Cancel culture
Agnes:
Um, so I thought we could talk about cancel culture today, um, because, uh,
Scott Alexander had an interesting post, um, sort of referencing the
difficulty of defining and also of drawing a line between like, at what point
do we call some activity cancel culture, um, uh, versus not, um, and, and he
references an old, um, essay of mine on, in which I explained why I thought
philosophers shouldn't try to use petitions to adjudicate their disputes with
one another, that that was sort of anti-philosophical. And I then drew on that
in response to the controversy that arose when the New York Times was going to
reveal his name and sort of undermine his blog thereby. And I thought they
shouldn't do that. But I also thought the attempt by the sort of set of people
who support him to try to use petitions to stop the New York Times from doing
that. also seem to me like a certain form of cancel culture. Anyway, that's
the context. That's why I was thinking about this. And so I myself would like
to have more clarity on Yeah, on just what are the evils in play? And a
question I have that comes up at the end of Scott's post is he's sort of
assuming that there's a set of allies who share interests in protecting one
another's free speech, and that there's a kind of coalition, a kind of
possible coalition of all the people who really care about free speech. And
I'm not sure that that is a possible coalition. So that's just a framing
question. Okay.
Robin:
So I reviewed the topic a little in the last few days because it's been in the
news, we should mention. The Telegram is a website that lets you have secret
messages and the CEO of Telegram was just arrested in France because France
wants them to reveal some of the secrets of people's messages and he doesn't
want to do that. And then in the last month in the United Kingdom, there've
been protests and then many people who have been supporting the protesters
have been jailed for several years on the basis of saying things that in US
would be very innocuous, like it's okay to be white or something. And so that
also raised the issue in the press recently. But I think the how to limit
government question is easier than the question you're highlighting, which is
more about private action and social norms. And so, yes, let's focus on that.
And the traditional idea of free speech, I think, is the idea that we should
just let people talk and say what they want, and that you don't wanna hear
what they wanna say, well, don't listen. But you shouldn't try to stop them
from talking to people who would want to listen to them. Now, we have some, of
course, legal constraints on free speech, i.e., you know, But they're pretty
extreme. We might have secrets in wartime that we wouldn't want people to
reveal or reveal private information about somebody that was their credit card
numbers or say a naked picture of them. So I don't think we're focused on
those sorts of issues that we're willing to accept that be some sorts of
things we might want to prevent people from saying. They don't have much to do
with big things. So the usual intuition for free speech rationale was this
idea that we could all together learn more if we argued and debated instead of
shutting people up. Because it's hard to learn from people who are shut up.
And we can more learn from people who, when they say things that other people
say things contrary to them, et cetera. But I think the place it gets harder
is that we do have the sense that sometimes people want to coordinate to
achieve outcomes. We do that in, say, politics, where we form political
parties, we have movements where people are trying to coordinate. And one of
the common actions of a movement or a coordination is to try to get a group of
people and to recruit them to all sort of act and service of some cause. And
then if you identify your enemies, then a potential tactic and attempting one
is to basically push, repress them on all fronts. Basically, get all of your
people to sort of do everything they can to discourage those people, i.e.
don't date them, don't visit with them, don't buy their products. and don't
listen to them. And that's more what's the key thing at issue here is some
people have said some things that other people disliked, and then instead of
just not listening, not buying the product, unsubscribing, whatever it is,
they will coordinate to get a group of people who weren't paying attention to
that particular person to say, you should do everything you can to also oppose
them. And you should unsubscribe to any platform they're on. If they have a
job, you should tell their employer to fire them, et cetera, as a way of using
the power of a big group of people willing to coordinate to further the ends
of your group. And that's more where I want to draw a line. That is, I'm
pretty okay with people just not listening to somebody they don't like. You
know, not going to a talk of theirs, not subscribing to their sub stack, et
cetera. And that if nobody liked what somebody says, well then, yeah, they
wouldn't have an audience. And I'm willing for there to be that consequence.
That is, nobody will listen to you if nobody's willing to listen to you and
nobody thinks you're worth listening to. But the idea that you would form
these groups and then coordinate with these groups to further what you see as
your group's ends by identifying someone as you see as your group's enemy, and
then using everything you have, all the influence you have over all the shared
institutions, to shut them up, that's when I worry more. But I can see that in
some extreme circumstances that might be called for, that's where I'm trying
to figure out how to draw the line. But at least that's how I would talk about
what the key problem is, the key, the hard issue, as I think it's pretty easy
maybe to limit what government can do, pretty easy to limit what, you know,
individual people could do IEC. I let people say what they want and let them
listen to what they want and, you know, evaluate what they want. And I let
small publications have their editorial policies, but, I mean, in an
intermediate difficult case, if you have a large platform, like say Twitter or
YouTube or something, you know, somebody can use their influence over that,
also shut people down. And, you know, how can I think about that when I'd
rather think about either the big government and limiting what they can do in
many small parties and letting them have editorial freedom? What position
would these large platforms play in that space? Anyway, I've said enough, but
that's how I frame the issues.
Agnes:
So the idea that we should just let people talk, and maybe we don't listen,
but we don't stop them, seems to me to apply to very, very few contexts. So if
I'm in a class, for instance, and there's some student and they're talking,
and they're going on and on and on, the rest of us can't just leave the
classroom? Or you often don't let me talk. And so the norm, let people talk,
is not a norm that we generally follow.
