Ep. 1412: Christian Miller Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

My guest today is Christian Miller. He is a philosopher specializing in ethics and philosophy of religion. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. The topic is his book The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World. In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: AI bias, censorship and the erosion of trust Academic dishonesty Media manipulation, political influence, and institutional transparency Conspiracy theories Skepticism vs self-deception Honesty crisis, critical thinking and personal responsibility Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel https://twitter.com/covel Facebook: @trendfollowing https://www.facebook.com/trendfollowing/ LinkedIn: @covel https://linkedin.com/in/covel/ Instagram: @mikecovel https://www.instagram.com/mikecovel/ Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  An interesting conversation today with a professor, Christian Miller, down at Wake Forest. The topic, honesty. The title of his book, The Honesty Crisis, preserving our most treasured virtue in an increasingly dishonest world. Now, I saw that title. I knew immediately I wanted to talk to Christian. We cover a lot of topic areas. And it's really not, even if it might sound like it occasionally, it's not a picking sides conversation. It's more a skeptical conversation, skeptical from his part and skeptical from my part. And skepticism about whether or not we can make a dent

• 0:42Speaker 00

  on the dishonesty that is prevailing across society. Without any further delay, let's jump into my conversation with Christian Miller.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Your particular topic is near and dear to me. Even though I've written a bunch of trading books, my podcast has expanded out over the years and all kinds of topics, including folks like yourself. But I'm in the middle of a book right now that's not related to trading. It's what they might call autofiction, somewhat about my experience being over here in Asia. And being a Gen X guy, born in 1968, happening to be in Vietnam, I had to learn a lot about Lyndon Johnson, you know, more than I ever expected to know. And, okay, that's fair. That's one issue. But I think the most interesting thing for me, and this gets into your world, is my use of AI for research. I thought going into it, well, this is cool. This is going to be a great new technique.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  This is like, you know, LexisNexis on steroids. It's just going to give me the facts and blah, blah, blah. Oh, my God, it couldn't be any farther from the truth. It couldn't be any farther from the truth. I'll give you a starting one for me. You know, Lyndon Johnson, a very colorful language that a lot of people have no earthly idea he ever said. And coming from the left, I think a lot of people would be shocked. So I asked, and I knew in advance what I was asking for. I asked, I think it was ChatGPT, give me the 20 most lewd things LBJ ever said. Now, mind you, a lot of this is documented. Some of it's not documented. But instead of saying, here it is. I really don't like this, blah, blah, blah. Here are the facts. It said, I cannot give that to you. We have guidelines, and that might offend people.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  I'm thinking to myself, my God, this is the President of the United States. He said these things on record. They're on tapes at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. In my understanding, AI is going to be this wonderful new flow of information. And there, right there, and this brings me to you, the complete lack of honesty. And at that moment in time, I say to myself, what else about AI is going to be dishonest? And how deep does the rabbit hole go? Your book, you go into some micro topics, as I call them, more on the individual level. I might want to keep you today more at the macro level. What strikes you when I share that with you? That kind of opening salvo for me. But I don't know how many people will actually go down the rabbit hole that I did and actually know that AI is lying to them or purposefully leaving things out,

• 3:18Speaker 00

  which is the same as lying, which gets back to honesty.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  First of all, great to be with you. Thanks for taking the time. Thanks for your interest in the work. I guess I'm a philosopher, so I like to clarify and define things upfront. And so maybe I'll start by making a few distinctions. So is it being dishonest? Is it withholding information? Is it misleading? There are a variety of ways in which dishonesty can manifest itself. And maybe we can pinpoint exactly what you think is going on in this AI case. It knows the information, but it's voluntarily, if you can speak in that language with AI, withholding that information from you because it doesn't think it's appropriate to share it with you. Is that the setup we have in mind?

