YouSaid · the spoken record

Larissa MacFarquhar

lines on the record: 76
first: 2019-01-16
most recent: 2019-01-16
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

“I would say that the predictions of the death of publishing and the death of reading have been going on for decades and they should ignore them. It's not true. People will continue to read. I don't know what form they'll continue to read in. They may not read on paper. They may read only online. But if a person wants to be a writer, there is no reason not to do that.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess. I mean, I don't think it's a bane if I'm not writing every day. I certainly do not write every day, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's sometimes good not to be purposeful in what you're doing. If you're writing, you are distilling vague thoughts into something more organized and purposeful. And I think there's a lot of merit to allowing thoughts to just meander about in your head and make weird connections with each other before you push them onto the page.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was an editor at Lincofranca, which is a now defunct magazine about academia. Yeah, I absolutely think so. I mean, one of the interesting things about this time of ours is that there seems to be so much appetite. It's almost like the 1890s against. There seems to be so much appetite for talks about ideas. There are all these lectures that are attended and sold out about relatively abstract, obscure subjects. And the internet also has disseminated all kinds of writing about abstract ideas that I think people didn't know how many people would be interested in reading such things. So I think, yeah, absolutely.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love it. I love reading philosophy, but stupidly I didn't take philosophy classes in college. I don't know. I think I had an experience that many people have had, which is they approach, they want to study philosophy because they think it's going to be about the meaning of life and they get into a philosophy class and it turns out to resemble more like something more like algebra. They're discouraged and move on to some other discipline and that's what happened to me. But I love philosophy now.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not true for me. I write, I tend to want to write about people I admire and don't altogether understand. And I write to understand them better.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do in your life was to donate or give or help people with whom you had no organic connection. There was such an attachment to the idea that a person ought to help their own community first. And I wanted to explore that because the altruists I was talking to them, this made no sense. I mean, I remember one man I spoke to, Jeff, Jeff Kaufman, would say, Why should I have more obligation to a stranger who lives two blocks away from a stranger who lives in Ethiopia? Made no sense to him. He understood that, you know, if someone's a member of his family or a friend, he might have more obligation to them. But if someone was equally a stranger, why should place make a difference? I've come to think that place makes a great deal of difference.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think they're probably levers because most of the people I talked to want to help humans generally. I don't know if this there's a necessary connection between strength of sense of duty and attachment to a universalist morality, but in the people that I spoke to, they were not particularly attached to helping their own community. They wanted to help people in general and they looked about for the best way to do that. And often that meant either going somewhere else themselves or at the very least sending their money far away. This is part of the reason I wanted to write this book now because there I found in conversations with people about such altruists that there was such a resistance to that, such a resistance to the idea that the best thing you could do for your life.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he heard that Judge Wallace, who I think was not George Wallace at that point, but George Wallace's brother Jack Wallace, wanted him never to come back to Euphala, because he was a troublemaker, wanted him to go. And his brothers in Cincinnati were saying, come join us. We can get you a job tomorrow. You can earn so many times more than you can earn in Euphala. Just come join us and have a better life. And when he heard that Judge Wallace wanted him out of Euphala, he was like, no, I'm going back. No one's going to push me out. And it was just sheer ordinariness. I mean, not only, but that was a big factor in why he was like, no, no one's going to push me out. I'm going to stay here. This is my home.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been talking to a lot of people about this, and I think an underrated, one of the underrated factors is sheer stubbornness. I read this book by this guy, David Frost, Jr., a man who lived his whole, almost his whole life in a little town called Eufala, Alabama in the southeast part of the state. All of his siblings left the town because there was greater opportunity elsewhere. Most of them went to Cincinnati. One went to Chicago. One went to somewhere else, I forget, but somewhere else where there were jobs and opportunity. And this was not only a small town, but a small southern town in the, you know, he was coming of age in the 20s and 30s. It was very difficult for a black man to get ahead in this town. And at one point he was trying to register people to vote and he was thrown in prison.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have been, you know, he would never have played a part in this extraordinary movement. Similarly, unions, if anyone who was dissatisfied with their wage, they reacted by going to the next employer. There would never be people who would stay and fight for higher wages and group together with people like them in the same position.