The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Jonathan Rauch. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Jonathan Rauch. Jonathan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute Governance Studies Program and the award-winning author of eight books on topics ranging from political reform and marijuana legislation to LGBT rights and Japan’s cultural identity. His commentary has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Journal, and more. Welcome, Jonathan.
Jonathan: Nice to be here.
Jim: This could be a very interesting conversation. Today we’re going to talk about Jonathan’s most recent book, I believe it’s still the most recent book, “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” I gotta say, I very much enjoyed this book. I strongly recommend it and I think it’d be an especially excellent gift book for a recent high school honors grad. You know, it’s honors grad, high school territory, or any college grad. And especially it would be a wonderful gift to a recently naturalized U.S. citizen. And the way I’d present it, I’d say this book is about your responsibilities as an informed and informing citizen. I think I wrote a note back to Jonathan after we booked it and after I’d read the book, I said, “Damn, I wish they would teach this in every high school class in America.”
Jonathan: Thank you.
Jim: No, it really did. I mean, this is really a good book. I like most of the books I read, but this is in the highest category of good, readable, important books. So let’s hop right into it. One of the things you use as a framing artifact is Plato’s Theaetetus. Throughout the book – don’t go into the arguments you use it in – but briefly summarize what that Platonic dialogue was about.
Jonathan: Well, this is Socrates stopping a young man on the street, a student, and trying to understand where knowledge comes from. How do we actually know anything? What does it mean to say we know something? And they go around and around, and he and Theaetetus try a bunch of answers to that and they wind up coming up dry. Nothing really quite works. The closest they can get is that knowledge is something that we believe is right and has a good explanation. And that doesn’t quite do it. And so they end the conversation, but they say, we’re going to come back and continue the conversation tomorrow. And that’s where it ends.
Jim: I love Plato. He pulls stuff like that all the time. Couldn’t get away with that today. Maybe you could if you ever played it. Anyway, the other thing before we hop into the body of the book I thought was very interesting, is a section in the introduction where you wrote, “Giving reasons, it turns out, is a good method of persuading others.” And so those who are good at giving reasons can prosper. But there’s a potential snag. The implication is that evolution selects not for the ability to reason in a way which leads to truth, necessarily, but for the ability to reason in a way which persuades. Say a little bit more about that.
Jonathan: Humans are wired to increase our status. You know, we’re wired for a lot of things, but if we have high status, we get more reproductive opportunities, and Mr. Darwin likes that. And one of the ways that we get status is people believe us. They think what we say is true. So persuading people that we’re right is a good way to get esteem. You know, you want to be the person who the group comes to for advice and to tell you the truth. And so persuasion is a very important part of the armory of how we go about getting that respect and esteem. And that’s why it’s so important to channel it in a constructive direction.
Jim: Yeah. This resonates very strongly with a guest we’ve had on, I think three times or maybe four, Gregg Henriques, who has written a bunch and done some research on what he calls justification theory. His argument is that human evolution, particularly the evolution of language and the psycho-cultural interactions between the two, was indeed driven by justification. And he lays out a very deep argument on why that must be so. So I think that ties in very closely with what you were saying.
Jonathan: Yep. The point of all this is not necessarily to reach scientific truth, but to persuade people that you’re right and get them to follow you and give you status and then hopefully kids. But that can be tricky, of course, because you can persuade people of things that aren’t true but serve your interest. And that’s hard to deal with.
Jim: Yep. And of course, we’re seeing a lot of that today.
Jonathan: We sure are.
Jim: Let’s start out with your first chapter where you quote a certain gentleman who you can feel free to name, who says a terrible statement unless he gets away with it.
Jonathan: Should we name him?
Jim: Name him.
Jonathan: All right. Well, this is the current President of the United States, but when that book was published, it was 2021. He was the recent ex-president of the United States. But he told us some things going way back into the early 2000s about how you manipulate people’s perception of truth. He’s very clever at that. He really understands it. The notion that Donald Trump is just some kind of instinctive actor or a lucky guy who’s not very bright is wrong. He has a deep understanding of how to manipulate people’s perceptions. He’s a student of that through his businesses over the years. Of course, there’s his book “The Art of the Deal,” where he talks about the art of, I think he calls it, true hyperbole. There’s nothing really true about it. You just wildly exaggerate stuff so often, so consistently through so many channels that people believe it. In the particular quotation that you mentioned, Jim, he’s talking about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, which in 2004 was a campaign that some people associated with Republicans ran to change the Democratic presidential nominee’s reputation. That was John Kerry, and he was a war hero, combat hero, multiple awarded. And they decided to change that reputation and to sink it. And they did a lot of lying to do that. And Trump was asked about that, and he said, well, he admired it. They did a good job of switching the narrative, turning it completely upside down. And when asked about that, he said, well, it’s a great thing if they can get away with it.
Jim: That’s very Trumpian, I would say.
Jonathan: It’s pretty out there. You know, he’s never denied what he does. He’s pretty open about it.
Jim: Yeah, it’s funny. I’m going to have to pull this up because it was so apropos to this. I should have had this in my prep. I actually put something out on Facebook today, which I thought – Twitter, which I thought was fairly apropos on this Trumpland, where lying is as natural as water is to a fish. I sometimes argue he’s not actually a liar because he doesn’t actually have a concept of the truth and reality. Rather, is the utterance useful, and that’s his only guide.
Jonathan: Yeah, you know, we don’t really know, Jim. He is such a good propagandist. And, you know, you don’t get to be as wealthy as he has become in business if you don’t know something about the difference between truth and falsehood. So I tend to think that he’s a deliberate and very smart, canny manipulator, not that he’s just kind of a dummy who believes any old thing.
Jim: I have made that point that you can’t build a 70-story building in Manhattan, going through all the hassles of zoning and planning, have it not fall down and be a total idiot. So the theory that Trump is just a complete clown is clearly not true. Whether where his epistemics lay, I don’t know. But we’ll dig into epistemics here more deeply. In fact, we often talk on The Jim Rutt Show about the meta-crisis, the many crises that are confronting us today and how we can deal with them or not deal with them. And one of those is, you name it explicitly in the book – the Epistemic Crisis. Tell us what you mean by that.
Jonathan: Well, we don’t expect or want people to agree on all the facts. In fact, we want the opposite of that. We want enough disagreement to spark some really good creative debates. That’s what drives knowledge forward. But we do want some basic agreement on the system that we use to come to conclusions about facts, at least for public purposes, you know, for things like who won the election, which are awfully important if you’re trying to run a country or a democracy. And the epistemic crisis is when people don’t agree on the core facts that are relevant to running a democracy and no longer even really agree on a common set of mechanisms to reach those facts, to find truth. And that’s when you just get a breakdown into multiple realities. You get lots of symptoms, but you get like multiple forking realities. An example of that is Republicans think one side won the election and other people think the other won it. And you get polarization as people dig into their epistemic corners, if you can dig into a corner. But they just get more and more settled in their own narratives. And you get pigeonholed, you get rabbit holes and you get conspiracy theories and all the things that we’re seeing. Conception of a common route to truth breaks down.
Jim: I actually happened to see – we don’t watch that much TV, my wife and I – we happened to actually see, I think it was Meet the Press where Kellyanne Conway coined the wonderful expression “alternative facts.”
Jonathan: Yeah, isn’t that great?
Jim: We looked at each other and said…
Jonathan: Did she just say that we have alternative facts? Yeah. And these guys, you know, I keep coming back to this, Jim, but these guys are not stupid. Trump is a student of propaganda and he understands that one of the things you need to do is confuse people, disorient them, put out so many different conflicting accounts of facts that people don’t know what to believe or who to believe. They don’t know if you can ever believe anything at all.
Jim: It’s like my evil twin Steve Bannon said, “flood the zone with shit,” right? Yeah. I call him my evil twin because we grew up fairly close together. He’s two weeks older than I am, very similar family backgrounds, but we kind of went in opposite directions.
Jonathan: Gee, that’s funny.
Jim: I went to him on the podcast one day and see if matter and anti-matter actually cause an explosion. It’d be kind of humorous.
Jonathan: It’d be fun. He’s a bright guy. He’s an interesting person.
Jim: Yeah. So I understand that is the case.
Jonathan: That’s the problem, actually.
Jim: Exactly right. Exactly.
Jonathan: Yeah. These guys are not stupid.
Jim: Let’s go on to the next key idea in the book, which is the marketplace of ideas metaphor. What do you think about that?
Jonathan Rauch: I think it’s great and I use it all the time, but it’s also incomplete and therefore misleading. Marketplace of ideas is… you know, if you ask most college freshmen where does knowledge come from, they’ll probably say something like “marketplace of ideas,” where lots of ideas are floated and then you have free speech and the best ideas win out. And that’s fine as far as it goes. And I use that all the time. Nothing wrong with it, except that it leaves out the key part, which is that if all you do is take a bunch of people with different views and you throw them in a room together and you say debate it out, what you get is complete chaos. You get cacophony, you get people posturing, you get trolling, bad behavior, you get nowhere. And then eventually, if you do that on a society-wide level, you get creed wars where one side just tries to wipe out the other, as you know, happened in Europe during the religious wars. And so you need a structure. It turns out that’s the big missing piece. You need to pit the ideas against each other in a carefully structured way so that it leads to drawing some constructive and true conclusions. And that’s the hard part.
