YouSaid · the spoken record

Glenn Loury

lines on the record: 213
first: 2022-05-14
most recent: 2022-05-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“They want to tell African Americans to pat us on the head. We're going to have a separate program for you. We're going to give you a side door that you can come into. That doesn't make us any smarter. It doesn't make us any more creative. And it doesn't make us any more fit for the actual competition that's unfolding before us. Now, you want to be 10% of the population that's carried along for the next hundred years. You want to be a ward of the state in the late 21st century. You go ahead. Because the Chinese are coming. You're not going to hold them back. The world is being remade every decade by new ways of seeing and new ways of doing. If you don't get on board with the dynamic advancement of the civilization in which we are embedded, you're going to end up being dependent on other people to look kindly upon you.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conservative, I am tired of the belly aching. I'm tired of the excuse, man. White supremacy. It is in my mind a joke. I lament the fact that that kind of rhetoric is so seductively attractive to African Americans and so widely adopted by others. And as I am fond of saying at the end of the day, nobody is coming to save us. I mean higher education MIT, Caltech, Stanford, where the future is happening. That is about mastery over the achievements of human civilization such as they manifest themselves in the 21st century. There's no substitute for actually acquiring mastery over the material. There's no substitute for that to be patronized. Have the standards lowered, they want to get rid of the test”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way that the civil rights movement has evolved under the wing of the Democratic Party into an organized appellogia for the failures of African Americans to seize the opportunities that exist for us now in the 21st century, but did not exist in the first half of the 20th century. The way in which the civil rights movement has become an avoidance mechanism for us not taking we African Americans responsibly. This is Glenn Lowry. Not everybody's going to agree with it as part of what makes me”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are doing it not because they're intrinsically more intelligent to other people, but because they work harder, because their parents are more insistent on focusing on their intellectual performance, because they're disciplined, because of the way that they devote their time and their resources to equipping their children to function in the 21st century. This is what I believe. I think it's demonstrably the case. And it is a factor in racial disparity.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Homicide is the order of magnitude more prevalent amongst African Americans than it is in the society as a whole. This is behavior. It's behavior of our people. I speak of black people. Of course, we're not the only people in society for whom violence is an issue. It's an order of magnitude more prevalent in our communities. I'm talking about schooling and school failure. So we have affirmative action as a cover. It's a band-aid on differences in the development of intellectual performance, which is only partly a consequence of the natural intelligence of people and largely a consequence of how people spend their time, what they value, how they discipline themselves, what they do with their opportunities, how parents raise their children, what peer groups value, and things of this kind. The Asian students who are scoring off the charts on these exams.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Internal to the community about how men and women relate to each other and engage in social reproduction, childbearing, the standing up of households, the context within which children are maturing and so forth and so on. So the African American family is in trouble. I think I can demonstrate that by reference to high rates of marital dissolution by high rates of birth out of wedlock and so forth. You can't even say that the African American family is in trouble. Violence.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the posture, what became of the civil rights movement, I mean, the civil rights movement, you quote King 1963, the civil rights movement starts out as we want equal membership in the polity, but it becomes a systematized cover, I'm going to argue, for deficiencies that are discernible within black American society, which only we could correct. That's a very controversial statement. I make it with trepidation. I don't take any pleasure in saying it. But here's what I'm talking about. So, I'm talking about the family. So, the family It's a matter.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Society is stagnation and ultimate attenuation of the economic benefits that might be available to people. Again, I think if you look at the developing world in the post-colonial period, the second half of the 20th century, that's exactly what you see. Planning doesn't work. Centralized control over resource allocation doesn't work. Okay, so I became more conservative in that respect. But I also, and this has to do with race, Lost”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They can carry on in that way. They need the corrective influence of markets in order to be responsive to the realities of life. I mean, I may not like it that prices are telling me that something that I want to do is infeasible. I may not like it, but what the prices are telling me is that the cost of doing it exceed the benefits to be derived from doing it. And if I persist in doing it notwithstanding that, I'm going to run losses. And those losses will accumulate. And the net effect.