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Well, I think it goes deeper than that. The owners of this particular AI have a certain political persuasion, and this is one of their heroes over the years. And so they protected him. I think that's even a more direct statement.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  They're choosing not to disclose this information for political purposes to make this person look better than in fact he is. Yeah, that's going to count as dishonest in my book. In general, any dishonest behavior is one in which you intentionally misrepresent or distort the facts as you see them. In this particular example, it looks like AI is intentionally, if we can ascribe intentions, maybe we can get into that debate, but ascribe intentions to AI, misrepresenting or distorting the picture of LBJ that you're getting as a user of this platform in order to paint a certain picture of him that doesn't correspond to reality. If that's what's going on, then that meets my definition of dishonesty.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  But of course, though, what's the bigger picture right out of the gate is it really has nothing to do with LBJ, right?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Presumably, this is not a one-off. This generalizes to lots, or at least invites the question of how much this is happening across the board? How much of it is a selective presentation of information, not for the sake of truthfulness or the facts, but for the sake of political or other kinds of causes? That's beyond my knowledge of the extent to which it happens. It invites skeptical worries about the trustworthiness of the platform and also the honesty of the platform.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  You said it's beyond your understanding at this moment in time. To share with you, it's not beyond mine. I've seen enough to know that it's deep and it's entrenched. And my understanding of these platforms will not change for the rest of my life. And even if somehow or another it got to the point where, okay, we were screwing you over before, but now we fixed it and it's all on the table, and you can know how the algos work and the weights work, then I'm going to be saying to myself, then why did you do that before? So the whole thing is it's garbage in, garbage out now, to me.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  So trust is easily broken, but hard to establish. Yeah, it looks like you just need a few of these instances to break trust with AI. And then you need a lot of corrective measures to try and reestablish trust. And even then, if you, going forward, have some kind of trust reestablished, in the back of your mind, you're always going to be wondering, why didn't this happen before? And could it happen again in the future? How do I know that now we've permanently fixed the problem so that we're immune from it happening in the future? You're not going to be able to know that.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Even though I'm forced to be, I don't want to be in the personal politics of Sam Altman or the personal politics of Mark Zuckerberg or the personal politics of the guy that owns Anthropic. And they're all the same. I just don't want to be involved in those politics. And it's fine that they have those politics. I'm not even debating that issue. The problem is when you obscure the fact that the politics are there.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  This resonates with a lot of my work on honesty in the education space, in the religious space, in other spaces. There's one thing to be forthcoming, that you're doing certain problematic things. It's another thing to hide the fact that you're doing them. You know, analogy in my space of education, when students use AI to fabricate their work and then turn it as if it were their work, they're not being upfront and transparent about where this work came from. By analogy, to what you're saying, if it's one thing to be forthcoming about the politics and have that distort the historical record, at least you've got the disclosure in place. That takes care of honesty worries. But it's another thing to have this going on and not be transparent about it going on

• 7:32Speaker 01

  and thereby misleading or promoting false information or misinformation with the general public who's using this platform unknowingly. Yeah, that's going to be problematic.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Since you just brought up students, and you were at this fine institution, Wake Forest, which I've never driven through. My nephew just finished four years at UVA playing football, and he is now taking his graduate year. He's at LSU playing football. His school that he wanted to go to was Wake, though. He was down there, met the coach, everything, you know, out on the field with the coach. Just didn't work out, you know, four or five years ago. But here's my thinking overall on universities. You just took it to the student level. Now, as I just ripped AI on factual issues, if you want to use it for like phrasing or a thesaurus type function, it's quite interesting, and it can be great for brainstorming. But when I look at the universities

• 8:24Speaker 00

  and I see where we have gone in the last handful of years, I don't know how long, and I know the courts have gotten involved. But I've got students over here, as you make the case, that are cheating, not honest. But then I've got academic institutions that are not honest about how they admit their students. And every last school, if I was to say, okay, you know what? Like I said, I know there's some court cases working, it's working their way through. But if I was to say, show me exactly how the merit system works inside the university system, there isn't one for admissions. There isn't one. Yeah, it's terrible that students cheat, but it's like the damn schools are cheating about who they let in.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  And then there are some parents who are trying to cheat the schools and let their kids in and foil the system, which is cheating itself. So it's all over the place.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  You mean like a legacy or something?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  There were these famous celebrity.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Oh, I know the SAT thing. Yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, the SAT scandal, these kind of famous cases of all these celebrities.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  But those are minor compared to the idea that from a sexual and a racial standpoint, schools have decided we will not judge on merit, that we will judge on other factors. And to me, I can't find anything more dishonest than that.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I would actually broaden the possibilities even out more. I'll comment on the admission one in a second. I'm a professor in the philosophy department here at Wake Forest. I'm confronting it most directly with my students and their work with respect to at home graded assignments. And I can say a lot more about kind of challenges I face there. Another area where it's coming up in the education space is with research. Many researchers are using AI as a shortcut to produce new research papers that they submit to journals and pass it off as if they were on work. So there are kind of lots of scandals and controversies abounding there. You're nicely highlighting yet another area, which

• 10:18Speaker 01

  is the entry into the higher education world. There's a lack of transparency. I wouldn't say always, or that it's not at all merit based, but it's only at best partially.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  That's a little bit of hedging right out of the gate.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's only partially merit based. So.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  That's a really bad phrase, partially merit based.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  So partially based on other considerations. And the ones that you highlighted are a couple. There are others, though, I'm well aware of many schools which are going to give an advantage to certain people or families in socioeconomic classes. If applicants is coming from a family which is going to be full pay versus an applicant which is coming from a family which is going to need a lot of financial assistance, that's not going to be a neutral weighing of the merits of the case. Now, when I say, I don't know, I don't have project access again into how it's always made, but I know that is often something that's taken into consideration for some of these schools.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  But you know what's terrible about that as well is the school has no earthly idea necessarily how that family got the money. So you could have one family that's just, you know, for lack of a better term, loafing off. You have another family that works their rear end off for generations. They get the money. They have the money to go to Wake Forest. The other family is just like, hey, you know what? We don't have any money. You know, our family didn't really try to strive over the generations. To me, that seems dishonest. If that's not on the table.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  There's the same issue of transparency versus hiddenness, especially if you put forward publicly that you're only using a certain set of criteria. And by the way, I'm not speaking about Wake specific. I'm only speaking in the abstract about schools. I'm not going to get myself in any trouble. I don't have any privilege access to Wake Forest itself. If you put forward externally, here are the criteria we use, and then internally you add or subtract from that list and use other criteria, then it's a specific form of dishonesty. I would say it's hypocrisy. So dishonesty comes in many forms. We've already seen this happen in our conversation as short as it's been, lying, cheating, stealing, promise breaking, hypocrisy, self deception, BSing. These are all different and they're

