‘The Constitution of Knowledge’ with Jonathan Rauch: So to Speak podcast

June 22nd. Very exciting. Still time to pre-order. Mark your calendar. You see how the hard copies showed up the other day? There it is, back from the printer. It's gorgeous.

So this is the system of norms and institutions that all of us rely on to keep us, as a society, collectively moored to reality, as opposed to unmoored to reality. There are two or three big concepts underlying this book. The first of them may be the most important: it's not the marketplace of ideas, it's the constitution of knowledge. It turns out free speech is essential, it's important, I'll be a lifelong advocate, but it's not enough to make knowledge because humans are inherently biased and we don't see our biases. The only way to turn our views into knowledge is not just to speak, because then you get a cacophony, you get people following each other down rabbit holes of conformism and confirmation bias. You have to have a structured social conversation, negotiation, and that takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of settings. It takes building institutions like courts and law enforcement and scientific organizations and academia and newsrooms, all of this stuff that we rely on to turn these conversations in productive directions. And then the second big idea of the book is all of that is what's coming under attack right now in an unprecedented way, from cancel culture and trolling and disinformation and other enemies that you and I weren't even talking about five years ago.

Yeah. You know, we tend to think that where knowledge comes from objective reality is us thinking well, and that's true, it's important to be logical and sensible. But that's not where reality comes from. The great breakthrough in Western society that allows for, for example, the shot that I got in my left shoulder that's protecting me from COVID right now, isn't from individuals thinking well. It's from creating this constitution of knowledge, this social process where we outsource our ideas of reality to this vast social network of, literally any given day, millions, tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people looking for each other's mistakes in a structured way. So that's where scientific knowledge comes from. A person alone in a room, that could be a madman, it could be Einstein, but it's only when other people acquire those ideas, start to test them, to debate them in an impersonal way that's crucial, and in a non-coercive way that's also crucial, that's where you actually look at those ideas, evaluate them, refine them, decide to send them on to other nodes in the network. What comes out of that network at the other end, that's our knowledge.

Yeah, and I know Greg's very critical of the marketplace of ideas idea in general. I actually think it's necessary but not sufficient. That's exactly right. I love the metaphor as far as it goes, but here's the problem: the marketplace of ideas metaphor makes it sound like you've got this abstract world where ideas are clashing, where people are trading ideas as individuals. And the problem with that is it doesn't prepare us for the attacks that we're facing now, because those attacks are not based on abstract conceptions of ideas somehow clashing out there. They're based on the real world, where it's important, for example, that you have organizations like the National Weather Service, NOAA, that are actually systematically doing the hard work of comparing in rigorous, organized ways according to rules. And that's what people like Donald Trump, when he changes the weather forecast, that's what those guys are attacking. So the notion that somehow the marketplace of ideas takes care of itself, if you have freedom that's enough, the good stuff will happen automatically, the attackers right now all recognize that's not the case. And that they can disrupt all of these mechanisms in the middle, all of these things like courts of law and government agencies and academia, your bailiwick. They can disrupt all that, they can game it, they can manipulate it, they can organize it for political gain, and that's what they're doing. The marketplace of ideas doesn't really help you with that because it kind of assumes, well, we'll all just talk, more speech, we'll be better at speech.

Yeah. The ideas go back to the mid-1600s and John Locke, our old friend, who's actually the founder of both epistemic liberalism, meaning the constitution of knowledge where we get knowledge, and also political liberalism, our constitutional structure. So no coincidence that they line up in a lot of ways. But the actual what I call the reality-based community, which is all of us who are in a day-to-day way participating in making knowledge, that's law and government and journalism and especially research science, academia, all of that is more recent and it grows up basically mostly over the last 200 years. And yeah, medicine is a good example because for many centuries we had medical ideas, but we had no way to systematically turn those into knowledge, right? And figure out what are actually best practices, what works and what doesn't. And it's only in actually a bit over 100 years ago, in the 19th century, that you begin to systemize that by getting a medical community, organizations like the AMA, research universities that began doing controlled experiments, journals that began publishing those experiments, regulations that began saying you have to pass certain tests in order to be medication. It's only then that you bring these various kind of home remedies and random cures that people are using into direct contestation. You begin to weigh them, you begin to say, well, okay, this works, penicillin really works, where alligator tonics don't work. And you see that replicated all across the spectrum. You see it in my field, which is journalism. 19th century journalism in the US was just absolutely ridden with extreme partisanship and fake news, gossip. Gossip arguably started the Spanish-American War just for circulation. And that was changed by people making deliberate choices just over a hundred years ago to set up the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which promulgated ethics standards, journalism schools which began to train people in better and worse ways of doing things, second sourcing, checking back for comments, running timely corrections. And you began to get structured newsrooms that were organized around these conventions of, we're going to stay truthful and here's how we're going to do it. That's not just sort of the marketplace of ideas spontaneously arising. These are actual human beings who make these social decisions to create the reality-based community, and that's what we're defending now. It's what you're defending at FIRE, essentially institutions.