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of evidence that the war on poverty was lost by the people who were trying to quote unquote eradicate poverty in our time. incentives really do matter and that the state, which is driven by politics, is often unresponsive to the dictates of incentives, whereas markets eliminate people who are inefficient and who are not cognizant of the consequences of incentives because they can't cover their bottom line and they won't persist for very long if they can't cover their bottom line. They're forced to respond to the realities of differences in costs and benefits and so forth in a way that governments can cover because they have their hand in our pocket. They can cover their losses and they can make accounts balanced notwithstanding their mistakes because they can take my property by fiat, by the power of the state. The tax collector comes if I don't pay, he seizes my holdings.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I began southside of Chicago, black kid. I was a liberal Democrat. I encountered the economics curriculum at the MIT and I became trained in economics in the tradition that I've just described. And I encountered also the Reagan Revolution. This is the late 70s and early 80s. These are big debates about economic policy and so on. And I found a lot to admire in the supply ciders, the people were saying, you know, let's get the government out of the way, the people who were worried about national debt, which is a lot more now than it was then. The people who worried that the welfare state could be too big. That the incentives of transfer programs could be counterproductive, that you had a war on poverty. And we did have a war on poverty. And poverty won.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the tradition of liberalism, Adam Smith and so forth. John Maynard Keynes, for that matter and so forth, that Milton Friedman and so forth, that Paul Samuelson, Bob Solo, James Tobin, and so forth, Thomas Sull, yes, that appreciates property. Virtue's a free enterprise. The set of institutions that allow for security of contract, a rule of law, things of this kind. So that's one thing to say about my politics. Another thing to say about my politics, and you're right, I've moved around.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Markets are going to produce inequality and all men being equal is a statement about the intrinsic worth of people, not about the situation that will come about when people interact with each other through markets because people are actually different and because there are factors that are beyond anybody's control called luck and chance that you and I both invest. It looked a priori like your investment in my investment were equally likely to succeed. But as a matter of fact, ex post facto, your investment succeeds. My investment doesn't succeed. I don't have wealth and you have wealth. That is an inevitable consequence of an environment in which both of us are free to make our investment choices and where the consequences of investment depend in part upon random circumstances over which no one has control. But you ask me about my politics and I was just trying to lay down a foundation by saying I begin as an economy.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Corporation, so nothing but illegal fiction. The corporation is not a person as such, but the nexus of contracts and relationships amongst the stakeholders who intersect in the context of the corporation is the way in which we organize the massively complex set of activities that are necessary in order to produce economic benefits, in order to feed people, in order to have everybody with a cell phone in their pocket, in order to be able to travel from one side of a continent to another on a device that is with almost absolute certainty going to safely take off and land in order to be able to build cities.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And input of customers and so on, and that functionality allows for the production of goods and their distribution and the earning of income and its distribution, which at the end of the day is the foundation of our prosperity. Corporations are people too. Mitt Romney got in trouble for saying that in 2012.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“State, which is why I think nationalism is important, and it's why I think borders are important. Because without a coherent Polity who can See themselves as in a common situation and agree through their politics to support each other to some extent. You can't sustain a safety net. You cannot have a social safety net for a global population. You can only have a social safety net for a bounded population who have a sense of common membership in an ongoing political enterprise, which they pay their dues through their taxes in order to sustain it. There's a balancing that has to go on. So that's the first thing that I would say about my politics. I'm a neoliberal economist. I believe in markets. I believe in prices. I believe in profit. Corporations are not an incarnation of evil. Corporations are a legal nexus through which production gets organized in which you solicit the cooperation of workers, of people who provide capital, of people who provide raw materials.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Social system would be left to their own devices regardless of whether or not they had saved for their retirement. I'm not saying that the ideal of extending decent access to health care to all people regardless of whether or not they can afford it, decent access to education, to people regardless of whether or not they can afford it is standing in the way of prosperity. I don't believe that. I think the mixed economies that we see in Northern Europe and in North America are a balancing of the virtues of free enterprise property and the pursuit of wealth on the one hand against the needs to have a decent society in which people who fall between the cracks nevertheless are bolstered through a sense of social solidarity that is accommodated by our common membership within a single nation.