• 12:31Speaker 01

  all manifestations of dishonesty. And this one in particular, I would shove under the heading of hypocrisy.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  I had a professor on my podcast recently, worked as a consultant in the Northern Virginia area a lot, made the case, and he was completely comfortable with this, that in XYZ classroom, that you could grade on a curve depending on the sex or race of the students in the classroom. And I was shocked to hear that. I was like, is that where we've gone? Are you kidding me? I mean, here I am over in a place in Asia where it really is merit. You know, it's a homogenous society. The kids with the highest scores, that's generally how it's going to work. To find out that there's actually parts of the academia in America where you're grading on a curve based on the race or sex in the immediate classroom with the immediate test, that blew me away.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  That's not something I've heard happen. Now, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. And probably people who engage in that are not going to be very forthcoming if they're engaging in it.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  This guy was.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm quite surprised. The legal ramifications of that would be quite severe, I think.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  That's going to depend on the state that you were in and the politics that you're playing under. You and I can immediately know, just draw the line down the middle of the country, probably half the country would be no problem with that idea. Half the other country would be like aghast.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  I would be amongst the aghast category there.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  Did I catch you off guard with how deep we got in so fast? Did you want to warm up?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm a philosopher. I'm used to controversy. I'm used to fiery debates. No, I mean, what we're noting here is it kind of how prevalent dishonesty can be. In this particular case, there are issues of justice and fairness. That's different from dishonesty. But if this is not transparently advertised as the criteria that the professor is going to be using, then dishonesty enters the picture. Now, if the professor is quite transparent and open about it, yeah, I use these kind of criteria too, then we don't have a dishonesty issue. But again, no professor in their right mind who, well, they shouldn't be using that in the first place. But even if they were, wouldn't be transparent about it, would be advertising it because they know that's a serious breach of ethics and the law. Overall lesson, dishonesty is such a big issue in so many areas of society today.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  I think you're right. It's deep. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. And I'll take you back in time to give you my first true lesson with it on a stage in a way. Because I noticed in your book, I don't want to paraphrase here, but you had some kind of expression in your book about the media. And I don't know if you were asking it as a question or as a statement, but you said like, you know, the media being reliable and reputable, right? And I thought to myself, well, okay, we'll see how Christian and I go here because I don't find any media reliable and reputable at all. And you might say to yourself, well, God, Mike, that sounds really hardcore. Well, okay, you know, as a 21 year old kid, I decided to run for mayor of Vienna, Virginia, right outside DC.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  And that was, you could just put your name in the ring and go. And I was 21, running against a guy who was 75. He'd been mayor for 25 years. So, look, I'm in the deep state area. There's all kinds of media coverage, ABC, CBS, NBC, Washington Post. I saw it all at age 21. The way things ran, the elections were on a Tuesday, and for the local papers, you could make a comment on a Friday, and then it would come out on a Monday, then the election was on a Tuesday. So I know on a Friday, they called me up and they said, hey, there's something going wrong here with a part of the government. There's some like hanky panky or something. And would you like to make a comment? And I said, listen, I was smart enough to not make a comment, but I said something to the effect of like,

• 16:12Speaker 00

  look, if there's something hanky panky going on with governmental employees, this is wrong. And that's all I have to say. Weekend goes on, the paper comes out on Monday and it says, basically, Covel declares sex scandal in government. Now, look, I didn't expect to win. Okay, I got killed. But the whole thing was, wow, at age 21, on an election where all these adults should have known and probably did know that they were going to win, I must have scared them a little because they went in with the heavy. They went in with this supreme dishonest action. And I'm talking low level media, local yokel paper. And, okay, so you have that experience at age 21, and everything that I've seen

• 16:56Speaker 00

  since then is to buttress that. So ultimately, the question I bring up to you, back to the reputable and reliable part, if I don't know who the owners are of XYZ AI company, TV company, newspaper, radio, if I don't know who the owners are, and I don't know what their politics are, which is pretty easy to figure out these days, it just is not something people talk about. If I don't know the politics of the owners of these distribution platforms, TV, radio, newsprint, AI, then we are where we are. And so, again, just another example of where, you know, I can see something innocuous in your book about reputable and reliable about the news media. And I immediately think to myself, you know,

