The Abuse Of Moral Talk For Self Promotion | Justin Tosi | Modern Wisdom Podcast 221

Justin Tosi is the Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University & an author. Moral grandstanding is the easiest way to signal your virtue without having to actually do anything virtuous. Why has it recently become so prevalent? Expect to learn why wishing that someone would get cancer isn't a good debating tactic, the different forms that grandstanding takes, why it is a moral problem, how hierarchies play into people's desire to grandstand & much more... Sponsor: Sign up to FitBook at https://fitbook.co.uk/join-fitbook/ (enter code MODERNWISDOM for 50% off your membership) Extra Stuff: Buy Grandstanding - https://amzn.to/2F8iPQo Follow Justin on Twitter - https://twitter.com/JustinTosi Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #morality #language #socialjustice - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So morality is supposed to be about helping other people, being kind to them, about resolving important social problems. But what grandstanders do is they turn morality into just an opportunity to show other people how good they are. And, you know, what an achievement for, for me to have such pure moral beliefs. But this is an empty achievement. And it's actually kind of pathetic if you think about it that way.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Justin Tossey. Justin, welcome to the show.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, Chris.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  Pleasure to have you on. Grandstanding. What is grandstanding?

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So if you want just a bumper sticker description of, of the idea, moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion. So if you see people on your social media feeds, or you just encounter people in everyday life who are, you know, walking around talking like corporate press releases, or sounding like politicians, giving these carefully crafted statements about, you know, how they've long stood on, on the side of the disadvantaged and so on. And kind of making moral talk about them and turning it into a vanity project or a big show where they're the main character. That's grandstanding.

• 1:13Chris Williamson?

  Why do they do it?

• 1:17Speaker 00

  So human beings care a lot about what other people think about them. We're all impression managers. So there are really fun social science studies showing that, you know, if you tell people,

• 1:30Speaker 00

  you know, I'm gonna leak to the university community that you got this really bad score on this, uh, this, uh, implicit association test that reveals perhaps racial bias. They will do horrible things, you know, that you'd see on Fear Factor or whatever, sticking their hands in a bowl of worms and, you know, nasty stuff like that, uh, because they care a lot about what their communities think of them. They don't want to be ostracized. And they all know that if people think, um, you know, that they are not very good people morally, that they run the risk of, of being kind of run out of their friend groups or their, their political groups, things like this.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  People are also self-enhancers. Uh, so we all like to think that we are morally good and morally above average, all of us. Uh, so we kind of have this impression of ourselves as, you know, I'm better than, than the average person. My heart is really in the right place and we want other people to share that impression. So we take steps to present a flattering picture of ourselves to the world. And that's why we engage in grandstanding because it's a very easy way to show people that our heart is in the right place. So why not do it?

• 2:45Chris Williamson?

  It seems like there's kind of two types of grandstanding there. One of them is like defensive grandstanding and the other is offensive grandstanding. Is that kind of right?

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so psychologists talk about two different ways that people seek status. On the one hand, people sometimes seek status through prestige. So this is when people try to present some characteristic of themselves that actually deserves praise. That is impressive. So in the non-moral realm, this is people who, you know, post flattering pictures of themselves on Instagram.

• 3:27Chris Williamson?

  This is my new bench press PR. This is my new, my fast car, my big house, my good looking girlfriend.

• 3:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So these are things that it's actually, you know, like, that makes sense that the people would admire these things. So people will sometimes seek status in this way. They'll seek prestige status. Sometimes people will also seek status through dominance. So they'll present themselves as someone not, or someone to be reckoned with, someone not to be messed with. So they'll go after people. They'll, you know, try to embarrass or humiliate people that they don't like. And their hope, implicit or not, is that people will stay away from them, not mess with them. Think this is not someone I want to piss off. I want to stay on this person's good side.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  And this is another way of kind of gaining respect, of gaining the esteem of others through being really aggressive. So you can grandstand in both of these ways. The prestige way is often a bit more defensive, as you put it. So sometimes. People won't be setting out really to impress people, but an opportunity will arise and they'll think, well, I don't want people to think that my heart is not in the right place about this issue, so I'd better say something, right? Where I don't want to be accused of remaining silent or something like this and so doing violence or whatever people are saying now, white silence is violence or whatever.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  So they'll do a little bit of grandstanding because hey, what's the harm? But then there are people who will go out and, you know, go looking for a fight. Look for someone who's kind of like straying from the pack a little bit and making themselves vulnerable. The person who doesn't put their fist up at the restaurant outdoors, it's happened in Washington DC recently. And, you know, these are the two you go after. So you can do a bit of grandstanding about, you know, look, I'm out here leading this group of people all making this gesture. Why aren't you doing it? Like, what's wrong with you? So the people doing that can also gain a kind of status and so they do. So all of this can be grandstanding.

• 5:44Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that some of the people who are choosing to play that game, choosing to play the moral grandstanding, armchair philosophizing side, do you think that they will skew toward people who can't use prestige and typical forms of wealth and dominance to move up the hierarchy? So if you have someone who isn't potentially very good looking or doesn't really have that much wealth or actually isn't all that clever, but has what I call podcast wits, which is that they're able to say, they're able to say something which gives this the representation of looking smart, they might think, hang on, I can't compete in the typical dominance hierarchy. I'm going to change the rules of the game. You want to play chess?

• 6:29Chris Williamson?

  I want to play rugby. Let's play rugby.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I like this a lot. You're hitting on a kind of pet theory of mine, which is that a lot of people who engage in grandstanding, if they actually had anything interesting to say, like if they were actually funny, or if they had something else going for them, that's what they would do, right? They would just be funny or they would just show their wealth. So they'd engage in some conspicuous consumption or something like that. But but they don't or that or it's so much easier for them to engage in moral grandstanding that that's you know, just a very simple, reliable path to status for them. So that's the stuff that they do instead. And our mutual friend, Rob Henderson, has written stuff about this about

• 7:16Chris Williamson?

  He's the fucking king of conspicuous consumption and this

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:20Chris Williamson?

  What is it, high status goods at the moment that he's playing around with?

• 7:24Speaker 00

  Luxury good, yeah, luxury beliefs in his case.

• 7:27Chris Williamson?

  Luxury beliefs, that's it. Sorry, Rob.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he draws

• 7:29Chris Williamson?

