Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
34 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“A phone is an experience blocker. That means you spend a lot less time talking to other people, in the presence of other people.”
02 / belief
“I could well be wrong about this, but overall, I think probably we’re doing it too much in terms of what’s good for young people.”
03 / belief
“My argument is that the virtual life, the phone-based life is blocking that, so it’s not like they’re going to be able to grow up without that stuff. I think your argument is that AI will play the role of whatever the Aztecs did.”
04 / observation
“” To which I say, “Yes, can you imagine if the only way they could connect was by calling them up on the phone or texting them, or Skype or Zoom or FaceTime, or multiplayer video games or many, many other ways that the internet allows you to connect.”
05 / belief
“Total honor system, no enforcement, no cameras, no punishment,” I think shoplifting will go way, way up.”
06 / disagreement
“You don’t have to have an algorithmically driven platform to find other kids who share your interest, so I disagree with that premise.”
07 / observation
“Fine. The point is, it’s not effortless to walk in. You could get caught. I’m not saying we have to get 100 percent.”
08 / uncertainty
“I think I see what you’re saying now, but I think your view would say, “Just for some reason we don’t know, things changed around 2012.”
09 / belief
“You may be right. I think I’m right that we’re going into a dip. It’s gigantic in terms of mental health impact, suicide rates, self-harm, hospitalizations, missed potential.”
10 / evaluation
“17 with depression, anxiety, and self-harm. So, the effect is actually much bigger than many people realize in the scientific community because you have to zoom in on girls and social media.”
11 / preference
“If you’re suggesting that we could outsource all of that bad stuff to AI so that kids don’t actually have to know what’s going on in their friend’s life — they don’t have to keep up with who said what to whom because they’re never going to actually meet their friend in person — then I would say, maybe that could work because we’re all just alone in a room.”
12 / prediction
“I’m not sure about Christmas vacation, but the point is, it’s very clear: Every year, as soon as kids go back to school, the suicide rate goes up.”
13 / preference
“I think we agree that if we could liberate the kids from that so that they could really spend a lot more time hanging out together unsupervised, they would be better off.”
14 / evaluation
“First, I believe the Time Use studies don’t count school time as time with friends because what they’re trying to do is like, how much time you’re in school, how much time you’re sleeping, how much time you’re eating, how much time you’re playing with friends.”
15 / evaluation
“Over and over again, whether we look at left-right or whether we look at religion, what we find is that it’s the secular kids and the liberal kids who got washed out to sea, got really depressed after 2012, and much less effect on the conservative and religious kids because, I think, they’re more rooted.”
16 / evaluation
“What I would say is that every culture needs a set of stories and moral values, moral principles and metaphors so that they can speak to each other, and they can quickly refer to things that have a lot of meanings for the listener.”
17 / evaluation
“” By the time I wrote chapter 7 and 8 of The Righteous Mind and really committed to understanding conservatives and libertarians, I realized, wow, there’s a lot of wisdom from all three perspectives: liberal, conservative, and libertarian.”
18 / evaluation
“The new identitarianism reverses that because it’s all about power and oppression.”
19 / belief
“I should have a much better answer for you, but I think just reading novels from non‑Western cultures, and I would consider 19th century British aristocracy to be sort of a foreign culture now, just can give you an idea of cultures other than our own.”
20 / uncertainty
“I don’t know about economists but if it was psychologists or people in the humanities, you go into the conference and everybody is wearing a suit and tie.”
21 / belief
“There’s a big, big line between saying, “Brown or Yale should step in and tell people what they can’t — .” In general I think no, in general the idea — .”
22 / belief
“Given that we find the same problem in cancer research and biomedical research — in almost every field where it’s been looked at — I think that the replication crisis is very real.”
23 / belief
“The president is the high priest of the American civil religion — I think that’s what Robert Bellah called it.”
24 / belief
“I find this really disgusting. This is I think one of the reasons I’m so upset by what’s going on on campus, is that the certain group of activists decides that somebody’s going to come speak on campus, fine, if you want to stand up and protest outside and hold up signs, that’s fine.”
25 / belief
“The only caveat that I would put which I would say if they don’t do this soon, then they would be overrated, is the behavioral economics work is an example of this wonderful dictum from Robert Zajonc, the famous social psychologist, which is that cognitive psychology is social psychology with all the interesting variables set to zero.”
26 / evaluation
“Once it becomes left versus right over Obamacare, it doesn’t matter however good your arguments are, I’m not listening.”
27 / evaluation
“I think there are certain kinds that they can understand a little better, but it hasn’t really been studied well enough because everybody’s been focused on care and fairness as morality.”
28 / evaluation
“Many people try to say well all that really matters is care and compassion. But if you take that to its absurd extreme you get kind of close to what we have on campus, which is we will destroy anybody’s rights in order to protect these seven victim classes.”
29 / evaluation
“The most important finding in psychology in the last 50 to 100 years, I would say, is the finding that everything you can measure is heritable.”
30 / evaluation
“Things that clearly involve harm, violations of rights, there are certain things that are predisposed to be moralized, but the genius of human beings is because we’re so tribal, we can moralize anything that gets tabbed as being predictive of what group you belong to or being part of “them.”
31 / evaluation
“They don’t tend to do a lot with group loyalty and hierarchy. They tend to focus more on, “I’ll tell you what, you don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you.”
32 / evaluation
“In fact they’re much more likely to rise economically than if they’re raised with any sort of family instability. So I think I’m more conservative about family arrangements, precisely because of these second- and third-level effects.”
33 / prediction
“” Basically I think a lot of students know is the way to get into a top school is show your social justice activism.”
34 / preference
“What I remember is just the idea of interpreting cultures as people are making symbols, we live in a rich symbolic world, a world of narrative, we need to interpret those, that I think is quite right, and that’s again what I love about cultural anthropology is it gives you a way of interpreting cultures.”