• 17:40Speaker 00

  I don't know where Christian and I are going to go on that.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  I actually have to find that statement myself because I don't think I would have subscribed to that myself. But it's been a while since I wrote this book.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  It might have been rhetorical. You might have been saying something. I'm not trying to describe it to you. It was just, I caught it in there.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Here's at least, I think, an interesting implication of discussing honesty and dishonesty in this kind of context. There's the work that was done by the media outlets. And in your case, it was clearly dishonest. You know, they fabricated this whole business. So that's not very interesting in the sense that it's straightforwardly dishonest. Now there's the question of what about the honesty and dishonesty of people who consume that media? So, and you go back to your case, someone reads the newspaper with that story in it. They don't know that it's fabricated. They trust that media outlet, and they come to form the belief that, you know, you had made his comments. It seems to me that is not dishonest on their part. You can acquire all kinds of false beliefs and misinformation

• 18:39Speaker 01

  from media sources and not be dishonest in the process. Because as long as unbeknownst to you, you don't realize that it is, it doesn't impugn your honesty. So more generalized from that one example, people on the left, they have their certain kind of media. People on the right, they have their certain kind of media that they like to consume. Presumably, what they're being told in general can't all be true. They're making contradictory statements. They have different perspectives. Someone's got to be right. Someone's going to be wrong on some of these issues. And nevertheless, if I'm in one group and I trust this media outlet, and I have no reason to think that they're fabricating their information, then even if I form false beliefs and get misinformation from them, and fake news, if you want to use that expression, if we get a fake news from them, I can still be an honest person.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  But not very high IQ.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  But it depends. Yes, in a sense, but there has to be some kind of division of intellectual labor because we don't have time to research all of our sources. I can't be an expert on the medical stuff. I can't be an expert on the political stuff. I can't be an expert on the education stuff. I have to have people I trust who have done the research, tell me what's going on and be able to trust them that they are being reliable in what they're communicating to me. I want to give even space to take some of the controversial things in America in the last few years, election denial, vaccine controversies. You could think the other side is badly mistaken. People tend to, right? They kind of vilify the other

• 20:04Speaker 01

  side. But the other side might have gotten their information from trusted news sources. And unbeknownst to them, they were fed misinformation, but that doesn't mean that they were dishonest in the process. It also doesn't have to mean that they were low IQ either. It could be. It should have been obvious that this was misinformation. But again, we don't have time to research all of these sources. We have to have faith and trust to some extent that what we're being told is accurate.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  So using the term "we," and unfortunately, in America today, when I look around, the "we" is very divided. It can be divided on racial lines, but I think even more so today, America is being divided on sex lines, male and female. I'd be curious also about, you know, when I look at the student bodies of college campuses, you know, well over 50% female. Other than the mating aspect of it, the biological part that I want women, I think I would be absolutely beside myself to be on college campuses right now, listening to a lot of female logic. Look, one of the classic cases right now, and any of my female friends listening, plenty of my

• 21:13Speaker 00

  female friends don't agree with this, but you know, when I watched this Clancy case come up, just to watch it be driven down sex lines was just fascinating, just fascinating. And I don't know where a civilization goes to where you just start to have these kind of like, well, I'm in the group, so I believe that. As a philosopher, it's got to make you crazy.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  I must say, I did not keep up on the details of the Clancy case, so I'm not going to weigh into that.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  The short thing was, is a significant number of women were like, she was crazy, she's excused. A significant number of men were like, what are you talking about? She killed three kids.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  So, group conformity, there's understandable evolutionary reasons, psychological reasons, why there might be kind of motivation to do that. From a philosophical perspective, I'm a philosopher who's interested in searching after the truth and doing the right thing and being a good person, period. And I think there are objective answers to all those things, objective truth, objective goodness, objective right things and wrong things. And so for me, I'm going to adopt a certain position solely because the group I'm a part of holds this position, and I'm motivated to conform to the group, regardless of whether that's tracking the truth or not. It's just group conformity because why? It comes with all kinds of status

• 22:32Speaker 01

  and rewards. I look good. I make a good impression on the people I want to make a good impression on. I don't get punished and ostracized from the group. So there are all kinds of these nice self-interested rewards by going along with the group. But if that's just my reason for adopting my position on political matters, religious matters, you know, matters of public opinion and court decisions and so forth, if that's the only reason the group tells me that's what is the right position to adopt, and I virtue signal or morally grandstand, so that I signal to others that I'm going along with the group and I'm more of the in crowd, then that's very problematic for me. I can't go along with that.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  It does seem to be psychologically a little more normal for the ladies to want to be in a group, and they feel more at ease with the group thinking than whereas men are very, a lot more comfortable being a lone wolf. He's like, I'm not touching that with a 10-foot pole.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  That's an empirical claim. I'm a philosopher. Don't ask me. My head's in the clouds. If that's true, is that cross-culturally true? Is that, oh, it's your experience in Vietnam? Or is that more of a artifact of modern Western societies?

