Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Back to the Red Scare comparison, and this is one of the interesting things about the data as well, is that that same study that I was talking about, the most comprehensive study of the Red Scare, there was polling about whether or not professors were self-censoring due to the fear of the environment, and 9% of professors said that they were self-censoring their research and that what they were saying. 9% is really bad. That’s almost a tenth of professors saying that their speech was chilled. When we did this question for professors on our latest faculty survey, when you factor together, if we ask them are they self-censoring in their research, are they self-censoring in class, are they self-censoring online, et cetera, it was 90% of professors. So the idea that we’re actually in an environment that is historic in terms of how scared people are actually of expressing controversial views, I think that it’s the reason why we’re going to actually be studying this in 50 years the same way we study the Red Scare. The idea that this isn’t happening is we’ll just be correctly viewed as insane. So maybe we can just discuss the current leaning of academia goes to the left, which you describe in various different perspectives. One, there’s a voter registration ratio chart that you have by department, which I think is interesting. Can you explain this chart and can you explain what it shows? Yeah. When I started FIRE in 2001, I didn’t take the viewpoint diversity issue as seriously. I thought it was just something that right-wingers complained about. But I really started to get what happens when you have a community with low viewpoint diversity, and actually, a lot of the research that I got most interested in was done in conjunction with the great Cass Sunstein who writes a lot about group polarization because as… The research on this is very strong that essentially, when you have groups with political diversity, and you can see this actually in judges, for example, it tends to produce reliably more moderate outcomes, whereas groups that have low political diversity tend to sort of spiral off in their own direction. When you have a super majority of people from just one political perspective, that’s a problem for the production of ideas. It creates a situation where there are sacred ideas. When you look at some of the departments, I think the estimate from the Crimson is that Harvard has 3% conservatives, but when you look at different departments, there are elite departments that have literally no conservatives in them, and I think that’s an unhealthy intellectual environment. The problem is definitely worse as you get more elite. We definitely see more cases of lefty professors getting canceled at less elite schools. It gets worse as you get down from the elite schools. That’s where a lot of the one-third of attempts to get professors punished that are successful do come from the right and largely from off-campus sources, and we spend a lot of time talking about that in the book as well. It’s something that I do think is underappreciated, but when it comes to the low viewpoint diversity, it works out like you’d expect to a degree. Economics is what? Four to one or something like that? It’s not as bad, but then when you start getting into some of the humanities, there are departments that there are literally none.…

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