JOSH: Hello and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, the podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with Michael Vassar about preference falsification and conspiratorial thinking, public outlooks towards justice, conflict theory versus mistake theory, and postmodernism and dominance.

SPENCER: Michael, welcome. It's great to have you here.

MICHAEL: Nice to meet you again.

SPENCER: As our listeners are about to find out, you are a very complex thinker, and my goal is to guide them through your thinking and help them understand your ideas. So I'm excited to have you here, and I thought maybe we could start talking about preference falsification. If that sounds good to you.

MICHAEL: So this is one of those ideas which everyone knows about before someone comes along and gives it a name, but we're all appreciative of the person who gives it a name anyway and happy to give it their name. So I learned the jargon from Timur Kuran, who was the speaker on Eric Weinstein's portal. This is the idea that throughout a society, there are all sorts of things which we all claim to believe and that practically none of us, except maybe some small children, actually do believe, and some things that we all claim to prefer or want that many fewer of us want as well.

SPENCER: So why is it so common that people falsify their preferences?

MICHAEL: I guess the other part of the preference falsification idea is that when there is a sufficiently large power shift in society, people en masse change their position and claim to have had the other position all along. You can imagine very easy and obvious cases. If you are saying that you think that Marxist-Leninist theory is basically sound in McCarthy-era America, you'll get in trouble. And if you think that Ricardo's classical economics is sound in the former Soviet Union, you'll get in trouble. In a more recent, very obvious example, there were people who were reaching out to the FBI and trying to cause trouble for Jeffrey Epstein, and this caused trouble for them, or trying to write journalistic articles about Jeffrey Epstein, and this caused trouble for them. But if someone were to speak out in favor of Jeffrey Epstein, now that would also cause trouble for them. There are many situations where society will defend one position, either a position of ignorance when ignorance is not a tenable hypothesis, or an active position that is not really tenable if investigated, and threaten people and silence them, preventing them from being able to have a podium with which to present their position. There was a Netflix movie not too long ago called Manhunt: Unabomber, which basically took the position that the Unabomber was subject to a certain sort of silencing, and that the government was trying to make sure that his case didn't go to trial because trials are basically a preference falsification opposition machine. They're a system for institutionalizing people's ability to present their position and demand that it be engaged with, represented by others, etc.

SPENCER: You're saying if he was able to bring it to trial, then he would be able to explain clearly his position in a way that would be hard to obfuscate.

MICHAEL: Yeah, that was the position of an excellent Netflix series based on an almost entirely fictionalized version of the Unabomber story, which, despite being almost entirely fictional, still qualifies as something like a much, much better The Silence of the Lambs with much worse acting.

SPENCER: So when people preference falsify, to what extent do you think that they realize they're doing it?

MICHAEL: I actually think it's much worse than either answer you might imagine, from a lot to not very much. I think that the unfortunate, extremely sad truth is that when people preference falsify a little bit, they have motivated cognition to be relatively less trusting of their senses and of their feelings, and motivated cognition to have lower expectations, kind of in general, and they have strong intuitions that there are things not to be curious about, things not to investigate.

SPENCER: So you're saying it sort of makes them not curious about their own thoughts because on some level, they're aware that if they get too curious about their own thoughts, they're going to have to admit that they believe something they're not allowed to believe. Is that the idea?

MICHAEL: Not just not curious about their own thoughts. Curious about areas of investigation. So there are certain areas of investigation that people are systematically incurious about in basically any preference falsification regime, namely areas of investigation that would lead to a better understanding of power dynamics, and especially of the power dynamics whereby people have false beliefs.

SPENCER: Well, it's if the emperor has no clothes, you don't actually want to believe the emperor has no clothes. Is that the idea?

MICHAEL: Yes, people very much do not want to believe that the emperor has no clothes. In the realistic version of the story, it does not go well for the boy and his family.

SPENCER: So they avoid looking in any area where they're going to discover the emperor naked.

MICHAEL: Yeah, the Chinese version of the story is called "Calling a Deer a Horse," where in the court of Xi Huang Di, or possibly his immediate successor, there is an aspiring, power-hungry advisor. The advisor brings a deer into the courtyard and is praising it as a horse. The people who don't join in the improv game of praising the horse he now knows are not ready to go along with him in his grab for power, so he has them all killed.

SPENCER: Wow. How common do you think preference falsification is in our society today?

MICHAEL: I think that when Paul Graham says that there are studies that show that 84% of Americans during the McCarthy era said they felt free to speak their mind, and only 60% of Americans today do, even though that's a terrible question and the growing methods are probably terrible, there's still probably a fairly high level of homogeneity in the ways in which those things are terrible. So we can say in a comparative sense, it's maybe twice as common, or two to three times as common as in what we think of as the darkest days of the Cold War.

SPENCER: What do you attribute that to?

MICHAEL: Fundamentally, I attribute this to phenomena which, by their nature, people would be reluctant to acknowledge or digest, if I was going to talk about it in any but the most abstract ways, because pinning themselves down puts them in danger to some degree. So let me try. In 2019, I believe, was the first year where corporate profits were approximately equal to the total income of the bottom earning half of the US population, and the top earning half of the population's total income was much larger than either corporate profits or the bottom half of the population. By 2000, we were in a regime where virtually everyone who does not have extremely specific, extremely verifiable abilities, like a hotshot surgeon, is dependent on radical, constant preference falsification of their overall way of understanding how the world works in order to hold on to a job that continues to make more than the median income.