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who didn't want to leave? I talked the other day to the extraordinary attorney Fred Gray, who I couldn't believe he was still alive. He was the person who defended Rosa Parkson and Martin Luther King Jr. in the bus boycott. And the reason he's still alive is he did that when he was 25. And he went to law school in Cleveland because there were no law schools in Alabama who would accept black students at that point. And his professor there said, don't go back to Alabama, you won't be able to practice. There's no room for a black lawyer in Alabama. It's too racist. Just stay here. You'll have a proper and much better career. And he said, no, the whole reason that I'm in law school is to go back to Montgomery and attack segregation. And it was his loyalty to Montgomery. If he had stayed in Cleveland and had what appeared to be a better career, of course it wouldn't have been, but sensibly might have been, reasonably expected.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buying or discontent with something, you can do two things. You can exit, which means you can either leave or a place or stop buying a product, or you can exercise voice. You can complain. You can try to change it. And I think this is extraordinarily important when thinking about issues of mobility, because if everyone left, if everyone's response to a bad job or a bad home was to leave, then nothing is fixed. It's the people who say, no, actually, I don't want to leave. This is my home. And there are many things wrong with it, but because I don't want to leave because I feel attached to it for other reasons, I'm going to fight. So it's really striking to me that the civil rights movement was driven in its earliest days not by the African Americans who migrated north in search of jobs, but by those who were still home in Alabama and many other states.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm glad you asked about this because I know we're both interested in this question. And one of the things I want to think about in this book is how people who stay are not necessarily staying because they're stuck. I think that is a dominant American mythology that the smart, ambitious, interesting people move. They leave not just small towns, but anywhere. They leave their homes and they go somewhere else, partly because they're restless, partly because they're curious, and partly because what they want to do is so big it can't be done where they are. And that leaves the people who stay looking dull by comparison. But I really want to question that. I mean, the sort of lodestar of this project, at least so far, is the great economist Albert Hirschman's essay, Exit Voice and Loyalty, which I'm sure you know. He argued that if you're discontent with where you are or what product you're”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could probably answer that question better than I. I mean, I think a lot of the reasons are economic. People have started moving. It used to be that in general people move to places with more jobs because they were looking for jobs, which sounds perfectly logical. And now people are often moving to places with fewer jobs because housing is cheaper, which is a sort of pessimistic and depressing fact.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is fascinating. I mean, you know, plane delays are annoying, but I have to say, I've never considered them the biggest problem in life.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No because in order to make use of any kind of external memory function, be it a library or note-taking software or what have you, you have to know what you're looking for. What I want is that's the problem with external memories, that it doesn't make the weird connections that your own mind does, don't you think? I mean, what would you like in terms of being a cybor”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father is a China scholar and my mother was a journalist who wrote about Asia, and so both of them had been to China many times, and we were at a hotel in Shanghai in'8y five, and we were standing in the lobby, and they both of them said, What is that? And my brother and I, who were kids, said Is music, obviously, what's the big deal? And they said, no, no, no, we have to find where that's coming from. And they followed the sound of the music, we all four of us went to follow the sound of the music, and it was this little tiny disco in one of the rooms in the hotel with a little disco ball, you know, rotating and multicolored lights, and they were playing Boney M, this British band from the 80s. And to my brother and I, this was a normal sight. My parents, their jaws were, they couldn't believe that there was a disco.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I've not been to China since 1985, so I can't answer that question. I'm sure it's completely different. I'll give you a little anecdote that shows you how long ago that was. I know you've been to China many times. Sure.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always do that because, I mean, not always. If I'm just interviewing someone for information, I try not to because transcribing tapes is a very time-consuming process. But one of the things I love about interviewing people is their language. The minutiae of the way they use words. And you can't always get that when you're just in a normal conversation because you hear to some extent what you're expecting to hear. And when you're taking notes on what someone says, you try to do it verbatim, but sometimes you will use phrases that you expected them to hear because it's the normal way to say something. But if you play a tape back, you hear that they didn't say that. They didn't say what you thought they said. They said something a tiny bit different. And it's so exciting because they said it in a way that's a little weird and is just their own. And I find that exciting the way some poetry is.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly that can happen, absolutely. But I think it's important to remember that a label and a diagnosis, while it for sure can be stigmatizing and can be dreadfully so, I mean, you know, the early DSM notoriously labeled homosexuality as a disorder. Obviously, that was both stigmatizing and terribly wrong. But at the same time, in some cases, a diagnosis can be comforting. It performs many different functions. Sometimes the diagnosis means to a person, ah, I am not the only one. There are other people who've encountered this before. People have thought about what it means, thought about ways to alleviate the symptoms that give me pain. There's hope.