Charan Ranganath: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, it’s really interesting. So, it’s not just about truth and falsehoods, like us as intelligent, reasoning machines, but it’s the formation of memories where they become visceral. You can rewrite history. If you just look throughout the 20th century, some of the dictatorships with Nazi Germany, with the Soviet Union, effective propaganda machines can rewrite our conceptions of history, how we remember our own culture, our upbringing, all this kind of stuff. And you could do quite a lot of damage in this way. And then there’s probably some kind of social contagion happening there. Certain ideas that, maybe initiated by the propaganda machine, can spread faster than others. You could see that in modern day, certain conspiracy theories, there’s just something about them that they are really effective at spreading. There’s something sexy about them to people to where something about the human mind eats it up and then uses that to construct memories as if they almost were there to witness whatever the content of the conspiracy theory is. It’s fascinating. Because you feel like you remember a thing, I feel like there’s a certainty. It emboldens you to say stuff. It’s not just you believe in ideas, true or not, it’s at the core of your being that you feel like you were there to watch the thing happen. Yeah, I mean there’s so much in what you’re saying. I mean, one of the things is that people’s sense of collective identity is very much tied to shared memories. If we have a shared narrative of the past, or even better, if we have a shared past, we will feel more socially connected with each other, and I will feel part of this group. They’re part of my tribe, if I remember the same things in the same way. And you brought up this weaponization of history, and it really speaks to, I think, one of the parts of memory, which is that if you have a belief, you will find, and you have a goal in mind, you’ll find stuff in memory that aligns with it, and you won’t see the parts in memory that don’t. So, a lot of the stories we put together are based on our perspectives. And so let’s just zoom out for the moment from misinformation to take something even more fascinating, but not as scary. I was reading Thanh Viet Nguyen, but he wrote a book about the collective memory of the Vietnam War. He is a Vietnamese immigrant who was flown out after the war was over. And so he went back to his family to get their stories about the war, and they called it the American War, not the Vietnam War. And that just kind of blew my mind, having grown up in the US and having always heard about it as the Vietnam War. But of course they call it the American War, because that’s what happened. America came in. And that’s based on their perspective, which is a very valid perspective. And so that just gives you this idea of the way we put together these narratives based on our perspectives. And I think the opportunities that we can have in memory is if we bring groups together from different perspectives and we allow them to talk to each other and we allow ourselves to listen. I mean, right now you’ll hear a lot of just jammering, people going, “Blah, blah, blah,” about free speech, but they just want to listen to themselves. I mean, it’s like, let’s face it, the old days before people were supposedly woke, they were trying to ban 2 Live Crew. Just think about Lenny Bruce got canceled for cursing. Jesus Christ. It’s like this is nothing new. People don’t like to hear things that disagree with them. But if you’re in a… I mean, you can see two situations in groups with memory. One situation is you have people who are very dominant, who just take over the conversation. And basically what happens is the group remembers less from the experience and they remember more of what the dominant narrator says. Now, if you have a diverse group of people, and I don’t mean diverse in necessarily the human resource sense of the word, I mean diverse in any way you want to take it, but diverse in every way, hopefully. And you give everyone a chance to speak and everyone’s being appreciated for their unique contribution, you get more accurate memories and you get more information from it. se in every way, hopefully. And you give everyone a chance to speak and everyone’s being appreciated for their unique contribution, you get more accurate memories and you get more information from it. Even two people who come from very similar backgrounds, if you can appreciate the unique contributions that each one has, you can do a better job of generating information from memory. And that’s a way to inoculate ourselves, I believe, from misinformation in the modern world. But like everything else, it requires a certain tolerance for discomfort. And I think when we don’t have much time, and I think when we’re stressed out and when we are just tired, it’s very hard to tolerate discomfort.…

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