SPENCER: Are you talking about falsifying political views, because it would be ostracized?

MICHAEL: It's more general than falsifying political views. Psychology is where you get the cleanest data about preference falsification. Hypnosis drew my attention by the time I was six or seven as a subject that everyone was familiar with in a surface way, and that everyone who looked into it a little could tell that the scientific consensus was that there is a real phenomenon here, but also that the science has failed to make much sense of this phenomenon over about 200 some years.

SPENCER: Presumably, you're not talking about stage hypnosis. You're talking about hypnosis with a therapist, right?

MICHAEL: The whole thing. It is one phenomenon, or at least it's generally believed to be the same phenomenon, whether it's stage hypnosis or hypnosis with a therapist.

SPENCER: I guess I take stage hypnosis as the hypnotist being able to get someone so comfortable that they're willing to do things in public that they wouldn't normally be willing to do, plus really good screening ability at choosing the right people who are willing to do that. What do you think about that?

MICHAEL: The screening ability is real and important, and getting people comfortable is almost assuming the answer that seems like a euphemistic way of concealing a blind spot, not an explanation.

SPENCER: You're saying basically the ability to, quote, get someone comfortable in front of a room full of people doing something that normally would be humiliating, is itself the technique, just sort of another way of saying what they're doing, is that right?

MICHAEL: When you say that you're getting people comfortable in front of a whole group of people in a way that would otherwise be humiliating, you're invoking concepts like comfort and humiliation that we have an understanding of emotionally and intuitively, but that we have a strong disposition not to inquire into. We're invoking concepts that we normally don't think much about, exactly what's going on. What do we mean by humiliation? What exactly is the nature of a fear in front of a large group of people? What does it mean to be comfortable? There are places where you could go to investigate, like the book Moral Mazes, which is very heavily about making people feel comfortable. But people normally don't investigate, just as they normally don't read Erikson or investigate hypnosis from the many fairly credible sources that tell them that it's very worth investigating.

SPENCER: My experience is when you try to zoom in on a topic like that, comfort or forgiveness or something like this, it kind of explodes in complexity, and you realize that there's just a tremendous amount going on underneath the surface.

MICHAEL: So a game like Go may have very, very simple rules, but it may have great complexity. If no one was going to explain the rules or the objective of the game, you might have to watch for a long time before you knew what was going on.

SPENCER: So you are saying, once you dig deep enough, the thing simplifies again. There's all this surface complexity, but actually it's just based on a small set of premises that produce the whole phenomenon.

MICHAEL: I feel like I am still missing a set of phenomena related to individual violence. I'm still personally ignorant of a lot of the psychology relating to individual one-on-one violence, but I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of social psychology now, as an integrated subject.

SPENCER: Can you explain some of what you've learned about such psychology tests?

MICHAEL: Have you heard of the idea of a double bind in Gregory Bateson?

SPENCER: I don't think so.

MICHAEL: Okay, let's do it with psychopathology. It's what people normally start with. I think a really striking thing about psychology is that we have an enormous amount of descriptions of abnormal behavior, and we also have a lot of descriptions of normative behavior. Bayesian behavior is relatively normative, and we have data that suggests that some of the abnormal behavior is relatively normative, like schizophrenics are better Bayesian updaters than non-schizophrenics, but we have an extreme shortage of a comprehensive explanation of normal behavior, or a comprehensive characterization of normal behavior. To some degree, we make serious attempts to comprehensively characterize child psychology. It's not that normal behavior is super diverse and complicated. Children's behavior is super diverse and complicated too.

SPENCER: So do you link this to preference falsification?

MICHAEL: I think normal behavior, just plain, is the same thing as preference falsification, not minor preference falsification that we were talking about earlier, that might lead to autism, but major preference falsification, preference falsification that is so total that one ceases to have beliefs as you and I might imagine, a belief at all.

SPENCER: In that view, what is driving that? Is it social cohesion, trying to fit in with the culture and not be ostracized?

MICHAEL: That is, in fact, central, but that applies to the normal autistic behavior too. It's social cohesion plus the inability to create a cohesion between one's own story of what is going on in one's life and the stories that other people will accept.

SPENCER: Could you unpack that a little bit?

MICHAEL: The normal behavior and double binds. So there's an anthropologist named Gregory Bateson, who was married to Margaret Mead back in the day, and who later in the 50s was known for his psychological theory that schizophrenia was caused by people being put in a situation where they were unable to reconcile directly conflicting demands or bring attention to the fact that the demands were conflicting. And I'm pretty sure that this is a theory that is distorted in some way from his actual theory. We could use the word preference falsification, but I actually feel like it's not quite the right word. Conspiracy theory seems a little bit better. Because technically, if you're saying that people are given irreconcilable demands and prevented from bringing attention to the fact that those demands are reconcilable, you're saying that people are conspiring against people, and that conspiring against people is the cause of schizophrenia and makes them paranoid. And around a decade later, Julian Jaynes creates the theory of the bicameral mind, which suggests that schizophrenia is related to this strange situation of dissociation between God and body. But schizophrenia is an incredibly open basket category, and it seems to a very large number of people that it's kind of unlikely that schizophrenia refers to one thing at all.

SPENCER: It seems some of it might be related to brain damage. Other factors might be genetics. Other factors might be psychological.

