Oliver Traldi rejoins Spencer Case to discuss the nature of political beliefs. Topics they cover include the bad incentives that influence political beliefs, how political beliefs should be defined, and the need for (and possibility of) politically neutral language in which to discuss political issues.
Oliver Traldi rejoins Spencer Case to discuss the nature of political beliefs. Topics they cover include the bad incentives that influence political beliefs, how political beliefs should be defined, and the need for (and possibility of) politically neutral language in which to discuss political issues.
Welcome to Micro Digressions, a philosophy podcast. This is Spencer Case, and I'm here today with Oliver Trolley.. How are you doing, Oliver?
Oliver:doing great, Spencer. It's great to be back.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:It's great to have you back. Oh, yeah. Before we move on, I'm gonna say that the music that the audience will be hearing right now, and you, if you listen to it after I edit it, is from my friend Jeremy Moey, spelled M-O-H-N-E-Y. You can find. It at Jeremy Mooney's Bandcamp site for a dollar. You can download it. It's called Sweet Man and I love it. So thank you Jeremy for letting me use your music as, as bumper music for my podcast. So, Oliver, I wanna ask you about the, this book that you're working on, which is on political beliefs. I guess I wanted to ask you what made you interested in political beliefs in particular, like, we've talked a lot about political language, but not a lot about what's unique about political beliefs.
Oliver:Yeah, so first of all, I should say, book is finished. In production now. Just sending them cover and stuff like that. What got me into political beliefs, really it was thinking about political beliefs. that got me back into philosophy. During the Trump campaign in, you know, late 2015 and 2016, let me put it this way. I was in a place in my life where I was spending a lot of time on the internet. Well, that's always true of me, but I wasn't doing much else. And I had friends. Who were very active in politics, who were professionals in politics. my brother, uh, is a very successful, union researcher and organizer and now kind of director of operations at multiple nonprofits in Washington DC. Um, my best friend worked on the Obama campaigns and then worked on the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. And, uh, I knew many of their friends. Uh, I also had college friends in DC, um, and in New York working on, on the campaign. This is all from the Democratic perspective. At this point, I didn't really, I hadn't really made very many Republican or conservative friends. I'm kind of ethnically left wing, so to speak, well, I started to notice, because of where I was at in my life. I was spending some time on some pretty weird corners of the internet. Then I would go talk to, the people I was close to and, you know, and their friends and their friends of friends and such. Um, when I was in DC or New York, or even just over text message or whatever. And, uh, we would have very different impressions of what was going on. So one of the first ones was that, for, for basically, even until the summer of 2016, you know, a lot of people thought that Trump would be somehow removed from the ballot at the Republican convention. As 2016, I had people telling me Trump was not going to win a single primary. That the winner would be Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or somebody like that. And they would link me to articles in, you know, Vox and Slate and things like that. By people like Ezra Klein or, or Nate Silver and, uh. Then of course, Trump won the nomination and even after that, people said, well, there's no way he's going to win the general election. And that I agreed with,. And of course that was wrong too. And so I started really thinking about how did everybody get this so wrong? What were the incentives? Why were the incentives so wrong? and, uh, I started thinking about the incentives to say various things about Trump and about Trump supporters. And about the different kinds of information that Trump supporters were getting from their different news sources and maybe the different kinds of abilities they had to assess that information compared to Clinton supporters, Democrats versus Republicans. Moders versus extremists, you know, various kinds of, delineations of who's in what corner of politics. And I just started to think about all, all these problems of where information is coming from and who actually knows what's going on. how to make institutions better and how people can reason better about politics. Um, and it started to strike me that I didn't feel that I knew anything about politics., you know, I had kind of grown up in a certain culture and, uh, you know, 2016 was also the year that I started reading publications like Quillette. It was the year that I opened a Twitter account, and, uh, just suddenly started to realize that there were, there was a lot of thought out there that was not like the thought that I had encountered. about politics and that I hadn't encountered it for political reasons. And so I just started to think a lot about, you know, people are very confident about their political beliefs, but a lot of the ideologies of our political beliefs have these problems, these bad incentives, these biases, these tribal affiliations, this lack of information, you know, there's this complexity to these issues that, you know, make it really hard for a lay person to evaluate, but then Uh, it's really hard to know what we would want from an expert on politics. hard to know how we would assess them. I started to worry about things like echo chambers. Um, there was an Eon article by Tai Nguyen I always pronounce that last name wrong, but, he also has an episteme article about it, called the Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles. And anyway, I, I just started getting involved in this question, uh, and that was a big part of why I went back to philosophy. I wanted to study the epistemology of politics, and I found, social epistemology, when I went into my PhD program and it seemed like a, a good starting point for thinking about the epistemology of politics. So I approached it through the kind of existing literature on the epistemology of disagreement. The epistemology of testimony, the epistemology of experts, the epistemology of democracy. And, uh, yeah, that was kind of the inspiration and that was kind of the route that I took. And, uh, you know, I was lucky enough through my platform in my public writing to, to meet, my now editor at Rutledge. Uh, at a conference and proposed this idea and it, you know, it just so happens that I, I was able to finish the book as I was finishing, uh, my dissertation as well. And it, it was great. to write. It was a lot of fun to write.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:this wasn't like a new turn. This was like what was driving you in your philosophical journey to begin with? I didn't realize that.
Oliver:Yeah. So it was, you know, I, I don't want to overstate it. When I started grad school, I did want to study things like metaphysics and logic and the philosophy of science. This political stuff was lurking in the background for me, but, um, I didn't kind of realize that I could professionalize it. You know, I thought this would be kind of a side gig in, in magazines and stuff like that. and then, uh, in the spring of my first year, I took a class with Blake Rober who became my advisor, an epistemologist at Notre Dame, who's also writing a book on the epistemology of politics., this was a class on the epistemology of polarization and we were reading the big sort. We were reading some Cass Sunstein. We were reading papers by some young philosophers like, Regina Rini and Daniel Wodak and Alex Worsnip and Kevin Dorst. And I was just realizing that. This was a very active field and I didn't quite think anybody, anybody was getting it right. there, there, it seemed like there was. a good deal of low hanging fruit there. There are some very smart people working on this. But it seemed like there were also, some mistakes being made. But also, there was an opportunity to do something comprehensive. Maybe people who studied epistemology would throw out a paper about politics here and there. But nobody had just said, what are all the issues about political beliefs? And combined. Combined the new philosophical work with older traditions. Obviously, there are traditions of political epistemology that go back to Marx and also back to Plato and Aristotle. So I thought a book was a good opportunity to talk about a lot of those things. And theories of political belief that come out of sociology or psychology or political science. It's an issue that's very active in those disciplines as well.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:you must be familiar with this paper by Michael, humor why people are rational about politics.