Robin:
Let me clarify.
Agnes:
Let me finish. Let me finish. Let me talk. And I think that often the kind of
conceit that there is such a norm goes along with the idea of something like a
special magical place called the public sphere where we let people talk out
there. And I'm not sure there is any such space as that. That is, there are
spaces like Twitter. There's something like the New York Times. So there's
bigger groups. But I yeah. So that's that's the first question.
Robin:
So in the background, we have a society we live in, and then we have different
places that are controlled by different people. So you can control your home
and you can decide who comes in and out of your home. As a teacher, you are
nominally in control of your classroom. As a publisher, Like a newspaper,
you're in control of what you publish. As a mall, you decide what stores are
there, what customers can come in. So the ordinary idea would be that the
usual people who control each space should be able to decide who speaks what
there, and that other people shouldn't come in and stop them. So if you want
to have a discussion in your home, other people shouldn't prevent people from
coming to your home to discuss something.
Agnes:
I thought the norm you were talking about is let people talk. Maybe you don't
listen, but you don't stop. What I'm saying is if you take a shopping mall or
a family or whatever, I don't think we adhere to that norm. That's not a norm.
Robin:
I'm just trying to say you misunderstood what I intended. So I'm trying to be
clearer just to say the usual norm would be to let people who control whatever
spaces there are decide who says what there. That's what I mean by let people
talk.
Agnes:
Just isn't it just analytic that whoever controls the space is going to decide
who talks? If you can make them do something, they don't control it.
Robin:
So that's why I'm trying to highlight the coordination. So let me give you
some other examples, because I think in your reluctance to sign petitions, I
think you are sensing this concern and weariness people have of certain kinds
of coordination. So for example, if we think of a labor market, we might think
lots of small employers, lots of small employees, a competitive market for
jobs, each employee should Each employee should be able to pick whatever job
somebody will offer them. Every employer should be able to offer jobs for
people. And then it's very decentralized and there's not much coordination.
And then people have noticed that sometimes there's a big company, maybe in a
small town, and then they can coordinate more to set a policy of the company
that will then be at the disadvantage of local workers because of its ability
to coordinate. And that seems illicit. But of course, we have other reasons
why big companies should exist, so we're not wanting to stop big companies.
But then people say, oh, well, we need a counter effort of a union so that
they can also coordinate to be an opposing force to the coordination of the
firms. And now maybe it's better because we have two forms of coordination,
but they're both kind of worrisome. So if we didn't have the big employers,
lots of employees all coordinating would be more of a problem, you know, in
terms of, you know, so, you know, in the past there were cobblers would form a
cobbler, you know, and butchers would be in a butcher's basically coordination
and they would all decide what together to do and those were problems. I guess
another example is in politics. Many have observed that a potential thing that
could go wrong with democracy is that 51% of the people would vote to sort of
take everything away from the other 49.
Agnes:
Or even 90-10.
Robin:
Right. For example, right. But that's a sort of failure motive. democracy, and
so that's a reason people have been wary of democracy. Now, it doesn't seem to
have happened nearly that bad, and plausibly it's because we have these norms
that make us wary of going that far. People have proposed, even in the recent
election, like, hey, those billionaires, let's just take the money, there's a
lot fewer of them than there are of us, and other people go, that doesn't seem
right. But that's not freedom of speech. No, no, it's about coordination, so
that's what I was, but I was saying the problematic issue in Cancel culture
and freedom of speech is the coordination, that is. If it were just
individuals deciding they didn't like something and then not going to a
lecture, not buying a book, not reading a Substack, that seems much less
problematic. If it happens that almost everybody doesn't like something, they
can hardly get any viewers. Like if somebody makes a movie and nobody likes
it, I think that's fine. I don't think They don't even like it because it
offends their morals. I think that's OK. But it's the coordination that's more
worrisome because then even if many people did want to listen to something, it
can be shut down through the sort of shared institutions like a university or
platform like Twitter, etc.
Agnes:
So let's say that There's a relatively small group of people who believe that
the earth is flat. And then there's more people who believe that the earth is
round. And let's say the people who believe that the earth is round coordinate
to shut down the people who believe that the earth is flat. They coordinate in
the following way. They try to produce really good arguments and books full of
explanations. And when the flat-earthers are willing to speak to them, what
they try to do is persuade them out of their view. And so they're taking out a
project. We're trying to eliminate flat-earthism. And they coordinate to try
to eliminate that view. And it's the many against the few. I think all that is
fine.
Robin:
Right. It's a certain kind of coordination. Right. It's a certain kind of
coordination that I'm worried about, not all possible coordination. Right.
Agnes:
So that's really the point. It's not about coordination. It's about a kind of
coordination. And that's why it's relevantly a question about free speech. We
have to specify the kind of coordination. Um, so what, for instance, if I use
your fear of losing your job to get you to say the words, the earth is round,
then the thing that is pushing you, the kind of pressure on you, isn't
relevant to the question, is the earth round? That is, whether or not you will
keep your job is not a consideration in favor or against believing that the
earth is round or flat. So that seems to be the, to me, that's the issue, is
that there are pressures that are not rational pressures that can be brought
to bear on belief.