MICHAEL: Because it's a sort of basket category, it's also a natural place for people to project publicly unacceptable thoughts. You can say that schizophrenics think this, rather than saying that I think this. Julian Jaynes comes across as pretty weird when he says that ancient Greeks thought the gods were talking to them directly all the time, controlling their actions. He seems somewhat weirder when he says schizophrenics still think that the gods are talking to them and controlling their actions some of the time. But he would come across as much weirder still if he were to say that almost everyone thinks the gods are talking to them all the time and controlling all of their actions. That would be a really politically unacceptable thought, or socially unacceptable thought that people would not find interesting, and we would never have heard of Julian Jaynes. I'm not saying that that's a true thought. I'm also not saying that Julian Jaynes's model is true. I think the hemispheres thing is definitely not mostly true, and the other stuff is really complicated, speculative, and vague, but Bateson's theory about schizophrenia, that it's caused by the inability to reconcile demands, seems to imply a theory that there is systematic work to prevent information from being shared, to prevent it from being elaborated or clarified. What the demands are, and Bateson is. I think basically there's no way to interpret Bateson as not directly claiming that in many cases, at least the preoccupations of schizophrenics are not mysterious, but that the psychiatrists are coordinating to pretend that their preoccupations are mysterious. Given that Bateson was writing in the 1950s at a time when electroshock therapy was very common and where lobotomy was still pretty common, and where almost 1% of the white American population was psychiatrically institutionalized at any given time, which turned out not to be necessary, because that's not the case today, not even close. There's a fair amount of reason on priors to think that there was some level of large-scale coordination by the psychiatric community. If you look at the blog of Scott Alexander, which can be viewed through archives via the Internet Archive, and find his papers about "My IRB Nightmare".

SPENCER: That's an incredible article about how hard it is to run a study in a hospital.

MICHAEL: I think it's more than how hard it is. It's an article about the existence within hospitals of somewhat spontaneous large-scale coordination to prevent someone from running a study.

SPENCER: Yeah, it's fascinating how he tries. In that article, he keeps talking about how he's trying to do the right thing, to run the study, trying to do the obvious thing, so they can make progress on an important scientific topic. It's almost as though the system is designed to make that impossible.

MICHAEL: Yes, it's almost as if the system was designed in real time, on the fly, in response to Scott's efforts to make it impossible for him in particular. That seems like the natural interpretation of the article that they actually hired people who were not legally licensed to evaluate IRBs in order to maintain a little Potemkin village for him. Doesn't that seem like, in light of the parts of the article where he says that the people who reviewed the thing were not actually licensed to view it? Doesn't that seem like it's what happened?

SPENCER: So you're saying, if he was a conspiratorial thinker whose mind went in that direction, he might think, well, the world is conspiring to prevent me from running the study. It singled me out in some way, right?

MICHAEL: I'm saying that to be as non-conspiratorial a thinker as Scott Alexander is to be willfully involved in a conspiracy. It's not actually a possible interpretation of what happened to not think that the world was conspiring against him. Scott writes about conflict theory and mistake theory and presents himself as incredibly strongly committed to a mistake theory of the world, which is an anti-conspiracy theory, the theory that nothing is a conspiracy. But he acknowledges that a very large amount of political thought, like all political thought, is more conflict-oriented, more conspiracy-oriented, than his own thoughts. He is acknowledging himself as an extreme outlier of non-conspiratorial thinking. I'm saying that any normal person would think that there was a conspiracy against them to prevent them from doing that study. The study was investigating kidnapping and drugging people who had not been diagnosed as schizophrenic or bipolar because people were, in fact, being diagnosed with a piece of paper that says, do not use this for diagnosis, and then involuntarily incarcerated and drugged. I think that, and lied to, and fraud, he was actually investigating an extremely large number of acts of extremely serious crimes, and in a situation where you are investigating an extremely large number of acts of extremely serious crimes, even when you are going along with the pretense that the people who are committing these crimes did not know they were committing crimes and were not intending it, and that they just somehow ended up in this weird state where they're committing these crimes, which is probably true, the natural thing to think is that people are going to try to prevent you from uncovering that.

SPENCER: So if we bring this back to the thread of everyday life. How would you tie that into the typical experience of a typical person?

MICHAEL: I think that the key point is that is a fairly typical experience of a fairly typical person, who is primarily atypical with respect to his profound commitment to not believing in conspiracies.

SPENCER: So Scott is a mistake theorist, which means he believes that we're all engineers trying to engineer society to be as good as possible. We might have disagreements about the best way to engineer society, but through debate, we can come up with better solutions, as opposed to being a conflict theorist, which is someone who believes that largely, society is about zero-sum games, where some people are trying to get resources others have, and it's basically just fighting between political factions. Is that a fair description of those two ideas?

MICHAEL: Yes, that's a fair description of those two attitudes.

SPENCER: So then what you're saying, I think, is that Scott is unusually oriented towards being a mistake theorist, whereas most people are not. Clearly, a lot of society is not, so for Scott to say, "Well, I'm trying to do this thing, and the world keeps thwarting me," must be just because of inefficiency, is actually quite unusual, whereas most people would jump to "someone's trying to stop me from doing this."