Oliver:No. Can you remind me? I mean, certainly a lot of people have made arguments that people are, have irrational political beliefs.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:His argument is that, people are irrational about politics, because they are not incentivized to form beliefs where you actually update in light of new evidence. Like if you, there were no repercussions for your financial decisions, You would make very bad ones, right? When you suffer actual pain for bad decisions, there's a feedback mechanism there. But if an individual voter just keeps voting for the wrong candidates or shouting the wrong slogans or whatever, he or she might not feel any pain from that, right? In fact, you might be rewarded for greater, acceptance within a certain group of people.
Oliver:Yeah, so, uh, I definitely think that that's part of what, what goes on with political beliefs. This is an idea, you know, I'm a little embarrassed to say I haven't read the humor paper, but it's an idea that, that is raised, by some other people. I call it the, uh, the skin in the game idea that's a phrase from, I think, Naim Tale who you know, has a lot of people blocked on Twitter. I don't really know his work too well. I just know the phrase. And it's something that, um, Hugo Mercier talks about in his book on Gull ability as well. Yeah, the Skin in the Game idea, just that our beliefs are better when, we're staking something on them. Um, this isn't like staking theories of rationality, like pragmatic encouragement. It's just about. You know, when do we actually work on our beliefs? When do we actually improve our beliefs? Likely the situation where we're improving our beliefs the most is when, you know, there are some sorts of consequences for having the wrong beliefs. And we have to, you know, we have to deal with the fact that we're wrong. And also when there aren't benefits from having the wrong beliefs. A lot of people talk more about the benefits of having the wrong beliefs. than the lack of consequences for having the wrong beliefs. So Dan Williams has a paper about irrational political beliefs, which is just about, and Rishi Joshi has a paper about this too. I think they just talk about, things like, social incentives for, you know, sticking with your tribe, sticking with your group, you know, even when they're, they're saying something silly. And, uh, you know, one thing I wonder about is just, when do people have the wrong beliefs versus when do they have the right beliefs and they just lie, right? And so this is a big question, I think, in the epistemology of politics that is one of those philosophical questions that, you know, might not matter that much to practically minded people. Practically minded people might say, well, why does it matter if they lie or tell the truth? you know, why does it matter if they. Say the wrong thing, but actually believe the right thing, you know, if their actions don't change, why does it matter? Well, one reason it matters is that you might think their actions will change, in certain circumstances, so they might change, if, if we have some sort of privacy, a private ballot, for instance, might be cast differently, um, than the way somebody talks, One thing that, uh, very problematic people. talk about online is, uh, when people do things like looking for sperm and egg donors, they might have various sorts of preferences, which they would, in polite conversation, castigate as, uh, you know, incredibly backwards and unethical. I'm not so sure that our beliefs do depend on, on incentives, uh, as much as some of these other writers do. Um, I certainly think that our expressions of our beliefs, um, depend on incentives. You often can construct, kind of isomorphically a theory of insincere expressions that corresponds to another theory of irrational beliefs. I do think that this can, this makes things difficult and it's something that people need to look into more. Um, so there's a chapter in my book where I say basically, for any theory of political belief, you can just turn it into a theory of political expression and have a whole, a whole different background theory of political belief.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:I think there's room, there's almost room here for just an error theory for most people. Most people don't have political beliefs. They're just saying what people around them say. I mean, if you're just, if you're just saying the things that people around you say, hoping to get some kind of social reward for it, that doesn't imply any kind of belief whatsoever. So, I wonder if there's room for skepticism about this project by saying, well, you assume that, there are these political beliefs. Really all there is is just political behavior driven by, attitudes and non-cognitive things. There isn't actually a whole lot of belief in this domain.
Oliver:Yeah, so I think there's a few things to say about that. First, I'll just say, I think this is, you know, an active and important. Theory of political belief. Michael Hannon has a paper about this. He calls it political expressivism. He's done the most to developed this theory. From a kind of non-ideological perspective. Emmi Tao, the one at Georgetown, not the one at UCLA. Uh, has a theory a little bit along these lines as well, and is, he has a paper in a little known journal called Disputatio or something, responding to, to Jason Stanley's book on propaganda, his old book from 2015 or something like that, writes that, uh, we don't need deposit it. Because there's this left wing tradition of being interested in, you know, why does the proletariat not rise up while they must have been infected by some ideology that makes them think that they deserve to be treated so horribly, right? ideology theories are, important theories of political belief, even though I tend to think they're wrong. And Tyro says, well, we don't need to posit these ideologies because we can just as easily posit. that people actually know what's right and wrong but they don't want, the bad guys with guns to shoot them, or whatever right? Lian Bright called this the, the Guys With The Guns Theory or something like this. And then, you know, Philip Converse, in a classic paper on public opinion from I think the 60's, I think his name first name was Philip, he basically suggested that, that most people are non ideological, um, and their, political beliefs can change very, very quickly. And a lot of political judgments are formed by kind of intuitive feelings of trusting or distrusting a person or a political party. And then just kind of going with the flow of what they say and adopting their beliefs as one's own. One thing I would say is that, It's not clear how many of these models actually get away from people having political beliefs, so you might think, the person who says we should go to war because they think their friends think we should go to war or something? You might think, well, you even the thought that your friends think that we should go to war. Maybe that is also a political belief because of spurring you to a political action. Right? So the question of which beliefs are political is a question that I start out the book with. And it's actually a question that virtually nobody. Really talks about, um. I actually think there's something parallel for the question of which beliefs are religious. So obviously beliefs about, Whether there's a divinity or whether there are supernatural forces. Are religious beliefs but you might also think That, Questions about, The truth of contentions and sacred texts for example. Are religious beliefs, and you might even think that the, Some moral beliefs are religious beliefs for certain people. Right? You might think that, um, you know, an atheist who thinks we shouldn't kill, that will not be a religious belief, but a religious person who thinks we should not kill, if that's on the basis of reading it in some sacred text, that might make it a religious belief, right? So a political belief is not just a belief about politics, just as a religious belief is not just a belief about religion. And so this is one thing that I start, start out the book with is just, which topics should we even be considering when we're thinking about political beliefs? And that, that helps guide our inquiry and, and our thoughts about, you know, how rational or irrational are these things?
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:So isn't this, isn't this purely nominal though? Like couldn't we just say, political beliefs are just the ones we want to call the the political beliefs for the purpose of this or that investigation or like what's at stake in defining that.