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capitalist oriented modes of economic exchange freeing up prices, markets, property and so forth, although obviously it's a complicated political economic system. I'm talking about China. But I think that the story of the 20th century and the hope for the 21st century is that prosperity is enhanced through the free exchange of goods and the pursuit and acquisition of property by people in a more or less capitalist oriented system. That's the view that I hold. I guess that makes me a conservative. I don't know. I want to say that's not to the exclusion of a social safety net. I'm not saying that old people in an ideal”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deserves to be studied and to come at it in a critical way, informed by the intellectual inheritance of Marx and Marxism. I think that's a part of a full education in social philosophy and economic analysis that a open-minded person ought to acquaint themselves with. But at the end of the day, I think that the free marketeers have the better of it. I think the story of the 20th century as far as economic development is concerned reflects that. I think that the experiments where centralized control over economic decisions was the order of the day failed. I think that the fact of the 21st century rise of China as a force has a lot to do with the spread of an effect.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we were not Marxists at MIT, although we did read Marx. I mean, those of us who were intellectually curious, you read Marx. Marx was an important figure in the history of the West, and I think Marx should be read, capitaled three volumes, et cetera. Alienation of labor and whatnot, the implications of modernization of the advent of industrial capitalism, et cetera. That kind of dynamic.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let's begin with the fact that I was trained as an economist. In a tradition of what many people would call neoliberalism. I was trained at MIT, which was not a right-wing place by any means. It was a place where you learned about markets and about the benefits of capitalism as a way of organizing society. The virtues of free enterprise, the fact that the pursuit of profit was not necessarily a bad thing, but it well might be the road to prosperity and to economic growth. The idea that private property and individuals seeking to acquire and succeed in acquiring wealth Did create inequality, but it also created opportunity, and it also expanded our knowledge and our control over the physical environment in which we're embedded in, et cetera.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People with different visual acuity indicates. But finally, I've said, yes, research on racial differences in IQ can foster political beliefs that we would regard to be obnoxious. On the other hand, to presume that what we don't know yet and might find out from the research is going to be harmful is to assume a kind of presumption or of knowing what the outcome of unknown processes might be, which we ought to be very slow to embrace because if we had done so in the past, we wouldn't have nuclear power. There's a lot of things that we wouldn't know. I mean, what were people saying about Darwin and exploration of the evolution and origin of the species? They were afraid that it was going to, in effect, disprove the religious-based accounts of what were they saying about it. About Copernicus and etc, et cetera. So, you know.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To ignorance and impoverishment at the end of the day for humankind, denying ourselves the potential benefits of that kind of inquiry, I think we need to take our chances with inquiry rather than to try to control it. And I feel that way about the exploration of human intelligence as much as anything else. So you've asked me to steal man the case against research on IQ of the sort that Charles Murray is famous for popularizing. And I've said, A, your measure of intelligence is single dimensional and it ought to be multidimensional. I've said B, the consequences of people's differing in intelligence depends not only on the natural endowments of the people, but also on the environment and the potential for intervening in that environment through one or another kind of instrument as the metaphorical example of the use of corrective lenses to level the playing field between”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experiment that cloning undertaking, whatever, because the consequences could be deleterious. Well, the consequences could be deleterious. The consequences could also be being able to generate electric power without producing carbon effluent. So who are you to tell me who you being the person in the political position to control the research, what the consequence of doing the research is? I think I don't want to cede that kind of power to politicians over the course of human inquiry. Yes, I would want there to be regulations governing the use of biologically sensitive and potentially dangerous pathogens in a lab in Wuhan or anyplace else. I would not want to simply leave that to laissez-faire. On the other hand, I think that the tendency to try to shut down inquiry on behalf of supposed adverse political consequences is the road.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's assuming the thing before you even know what the thing actually is. It's a kind of omniscience. It presumes that you as the master of the universe can tell people what it is that people are being treated like children, what it is that they're capable of knowing and what it is that they're not capable of knowing. It would be like someone saying to Einstein, I don't know about that special relativity theory. You know, it could well lead to the development of technologies that would allow nuclear weapons. If someone's saying the Oppenheimer, who is a physicist overseeing the Manhattan Project where the US developed a nuclear weapons capacity, don't carry out that project because the results of acquiring that knowledge may be more than we can deal with. If someone's saying to someone research who's interested in exploring the nature of the human genome, don't carry out that.