MICHAEL: Yes, I'm saying that, but I'm saying something more. I'm saying that people were trying to stop him from doing this. I think that if he was in danger, if he had been psychiatrically institutionalized, his perception of the situation would have more or less immediately changed, and he would shift from seeing it as mistakes to seeing the same behavior as conflict. If someone was psychiatrically institutionalized and did not shift from seeing it as more or less mistakes to conflict, they would very predictably fail to get out of the psychiatric institution, while if someone did find themselves institutionalized and regarded it as a conflict and kept calm and tried to obey the paranoid delusions, they would probably succeed at getting out of the psychiatric institution.

SPENCER: Interesting, so you're saying if they said, "Well, this must be a misunderstanding. Clearly, someone made a mistake. I'm not supposed to be here. The institution has to be by accident," their behavior would be such that they would stay institutionalized effectively, whereas if they said, "Okay, clearly these people are out to get me, and they're trying to hold me here as long as possible. I'm just going to optimize around that," then you find a way, basically, to be let out.

MICHAEL: Yes, I'm saying that.

SPENCER: Let's bring this back to the people who might be trying to stop Scott Alexander from running that study. What do those people believe they're doing?

MICHAEL: So most of them try to believe that they are trying to help Scott Alexander keep out of trouble, and that the more information he reveals, the more in trouble he will be.

SPENCER: So you're saying it's not that they are trying to stop him, per se; they think of themselves as trying to protect him, and the net effect is that they're stopping him. Is that the idea?

MICHAEL: They believe that revealing information is dangerous and preventing someone from knowing things is morally obligatory upon all people, always, whenever those things relate to conflict. That's what conflict theorists think.

SPENCER: Got it. And so let's bring this back to people's everyday lives, right? Could you help us apply this?

MICHAEL: In people's everyday lives, very few people in any given society adopt heretical beliefs. Very few people in any given society try to act as if, for instance, Foucault's model of prison was more or less true, instead of the model of prison that we were taught as children.

SPENCER: Which is what, just to elaborate?

MICHAEL: I'm not going to try to explain Foucault in any conversation.

SPENCER: Okay, but what's the model of prison that we're taught?

MICHAEL: People are taught that there are courts and the courts are run by people who are trustworthy and are trying to be fair and implement the law in an impartial manner. And there are police, and they are more or less trying to be trustworthy and implement the law in an impartial manner. Most of us are trying to be trustworthy and implement the law in an impartial manner and trust the courts and trust the police. This does not explain why we try not to talk to the police and try to avoid the courts the way we mostly do, and that most of us are obeying the laws, and some people are not, so we have to punish them or something, because somehow that will either protect us or cause them to start obeying the laws. It's never really clear which, and we don't have an explanation for why we have to punish so many more people than other countries do.

SPENCER: It is really shocking and horrible, the statistics on how many people are incarcerated in the United States. What do you make of that?

MICHAEL: I note that way more people used to be psychiatrically incarcerated in the United States than are now psychiatrically incarcerated in the United States.

SPENCER: Do you think there's some kind of substitution there?

MICHAEL: I don't think there's some type of substitution. It was very much more white people who were psychiatrically incarcerated. Now it's very much more black people. I think that, generally speaking, to a really high degree, America is a mistake theory nation. We were actually founded on mistake theory type premises in a way that other countries were not.

SPENCER: Because they were actually trying to design a society from the ground up and say, how should society function?

MICHAEL: Yes. And as a result, mistake theories, although Scott Alexander is an almost unique extreme of mistake theory, you can't really be more of a mistake theorist than Scott Alexander without actually ending up locked up in a psych ward forever. People throughout America are frequently pretty much mistake theorists, not the majority of people, but a very sizable minority, a very easily manipulated minority as well. Because to be a mistake theorist is to be very easily manipulated.

SPENCER: Why does it make people easily manipulated? Because they're not expecting people to try to manipulate them?

MICHAEL: They are, but they have a very distorted understanding of what manipulating a person even is. They're not themselves manipulating people, and they're trying to protect people from being manipulated while not having any idea of how manipulation works.

SPENCER: And what do you think they're getting wrong about the way manipulation works?

MICHAEL: The whole totalized understanding of the human social world is like asking what someone is getting wrong with their beliefs about the mechanism of Santa's sleigh.

SPENCER: So in your view, do mistake theorists tend to cluster in certain places, let's say San Francisco?

MICHAEL: Not San Francisco. Actually, San Francisco would be the most conflict theory place in the entire world, as far as I can tell.

SPENCER: Interesting.

MICHAEL: But as a very general rule, people who are more engineering-oriented are going to be more mistake theorists. You basically can't do engineering without being a mistake theorist, and San Francisco is in the business of, from a mistake theory perspective, doing engineering, which means that, from a conflict theory perspective, San Francisco is in the business of preventing engineering.

SPENCER: Preventing engineering. Could you unpack that a little bit? Obviously, a lot of the startups come out of San Francisco. So what would you mean by that?

MICHAEL: Right. But obviously, most startups do not involve very much engineering. SpaceX involves a great amount of engineering, but not in San Francisco. Google involves a great number of engineers, but they don't do much engineering. Apple involves a great number of engineers, and they don't do much engineering.

SPENCER: What does engineering mean here? Just to clarify.

MICHAEL: Engineering means the stuff that people are taught to do in an engineering degree program and the stuff that people learn to do on their own in order to produce machines or devices, objects that would be inscrutable to a casual investigation by someone who wasn't familiar with some engineering subject.

SPENCER: So I think about just taking a system and then trying to systematically understand and optimize it. Is that roughly right?