Oliver:I think you, you could do this stipulatively like that. Yeah. for me, I was more interested in thinking about, you know, there's actually, there's surprisingly little, it's surprisingly uncommon for somebody to ask even about what is the nature of politics itself. a Lot of work in political philosophy is, what is fair, what is just, what is equal or whatever, right? You know better than me, you know, more, much more political philosophy than me, I think. But what my understanding is that it's quite rare to have a discussion of just what is politics to begin with. And people often throw out some, some definition, but there's a whole lot of varieties of definitions there. One reason is to try and get the nature of politics right and connect it up with that. Another reason is that, And this goes also for the question about the nature of politics, there's something substantive and political in the question of which beliefs are political. So the question about the scope of politics, what the scope of politics should be it's not a kind of politically inert question., people will say politics shouldn't touch this issue or that issue., and often what they mean is it would be out of bounds somehow. To legislate about that issue or to, to take state action about that issue. And I think there's a danger of, taking a political stance when you act merely stipulatively, about the nature of politics. I didn't want to bias the book in any political way. Um, so my goal was to try to do some genuine conceptual analysis about the nature of politics, some kind of old style conceptual analysis. Of course, very roughly, hopefully other people will follow it up and do more. That's another thing to say about the book is just that, on the one hand, I want it to be used as a textbook. On the other hand, my hope is that for like basically everything in the book, other people will find ways to improve on it and that maybe there'll be some kind of conversation that I help structure. Um, that's kind of my dream is that you know, I think one way, one way to do well as a philosopher is to get everything right. Another way is to ask the right questions and get everything wrong. Um, and I think it's, it's more likely that. I've sort of organized things in the right way and said a lot of dumb things that people will correct me on. And if they do so, you know, that's great. Um, I just hope they're not too mean about it. But yeah, I think, for me, I think it, it would be, it would, it's better to do it non stipulatively. Because I think there, there is an interesting question about just what is politics? What is the nature of politics? The work I'm doing now, I only touched on it briefly in the book, but I think one of my next big projects is going to be about the debate about the role of morality in politics. Which I think has to take a, has to take a non stipulative,, approach to what politics is. Um, it has to look for what really is politics and is it really something, To which morality does or doesn't apply.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:Yeah. So it seems like politics is largely about power relations, power structures. That sounds very FCO I guess, but, it can't be purely moralistic, right? Like, I was having this discussion with a friend a couple weeks ago where I said I didn't like the idea of spheres of influences because it smacks of, might makes, right. And then I, I later came to think, well might makes prudence, and prudence does bear on what's right. So you can sort of see how we can talk about, what can be done through existing power structures that seems like politics and morality, what you ought to do with those, through those existing structures. I guess.
Oliver:Yeah, so I've found, I've been reading about this debate. I'm curious what you think about it. Because, a lot of the political realists do say, yeah, you know, morality bears on what we ought to do in politics. But it's only part of the story. Part of what people like me try to figure out is just like, if we're talking about what we ought to do, what is the other part of the story that's not a moral part, you know?
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:Oh, I would not say. I would not say that there is a political ought that can counteract the moral ought. In fact, I don't think there, I wouldn't think there's a uniquely political ought at all. But I think there are descriptive facts about the world and about what's possible, and you have to understand what's possible, what would happen. Right. Not just what would ideally be the case. So I guess politics would be discovering the likely consequences of our actions. I wouldn't think of it as its own normative domain.
Oliver:Yeah. So, that, that I think is a lot closer to my position that in politics, you often have to be very consequentialist. It's just kind of the nature of the game and, um, politics is very complex. So you have to be very careful. You can't be, you can't be too much of an idealist. Otherwise you end up messing up a lot. And that's a lesson that you learn as you do politics. Um, I think all of those things are true. Rightly described. I don't think they do anything to undercut, like the, authority of the ethical normatively. You know, um, I think they just say. Well, this is what's ethical. What's ethical is to think about the consequences of your actions when you're acting politically, right? What's ethical is to think about all these little details in politics, right? Rather than just saying, well, here's my principle. I'm going to do, I'm going to apply it axiomatically to every situation. That doesn't seem like the ethical, like the actually ethical way to act to me. Sometimes people who have this view that politics and ethics don't mix, I think they just, they just have the wrong view of ethics. Or maybe they're thinking about a highly, deontological view of ethics or a highly or about virtue ethics or something. There's certainly, don't seem to be thinking about, you know, the sort of spreadsheet consequentialism, that at least some moral realists are talking about. But yeah, it's funny how this debate, basically every, every other metaethical debate has been invoked. Um, in the literature about this debate about the role of morality in politics. Um, that's part of what makes it so interesting. There's a lot of disentangling to do.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:the interesting thing is, political beliefs have something to do with our identities, and yet political disagreements also have. Something to do with our identities, right? it seems like you can't really even be polarized unless there is some community of which you're a part if there's a complete rupture. You wouldn't describe that as polarization.
