Lex Fridman: preference

Transcript context

…It seems an odd thing to accuse you of because you have quite a wide range of long conversations with a very diverse bunch of people. But there is a very, very harsh drop off because what I like is high quality disagreement. That really makes me think. At a certain point, there’s a threshold, it’s a kind of a gray area when the quality of the disagreement, it just sounds like mocking, and you’re not really interested in a deep understanding of the topic, or you yourself don’t seem to carry deep understanding of the topic. There’s something called intelligence square debates that may- There’s something called Intelligence Squared debates. The main one is the British version. With the British accent, everything always sounds better. And the Brits seem to argue more intensely, like they’re invigorated, they’re energized by the debate. Those people I often disagree with, basically everybody involved, and it’s so fun. I learned something. That’s high quality. If we could do that, if there’s some way for me to click a button that says, “Filter out lower quality just today,” just sometimes show it to me because I want to be able to, but today I’m just not in the mood for the mockery. Just high quality stuff, because even flat Earth, I want to get high quality arguments for the flat Earth. It would make me feel good because I would see, “Oh, that’s really interesting. I never really thought in my mind to challenge the mainstream narrative of general relativity, of a perception of physics. Maybe all of reality, maybe all of space is an illusion. That’s really interesting. I never really thought about, let me consider that fully. Okay, what’s the evidence? How would you test that? What are the alternatives? How would you be able to have such consistent perception of a physical reality, if it’s all of it is an illusion? All of us seem to share the same kind of perception of reality,” that’s the kind of stuff I love, but not the mockery of it that cheap, that it seems that social media can inspire. Yeah. I talk sometimes about how people assume that the big debates in Wikipedia or the arguments are between the party of the left and the party of the right. And I would say no, it’s actually the party of the kind and thoughtful and the party of the jerks, is really it. Left and yeah, yeah, bring me somebody I disagree with politically. As long as they’re thoughtful, kind, we’re going to have a real discussion. I give an example of our article on abortion: so, if you can bring together a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist and they’re going to work together on the article on abortion, that can be a really great thing, if they’re both kind and thoughtful. That’s the important part. They’re never going to agree on the topic, but they will understand, okay, Wikipedia is not going to take a side, but Wikipedia is going to explain what the debate is about, and we’re going to try to characterize it fairly. And it turns out your kind and thoughtful people, even if they’re quite ideological, like a Catholic priest is generally going to be quite ideological on the subject of abortion, but they can grapple with ideas and they can discuss, and they may feel very proud of the entry at the end of the day, not because they suppress the other side’s views, but because they think the case has been stated very well that other people can come to understand it. And if you’re highly ideological, you assume, I think naturally, “If people understood as much about this as I do, they’ll probably agree with me.” You may be wrong about that, but that’s often the case. So, that’s what I think we need to encourage more of in society generally, is grappling with ideas in a really thoughtful way.…

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