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Definitely, social media is playing a role in things. That's definitely shaping the sexes differently, in my opinion. How exactly? I can't necessarily know for sure, but by observation, I can see that almost every female that I know is very motivated to have imagery of their life on social media. Whether they go too far with it, or it's just the daily whatever, but that doesn't seem to be the same for men. It's not one-to-one, but there does seem to be some difference. I'll tell you where I really wanted to go, though, because I think this gets an interesting thing, where you go in your book, you bring up a couple of examples that are quite, quite famous in terms of what you might call dishonesty.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  And one would be like the 9/11 truth movement, right? I've got plenty of friends who absolutely subscribe to, male friends, they subscribe to the nitty-gritty of the 9/11 truth movement. But here's the part that I think is missed a little bit, that is not discussed. As a Gen X guy, I've watched two Iraq wars. I've watched the weapons of mass destruction, raise your right hand routine. I've watched Libya, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Israel. I've watched all these things nonstop. Look, I was in high school when they started selective service again, after they blew up the Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon, and I thought to myself, I guess

• 25:02Speaker 00

  this means I'm going to fight in the Middle East war. I was thinking this when I was 14 or 15. The quote you says is, "The collapse of the towers was an inside job," just kind of like what people think, some people think, the 9/11 truthers. But if you take into account everything that I just said, and then you say to yourself, well, God, do I know the full story? And what have we been doing all these, my entire life? What have we been doing? And why have we been doing it? I sometimes think that some of the 9/11 truth stuff that sounds a little wacky is, if you just kind of zoom out, is more like, hold on, this entire Middle East thing for decades doesn't make any sense. We clearly don't have all the information.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  How could we have all the information with wars that have taken place, et cetera, et cetera? The government's not going to tell you everything. You know, it's pretty easy to understand why people might say, well, instead of trying to broaden it out and say, all these conflicts don't make sense, what are we doing? People, I think they go ahead, some of them, will latch on to something like the 9/11 truth movement, is kind of a simple heuristic to say, it represents all of what I just said in that moment, and it forces the other side to say, oh, that's not true, da-da-da-da, call them names, whatever. But I just think it's, given everything that we've seen in the Middle East in our lifetime, to not be skeptical of anything and everything seems not exactly the pursuit of honesty.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  I can understand where you're coming from. You have all this background information that leads you to have a kind of default skepticism about what the government is telling you, about political matters, pretending to say Islam, or the Middle East, or whatnot. And then here's this one particular event, and you bring that default skepticism to it, and you say, how do I really know that I've been told the truth about this particular thing? Two observations about that. One is, even if that's what you do, the conclusion would seem to fall logically that you're skeptical, not that you pronounce, oh, this must have been an inside job. If you start pronouncing this must have been an inside job, you're no longer skeptical. Now you think you would know the truth. You have

• 27:12Speaker 01

  the privilege access or the insight that others don't. You can see behind the facade into what's really going on.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Do you think that's done on purpose, though? Because there's so many instances of things happening. For example, JFK, for example, the Gulf of the Tompkins. And then they look at all these Middle East wars, and, look, I remember watching the second plane hit live, and, okay, I never had any thought to myself that this was fake. I thought, yeah, I never had that thought myself. And I had been in World Trade Center 7, literally five or six years before that, in Solomon Brothers' offices. So I kind of knew the building, and you know, I realized how close it was to World Trade Center, 1 and 2. And so, when they fell, and World Trade Center 7 was so close, and me, having been in Lower Manhattan,

• 28:03Speaker 00

  I thought to myself, my God, there's so much chaos. These buildings are so tall, they're falling, anything could happen. There's so much chaos going on. I just don't know. That's always been my perspective. But I also don't have a great argument for the people that are more skeptical.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Two points again. The first one is, if you're really approaching this with a skeptical stance, it's a mistake then to make pronouncements about what actually happened. Your position should be, I don't know what happened. I'm going to stay on the fence. However, second point, I'm not on the fence myself. I believe that I'm not the conspiracy theorist person here. I'm not the truther. What I saw with my eyes, and you said you saw with your eyes, is what actually happened, end of story. And then I worry that in some cases, I'm not going to paint all of these conspiracy theorists with the same brush, but in some cases at least, there's self-deception going on in the following sense. The abundance of evidence seems to me pretty clear in favor of, let's say that we'll call it the standard

• 29:02Speaker 01

  account. However, some people want a certain conclusion, or want things to turn out a certain way. And so, what way? They want it to be an inside job. They want to say that the US government was involved. And so they'll downgrade what I think is overwhelming evidence for the standard view, and they'll upgrade weaker, maybe you say flimsy evidence, for the conspiracy option. And so what they're doing is they're calibrating the evidence based upon what they want the conclusion to be. And they want the conclusion to be a certain way, so they ignore really strong evidence, and they upgrade really weak evidence. And as a result, they arrive at that genuine belief, their genuine conclusion, yeah, it