MICHAEL: I think we don't need to delve into what engineering means to say that very little engineering goes on in Google.

SPENCER: Someone I'm friendly with who used to work at Google was saying that they believe Google could cut out 90% of their engineers without really noticeable effects on output. Do you agree with that?

MICHAEL: I think it is beyond reasonable doubt that that's true. I am personally unsure whether it's 90 or 99% and I am pretty confident that your friend is also personally unsure whether it's 90 or 99% and is trying to be extremely defensible and maintain a very, very defensible boundary, which is what I would do when saying that as well. I genuinely think you need at least close to 1% of Google's engineers in order to maintain their machinery.

SPENCER: It's fascinating to look at the list of Google failed projects. There's a website that catalogs them all, and it's sort of unbelievable how many there are.

MICHAEL: I am saying that it is literally unbelievable. It cannot be believed within a conflict theory, and it can only be believed through not being curious in a systematic, structural way, within a mistake theory.

SPENCER: But I think the natural response that people would have is, well, it's hard to start new things. You've got to try a lot of things, and it's sort of expected that many of them will fail. Even if you're Google, you should expect that most of your projects will die, but then occasionally, you'll have huge wins. What's your response to that?

MICHAEL: When you're dealing with the resources of Google. That response presumes that people are not going to try to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, that response presumes that people are not going to do what Elon Musk calls first principles analysis. My response is that within an ironic mode of discourse, numbers don't mean anything. First principles analysis doesn't mean anything. There isn't any way of checking. It is not polite to investigate and challenge claims. But the response that you gave can only be copied from a non-ironic mode of discourse. It cannot be generated; rather, that response you get can only be generated by people in an ironic and a non-ironic mode of discourse, copying responses back and forth with alterations.

SPENCER: So I think that, as Scott, I am an extreme mistake theorist because I basically view myself as on the team of almost all humans.

MICHAEL: Conflict theorists also view themselves as on the team of almost all humans, not all of them.

SPENCER: Oh, they do?

MICHAEL: Yes, at least 80% of conflict theorists, probably 90, view themselves as on the team of almost all humans.

SPENCER: Oh, and they're just fighting the bad humans, or something like that?

MICHAEL: Conflict theorists all see themselves as being bad humans and are on the side of humans anyway, but they see themselves as being bad, but less bad than average.

SPENCER: I would assume that they think they're fighting for the good side, even if sometimes they do things that are manipulative, they're doing it for a good reason.

MICHAEL: They do think that if they do things that are manipulative, they're doing it for a good reason. They do think they're fighting for the good side, but they still think they are behaving in ways that are systematically unjust almost all the time, and they are sad about that. They feel ashamed about it, but live with it. That's why they look normal. They're not holding patterns of muscle tension in their body all the time the way weirdos are from the dissonance between their unjust behaviors and reality.

SPENCER: What percentage of people in the US would you estimate are conflict theorists in your model?

MICHAEL: We really want to distinguish between mild conflict theory, which practically anyone is. Anyone who isn't at least a minor mild conflict theorist is incredibly far gone, way outside of the neurotypical spectrum, to the point where they would be institutionalized if they were not incredibly good at avoiding getting caught. So the number of people who are not even mild conflict theorists, I would guess that you and Scott Alexander are both less conflict theory-ish than 99.9999% of these unincarcerated 30 years old plus and making above median incomes. I would guess you and Scott are both top one in a million, most extreme. But there is a continuum. No one is a perfect mistake theorist. In the psychiatric literature, being a mistake theorist means believing in a just world, and being a conflict theorist means believing in an unjust world.

SPENCER: So I think of this idea of believing in a just world. You feel there must be some method to the madness, that the world seems chaotic and it seems like bad things happen to good people for no real reason, that bad people sometimes win, but they can't possibly be true. There's some kind of tension where you feel, okay, I must be misunderstanding things, because the world can't possibly work like that. What's your thought on that?

MICHAEL: Living in an unjust world doesn't mean that you think that courts are sometimes unjust. It means that you think that courts are trying to be unjust. That's kind of the fundamental issue.

SPENCER: Okay, I see. So it's more about motives, you're saying?

MICHAEL: And systematicity. It's about whether on average things are just or whether on average things are unjust. That's really much more important than motive.

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SPENCER: I've heard that conservatives are more likely to believe in a just world. Is that true?

MICHAEL: Overwhelmingly, for sure, yes, but insincerely. Only radical libertarians believe in a just world to a degree that is non-ironic.

SPENCER: I've made the case to radical libertarians before that. Okay, imagine someone is born just with very few abilities.

MICHAEL: That's unfair, but it's not unjust.

SPENCER: I see. Can you unpack the difference there?

MICHAEL: So there's a difference in the belief in a just world psychometric between belief in a procedurally just world, one where the rules are systematically violated, where systems are trying to break their own rules. The belief in a distributively just world and the psychological properties of believing in a just world that are interesting and surprising, like less belief in a just world means less self-care. Those properties correspond to belief in a procedurally unjust world, not to a distributively unjust world.

SPENCER: I see, got it. So it's more about people's intentions and the procedures they're carrying out in society.