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overrated or underrated. No kidding. I can't believe you read that. I would say, and I'm very curious what you think. I mean, I think it is underrated because people, you know, there's this silly notion that what psychiatrists do is label people with diagnoses and that's really stigmatizing. And for sure sometimes that's what psychiatry does. But I think that a lot of the anti-psychiatric discourse is founded on misunderstanding that the DSM is psychiatry's Bible. That's what many people call it. Whereas in fact it's more like a dictionary. What it is is a groupings each disorder is a grouping of symptoms that enable psychiatrists to come to consistent to talk to each other in consistent ways. Because they're using the language of psychiatry in consistent ways without which the discipline could not function.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that movie, but I don't really know if it's overrated or underrated because I don't know how it's rated. I think most people love it. So I would say it's... I think it's been given its due. It was slightly overshadowed by pulp fiction, which was also a terrific movie, but.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I do too, but I think there is something about taste today that prefers a clearer sort of more limpid kind of prose. And while I understand that sometimes overwriting can be annoying, sometimes it's just lazy and you read early Kenneth and you realize people aren't trying hard enough. I mean, you can't just say cup. You have to come up with, I'm not even going to try to imitate him, but suffice to say people should read him more.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. But an interesting thing happened. I wonder which you prefer, because as he got older, his writing got plainer and calmer, and it stopped jumping about trying to arrest your attention.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underrated. I am so glad you asked. No one seems to know who he is. Well, he was such a figure of his time. I mean, it's very interesting Kenneth Tyne, and he was, I should say, because no one knows who he is, he was a, I guess, theater critic, started out as a theater critic in England in the 50s, and then in the 60s, late 60s, I think, early 70s, came over to America and started writing for The New Yorker. And a very interesting thing happened to his writing. I don't know to what extent it was a result of the New Yorker or whether it was just him getting old, but When he was a young man, his writing was electric and baroque. I mean, you know, the adjective to noun ratio was so high. There was like no every sentence was encrusted with adjectives and adverbs and there was no sentence that was just getting from A to B. It was just so what many people would say overwritten, but I thought was so it was just exciting.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What sometimes, though not always I'm trying to do is give the reader a sense of what it's like to be inside that person's head. And the more that you describe the physical person, the physical circumstances of the person, anything that involves being outside the person, looking at them, the less you cultivate that sense of intimacy that comes from being inside their head and looking out through their eyes.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably not, but I'll say two things about this. Okay, first is I think there's far too much emphasis on describing people's looks because the thing about humans is that their faces are unique. So you can describe somebody, but you're never going to be able to call up an exact picture in a reader's mind about what the person looks like. So, you know, what you're doing is not really describing what they look like. What you're doing is evoking something, which I guess is what the malign form of that is looksism. started avoiding describing what people look like not because it results in looksism, though I'm sure that's true, but because whether unconsciously or not, it puts the reader in a position of being outside the person looking at them.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, what led me to Well, I have to be honest, although I had reasons and persons his first book on my shelf for many years I had not read it, and I did not know because I am not deeply part of this philosophical community that he had a new book coming out. So the idea came from my editor Henry Finder, who does know a great deal about philosophy and suggested that it would be a good subject. And I was delighted because I had been meaning to read reasons and persons. I mean, as you know, it's an electrifying book. It's so exciting. And so I was thrilled to do it.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wonder if that has something to do with my choice of work it felt like such an amazing privilege to be at there at that moment because it literally had not occurred to her before this central understanding of her life which was”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're constantly rushing from task to task to task. There's a lot of paperwork you don't ever get to know a patient. You're just sticking needles and arms and doing things that need to be done but are not intimate. Whereas when you're a hospice nurse, you spend an hour with a person, you really get to know them. You visit them every week, sometimes for months. And it's much more. Anyway, so fair enough. Totally reasonable answer. And then we started talking about her life. And she said, I'm going to get these details wrong, but something like my brother died at 20 and my other brother died at twenty-four. And my niece died at eleven. And my, you know, nephew died. And again, I'm maybe getting these details wrong, but a lot of, there had been so much early death in her family. And as she was telling me one of death after