  Sorry, mate.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  So he draws this stuff from Veblen, who has this whole theory work out. So Veblen is just this academic outsider. He doesn't fit in in all the elite circles. He doesn't have all the servants. And he's kind of puzzled by this world. So, you know, he writes this this great book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, all about their their kind of lame practices, just, you know, acquiring obscure languages and engaging in all this pomp and circumstance, just to show people that they have the time and the money. So, you know,

• 8:11Speaker 00

  what Rob points out, and then we're kind of, Brandon and I are in the same vein, is that people do this also with their moral beliefs. So they'll they'll claim at least. And very often, I think they actually do have the beliefs. But they'll at least claim to have these flattering beliefs and they'll get status for it. And, you know, so sometimes this is because they have nothing else going for them. Sometimes it seems like this is just the precondition for being accepted into polite society. So there's stuff recently, maybe you saw this about woke fishing. So people claiming, you know, very disappointed, you know, women say, I went on a date with this guy, and he said he was, you know, a

• 8:55Speaker 00

  good progressive. He had, he said all the right things, but then it turned out he wasn't super progressive. And so people are, you know, turning this into this great conspiracy that these these guys are all out there. You know, pretending to be really woke and they're not. And I think actually a better explanation for this is just that people don't really think these words mean very much. And they're just, you know, they know if I'm in polite society, these are the things I have to claim to believe. And then, but then you get them like, you know, one or two deductions away from the thing that they claim to believe. And it's like, whoa, what?

• 9:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know. I mean, like, what's the difference between woke fishing and the vast majority of people who are playing around with these brand new rules that six weeks ago were completely acceptable and today is completely unacceptable, or the reverse? Like, the fact that you believe that you believe doesn't make, doesn't mean that you actually fucking believe it. Like, it's just that your self deception is so pervasive that the guy who's using woke fishing has weaponized your miscalculation of how you see things. I put it in, I put the woke fishing thing in a newsletter recently. And thankfully, I think in the UK, we don't have that same polarization, at least not in, not in quite

• 10:13Chris Williamson?

  the same way. But yeah, I think Rob had put, was it Rob that had identified any guy who has moderate in their Tinder profile has to be a Republican?

• 10:25Speaker 00

  That sounds like something Rob would say.

• 10:29Chris Williamson?

  So like, the, the, the set point, basically, of where people, guys are expected to be now on the Tinder spectrum, is that because of woke fishing, you need to be like, super, super progressive, just to be centrist. And like, anything short of that is like a gun toting NRA hick that loves country music and drives a pickup truck. Like, that's it. But dude, the woke fishing thing's great. Have you got some, some examples for people? You mentioned this recent incident where there was a lady sat down at a restaurant, and you've got tons and tons of examples. Let's give the listeners some concrete examples of what happens, what grandstanding can actually look like when it manifests.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so let me run through it. In the book, we give you, we give everybody this this field guide to things that people do when they grandstand. So to be clear, it's not the case that like every time anyone does something on this list, they are grandstanding, right? It's rather that when people are grandstanding, these are the kinds of things that they tend to do.

• 11:32Chris Williamson?

  So just to interject there, and that's the point. The point is that it's a Trojan horse. It's you weaponizing a particular worldview, point of view that other people hold truthfully, but it's you doing it in a way which is metacognizantly kind of labored, right? You're doing it for the effect rather than the fact that you are compelled and you genuinely believe it.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's very close. So actually, we think that you can really believe the things. And in fact, and we can get to this, this is why some of this is so dangerous. Because if people were actually just bullshitting, right, then it wouldn't be so bad if they're claiming to believe these these crazy things. But because they believe it, then it takes on this new dimension. It's not just like people jerking off in public. It's like, whoa.

• 12:26Chris Williamson?

  So much more dangerous.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 12:29Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so the framework, tell us.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that people tend to do, which I'm sure everyone has seen, is that they'll engage in piling on. So they'll look for a case of someone who's violated a norm in public. Social media is, you know, the perfect forum for this. And they'll see people getting in their digs at this person, and they'll say, you know, either something that everyone, you know, someone has said 100 times already, or they'll they'll attempt some new form of abuse to mock this person. And they'll do this to show other people that they are in the right on this issue, that they they're part of the crowd, that they're not, you know, cautious, you know, they're not sitting on the sidelines.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  They agree with everyone else about how bad this person is.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  Another thing that people will do is that they will engage in what we call ramping up. So this is when moral talk becomes a kind of arms race with people looking to say the most extreme thing that the crowd will still think of as morally impressive. So in the US, I don't know if this discourse has reached the UK, but with all of these protests, people started really hitting this point of, you know, we need to defund the police. And very quickly, this became, you know, we need to actually abolish the police. So within a matter of 48 hours, this moved from like, you know, we need to take a good

• 14:03Speaker 00

  look at how we're funding these organizations, like get rid of them entirely. And that's of course what we meant all along, right? So this is, I think, part of the dynamic that you were hitting on earlier of things, you know, moving so quickly and it's like people haven't thought this out. And it's because grandstanders have an incentive to be really extreme and, you know, make the splashy claim that will then become the official statement that everyone, you know, argues about and says like, this is, whoa, this guy's really, you know, out there or whatever. Another thing that people will do is they'll engage in trumping up. So they'll make exotic moral claims. And the idea here is, you know, a lot of people might have overlooked this problem,

• 14:47Speaker 00

  but I'm really sensitive or I'm really knowledgeable about justice and how morality works. So I saw this and everyone else should take notice, right? So if there's an incentive to do this, you'll get people becoming really creative and saying things that are just way out there because it will impress at least some members of their group. You'll also have people engaged in what we call excessive emotional displays. So these are the people you might be thinking of who are just always outraged about whatever the latest thing is. And it's always at 10 or 11, right? Like, so they're always going to 11 because they want to be seen as like the most like

• 15:31Speaker 00

  sensitive people, the people who care the most about justice. And then finally, Grandstanders are really often dismissive of people who disagree with them. So they'll say things like, "Look, if you don't see what's so bad about this, Chris, I don't even what, I don't know what to tell you, man. Like, you're just too far gone. You are too in the dark. You need to do some work on yourself." And then, you know, then we can talk or whatever. But it's not my job to educate you. Educate yourself, right? So stuff like this. And the idea here is like, I can't, I'm so good, I can't even put myself in the frame of mind of someone like you. So I wouldn't know where to start. So, you know, you can grandstand in other ways too, right?

• 16:13Speaker 00

  Anything that is moral talk could in principle be grandstanding. People could be driven to say it by a desire to impress others. But these are just some really common things that people tend to do.

• 16:28Chris Williamson?

  I mean, that just sounds to me like a matrix breaking down the like vast majority of tweets with more than 5,000 likes that I've seen during 2020. Like if it's broken 5,000 likes and it isn't Macaulay Culkin telling us that he's 40, like it's probably one of those tweets.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:49Chris Williamson?

  So is grandstanding a new phenomenon? Is it just another byproduct of social media? Or how does new technology link in with all the things that you've just said?