Jim Rutt: Yes, yes. Well, actually, let’s do an intro at this point. Give a relatively short précis on what you actually mean by the Constitution of Knowledge as the framework or framework of frameworks for processing epistemics in a useful way.
Jonathan Rauch: Constitution of Knowledge, the title of my book – the big idea of the book, Constitution of Knowledge, is the system of rules and norms and institutions that we rely on to keep ourselves anchored as a society to reality and to steer us away from falsehood and dissension and ultimately war.
Jim Rutt: That makes sense. Talk a little bit about – and this is something that would be of great interest to our audience – we talk often about the individual and institutional spiral, where institutions make people, but institutions make people. And if that cycle is working positively, our institutions make us better people, which then allows those better people to build better institutions. So maybe you could weave together a little bit, if you could or you care to, the relationship between the individual and the institutional.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, I love how you say that. Institutional spiral. That’s a good phrase.
Jim Rutt: Or I call it the personal institutional spiral. The two are equally important.
Jonathan Rauch: I see you’re a sociologist in your day job. That’s a good idea. I think I’ll steal that.
Jim Rutt: Feel free.
Jonathan Rauch: You go back to the vision of James Madison and the founders of the American Republic to see why that concept is so important. So we had the Declaration of Independence, and it set out some very inspiring principles. And it led almost immediately to the collapse of the fledgling republic because the rules that were in place had all the wrong incentives. States began to get into trade wars with each other and navigation wars, and they were inflating their currencies and printing debt, which they were welshing on. The whole thing was just falling apart almost immediately.
And James Madison, the father of the Constitution – I think the greatest political genius who ever lived – said, what we need are institutions that are going to channel our ambitions in constructive directions. So these institutions will take the dark side of humanity, the part that wants to win, the part that gets into conflict, very different political views, and force them into compromising with each other, finding creative solutions so that we can live together as a country.
And he and they, the Founders, tailor institutions to do that. And that’s the Constitution. But the point you made is also true. You have to develop the values that support the Constitution. It’s just a piece of paper. And all the Founders warned us, if it’s just a piece of paper and the values, the virtues, what they called republican virtues to sustain it, aren’t there, the whole thing will fall apart. And so they relied on those virtues to come from outside in places like the church and families and homes and communities.
But they also hoped, exactly what you said, that republicanism would become a habit. And as a habit, it would lead to virtues which would then help keep in place the Constitution itself. That’s what Lincoln said, actually, in his first great speech in 1838. He says, the important thing, the Constitution needs to become almost like a religion in the sense that it becomes such a habit and so ingrained in the way we live our lives and think our thoughts, that it becomes a touchstone for our virtues. So that’s your institutional spiral right there. Of course, that’s an upward institutional spiral. And the problem is downward institutional spirals when they start going the other direction.
Jim: Indeed, that is the central theme of a book I’m writing right now. The fact that we’re in a downward spiral. But it’s possible to reverse that and produce an upward spiral. And we’ll see if we can pull it off. I’ve been working on it for a while. So you talked so far principally about the political public policy realm. One of the things I thought that made this book better than most of this sort is that you took the concept and you generalized it to what you called the reality-based communities. Tell us what you meant by that.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, “reality-based community,” singular, which actually turns out to be important because that’s what’s unique about it. We don’t have multiple realities. We have one reality and many different views, contrasting views of it. But we’re all on the same page. And that’s super important. That’s what’s unique about science. The reality-based community is those people and those institutions that for the most part professionally are following the constitution of knowledge.
They’re part of these institutions and norms and rules that structure how we go about getting knowledge. We can talk about what those rules are. But they’re the folks who do everything from the science in the labs, which are of course a mainstay of the reality-based community. But it includes journalists. I’m a journalist by training. We have a lot of rules for how you stay anchored to facts – everything from double sourcing and attribution rules and documentation rules, all kinds of things like that.
It includes lawyers. Lawyers are part of the reality-based community. You’re not allowed to make stuff up and bring it to court. You’re not allowed to go to court saying that you won an election that you lost and then provide fake evidence for that. The whole idea of a fact actually comes out of law, not science, because you had to have facts for the court to decide on. Museums, libraries, part of the reality-based community.
Government – absolutely crucial. You’ve got to have a government that’s moored to facts. Because if government can make up its own version of facts, it can then do anything it wants to. You know, it can announce that Jim Rutt is a pedophile and put him in jail and make all that up. So government is tyrannical if it’s not fact-based. And you can ask George Orwell if you don’t believe me. So all of those institutions are the reality-based community and they are the core institutions that keep us anchored to reality.
Jim Rutt: And I got to say that is what I find our current epoch so disturbing. I’m a science guy originally, who then went into physics, right. Then went into business, then after 30 years in business, retired and went back to science, basically complexity science and evolutionary theory and things of that ilk. And so my home base is the reality-based community. Very damn good point that it is a seamless community, really, sub-communities, but they all overlap and they play by the same rules and they can communicate. Because as one of my best friends says about the reality-based community, you can’t go too far astray because reality is the checksum on your ideas.
Jonathan Rauch: Right? Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s often called the universalism or universality of science that in any of these professions. But the easiest to grasp is science. Any scientist anywhere in the world needs to be able to conduct an experiment that another scientist somewhere else in the world, different culture, different language, could be even a different discipline, but can confirm or disconfirm. They can’t go around saying, well, in my reality this experiment works, but in yours it doesn’t. So you can’t do that fragmentary thing where we’ve got online, we’ve each got our separate realities and you can’t do that postmodern thing that you hear about in universities where people say that, well, I have my truth, you have your truth. Your truth is a colonialist white supremacist truth. My truth is the truth of a marginalized community and thus truer than yours. You can’t do any of that. You gotta be able to persuade and show anyone anywhere that in their reality what you say is true. And they have to be able to do the same to you. And that is unique. And that is the special secret sauce of science.
Jim: And to this issue of the identitarian method of discourse, I’ve tried to push back on that. Fortunately, the tide is finally starting to recede on those clowns. But whatever the hell it is you’re talking about, it’s not truth. I call it a point of view. And as a XYZ left-handed lesbian in a wheelchair, you do have a lived experience that’s different than mine. And that is a legitimate thing for you to talk about. But don’t call it the truth, call it a perspective. Right? You can’t say that the bridge is incorrectly designed because it was designed by an old white man. The bridge stands up or it doesn’t. And the identity… that whole postmodern move was just like, what the fuck, right? I must say that I never got even slightly sucked into it. And the little exposure I got to it over the years caused a great negative reaction in me, at least as strong as the bad epistemics of Trump and his buddies. It’s yet another variety of plague upon the reality-based community.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, the Constitution of Knowledge has been controversial and challenged and even threatening since day one. You know, Galileo was famously imprisoned by the church and has had in its day enemies that were more powerful and more effective than the ones it has today, even though the ones today are quite formidable. So I try to remind people that this system has stood the test of time. In fact, it works so well in linking literally millions and millions of minds across every continent and every culture and every language in a single great enterprise of advancing truth. It does that so well that on any given morning, we literally create more new knowledge as a species than we did in our first 200,000 years. I mean, this is a system that can decode the genome of a new virus over a weekend and then design a vaccine over the course of another weekend. This is species transforming.
But a lot of people don’t like it and never will. It gets in the way of their political agenda or their personal agenda or their status or their deeply held personal beliefs or whatever it is. And that just means that, Jim, you and I have to get up every morning for the rest of our lives and defend it and promote it, and so will your kids and your grandkids and their grandkids. And we just need to be cheerful about that because it’s a pretty darn good system and a lot better than the alternatives.
Jim: I will say my offspring are absolutely committed to the reality-based community and hopefully my grandchildren will be too, though they’re a little too young yet to tell. But that is very… you’re absolutely right. If we let the reality-based community lapse, God knows what could happen. Could be the Dark Ages, right? Where the cliché version that it stopped for a thousand years isn’t quite true, but certainly there was a massive loss of operations, opportunity to move human capacity forward. So this perfect transition to the next topic, which is one of the most important tools to fight this fight, is free speech, which has indeed been under challenge of late from both the left and the right.
Jonathan Rauch: Yeah, you need three things to make the Constitution of Knowledge work. And free speech is one of them – it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. You need two other things also. We can talk about what those are if you want. But you have to start with the idea that you never criminalize or punish inquiry, that the door to learning is always open. As the great American philosopher C.S. Peirce put it, “Do not block the way of inquiry,” which he said is what should be inscribed over the door of every hallway of science.
And that’s right. Only through constant criticism and reevaluation can knowledge advance, because otherwise we don’t identify our errors. And that means, of course, that you’ve got to confront ideas you don’t like, ideas that may seem toxic and harmful. And that’s okay. Sometimes that can be annoying. Sometimes it can be worse than annoying and it can do real damage. You know, I’m gay and I can tell you that the claim that homosexuality is a disease that’s treatable with therapy has hurt a lot of kids. But the problem is also part of the solution to the problem, which is floating those ideas and refuting them is what teaches you that they’re wrong. And that’s how we found that out.