• 29:46Speaker 01

  was an inside job, but the process they got to that conclusion was a self-deceptive one. This is another form of dishonesty we haven't talked about yet. And when you gauge in self-deception, you ignore evidence so that your preferred conclusion turns out to be the case. But in ignoring the evidence, you do something dishonest.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Like you said, fair enough to be skeptical, but it's different to draw the conclusion. I guess in my mind, some of the folks that I know that have gone full on, they're skeptical like me, just for all the wars that have unfolded in our lifetime, but then they take an extra step. They don't do anything in their life that is unusual, other than talking amongst themselves, many family people, all that kind of stuff. They just go from skepticism to belief on a top- Like that. Then for me, someone who understands the political machinations a decent bit, I go back to the project I told you I was working on and LBJ had 8,000 hours of recordings, secret recordings that he made in the Oval Office and around his ranch and stuff.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  And to this day, those 8,000 hours of conversations are not keyword searchable to this day. Now, there's been untold biographies written about LBJ. I have them. I can open them up on PDF. I can search for terms and I can see that they're basically sanitized. So I think the hard part for someone like me to tell my friends that are hardcore believers in 9/11 conspiracies is that I'm sitting over here in real life, working with a situation where we took a president of the United States, we have buried the record, we have not transcribed

• 31:30Speaker 00

  the record, you can't search the record. Then you've got AIs misconstruing the record in modern times. And then I say to myself, well, how can I in good faith tell people that are jumping to these conclusions that they are 100% wrong? It's kind of difficult. And I think this gets to what I was seeing, which was a little bit of the rub in advance of this conversation, is it felt like you were coming up a little bit more from the individual and dishonesty. And for me, I'm kind of coming from top down. And when I see the institutions, the government, the media, the AI, when I see this top down pushing on people in a way that is dishonest. Well, again, this is why I wanted to talk to you, because we've walked into a topic area that is complicated as hell.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  It seems to me, not knowing anything about the LBJ example. So for listeners, it's almost 11 o'clock here in Eastern time in the US. So I've had a long day teaching and thinking about all kinds of philosophy. So sorry if I slip up once in a while.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  I'm waking you up.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Perhaps a disanalogy in the two cases is that, as you've described it, it's a lot of unknowns. We don't have access to the information. It's unclear what's going to be there, will we ever get access to it. Whereas in the 9/11 case, we have really strong evidence in favor of one position, really strong evidence. And what it would take to undermine that evidence from a conspiracy perspective would have to be incredibly high, incredibly convincing to change, in my mind, the standard narrative of what happened at 9/11. So they seem to be just different in these two cases.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  I'm not attempting to change anything. I'm not attempting to agree with them. But you know, there are also variations of this, too. If I look at all these, the hijackers themselves. So one, just an honest question one could ask would be, and I think the hijackers did what they did. I think that's what happened. The hijackers did what they did. Do I think there's a possibility that any of the hijackers ever in prior incarnations worked for the CIA in some capacity? That's not an out of the realm question to ask. It really isn't. I'm not saying that means they're a part of a conspiracy. I think they did what they did on their own. Okay. So this is the part I think sometimes we're not allowed to ask questions. We're just not.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  I guess I've never thought about that question in many detail. We can ask that question for sure. I mean, I'm a philosopher. I ask all kinds of questions. You're not going to get an answer. That's true as well. But unless I have some evidence in favor of thinking that's the case, my answer should provisionally, for the time being, until such evidence emerges, should be, I have no idea, no reason to believe that.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Look, listen, I'm not in this for a binary. I'm not in this to try to say anything about some conspiracy. I'm just pointing out, in my personal experience where I've seen large operations, including government, I mean, God, if anyone's ever had to deal with the government on freedom of information request, it's an absolute joke. But the law says, give the documents and governments will spend all day long not giving the documents. So it's like, there is more than enough grounds for people looking at higher level institutions, media, government, et cetera, AI, and saying to themselves, geez, who do I trust? What do I believe?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yes, but what's the alternative? Again, because of the division of cognitive labor, I can't figure out these things out. I need to know these things. I have to have some kind of sources to go to, or at least I'd like to have some kind of sources to go to that will feed me information that I can think is trustworthy until proven otherwise. A blanket skepticism of all media and of all government communication would just be completely paralyzing.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  Your book is called The Honesty Crisis. That means when we're in the middle of something and it doesn't seem to be getting better. And we've not figured out anything in this conversation so far that points to a pivot away from where we are. In fact, it's only going to get worse in the current trend line. Fair?

• 35:32Speaker 01

  That's fair. I mean, let me just actually echo that point and clarify what I mean by an honesty crisis. So for me, an honesty crisis is any situation where two things happen. One, dishonesty becomes more appealing, more tempting than it was before. And two, dishonesty becomes easier to get away with. And it's hard to catch people being dishonest. When you have those two things at the same time, you have an honesty crisis. And I think there's not one honesty crisis in society and by society, I'm typically mean US society. I think there's just a variety of specific honesty crises popping up all over the place. I focus on six, one in education, one in religion, one in politics, one in relationships, one in celebrity influencer culture, and one in