Yeah, it's not just a metaphor, it's not just a simile. It's actually a lot of very direct parallels in how both of these constitutions, the one written and one not, organize social cooperation and negotiation in a non-coercive, constructive way, which is incredibly hard to do.

Yeah, yeah, and all of them came up in the Enlightenment, right in there, and they're all grounded in the same fantastically profound, important, but also counter-intuitive and hard to defend proposition, which is that the safest, most efficient, and most reliable way to make social decisions is to put no one in particular in charge, to outsource them to these networks of impersonal rules. So that's what we do with markets, where we have lots of exchange going on, with lots of institutions in there in the middle. It's also what we do with politics. No one person is in a position to run the whole government, at least not for more than short stretches.

Yeah, and it's also to make sure that no one faction can seize control. The typical way... every society, small or large, has to deal with disagreement and they have to deal with reality. They have to figure out how to come to some sort of account as a society of what's true and what's false, not on every little thing, but even a tribal society has to come to common beliefs, for example about religious practices, about how they're going to deal with the weather, migration, all kinds of things like that. It's important for them to stay moored to reality. But that's hard to do because human beings look to each other to decide what to believe, and that leads to distortions. We look for beliefs that confirm our biases, that confirm our identities, and that support our standing in the group, and that can lead whole societies into rabbit holes of unreality. And then they split into sects, and then the sects go to war. They settle disputes about reality by going to war. That was the 30 Years War, about maybe a third of the population of Germany might have been killed. Or they go to authoritarianism, the standard way of doing it, which is some authority, a priest or a pope or a prince, decides what's true. So the liberal revolution, what you guys and we are all defending at FIRE, is a very different way of doing it. It's saying, wait a minute, let's create a set of impersonal rules in which no one has special advantages and no one has coercive power, and then you guys are going to have to persuade each other. In politics, it means you're going to have to compromise to get stuff done whether you like it or not, but that'll be a dynamic force because the compromise process will introduce new ideas and new players and actually better solutions than either side would have had. Same with knowledge. If I have a proposition and I want to get it taught in the textbooks, get it established, I'm going to have to get it published, it's going to go through multiple levels of review, I'll have to persuade people around the world in a variety of disciplines, and only after it's been through that process does it get in the textbook. And that's what FIRE is defending.

Yeah, so that's the problem. This has been called the epistemic tragedy of the commons. Lots of jargon, I know, I know Greg doesn't mind. But suppose I decide to believe in QAnon. That will, apart from the friends I might lose, have no particularly negative impact on my life because it doesn't really matter if I think that Hillary Clinton is leading a pedophile ring of Democrats and maybe Jews that are kidnapping and killing children. I'll believe that. But if that's good for my ego, or if it lets me feel like I'm initiated into some network of people who know better, or it's getting me new friends online, I'm feeling an improvement in my life, not a disimprovement. I mean, this is way more fun and way more energizing and motivating than believing difficult stuff that's really complicated about politics. The problem is if a lot of people make that same self-oriented decision and start going down epistemic rabbit holes, societies begin to break apart. They lose touch with reality, and you get into a world where 75% of Republicans believe completely falsely that the election was stolen in 2020. And that is a direct threat, that's an epistemic threat to maintaining our political order.