• 17:03Speaker 00

  So when you asked why people do it, I referred to some just common traits of human beings, that we care what other people think of us and we think well of ourselves and want other people to share that impression. So those are not new traits. Those are things that have probably been with us as long as we have been recognizably human, working together and caring about whether we can trust one another. So the ingredients to grandstand have been with us for a very long time. And we think there is indeed nothing new about the idea. Or really about the behavior. What is new is that it's now so much easier for people to grandstand. It's basically costless.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  So you just pick up your phone and you have an audience, you know, depending on how interesting and attractive you are and all these things, you have an audience of hundreds to thousands to millions of people who are just ready to gobble up whatever it is that you say. And moral terms, moral, you know, especially emotionally charged, moral claims that people might make online, there's good social science showing these are great ways to get attention. So what social media does is that it removes so much of the cost of grandstanding because you don't have to go anywhere to do it.

• 18:28Chris Williamson?

  Cost or effort?

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Uh, well, both, yeah. So sorry, I'm being an-

• 18:34Chris Williamson?

  Academic about you.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:37Chris Williamson?

  I just wonder about the difference between the cost and the effort there because the cost of getting grandstanding wrong online, saying the thing you thought might be different to the effort required to do it. Does that make sense?

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Good point. Yeah, that's right. So, yeah. So I mean, so I was thinking mostly of effort.

• 18:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  But you're right. It also probably changes the way people grandstand. So it probably makes them more careful about it. So that's why they have something called the long caption that you're no doubt familiar with, Chris.

• 19:08Chris Williamson?

  No, what's that?

• 19:09Speaker 00

  Oh, uh, maybe this is not a thing. I thought this, so it's when people on Instagram will post like a thirst trap picture and then they'll have a long caption about whatever social justice issue or, or, you know, so just like a long-

• 19:26Chris Williamson?

  I do that. I am an absolute-

• 19:28Speaker 00

  You have a long caption?

• 19:29Chris Williamson?

  I'm patient, I'm patient zero for that, but it won't be, it won't be social justice posturing. It'll be like thirst trap photo. I have a new podcast episode now live with Justin Tosi, link in bio.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 19:42Chris Williamson?

  Like we are-

• 19:42Speaker 00

  That's okay.

• 19:43Chris Williamson?

  All right, fine. Well, I mean, if I'm, if I'm part of the cool kids crowd, that's really all that I care about, man. I just don't want to feature in grandstanding 2.0.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, what so I think that goes to the theory that we were talking about before. I mean, so you have you have something to offer people is actually interesting. You have a podcast where you have brilliant people on and and talk to them about about their books and and whatever else people actually want to hear about. But if you don't have anything like that, you have nothing to promote. You can further promote yourself by by writing up some some mealy mouth like really carefully measured because again, you don't want to to make people mad and incur some further cost.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  So, right, so what the other thing that social media adds is is it just makes it so hard to avoid other people's grandstanding. Right, so before you could just like not go to political rallies or not go to that one coffee shop in the college town or whatever. But now it's like, you know, somebody's mom is just like won't shut up about whatever is is in the news. She wants everybody to know that, you know, she's long stood with the oppressed and so on. And so we see grandstanding everywhere. So that's what's new, I guess, is just the platform makes it so easy.

• 21:00Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, yeah, it's a it's an interesting thing to think about what social media has done to people's desire for people's desire to signal. Right, because everyone now essentially is their own brand. You wear a Nike T shirt or an Adidas T shirt or this T shirt or that T shirt. And immediately people are saying, OK, what does that say about you that you wore that thing? What does that say about that brand that they are the sort of brand that is worn by that sort of a person? And the same thing happens with intellectual arguments and concepts and political affiliations and your favorite Netflix series that you talk about online. And everything now is an opportunity to self brand.

• 21:45Chris Williamson?

  And I had a couple of years ago, I had Robin Hanson, Elephant in the Brain, on talking about everything is signaling. And increasingly, I just realized that Robin Hanson was always right, that it's just. Signaling all over the place and that's it.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. So it's all signaling and it's all like, this is what fucking sucks so much about it is it's also all an opportunity to pick someone apart and like nitpick every, so I mean, I'm sure you, you, you get this, like you're, you're more active in social media than, than I am, which is not saying a lot, but I mean, you probably get, I actually saw some last, some just like ridiculous responses of people like, um, I think some guy said you needed a bra or something like that.

• 22:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that was, yeah, yeah. I mean, to be fair, to be fair, he was right. Um, but you know, I can't, I can't abuse a guy, but I think, uh, there's, there's a few different, there's a few different types of moral grandstanding. The reason that I'm particularly concerned about this, uh, iteration of it is that when you get a sufficiently large minority of people speaking sufficiently loudly, they can shift the Overton window of acceptable speech in a direction that I actually think it's really difficult to bring it back from. Like it's now

• 23:05Chris Williamson?

  quite hard to have a discussion online saying, well, is being pro-choice actually that smart of an idea? Or is there a discussion to be had about being pro-life now around abortion? Like that, if you dig into some of the, especially Ben Shapiro's arguments around it, is really, really compelling. But to say it is like, um, moral grandstanding, uh, putting, like lighting a flare or attaching yourself with one of those laser pointer things that the drones fire in on. Um, and that's like, so the Overton window, for people who don't know, it's, um, basically a particular window of acceptable speech and you can swing, you can

• 23:48Chris Williamson?

  speak within this window, but if you move too far to the conservative or too far to the progressive side outside of that window, you tend to be like ostracized by society and they say, oh, like, what are you talking about? Like, um, here's an interesting one. Actually, I wanted to ask this, I've had it in my head for a little while. Peter Thiel, during job applications, asks people, what is a belief that you hold that most of the people think is untrue? Have you got one off the top of your head? Can you think of one that fits that?

• 24:17Speaker 00

  Oh, man, I'm gonna get in trouble.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Not off the top of my head.

• 24:23Chris Williamson?

  Got you.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  You have any example?

• 24:25Chris Williamson?

  I'll give you mine. So mine is that pedophiles who don't act on their urges requires requires sympathy, not militant responses. And this came after a conversation with a neuroscientist who taught me that we don't have control, conscious control over our sexual urges, which means that essentially people who are aroused by children have been cursed with this thing that they can't act on. And if you have a society which demonizes them ahead of them doing any actions, what's illegal is the action, not the actual thought, right?

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Not the attraction.

• 25:01Chris Williamson?

  You can't control the attraction. And as soon as I had that, I was like, there is not, there is no other reasonable solution to this other than that. If anyone is listening and they're interested and wants to go back and listen to it, it was the seven deadly sins episode around about 170, something like that.

• 25:19Chris Williamson?

