reaction to
Speaker 2: the George Floyd murder. Blacks have been murdered for a
Speaker 2: long time. This reaction was quite different, spontaneous, enormous in scale,
Speaker 2: way beyond anything in American history, and have widely supported
Speaker 2: at around sixty percent support, a lot of solidarity, sensible goals.
Speaker 2: It was a very striking phenomenon, led by Black Lives
Speaker 2: Matter organizers, but many others coming in. Well, that's one
Speaker 2: sign of serious changes. I want to see another sign
Speaker 2: take a look at this morning's New York Times as
Speaker 2: a very good op ed by Eric Kohner. Fine historian
Speaker 2: calling for abolition, and what he's calling for is abolition
Speaker 2: of criminal labor, mostly black. He's a historian of abolitionism, reconstruction,
Speaker 2: Civil War, and so he points out that the Thirteenth
Speaker 2: Amendment banning slavery had a qualificatient it said forced labor
Speaker 2: is legitimate as a punishment. That, as he discusses, was
Speaker 2: the opening that the South used to say. And he says,
Speaker 2: we still have it today in private prisons where convicts
Speaker 2: are forced to work for ridiculously low wages of profit.
Speaker 2: So we should really move on to abolition. You wouldn't
Speaker 2: have had that up it a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2: It's a sign of the increasing consciousness and awareness of
Speaker 2: the really black history that is our actual dark, cruel history,
Speaker 2: its history that's part of our legacy. Now we've never
Speaker 2: grown out of it. Part of it the extermination of
Speaker 2: the indigenous populations and other part of it. And these
Speaker 2: are things that are gradually seeping into consciousness, not anywhere
Speaker 2: near enough. So there are holocaust museums all over the country.
Speaker 2: Try to find out how many museums there are for
Speaker 2: slavery of nation of Indians.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought that was a good point. You made
Speaker 1: that point in that interview five years ago there that
Speaker 1: you don't see and I don't think there has been
Speaker 1: many more slavery music in that five years. So that
Speaker 1: thought that was a really good point. So in some sense,
Speaker 1: we're making progress in social progress in lots of ways.
Speaker 1: You're you're very pessimistic about the future. You've called Trump,
Speaker 1: you know, our current president right now, the worst criminal
Speaker 1: in human history. That's that's a pretty big that's a
Speaker 1: pretty big deal. Why more so than like Hitler?
Speaker 2: Did Hitler devote his energies to trying to destroy the
Speaker 2: possibility of human life on earth, to try to maximize
Speaker 2: the use of fossil fuels and to eliminate the regulatory
Speaker 2: system that provides some mitigation. Is condemning the human species
Speaker 2: to extinction? Are we going to survive another couple of
Speaker 2: if in the next few decades, if we don't deal
Speaker 2: with the elimination of fossil fuels, it's we can be
Speaker 2: very confident that will have passed irreversible tipping points. Practically
Speaker 2: one hundred percent of climate scientists agree on this.
Speaker 1: I think it's a good point, but you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm concerned about is you know, Trump did win. There
Speaker 1: are a lot of people who did vote for him
Speaker 1: their primary the people that vote for him their primary concern.
Speaker 1: You know, a lot of them are poor. You know,
Speaker 1: they were concerned about their own lives. They're concerned about
Speaker 1: what they're going to do. And I think, you know,
Speaker 1: i'd love to get your thoughts how we can get
Speaker 1: the Democrats to actually focus on reducing economic inequality and
Speaker 1: meaningful ways so they can bring on board and convince
Speaker 1: the poor and uneducated people to stop voting for you know,
Speaker 1: the next Trump, you know, or even Trump four years
Speaker 1: from now. You know what, what can what can we
Speaker 1: do as Democrats?
Speaker 2: Well, I think that's right, but we should separate it
Speaker 2: from the former question. Is Trump the most dangerous criminal
Speaker 2: in human history? I think that's worth considering, and I
Speaker 2: think the evidence for it is overwhelming. Every time I
Speaker 2: say it, I say, here's an outrageous statement, very outrageous statement.
Speaker 2: Ask yourself if it's true. Okay, and nobody wants to
Speaker 2: think about it, so we turn to something else. But
Speaker 2: I think it's pretty important. Okay, but let's put it aside.