Oliver:Yeah, so certainly, one tradition of thinking about kind of, you might call it the Schmittian approach. One way of thinking about what politics is, is that it's this way of developing distinctions between groups of people, right? It's hard to know how we could have politics at all unless we were making these, rather harsh distinctions in many of these cases. And I forget what I say about this in the book, and I forget exactly what other people have said about this, but one thing you often do seem to see, in American politics at least, is that, the different sides react against each other's beliefs, almost to identify themselves by contradistinction, and you get these very odd patterns of cycling views, one thing that I do cite in the book, that I think a lot of people know about, but nobody knows quite what to make of is the cycling of views on COVID. the early days of COVID where, you know, sort of right wing preppers were the, were the people who thought COVID was going to be very serious. And progressives were saying that that was sort of, Racist, anti Chinese belief that COVID was going to be serious. And then, uh, you know, in the fall of 2020, uh, during that, during that presidential campaign, you know, Kamala Harris saying that. she didn't want to take the Trump vaccine, um, and things like that. So that's an interesting, to me, that's a very interesting phenomenon. Um, this cycling, um, and how, the sides kind of cycle against each other. It's not like you develop this consensus, right? Um, it's like once an issue is politicized by one side, the other side almost has to oppose it. There's a sort of psychological, necessity to have the opposite view and to maintain your identity as opposed to the other group. And again, this is something that maybe I should have said more about in the book. Maybe I still can say more about in the book. A lot of the theory about political beliefs from a kind of group oriented or tribalistic perspective is about the dangers of being cast aside by your group and the pleasures of being part of a group. But in fact, in the U. S. This doesn't quite fit with the picture of polarization that we have, because the picture of polarization that we have is about negative affect against the other side. It's about the fact that we hate the other side so much. And that motivates us much more than any positive feeling we might have for our own side. I don't know if that makes sense. But yeah, that's, that's something that's very interesting to me, that pattern, and it's certainly part of where our political beliefs come from is something to do with the fact that either these beliefs are, you know, in the weak case, they're just beliefs that everybody in our group happens to have. So we feel that we have to have them too. But in the strong case, they could be beliefs that are almost like definitive of being in the group. Right? You and I both have written about some woke political beliefs. So you might think that that's a place where having certain beliefs about, you know, the United States being a racist society or whatnot, and racism being bad and things like that. Those are just definitive. Of fitting in that group so that it's not that you're worried about being kicked out of the group if you fail to have those beliefs, it's like, if you fail to have those beliefs, you already, you're, you're not, you know, you're already not part of the group, right? The beliefs themselves are so important. I think that was probably part of what motivated me as well. I do think that. The progressive political culture became a culture that was much, you know, in many ways more concerned with political beliefs than with political action. And people were very concerned about kind of the purity of their beliefs and whether somehow, you know, if you think about things like unconscious bias, people were very concerned about. Against all of my own desires, do I somehow believe something that is really evil? I think that was also part of what motivated me to work on political beliefs because, it struck me as very odd that people would care so much, would think that there were such high political stakes to what was going on in their own heads,
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:I wonder what we should think about the idea that certain beliefs should occasion certain social penalties, the paradigmatic one, the one everyone brings up is if you find out somebody is like a closeted Nazi, you should not be friends with that person or that there's some beliefs that are sort of trip wires where you, you express that when you reveal that you have that one, and there's a duty basically on the rest of us to impose some kind of penalty. What do you think of that? It seems like in, the, the broadest possible scope, it's hard to resist that to some level.
Oliver:Yeah, I think it's hard to say anything completely general against that. But the nature of what we're doing there, you know, could be contested. So, I'm sure you know that there's, there's like a puzzle about whether We can hold people responsible for their beliefs, which has to do with the amount of control people have over their beliefs. some people think moral responsibility only exists where we control something. We're only responsible for what we can control. And people also think We can't control our beliefs. And so if those things are both the case, then it's hard to see how we can have moral responsibility for our beliefs. Now that doesn't mean it might be right for a community to ostracize somebody with the wrong beliefs. But that might be just for, you know, it might just be that's the right policy that leads to the least harm, right? Um, it doesn't mean that the person who's being ostracized has actually done anything wrong by having the belief that they have. So I think that there's a lot of open philosophical questions about the nature of responsibility for belief that bear on this. I also think in a lot of these situations, there's a question of. Finding out that somebody has this political belief and the process of finding out that somebody has a political belief, you know, you might think that it's however they express that that's what they're doing wrong, right? Because we don't have direct access to anybody's beliefs. It's not clear that that's ever what we penalize somebody for ever what we what we ought to penalize somebody for.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:We could imagine. We could imagine. We have the technology, you get the little scanner and, and, okay, you've come up clean. No, no bad beliefs, no red flags or something like that.
Oliver:Yeah, I think, I mean, I certainly think that from a purely political perspective, I think others would join me in finding that a little bit dystopian. if you're scanning people's brains for wrong think, and then kicking them out of society if they, if they have certain wrong think. But it is true that, you know, I, define political beliefs as having a certain relationship to political action. And so I do think that that's the main reason we blame people for their political beliefs. Is that we worry about what political actions they're going to take. so if we ostracize the Nazi because we were worried about, the um, Nazi like actions in the present day. That makes a lot of sense to me if we, if we just do it, because we think having the belief is bad enough that I kind of wonder about.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:Yeah, I, I just don't see how ostracizing somebody is gonna make that person less likely to like, explode and become a terrorist or something like that. I think it's more likely that what we're trying to do is maintain a kind of epistemic herd immunity that you raise the cost of certain beliefs that those beliefs are really bad and really obviously false. So there's a near consensus on both those things. And so we feel comfortable raising the social costs for expressing death so as to deter their dissemination. I don't know that it's got anything to do with stopping individual actors from like blowing up or something.
Oliver:that's, there can, there definitely can be deterrence costs. You know, this is getting back into what we talked about before, about the question of incentives for beliefs. Um, and just what sorts of powers the incentives for abilities have, and I think this is something that warrants a lot of further investigation. I think this is something that should be operationalized and should be worked on by philosophers and psychologists. Just the question of, you know, at what level do people believe or not believe based on incentives? Do they stop expressing things based on incentives? Do they really not believe them or what? Right. I think those are questions that can be really important. It's probably the case that raising the social cost of a belief. is going to make less people have that belief. Um, I mean, it seems like it's almost certainly the case., there's something some people will object to in kind of approaching kind of group epistemology or what you, what you called a epistemic herd immunity that way. which is that. It seems to kind of try to achieve rationality through irrationality. So there's this question of what are the admissible reasons for belief? What are the rationally admissible reasons for belief, right? and the answer I favor, and this is what my dissertation was about, is that the rational. The admissible reasons for belief, the ones that are right to use in terms of intellectual rationality, are simply epistemic reasons, which kind of most classically would be evidence, right? Evidence in favor of or against some proposition. And you might simply worry about if my way of trying to get my group to be epistemically rational is by manipulating them using factors that are epistemically irrational, non epistemic reasons, like the practical cost of the belief, the social cost of the belief, right? Practical reasons for or against belief. You might think that the prospects of getting group rationality through individual irrationality that way are slim. And you might get some of the very bad beliefs out, but you might think that Everybody is simply engaging in motivated reasoning all the time. And so what you end up with will also be wrong in some other way, in some other way that you haven't anticipated. Right. and I do think that this is something. that we've seen, where groups that are kind of based around the exclusion of evil or infectiously bad. Beliefs end up making mistakes in ways that you might think don't seem so related. They end up not considering alternate viewpoints at other times. And you also get, every time you raise the cost of a belief, you get trolls whose whole purpose is to show. It's to do costly signaling, right? Their whole purpose is to show I can bear the social cost Of, of this evil belief, right? I can bear being ostracized for this belief
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:okay. I mean, maybe it's the case that it would be ideal if we based all of our beliefs on epistemic reasons, but it might be similarly true that it would be ideal if we made all of our practical decisions based on, on moral reasons, but we know that people aren't going to do that, and so that's why we have to have law and stuff like that. We have to have, you know, punishments for people driving while drunk and stuff like that because they won't necessarily respond to their moral reasons. So the thought would be maybe if we need some moral enforcement, maybe we need some kind of like softer epistemic enforcement.