And here's the... so I mentioned the first big lesson of the book is it's not just a marketplace of ideas, it's a constitution of knowledge. Here's the second: you're being manipulated. What's going on here is not just people kind of wandering off the reservation. It's not just a generalized sort of environmental reduction in faith in institutions. Something I don't know that Gurri and others are well enough aware of, this is a deliberate, systematic, very sophisticated disinformation attack on the institutions, norms, and practices that keep us moored to reality. This is Donald Trump and his allies, and people in cancel culture, especially on campus, the people you're dealing with. These are activists. They're operating in an organized, sophisticated way to deliberately unmoor from reality for political gain. Because once you detach people from reality, ask a Soviet propagandist, you open them to demagoguery, to deceit. They become cynical, they become demoralized, demobilized, all of these things that make it easier to control the political environment. And that's what we're seeing now. This is not happening accidentally. This is Peter Pomerantsev's 'Nothing is True and Everything is Possible.' And I know you interview him in the book.

And that's exactly the goal. Create cynicism, mistrust, make people think that mainstream media is just another racket, so the only person you can trust is Donald Trump, as he will tell you.

Well, just a small point is I want to make a defense of PolitiFact and the Washington Post fact-checking team. Yeah, of course they get something wrong, they will infuriate you. But notice the reason they're infuriating you is that they spell it out and they show their work, and they tell you what their sources are and put you in a position to say that's the totally wrong conclusion. Everything there is not made up, unmoored from reality. The citations are going to be real. And it's like, you read a bad academic paper, but if it's playing by the rules, it won't be using fake data. Yeah, and that's the distinction here. You can disagree with PolitiFact and you can say they got that one wrong, and journalists get it wrong all the time. But the key to the reality-based community, the great innovation that put this vaccine in my arm a month ago so I can be sitting here in this room with you, is not that it doesn't make mistakes. It's that it makes them incredibly quickly and then it corrects them incredibly quickly. And it does that by making sure that the price of being wrong is not that you lose your job or your reputation or your life, it's that you lose the argument and we all move on. So this brings us to where what you were talking about and what I think is the core of FIRE's mission, and maybe if I may, Nico, what I think is the most directly relevant part of the book to what you guys are doing, which is the only way this error-correcting mechanism works inside or outside of academia is if you have lots of viewpoint diversity. You've got to have pluralism because we can't see our biases, and if we only talk to other people who share our biases, all we'll get is a distortion of reality. We'll just be in an echo chamber confirming each other. So what do you do if you want to disrupt the scientific process in ways that steer it politically, that dominate politically? Well, it turns out you can game the environment by coercing people socially. If they're afraid, if one whole side of the argument is afraid to speak up, or one whole side of the argument isn't even represented in a particular department on campus, you're going to get a distorted, manipulated reality in which only one side will be heard, and that side will be able to dominate politically, and that will be their goal. And I worry, as you see in the book, I worry a lot about that environment increasingly growing on campus. And that's why I think FIRE's work, you think of yourselves as you should as a free speech group, as a liberty-based organization, you guys are also a science organization. You are defending the norms and practices that make it possible to gather knowledge and that give the university credibility in seeking knowledge, by defending intellectual pluralism and by trying to keep the dialogue open and prevent this kind of information warfare, this kind of dominance.

I saw the trend emerging, and we didn't have the word cancel culture when I started this book. We had call-out culture, which is how Jonathan Haidt used to refer to it, and even that was new. I kind of had to write it in as I was going along. So yeah, it came up gradually. So the insight of this book that I think is new and might be helpful is to understand that what we call cancel culture, although it's not new, it's in fact very old, it's an age-old form of propaganda. It's now operating at a much higher level of capacity than it did in the past because of social media, which make it much more efficient. But we need to think about it as not just random people being mean to each other online, or not just a bunch of extreme activists who are acting out. We need to think of this as targeted information warfare. It's about groups with particular ideologies on campus and off using social coercion to manipulate the environment so that a lot of people are afraid to speak out. So it turns out you can create what's called a spiral of silence on campus. You see this all the time. People who, for example, think affirmative action is counterproductive are very reluctant to talk about that. But that means other people who think the same thing assume that they're isolated, they become silent themselves. So you create this cascade, this spiral of silence, where one group which is in fact a minority on campus, actually in many cases, is able to dominate as if everyone agreed with them. That's what they're aiming for, and they're doing it on purpose.