Robin:
That is indeed an issue. But I fear if we try to define the problem that way,
we're making it way bigger and less tractable. So I think there is this shared
concept of free speech and a norm favoring it. And I think it's more narrow
than wanting to promote all sort of good thinking and discourage all thinking
that isn't based well on evidence or something. That just seems way bigger
than this issue. I think people have a sense that people should be allowed to
speak And even if they aren't giving very good arguments, even if they're
being rhetorical, even if they're being demagogues, even if they're being
orators, we should still let them speak.
Agnes:
So, like, you said that earlier, and then you're like, people have this norm,
and then I gave you some arguments that we don't have any such norm. And then
you said I misunderstood you, and what you really meant was that people who
control an area shouldn't be interfered with by people who don't control it,
which I said was be analytic part of the definition of control. And I still,
I'm just, I'm not sure you're saying anything when you say the words people
should be allowed to speak. That is, I just don't know what you're talking
about. Whereas that's why I substituted a different claim, which is that
there's such a thing as believing things for the right reasons. And that
there's such a thing as trying to, like, encourage changes of belief that are
not driven by the right reasons. And that cancel culture has to somehow be
involved with that second thing. Because the thing, just let people talk,
that's just not a thing. There is no such thing.
Robin:
I was trying to make analogies to other ways that we are wary of certain kinds
of coordination. And I was claiming that the issue, for me at least, is being
wary of certain kinds of coordination with respect to cancel culture.
Agnes:
I gave a characterization of what the certain kind is. You didn't. It's fine
if you want to give a different one, but you need to give some
characterization. My characterization is coordination to induce non-rational
changes in belief. If that's not the evil one, then what is the evil one?
Robin:
So think of the example of a cartel or a union. you know, these are familiar
examples to economists, they are the kind of, you know, problematic
coordination that works. So if you have a bunch of employees, say, that
coordinate, say, to create some educational classes where they can get
training, or maybe coordinate to sort of share information about what job
opportunities there are, or maybe share rumors about which places are good to
work for, those kinds of coordination don't seem particularly problematic.
Similarly, if firms coordinate to train their workers together, if they
coordinate to have people know about their kind of product, if they coordinate
to be able to share information about problems that might occur, those are
also not problematic. What if you list the ones that are not problematic?
You're not telling me what is ... I'm just trying to point to the other ones.
Agnes:
The problematic ... What is it that the other one's having in common? That's
what I want to know. I don't want examples. I want to know what is the
problematic thing.
Robin:
Again, we have to start from examples to try to think of ways to characterize
them in common, but... Okay.
Agnes:
You've given a bunch of examples, so now tell me whether the cartel, the
union... Okay.
Robin:
The cartel and the union are basically saying, people in this group You may
not associate with other people without the approval of the group. That's the
key thing. The group puts limits on who can associate with who, how. In turn,
that's the key coordination. So a union says, you can't go to a firm and take
a job they offer you. because we need to all agree together on what jobs we're
going to take for them. None of us are going to take any job unless we have a
deal collectively with them. That's a coordination to raise the wages of the
workers. And similarly, a cartel would have a coordination like that to raise
the prices the customers would pay by the cartel saying, you can't just go
sell whatever you want to anybody you want. You have to abide by our central
rules about who you're allowed to sell to. And the analogy for speech is
saying, you know, you have to follow our central rules about who you talk to,
who you listen to.
Agnes:
It seems to me that most groups do the thing you've just described, namely
place limits on who can associate with who, how. Country clubs, obviously,
like- I'm talking about outsiders.
Robin:
What outsiders you miss are, not the insiders. So a country club is a group of
people who will agree to associate with each other in the club. But if you
said you can't- You can't bring outsiders in here. No, that's not- That's what
outsiders use it. But that's not what we're talking about. Say you had a
country club that says, we won't allow anybody in here who associates with
Jews, and there haven't been country clubs that could be like that. They said,
your association with those people makes you illicit in our group, because
we're a group where they're trying to coordinate on repressing that, opposing
that other group, and therefore we're going to place limits on what other
associations you can have outside of our group.
Agnes:
So it's something like the group that tries to be your only group. Like what
you like is people can form whatever groups they want, but those groups have
to not, they have to not make the claim to be the whole background culture or
something like that. Because a culture wouldn't do that, right? A nation does,
like we're, you know.
Robin:
I mean, we don't let people travel to other countries, even if they are from
our country, and some countries allow dual citizenship.
Agnes:
We might not, for instance, let... Okay, sorry.
Robin:
So, if we... So, for example, the US wanted to punish Cuba after the Cuban
Missile Crisis, and so it said Americans were not allowed to go visit Cuba. I
would also disapprove of that, that I would say that's somewhat of an illicit
way the United States is trying to punish what it sees as an opponent, a
rival, by preventing U.S. citizens from traveling to Cuba.
Agnes:
But say that I say to my children, You know, you can't, any of your friends
who play video games, they can't come to our house. Say I say that. From your
point of view, that's like the country club case where they just can't come to
my house and you can associate with them in school. But my kids might say,
yeah, but that's not really a very relevant distinction because I can't really
be friends with anyone that I can't bring to my house. And similarly, the
people who oppose the country clubs, people who say, you can't join our
country club if you ever talk to a Jew or something, they might say, for the
same reason, there's something problematic about not inviting the Jews, not
allowing the Jews to be part of the country club. And so I'm not sure that I
see such a principal distinction between whether what you do is prevent some
people from coming in versus you try to legislate the associations that happen
outside.