Track 1:Yeah, I, I, I can buy that. To be honest, I, I haven't thought too much about, um, this issue of, what should we do to people if we can see all their beliefs. I think in some ways, you know, I wrote this book from the perspective of, imagine somebody who really is trying to get it right about politics. What should this individual do if they're trying to get their beliefs right? What tools do they have at their disposal and do, do, do they even really have any good tools at their disposal? If that makes sense.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:The interesting thing is if somebody disagrees with. This enough. In politics, we tend to assume bad faith, or at least the accusation that the other person isn't even really trying to believe the truth, is likely to come up. Have you noticed that
Track 1:Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, one thing I find interesting about this is that I wrote about this a little bit in the book, and I think maybe you and I talked about this a little a few years ago. Paradoxically enough, an accusation of bad faith can actually be, a kind of application of the principle of charity, in the sense that, if we take a belief to be kind of wild enough. Then we're going to look for any explanation of somebody's utterance of it,, that we can, that doesn't involve them actually believing it. And I think the reason that we see this so much in politics is simply that people forget or deny The true and genuine scope of political disagreement, just how much disagreement there is about politics. And I think it's partly because political beliefs are these group determining and group relevant things, especially now in our polarized time. So people aren't exposed to much, much disagreement and they start to think that their political beliefs are just very, very obvious. Um, and very, very undeniable. And so whenever anybody does disagree with them, they start to say, oh, well this must be a troll. This must be bad faith. Or maybe this is a joke, or some kind of performance art, or something like that. It's what happens when we're not actually around people who disagree with us that often. We, we relate to them in this way where,, the disagreement is so surprising that we come up with explanations that don't involve them actually believing what they're saying.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:Yeah, so, uh, I wonder. whether you've thought about like this practical question, which I've thought a lot about, which is how broadly you should maintain friendships with people who disagree with because I, I guess I've adopted a policy that I'm willing to, to put up with just about anything, uh, if I think the person might jar me out of some bias or help me see something from a different perspective every now and then. Um, and I guess isn't completely intolerable to me, like most of the time I have a, a range of people I'd say I'm friends with from the pretty far to the left to really pretty far to the right and I guess I think that it's probably safer for me to have a sort of broad policy of who I'm friends with. I I'll talk to people who will talk to me. And I, I, I, it's, maybe it's over broad, but I see so much of the opposite thing going on where people have just unfriended like, uh, or just stopped talking to everyone who disagrees with them about anything so that, you know, maga people who won't talk to a moderate Republican, for example. And you of course, there's the version of this on various corners of the left. In a time where that seems to be the, the general pitfall, it seems like the opposite policy might be the prudent one.
Track 1:Yeah, so I would say I basically, I basically no longer end friendships over politics. I certainly have lost friends over politics, people have ended friendships with me over politics. Um, but I basically don't end friendships over politics., and I think, you know,, it really helps, you know, I'm not gonna call it a superpower or anything, but I think it really helps because you get to see what people actually believe. and you get to see that there really is this very wide range of political disagreement, but you also get to see where your wide range of friends actually in private agree. You know, and actually, you know, in private there can be much more unanimity than there seems in public. Especially if you're determining your friend's Even if you're not ending friendships based on politics, you might be friends mostly with smart people or with good people or something like that. And then, um, something where there's a lot of public disagreement between left and right, you might find that there's a lot of private agreement about individual cases. This is something that I certainly found in the woke anti woke culture wars, that you would, find individual cases where, you know, all my, all my woke friends and all my anti woke friends, I. Or my closest ones at least, would agree. Yeah, like, this case was a big deal, or this case wasn't a big deal, or this censorship was wrong, or this, this, this person really was a nut and really did need to be fired, or something like that. So I think having a wide range of friends is really good, in terms of our, you know, not the epistemology, but uh, the sort of epistemic utility, you know, just kind of from, if your goal is having, the right political beliefs, you know, you might think epistemology is based on what we do with our evidence, but then there's this other question of how do we develop better sources of evidence? And I think cultivating cross-cutting political friendships, is a great way to have multiple sources of evidence, in large part because, you know, there's this old Freddie Debore piece called the Back Channel. Which is a phrase that has just been so useful to me because as I've developed more and more friendships with people in philosophy, out of philosophy, in politics, outta politics, I've noticed that if you, if you're one of these people who people feel that they can talk to, you got all this useful, useful information about what people are actually thinking, privately. And it often will contradict the public image, of what's going on with some group, um, or in reaction to some event. so this idea of the back channel is really important to me. Basically, I, the idea just being, watch what happens in private, watch what happens in one-on-one conversations, and listen to that where people express, you know, the views that there won't be these social sanctions for it. These visa, there's not incentives for Right, except the incentive of just dealing with me as an individual. So I think there's a lot of benefits to, cross-cutting political friendships. And of course, there's the other benefit of just having more friends. I've never quite understood, well, I shouldn't say that. actually, I feel that I understand all too well why people want to use politics this way. In the era of social media, it is actually quite easy to make friends. and in some cases we actually would prefer to have a new enemy rather than a new friend because we have, you know, we have negative feelings that need to be expressed somehow. Um, we have feelings that have to get out. We have some anger or frustration and we just want to get into a little bit of a fight. And I certainly have that too. And sometimes, sometimes I just think, well, I've, you know, I've befriended all my, all my old enemies and now I don't, now I don't have anybody to attack. Um, and it can make me sad sometimes. I can understand why people want people who they aren't friends with. Maybe that's part of the motivation. And I can also understand, you know, again, if people's political beliefs eventuate in political action, maybe people take actions that you think have crossed the line and they make you uncomfortable with them.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:I. mean, I think, I think worries about actions when people, essu people who have the wrong political beliefs saying they're worried about actions, they're worried about this is gonna lead to some terrorist attack, or this is gonna lead to some incident. I think that is a rationalization. I don't think that's what's really doing it.
Track 1:So the, I'm, I'm curious though, what do you think is really doing it? Because I mean, maybe the, do, do you think it's like a contagion, Or, or worry about kind of being associated with the wrong person or something. It, you know, it blows back onto their image.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:by way of answering that, maybe I'm, I'm dodging your question, but I think you're going to be interested to hear This This is a, a quotation from Adam Smith's, uh, the Theory of Moral Sentiments., love is an agreeable resentment, a disagreeable passion, and accordingly, we are not half so anxious that our friends should adopt our friendships as that they should enter into our resentments. We can forgive them, though they seem to be little affected with the favors with which we have received, but lose all patience if they seem indifferent about the injuries which may have been done to us. Nor are we half so angry with them for not entering into our gratitude as for not sympathizing with our resentment. I've got a note here that, resentment is an underrated glue of friendship.