Jim: Yeah, that’s so important. And anyone who is attacking free speech, to my mind, that’s a call out that they’re an enemy of the Constitution of Knowledge and the reality-based community. And I just cannot get my head around anybody who thinks that they’re making a principled attack on free speech. It’s a very good way to sort the villains from the heroes in the current narrative is, okay, where does that person stand on free speech?
Jonathan Rauch: Yeah, I guess I’d just register a caveat, which is there are a lot of reasons people oppose free speech and not all of them are bad. I think they’re superseded by better and different arguments, but we do have to listen to them and we have to remember that a lot of these folks are acting in good faith. So “villains” is a bit too strong for my taste. Now there are actual villains. There are people out there who are knowingly lying using conspiracy theories and half-truths and exaggerations and Russian-style mass disinformation – AKA “flood the zone with shit,” as I think you quoted Steve Bannon earlier as saying. And they’re doing it on purpose. And those people, yeah, they’re villains.
Jim: So keep in mind good faith does not distinguish the heroes and the villains. Having read several biographies on him and biographies of his henchmen, that good old Adolf Hitler – you know, the Godwin’s Law reductio ad absurdum – woke up every morning thinking he was fighting the good fight for Germany and humanity. So you can still be a villain and be operating in good faith.
Jonathan Rauch: That is certainly true. Look, you know, you can’t be a gay American born in 1960, be my age and grow up in that world without encountering a lot of people who think they’re doing God’s work by oppressing people like me. But free speech is what got us out of that.
What breaks my heart more than anything, Jim, is so many people today in their 20s think that free speech is something that serves the interest of majorities and helps to oppress marginalized groups – that free speech is a code word for speech by the powerful. And nothing could be further from the truth.
When we set out on the same-sex marriage campaign, or for that matter, the gay rights campaign, which I was part of, as we called it back then, we had nothing. We had no money, we had no power. We could not get a same-sex marriage bill introduced by a single legislator in any state legislature in the country. That’s why we went to the courts. It wasn’t because we loved the courts.
What turned the tide for us, what made possible the fact that today I am happily married to a man now for 10 years, was surfacing the bad ideas, comparing them with our better ideas, showing people the difference between hate and love. Showing them that a world in which gay people can marry strengthens, doesn’t weaken marriage, exposing the fallacies – some of them lies, but many of them just ignorant beliefs, wrong beliefs that were behind the anti-LGBT feelings.
Free speech is what got us where we are. Free speech is the only safe place for minorities. John Lewis, the great civil rights advocate, famously said, “Without freedom of expression, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings.” Frederick Douglass, the second greatest American of the 19th century, said exactly the same thing. He gave one of the most famous and powerful defenses of free speech ever in Boston a couple days after an abolitionist rally was deplatformed. So this is not just me talking. This is the experience of LGBT people today, of women, of blacks, other minorities. The most endangered minority in any society is always the dissident. That’s the person you need to protect.
Jim: I was going to talk about this later. Since you’ve brought it up, let me put it on the table. We’ll talk a little bit about my own experience with gay rights.
I’m a little older than you are. I was born in 1953 and I grew up in a working-class border South community that, shall we say, had extremely unenlightened views. The worst imaginable slurs of all sorts were used routinely. And as I sometimes tell people to explain my background, not saying “fucking” before the N-word was considered a mark of gentrification – that kind of place.
Anyway, homosexuality was utterly anathema. I mean, zero – the idea of somebody coming out in my high school in, say, 1968, because we were also very backward. I graduated in ’71 from high school. I never even saw any marijuana or smelled it. We were still into the beer and pickup truck ethos as late as 1971.
Homosexuality was utterly anathema. Nobody was out. No one even hinted they were out or gay or anything else. And yet in a school of 2,800 people, 1,400 guys, we know regularly as clockwork, 4% of them will be principally homosexual in their orientation and another 5% will be bisexual. We know that, right? It’s true in every society on Earth and almost every population that’s ever been studied, so plus or minus. So I did the math – 115 people in my high school with either homosexual or bisexual orientation, and not one of them would ever say a word because it would just be social death for them and maybe even physical death. So that’s how horrible that was.
I had the good fortune to go to work for a Bay Area publishing company in 1977, a couple years out of college, my second job. And there were a lot – it may have been 15% of the company were at least gay at work, right? I’m not entirely clear they told their parents yet, or their neighbors, but they were gay at work. And some of them were kind of hilariously open and performative about it, which I thought was very interesting, really a real eye-opener for me.
And I still carried around, no doubt, some residuum of these ignorant ideas I grew up with. But you know, when you talk to the people and you see the people and you live with the people and you travel with the people, you go to sales meetings with the people and you find out they’re just people, right? And very quickly those backward views I had just evaporated within a few months. It was quite amazing. In fact, I even attended the second Gay Pride parade in San Francisco in summer of 1978. I told my friends back home, they go, “What the fuck?” So I thought my own personal journey in that regard was illustrative of the power that the truth has to set people free from essentially ignorance-driven bigotry.
Jonathan Rauch: That’s a lovely story, Jim, and I appreciate that. You know, we had so few allies in those days. A lot of people don’t know this, including young people who should know it – until 2003, which isn’t all that long ago in the scheme of things, it was illegal to be gay in 13 states. When I was born in 1960, it was illegal to be gay in all 50 states. And yes, it was enforced. They could break into your home and arrest you. That didn’t happen very much, but for example, if you went to a gay bar, you could be accused of various crimes like loitering and nuisance. And if you danced with another person of the same sex, they could get you for that.
But the big thing that they loved to do was nail you. You’d have police who would pose as gay people and dangle themselves, and then they would book you if you asked for a date or said, “Would you like to go somewhere?” They would book you for solicitation of sodomy. And then the way that would work is you’d go to jail overnight, and then often the charges would be dropped, but they’d be put in the newspaper first. And that meant you were out of a job and probably had to leave town. Also, it meant you shamed your parents and your family. This was a devastating, life-changing experience. And this was something the cops did for fun.
So all of this stuff was going on when I was born. People don’t know about it, but we had very few allies. To my knowledge, the number of college campus protests against those sodomy laws: zero. All those years, no one paid any attention to what was happening to us. So thank you.
Jim: And my dad was a Washington, D.C. cop for his career.
Jonathan Rauch: Oh, the D.C. vice squad, they were the…
Jim: And I was gonna mention the vice squad, they were the guys. They would select pretty boys from the police force to be these trollers at the bus station – that was their favorite place. And some, I think, was the park on 16th Street. What’s that?
Jonathan Rauch: Lafayette Square.
Jim: And they would cruise these parks and they would cruise the bus station. And they were notorious. And of course, the cops just thought this was hilarious and a good comeuppance for them. Goddamn, you know what’s right. And it was pretty depraved in retrospect.
Jonathan Rauch: Oh yeah. D.C. was notorious, but this went on all over the country. I wrote an Atlantic article about it. I hope – I mean, maybe this seems like a digression, but it’s so important to me.
Jim: No, this is important. This is on the theme.
Jonathan Rauch: If you Google my name and “America Owes Gay People an Apology,” you will find an account in article form of America’s truest experiment in totalitarianism. And I mean by that totalitarianism – I mean a campaign that harnessed all of society, government, but also science and medicine and the church and employers. Every aspect of life for a period of 50, 60, 70 years was focused on eliminating homosexuality from society in every way, shape or form.
And a lot of what was done was seriously shocking. People were given lobotomies, for example, and electroshock was used. People were terrorized. They lost their jobs by the thousands. Many more people were fired from the U.S. government for being gay during the McCarthy era and on into the ’60s and ’70s than were ever fired for communism, including people in the upper reaches of the LBJ administration, for example. It was a reign of terror and it was deliberate and it went on for decades. And it was every level of government, local, state, federal, it was every kind of police force. And there has never been a public reckoning or apology for any of that. It’s been forgotten. And that’s disgraceful in my view.
Jim: I can tell you another family story that’s actually relevant on this point. Then we do have to move on. Much as I like to tell tales, my dad retired from the Washington D.C. Police Department. He did a little this, little that, turned out what he really liked was being a cop. So he went back into law enforcement with the federales. He became a federal law enforcement guy, did a little this, a little that, eventually ended up with the Defense Criminal Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon.
His job was to do what they called field investigations for people applying for top secret security clearances. At the time, this was right before he retired a second time, and he could get away with this because it was near retirement and he didn’t give a damn. He was a really good man actually. He had very retrograde views about a lot of things, but he was fundamentally a good man.