MICHAEL: It's actually not about intention. It's just about the procedures people are carrying out. Maybe only one in a million or so Americans over 30 with above-average incomes are as just world belief as you and Scott, but there is a fundamental divide between people who believe that the world is on net just and people who believe that the world is on net unjust. Conservatives are definitely much more likely than liberals to believe that the world is on net just. Autistic people are more likely to do so. Lower status people are more likely to do so. I expect the biggest difference is going to be lower status. People are more likely to believe that the world is on net just. The more exposed you are to higher status contacts, the less plausible the belief that the world is on net just becomes.

SPENCER: It just seems totally implausible to me that the world is on net just, but maybe that's something about my own bias that just seems implausible.

MICHAEL: You're saying it's implausible that the world is on net just?

SPENCER: Exactly.

MICHAEL: I think you're failing to understand what I mean by on net just because I think it's totally implausible that you think that the world is on net unjust.

SPENCER: I guess what I mean is that I think there are pockets where humans are really collaborative and by and large help each other. But I think that the default state is that there is a huge amount of conflict, and we've only tamed that conflict in certain pockets of the world.

MICHAEL: So when you say the default state, you're talking about the state of nature in a Rousseau or Hobbes perspective, right?

SPENCER: Okay, so I guess going back to thinking about humanity and its development, people started in small tribes, and I think in small tribes, things were largely quite egalitarian in many cases, and people actually worked together and helped each other, partly because they had familial relationships and partly because their success depended on the success of the whole group. But as groups get larger, you lose that system, and either tribes become in conflict with each other, or you need to add other things in place to get humans to cooperate.

MICHAEL: I would point out that in the sense I'm using it in terms of procedural justice, tribes being in conflict with one another would be very weak evidence for procedural justice because it would be evidence that there aren't procedures between tribes for the most part. So if there is much more conflict between tribes than within tribes, that's very weak evidence that procedures are keeping people from conflict.

SPENCER: I see.

MICHAEL: You're saying also that egalitarianism is fairly strong evidence for procedural injustice because in the absence of procedural injustice, resources would tend to accumulate in positive feedback loops, but people helping each other is the central piece of evidence for procedural justice.

SPENCER: Got it.

MICHAEL: In general, you would expect more procedural justice in environments where people must help each other more to survive.

SPENCER: And I guess in small groups, I assume that humans have a lot of that, whereas in large groups, I assume that they don't naturally, and we have to build systems to make it happen.

MICHAEL: I would expect that small group versus large group is important, but harshness of environment is at least equally important.

SPENCER: So living in abundance versus living in a situation where not everyone is going to make it?

MICHAEL: Right. Is your selective gradient caused by differences in how well people overcome scarcity, or is your selective gradient caused by how well people play political games and take from one another, or cuckold one another, or kill one another, or otherwise shape the genomes of the next generation?

SPENCER: Well it's an interesting idea that if things are growing, if there's more and more every year to divide up, then why fight over things? But if things are not growing, if there's a finite pie, then you could see why people would be extremely motivated to try to take from others.

MICHAEL: That's true, but also people taking from another is what mostly prevents things from growing. There are maybe a few places like Monaco, which might legitimately count as developed nations; they're fully capitalized. There isn't any way that the country could be made richer.

SPENCER: So that suggests a downward spiral effect, right? If people start perceiving that there's not enough to go around, or things are not growing, they go more into a mode of, okay, we've got to grab what we can from others, but that actually prevents growth and kind of spirals out of control. Is that what you're saying?

MICHAEL: It suggests positive feedback in antisocial behavior. But I feel like I don't expect Monaco, because growth is no longer impossible through capitalization, to suffer a downward spiral of that sort. I don't really have opinions about Monaco at all. It's probably a weird enough anomaly that I don't want to go out on a limb. So yes, though definitely there's positive feedback in defection, there's positive feedback in zero-sum behavior, which is very, very different from defection. Just world people believe that the important distinction is between cooperation and defection. Unjust world people believe that the important distinction is between more locally sustainable forms of zero-sum behavior and the less locally sustainable forms of zero-sum behavior.

SPENCER: What do you mean about more or less sustainable forms of zero-sum behavior?

MICHAEL: Robin Hanson talks about burning the cosmic common, how the default consequence of space exploration is for almost everything to be converted into zero-sum conflict. If people work from the assumption that things are fundamentally zero-sum and the world is fundamentally unjust, but if we all pretend that things are positive-sum and just, and if we silence people who dissent from that pretense and scapegoat people we can't easily silence, we can profit from scapegoating the people we can't easily silence. They'll tend to be rich, and we can also maintain life under conditions where we are all working to hurt each other.

SPENCER: Okay, so I want to switch topics slightly to go back to something that an objection I can imagine listeners having, which is they might think, okay, you're claiming that almost everyone is engaging in massive preference falsification, but I don't feel like I'm doing that. What would you say to them?

MICHAEL: I would say that, as I say, there are two types of people. There are people who think that things are overall unjust, not just kind of unjust, and those people do feel like they are engaging in massive preference falsification but won't say it unless they are very psychologically abnormal.

SPENCER: Okay, so let's talk to the other group. Is that group actually not falsifying their preferences significantly, or are they and they just aren't aware of it?