  So that was one thing. But basically, my point there is that we're memetic beings. And this is the reason that Peter Thiel puts it in his job application, is he's constantly looking for people who are outliers, who are prepared to see outside of the Overton window. And by us being memetic beings, the beauty of that question, what is a belief that you hold that most other people think is untrue or abhorrent or weird or wrong? And, you know, thinking in that sort of a way allows you to see, actually, that person has a very unique worldview, they have that's different. But yeah, to get back to the Overton window thing, people's can, if you have a big enough majority of people, they can shift the entire window of acceptable speech. So that something last week, which was, you see this with

• 26:03Chris Williamson?

  the way that you may now have to refer to transitioning men and women online, the, all of the different terms to do with people who have a different sexual orientations, to do with different gender identities, to do with this. It's like, if you do it for long enough, people kind of can't remember the old thing. It's very 1984.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, yeah, that's, that's all really good.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  So one of the things that we talk about in the field guide to Grant City is this thing I called ramping up. And I think ramping up explains why the overton window can shift as it does. Right. Because you'll, I mean, as you say, you get just a group of people who are loud enough and they keep, you know, they circle around this extreme moral view. You now, you know, once it catches on, you can't say anything to them that's very far from that position. So, so, I mean, you can have multiple phenomena here. One is you can shift the window to be wider, right? Because you'll have multiple groups polarizing in this way. And so like, we now have to talk about all of their beliefs.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  And I think that can be fine, right? Like some extreme views, it's actually really helpful to talk about them. But you can also have multiple overton windows where it's, it's like,

• 27:28Speaker 00

  you know, in front of this one public, right? Because you can have a divided public. It's only this thing that can be talked about in front of this other public. It's only this position. So, you know, you said, you can't talk about like the Ben Shapiro views on abortion with the pro-choice people. You know, you also can't talk about some of the pro-choice arguments with the people who really like the Ben Shapiro stuff. So this really sucks.

• 27:51Chris Williamson?

  Like ships in the night passing past each other. You've got one group which is speaking about one problem, another group which is speaking about another. But again, Ben Shapiro has a wonderful bit about this where he talks about how in the pro-choice, pro-life abortion argument, one group is talking about rape cases and incest. And the other group is talking about girls that go out and get drunk every weekend and just use it willy-nilly. It's like those aren't mapping on to each other. You're talking about one thing and you're talking about another. And these two groups don't even actually ever end up interacting.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, neither group wants to talk about the other's hard case for their view, right? And that's a real loss.

• 28:31Chris Williamson?

  Everything's in the middle. The same goes with the gun rights, right? Like it's, one person's talking about, should you be able to have an AR-15 with a semi-automatic turning stock on the back? And the other person's saying, well, I just want someone, like, I want to have a handgun that can protect myself in the home. Like, those aren't the same, they're not talking about the same thing.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, and like you said earlier, if you try to stake out some position in the middle where you actually want to talk about a sensible, like nuanced view, it's like you're making, you know, you're putting a target on your back, right? So you're putting chum in the water, I get to introduce even more metaphors for both sides, right? And they're both just like, if we can agree on anything, it's that this guy sucks.

• 29:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because he's not you, but he's not us. Douglas Murray hit the nail on the head about this in a conversation I had with him, and he said that a subtle or nuanced view to the opposition seems like a lack of conviction about your ideology wholesale.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's totally right. So one thing that we talk about in the book is what psychologists call the black sheep effect. So the black sheep effect is this kind of strange on the face of phenomenon of people really disliking the kind of weakly committed members of their group. So the way it works is they see these people as not trustworthy, right? So they think like they don't really get the principles. So in the US, I mean, I'm sure there are examples of this in the UK, in UK politics too. You know, John McCain used to be this guy who like, the Democrats actually kind of liked him.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  He was a Republican senator. The Democrats were like, this guy's okay, you know, because sometimes he votes with us. But the Republicans, whenever John McCain would defect, like this son of a bitch, like this guy, we can't count on this guy for anything, right? So he's their black sheep. So no one wants to be the black sheep of their group because they know then that makes them like... You know, uh, well, the black sheep, right? It makes people not like them, not trust them. Uh, and so it, this is why it's so dangerous for people, uh, to express any doubt about the strongly held beliefs of their group. So they grandstand instead.

• 30:58Chris Williamson?

  Jordan Peterson, in his conversation with the lady from GQ, that was like when they got that, uh, Kathy Newman and they sent her away. It wasn't Kathy Newman, but it was like they'd sent Kathy Newman away, put her on a course of steroids and research for like six months. And then she, she came back like we've made her stronger, faster, bigger. And, uh, and he does this wonderful point where he says, I shouldn't be able to guess the rest of your views when I only know one of them. And that appears to be the converse of what we're discussing here, that you need someone to take their ideology wholesale, not piecemeal. And the reason for that is that it allows the rest of the tribe to better predict their future behavior. Look, we don't need to worry about Jim. Jim's fucking sweet. It's Tom

• 31:43Chris Williamson?

  that we need to worry about because Tom likes free markets, but actually he's pro-choice, or Tom likes restricted gun control, but actually he's a little bit more right leaning, or what, you know, whatever it might be. Um, because it's the chink in the armor.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah. Uh, so this is, this is just such a puzzle to me, to like anyone who's like ever read philosophies. It's like, well, hold on, like your position on free markets and your position on abortion, these things should have almost nothing to do with each other. Right? But in general, if you find out what someone thinks about the one thing, um, you pretty much, you can guess pretty reliably what they think about the other thing. Um, so how can we explain this? I mean, so it's, it's just, it seems, because the ideas aren't, aren't really doing the driving here. It's, it's the tribalism. Uh, it's the people, you know, they might feel really strong about the one issue and then they fall in with a group, uh, who feel strongly about that issue. And then they

• 32:42Speaker 00

  have all these other commitments. And in order to remain like in, in the good graces of, of this group. People have to, in some belief, in all of the other orthogonal issues that are popular, or that people tend to take a particular position on within their network.

• 33:02Chris Williamson?

  And that can continue to go further and further toward the extreme and drag other people with it. And I guess this is where you get sort of silent majorities. Brett Weinstein, or Eric Weinstein, had a wonderful point about this, where he said, "The problem with the left at the moment is that the moderate left is allowing the extreme left to do the work for them and not speaking up about it." Now, that is, silence is compliance with the extreme people on your side. Like, you can't expect people on the other side of the aisle to speak up for your point of view. That's not going to happen. But there is a gradation within your point of view, and that is where the people should be speaking up. Unless, of course, everyone's taken their point of view wholesale.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this is something that I think is so damaging about grandstanding, is that, like I said, we need people who are dissenters within their group to be able to speak up. There should be a low cost to asserting an unpopular belief, or to challenging the orthodoxy. Because when there is a low cost of doing so, so sorry, I'm again being academic. So what I mean is, when people are not...

• 34:13Speaker 00

  No, they don't. When it's safe for people to speak up and express doubt, they're more likely to do so. And the result is, people then get to engage with a challenge to their view. And what you emerge with, hopefully, is a more strongly justified belief, rather than just a comfortable orthodoxy that becomes what John Stuart Mill would call a dead dogma. So it's something that people believe, they forget why they believed it, but they're not going to question it.