Anyway, he had gone and done a full field survey, as it was called, to get a top security clearance where they talked to every neighbor you had at every address you’d ever lived at. It was a very extensive thing. And in those days, believe it or not, in the ’80s, you could not get a top security clearance if you were gay. Period. And so my father had a case and he processed it. And the guy was gay, but he was out. And my father, as a matter of—it’s interesting, it wasn’t even exactly a matter of principle. It was a matter of stupidity. I’m going to be very crude here, so don’t try to avoid being offended, but this is literally how my father described this. He says, “If a guy’s a cocksucker and he admits it, he ain’t a security risk. If he’s a cocksucker and he won’t admit it, he’s a security risk.”
Jonathan: He’s exactly right.
Jim: And this is what he did. He was like a GS-13. He was no heavyweight, but he refused to back down. And he appealed his decision to grant the top secret security clearance all the way up the chain to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, who at the time was Frank Carlucci. And Carlucci agreed with him and approved it. From that day forward, if you were gay and out, it was not deemed a security issue at all.
Jonathan: Well, that’s a great story. Until 1995, officially gay people were not allowed security clearances. Agencies, I guess, were empowered to make exceptions. I didn’t know about that. But not all that long ago, 1995 is when President Bill Clinton finally signed the executive order that officially said homosexuality is not grounds to deny someone a security clearance. And this, by the way, affected thousands and thousands of loyal and patriotic and highly skilled and dedicated Americans who were kicked out of their jobs if they were discovered because of their sexual orientation.
The State Department had what a friend of mine there who lived through this calls “the goon squad.” And these people, they lived to ferret out homosexuals. They would find ways to get into your life, figure out where you’ve been. They’d grill people about, “Well, where was he that night? Did you go out with him? Did you have sex with him? Did someone else have sex with him?” They’d find diaries. This just went on and on. But all praise to your father. These small heroes who just put up resistance—that’s ultimately what creates the cracks in the system that can help to bring it down.
Jim: Yeah, it’s interesting in retrospect. He wasn’t a moral hero particularly or enlightened at all. He just thought it was stupid.
Jonathan: Well, you remember during—which of the Gulf Wars was it? I guess it was—was it the one under the first Bush or the second? But one of them, the Defense Department fired like, what was it, over a dozen Arabic translators because they were homosexuals. Now, this was at a time when there was a desperate defense need to translate what the enemy was doing.
Jim: Yeah, it must have been the first Gulf War, because by the second Gulf War that would not have been…
Jonathan: Oh no, we were not allowed to serve openly in the military until 2011.
Jim: That’s right. There was that goofy-ass… The highest example of hypocrisy I’ve ever heard of in my life – “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” In fact, I voted against Clinton in ’96 in protest of that, actually, and two other issues. I voted for him in ’92. But I said “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is not what you promised, asshole. And for the government to have crafted this grotesque example of hypocrisy, I just found morally offensive. But anyway, enough on this topic. It’s an important topic, but let’s move on. The next thing you talk about is something we see all the time – tribal truth. What are you pointing to with that concept?
Jonathan: Well, this is the idea that we talked about earlier, which is a lot of people, when they identify truth, they tend to identify what the people around them, who they rely on for good faith and for status, believe is true. If you believe, for example – I don’t know, suppose you’re a QAnon believer. Now, none of that stuff is true. But if you believe, it probably doesn’t do you any harm in your day-to-day life. You probably go and shop for groceries and bring the kids to school and whatnot. But it may raise your status among people in the QAnon group and they’ll think you’ll start to get some recognition, you’ll get some friends in this group and this is good for you, this is rewarding. And you don’t have to be QAnon – there are many kinds of beliefs that will increase your status and your social connections. And we tend to sort on the basis of those beliefs, not necessarily what’s true. We’re basically a tribal species fundamentally, and the point of the Constitution of Knowledge is to fight this by requiring us, in order to establish that something is true, to persuade people who don’t agree with us and aren’t like us – break out of that tribal truth.
Jim: Yeah, I’ve been using an example of tribal truth in some of my talks recently. I didn’t call it epistemic crisis – I think I called it epistemic failure or something like that. It was an amazingly clean example of it. Remember when Trump got shot in the ear in Butler, Pennsylvania? In my online world, which is pretty extensive and I would say much smarter than average, immediately – and then this is the scary part – for two weeks, the two tribes, Team Red and Team Blue, were both making the most absurd tribal claims, especially after the evidence was in 40 minutes after the assassination attempt, that both of these epistemic assertions had very low single-digit at best probabilities.
And that was my Team Blue friends: “It was staged. This has got to be fake. This is a trick to help Trump.” And then the Team Red team was, “Oh, it was the deep state. They were trying to take him out.” And I said, okay, maybe that’s the first thing that comes into your head. You’re actually thinking with a reasonable capacity. But less than 40 minutes later, or in fact, if you’re watching on TV immediately, you knew he got shot in the ear. Stop and think for even a second – if it was staged, no one’s going to try to shoot somebody in the ear from 150 yards away. The maximum accuracy of the best rifle made isn’t good enough to guarantee you’re not going to hit him in the head instead, even if you were the shooting instructor for SEAL Team 6. So clearly it wasn’t staged.
And then the deep state – the very simple refutation of that is if it was the deep state, he would have been dead. The marksmen that they have are not going to miss from 150 yards. And they weren’t going to… And they wouldn’t use an AR-15 shooter either. They’d be using a Remington 700 loaded with .300 Win Mag and he’d been blown to pieces.
Jonathan: Yeah, that’s a very good example, Jim. And it goes to this broader point, which is that in a lot of our lives, the way that even very smart people – don’t get me wrong, college degree doesn’t change this. In fact, it may actually enhance this effect.
Jim: The research makes it worse, says it makes it worse, which is bizarre and scary, but that’s what the research says.
Jonathan: Well, it turns out that very smart people with college degrees are better at rationalizing their own false beliefs. So they’re able to dig in even deeper and come up with even more convoluted schemes. But yeah, most of the time we are inclined as humans to believe the things that will raise our status with our group and our tribe and benefit us in that way. And you just gave a perfect example of that. Because both of those conspiracy theories may be wacko in terms of the facts, but they’re going to raise the status of the people in both of those red teams and blue teams who hold those things. You know, they’re going to be online saying that stuff and other people are going to say, “You go girl, this is great, you must be right. I’m going to follow you.” And that’s how these things spread.
Jim: All right, let’s move on a little bit to how we were able to create a reality-based society, at least in part. And you make the very good point. This is dear to my heart because it’s one of the things I greatly believe in – is the rise of liberalism, real liberalism and John Stuart Mill liberalism and Thomas Jefferson, James Madison liberalism was part of the booting process, I think, as you called it, for getting us into a reality-based community.
Jonathan: Well, there’s a lot of history there and you warned me against long professorial answers. So I’ll make it super brief and we can drill down if you’re interested. But boy, I could go down some rabbit holes. I did my college dissertation on the history of geology, so, you know, we could have some fun.
Jim: Go for it. This is an important topic.
Jonathan Rauch: So in the 15th and 16th centuries, on into the 17th, you get the Wars of Religion, which is Catholics and Protestants cannot agree on some core issues about reality, like who’s God and who isn’t and who gets to live after life and who doesn’t. And it turns out Protestants also don’t agree with Protestants about those things. And they settle these disagreements the way human societies throughout time typically have, which is they try to exert force over each other. They try to deal with this issue coercively. And that leads to a war that’s extremely bloody and very long-lasting. And at one point, according to modern estimates, wipes out something like 30% of the population of what is today Germany.
Two things happen. The first is some philosophers, especially a guy named John Locke, English philosopher who is exiled in Europe, says there’s got to be a better way. And that better way is what they call empiricism. And that better way is, you know, you can’t win an argument by killing the person on the other side or banning them, imprisoning them or exiling. You win an argument by showing that you’re right and you’re going to have to make empirical cases for that based on stuff that you can actually show.
So that’s the doctrine of empiricism. And they also have this doctrine of liberalism, which is that people are interchangeable. This is the great idea that made modern society possible. If you’re just citing your authority and you say, “God told me so, so it must be true,” you can’t do that either. You’ve got to persuade in empirical ways that other people can see, even if they’re different from you. So John Locke begins setting that on its feet and it is further refined, and that becomes the philosophical basis for the constitutional knowledge.
Meanwhile, at the same time as they’re doing that, you have actual practitioners. And this is of course, the age of Descartes and of Newton and of the other great founders of science, Francis Bacon and so forth. You have experimentalists who are beginning to apply those very same tenets and push them forward. And they’re showing the remarkable power of using these methods of structured observation. It’s not just walking around looking at things. How do you create an experiment that can demonstrate something to someone else?
As they go about doing this, they’re quite conscious of the fact that there are, of course, technological benefits, but there are social benefits. You’re going to have peace instead of war, because you’re not, according to the rules of this system – liberal science, I call it – you’re not allowed to use coercion to settle disagreements. You got to use persuasion, and it’s got to be structured persuasion of just the kind we’re talking about. Your reason has to be available for anyone to see. Your evidence needs to be available for anyone. Your experiment needs to work wherever it’s tried.