MICHAEL: The other group is falsifying their preferences much less; they're falsifying their feelings. Insofar as they have feelings that are different from the feelings that someone in a different culture would have about the desirability or undesirability of some experience, one or both cultures are falsifying feelings. You might find that in, say, a Chinese culture, a Christian culture, and a Muslim culture, the people in the most numerous classes, which are also one of the lower classes, are actually very similar. The differences between their cultures don't lead to very different feelings, except about what foods they feel comfortable with and a few things like that. But in an elite circle within those cultures, their feelings are going to be massively different from one another and also massively different from the commoners. You'll find that, for the most part, the commoners in all of these cultures are not falsifying their feelings, but they are suppressing their feelings. They are dominated, so they don't get to act out. They don't get to express their feelings very freely.

SPENCER: These are feelings about being oppressed or not able to get the things they want, or what?

MICHAEL: Their feelings about everything, about how desirable different products are, how desirable different foods are, what makes them comfortable or uncomfortable.

SPENCER: But who are they falsifying it for? What is the consequence of not falsifying these preferences for one another?

MICHAEL: For the elite, the consequence of not falsifying is that they would be considered heretics.

SPENCER: Could you maybe give an example? What is a feeling that someone might falsify so they're not called a heretic?

MICHAEL: Insofar as sexual taboos differ between societies, at least most societies are falsifying people's feelings in order not to be called heretics.

SPENCER: I see, so people will, for example, not talk about their sexual preferences because they'll be called a heretic if they admit to them. That kind of idea.

MICHAEL: Their sexual preferences would be taboo, and claims about what is right and wrong in a sexual domain separate from preferences would also be taboo, and possibly more taboo when you express a preference that is only a mild heresy. When you express a moral claim that differs from the moral claims of a preference, falsifying society, that is a major heresy, and when you express some moral claim that is different from the moral claims of a non-preference, falsifying society, that's called an actual moral event.

SPENCER: Let me see if I can summarize some of the stuff you said and see if you agree with my summary of it. I think what you're saying is that most people are conflict theorists, and on some level, they realize that they're falsifying their preferences. They do it significantly often, and maybe they feel kind of bad about it, but they also feel like they're fighting on the good side. So it doesn't leave them feeling permanently bad in some sense. Whereas a relatively smaller group are mistake theorists, and they falsify their preferences significantly less. What they don't realize is the extent of preference falsification that's happening, and that also makes them more prone to being manipulated because they don't understand the manipulation that's occurring. Is that roughly accurate?

MICHAEL: I would say that. I would also say that mistake theorists mostly weaken their preferences rather than falsifying them.

SPENCER: So rather than flipping the sign from positive to negative, they're just kind of reducing the magnitude of their preferences.

MICHAEL: Yes, and they can reduce it by quite a lot. They cannot care almost at all about things that people would naturally care a lot about, like the difference in quality between a bad and a good steak, if they're carnivores, the sorts of things that John Stossel tends to be wrong about. John Stossel is another fanatic mistake theorist. He is more of a frenetic than you or Scott and less of an authentic mistake theorist. So a lot of what he does is give sensible doctrinaire libertarian claims, but he also makes very extreme claims about things like expensive and cheap wines being indistinguishable from one another, or expensive and cheap coffee being indistinguishable from one another.

SPENCER: I find that really strange because, on the one hand, I do believe that many casual wine drinkers could easily be tricked into thinking that a wine is expensive or cheap. I actually did an experiment where I gave people a bunch of wines at different prices without them knowing which is which, and the correlation between the price and people's enjoyment was actually, I think it was slightly negative. So I do believe that. But at the same time, I also believe that people could train themselves with practice to be incredibly good at identifying wines, almost to a shocking degree, if they were able to practice enough. But what's your thought on that?

MICHAEL: I agree quite strongly, and I think that it's interesting that someone like John Stossel is very attached to the forced belief that these things actually can't be easily distinguished.

SPENCER: Wine is such a fascinating convergence of connoisseurship and genuine understanding with total bullshit. There was a wonderful documentary about a guy who essentially duped some of the high-flying wine community. He would make kind of weird mixture wines, where he'd buy a bunch of cheap wines and try to mix them together to make something that tasted like a fancy wine, and then sell them for huge amounts of money.

MICHAEL: That's great. A very simple way of thinking about this is if you're engaged in finite preference falsification, where you mostly just trust your senses less, you trust your emotions less, but you still trust that your sense of coherence is very valuable, and you trust that your memory is pretty reliable. When you shift from a regime of weak preference falsification to a regime of strong preference falsification, you exaggerate your feelings. You become overly trusting of your senses in a certain sense.

SPENCER: Even though they're not where you actually believe?

MICHAEL: You believe your senses. You don't believe your memories.

SPENCER: What do you mean by that?

MICHAEL: When you tell someone what you did on your vacation, you are making up a story on the fly which is somewhat inspired by what happened, but not constrained by what happened. People who are in a strong preference falsification regime don't think that things being true or coherent is very important. They think that feelings and experiences are important, and they both believe their own memories less, believe other people's memories and claims less or almost not at all, and believe claims about experiences and feelings much more, or at least pretend to.

SPENCER: This reminds me of a study I ran on Trump versus Clinton supporters, and this fascinating way in which Clinton supporters in my study were very convinced that Clinton is much more honest, but the way that they were looking at honesty is about saying a fact correctly, right? Whereas Trump supporters view Trump as more honest. But the way they talk about honesty is somewhat different, where they think of honesty as saying what's on your mind and saying what you feel. It's interesting, because if you ask Clinton supporters if Clinton really expresses what she is feeling, I think largely they would say no, she doesn't, and I think they would also largely agree that Trump is more likely to actually express his feelings in that moment. So it made me realize they're actually just different ways of looking at what honesty means.