• 34:42Chris Williamson?

  I love that, a dead dogma. Man, iron sharpens iron. That's why having good conversations is real important. What were some of the most extreme examples of grandstanding that you found? The one where someone tweeted that a two-year-old eaten by a crocodile shouldn't deserve sympathy because she was sick of white men's entitlement seemed a bit mental.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. So what this is like a kid got killed by an alligator. Oh, and then like, because like, I think there had been a shooting or something recently and people were like, oh, yeah, well, I mean, we're down on white people right now. So like, to the credit of the mob, like, this, this was seen as finally too far.

• 35:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay, all right. So that one was outside of the Overton window in terms of extremity.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, but within a certain group.

• 35:30Chris Williamson?

  Probably fine.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  It was like, great. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, white man. Yeah, time for some of these white men to get eaten by alligators, right?

• 35:37Chris Williamson?

  No, the white men, their two-year-old, two-year-old daughters.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, and their children. Yeah, too. Exactly. Right.

• 35:44Chris Williamson?

  What was some of the other ones? What was some of the more extreme or the extreme examples that you found?

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Gamergate is always a good one for this. So this was, this is still very difficult for me to explain, because I think this is like, one of the first like nerd culture things that became sort of mainstream and it was just like not explained very well. But this is basically like, people started getting worked up about two things, about both kind of cozy relationships between game publishers and game critics. So that like, the reviews were just sort of like industry pieces about like, why this is a great thing and you need it. But also about games becoming too political. So, you know, games like shoehorning

• 36:33Speaker 00

  in representation of trans characters or like lesbian characters or things like this. Anyway, a feminist media critic kind of called attention to a lot of like, the toxic responses from people who didn't like the politics. At least, I'm going to get emails now of people correcting me. No, that's not what it's about. It's really about ethics.

• 36:55Chris Williamson?

  The internet corrects everyone, Justin. We're here to be corrected.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know it. But anyway, so I mean, people were sending her death threats, just like, you know,

• 37:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Like, everyone's calling her a bitch online and, you know, saying she needs to get raped. You know, she's Anita Sarkeesian, she's collected all of these like horrible responses. And, you know, so how do you explain this? It's not all grandstanding, right? Some of it is actually just people being crazy and like psychos. But, you know, you can see why for someone in a certain community, the thing to do is express like extreme disdain for this person who is a threat to their cherished beliefs about what video games should be, something like this. So, so, yeah, so it's like a high status move within that group to come up with like the most misogynistic thing or whatever to say to this woman.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  And so as a result, you get these like horrible pylons, where, you know, someone has stepped out of line, it's time, you know, at least within our group to to correct them.

• 37:59Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't the, wasn't it like the lawyer from a big TV company had tweeted after the Las Vegas shooting saying that 847 people have been injured, 120 people have been killed, but most people that listen to country music are gun-toting Republican hicks, so I don't really care.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, right. So this is another one that finally went too far. But, yeah, there are still people, it was a viral treat, people like this, right? Because it was like, like, I mean, okay, finally, someone willing to say what the rest of us are thinking. This group is so bad and they want everyone to have guns anyway, they should get killed by by the guns. So, yeah, this is, this is like moral talk run amok, right? So the thing that we point out, the reason we talk about these crazy examples is that we think people have this this kind of naive view that whenever someone is talking about justice or whenever someone, someone is talking about like what people deserve, anything that that sounds like social justicey or or forget, you know,

• 39:03Speaker 00

  it's not like it's a right-left issue, anything that sounds like it's about morality, people think like, oh, Well, this person, like, their heart is in the right place. Like, even if they're wrong, they're trying to, like, say something important here. And it's not always that way, right? So people can actually, you can give a moral evaluation of the way people use moral talk. And this is what we're doing when we talk about grandstanding. We're saying, like, "Look, you can actually think critically about the way people are using this practice." Right? And it's easiest to see when it's someone going off the deep end and talking about how kids should get killed and things like that. But it can also happen, just with everyday, ordinary speech, when people are using it to look good rather than to do

• 39:47Speaker 00

  good. And that's what they're doing with their grandstanding.

• 39:50Chris Williamson?

  Is grandstanding a moral problem, then?

• 39:54Speaker 00

  It is. Yeah. So we give arguments from every major moral theory. So we point out that grandstanding has bad consequences. Some people think morality is all about the consequences of actions. And if that's your view, you should be really worried about the polarization that we've talked about with grandstanding, about people becoming really cynical about morality and people just, you know, feeling outrage exhaustion. Like, "Oh, God, I just can't, you know, everything's outrageous all the time. I can't do it anymore. I can't tell what, like, is actually outrageous." And so it all stops working. There are also

• 40:34Speaker 00

  arguments that we give about respect. So we say, for instance, that one of the things people do when they grandstand, again, is, like, pick a target, right? And use that person as, like, a display model, or it's like, "No one's, you know, no one needs this thing. Can just beat the hell out of it just to show everyone, you know, a demonstration of our moral credentials." And, you know, it doesn't matter, right? But of course, it does matter. You're not supposed to treat people that way. And even if they deserve it, right? Even if they've done something bad, like, first of all, you're probably going to go too far. Mob, mobs are not known for their restraint. And you're also just going to be on the lookout for opportunities to beat people up like this. So to use people

• 41:19Speaker 00

  as an opportunity to showcase how good you are. And then finally, we give some arguments about moral virtue.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  My favorite of these is we draw on this philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Some of your listeners may be familiar with it, and we say, "Look, people like a challenge." So Nietzsche says, "We all have something he calls the will to power." So we all hate obstacles in a way, because they're in the way of us getting what we want. But we also need them, because we need that satisfaction that we get from overcoming an obstacle, beating a challenge. So, you know, we all have opportunities to do this in all areas of our life. We can actually do something that's a real achievement. We can do really well at work.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  We can hit a new personal record in the gym, whatever else. We can also kind of make up a challenge that's just sort of invented for the purpose of us achieving something. And this is sort of like a cheat. And this is what people do with grandstanding. We think they act as if it's an achievement to say something morally charged that shows what a good person they are. But of course, this isn't a real achievement. It's actually just an abuse of morality. So morality is supposed to be about helping other people, being kind to them, about resolving important social problems.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  But what grandstanders do is they turn morality into just an opportunity to show other people how good they are and what an achievement for me to have such pure moral beliefs. But this is an empty achievement, and it's actually kind of pathetic if you think about it that way.

• 43:11Chris Williamson?

  Man, this weaponizing of the... Something which at its core should be really, really virtuous is really worrying, and we're seeing it a lot at the moment. Moving into an area that I know sweet fuck all about, why is grandstanding a particular problem in politics?

• 43:38Chris Williamson?