another,”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you wanted to do desperately when you were 24 and now can barely remember it. How did that happen? How did you come to forget that thing? Those kinds of questions. And if you have a sort of two, three, four hour conversation where you go with the person prompting them over the course of their life, it can be revelatory for them to because you just don't talk about that stuff usually. You talk about what you did last weekend or what movie you've seen or what book you've read or what you had for dinner, stuff like that. You don't talk about these longer-term movements in your life. So at its best, I'll give you an example. I was interviewing a woman named Heather Myrand, who is a hospice nurse in Brooklyn. And I asked her why she chose hospice as a specialty. And she said what I know from interviewing other hospice nurses is a common answer. She said, you know, I don't even though working in a hospital is more prestigious. I didn't like it because it was so fast-paced.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I ask them, and I think most people just like to tell the story of their life and enjoy the feeling that somebody is intensely and unfeignedly interested in what they have to say. And if I'm lucky, it can be a really extraordinary experience for both of us because obviously I don't know the person very well. I just met them, or even if we meet multiple times, I don't know them nearly as well in many senses as their friends or their family. Of course, that's obvious. But at the same time, for the most part, even with people you know and love the best, you don't talk about your life as a whole. They don't say, well, why is it that where did you start out when you were ten? What did you want to do when you were ten and why did you at twenty take this path rather than that path? And why did you give up on that thing?”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have any tricks. You know, it's funny people will say, often ask me, how do you get people to talk to you? There's no trick involved. I think when I am interviewing someone, I'm interviewing them because I really want to hear what they have to say and I'm incredibly interested in their life and how they describe it and how they came to have the ideas that they do and why they love them.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, possibly. I mean, you know, when I write a profile, inevitably it is going to be my view of the person, though I like to imagine that I am letting them speak. I mean, I realize this is unrealistic fantasy of mine, but my fantasy in many cases is that I leave the room. I introduce the reader to the person I'm going to write about and say, here you are. I've introduced you. I'm going to go now. And you can talk. And I like to imagine that the piece is in a way written by the person themselves. Now, obviously, this is not true, and the piece is very much inflected by my view of the person, but that's what I like to think about. And so although inevitably it's a profile is an unrealistic because subjective view of a person, I like to imagine. That I try to do that as little as possible.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for them, it's worth it because of the stimulation as they see it to human greatness. And so he said, we pacifists, we people who think war is dreadful have to come up with some other means, some other circumstance to push humans to greatness so that war is not to people who value greatness does not seem necessary.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Self sacrifice and heroism that they might be pushed to in war, but we can artificially engender it and we can do it in a way that does not result in the horrible bloodshed and loss and waste of war, but results in something positive. So he had the notion of let's send people to do work that is valuable but is really miserable and uncomfortable and pushes them so they could be working in coal mines or they could be working in working to in soup kitchens. I can't remember his examples. I read the essay a while ago, but the idea was there's no need to and it was interesting because the reason he thought this was necessary is he thought he said you know people who are pacifists always talk about how terrible war is because it's so bloody and violent and wasteful. What they're not getting is that people who like war or don't dislike war admit all that. They know that. It's very obvious.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, but I think, you know, it's, look, I would never advocate, I would never consider it to be lucky to be caught up in a war in any capacity. Wars are awful, but there is something about certain circumstances that push humans to live more extraordinary lives than do the kind of easy circumstances that some people find themselves in here, not everyone by any means. great William James wrote an essay about 1 years ago called The Moral Equivalent of War. And he advocated a kind of, well, it sounds odd because of the name, but a kind of peacetime peace corps because he said, you know, there's no need to depend on moral luck in effect. This is not his language. But we can engineer circumstances in which people are pushed to the same kind of”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Humans are pushed by their circumstances to greater deeds. I mean, this is something that I noticed when I was writing about altruism also, that during wartime, things that seem extreme and bizarre and unreasonable in ordinary times come to seem normal. So in an ordinary times, a kidney donor, for instance, somebody who donates their kidney to a stranger might seem like a weirdo, but during wartime, somebody who a soldier who sacrifices his life for that of a comrade is thought to be a hero for sure, but definitely not a weirdo. And somebody who leaves his family behind to serve in an army is, again, thought to be noble.