Robin:
So let me highlight a factor that's relevant in these problematic cases, but
not in many of the other cases you might be thinking of. And that's sort of
the importance of scope of the coordination. So say a union negotiating with
the firm, it's important that the union contain a large fraction of the
workers who might work for the firm. If it was 2%, it just doesn't work. So
there's this attempt to get a large fraction of people to all be on the group
saying, you know, we're not going to accept a job unless we all do. Similarly
for a cartel, you need all of this, you know, a large fraction, even most of
the suppliers of an industry, it's like OPEC, you know, back in the day,
restricting oil prices, they needed most oil producers to be in. And when new
oil producers showed up who weren't in, that was the fall of OPEC. And so
that's also the cancel culture thing as well. You need a large enough group of
people to be not willing to associate with this person for it to have a
substantial effect. If it was just 1% of employers, it wouldn't take you
because of your problematic features, that wouldn't be much of a problem. It's
when 75%, 90% of them won't hire you, then it has strong force, these threats.
And that's the coordination that we're talking about, a group of people try to
become a large fraction of all the people someone could associate with, and
then using that strategic power to impose terms on them. And that's what a
boycott is, and that's perhaps what even a petition is trying to create the
impression of. That there's not just a few people have this opinion, but a
large enough fraction that they will be able to have real pressure.
Agnes:
So like monogamy in your view is kind of like cancel culture or whatever, or
this thing, whatever we may name, a bad kind of coordination because say we're
married and I'm like, no, you can't sleep with other women, not only not in
our house, it's not only that you can't bring them into our house, I don't
care where you go, you just can't. I'm trying to limit the number of
interaction partners you can have and to legislate that it can only be me. So
you would object on the same grounds then to that?
Robin:
So the concepts I'm trying to apply here are the familiar to economists
concept of market power. So that, you know, is relevant as what's the relevant
market. So if oil producers you see have a, you know, conspiracy together to
limit oil prices, that will you know, have power to the extent that people
need oil and they just don't have other substitutes. So if the solar, you
know, wind, wind power isn't part of the conspiracy, that's not a problem.
That's just not much of a substitute for the rest. If we have, you know, a
pretty competitive market for who you marry, who you have as a partner, then
we don't have the distortions of market power happening in choosing a
particular marriage partner. Now, after a while, once you have become attached
to your partner, then there is a lot of market power. And so that's actually
an issue in, um, And the same way for an employer and employee, once they had
a long-term relationship or friends, then there is more market power. And then
we tend to think of, as economists, that that's well enough disciplined by the
earlier market, when you had lots of choices, that you choose where you get
locked in.
Agnes:
You might think that like, In a culture with social monogamy norms, actually
the earlier part was also subject to a certain kind of coordination. That's
what norms are, is coordination, right? And so you never really had the
choice. Because all the women that you would approach would have said, do you
know? And they had the whole force of culture behind them and social norms.
Robin:
Right. So, if basically very few people were interested in polyamory, say. And
then early on in the mating market, you were looking for partners and there
just were very few who satisfied that criteria that would limit your options
in that direction. There just wouldn't be very many people who wanted that.
That would be different than if lots of people were attracted to it, but there
was a effort to repress that. And people weren't allowed, say, on dating apps,
say, to specify that that's what they wanted. If they said that's who they
were, they'd get fired from their jobs. They wouldn't get a security
clearance. Those are the kinds of things that people complained about. So for
example, with respect to, say, homosexuality, there was a time when Not only
did it seem like not very many people were interested, but there was active
repression of anybody even trying to say, hey, I'm interested, who out there
might be interested in this? There was a coordination to make that very hard.
People wouldn't get jobs, they wouldn't get security clearances, all sorts of
things they wouldn't get if they publicly announced that they were looking for
that sort of thing. So that was a way that society did actively coordinate to
suppress that subgroup of people.
Agnes:
before that they coordinated to suppress them in a much more effective way,
which was such stringent social norms that it would never even occur to anyone
to really even classify themselves that way. It's like to, you know, suppress
like women's desire for freedom Once the women have a little bit of a taste
for freedom, you have to engage in active suppression, but the social norms
are a way to do that without any active suppression. It just seems like the
idea of limits on association is just very deeply built into culture. That's
part of what culture is.
Robin:
I mean, part of the origin of, say, free speech was a few centuries ago when
there were some people called liberals who wanted to talk about, say, birth
control or women's voting or other sorts of options, and the culture you know,
most people didn't even notice there were options, then some people wanted to
call those options to people's attention and to advocate for them, and then
they faced repression. That is, and that's the origin of much of modern free
speech. Discussion is, in fact, those efforts to call attention to the
possibility of changing norms, to question norms, and do that via speech. And
then there was active repression of that speech as a coordination to prevent
those options from being things people are aware of.
Agnes:
Right. But it seems to me that if we're trying to defend it, defending it by
saying there shouldn't be any limits on association is that seems to me to
just be a much broader category, which is very, very close to the idea of
culture itself. And so it seems like what we ought to be defending is not
anything about association, but something about the process of trying to
arrive at the truth. Like you said early on, right, you said something like,
well, if people are allowed to say what they think, then we'll all learn more.
Somehow that got alighted from the discussion and now it seems like it's a
discussion about people being able to have as many trade partners as possible
or something like that. And that seems to me to be a slightly different issue.
from the issue of how do we enshrine the value of the pursuit of truth?