Speaker 2: So what can the Democrats do? Well, that's a very
Speaker 2: pertinent question. In fact, we've just seen what happens when
Speaker 2: they don't do anything. So take the November election. There's
Speaker 2: been a lot of There are areas of the country
Speaker 2: that voted for Trump that haven't voted for a Republican
Speaker 2: for one hundred years, and there's been a good deal
Speaker 2: of discussion of it. Like South Texas, Mexican American area,
Speaker 2: it's an oil economy, hadn't voted Republican since Harting. A
Speaker 2: lot of them voted for trum even some counties went
Speaker 2: for him. The reason what they heard from their sources,
Speaker 2: Fox News, the White House, whatever they get their information from.
Speaker 2: What they heard is Biden wants to take away your job,
Speaker 2: destroy your community, destroy your businesses, devastate your families. Don't
Speaker 2: vote for him. Vote for Trump, who says I'm going
Speaker 2: to keep your jobs, keep your families, keep the oil
Speaker 2: production working, and so on. That's what they heard. Now,
Speaker 2: if the Democrats were a political party that had any
Speaker 2: concern for the general population instead of being committed to
Speaker 2: Wall Street and rich donors and the wealthy professional classes,
Speaker 2: if that were the case, they'd have had down in
Speaker 2: South Texas saying, look, it's a fact that we're going
Speaker 2: to have to get off the oil based economy. There's
Speaker 2: just no debating that. That's like debating the weather. It's
Speaker 2: a fact. We have to face it. Now here's the
Speaker 2: way we can face it. We can face it with feasible,
Speaker 2: sustainable measures which will give you better jobs, better lives,
Speaker 2: better communities, happier existence. Here's the way to do it.
Speaker 2: But they didn't do that. No, okay, so there's the
Speaker 2: answer your question. You don't you don't break through the propaganda. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's what's going to happen.
Speaker 1: That's definitely one answer. Do you see any potential backlash
Speaker 1: from focusing too much, going too far left and that
Speaker 1: kind of being the main democratic talking points, you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of race and gender. Do you see any
Speaker 1: any potential problems with making that too much the central
Speaker 1: focus you can.
Speaker 2: I'm in the atmosphere and many universities is by now toxic.
Speaker 1: Cancel culture. Are you frying to cancel culture?
Speaker 2: It's called cancel culture. It goes way beyond that. It's
Speaker 2: the disdain for people who use the wrong pronoun say
Speaker 2: that's a lot of young people in the universities feel
Speaker 2: they're working on takeshells. If I say the wrong thing,
Speaker 2: or do something that's slightly the wrong way, then it's
Speaker 2: the tragedy. Got'll be you know, I won't be killed,
Speaker 2: but you have to be expelled from the society. And
Speaker 2: if you go that far, you're doing completely the wrong thing. Totally.
Speaker 2: So it's possible to take important issues and to destroy them, okay,
Speaker 2: by just not handling them like what I said before,
Speaker 2: somebody came along and said, let's burn down Washington. That's
Speaker 2: you know, maybe you can make an argument for it.
Speaker 2: That's not the way to deal with the world, not
Speaker 2: a sensible way.
Speaker 1: What are your thoughts about defunding the police depends?
Speaker 2: Well, that's an interesting case. If you just used the
Speaker 2: slogan defund the police, you're giving an enormous gift to
Speaker 2: the far right and pick it up and run with it.
Speaker 2: They love it. Say, these guys want to take the
Speaker 2: police out of your community so that black criminals can
Speaker 2: come in and rob your house. I want that. Now.
Speaker 2: I suppose you did it sanely, the way many of
Speaker 2: the organizers did, the way Bernie Sanders did, the way
Speaker 2: Alexandria Kassie protest did. She was asked, what do you
Speaker 2: mean by defund the police? And her answer was, just
Speaker 2: go into any white suburb. That's what we mean by
Speaker 2: defund the police. The kids using drugs, you know, pick
Speaker 2: them up, beat them up, take them to jail, and
Speaker 2: incarcerat them. You deal with it sensibly through community services.
Speaker 2: You have the police when you need them, but they're
Speaker 2: not supposed to be involved in community service operations of
Speaker 2: family disputes, overdoses, mental health issues, because they're not these issues.
Speaker 2: That's community service. I think the police are in favor
Speaker 2: of that kind of defunded. Bernie Sanders did the same.