Track 1:Yeah, that, does sound right to me. I mean, people love hate reading, people love hating the same things. And you know, I know from my, my own recent social experiences that there is a motivation. If you feel somebody has genuinely hurt you. You do hope that the people close to you will kind of side with you. You hope that the people close with you, you know, will not think that it was right, that you were hurt, you know, will not think that it was okay. And, uh, and yeah, we'll, we'll share in your resentments as, as Smith said. So that makes complete sense to me.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:So you know how some people will prefer a more tight-knit group with, I guess a more intense sense of connection. And the same way nationalists, you know, I guess prefer a tighter sense of identity than the cosmopolitans who are citizens of the world or whatever, like maybe a small scale version of this is, is you prefer to have a closer knit group. And part of the bond then is gonna be the resentment that you share for the outburst.
Track 1:Yeah, I think that's completely right. And I do think it's a strong bond. And it also, you know, it's also an activity, right? Making fun of the, the hated people is a fun activity. a lot of people who are involved in politics, Start out by being one of the hated people for another group and then reacting against that. You know, a lot of people in politics start by thinking, oh, those, those Republicans are such mean bullies. They're always so mean to us. And that you form a group of people who are so mean to the Republicans. As an anti woke person, I think we saw this a little bit with once the anti wokes got organized against the Wokes, you know, we, we had our own, we kind of replicated the same things they had done to us, right? In a lot of ways. doesn't mean that we're wrong, but it does mean that, the social structure of anti wokes was not so different than the social structure of Wokes. That's why in some ways I'm a sort of universalist about politics because in every political group you have a lot of the same incentives. You have a lot of the same structures, you have a lot of the same motivations. You have just a lot of the same, you know, internal apparatus. There's always hierarchies within groups and people trying to gain status within groups. As well.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:I just have to say I, I've said this many times, but I'll repeat it. I'm so glad that James Lindsay exists to warn me about the dangers of being too anti woke, because I would not have known it could be that kind of a mind virus.
Track 1:Yeah, no, it's funny. Um, well, it's hard to know how much or how little to say about Lindsay But yeah, you know, you and I were in Toronto in 2019, I think, for one of the very first Colette meetups. and even then, I remember there was, there was some sort of comedian who was, uh, it was just making all these jokes about, you know, safe spaces and people identifying as helicopters and things like that. Um, and some of them were funny, but a lot of it was just sort of like, it's funny because we hate those people. And it was exactly, it was exactly, you know, a, a, a mirror image of the progressive comedy that I thought we all objected to.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:Yeah, I've met. This before that, I, I was in a Republican fundraiser in like 2007 in Idaho. Like, no, I guess it was a little later than that. It might have been like 2009, but in Idaho, and the jokes were painfully unfunny, but they were at the expense of the other party and everyone was laughing hysterically as if they were funny.
Track 1:Yeah.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:It made me profoundly uncomfortable. And, that was the first time I really realized the extent to which resentment and animosity is the real engine of democracy. This what's fueling us. It's the, it's this contempt. And I felt really uncomfortable and I felt like, what if one of the people, one of the caterers is a Democrat and they're listening to this, just, I felt so embarrassed on behalf of that person and, and just to even be seen there, even though these were not stupid people,
Track 1:No.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:But they were acting very foolishly and they were just, yeah, it was, it was bad. It And this, this isn't a fundraiser. This is what gets people to, to open up their wallets. It's the, it's.
Track 1:Well, you know, I've often said, and maybe I should write something more general about politics based on this, or maybe I should have included in my book. I've always thought that The most characteristic sentiment in politics is, you know, it's okay when we do it right. It's wrong when you do it, and in fact, my whole politics is gonna revolve around the fact that it's wrong when you do it, but it's okay for us to do it. And I think you, you get that with that sort of mockery for sure. as well as all sorts of, illiberal, things like censorship, or, you know, progressive, you know, racism. Uh, and in general people abandoning their principles because it might kind of, actually in their interest to do so in, in a certain moment. It's often talked about in the context of liberalism. But I think it extends far beyond that. It, it's something very general about, whether you, you know, when you complain about the other side doing something, whether you then do that same thing that they did.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:But you'll never see it as the same thing, because there's always gonna be some difference. Right. That's the thing is like, I don't know if I ever convinced anyone that, Hey, you're doing exactly the same thing that you, you condemned. It's just so hard to do because it, it really will seem different. It really will seem different to the person doing it.
Track 1:Yeah. That's no doubt true, but I think it can't be, you can't be so pessimistic because you and I have both had the same reaction. You know? And it's not as though, there's no reason to think that this is some unique area where nobody who fails to have the reaction immediately could be convinced. So I don't see why, why you couldn't convince somebody at some point that, that yeah, you're doing the exact same thing that you've complained about. And in fact, I feel like it's happened to me that people have said, you're doing the exact same thing that you complained about, and I realized, oh yeah, they're right. so yeah, I think people do see this. Sometimes it's a matter of how long it takes them. some people really worry about doing the exact same thing that they complain about. And then, you know, there's also a meta to this where people are like, well. The other side does the exact same thing that they complain about So why can't we do the exact same thing that we complain about? so it can kind of go as many levels as you want in general. one way, and I don't know, maybe I should write something about this too. A, a lot of the good things are coming outta this conversation. I don't know if there's things that would've fit in the book, but maybe, maybe for future things to write. In general. One way to think about a lot of the things that happens in these disputes is through the notion of unilateral disarmament. When, when somebody says, I don't like it. When you do that, they're asking you to stop using a certain weapon or tool, you know, in the political toolkit. and basically, even if I say I don't like it when the other side uses that weapon, I think the way a lot of people think about it is, I'm not saying that weapon is bad. I'm saying, you know, it would be great if nobody used that weapon, but if they use it, I'm gonna use it too. Right. you saw this even, you know, something as ridiculous as, the fat shaming of Donald Trump, right? They made these balloons of Donald Trump, you know, all the, all the people who had said fat shaming is so evil for so long. And then they made these, fat Donald Trump balloons. And so suddenly fat shaming was on the table, and they just said, well, you know, we're not gonna stop using this against somebody who, who would use it against others, right? So. The idea there is basically you can always use a tool against somebody who would use that tool themselves. that seems like a crazy idea to me, but it does seem to be the way that a lot of people operate is just by kind of avoiding at all costs, any sort of unilateral disarmament, avoiding putting themselves at any sort of disadvantage in that way.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:I remember seeing some people on the left who came out against the fat shaming of Donald Trump,
Track 1:Yeah.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:But the one that really bothers me, and I can't help but dive into the current moment is, if there's any slogan that has ever been used by white supremacists, then you must not utter it ever. And it's terrible if you do,
Track 1:Right, like the okay sign.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:or it's okay to be white or white lives matter or something like that. Like if any of those slogans is used by racist or could be seen to have been used by racist or or whatever, don't you ever say, but you know, glory to our martyrs is fine because we just don't mean it in the pro terrorist way.