Because at least it's conceptually possible that a society that is in some
ways very repressive, in some ways very repressive, could still be oriented
towards the pursuit of the truth. It would just be repressive about stuff
that's not relevant to the pursuit of the truth.
Robin:
So to stand back for a moment, this is a common thing that happens in the
world, and we're struggling with it. The scenario is that we have some rough
norms and patterns of behavior that we like and some that we don't, and that
we give some names to, and that in history, people have had examples that were
categorized as, you know, in fit with his name or not. So free speech is an
example of that. You know, when people grow up, they hear many things and
those are called examples of free speech and other things are said not to be.
And we, in some areas, have sort of the perception that many people support
that, maybe in other areas less. And then we want to think about it more
clearly. And we realized that the examples we've been given, you know,
inherited, don't actually very clearly fall across, you know, a nice clean
line. And so we're looking for lines we could draw that would help make sense,
not only of the examples we've seen, but maybe of the rationales that people
have offered for why there should be such a distinction. So I was pursuing the
idea of this trade partner analogy as the way to characterize this, but I'm
not that confident in it. And if you have a different proposed way to
characterize, I'm happy to switch over for a while.
Agnes:
They gave it to you earlier.
Robin:
But it's not very actionable. So that is, we need a concept of free speech
such that we could agree together on what were or were not examples of free
speech. If you say pursue truth, that's free speech. We, as you well know, we
don't know how to coordinate on which particular examples are or are not us
pursuing truth.
Agnes:
Well, I mean, so as I told you, I wrote this op-ed in which I explained how to
apply this standard to a particular case, namely petitions. And what I said
was, in the case of a petition, the petition is more forceful if it has more
names on it, but having more names on a document doesn't make it more true.
And so that would constitute a non-rational form of pressure. Now, there are
alternatives to petitions that are maybe not so far from them, like you could
do a poll or something like that, right? You could have good polling, And then
the fact that the majority of people believe something is at least a little
bit of a reason to move in that direction. So there are things in the vicinity
of petitions, but as I say, if you wanna say, why is a petition bad but a poll
good, I can use the resources of my let's pursue the truth theory and explain
that some things are considerations in favor of believing something and some
things are not considerations in favor of believing that thing. And that's the
relevant distinction. And when you try to get people to believe something on
the basis of something that is not a consideration in favor of believing it,
then you're employing non-rational pressures. That's what I think cancel
culture is.
Robin:
If you think about oration, just the fact that some people are better at
putting words together to make things sound nice and eloquent, that's also not
directly truth revealing. I agree. So bad. I don't see how our disapproval of
that helps us decide when people have crossed a line for some sort of... So
we're trying to draw a line for, say, cancer culture, and we're going to allow
oration. We're not going to ban oration from the world.
Agnes:
I would look to ban anything. So this gets to the second part of it, which is
like, suppose you care about rational argument. What's your method? Which
things are you going to ban? You're going to ban zero things. What you're
going to do is make rational arguments in favor of conclusions and try to
persuade people. That's what it is to believe in it. So for instance, if
somebody, if I thought you were using oratorical tricks on me, which I think
you pretty much never do, But if I thought you were doing that, as a fan of
rationality, what do I do? Do I shut you up? Do I ban you? Do I lock? No, I
give you arguments and I say, look, here's the thing you said, but that's not
actually a reason for believing the claim that you're making. So please don't
talk like that, because I want to believe it for the right reasons. That's my
strategy. That's the only tool in your toolkit.
Robin:
So first, I do think signatures on a petition contain information, and it is
an information analogous to a poll. It's farther up the percentile
distribution. So in many topics, we have this idea that There's the median
person and how much they care, but then there are the people who care a lot,
and often they have disproportionate influence. Many political changes over
the years, say, have happened because a small minority had very strong
feelings about it, not because the median person cared that much. And so it's
valuable, in order to guess which way these things will go, to get a sense of
opinion of extremists, not just opinion of the median person, and petitions
are a way to collect information on extremist opinions, because You know, it's
somewhat of an extreme act to go sign a petition. So they are informative in
that way. But yes, they also sometimes have the implicit threat that they're
not just trying to inform you about their opinions. They are perhaps getting
ready to coordinate to pressure people to following their point of view. Of
course, a poll could do that as well, depending on the context.
Agnes:
Right. So so why are they? objection that people made that I'm interested in
to the petition piece is that people need to know what to pay attention to.
And what the petition does is draw attention to a set of claims and the fact
that many people believe something might be reason to pay attention to it. I'm
not sure what to say to that argument.
Robin:
But I mean, I think we're closely in agreement here in the sense that in this
context, we can see two possible social functions that the petition might
serve. One is the positive one of giving these sorts of information. Then
there's the negative one of being a focal point for the sort of collusion that
I was concerned about. But if not for that second kind, you shouldn't have
much concern for it, right? If it could only do the good things, it couldn't
do a bad thing.
Agnes:
Absolutely. I'm just doubting that what's bad about that collusion is best
cashed out in the way that you had of cashing it out, namely that there's some
limit on the number of trades people can make with other people. I think the
collusion is bad insofar as it attempts non-rational influence on belief
formation and for no other reason. It's irrelevant how many trades people can
make. So there's a question, why is the collusion bad? But I think you're
right that I could imagine a world where your point about, like, petitions
give us information. I mean, this is why I said a poll, because it's not just
that the petition attempts to, you know, the petition about Scott Alexander
was attempting to pressure The New York Times, right, to be like, think of all
these people who are gonna Not just cancel their subscriptions, but try to get
other people to cancel their subscriptions. That was clearly behind the ethos.