• 36:13Speaker 01

  technology, in particular deep fake technology. I'm seeing them pop up all over the place in society today. With respect to some of them, I think we've actually gone, there's no going back. There's no going back to the way it was before. For example, the AI student use. I don't see any way to recover the integrity of the work students produce on their own and be able to trust that they do it without AI. Some other areas, I'm hopeful that we might be able to make some progress, but we haven't made it yet. So there's no pivot point yet.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  On the AI writing part, as an author, I've definitely experimented with what AI can do. As a professor, reading work from students, it's got to be painfully obvious when there is no flair. There is no individuality. There's no personality in the writing. I don't think students are necessarily seeing that if they don't develop their own flair, their own personality, they are going to end up sounding like in their writing, maybe even their talking or their emails, like Muzak, right? Seriously, they're not going to ever learn, you know, something that's unique to them. They're just copying.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  You can make that kind of argument. And there's probably some validity to that argument. I can make additional arguments about what they're missing out on. I teach philosophy classes. So if they use AI, they're not going to be developing their critical thinking skills. They're not going to prove their argumentation. They're not going to be able to get better at interpreting someone's position and then seeing the flaws in it and raising objections to it. Also, their just basic writing skills will be hampered, too. They don't have to engage in the mechanism of writing. I can give all those arguments, plus your argument as well, and present them to students. But these are all long-term arguments. If you go down this path in the long term, here's what's going to happen to you. Here's what's happened to your writing. Here's what's going to happen to your thinking. I hate

• 38:07Speaker 01

  to be a little bit of a downer, but it's hard to have those arguments outweigh the perceived short-term benefits of a tool that they now have in their toolkit, which is more efficient than anything they've had before. A five-hour paper becomes a five-minute paper, more effective than anything they've had before. So they can have this tool, write the paper for them, turn it in and get a better grade than they would have gotten otherwise if they had written it themselves. Evasive. They know that they can't get caught with 100% certainty. So there's the punitive consequences are not going to scare them. And then they feel like everyone else is using it. So they have to keep up.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  The AI masters themselves could have very easily asked their AIs in advance of releasing them on the public and your students, what will happen? I don't think this is an unknown thing that's happened. So the question I have is, why? Why have certain large language model companies decided to destroy young minds? And why have we allowed it to happen?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, heavy at 11:00 PM.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I can't peer into their psychology.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  Obviously, they don't care.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  So here's a probably overly charitable interpretation of what's going on. And maybe you'll dismiss it or reject it. I mean, you could say, we are producers of this technology are just, you know, we've come up with this tool. The tool itself is inherently neutral. It's not good or bad. It's not honest or dishonest. It's not right or wrong. It's up to users to decide how they choose to use it. And some users can use it for all kinds of valuable purposes, valuable medical purposes, valuable research purposes, and so forth. If other people choose to use it for deceptive, dishonest purposes, say in the education space, that's on them. It's not the technology that's making them do it.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  Well, hold on. How much does Facebook just find for, you know, so yeah, you said charitable, but this is part of the modern honesty issue is like, we just keep having these shades of gray, where there is no longer a right or a wrong. If all students right now are doing what you are describing, that's not a good. As they get older, they're going to be missing all these skills that you point out. And when they have to listen to political leaders or whoever, they are definitely not going to understand it the same way you understand it. I understand it because they're trained differently. The brain is a muscle. If the brain has not been developed in a certain way.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  I like all those points. I use the muscle analogy. I use that kind of habit analogy. We can develop good habits or bad habits, intellectual virtues, intellectual vices, but they can't be formed overnight or you can't flip a switch and make them come into existence. They have to be molded and shaped, just like if you want to be a good chess player or a competitive athlete, you've got to work at it over time. AI provides a shortcut. It gets you to the place where the student wants to go very fast without the cognitive labor involved that would have the skill building associated with it. So yeah, downstream, there are going to be these very worrisome negative consequences. When someone presents to you with an argument downstream, a religious argument, a political

• 41:18Speaker 01

  argument, whatever it might be, and you haven't been trained at dissecting, distinguishing, objecting, and responding, and you're more easily malleable by those kinds of influences.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  I want to go on one other topic. It's kind of connects back to, you know, if somebody believes something that looks like a conspiracy and say, well, how did they get to that point? And then, you know, we all lived through COVID. What a fascinating time, right? I don't think anybody really believes the truth of that whole thing is on the table, you know? A couple of vaccine companies are trading at this level. All of a sudden they're trading at this level. Now they're back down to this level. Fascinating time. And I get why he does it. But when you drag up the 80-year-old senior, former head of the CDC, Fauci, to raise his hand, and, you know, he's saying, I plead the fifth, I plead the fifth, I plead the fifth. I'm also a guy who grew up in the eighties, who was scared to sit on toilet seats because Fauci

• 42:14Speaker 00

  told us another virus was going to get me from the toilet seats. This kind of stuff, it's pretty easy for people to develop, even if they don't know how to get to just pure skepticism. I'm skeptical. I don't know, which was your point. Be skeptical, but don't try to draw a conclusion. But then that leaves a lot of people feeling like, well, my God, why can't I draw a conclusion? There's so much of this. Look, during COVID, I linked to on Facebook, a CDC article, PDF on the CDC website, and Facebook blocked me for a month. At some point in time, people just, you take all these experiences and you say, well, gosh, how do we get the honesty on the micro level if we've got dishonesty on the macro level?