Well, once you set those rules up, it begins to snowball. You begin to get the rapid advances in science and philosophy that go hand in hand, and reinforce each other through the 19th century and you get to today. What you don’t get is uniform consensus that any of that is right, because you’ve always had holdouts. And they’re everything from the great totalitarian states like the Soviet Union to Christendom back in the last century, which deeply objected to and tried to censor the theory of evolution, for example, and today’s modern woke movement and MAGA movement, which also in their very different ways, are confrontational and hostile to the constitutional knowledge. But how is that for a nutshell history of science?
Jim: Yeah. Not bad. Right. And the key part that you missed, but I’m sure we can get into in more detail, is the role of institutions in bootstrapping that. And when I use institutions, I mean it in the way that a theoretical economist would – meaning it doesn’t necessarily have to be a building with its name on it. The institution of the “community of letters,” I think in the early days of the scientific domain, is that they had some mutually agreed emergent standards that they all agreed to play to, even though there wasn’t actually a building with a name on it called the community of letters.
Jonathan: That’s the big idea of the Constitution of Knowledge. This idea, this is not a metaphor, a simile, a literary device or a figure of speech. It’s an actual thing. It’s not written down in just one place like the U.S. Constitution, but it is written down in the rules and norms of institutions around the world. Things like the American Association of University Professors’ Red Book, which is a guide to academic standards. Things like the American Association of Newspaper Editors’ ethics codes, which were first codified in, I think, the 1910s and which still exist.
The keepers of rules are institutions. And yeah, they can be a building with a name on the door, but they are also networks of people who hold to these rules and promulgate these rules so that the rules transcend the individual at any given time. And the rules are passed down from generation to generation and they’re refined and they’re strengthened so we get better at doing science. And those are the rules that are under attack right now in places like academia, where they say, you know, no one’s objective, and whites get prevalence over blacks or whatever it happens to be that day.
But that’s right. This is the core thing, that the marketplace of ideas metaphor is incomplete, that it’s not just individuals spouting ideas. It’s within the context of rules and norms and institutions that shape how it is we have to address each other in order to play by the rules and persuade each other successfully.
Jim: And that’s an important part because early on, one could say, well, persuasion bad. Right. But of course, persuasion is indispensable to this process.
Jonathan: Yeah. And it’s structured persuasion. But that’s right, that’s how science moves forward. There’s a lot of disagreement at first. An idea, hypothesis, whatever, may be controversial. Sometimes they don’t get settled and science just moves on. Or it remains an open question.
But very often this process is super good at harnessing differences of opinion, different biases, different perceptions, and forcing people to bring them into some kind of conjunction and say, okay, so what do we think is really going on here? Idea A isn’t quite right. Idea B isn’t quite right either. What about idea C? It combines elements of the two of them and brings in something else. And that’s how science moves toward what they call consilience, which is how we get facts, which is when something looks true because a bunch of different lines of reasoning and argument all seem to confirm it. You never reach final truth in science. You’re not supposed to, but you move toward it and you get closer to it, and that’s how you do it.
Jim: I’ve got a little mouthful sentence that I use. I guess it’s just a phrase to define that process, which is the intersubjective agreement to the inter-objective.
Jonathan Rauch: Intersubjectivity, yeah. That is a term that some epistemologists throw around. This is the great insight of Charles Sanders Peirce, who’s the guiding spirit of the Constitution of Knowledge in my work. This is a 19th century American epistemologist, philosopher of knowledge, who was so far ahead of his time that it took basically 100 years after his death before people really understood his importance. But he’s the guy who figures out the magic of science is not the brilliance of the individual scientist. You got a guy with tousled hair sitting in a garret in Bern, Switzerland, writing equations. Even in principle, if he’s all by himself, you don’t know if that’s Einstein or a madman. There’s no telling.
The science happens when you take those ideas and you put them out into this network of independent but linked error seekers, people who are using these structures and these criticisms to try to shoot down the idea or to try to support it and bring it before others. That’s where the magic happens. It happens over the network and that’s where our knowledge is. Peirce is so far ahead of his time. He’s a network epistemologist. He says knowledge is not in our heads. It’s on this network of minds that we’ve created that spans the entire globe. It’s knowledge. Science is not a me, it’s not a them, it’s a we.
Jim Rutt: Yeah, indeed. And now this is a really important point, at least I believe so. I think you’ll 100% agree, is that both terms intersubjective and interobjective are critical. You know, the QAnon people are intersubjective, right? They float their crazed theories and some consensus arises over time on what parts are true, which parts are false. Q drops, that’s not real. Right. So they do have intersubjective, but they don’t have the checksum of reality being the interobjective aspect of it. In fact, you actually attempt to define reality in the book. So take a whack at what is the interobjective that the intersubjective has to be tied to if this isn’t going to become nonsense.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, you’ll excuse me for not using either of those terms. That’s fine, they’re mostly new to me. But reality is a set of propositions that have been validated by a process that’s reliable. And that of course leads to the obvious next question, which is, well, what is that process? Like could I consult an oracle? Could I look at a deck of tarot cards? How about if I go to a priest and the priest tells me what’s true and what’s false? Can I consult the Bible?
So there are all kinds of ways that you could validate propositions to figure out if they reflect reality. And the claim of my book and many others in the same tradition is that there’s one way that is different from all others and that’s the Constitution of Knowledge. And that’s for just the reasons we’re talking about. Because it’s impersonal, requires everyone to follow the same rules, because it’s universalistic, it requires everyone to work in the same reality because it’s open-ended. It does not allow anyone to permanently settle any argument and thus ban people who disagree. You can always find an error somewhere if you look hard enough because it does all of those things that it settles disputes about reality in ways that are much more socially peaceable and productive and in ways that actually produce a picture of reality which is vastly more accurate than any prior human enterprise.
Jim Rutt: Yeah, if you just look at the timeline of everything, 1625 was the inflection point when the earliest parts of this started to come together. And the ability of the human race to move forward in capacity has just been on an exponential incline since then. It was essentially flat. Interestingly, it wasn’t quite flat, but it was like 1% a century of increase in actual useful knowledge. And now to your point, it’s more like 1% a day.
Jonathan Rauch: And this is – I may have made reference to this earlier, but we need to understand what’s happened here as a species-transforming process. Because of the constitution of knowledge, we are functioning as a species probably two orders of magnitude above our design capacity. We were designed to be small tribes of people, 100 or 150 or whatever, wandering around, each in our own separate reality and accumulating knowledge at the rate of centuries. Today we’re accumulating knowledge at the rate of minutes over networks of thousands and thousands of institutions and millions of individuals. This is, as I say, it’s literally species-transforming.
Jim: It certainly has been in good ways and bad. We’ll get to the mostly good, but…
Jonathan Rauch: We can get to bad.
Jim: Yeah, mostly good. One last thing before we move on from this part. You laid out, I thought, quite interesting and accessible concept of the social funnel of knowledge.
Jonathan Rauch: Okay, so I mentioned earlier that you need three conditions to make the constitution of knowledge work. And the first, but only the first, is free speech. It’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Free speech is the wide end of the funnel. And that’s the idea that you need lots and lots of hypotheses and you need lots of people making the hypotheses. You need creativity, you need some off-the-wall stuff.
You know, I hate this business where people submit fake papers to journals that are outlandish and then, if they get published because they’ve got fake data, they slam the journal for publishing nonsense. Well, science actually proceeds because occasionally someone puts something really weird out there that turns out to be quantum mechanics, right? So you want that funnel to be wide. You want to encourage people to make mistakes. This is what is so unique about liberal science. Other systems punish mistakes by punishing the people who hold them. Or as Popper said, we kill our hypotheses by killing the hypothesizer. Science does it differently.
It encourages you to make mistakes, but it also encourages you to correct the mistakes. So as Popper said, we kill our hypotheses instead of each other. And because we survive to make more mistakes, we’re able to set up this giant global machine that winnows those millions of hypotheses that go in the big end of the funnel every day, and then very quickly sort out those rare gems in there, those needles in the haystack – mixing metaphors shamelessly – that turn out to be worth pursuing and maybe even turn out to be truthful.
The narrow end of the funnel, that’s what comes out the other end. And it’s defined by the second thing that’s indispensable to the constitution of knowledge, and that’s the discipline of fact. Once you put the hypotheses in the system, we all have to agree that there are going to be some very demanding and specific protocols that we’re going to follow before something is called a fact. Now those will vary depending on the discipline.
But you’re a physicist, you know, there’s going to have to be some math, there’s going to have to be some experimentation. You’re going to have to publish a paper. It’s going to have to be fair and assess the state of the literature. It’s going to have to show all your work. You’re going to have to invite replication. You’re probably going to have to share your data, on and on and on. You must follow those rules.
If you don’t, you won’t get thrown in jail, but you won’t be participating in science either. And so you won’t get published and you won’t get the Nobel Prize or in the textbooks. So that’s the winnowing process. And it depends on that big important number two, which is the discipline of fact. You cannot just say things. You cannot bullshit your way through. You cannot rig the experiment. You can’t make stuff up. That’s the winnowing process and that’s essential. And that’s why I keep emphasizing folks – free speech, it’s necessary, it is not sufficient. You must adhere to these rigorous fact-finding processes. And it’s going to be hard and you might fail and your pet idea might not withstand this scrutiny. You got to be mature enough to deal with that.