  Because I can talk about the way that someone perhaps should maximize their own agency in life and use their sovereign will to become the things that they can be. I just, I haven't started to draw that perspective out to kind of the collective. And I found it really interesting that you guys did discuss how grandstanding acts as a problem in politics.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Sure. So, um, politics is heavily moralized now. Everyone wants to see that their politicians have good character. This isn't really new again, but now I think it's, it's probably even more common because people like to feel like they have this personal relationship with their politicians, probably because of, of social media. So politicians have this strong incentive to show people how good they are. Now, that might be good, right? It's good for people to be informed. It's good for people to know what they're getting when they, they vote for someone.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  But again, just because someone says something doesn't mean that it actually is good information, right? Or that it sets up good incentives for them to actually do their job once they're in office. So, a couple of problems that come up here. One is that in democracies, we have kind of split representation of viewpoints in government. We need our representatives to be able to work together and compromise to give up, you know, something that's kind of on the periphery of what we care about in order to achieve a solution to the, the really big problem.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  So we need them to have a little bit of leeway, a little bit of flexibility. But once politicians start taking strong moral stances, because they're incentivized to do so. They lose some of this flexibility. They are expected then not to give an inch. And because of this, they can't then work together and give up a little to get a lot. Right? So instead, you know, we see this especially in the States right now, where at least our last couple of presidents have governed by executive order because it's such a popular position in among legislators to say, you know, I'm not working with those

• 46:04Speaker 00

  people. They're corrupt. And if you do, it's again, chum in the water, right? Because you're the black sheep. Everybody sees you're not reliable. You seem not principled because you're willing to compromise. And so this is really dangerous, right? So it makes democracy really dysfunctional. The other thing that happens so much in politics is that if you turn like political action into a morality pageant, you create incentives for politicians to look like they're doing something really morally good, that people can see immediately their heart is in the right place, even if it turns out for, you know, complicated like nerdy reasons,

• 46:49Speaker 00

  it doesn't work. Right? So effectively then politicians start to propose what we call expressive policies. So these are policies that on the face of it, sound really good. They make it clear, well, at least if the person's sincere, that the person proposing the policy, their heart is in the right place. They care a lot about the issue, but they don't actually work. So all they end up doing is being a symbolic gesture. So a good example of this is rent control. Every economist recognizes rent control does not work. It does not actually-

• 47:23Chris Williamson?

  What is rent control?

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Rent control is setting a limit on how much landlords can can raise the price of rent, basically on putting a ceiling on what people end up paying for rent. So I mean, what could be bad about that? Right? It sounds great. Like you look at your lease, you're like, I wish that number was lower. And rent control promises to give you that very thing. But the problem is, when, and you see this over and over again in cities that have imposed rent control, the result is a shortage in affordable housing, which is exactly the opposite of what we're supposed to get, but for complicated reasons, at least, you know,

• 48:04Speaker 00

  sort of complicated reasons, landlords, you know, then see rent, see, you know, housing developments and investing in, you know, making places, you know, good places to live, they see this as not a good investment, right? Because the return is limited by their rent control policy. So at least in the long term, what you get is no more new housing, crumbling old housing, and people rushing to fill, you know, the affordable spaces. So you get somewhere like New York City, where people have lived there for like 80 years or something, or are lying about, you know, still living there when it's their great aunt or something that is on a lease and it's just like gifted it to them. You

• 48:48Speaker 00

  get people like this, having their, you know, $300 a month apartment subsidized by people who have just moved there, paying like, you know, $3,000 a month or whatever. So, back to politics, I mean, the incentive for politicians is not to like go through all of this because it's really boring, right? For most people who just want to pay lower rent, the incentive is for them to make people feel like finally, someone is addressing my needs, they're doing something about, something I need addressed. And so you get these policies that sound good and don't work.

• 49:24Chris Williamson?

  I identified a problem with Sargon of Akkad a few weeks ago about Joe Biden's response, where he flip flopped from saying that the travel ban from China at the beginning of COVID was xenophobic and racist and some other words, and then two and a half months later said that Trump had done it too late. This, to me, this entire situation, and that as a particularly simple example.

• 49:55Chris Williamson?

  Is so worrying because politicians should be the best of us. They should be the most virtuous, the most truthful with the most transparency. They should be held to the highest levels of rigor. They should be the most precise with their speech. Everything should be fact checked. Everything should be right. Well, that that doesn't follow on from the thing that you said before. Whereas when things are simply said for effect right now, there is, I can't trust what comes out of people's mouths. And unfortunately, as you identified with social media, the people at the top of the tree are examples for those further down it. And if in an increasingly politicized society at the moment, people are taking that to be, well,

• 50:36Chris Williamson?

  Joe Biden, presidential candidate, Democratic nominee. If he's able to flip flop around his sort of points of view, then why can't I weaponize my points of view? And I, I don't want to live in a world where people lie. Ideally, I'd have everyone read, take the red pill online and read Sam Harris's book and never lie. At least I'd know where I fucking stand. But in this situation, it seems like as long as the, as long as the recourse isn't greater. It's like a mathematical equation. If recourse isn't greater than moral outcome. And there's an if function of like, is not too conservative, then okay to get away with.

• 51:21Chris Williamson?

  Like, you know, it's like a weird sort of gated beast of computer code. But I don't want, I don't want the politicians to be able to say stuff and, and not be, not be called out for it, man, at all.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's right. So we do want to hold people to account. The worry is that the incentive is not good for them when they're held to a median account. So here's something no one wants to hear when they're upset about something. We don't have all the information yet. We, we need to look into this and then, you know, do some investigating, figure out what actually happened. And then we'll figure out what to do. Because if you say that, the people who are like screaming for blood immediately, like they, they want a solution right now, will be really mad. Right, so, you know, we see this problem with politicians as primarily one about incentives. So we get what we ask for from politicians in a democracy.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  So if what we want is just to be comforted, to be reassured that the people in power are good, we'll get these irresponsible moral proclamations, rather than people being willing to take a little heat and take their time and do their job right, in ways that we won't immediately recognize as them doing their job right.

• 52:43Chris Williamson?

  How do we fix this? Big problem, lots of layers to it. There's political implications, there's personal implications. I'm really, really concerned about self-deception, wildly concerned about self-deception, because I think that that restricts an individual sovereign agency over themselves, which is really, really pernicious. So what do we do? Can you fix it for us?

• 53:08Speaker 00

  I can't, right? I can tell you how to help fix it. So, the most tempting thing to do here, probably, for most people, is you want to pick up this book, Grandstanding, and figure out how to find these grandstanders and go after them and humiliate them, make them stop it. Call them out. But that is exactly the thing that you should not do.