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Racist, okay? On the other hand, I think the calculation we shouldn't do this kind of research, suppose I'm at the National Science Foundation, research team submits a proposal. The proposal proposes to undertake a study. The study would explore the extent to which people and racial groups differ with respect to their intellectual performance and how that's influenced by their genetic and environmental interaction. And I decide not to fund the study based on a political calculation that the subject is too sensitive. And if you explore that subject, you might get the wrong answer. And if you get the wrong answer, the white supremacists will be encouraged. Well, that is presuming before the research is done that I know the outcome of the research and that I can calculate what the political consequence of the research outcome is going to be.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of research on human differences in intelligences to observe that, yes, human beings and perhaps racially defined groups may differ on the average in intellectual endowment, but there well may be social interventions that level the playing field, whether it's in education or in other kinds of programmatic interventions, especially for the poor. A final level of argument is the one that you alluded to, which is that if you talk like this, you're going to encourage a kind of politics which is very ugly, and it's best to frame the discussion in ways that don't put emphasis on racially defined natural differences between populations. That's an argument that I am myself personally conflicted about. On the one hand, I think, you know, those people are just stupid.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not they're law abiding? How do they conduct themselves and their families and so forth amongst individuals? Yes, social outcomes are influenced by so-called cognitive ability, but they're influenced by many other things as well. If there are interventions that can be undertaken in society that level the playing field between people who have different natural endowments of cognitive ability, the fact that people or groups differ in cognitive ability becomes less significant. Just like it's less significant that people differ with respect to how well they see when corrective lenses allow for the leveling of that playing field. There are, in fact, interventions, educational interventions, early childhood interventions that have been shown to level the playing field to create better life outcomes for people even if they happen to be in doubt with low intelligence. So a second level of arguing against this whole program.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Visual acuity varies between human beings. Some people see better than other people do. Visual acuity can be measured. I can put you at the chart and can you identify and read that bottom line in small print or not so we can measure visual acuity and it varies between human beings. Visual acuity is partly genetic. I think that's undoubtedly true. We inherit genes that influence whether or not we are nearsighted or far sighted or astigmatic or whatever. So visual acuity differs between people and can be measured and is under genetic control. On the other hand corrective lenses allow for us to level the playing field between people who are differently endowed in terms of visual acuity. Likewise, social outcomes are what we're really interested in, employment, earnings, whether”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being able to discipline and control your impulses so as to remain focused and so forth. That could be one dimension. I could start by questioning the very foundation of the argument for racial differences in cognitive ability by saying that your measure of cognitive ability is flawed. I could go to a higher level. I could say what we're really interested in is social outcomes and the question of what factors influence social outcomes extends well beyond mental ability to many other things. So here's an example. Visual acuity. How well do you see? You're not wearing glasses. I am.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, are that it's much better to think about multidimensional measures of human mental functioning rather than a single cognitive ability measure, a so-called IQ, which is a narrow construction that doesn't capture all of the subtle nuance of human difference in functioning. Functioning is not just the ability to recite backwards a sequence of numbers, I say eight, seven, nine, five, three, two. You say two, three, five, seven, eight, nine. It's not just that. Intelligence is a complex management of many different dimensions of human performance, including things like being able to stick with a task and not give up things like.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could do it at three levels. One is what do we mean by cognitive ability? So there's many different kinds of intelligence a person might say. How good are IQ tests at measuring other kinds of human capacities that are pertinent to success in life like temperament, like emotional intelligence and so on? So intelligence is not a one-dimensional thing measured by G, the cognitive psychologists talk about G, the general intelligence factor, which is a statistical construction. It's a factor analytic resolution of the correlation across individuals in their performance on a battery of different kind of tests, and they use that to define a general factor of intelligence, and a person could say, that is a very narrow view of what human mental capacity”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like you're calling black people inferior. It's like you're saying they're genetically inferior. That's what people are saying. It's like you're rationalizing the disparity of outcomes by reference to the intrinsic inferiority of black people. If you say cognitive ability matters. For social outcomes, if you say cognitive ability exists, people really are different in terms of their intellectual functioning. And if you say cognitive ability differences are substantial between racially defined populations, the sum of that, there is cognitive ability, it matters and it differs by race, is the conclusion that outcome differences by race are in part due to natural differences between the populations. People find that to be completely offensive and unacceptable. So that's what I think is going on.