Jim: Yeah, it’s interesting. My best presentation I ever got – unfortunately the video of it got lost – it’s called “Shoot the Puppy” and the concept was aimed for entrepreneurs. It was called “The Journey from Idea to Exit.” So the whole life span of a company, and I literally had a picture of a dog with a real gun pointed at his head – it was our dog. And the idea was you had to be ruthless about shooting the puppy along the way. You know, look for a reason to say no. Just as in science, we’re always looking for the thing that falsifies our idea, to go back to Popper. And that happens early, even before you’ve done the first experiment, just when you’re doing the thought experiments. That is an absolutely critical mental skill that is very difficult. Funny, I’m mentoring a young fellow who works at a high-tech company and is thinking about leaving to start his own company. And I actually gave him the “Shoot the Puppy” lecture this morning – that you must not just jump in and believe, you must verify each step and be ready to move on, do something else if you find an error in your thinking.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, will you accept a friendly amendment to that, which is ideally the scientific mindset and the journalistic mindset and all the people who are part of the reality-based community’s mindset should be: we try to shoot down our own hypotheses because we’re good scientists. But most people don’t actually do that. And it turns out in science, you want people who really believe they’re right. In fact, you often want people who are dogmatic because they’re going to stick by their guns and they are really going to fight for their ideas. And that’s where the energy to move forward comes from. It’s also a fact, tons and tons of cognitive research on this – we cannot see our own biases and we’re all biased. So we’re not very good at shooting down our own ideas. So here’s the magic of liberal science: it forces us into contention with people who have different biases than ours and people who will see the mistakes that we don’t see. So we can be dogmatic, as long as the system isn’t dogmatic, knowledge will move forward. And that’s the key. So what this is doing, you think about this, this is taking one of the most flawed traits of humans, which is being dogmatic and biased, and turning that productive, channeling that in a constructive way.
Jim: I like that. I like that amendment actually, because it is important. I personally think you need personally to have some discipline with respect to your ideas. But not everybody does. And some of the greatest thinkers didn’t.
Jonathan Rauch: Einstein rejected quantum physics right until the end. Now, I’m not saying people should strive to be dogmatic. They do need – ideally you have both. You have an individual attitude which is scientific and empirical and open to correction. Of course you should have that. So you do need both. But you don’t just count on the individuals to get it all right the first time themselves.
Jim: Yeah, I think that’s actually a very good point. I will say though, within reason, whatever that means – I mean, my scientific home these days is the Santa Fe Institute, which is a very interesting theory place. And because it’s high profile about theories, we get the most crazed shit sent in from time to time. Theories of everything. For some unknown reason, there’s always a triangle on the cover with a word next to each vertex of the triangle that allegedly explains it all. And we always like to say that we’re very open to any idea, but it can’t be crank. And now defining what is crank and what is a wild out-there idea, of course is…
Jonathan Rauch: Well, that – of course you mentioned the funnel. That’s the beginning of the winnowing process. The very first thing that happens when a hypothesis… Well, first thing that happens, a hypothesis is floated. And if it’s clearly nonsense, it won’t even be accepted into the system. People just won’t be interested in spending money or time to study it. And science has made mistakes that way. It has rejected important hypotheses that it should have accepted. But usually it’s right about what’s cranky and what’s not. But then once an idea is acquired and is deemed to be, well, this is Santa Fe Institute, we want to talk about this, then you start the process. You’ll hold a conference, you’ll see if there’s a paper about it, you’ll look at the evidence and then maybe Jim is going to say, well, I’m going to maybe do a paper on this myself, develop this idea or critique this idea. And then you’re off to the races. Then you’re really getting somewhere.
Jim: Absolutely. All right. Well this has, I think, been a great job in laying out the constitution of knowledge and the reality-based community. And this will let us now take the next step where we enter into the network world where the pace of things and the nature of connectivity fundamentally changes.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, the principles don’t fundamentally change of how you do this, but you get some new challenges now. You’re in an environment where there’s less gatekeeping. And that has some good aspects, but it has some very bad aspects as well. It gets easier to fool large numbers of people. It gets easier to use disinformation, trivially easy publishing stuff that’s nonsense or deliberate trolling, deliberately inaccurate or just misconceived. You know, when I was growing up, you probably had to own a newspaper to do that. Now you just put out a tweet.
Jim: As I used to say, “Don’t argue with the man who buys ink by the barrel.” That was the negative aspect. That’s the negative side of that, right?
Jonathan Rauch: Well, there’s a positive side of that too. You know, I come from that era and you know, the great killer app of the modern journalism business was the editor. You can call that a gatekeeper. I guess people think that’s a bad word. But editors were professionals. They were experts who sat around all day thinking, is this worth spending ink on? Is it important? Is it accurate? And they’ll ask the reporter, have you checked it? And then they’ll go to a front page meeting and say, so is this really worth a lot of time? And you need traffic cops there inside the funnel to make these decisions in a professional and expert way. And when you lose that, you get a lot of chaos. You get a situation where it becomes very difficult to screen out and find the good ideas amid the welter of, can I say this, bullshit.
So that’s the world we get into now. And then things get even more complicated and difficult when you start setting up social systems, social networks and Twitter and stuff like that, whose design idea is: First, you want them to be sticky and addictive, so you want to publish stuff that attracts people that they can’t look away from. And second, it doesn’t necessarily have to be true. That’s not a criterion, because you’re selling ads, so you want stuff that gets eyeballs, not necessarily stuff that’s true. Well, once you’re looking for stuff that’s addictive and you don’t care if it’s true or not, you’re in a world where, of course, it is so easy to fabricate outrageous, addictive, funny and made-up stuff that captures eyeballs that you quickly get in a system which is selecting against truth, not for truth. Now, most information systems, if you put your money in the slot and what comes out is a falsehood, you’d say that information system is broken. But that’s exactly what we’re doing a lot of the time with social media. And that poses a big challenge.
Jim: Yeah. And indeed, there’s a key word that you didn’t use that is kind of the root of all evil in that scenario, which is that the figure of merit for these companies is what they call engagement. Which is how likely are you to interact with the quantum of information that lands on your screen? And if the only figure of merit, if the algorithm is tuned to maximize engagement, we now know – we didn’t probably know when they first started doing this, 2007, 2008 – that lies on average are what, 3x as engaging as the truth in the same domain. And so at an interaction of technology and human cognitive capability, we have, because we’re driven by engagement, this mathematical calculatable number, we have systems specifically guaranteed to produce a lot more false claims than true claims.
Jonathan: Yeah, we have a couple things reinforcing each other. One is that, as the saying goes, enragement is engagement. The best way to get Jim’s attention and make sure that I can hold his attention and he can’t ignore me, is to accuse him on Twitter of being a pedophile and saying that he, I don’t know, molests his grandchildren, God forbid, or whatever. Well, that’s very hard for you to ignore. So you’re going to rise to that bait. And if you do that on an industrial scale, you’re going to get a lot of attention.
The second thing that happens is we’re wired to assume, because we’re groupy and because groups often understand things that individuals don’t, that if a lot of people are saying something, if we’re hearing it all over the place, it’s probably true. At least might be true. I mean, why would all those people say vaccines cause autism if there isn’t something to it? Did the moon landing really happen? Well, all my friends say it might not have, maybe it didn’t. So these things interact. The more you hear something, the more engaging it is, the more people think, well, there must be something to it. And thus it begins to spread as a substitute for truth. And here we are. And of course, you know, it’s hard to engineer truth to be sticky. It’s just the truth. But it’s very easy to engineer misinformation and disinformation to be sticky. You just test it and you see what sticks.
Jim: Yeah, that’s the thing, literally machine testing. Okay, I’m a machine troller. I’ll put out 16 versions of the same story with different wording, different hooks, different images, and I’ll know in 10 minutes which one works. Ten minutes, I’ll know which one worked.
Jonathan: And with AI, you can, you know, you don’t need humans to do this anymore. You can just do this at the rate of, you know, you can generate a million pieces of disinformation and spew them out there and immediately see which ones are sticking and focus on those. And this is a real, real epistemic challenge.
Jim: Yeah. And I will tell you this as somebody who was there at the dawn of the consumer online world in 1980, when I went to work for a company called The Source, which was the world’s first consumer online service, we had no clue about this. We were exceedingly naive. We thought we were doing the good work for humanity and that inevitably citizenship is going to be amazingly upgraded because everybody will have the ability to get access to data of all sorts. They’ll be able to reason together in the marketplace of ideas. We believe that. We believe we were doing the good work in 1980, ’82, ’85 and well.
Jonathan: On into the 2000s. Of course, that’s the fallacy of the marketplace idea. It’s – you need freedom of speech and you need to have lots of ideas, but you also need these mechanisms to sort through them. And that requires a lot of rigorous structure. And that’s the part we forgot about.