• 53:31Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 53:33Speaker 00

  So for one thing, it won't work. It will just be turned right around on you. People will say, "Well, actually, you're grandstanding." First of all, because people will think any use of moral terms at all now is grandstanding, which is not good, and that is not our view, by the way. But also because they want to defend the person in their tribe, right? Or the person they agree with, and they don't want to be called grandstanders themselves. Another reason not to do this is you're giving the grandstander exactly what they want. They want... Public discourse to be about how good they are. So if you start calling them out for grandstanding, like, oh, that's very interesting. Let's talk about whether I'm a good person. That's, you know, that sounds like a great thing for us to be arguing about. Right? So, so that's no good.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  So what we say instead is you should treat this problem as an opportunity to examine your own behavior. So what you should do about other, other people you think, you think they're grandstanding is just ignore them. Right? Because ignoring someone you think is grandstanding is probably no worse than, than just like not being on social media at all, which is not bad. But what you can do is when you're about to contribute to some political discussion, ask yourself, am I trying to do good here? Or am I just trying to look good? So to give a slightly more fine grained test you can run. You can say, okay, let me imagine I say this thing. I type out this like, you know, 3,000 word post or whatever.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  And then suppose I learn, you know, a day later, nobody really cared about me at all. They didn't think anything better of me because of this. I failed to like impress them. Would I be disappointed? Or, or would I instead be comfortable like, well, you know, at least someone saw something important morally. Right? Because if you would be disappointed that you didn't get anything for yourself, you were probably grandstanding. You were motivated to say that thing because you wanted recognition. And that's precisely the thing that you should avoid doing.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  So, uh, in other words, you know, you should take this book as an opportunity to examine your own behavior. And if you don't like what you see, maybe sit one out. Right?

• 55:51Chris Williamson?

  Self policing.

• 55:54Chris Williamson?

  When there are so many group incentives to go along with the group. I mean, the solution is to sell 7.9 billion copies of Grandstanding, which I'm sure that you would be fantastic.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  I think that sounds ideal, Chris.

• 56:09Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, I know. Everyone, everyone wins. Use the affiliate link in the, in the show notes below, please, because I can retire along with you. We can just.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Good.

• 56:16Chris Williamson?

  Cayman Islands, just grandstanding to fuck on the top of the, the new plane that we bought.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Hell, yeah.

• 56:23Chris Williamson?

  But. Like, that's a good way for the people that are listening who are reasonable, intelligent human beings that want to try and make themselves and discourse better. But that doesn't actually get at the group think problem that we've got going on here. Are you hoping that simply by not giving them our attention that they're going to stop doing it? That seems a little short sighted.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  Well, I am taking the long view here, so it probably looks short sighted. But here's what I think. So imagine you did that, right? Imagine like you wrote out a big. Look, to be honest with you, I've done this. I've like, I've engaged in grandstanding. It's just a human thing. It does not feel good when you like, take a stab at it and you get no attention at all. Right? So the thinking here is that if enough of us start to ignore this attention seeking behavior, it will come to be seen as embarrassing.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  So an example that we give in the book is think of, or look into, because people generally don't know about this. Look at medieval dining etiquette guides. So there are actually books in the Middle Ages about how to behave at the table. And it's things like, don't blow your nose in the tablecloth. Don't pick up a bone off the serving dish and like gnaw on it and then put it back on every, you know, the food everybody else is going to eat. It's stuff that's like, what the fuck? Like, what were these people doing? Why did they have to be told any of this in a book? By the way, that like only educated people are going to read.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  So it's like unthinkable that any of this was ever normal behavior, but apparently it was. So the, the hope is like, as crazy as it sounded then, like to get people like, stop blowing their nose in the tablecloth. Maybe, maybe that's the position we're in now with grandstanding. Like the norms just haven't yet caught up to the social conditions and they can. So people, people will come to see it as like really gauche to engage in moral grandstanding. Right? It'll be seen as shameful, you know, the sort of thing where like you see, you know, your, your partner doing it at a dinner party or something like, okay, we need, we need to go home. Like you've had enough, right?

• 58:46Chris Williamson?

  That's enough wine, Justin. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, Zach. Yeah. So, you know, it's not very satisfying, but what we need is for these good norms to emerge. And I, in the long run, at least, I'm hopeful. So if grandstanding doesn't destroy the world first, I think we will get there.

• 59:02Chris Williamson?

  So here's, here's a little conception that I was playing around with recently. I think that the people who are the funniest critics and have created the framework that grandstanders go through, I'm thinking the James Lindseys of this world, the Douglas Murrays, the Andrew Doyle's of this world, they have weaponized ridicule and insight to counteract this. Now, it's all well and good us saying, right, I'm just gonna, you know, you want my fucking attention, mate. I'm not giving it to you. We can chill out. What you need to do is also

• 59:41Chris Williamson?

  have a, that is the, how would you say, that is the guy who is getting shot with paintballs and has a full metal suit on and just doesn't engage in the game. But what you also need are a couple of nuclear warheads who can go in and completely decimate the battlefield and make it so toxic for anyone to go into that area again. Perfect example of this, think of the word woke.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 1:00:10Chris Williamson?

  The word woke now has been flipped on its head, the same way as the N-word got flipped in reverse, woke has been flipped on its head again, right? Progressive now is almost a term of, like, an insult to call someone a progressive. Like, it's kind of, it brings up these, which is stupid, right? Because people have tons of progressive views about all sorts of things.

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  And it'll flip back eventually, too.

• 1:00:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's, was it Goethe that says about we vacillate between different extremes? No, it wasn't. It was someone else with a weird name, some other sort of Germany philosopher, saying that we vacillate between extremes of society and then we kind of end up falling into the middle. I can't remember who it was. But yeah, people like Douglas Murray, people like Andrew Doyle with his Titani McGrath account and his Jarvis Dupont account and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And particularly people like James Lindsay, I think, past guest on this show, wonderful dude, who has the playbook. Of what's going to happen because when he can show you that he knows what that person's going to do, say, think next before they do say or think it, you actually go-

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  He knows their view better than they do themselves.

• 1:01:21Chris Williamson?

  Holy shit. This guy, this guy isn't playing in Matrix. He's playing in source code. He's playing, do you know what I mean? Like he's got, he's got the CSS terminal up and he's bootstrapped himself into what's going on. Here's another thing as well that I thought when reading Grandstanding that I thought was really interesting. I don't think that everybody should be allowed to express an opinion on the internet. I think that previously, I think that-

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  There needs to be at the very least like an over 70 internet.

• 1:01:57Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. I just think that the world previously, in order to be able to publish your work online and have lots and lots of people see it, you had to have justification for that to happen. There shouldn't be a reason that any Karen or Keith can say a thing which is sufficiently X. Pick your reason that clout occurs sufficiently outrageous or insulting or racist or homophobic or progressive or conservative or whatever it might be. And it be seen by a couple of hundred thousand or a couple of million people. That is not

• 1:02:36Chris Williamson?

  the way, the human brain is not designed to consume the entire world's news instantly. It's too much information, both incoming to the people that have to see what Karen O'Keefe just wrote, and it's too little friction for people to be able to get their thoughts out. People are too detached from the words that they write and the effect that they have, which leads them to be able to say stuff. That they wouldn't usually, like the number of times that

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:03:05Chris Williamson?