Track 1:Right. Right. I'm concerned about, And I, I just much as I like him, I was thinking about this a lot when I recently read and reviewed Jason Stanley's new book on the politics of Language. I'm concerned about this cottage industry of experts on what things mean, who are almost all of a progressive political persuasion. And we'll say, I get to tell you which things are offensive, right? And I'll determine that, that this slogan is offensive and that one isn't.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:Not only, not only what things are offensive, but what words mean? I mean, I
Track 1:yeah.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that a million of analysis is basically semantic divine command theory with like the trans community in the place of God. Like, we're just gonna tell you what things mean and it's better that words mean this, because we're the oppressed and we know, and so you better, you better use the words we want you to in the way we want you to use them. What more is going on there?
Track 1:Yeah. Well, I would say it's, it's a matter of the people saying we're the experts and we're, and we know with being oppressed, as being one way of gaining a certain sort of expertise. You know, I think of it as purely stipulative for the most part of just saying, we're gonna use this word this way now. And I think we've talked about it before, but in her book down girl, this is what Kate Mann says. She says, well, this word has a nasty flavor. And I think we can use that to our advantage as feminists to use the word misogyny in a certain way. So I'm just gonna stipulate that we use it that way.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:Michael Bray. In Antifa, the anti-fascist Handbook, there are really two definitions of of fascism, and one of them he gives is close to the actual definition of fascism. And the other one he mentions, he calls the political definition, meaning the one we're gonna use politically, that includes, you know, antit, transphobia and, and just
Track 1:yeah. Yeah. Uh.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:and so what we're gonna do is, use the other definition when it's convenience, to lump our opponents in with, with actual fascists.
Track 1:Yeah. And so this gives you a sense of, this question of which beliefs are political. You wouldn't think that beliefs about the meaning of words would be political, but then suddenly somebody makes it a political battleground, right? So this is one of my concerns about this is why I think it's really important to have the right account of what political beliefs even are, because we have to understand how one day something, and this was my actual experience, right? This is why I'm very concerned to get this right in my work one day. Something that you think is just a normal belief, an everyday belief about the world, suddenly somebody tells you that that's political and that you're on the other side, and that they might even hurt you for it, right? And It could be a meaning, a belief about a meaning of a word that you've been using your whole life. And suddenly they tell you you're wrong about what that word means. And you're gonna be in some sort of trouble unless you start using it in the other way. And suddenly you have a political belief about the meaning of that word. Where before that you, you just had a completely ordinary belief, right? Um, maybe even an uncontroversial belief. And so. Yeah, I hate the stipulation. I hate the stipulation of Ameliorative analysis. I don't think it's politically efficacious in the end. But it certainly, one thing it does is we were talking about political groups before. One thing that it does is that it does kind of assist with the segregation of society into different political groups because you end up with people who can't even communicate with each other anymore. Right? You can't even join the actual political debate because you get caught in these debates about language. What does fascism even mean? I want to call you a fascist and I'm gonna use this definition of fascism. Then you spend an hour debating what fascism even means. You don't even get to the debate about whether the things you disagree with that were the reason for them calling you a fascist to begin with are right or wrong, right? You can't even really talk about anything because You're talking about talking so much, you're talking about the definitions of words. And I think this is one reason why people are really upset about this stuff, that they feel that there's, you know, changing definitions leads to these disputes, which I think people are right to call merely verbal. And they cover up substantive disputes, which are so important to have about politics, right? And which, you know, it could easily be that the side that is doing the redefining is actually right about the substance. But the substance is then never actually even addressed because we have all these odd disputes about what words mean in their place, right? So I think it's an incredibly unproductive. and also incredibly annoying tactic.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:It cannot be the case that our language can be. A purely instrumental tool of, politics. Here's an example from the right an older example, which is defining terrorism so that no matter what a state does, it is a terrorism.'cause it has to be a non-state actor.'cause we're stipulating that. Okay. That is, it's a stipulation, but it isn't, it isn't innocent, it pushes you in a certain direction. It's, it's like, don't associate these things with this bad concept associate only these other things. So, you have a situation where each side of a political debate is doing this relentlessly, then yeah. It it makes communication impossible., language has to be a neutral, a politically neutral ground. This goes to your point about by defining politics, we get to the limits of politics. We define the limits of politics. A common language between political, having people having a political disagreement, a common, vocabulary, and agreed upon set of discourse, norms among the people who are disagreeing. That seems like that has to be something that is, is politically neutral, at least, at least while a particular debate is, occurring.
Track 1:So I'm, I'm curious. I do hope that you get to read Jason Stanley's new book, which he wrote with David Beaver. They give an argument that language can never be politically neutral, but I couldn't quite, I. I was trying to reconstruct the argument and I just couldn't, I threw up my hands a little bit and they, they've published this in a few places and they've talked about it in a few places. I think they must be equivocating on the meaning of the word neutral or something, or, or not realizing that neutrality is gradable, you know, that it comes in degrees. or just thinking maybe, maybe just taking a really extreme view of what would make something non neutral. They say that, for example, they say that the word dog is not a neutral word to describe dogs because it it has a certain feeling, which comes from the fact that it's that I think it comes from old English, so it has a certain kind of salt of the earth, common feeling that it's not, not there in like a Latinate word. And so they say that, that that makes the use of the word dog non neutral. So they're basically like, it's not just words with strong connotations, no word is neutral because every word has a different kind of feel to it. And this just seems so radically different. You know, it's such a wild way to think about neutrality, that something like that destroys neutrality. Neutrality must be at least a little less fragile than that.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:Any kind of emotional valence or set of associations that somehow connects it with politics and it's, it's no longer a neutral term.