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the identitarians, the ones who want to make the university kowtow to their particular understandings about their own identity, we now have at Brown University and various other places, we don't do Columbus Day anymore. We do Indigenous People's Day when that day comes up in October. We don't talk about Columbus. They're taking down statutes of Columbus all across the country and so forth and so on. I'm not arguing anything here other than That the latter day position By POCs black, indigenous and other people of color. The Latter-day Position that the university has to reflect a particular sensibility about these identity questions. I think it's a threat to the integrity of the enterprise, said”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The tendency to try to say, oh no, that person is a climate denier. They can't pursue that area of inquiry is against the spirit of the university. I think the barbarians at the gates has to do with the people who think they know what the right side of history is and try to make the university stand on the right side of history. My position is you don't know what the right side of history is, and the purpose of a university is to equip you to be able to think about Is the right side of history? What is the solution to the dilemmas that confront us as human beings living on this planet with the billions that we are in the condition that we are?”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at where we stand in the 21st century. We're vastly richer than our ancestors just 250 years ago. We have much more knowledge about that and so forth and so on. 250 years from now human ingenuity will have devised in ways that we can not even begin to anticipate all manner of technological means for managing the problem. There's no reason that we should shut down industrial civilization today because we fear the consequences of it when in fact we are vastly richer than our ancestors and those who come two centuries after us will be vastly more effective at dealing with problems than we are now. I'm not actually making that argument. I'm just saying”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Significantly lagging behind with respect to that, it brought literacy to the southern hemispheric populations that were dominated in the process of the colonizing thing. It's complicated. I'm not taking that position, by the way. I'm just saying somebody at a university should be able to take it up and pursue it and engage in argument with people about it. I'm talking about race and ethnicity, but this extends to a wide range of things. Suppose we're talking about climate and one person says the earth is endangered because carbon in global warming, et cetera, et cetera. And another person says, no, wait, no way.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to study differences between human populations and their acquisition of or their expression of cognitive ability. That's fair game. It's an open question. If I want to know something about the nature of gender affiliation and identity and gender dysphoria and whatnot, that's fair game to study in a university. You can't shut that down. You shouldn't be able to by saying I have a particular position here. I'm a member of a particular identity group. Suppose I want to study the history of colonialism. And there's a narrative on the progressive side, which is colonialism is about Europeans dominating and stealing or whatever, whatever. And I happen to think, well, there's another aspect to the story about colonialism too, which is that it's a mechanism for the diffusion of the best in human civilization to populations that were...”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who are trying to shut down open inquiry at the university on behalf of their particular view about things. Threat to what the university stands for, and they should be resisted. So if I'm inquiring about the nature of human intelligence,”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the university is a magnificent institution. It is a relatively modern institution. I mean, last 500 years or so. I mean, there are universities that are older than that, but the great research universities of the world, not only here in the United States, are places where human ingenuity is nurtured, where new knowledge is created, and where young people are equipped to answer questions that are open questions about our existence in the world that we live in. You can trace to the university much, if not most, of the advances in technology and resourcefulness and our understanding of the origins of the species, of the nature of the universe, cosmology, et cetera, science, pursuit of humanistic understanding, the nurture. Of traditions of inquisitiveness. So that's the university. Barbarians at the gates.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, a university is dedicated to the pursuit of truth and to the education and nurturing of young people as they enter into the pursuit of truth, to doing research and to teaching in an environment of free inquiry and civil discourse. So free inquiry means you go wherever the evidence and your imagination may lead you, and civil discourse means that you exchange arguments with people when you don't agree with them on behalf of trying to get to the bottom of things”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll just tell you personally, I'm excited about the prospect. I'm glad to see Musk making the move that he's making. And we'll see what happens at Twitter and so forth. You look it forward.