That's Ben Levitt on Trape.
Robin:
That is the collusion of sort I was talking about, right?
Agnes:
Exactly. But the thought was, but the reason that puts pressure is you're
going to lose money.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And you don't want that. And so you shouldn't do this thing. Now, the loss of
money isn't the reason not to do this thing. The reason to do the thing is it
would be wrong to reveal his name or whatever. That is the actual, notional
consideration is that. But suppose that the New York Times could just get, you
know, was just unsure. Is it wrong or right to reveal Scott Alexander's name?
And then they wanted to get information on that. And if the petition were
presenting itself as a way of allowing the New York Times to get information
on how many people think this is wrong or how many people, you know, really
think it's wrong or something, Yeah, I agree that might be okay, I just think
that that's not fundamentally what it is. It's not just that they're trying to
put that pressure, it's also that... people put a lot of pressure on one
another to sign the petition. That is, it's not only extremists. It's people
who want to signal that they're part of a certain group. I think that was very
true of the people who signed the Scott Alexander thing. It's like, if you're,
even in Scott's response to me, like his thing was, oh, she said she supports
me, but she didn't sign the petition, right? So how much can she really, she
signaled that she doesn't support me. In fact, they never said I supported
him. I just said that I believed that it was true that they shouldn't reveal
his name, right? It's not the same as supporting him. But the question, are
you a supporter or not, then becomes the question for signing the petition.
And so it's collusive or pressuring, non-rational pressuring at both ends,
both in who signs and in the effect on the person who receives the set of
signatures.
Robin:
So norms and even laws, such as crime laws, tend to work much better when
they're trying to suppress something that's rare anyway. Something that's
ubiquitous is much harder to deal with. So, for example, most crime laws are
trying to suppress things that don't happen very often, even jaywalking, or
stealing, or fraud. Because they're rare, we try to draw a line around them,
and then we make rules that try to suppress them, and then we can be rather
successful with that. But obviously there are lots of things that go wrong in
the world. People are often not respectful of each other. They, they insult
each other, things like that, but they're, they're so ubiquitous and it's
really hard to draw a line that we just don't try to use law or even norms
that much to try to suppress things that are just ubiquitous. So that's why I
would recommend the cartel view here, because in fact, cartels are rare. That
is. You know, most workers can't be bothered to make a union. Most industries
can't manage to make a cartel. You know, it's just takes a lot of work and
trouble to set up these coordinations. Most people don't get canceled. And so
the key canceling problem seems like it's a rare phenomena that is somebody
has to bother to set up some sort of a, you know, discussion or outrage about
something and gets the momentum going and then something happens. But it
doesn't usually happen to most people, even when they say mildly offensive
things. And so that's why it seems there's the potential for having a norm
that would sort of draw a line around it and try to suppress it because it's
rare. Whereas you're talking about just everything people does that isn't
fully truth oriented. And honestly, most conversation and most thinking isn't
very truth oriented. And if we're trying to fix all of that, we're just not
going to have much luck, at least with a you know, a particular norm with a
boundary that trying to go for a particular problem.
Agnes:
I guess we're just asking different questions. It's like, you want to know,
what should we ban? And I'm happy with the thought, well, that requires a lot
of practical expertise. Like, neither of us has really enough of it. And
there's people probably who specialize in that. And I'm pretty happy to leave
it to them. But maybe they want a little philosophical advice every once in a
while. But I'm not that worried about the question, what should we ban?
Robin:
It's not banning, it's having norms against. Right.
Agnes:
What is wrong? What is the thing that is wrong? What is the thing that is
going wrong? What is the thing that is going wrong in a petition? And I don't
think limits on who can associate with who is a plausible answer to that
question. And when you say, oh, cartels are not common, I just think every
family is a kind of cartel. And if I put restrictions, even just saying that
my kids, say my kids can't leave the house past a certain time at night, I
mean, that limits their set of associations. We're just doing this all the
time. Limiting who can associate with who is the basic backbone of any kind of
Robin:
But I tried to point out how I'm not talking about all possible limits on
associations. I was talking about a particular kind that's rare, this kind
like a union.
Agnes:
But when you say a kind like a union, and then I want to know what kind is
that? And it kind of seems like maybe it's just because there's a lot of
people involved?
Robin:
It's one that needs to have a large fraction of the relevant people as part of
the association. Group, that's what it is.
Agnes:
Family, it's also true that 100% of your family members tend to have to be
involved in enforcing the family rules, or at least the parents. So that's a
large fraction, a large fraction of your parents are going to be involved.
Robin:
I'm invoking a standard set of economics theory here by which we understand
when market power is a problem and when it's not. And market power isn't
usually seen to be so much of a problem in the family, so that's why we can
not be so worried about it.
Agnes:
I mean, I can't tell, you know, maybe then there's some secret reason that
economists have that you haven't been able to explain to me that would explain
the difference between these two things. Or maybe the economists themselves
just don't really know why market power is the problem and that's why they
can't tell me why it's not a problem in the family. But, as I said, the thing
that I, the consideration that I brought to bear actually does say what the
problem is, right? So that to me is progress, is picking something out that
is, I'm not sure why limits to association are a problem. As I see it, limits
to association are a condition on culture. non-national pressures on belief
formation, I can explain why that's a problem. Because if your beliefs are
formed by non-national mechanisms, you're going to have false beliefs. False
beliefs is bad because truth is a constitutive name of belief. There you go.