It's very sophisticated. It's not new. Tocqueville in the 1830s came to America and said the biggest threat to democracy is people become afraid to speak out once they see the direction of public opinion. John Stuart Mill warned against it in 1859. He said that amazes me, but Mill said the biggest threat to liberty in England at that time was not from the government, it was from enforced social conformity that made the person of genius, the eccentric, the person with the really out-of-the-box view, reluctant to pursue that or to voice that.

So yeah, it's both of those things. I mean, you guys have a probably better feel than I do for what's going on here. But yeah, number one, a lot of these attacks... let's give folks credit. The activists on campus are not snowflakes. They're impassioned people who are making arguments that come from well-intentioned places, including anti-racism, I think, which is something we all support. We may disagree about how to define it, but that's not something any of us want to be on the wrong side of. We want to pursue that social goal. And then the second thing is the culture, and we don't like making people feel upset. I'm gay, I can tell you that there's a very serious downside to being in a world where people believe things that are false and harmful about you, and you ingest that as a child. I, you know, that's the whole story of my life. So those two things are very compelling. And then there's a third thing which is really important, and this is where I think FIRE's work, and especially its upcoming work, is going to be so important, which is you can't overemphasize that one side of this argument came on very quickly and took everyone else by surprise. No one was prepared for this. They were all caught off guard.

I'm saying that the pluralistic liberals, people who want to defend free speech and especially intellectual pluralism and both the right and the positive need for people to say things that are outside the box and controversial, those people weren't ready for any of this. They weren't organized. FIRE was doing important work on campus, but there wasn't a whole lot outside of that. Most people focused on the First Amendment and legal defenses. So I'm not sure people saw coming that there was going to be a major, focused, targeted campaign trying to shut down whole aspects of the debate. And what I'm seeing now is the beginnings of a counter-mobilization. I'm seeing the beginning of liberals, small-L liberals, people who believe in pluralism, diversity of ideas, toleration even if that upsets people. I'm seeing them start to organize and fight back in a way that we've never seen before. I think they've finally tumbled to the fact that this attack is coming from what I call purists. They're people who only want to tolerate and accept one viewpoint, their own, and they've come to see that that's incompatible with the liberal order, not just incidentally but fundamentally. And I think they're starting to understand that there's also this weird neo-Marxist structure going on here, this notion of a kind of eternal endless revolution. And as that happens, you can see they're starting to figure out how to organize groups and ideas that are going to come to the defense. But it takes a lot of time to counter-organize.

So true. And one of the great disappointments of my career was seeing how few tenured professors actually bothered to stick up for their friends or for their students. There are some real big exceptions, of course, people like Alan Charles Kors, who co-founded FIRE, or Donald Downs. Donald Downs, by the way, he's a free speech hero that everybody in the free speech movement actually knows. He's recovering from a double lung transplant, really serious surgery, but so far he's doing okay. He was just on the podcast in February or early March. But Robbie George, Keith Whittington, Nadine Strossen, of course, there are a lot of people who are exceptions. But it has been disappointing how little use so many professors make of the safest job in the world.

Camille Paul at the University of the Arts, for example, Mark Hamilton at the University of Alaska, President Zimmer at Chicago, President Daniels at Purdue. Leadership at the top really matters, because that's able to say we'll have your back. If just because you offend a student doesn't mean you're going to be investigated or lose your job. But Nico, to me the moral of the story is you have to work both sides of the equation at once. Remember, the point of information warfare is to demoralize and demobilize the other side. Again and again I talked to professors who would say something like, well, I don't like what's going on, I'm having to change the way I teach because I'm frightened of my students, but there's nothing I can do about it as an individual. I don't want to get investigated, and I know that if I'm just one voice I'll be demolished. So they don't speak out. Of course everyone else makes the same calculation, and you're back to what we talked about before, the spiral of silence, the intimidated environment which is what the activists are seeking. So you have to do two things. First, you have to say to that professor, you can make a difference. Sakharov made a difference. In fact, he played a key role in bringing down the Soviet empire, because what does disrupt a disinformation campaign, a spiral of silence, is when it hits that anchor in reality that says no, no, no, facts, facts, facts, truth, truth, truth, here's the evidence, and I'm not shutting up. But just as important, you have to make it worth that professor's while by providing group support. They have to have resources to file a lawsuit, that can be FIRE. They need cultural resources, they need support groups, they need other people like Keith Whittington, and I think the Academic Freedom Alliance is going to do this, coming to them and saying we're a community, we share your values, how can we help? You're going to need all kinds of institutional resources so that people can organize. And only after they're organized and counter-mobilized can you fight this disinformation campaign. Remember, it is a campaign, it is coordinated, it is a front, not just an individual that you're fighting, and you have to organize against it.