  The ultimate answer to most things, most insults is would you say that to my face? Like, of course you wouldn't. And then look at the, the particular instance that we saw with the lady that was sat down in that restaurant last week in America. Like, would you say?

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  They did say it to her.

• 1:03:23Chris Williamson?

  Would you say it to my face? Yes, but only if you've got 150 friends with you.

• 1:03:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

• 1:03:29Chris Williamson?

  Who are also saying it, you know?

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Chris Williamson?

  So all of this stuff compiled together and the desire for status and this increasing sense of sort of melancholy and loneliness that people have. This lack of grand connection to the, the natural world, which gives us a sense of perspective about how little and insignificant we are. And a meritocracy, which inevitably means that if the winners are virtuous and justified with their successes, that the people who don't have successes are losers and they. Matt, I, it doesn't surprise me that this has happened. It makes sense that we've got ourselves to this stage. But as you say, being morally outspoken is not in itself an achievement. And that is the, that's the fucking synopsis to this book. Being morally outspoken is not in itself an achievement. So stop saying that it is. Stop thinking that it is.

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  That's right, man. Let me say one thing about, about the titanium McGraths of, of the world and, and James Lindsay. So I mean, I, look, my view is that like, this actually might be my, my most unpopular belief, but like absolutely anything can be funny. If, if the person is like talented enough. So, uh, so I'm a big fan of this podcast, Come Town, which I think is like, you know, exemplifies this. This MO of like, absolutely anything can be funny if, if you're funny enough. So there are people who are actually really good at, at going after and shaming grandstanders. And look, you know, norms are really complicated. I don't have like a full view about how they develop.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  You probably do need some people who, who are enforcers. But for every, so here, here's what I'll say about this though. That behavior is often emulated by people who are not very good at it. So for every like actually funny titanium McGrath post. If you look at the replies, it's full of like devastatingly unfunny, like cringey replies of people who think they're doing it too, and they suck at it. So it's, it's like, it's okay, right? You know, I mean, so this is like. People, people like moral rules to be like one size fits all, you know, they, they want to feel like, well, why is it okay for them? But I can't do it. It's like, cause you're not fucking funny, man.

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  Like, so, so I, I think it is still probably like good general advice. Uh, and you know, even if people were good at it, we don't want people doing that all the time. Like, cause you also need people who are like polite and, um, you know, good at building bridges.

• 1:05:57Chris Williamson?

  Society if everyone was Andrew Doyle, man. Jesus.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. And then it probably actually wouldn't even be funny because the shtick would get worn out like so quickly. But, but yeah, I mean, yeah, I, I, but I do, I do, I do still think like, it's just not a good general turn for us to start like all policing each other. At least about things, uh, things like grandstanding. Um, so moral criticism, really important, um, even fitting, even when it's, it's like done badly sometimes. But, uh, I, I think, uh, the general, the general response, uh, to this probably should be humility, uh, rather than, than going after other people, as fun as it might be.

• 1:06:43Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more. The self deception thing, I just want to finish on that because

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Chris Williamson?

  I think it's really, really, really important. And again, like it's the most, it's the scariest part of all of this for me.

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Chris Williamson?

  And upon realizing all of the different layers that our evolution has left in us. That means that we really, really are significantly unconscious about why we do so many of the things that we do. With regards to reciprocal altruism, or why we're attracted or disattracted to our partner and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, the murky waters of stepping into your own programming and choosing your wants and desires carefully is made worse. When you allow people to weaponize morality and you start to go along with it. Like our job should be, should be to try and see our desires and the way that we operate as transparently as possible, as far as I'm concerned.

• 1:07:39Chris Williamson?

  You want to live a, a life which is very consciously designed because there's a ton of stuff which you really, really don't want. And if you're not careful, you'll end up in a place not only that you didn't mean to get to, but you don't want to be. And yet, if you are too

• 1:07:58Chris Williamson?

  at the mercy of group think and this kind of moral grandstanding, you make the waters murkier rather than clearer. That's my thought. What were you gonna say?

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I tend to agree with you. So I find a lot of like the evolutionary psychology stuff kind of unsettling for the same reasons like I, you know, nobody likes to especially to be told. You know, you think you're in the driver's seat here, but like actually there it's like your lizard brain, you know, it's like these deep seated impulses that you're completely unaware of. I think, so I think, I guess I agree with you that up to a point, it's it's good to like be in control and actually aware of what you're doing. And it's an important part of like being an autonomous human being. But there are also like things about us, like there's a reason we are this way.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  Right? So it is an adaptive trait still for for us to engage in a little bit of self deception. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, reiterating it like, it is, I think, good to be in control of your life and not just a complete slave to your impulses and things that are beneath your subconscious.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  But it's also an impossible goal to chase complete, complete awareness and control. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I didn't think you.

• 1:09:21Chris Williamson?

  I agree. I think that's, I think that's actually a really good point that I haven't considered. And I think it's partly because I'm swimming in Eve psych at the moment. So I'm like, just, I don't have, I have such little faith in my own constitution because of it. But you are right. It is an adaptive trait and having faith that the wisdom of whatever, a couple of 10,000 generations or whatever of humans or 1,000 generations, you know, 10,000, 10,000 generation of humans, 250,000 ish, round about, right?

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Chris Williamson?

  Some of the stuff, despite the fact we're in a new environment and all the rest of it, like there's some things that are still going to be effective. So actually, I really, I really like that, man. That's a good, that's a good little sort of reversal to, to the things that I've been thinking about recently. Dude, it's been, it's been, it's been really, really fun.

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, man.

• 1:10:21Chris Williamson?

  The book, Grandstanding, will be linked in the show notes below. Any other stuff that you want to drive people to? Any other places on the internet that they should go to check out your stuff?

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, you can follow me on Twitter or my co-author Brandon Warmke. We're easy to find. We will, we'll post our op-ads and other public things there if you want to follow our work. So we're still working on Grandstanding stuff. We're doing a lot of empirical work now, testing some of the speculative but well-founded, of course, claims that we make in the book. And, you know, so far, we're just right about everything. So.

• 1:10:56Chris Williamson?

  Don't you love it when that happens?

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  Dude, it's great. Yeah, it's so satisfying. Philosophers, we mostly just, just like make things up and make it untestable. But like for this project, Brandon and I are like, no, let's, let's like engage with reality and like put ourselves out there. And like it's working so far. So.

• 1:11:11Chris Williamson?

  I hope it keeps on working, dude.

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  Thanks, man.

• 1:11:14Chris Williamson?

  Thanks so much for your time.

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  Hey, thank you.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

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