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do know that the question of where the COVID-19 virus originated in the role that Lab Leak account could have played in the public processing of that event was real news and that it was suppressed by people who were trying to control misinformation, disinformation. Russian disinformation campaigns and whatnot. So, Twitter has users. I'm one of them, and it has a lot of users. It's not as big as Facebook. I gather it's not, but it's important. The ability to construct counter platforms, people moving around and whatnot, it's a kind of network dynamic that maybe I should understand it better than I do being a social scientist”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, the people on the left are very upset about the possibility that Elon Musk and Twitter will be open to more open to provocative public speech that has heretofore been banned or suppressed. And I think they might be right to be concerned that that could happen. I don't know enough about the technology and about the market to really, I mean social media and whatnot, it seems like it's a complicated system of interactions between people and who the users are and so forth and so on. I do know that New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop was real news and could have affected the outcome of the election and it was suppressed and that Twitter had a role in suppressing it.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Express that view, and the more who express it, the safer those who have yet to express it, but who hold it will feel in expressing it, and to the extent that the view is very widespread but is kept under wraps an explosion could happen. And you can look up it tomorrow and have a very different country than you had today because the conspiracy of silence, the spiral of silence, ends up getting unraveled by somebody who steps out away from the consensus, dares to take the slings and arrows of exposing themselves as a naysayer, but taps into a sentiment that's very widespread. And I fear that with respect to many racial issues, this is the situation that we actually confront, that it could unravel. In a very ugly way.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's correct. And the little kid, by the way, could be somebody like Donald Trump only more effective than Donald Trump. Somebody who is smarter than Donald Trump, somebody who is shrewder than Donald Trump. Somebody who figures out that when Colin Kaepernick takes a knee at a football game and says, I'm not going to stand for this presidential allegiance that a vast number of people are. Very unhappy about that. Somebody who understands that when a Black Lives Matter activist stands up with his bald fist and says, burn this bitch down about a city in the United States of America, that a lot of people are upset about that. A lot of them. Person, a shrewd politician, a shrewd manager of public image. Could build on and create a circumstance in which more and more people would feel safe”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The kid who speaks out and says the emperor has no clothes creates a circumstance in which its common knowledge that the emperor has no clothes. Now common knowledge does not just mean knowledge. It does not even mean widespread knowledge. It means comprehensive knowledge of other person's knowledge of the thing. So the spiral of silence is an equilibrium that is susceptible to being undermined. By a process of a kind of cumulative process, a snowballing process of revelation, that you're not the only one who thinks this way.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But everybody thinks that, you know, I don't want to be the only one to say it. And so we all kind of collaborate in this charade of keeping the view to ourselves. Then along comes an event that somebody decides to defy the consensus and to speak out. It could be a little kid who in the story about the emperor has no clothes doesn't realize that he's not supposed to say that the emperor is naked. The thing about the kid in the story who says that the emperor is naked is not that he's saying it. Not even that other people hear him saying it. That everybody knows that everybody else heard him say it.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't express those views. And when they don't express them, anybody holding the view because they don't hear it said by others think that they're the only one or one of the few who hold the view. And so they don't want to be the only one out there saying something. So they keep it to themselves. So now this view, this attitude in society could be held by a large number of people, but because of the fear that if they were to express it, they'd be ostracized. No one says it. And since no one is saying it, the others who hold the view don't know that they're not alone. They are not the only ones who hold the view. And hence they keep silent. That could be an equilibrium. It could be a relatively stable situation in which the emperor has no clothes. Everybody can see that this dude is naked.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know about this. I think I once read this book by a German political scientist called Elizabeth Neila Neumann. That was the writer's name. Elizabeth Neila Neumann. The book was called The Spiral of Silence. And the argument was there can be some views, some issues in society that get defined in such a way that it's inappropriate to hold those views. And as a result, people who don't want to be shamed, who don't want to be ostracized.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source