What a great question, because that's really the question that the book ends with. This is not the first major information warfare attack or disruption in the Constitution of Knowledge. In fact, the first big information disruption was before John Locke, it was the invention of movable type. And that was used immediately to put out fake news about witches, which led to the murders of tens of thousands of people across Europe. And people fretted at the time, we can't even have an organized society with the printing press because there's so much wild stuff out there, so many conspiracy theories and fake news. It led to a war across Europe. So we have faced disruptions in the past. In general, the way we face them down has been you build new institutions and norms, or you adapt old ones, so that people start to understand what the challenge is and how someone like us should react in that situation, so that it's not just up to the individual. We turned journalism into a fact-based, reality-based community by saying okay, it's not just me, people like us, professional journalists, we're going to run a correction if we're wrong. If I write something about Nico Perino and it's wrong, I'm going to call him up before I put it in. So you develop what the heck... As Greg said, like PolitiFact, they get one thing wrong, people see they get it wrong, then the whole system is discredited. Well, I don't think the whole system is discredited. Over time, they're getting that, that is what they'll say. And the point is you need to counter that in systematic ways. So to go back to your question, sorry to be so roundabout, but to go back to the point you're making, I don't think we know yet if we rise to this challenge. We haven't talked about digital media, huge challenge, because I'm going to get to that, I have some questions. Cancel culture is very effective and very well organized. Disinformation is weaponized by Trump. All of these things are really tough. And whether we fight back effectively depends on do we understand the nature of the attacks and do we begin to counter-organize so that we can respond effectively and regain people's trust. I mean, a lot of it is people like me in journalism, and a lot of it is on people in academia. Greg referred to this, to understand that they are badly damaging the reputations of their institutions when they allow themselves to become politicized and one-sided.

Just so people know what Greg is referring to, this is a professor who came under attack. She's a philosopher, she wrote a perfectly good paper, it involved trans issues. Some people decided to go to war to make an example of her. That's how information warfare works, you go after vulnerable individuals and that suppresses and chills speech in a whole class. And they, among other things, demanded that the paper be retracted, although there was nothing wrong with it. And in that case, the journal said no, that's not how it works. We retract things because they're fraudulent or because of ethical violations, but we don't retract things because some people don't like the message. And those instances are super important. And there are others. I'm talking a little too abstractly, but for example, Purdue University now is in its fifth year of including a First Amendment module, a free speech module, in its freshman orientation. And that's important because that prepares students as they come in the door for the kind of environment they'll have in college. And they'll understand that yeah, there's a right to be offensive at Purdue, a public university, and in the United States. And amazingly, a lot of students just don't know that. Well, we can't defend what we don't know even exists.

To be clear, we're not serious about it being required by law, but the idea of this being introduced in an orientation as a sophisticated concept, not just as a legalistic concept, absolutely. Well, that's the goal of the book. When I set out to write this book, it was not just for my understanding. So here's the thing, Nico. The Constitution of Knowledge is by far the most benign and powerful social system in the history of humanity. This has transformed our species from a group of small tribes or maybe religious sects, each with a separate truth, none of which is particularly well attached to reality, into a species that has a species-wide network that's finding knowledge at a fantastic rate and expanding exponentially. The number of papers on COVID-19 went from zero in January of last year, it was doubling every two weeks through August. This is the rate at which this global system is able to make mistakes, find mistakes, turn that into knowledge, and then turn that into good stuff. But when a system is that successful over that long a period of time, people take it for granted. They think, well, it's just going to happen automatically. No matter what we do, we'll have a marketplace of ideas, we'll have free speech, and the rest will take care of itself. And the point is that's not true. It's like the US Constitution. People need to understand how all this stuff works, checks and balances, Congress, courts, where laws come from, why it's important to have rotation in office even if your side loses. Same thing with the Constitution of Knowledge. People need to understand why it's important to have dispassionate fact-checking, why it's so important not to have truthiness, not to be believing and teaching stuff just because you think it should be right.