Jim: Though I will add there is a fork in the road that made it much worse. Prior to about 2002, if you wanted any kind of quality online thing you had to pay. Ads were at most supplemental and prior to about 1996-95, ads were almost non-existent as a revenue source online. That produced a very different dynamic. If I’m paying, let’s say ten bucks a month for some service and there’s no ads on it, the person that’s creating the product and managing the product has an incentive to get me on and off as quickly as possible. Because being on costs them money. And oh by the way, they want me to get the maximum value for my shortest possible engagement so that I keep my subscription going. And that I would say is a pro-social product cycle.
If you go past the 2002 epoch where it’s essentially all ad-driven on the big wide consumer sites at least, the opposite dynamic comes on, which is I want you to stay on as long as possible because I’m feeding you ads and the longer you stay on, the more I collect in terms of advertising. I monetize you better the longer you’re on. So the dynamic now says I don’t want to get you off as soon as possible, I want to keep you on as long as possible. Which therefore means I do not want to satisfy whatever reason you came on this service for. I want to do it in the slowest roll fashion possible so you’ll hang on – what’s this? TikTok for 45 minutes, right? And accomplish nothing. And how do I do this? By very sophisticated cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience understanding of how to play the dopamine piano. And so the cycle, the virtuous cycle that we talked about before for paid services is now an anti-virtuous cycle to hold you online as possible, provide you nothing and manipulate you to stay in that state.
Jonathan: Yep, I like that. It’s an important distinction.
Jim: Yeah, it is the world that we live in. And you know, if I were the czar, goddamn good idea, the first thing I’d do is ban advertising. Advertising on the Internet, period. Right. And then I would give everybody $100.
Jonathan: Well, there are pros and cons, so we could argue it all day. The Internet is a hard problem. There’s nothing easy that works. Because the problem with the subscription model is you get the rabbit holes and the self-selection and you get the people who are not exposing themselves to different views.
Jim: That’s true. It raises the level of the walled garden as we used to call it. Now today, with costs being what they are, there’d be a million of them. So let’s actually talk about that. You do talk on the very important topic of the filter bubble.
Jonathan: Yeah. I’m not sure, I can’t remember in the book if I used the phrase.
Jim: I think you did. It’s a little archaic actually.
Jonathan: Well, it’s kind of been disproven – the idea that people only get information sources online from places they already agree with.
Jim: Yep. You used it three times.
Jonathan: Oh good. Did you just search in that microsecond? Isn’t technology amazing? The next thing I want to know is did I use it in a way that endorsed it or did I say other people referred to it? Because I’ve become a bit of a skeptic about filter bubbles. It turns out that people, some reports, some research finds that people are filter bubbling less in the online world than they did in the old print and radio world. Because the barriers to encountering stuff that you disagree with are just so much lower that it’s just going to come along in your feed, you know, in your Google search or whatever.
Jim: I, Paul picked up one quote. You said the social science results are mixed.
Jonathan Rauch: Yeah, okay, so that’s right. And I think over time the idea of filter bubbles has lost some of its prevalence just because of empirical research. But what is true is that we now have two different media universes. You’ve got conservative media in one world, which a lot of it now is based on this – the flaw of both the eyeball and the subscription model. It’s enthralled to its audience. So it presents people with stuff they want to hear. And sometimes that’s not true stuff. Witness the election “Stop the Steal” and Fox News’s $790 million settlement with the voting company. And then you’ve got mainstream media, which is still more fact-based, though not of course, far from perfect. And that’s leading to a division in the public. And it’s why we can sustain two very different views of reality – one in Republican world to a large extent and one in Democratic world to a large extent.
Jim: Indeed, indeed. So essentially we’ve been talking about so far are patterns that are inherent to the structure of the economics. Let’s talk about this engagement tar pit that is profitable to suck you in, keep you on as long as possible, feed you as many ads as possible. So now let’s take the next step where these ecological phenomena now get exploited by people intentionally, whether for profit or for manipulation. Where people say “let’s use the affordances that these guys have created just to make money.” They don’t really have any ideological doctrine – they are arms of corrupt-type dudes. And now let’s be bad guys and figure out how we’re going to use these affordances to do things that are not good.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, some of them think they’re good guys and it’s not necessarily tied up with money. Paradigmatic case of this is anti-vax movement, which was studied in detail by Renee DiResta, a wonderful researcher.
Jim: We had her on the show some time back.
Jonathan Rauch: Yep, she’s got an excellent book out that I recommend. Even better than my book. It belongs on your must-read list and it’s called “Invisible Rulers.” But Renée cut her teeth – she was a mother in California and she began realizing that the anti-vaccine movement was taking up more and more mindshare and endangering her kids and a lot of other kids. And so she began to look at how anti-vax was spreading and she discovered that it was a very sophisticated campaign that used a lot of Internet tools like search engine optimization and implanting fake stuff in key places. It also used influencers to amplify.
What the anti-vaxxers figured out is that by manipulating the online world, they could make it look like a small fringe – and by the way, false – view was held by a whole lot of scientists and researchers. So they could make it look like if you look up, I don’t know, measles vaccination, the stuff that will come up will look like science, but it will all be fake stuff saying that vaccination causes autism. She actually got into the networks and traced how this worked and realized that it was sophisticated and deliberate.
Then in the run-up to the 2016 election, she looks around – and other people look around, it isn’t just her at that point – and see the exact same patterns. But now it’s being led, for example, by Russian trolls, people working out of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, and it’s happening in circles and activists in the United States. People begin to realize that a lot of manipulation can happen and does happen for a lot of reasons. One is political power, political gain, another is prestige and status – you know, my version of reality prevails. Sometimes it’s just ideology. Anti-vaxxers – just you tell me why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes the things he does, but I think he’s probably sincere. And then some of it is just villainy or money. Those famous Macedonian teenagers started a whole bunch of fake news sites and attracted lots of people to it and monetized that and made, what did they say, like $100,000 a month or some such thing.
Jim Rutt: Yeah, and for them it was huge bucks that basically probably had some, at least at the margin, had some impact on the US Election.
Jonathan Rauch: Yeah, and that’s right, you know, but it turns out that this stuff is highly consequential and people will actually vote based on thinking that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump.
Jim Rutt: For pointers for folks, Renée DiResta came on way back when on 10-1-20 in episode 81 where our topic was on social media warfare. So I’m sure we talked about a lot of these kinds of topics. I’m just going to revisit this interesting thing you laid out that the filter bubbles were worse in the past. It may be the case now. I think about it because in the old days people would subscribe to The New Republic or National Review and so they got their timely analysis from either sort of center-left to relatively right. I think I must have confused all the magazine subscription algorithms because for a long time I subscribed to both of them, but not too many people did. You were one or the other. Today you’re on Twitter, you’re going to get hit by the left, the right, the nuts, the sober, et cetera. So I can see the argument that the filter bubbles were actually stronger in the past may have some validity to it. But on the other hand, the mainstream media was far less polarized than the online world is, so you did get a goodly chunk of relatively objective information.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, that’s right. And I was about to say I think of this as an environmental problem, like what happens when the air is not fit to breathe and the water’s not fit to drink. Which is what happens when the epistemic environment gets so full of garbage and toxic stuff that it becomes very hard to tell what’s true or what’s false. Then you get a cynical and demoralized and angry population. And that has a lot to do with where we are right now.
Jim: Yeah, I call that meme space pollution – kind of a nerdy frame for it. I’m just curious, why did somebody spend money and use expertise and lots of effort to spread the anti-vaxxer ideology? You think that there’s some money in selling vaccines, but what motivation could there be for anti-vax? Take this level of effort, I don’t…
Jonathan Rauch: Think they spend a lot of money. Part of what’s going on here is that this is all extremely inexpensive. You can do it on your laptop at your kitchen table at night. And a lot of people have. That’s what powered the QAnon movement. Lots of people sitting on their laptops acquiring and then further bolstering and then passing on these crazy conspiracy theories. And sooner or later, someone with a rifle shows up at a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. looking for Hillary Clinton’s child sex trafficking network. That’s the whole problem. It’s not expensive. It doesn’t require a big outlay. Anyone can do it and anyone does. But it is more dangerous when it’s done by powerful actors and state actors and especially by leading politicians. And you know who I’m talking about.
Jim: Now, your book was published in 2021, which means it was written in 2020, probably, right? Or though there was some stuff in it about the fact that Trump had lost, as I recall.
Jonathan Rauch: Yeah, I squeezed some stuff in about that right at deadline.
Jim: But time has marched on. Hate when that happens. Right. How do you see the world today with respect to the intersection of our social meme spaces, you know, online and epistemics as of yesterday afternoon?
Jonathan Rauch: Oh, it’s worse. The social media companies have dropped any pretense of trying to check facts just to inform users if something is proven false. They were not widely taking down stuff – that’s a myth. They were mostly informing people and putting up informational banners and saying “for more context or information.” And that may have not worked very well, but it did work to some extent. And my friends in the fact-checking field say that what you don’t see – of course everyone hears about the examples of fact-checking gone awry, where something’s taken down or refuted that shouldn’t have been – you don’t hear about the literally millions and millions of genuinely false and dangerous stuff that gets taken down because it’s not controversial. You don’t hear about it.