Track 1:yeah, exactly. And, they give a, a whole new theory of meaning as what they call resonance, which you might think means emotional resonance, but they don't even mean it that way. But, uh, yeah, it's pretty odd, pretty odd what they do in that section. So I, I hope you get a chance to read it because I think that, I don't know if Jason will still like me after this review or if he even does now, but, I do think that, you know, Jason needs, needs somebody to calmly explain to him that he's gone a little too far in this. Formulation of what he means by neutrality., it just can't be that this is, you know, he, he's arguing against a kind of ghost. This isn't what people mean by neutrality. They don't mean that you're never gonna make anybody feel a certain way with the language that you use.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:You can imagine like a sports team, and they're like, okay, we're gonna do the coin flip. And, the referees, uh, telling the players of both teams, okay, this is how I'm gonna call certain things. It seems like that could be perfectly neutral, right? It doesn't seem like the val, the emotionally valent nature of language, uh, makes that not neutral.
Track 1:No, but I guess they might say, you know, well, what if, you know, what if one of the words hurts the feelings of one of the members of one of the team and not the other? I, I don't know. They think neutrality, would involve all of that, you know? But I don't think, you know, to me, neutrality is very like, y you know, often my girlfriend and I, you know, we both wanna watch tv, but neither of us want to pick right. We both want to be neutral. I think a lot of people don't have this experience, and this is why they doubt neutrality. But for me, I often don't want to make a choice, right? I find choosing taxing in itself. And so I often want to be neutral. I want to let other people make the choice, right? Um, and I think actually a lot of people have this experience where they say, yeah, I, I want you to pick, I have an ex who would, who would often say, um, What do I want to eat? And I would have to list things, you know, I would've to basically pick for her what she was going to eat. That's the kind of neutrality, right? And I think usually that's more than neutrality. Neutrality and language is generally not what people are talking about when they talk about political neutrality. They're talking about does this process have in it a choice already or is it merely kind of like a A way of presenting the choices and, uh, you know, a way of letting people make the choice of the group or, or as some sort of polity. And of course, you know, it may be that one, one process would lead to one choice and another process would lead to another choice. But those can both be neutral processes, right? Like, rolling a dye and flipping a coin might, might lead to different choices if I'm between two options, but that doesn't mean that either of them is non neutral. Anyway, I don't know. Neutrality is something I've been thinking about a lot recently.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:I guess I, I take your point about the need to understand what politics is. When we think of, there's some things that seem to be expansions of politics into new domains that suggest that there, there, there was a non stipulative account of politics. So I I, I'm seeing your point there more forcefully now. Before we go, you, I didn't get this far in your book, but I know you got a chapter on conspiracy theories.
Track 1:Yeah. So, you know, conspiracy theories is, is one of these, uh. one of these concepts that you see in, in the popular discourse a lot, and philosophers try to talk about it and then they realize it's not a very philosophical concept. Right. So like a lot of people I basically have been convinced by, and I think a lot of people don't realize this about the, the philosophical literature on conspiracy theories, but it's actually, it's not really that anti conspiracy theory. So most philosophers who have written about it, I think are Particularist. So what a particularist means in the context of conspiracy theories is you think that, you have to determine, what's wrong with any particular conspiracy theory by looking at, you know, it in particular, rather than coming up with some universal account of what's wrong with all conspiracy theories. I also think, there's a definitional problem as well that philosophers haven't come to a consensus yet either. Just just which theories are conspiracy theories? It's actually pretty hard to avoid believing conspiracy theories. So just for example, like, you often get into international situations where, either one country conspired to attack the other country or the other country conspired to make it look that way. Right? So either way, there must be a conspiracy. and so you end up with this question of just like, okay, so are you a conspiracy theorist? If you believe that there ever are any conspiracies, while there are certainly conspiracies sometimes, right? Conspiracy theory is a topic where it's not clear to me exactly what it's grabbing at and, it's not clear to me that it's a joint carving category, even in the very rough sense of joint carving that we would have in this arena. aNd it often seems like, there's a certain class of conspiracy theories that just have bad vibes or low social status. That are grouped together under the label. And then there are other conspiracies which everybody knows exist, or existed in the past. Right? There are other, there are past events that, you know, uh, the assassination of Julius Caesar, for instance. You know, it's historical fact that it, at least, unless I'm rem misremembering something, it's a historical fact that that involved a conspiracy. So I think there are just a lot of open questions about conspiracy theories. Another one, just really briefly, I cite this great ARC digital article. You and I have both written for ARC Digital, by Political Science scientist, Joe Yassky, I think is his name. Basically asking, is this the year of the conspiracy theory, I think is the title. and uh, basically he, he writes that pretty much every year somebody publishes an article saying that it's the year of the conspiracy theory. And it's not clear at all from his empirical investigations that that belief in conspiracies is, is going up in any meaningful way. I do think that you see, conspiracy theories, on both the left and the right. And, uh, certainly left-Wing academics look for ways to suggest that. Again, as we were talking about before, they look for ways to suggest that there's some big difference, some factor, some feature of right-wing conspiracy theories that left-wing conspiracies don't have some really evil feature. But I don't think there really is such a feature. I do think that, you know, conspiracy theories, it would make sense if that they become more vicious or that if they rise with polarization as polarization makes us think the other side is worse and worse. We start to imagine that they could do worse and worse things, not just as individuals, but in concert. Russia, gee posited a conspiracy in the, in the Trump campaign, right? Whether, whether it was correct or incorrect, that was a conspiracy theory. And you get this, you get this problem where a lot of people say, well, to be conspiracy theory, then it, it has to be false. Well, that's just, you know, that's just a non-starter as the theoretical delineation, right? We can't, we can't bias the investigation into political beliefs by saying we already know what all the correct and incorrect political beliefs are. That would be, to me, that would be ridiculous.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:So, is there something better we can replace it with? If I hear you correctly, like this whole category is just a muddle and probably, if we just gave up on the whole category of conspiracy theories and trying to classify different views as conspiracy theories. Nothing would be lost in giving that up.
Track 1:Yeah, I, I, I don't know if I would go quite that far, but I would certainly say that somebody has to do the work of, of showing otherwise, of really showing that it's an intellectually useful category. Obviously, it's a politically useful category, just like we were talking about with all the ways that people can make political use of language by attacking the other side. But that's not, that's not the sort of thing we should, I think you and I agree that's not the sort of thing we should care about in the academy.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:All right. Well, Oliver, do you have anything else to add? I think I'm about ready to hit the Hey.
Track 1:No, I think I'm, I'm getting kind of tired too.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:So let's end with, it's been great having you on.
Track 1:Oh yeah. Thanks so much for having me. and, yeah, I hope you'll, I hope you'll read the book when it comes out.
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:Oh, I didn't even get the title. Let's get the title in right at the end.
Track 1:Oh, of course. it's with Rutledge, it's political Beliefs, a philosophical introduction, and they're telling me, uh, it might be out next summer. Um, that's the hope
spencer_1_11-15-2023_214040:That's great.
Track 1:I.