Speaker 2: He said, yeah, that's what we want. We want police
Speaker 2: freed from obligations that are none of their business and
Speaker 2: are just a burden. And in fact, they're probably ninety
Speaker 2: percent of what they do. And let's fund let's have
Speaker 2: better pay for police, so it's more desirable, profession people,
Speaker 2: better trained, and have them focused on police work. But
Speaker 2: the things that should be done like they're done in
Speaker 2: a white suburb, they should be done everywhere. I lived
Speaker 2: in a suburb of Boston. Just give you an example.
Speaker 2: We were away for the summer and some neighbors called
Speaker 2: us up and said, somebody broke windows in your house.
Speaker 2: So we came back to see what happened. It turned
Speaker 2: out somebody had broken in, so we called the Lexington
Speaker 2: police and they came over and the first thing they
Speaker 2: said is look in your medicine cabinet. We looked in
Speaker 2: our medicine cabinet and yeah, somebody had gone through it
Speaker 2: and taken some stuff in. And they said, is this
Speaker 2: kids in the neighborhood. We know who they are. We're
Speaker 2: not going to send them to jail. It's up to
Speaker 2: their parents and the community to discipline them and put
Speaker 2: them on the right path. That's the way to deal
Speaker 2: with it. I didn't want them to go to jail.
Speaker 2: I suppose it was a black community. You know what happened.
Speaker 2: So when Kassio Cortez says defund the police means make
Speaker 2: it look like a white server, that's a message that makes.
Speaker 1: Sense, Okay, yeah, and that goes that transcends the slogan.
Speaker 1: You know, this is just a superficial you know, just
Speaker 1: to defund the police, you know, without any nuance or yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree. Well, thank you for giving your point on that.
Speaker 1: You know, I am wondering, what's the biggest thing you
Speaker 1: were wrong about and change your mind over in your career.
Speaker 2: A lot of things. I mean, in academy and professional work,
Speaker 2: scientific work all the time. Yeah, right now I'm writing
Speaker 2: in the midst of an article which gets it just
Speaker 2: works on problems that I didn't notice in earlier, things
Speaker 2: which are totally wrong enough to be fait. That happens
Speaker 2: every day. So in scientific work, it's just that's what
Speaker 2: work is. Fine, mistakes, you direct them move on. In
Speaker 2: social political domains, not very much. I still believe pretty
Speaker 2: much when I believed as a young teenager. I mean,
Speaker 2: there are individual there are individual things that are wrong,
Speaker 2: like text day of the Vietnam War, which I devoted
Speaker 2: a lot of my life to. I started in the
Speaker 2: early sixties when it was very unpopular, but that was
Speaker 2: much too late. It started ten years earlier, but nobody
Speaker 2: even heard of it. By the early sixties. That already
Speaker 2: getting out of control. There are things like that.
Speaker 1: Well, I have one final question. I want to be
Speaker 1: very respectful of your time. You have grandchildren, right, great
Speaker 1: grand great grandchildren.
Speaker 2: Okay, I can't see one of them's in Japan. I
Speaker 2: can't travel.
Speaker 1: Can you see them on Skype or on the screening
Speaker 1: like that?
Speaker 2: I don't know. It's me.
Speaker 1: I was just wondering if you could give advice to
Speaker 1: your great grandchildren, you know, for the life that they're
Speaker 1: going to grow up to live in fifty years from now,
Speaker 1: you know when you probably won't be here. Who knows
Speaker 1: you may be here, but you know what sort of
Speaker 1: advice for them? And then you know that that can
Speaker 1: just apply to any young person listening to you right
Speaker 1: now who really values and treasures your thoughts.
Speaker 2: Well, I never really gave any advice to my children.
Speaker 2: They didn't ask for it, then I didn't give it.
Speaker 2: I do get a lot of letters from young people
Speaker 2: these days asking for advice, and what I usually say
Speaker 2: is the only advice I know is if anybody tries
Speaker 2: to give you advice, put it aside. Figure it out
Speaker 2: for yourself, what kind of life you want, how to
Speaker 2: lead it. There's no general answers to you should live,
Speaker 2: no rules. There's cliches. You can give the cliches, but
Speaker 2: it's really up to you. You have to create your
Speaker 2: own life.
Speaker 1: But if you're an activist, if you're aspiring academic, you
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Here I can repeat the cliches, they can figure them
Speaker 2: out for themselves.
Speaker 1: Okay, fair enough. I just want to thank you so
Speaker 1: much for this chat, but also just inspiring me in
Speaker 1: my own career and being such a legend.
Speaker 2: Good very Please talk to you bye, have a good one.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of this ecology podcast.
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Speaker 1: you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
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