The fact-checking programs are gone. They’re off of Facebook. They’re doing something called Community Notes, which is, we don’t really know yet, but it’s probably ineffective or even less effective. The much bigger problem is that you now have someone in the White House who is a master of Russian-style mass disinformation, and he’s using that right now in a campaign to brand Ukraine as the aggressor in the war with Russia. An outrageous lie, but one which half the public will believe because the President’s saying it and he knows what he’s doing.
We’ve talked about this at the beginning of the call. We need to emphasize he is not some kind of dummy who just believes weird stuff and can’t keep his mouth shut. This is a very deliberate campaign to deceive Americans about the nature of that war for political gain. So you’ve got the world’s leading disinformation expert and practitioner in the White House. On the plus side, there’s a lot more awareness now than there was certainly in 2016 and maybe in 2020 of what we’re up against in the epistemic challenge. We know a lot more about the tactics and methods that are being used, and it’s a little bit easier to identify. So maybe that’s a plus. But right now I’m feeling pretty bad about things.
Jim: Yeah. I will say there’s at least been no sign – maybe it just means they learned how not to leave any fingerprints – but there didn’t seem to be any major sign of external successful manipulation by foreign powers in the 2024 election.
Jonathan Rauch: Yeah, I haven’t heard of much, though it’s still early on. We know that in 2020, the scholars who looked at this found that there were significant efforts by foreign powers. The usual suspects – Russia and Iran are the big two, but North Korea gets in there and China’s really stepped up their game. But they know of a series of campaigns. I think the number – don’t quote me on this, but it’s about right – that they identified 14 of these campaigns that were launched and that 12 of the 14 were nipped in the bud. They were discovered by the media platforms. And if you catch them early and you slow them down, they don’t go viral in the same way. And this is a success story that you don’t hear about unless you’re a specialist and happen to know about it. So there are mechanisms that you can use to slow this stuff down and to be on the watch for it and stuff you can do, but you have to want to do it right.
Jim: If your theory is flood the zone with shit so that nobody can think straight, then there’s strong incentives not to do it.
Jonathan Rauch: Correct.
Jim: All right, let’s now exit on the last chapter in your book, which is basically your recommendations for what people can do.
Jonathan Rauch: I don’t even remember what I said. We’re what, four years later now and the environment has changed. Read me off some of the things I said and we’ll go through them.
Jim: Let’s see, you talked about the importance of institutions, the need for counterparts, mobilization.
Jonathan Rauch: Yep.
Jim: Against the forces of chaos and coercion.
Jonathan Rauch: Chaos and coercion.
Jim: Speak out against misinformation. I think that’s important still, right? I do all the time. I put up obnoxious posts like, “Can you believe what this just said?” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, you’ll love this one I put out.
Jonathan: Yeah, but don’t say that. Okay? Don’t drop F-bombs. It won’t work.
Jim: I have my own little signature which is “PHUQUE.” I’ve been trying to popularize that as the euphemistic form for fuckers. Here’s what I put up three days ago, which is somebody who said something about people that believe the moon landing was fake. And I said, “Yeah, I haven’t heard much from those people. I suspect they went outside during a thunderstorm, looked up at the light show with their mouths gaping and drowned.”
Jonathan: Oh well.
Jim: But I know that stuff doesn’t work, but it’s fun.
Jonathan: I’m old-fashioned on F-bombs. I want to see fewer of them. I think it’s one small thing we could do to improve the quality of everyday life. But on a more serious note, so these are things that we’ve already alluded to to some extent. One is institutional. There are tons of institutions in the reality-based community. If you participate in medicine or law or scientific research or journalism or in government, you can do everything you can to maintain those standards and promulgate those standards. And all power to the people in government who are pushing back against attempts to, for example, remove information from government databases. I think eventually there may be attempts to actively distort that information. In Trump’s first term, you remember he tried to change the weather report.
Jim: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Ordered them to say no because I wrote something on the whiteboard, so therefore it must be true. The whiteboard, that’s right.
Jonathan Rauch: This is out-and-out Orwellian manipulation of information. And the scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said no. Lots of people need to say no. A bunch of Justice Department people just resigned because they said no. It’s a not quite factual issue, but it’s related. And more people are going to resign. And it is necessary for those who are in the institutions to uphold their integrity because once they’ve been corrupted, it’s Katy, bar the door.
That’s especially true in universities. We haven’t talked much about the left-wing threat and we probably don’t have time for it. But some of what’s happened is that in certain disciplines and departments of academia, you have seen the abolition of the third thing that you really need. I mentioned there are three things you need to uphold: the constitutional knowledge, freedom of speech, the discipline of fact. Number three is diversity of viewpoint. If everyone agrees, we are not going to find each other’s mistakes – we’re just going to make the same false assumptions. That’s been corrupted in universities where there are whole departments now where you will not find dissenting views on a lot of key issues.
And so people in academia are starting to rally around stuff like a group like Heterodox Academy, which I’m on the board of. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is in this space, the Academic Freedom Alliance. At individual universities – Harvard, MIT – there are now faculty groups that are rallying for academic freedom and integrity. And that’s important. There are things we can do in our home institutions to shore them up and there are things we can do as individuals, which you also just alluded to. And that’s be a friend of truth wherever you find it. And that means, for example, if you’re a student at a university and you hear another student say something you disagree with, don’t try to shut them down or deplatform them.
Don’t go on social media and condemn them as a racist, even if you disagree with them very strongly – champion their ability to speak. Make sure that that is preserved because it may be your view, your minority view, that’s stifled next. So those are things people can do. I still think there’s a lot that can be done by media companies to stem the worst of the worst. They’re just not doing it at the moment. I think they’re scared of Trump and they’re scared of the backlash and it costs them a lot of money.
But there’s plenty of methods and modalities you can take to at least partly start to clean up the information space. You don’t need to censor stuff. You don’t need to be high-handed. You just need to tweak some algorithms so that maybe falsehood is not a plus. So those are some of the things that can happen. The most important, the central one and the theme of my book and the reason I’m here on this podcast: understand the Constitution of Knowledge. Understand that just having free speech online or anywhere else is getting you nowhere in terms of preserving knowledge and our ability to find knowledge. There’s this whole system and structure we’ve got to understand it and we’ve got to defend it because its enemies are very severe, sophisticated, and they are coming for it.
Jim: Well said. I’m going to throw at least one out. A guy we’ve had on the podcast, a personal friend now, David Brin, the astronomer and science fiction writer, has written lots of great science fiction. He’s written a little book called “Intellectual Judo,” I think it is, which is how to fight these battles online. And one of the things he recommends, and I use it a fair bit, is if people say something that you believe is absolutely not part of the world of reality, challenge them to a wager. I’ll regularly say, “Can you turn that proposition, that statement into a wagerable proposition? If so, I’ll give you odds on it.” And the thing that’s interesting about that is if you can actually engage the people, which you mostly can’t, but sometimes you can, they stop and think about it and say, “Wait a minute, how can I justify this? What kind of odds am I going to put on this? He’s actually serious. He’ll actually put up the money to challenge this proposition if I can put it into a wagerable form.” And Brin’s argument is it forces people to run through an epistemic process to assess the validity of their information.
Jonathan: I like that.
Jim: It’s an interesting one. Interesting little thing you can do. If you hear someone say utter nonsense, say, “Make that into a wagerable proposition. I’ll give you odds on it.” Alrighty. Well, I did intentionally skip the cancel culture woke thingy. I’m a fairly well-known anti-woke warrior and I beat that one to death. And I thought we had lots of other interesting things we could talk about.
Jonathan: Well, that’s right. And right now I don’t think we’re in any shortage of stuff that’s been said about that.
Jim: So that’s also my sense that the tide is moving out on that one.
Jonathan: Yes. Well, I think that’s right.
Jim: And the other one is the tide is building. And so I think we really ought to put our firepower power.
Jonathan: Well, that’s right. If people are interested, there’s what my book talks about, which is a little different, is that so-called cancel culture and wokeness and all of that are using some very sophisticated propaganda techniques to manipulate the environment in the institutions where they’re functioning. And it’s interesting to see how they do that. They manipulate apparent consensus and that turns out to influence opinion. So folks are interested in what they’re doing. That allows these small, extreme minority viewpoints to dominate in places like campuses and sometimes corporate life, for example. This explains how they accomplish that.
Jim: Yeah, that’d be chapter seven in Jonathan’s book. Well, I really want to thank Jonathan for this very interesting conversation about his book.
Jonathan: I have a new book out.
Jim: Is it out?
Jonathan: It’s out. Came out February 4th. It’s called “Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.”
Jim: That sounds like a good one. I’ll have to read that.
Jonathan: It’s another defense of our great liberal order, but coming at it from a different part of the problem.
Jim: Great, I’m going to get on and read that. The book we’re talking about today is “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” And this really is a good book. And again, I would recommend giving it away as a gift book to high school grads if they’re smart, college grads if they’re just average, and especially newly naturalized citizens and say this is a handbook on how to be a well-informed and a well-informing citizen. So thank you, Jonathan.
Jonathan: I love that. Thank you.