Yeah, well, the other problem with that sort of language is you can't falsify it. You almost have to take it at someone's word, right? Because it ends the whole debate. Because having the conversation is traumatizing, and that's what it's designed to do. So the point of this book is to say, hey, wait a minute, look at all of these things that we need to understand if we're going to defend the culture that we rely on. Surface it, make it visible.

Both both are true, and they interact, but yeah, the system's being manipulated. I mean, take Trump. People say, well, he's a bozo, he doesn't know what he's doing. He's spent the last 30 years building his career on manipulating the information environment. This is a guy who would get on the phone and pretend to be someone else in order to manipulate the media. This is a guy who learned the art of what did he call it, truthful hyperbole? I think that's from The Art of the Deal. This is someone whose entire career is based on creating illusions, manipulating the media, using intimidation tactics to silence or isolate people who he doesn't want to be heard from. It's no surprise when he comes into office and then weaponizes those things on an unprecedented scale and then turns an entire political party into what amounts to a propaganda organ. So I think it's wrong just to say, well, the internet came along and it shattered old institutions. There is an element of that, but if we're going to defend the Constitution of Knowledge, it is important to understand it has very real and very potent enemies, and those people are working every day. Rush Limbaugh, okay, he's been on the radio 30 years. His big constant gig has been attacking day after day the institutions that we rely on to make knowledge. He talks about the four corners, the four pillars of deceit, and that's science, academia, journalism, and government. He's on the radio every day saying you can't trust them, they're all out to deceive you, only trust me. Well, that's going to have an effect, right? So got to stay focused on that.

Yeah, I do say that outright. Something others see as censorship, you talk about, I don't see it that way. You talk earlier about journalism and how it took a while for the Constitution of Knowledge systems to kind of catch up and formalize it and make it what we know it is today. Is social media the next frontier? You write, at this writing perhaps surprisingly, and this is what makes me think that you're supportive of content moderation, at this writing perhaps surprisingly, the organizations working hardest to build institutional barriers to propaganda and intimidation are the ones most often criticized for doing too little, social media companies, or doing too much if you're looking at the right. Figuring out how to moderate oceans of content non-arbitrarily is a herculean job, but major companies Facebook, Google, Twitter are spending millions, hiring thousands, and innovating to do better. So I've put a lot there.

And that's exactly why building institutions and guidelines is so important. Because you want to be able to say, okay, well, we're developing some actual codes that people have given some thought to, and we're even going to follow these codes when it's against our commercial interests. That's the commitment Mark Zuckerberg has made. We'll see if he lives up to it, but he's saying let's not do it ad hoc based on politics. And to me, that's a major development. That's the right idea for how you approach this.

Yeah, and no one's always going to like the standards or the outcome. But remember, the core of the constitution, whether it's the US Constitution or the Constitution of Knowledge or even market systems, you won't always like the outcome. You've got to believe that the rules are in some sense fundamentally legitimate, but you're not going to always like the outcome. And it's very important that not everyone will. Back to the point you were making just now, Greg, I want to throw in a friendly amendment to what FIRE's doing. Because yeah, you're defending free speech on campus, but in doing that you're also defending all of these rules and norms. Some are written, tenure protections, plagiarism and abuse protections. Some of them unwritten, like free speech on campus that allows for open discourse, challenging discourse, not letting safetyism interfere with that. You're also defending these rules of the road that make it possible for academia to produce knowledge in a non-politicized way. You're defenders of knowledge, not just free speech.

