Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…I’m thinking a lot about that, and that’s one of the things we talk about in canceling of the American mind, is arguing towards truth. And that cancel culture is cruel, it’s merciless, it’s anti-intellectual, but it also will never get you anywhere near truth. And you are going to waste so much time destroying your opponents in something that can actually never get you to truth through the process, of course, of you never actually get directly at truth, you just chip away at falsity. But everybody having a megaphone on the internet with anonymity, it seems like it’s better than censorship, but it feels like there’s incentives on top of that you can construct to incentivize better discourse. To incentivize somebody who puts a huge amount of effort to make even the most ridiculous arguments, but basically ones that don’t include any of the things you highlight in terms of all the rhetorical tricks to shut down conversations. Just make really good arguments for whatever, it doesn’t matter if it’s communism for fascism, whatever the heck you want to say. But do it with skill, with historical context, with steel-manning the other side, all those kinds of elements. We try to make three major points in the book. One is just simply cancel culture is real. It’s a historic era and it’s on a historic scale. The second one is you should think of cancel culture as part of a rhetorical, as a larger, lazy, rhetorical approach to what we refer to as winning arguments without winning arguments. We mean that in two senses without having winning arguments or actually having won arguments. We talk about all the different, what we call rhetorical fortresses, that both the left and the right have that prevent you from, that allow you to just dismiss the person, or dodge the argument, without actually ever getting to the substance of the argument. Third part is just how do we fix it? But the rhetorical fortress stuff is actually something I’ve very passionate about because it interferes with our ability to get at truth and it wastes time. And frankly, it also, since cancel culture is part of that rhetorical tactic, it can also ruin lives.…

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