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Or we have least uncertainty about people's honesty on the macro level. And we don't know who is trustworthy or not. We have grounds for suspicion about different parties.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  So diplomatic.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I could wade into the vaccine specifically. I'm not a vaccine denier myself. I'll just put that out there. I trusted, and I still trust in the reliability of the vaccines to some extent in preventing things from being much worse than they would have been otherwise.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  It would have been fine, though, for somebody to have the opposite view of that and not be considered. Okay, I get it if you consider the nine 11 truthers whack jobs. I get that. But I think it would be a little bit different if people said, you know, given Fauci's track record, given the track record of some of these big pharma companies that do nothing except get people gacked on drugs like OxyContin, that people might have a perfectly reasonable view to be opposite of yours on the trusting of big pharma and Fauci, right?

• 43:56Speaker 01

  This is something I explore a lot in the politics chapter. It depends on how they form their beliefs. There are different ways in which you might, and I think this will tie together a lot of themes we talked about, arrive at a vaccine, let's say vaccine supporter or vaccine denier. So vaccine denial conclusion. If you arrive at it because you want to fit in with your in crowd, and everyone of your similar political persuasion is a vaccine denier, you haven't really researched it at all, but you know, it's the thing you're supposed to say so that you can gain that status and not get punished socially for going against the in crowd. That's not going to cut it for me. That's not a reasonable approach, and it's not going to

• 44:36Speaker 01

  be honest either. Here's another scenario. If you just want that conclusion to be true, say for political reasons, and because you dislike the other side so much, and so you're just going to tailor all the evidence to fit your political views and make it turn out to be the case that the denier position is the correct one, only because you inflate weak evidence and deflate powerful evidence against your view, that's also not going to cut it my view. Now, a third possibility, and I'm sorry to talk like a philosopher, but I think we just, I don't want to paint in broad brush. I don't want to label all vaccine deniers in the same way. Here's a

• 45:15Speaker 01

  third possibility. You have certain kind of trusted sources in the media, in the education space, in the medical space, who tell you publicly perhaps, that you should be skeptical about these vaccines. And you don't have time to research it yourself. You're very busy, and you have grounds for trusting them, that they are authorities and they know what they're talking about. It's reasonable to go with their opinion. In that kind of case, I'll say, you could be honest in arriving at the conclusion that vaccine denial is the correct view. I don't think you're right, but you can still be honest in arriving at that conclusion. Trust, we cannot get rid of it, I

• 45:55Speaker 01

  don't think. If it's a basis for forming beliefs in a reasonable way, then it's not dishonest.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  I can't keep you too late here. I've got to let you go. But, you know, I'll be in the States here in December. If you want to do a part B, I'd love to do a part B. And the reason why is because we really haven't gotten into essentially your subtitle, which is preserving our most treasured virtue in an increasingly dishonest world. And that, to me, reads as optimistic, right? I would probably be the opposite. So that might be an interesting conversation to dive into. Can these things be fixed? My opinion would be mostly that this is so political and so driven on sex and race lines, that to me, it makes more sense logically that this ends in some

• 46:41Speaker 00

  kind of civil conflict or implosion or something, or states just literally move to themselves, you know? Balkanized seems like the word here. The whole idea of United States seems almost farcical.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Love to talk more. First of all, there's a lot in that subtitle. So it's preserving our most treasured virtue in increasingly dishonest world. Why is it our most treasured virtue? Why should we bother preserving it? Why is it important in the first place? And the how? If you buy that it is really important, worth preserving, how we go about doing it? And then picking up on a theme that's emerged in our conversation, my approach has definitely been more at the individualistic level. And your approach has been much more at the macro level. Maybe that's not incompatible. Maybe at the macro level, it is, there's less room for optimism. I'm trying to invite individuals at least to look at their own lives and see areas of dishonesty in their own lives that they can do something about. Even if they can't fix the culture, they can at least, and I could personally work on myself. And that's making some kind of

• 47:41Speaker 01

  progress, micro progress.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  That's a great place to end it because ultimately, all we can control is ourselves. We only live once. There is no life extension. So be a good person, try to do the right thing, and that's about all you can ask for, right?

• 47:55Speaker 01

  This is a really important thing. It's maybe the most important virtue there is. Let's not overlook that and forget that, but let's actually devote a lot of our attention to trying and get better at being honest.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  The book, The Honesty Crisis, preserving our most treasured virtue in an increasingly dishonest world. Christian, is there a website you want to send people to also?

• 48:16Speaker 01

  There's the usual bookseller website. So wherever you want to go.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  They can find you at Wake Forest if they want to, if they want to be friendly or hate, either way, right?

• 48:24Speaker 01

  So it's christianbmillar.com. And I've got a whole bunch of resources on there and materials for further reading.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  Hey, Ben, I appreciate it.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Love to follow up on discussion with anyone.

• 48:39Speaker 00

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• 49:15Speaker 00

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