No. And what's funny about this is one of the reasons why I refer people back to First Amendment law so often is it deals very well. It's not like it's some mechanical machine. When it actually looks at situations involving actual professors, it's able to make these distinctions. And remember, the function of it is to help us understand what the world is. And there are competing levels of academic freedom on institutional, individual, and even to some degree, and it's better thought out than people give it credit for. And all these ideas that actually do a better job of producing knowledge are kind of baked in. But what I would love to get, just like you said, just like we've discussed before, is priming students when they come in for this being a very noble, very strange, very important endeavor that's fundamentally nothing like K-12. It's about being part of the way the world looks at itself. And it's not like everyday life. Something I make a big deal out of, I fuss about in my book because it's so important, is that we don't conduct our everyday lives according to the Constitution of Knowledge. I mean, every time we walk into a church or a synagogue or a mosque, we become part of, we're not doing science. We're in a community, an epistemic community with certain beliefs which we don't send out for a lab to be tested or put them in journals and hope that scientists around the world will correct us. It's a very different world. And so we're not telling students, look, you have to give up all your beliefs and be some kind of Vulcan. But we do need to tell students, yes, free speech, you'll hear things that are offensive. And yes, academic rigor, there are going to be certain requirements for what we say is knowledge around here. You can say anything you want, but if you want to say that what you're saying is actually true, is actually objectively true, we're going to teach you the steps that you have to go through to do that. And you're not allowed to shortcut that by just saying, well, but subjectively I think like X or Y is true.

So I worry about that a lot, and I think conservatives of good faith, not just people like Rush Limbaugh who are doing propaganda, but conservatives of good faith have a case. And I'm worried about it. But I think they kind of mislocate the problem. But you tell me if you think this is right. I think people have the idea that there's a kind of higher ed conspiracy of the far left to politicize the whole thing and turn it into social justice warfare. And I don't really think that's the case. I think most professors and most students are still there to do in good conscience the job that they were trained to do, which is find knowledge in fairly rigorous ways. And that more of the problem has to do, first, with a coterie of activists who are using the tactics we talked about, social coercion, intimidation, silencing, to distort the environment that makes it harder for people of good faith to do that work and to feel protected doing that work. But second, maybe more important, that in certain disciplines and departments at major universities, there's no longer enough viewpoint diversity on the faculty so that people are actually testing each other's beliefs. And so it's not a deliberate effort to suppress one side, it's the lack of representation of one side leading to a skewed outcome. We also see that increasingly in journalism, I'm sorry to say, at some major outlets, we won't name them right now, but you know who I'm talking about. And one of the things the book says is that it's imperative that the university put as high a premium on viewpoint diversity as on other forms of diversity. There's a lot of discrimination now that's documented against conservatives in hiring and in tenure and even in publication. That has got to stop, because I think it's damaging the credibility of the entire reality-based community.

Yeah, you know, and in fairness, the American university was not born as a research institution. It was born to train ministers and pastors and also farmers. But from there, they've got a deep DNA which says that they should be about social justice and morals. So this is an old argument. Do you think I'm Pollyanna in saying that what's happening is less a politicized takeover broadly across academia and more lack of diversity that's been allowed to creep in and encouraged by some forces?

Yeah, definitely. We've seen some problems in math departments, like some guy was pilloried because he wrote a statistical paper that showed it can be true that different groups can have different preferences without the presence of discrimination. But mostly we're talking about social sciences and humanities. Is that right?

Oh, and that is something that I say all the time, and I would like to repeat it again. There is a huge middle of FIRE cases that aren't all that political, and sometimes don't take place at the sexiest schools, even sometimes at fairly well-known schools like the parking garage case. They get almost no coverage. If it fits a culture war narrative, it gets a lot more viewers, particularly if it's political correctness run amok. It actually gets better attention from the New York Times if it fits that narrative, which I find amazing. And I really wish sometimes people would focus on the big middle of cases where a lot of cases it's just a bureaucrat who has gotten a little drunk on having power and no accountability.

Well, I'm a huge fan of FIRE's work and others' work on campus free speech per se, like the Valdosta case where someone criticizes the president's plan to build an Eastern European-style monument to himself of an unnecessary parking garage and then gets persecuted. But I'm also a big fan of Heterodox Academy and now the Academic Freedom Alliance and others which are starting to pay attention to what I think is in some ways the underlying problem, which is this lack of intellectual diversity. And they're beginning to say, look, as academics, as professors, we're seeing the toxic effects of lack of intellectual diversity. My hope is that there's enough reserves of that kind of integrity in academia so we can begin to see some focus coming from inside the academy on making sure that it's hospitable to multiple points of view. But I don't know, I mean, some people say forget it, it's not happening.

There you go.