That's an explanation.
Robin:
It's also an explanation why 90% of what everybody's doing is wrong. Sure.
Agnes:
I'm happy to oppose more things. As I say, I'm still trying to figure out what
to ban. I'm happy to try to correct all that stuff too. A lot of the stuff we
do wrong is wrong for similar reasons. That's okay.
Robin:
It seems like you're just trying to recruit this particular discussion of free
speech to another agenda that you have. And that seems somewhat unfair in the
sense that these people who are trying to talk about free speech, they aren't
against more generally trying to be rational about things. Many of them are
rationalists and have that very specific label, but they are saying, look, we
are in a culture that has a tradition of promoting a certain kind of thing
that's been called free speech. They think that's worth reserving and
protecting. And in service of that, they would like to, as Scott's post
indicated, be more clear about where to draw the line around this concept free
speech that they want to coordinate on protecting. But you're basically
throwing that away. You're saying, well, that's not interesting compared to
all the other ways that we also are not very logical or rational about things,
and therefore it seems like you're just throwing away the whole phenomena that
they're trying to deal with. It's a particular norm in a particular context
that they are trying to be clear about, not just generically doing well in
thinking.
Agnes:
Well, when we say they, the people we're talking about are me. That is, I
wrote this piece. And Scott is, in part, responding to me. So I'm kind of the
they here, right? So what questions I was trying to raise, that's part of the
issue here. And I made a very concrete argument about a very concrete case and
where I think we should draw the line. And I'm happy to talk through Scott's
cases. I think I roughly agree with you. I think I might draw the line a
little bit earlier. I think you were at like A10 or A11, and I was at like A7.
Um, um, but, um, but I can explain why I would draw the line where I would
using my criterion, right? So, um, you know, um, um, um, um, he has a list of
things where you're, like, offended by the fact that there's a podcast that
promotes, uh, pedophilia, and you could just not subscribe to it. You could,
um, uh, uh, not subscribe because it, um, There's one episode of that kind,
etc. And, you know, he has a bunch and I would draw the line where you post on
social media. That was gross. I can't believe they would do this. Where, to my
mind, what you're doing there, the way I interpret that speech act, This could
be a misinterpretation, but the way I interpret it is you're trying to put
non-rational pressure on people to be opposed to this thing, to this podcast
for not the right reasons, that is through disgust or whatever, instead of
just making the case against it. That would be the way to try to influence the
beliefs of other people.
Robin:
I draw the line. you're well aware that you're a very good writer in the
public sphere and that your writing is quite different than a mere
straightforward listing of art premises and conclusions of arguments. So you
are accommodating at the very least all of these irrational habits and styles
of people in your writings. I mean, why wouldn't your norm here also want to
disapprove of that?
Agnes:
I think that's a good question, and I think that talking in such a way that
people find it engaging to listen to you is not necessarily using oratorical
methods of persuasion, though it can be. So here's a thing that people say to
me a lot, and I think they say it more to me than most people. They say, I
really like reading the stuff you write, even though I disagree with most of
it, or even though I disagree with a lot of it, or even though I usually
disagree with you. Actually, my niece recently reported sort of shame, almost
ashamedly to me about somebody else. She said, she told me she likes reading
you, but she usually doesn't agree with you. Now for me, that's a really good
sign, right? It's a sign that I'm able to engage people without putting my
finger on the button of like trying to convince them of my views through those
methods I have of engagement. And so that's an art and I partly rely on people
reading my writing and giving me feedback to make sure to steer me away from
that danger zone and editors above all. But I think it's a real consideration
and one I take seriously and maybe sometimes I stray over onto the side of
using my powers for the forces of evil and that's a bad thing and I shouldn't
do it.
Robin:
Even more extremely, you might argue that much of fiction or even music
illicitly persuades people of things through its arts, its, you know, the
beauty and compellingness of the art form of the movie or the song. And
therefore we should be suspicious of all of that compared to simple,
straightforward, logical presentation of, you know, arguments.
Agnes:
I agree and I think we should. To say that we should be suspicious of
something is not to say we should never engage in it. Those are two different
claims, right? So, and I think music and fiction are different. I've written
about fiction and exactly why we should be suspicious of it. Namely, I think
fiction has a negativity bias. It is designed to show us all the bad stuff in
life that we don't otherwise want to look at. Um, for that very reason, I
mean, I think life has a bit of a positivity bias. So there's something maybe,
you know, there's some kind of informational value in fiction in that way. Um,
but it also, it is itself distorted. So that's the case of fiction. I think
that is, I think these suspicions exist and they're worth taking seriously. In
the case of music, I think it mostly affects your mood and it's fine to say,
well, to affect someone's mood is to affect their beliefs, but it's really
short term. So your mood just goes back later. Like the music just kind of
washes. It reminds you anyway, kind of washes.
Robin:
There would be associations of the mood to the topics discussed in the song.
So, for example, if it was a patriotic song, then you might have a positive
mood toward the nation induced by the song talking about the nation.
