Jonathan Haidt: prediction

Transcript context

…Let’s say you were put in charge of undergraduate admissions at Yale, and you could more or less do what you thought was best without constraint, what would you change? Oh gosh, I’d change a lot of things. One thing that I would do is I would start admitting for signs that you can contribute to an intellectually diverse environment. That means that I would look for people who — so Yale in particular, but all of the top schools have a huge problem, that they have basically social justice warriors who are so empowered, so angry, that they dominate discourse and you basically have the small illiberal left has completely terrorized the larger liberal left. Yale right now is quite dysfunctional. Students there say they can’t speak up, they can’t speak up in class, they feel pressure on Facebook, if somebody sends around a petition for some left-wing cause they have to endorse it, even if they don’t want to. Yale’s a mess right now, as a lot of schools are. That should be the top diversity issue, is intellectual diversity. I would stop admitting for social justice cred, in other words, if you say, “Oh, I started this protest group, and we got this overturned. ” Basically I think a lot of students know is the way to get into a top school is show your social justice activism. Well, top schools are now full of social justice activists, and they’re no longer places where people can say anything that contradicts the social justice activists. What’s that old joke? “Doctor, it hurts when I do this. Well, stop doing this.” They should stop admitting social justice warriors and start admitting people they’ve got the guts to disagree. We now move to a segment of the conversation called underrated versus overrated. I threw out a bunch of names or concepts, you tell me if you think they’re underrated or overrated and why. Number one, Sigmund Freud.…

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