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I've always been struck by reports of people who come back from war and they say that while it was terrible, it was also, I mean, this is not everybody, obviously, and not all wars, but I've been struck by how many people say that there was something also great about the experience of bonding with their fellow soldiers, of living so close to death that life became more extraordinary to them and more precious. And people sometimes return from that kind of extreme existence to find regular existence kind of dull and savorless. And I think that”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I mean, it does see there's, I mean, there's lots of data to show that people who are in long-term committed relationships, whether marriage or other kinds of relationships tend to be happier. So maybe there is something about humans that prefer to be in such relationships. But whether that's more true of men than women, I don't know.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and that's the least mixing of all is if you stay at home. So, you know, I think that's a very obvious fracturing of our political dialogue is only the most obvious of the malign effects of technology.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to church with or socializing with people who are very different in terms of age, in terms of, well, not conviction and going to church, but running into people who are a different social class, who do different things for work, that kind of stuff.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And convinces them that the voices in their own echo chamber are in fact the right ones to listen to and they tune in less and less to other people. I mean, it's interesting. I would like to ask you about what you consider the roots of complacency and the kind of sorting that we have both been noticing because in some ways you would think that people moving around and going other places and moving house every few years as America and Americans did more several decades ago would result in exposure to more kinds of people and have a bigger sense of the world. But in fact it often results in people grouping in amongst people who are very similar to them. Whereas if you have an old fashioned small town it can result in the opposite which is to say people go”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is true. This is true. But I think privacy has social ramifications that people don't always consider. So they give away a lot of information for free on Facebook, let's say, because they may imagine that on Facebook they are giving their information to their friends. Well, but it turns out they're not. They're giving their information to lots of advertisers. They're giving their information to political operatives. Their information cannot be put back into the bottle. And we now know that Facebook's, I mean, I'm just picking on Facebook because it's the lowest hanging fruit, but there's many instances of this. We now know that Facebook's mission to quote unquote connect everybody. It sounded like it was going to produce a much more pluralistic diverse world where people would have communication with people they couldn't connect with physically because they lived in a different place. But in fact, as you've noticed in complacent class, Facebook more often does the opposite. It unites people who are similar.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, I mean, where to start? I mean, you know, I don't know that I have anything unobvious to add to what everyone already knows. I mean, privacy has been eviscerated. I think the people...”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say no. I think it's become very clear to us, especially in the last year or two, that there are many problems with the technologies that have been developed.”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really force that person to suffer from lies like, no, sorry, your spouse is long dead, no, sorry, your child has not come to visit you in weeks, whatever truths you might want to tell them. And quite apart from future you, what about future me who is distressed by your distress? Should I be required to tell the truth to you and make you weep every single day? What if I'm your nurse in a nursing home and I am made miserable every day on the job because you insisted on truth back in twenty eighteen?”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, okay, so that's why I started asking people, what about that? Why couldn't people decide? I mean, they decide in other medical instances. They sign advanced directives that in principle should direct their care when they can no longer enunciate what they want. And why couldn't you do that with lying? Why can you say, don't lie to me? I'm tough. I can take it, or I hate lies, or it's undignified, or whatever reason you had for rejecting them. You know, I think the problem is that with dementia, in many ways, once you descend past a certain level of memory and cognitive functioning, you're not really you anymore. And is it fair to impose this harsh discipline of no lies on future you who actually has very little in common with the you sitting across from me now is saying don't lie to me almost certainly does not hold that value anymore is very vulnerable do you want to”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is the thing. That's the whole problem. If you're going to lie to be kind to people with dementia, why not lie to everybody? I mean, my gosh, there's always nice things you could say to someone that are completely untrue, and I'm sure we all do it on a daily basis. But should we do it all the time? Should there not be some point at which you try to be honest rather than kind at every point? Because if there isn't, I mean, that's one of the fascinating things about this question is, well, what is the purpose of our adherence to truth?”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the nursing home, hear you lying. If people waiting in the doctor's office hear you lying and lying evidently with a feeling that's the right thing to do, this will spread a sense that lying is fine, that lying can even be the better thing to do. But once you've lost the sense that lying is rare and repellent, you've lost something essential in terms of social trust. And I think she's right. I mean, I think that it's a very delicate thing that if we all started lying, you know, and also...”
2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source