Agnes:
I was not even thinking of music with lyrics. But right. So if you're thinking
about music with lyrics... Most music does have lyrics. No, that doesn't seem
true. Classical music is a very large fraction of music and most of it doesn't
have lyrics. So lots of music doesn't have lyrics, lots of music does have
lyrics. They're just both kinds.
Robin:
So let's talk about rationality norms then. So maybe that's the key thing. So
we might agree we would like people to be more rational. And then some
communities have developed norms to promote rationality. But norms are
enforced via social pressure.
Agnes:
And so... I think you can enforce norms by explaining why the norms are
correct. Like in my family, we have norms. And when my children try to flout
those norms to as much degree as possible, I try to explain to them why the
norms are correct rather than using forms of pressure.
Robin:
Most academic fields, for example, have norms of what a proper research paper
looks like, say. And most of the time, you know, people aren't explaining why
those norms are correct. In fact, people rarely do. They just have the norms
and then they enforce those norms on, say, submissions to journals. They
reject them if they don't seem to satisfy the norms. And certainly even media
like newspapers, they have norms for what a good news article is supposed to
look like. And they enforce those norms on junior and senior journalists. And
they have some rationale sometimes in terms of truth orientation, but they
just seem to also have some local inertia. Different groups all claiming to
promote truth has very different norms about what proper methods are.
Agnes:
But I think there are different ways that you can respond. I think it's fine
to take the norms as like a starting point, but if someone has like some good
reason for opposing them or for wanting a justification of them, then one
thing you can do is just use, you know, social pressures to shut them up. And
another thing you can do is explain why the norm is a good norm or take into
consideration their reasons for thinking that we should have a different one.
Robin:
Do you know how long we've been talking?
Agnes:
Not quite an hour, but we can stop.
Robin:
Well, one more observation is that courts have rules of evidence. That is,
they have rules about the kinds of things you're allowed to say in court to
persuade a jury or judge. And I guess you would be against those rules. That
is, they don't... In each case... I mean, obviously, someone could say
something on one side of the case, violating those rules, and we could say,
then the other side can explain why that was a bad thing to do, but that's not
how we do it. We just don't allow certain kinds of things to be said in court
that don't satisfy the standard rules of evidence.
Agnes:
So the thing that I think would be bad is if we tried to get someone to
believe, say, that the standard rules of evidence are correct for reasons
other than reasons that would make them correct. For instance, by saying
you're an idiot if you don't follow those or whatever. But no, I'm not
generally opposed to the existence of rules. And in general, people, in order
to coordinate, have to follow rules.
Robin:
But I was emphasizing, it's the same as the idea of limits of... So I was
talking about groups of people having a norm about certain kinds of things
being cancel culture, and then we'll try to... have a norm that you just don't
do that and we look askance if you do that. But you say, no, that's pressure.
That's not persuasion.
Agnes:
But instead of looking askance, there's another thing you can do.
Robin:
But in courtrooms, again, if there's the rule, you can't there's evidence you
can't present and you're not allowed to present and you can't argue against
the rules of evidence in a particular trial. You just can't present the
evidence.
Agnes:
Right. So I guess I think in the in the context of a courtroom, The forum for
arguing against the rules of evidence isn't the courtroom, it's, you know,
some very far removed thing from the courtroom. But if our method of dealing
with whether those should be the rules of evidence is just shaming anyone who
ever questions them, that's a bad method.
Robin:
But then why couldn't we have rules against cancel culture? And then this is
the sort of forum where we argue about that. But then when we have cancel
culture show up, we just impose the rules that we don't discuss in that
context for reasons for it.
Agnes:
Yeah, I think that actually that would be fine if we had the other thing. That
is, if we had any sense that we had arrived at some set of rules using a good
procedure. But as far as I can tell, the- It's true for law as well.
Robin:
I mean, the procedure we use to come up with rules of evidence is not very
inspiring to me.
Agnes:
Well, then I'm not happy with that either. I mean, I'm fine with being unhappy
with more things, but I think that if we had the sense of ... So maybe the
point is this. You say, okay, we want to have a system which draws lines. And
I guess my thought is we're at a very early stage here of this conversation
where we're not, I don't think we've even settled what is the basis on which
we should be drawing these lines. And a lot of people have strong intuitions
about exactly where the lines go. And they're sure that they know what this
free speech thing is. I just think we're way further back. We don't really
know what we're doing. And if we were to think this, come and think this thing
through, then we could institute some kind of a system and then we could
enforce the system. And when the people, on whom we were enforcing, and we're
like, wait, why are these the rules of evidence? Why are we doing this? Then
we'd have something to tell them, instead of just, aren't you in favor of
freedom, or aren't you friends of Scott Alexander, or whatever, right? Right.
Well, right now, that's what we've got, and the thing we've got does not
qualify as free speech.
Robin:
If we've had this for several centuries go out, then plausibly it would take
several centuries more to get the sort of consensus you're expecting, and we
just can't wait several centuries to take action. Why not? well, we have to
make choices now about canceling or things like that.
Agnes:
Oh, sure. But look, we've always had to make choices on the basis of poor
theories and poor intuitions. And maybe then my thought is, yeah, I'm not that
interested in weighing in on, should we make this bad decision or this other
bad decision? The much more interesting question is, let's try to make
progress on the real issue so that we can move towards making the good
decisions. I'll let you have the last word because we should stop.
Robin:
Well, thanks for discussing this.
Agnes:
Okay.
Robin:
All right. Till next time.
Agnes:
Yeah.