MICHAEL: Yep, right, the Trump supporters have a strong belief in an unjust world, and Clinton supporters have a mix of strong belief in an unjust world and weak belief in an unjust world in this model.

SPENCER: Where are the people that believe in a just world? They're libertarians. Some of them are Clinton supporters.

MICHAEL: Some of them are Trump supporters. Some of them are libertarians. Increasingly, in the modern world, many of them are democratic socialists of America. They were libertarians almost universally during the Clinton era, and they were libertarians who were very positively impressed by Bill Clinton, whom they thought was much more libertarian than they expected from a Democrat. But now that libertarianism is much more obviously false than it was during the Clinton era, many more of them are democratic socialists of America or hold other fringe beliefs.

SPENCER: So what's the connection between libertarianism and mistake theory?

MICHAEL: Libertarianism is just a straightforward implementation of mistake theory if you believe that your teachers, your parents, and the news are mostly telling you the truth about facts and mostly telling you the truth about values, but they are stupid and unable to tell what is coherent and what is not. If you believe that the people around you are making lots and lots of mistakes that you can't very easily imagine making yourself rather than trying to do something other than tell the truth, then you're going to think they're wrong all the time, and you're going to think that their expressed values and their high confidence convergent factual expressed beliefs reliably point towards libertarianism.

SPENCER: Reliably point towards meaning, imply it's the best theory of society? Or what do you mean by that?

MICHAEL: At least the ones on the table.

SPENCER: Why is that? Can you put that together? Why does that imply libertarianism?

MICHAEL: Bryan Kaplan has an article, "Libertarianism as Moral Overlearning", I believe. Or Eliezer has an article, "Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism".

SPENCER: I guess maybe I'm misunderstanding libertarianism. Because I think of it as a viewpoint that freedom of choice is a paramount value, and that the most efficient way to organize society is to let everyone choose what they want to do, and people will figure out how to get gains from trade through lots of local optimizations, rather than trying to use force from above to figure out how to construct the best society, right?

MICHAEL: And that is what we are all explicitly taught. Our ideology when we are children. The schools teach us that. They teach us that that is the defining characteristic of America, of modernity, of the Enlightenment, of progress. They teach us that all of our wealth and abundance, the ways in which our society is better than past societies, and all of the ways in which the world is getting better are coming from that.

SPENCER: From that, and also democracy, at least. That's what I was taught.

MICHAEL: Fine, but if you are really a good mistake theorist, you immediately conclude that they're making a mistake about democracy.

SPENCER: I'm trying to tie together the view of libertarianism that I was taught. Right?

MICHAEL: Very few libertarians are complete mistake theorists. Maybe Michael Vassar, age 15, or even 10 is more or less a total mistake theorist and regards it as self-evident that adults are a mix of lying and dumb, but mostly dumb about democracy. It's understandable that they're making a mistake, but the vast majority of libertarians are going to distrust their own minds enough that they're going to think, yeah, maybe democracy is not so bad.

SPENCER: I think what fundamentally confuses me is, if you're a mistake theorist, I don't see why you couldn't still have the view that, okay, we want to design society. We want to engineer society from the top down and build a good world, rather than do bottom-up libertarian type transactions. That's why I'm losing the thread.

MICHAEL: You could, as a mistake theorist, think that we want to engineer society from the top down, but you would, as a mistake theorist, believe that people are reporting empirical facts more or less accurately and in a more or less unbiased manner. You would believe that people had tried doing things both ways in a mistake theory way, and that the mistake theory of the Soviet Union worked out worse than the mistake theory of us. There were many similar natural experiments, like the mistake theory of East Germany and the mistake theory of West Germany.

SPENCER: I think I'm getting it. I think what you're saying is that if you believe in mistake theory really deeply, then you look at societies and say, well, everyone's actually doing the thing that they claim they're doing. If we just compare societies, we see that those that do the bottom-up, where everyone does the transactions they want to do without much control, those societies do better, whereas the societies that have lots of top-down control do worse. Therefore, you know, libertarianism. But if you're, on the other hand, a conflict theorist, then when you interpret what's happening in the top-down control scenario, you don't take it at face value, so it doesn't lead you to a libertarian philosophy. Is that the idea?

MICHAEL: That seems right.

SPENCER: Got it. So is there a way you can talk about what Americans are falsifying their preferences about on a day-to-day basis?

MICHAEL: Sure, but I suppose the most important point in this conversation is there is a fundamental difference between being a partial mistake theorist and being a total mistake theorist. There is a continuum from being almost completely a mistake theorist to being almost half a conflict theorist. There is a divide between being almost half a conflict theorist and being a total conflict theorist. Then there is another continuum between being a conflict theorist that is trying to look like a mistake theorist as much as possible and being a conflict theorist that is trying to look as little as possible like a mistake theorist.

SPENCER: Let me just break that down and see if I understand. I think you're saying, first of all, there are two types of conflict theorists, roughly speaking: those that are trying to appear as mistake theorists and those that are trying to appear as very much not mistake theorists.

MICHAEL: Call it one continuum, but not too tight.

SPCENCER: One continuum basically, of to what extent conflict theorists are trying to look like? Conflict theorists first look like the opposite. Okay, so that's one. Then I think you're saying also that there's a divide on the mistake theory side, whereas people who, potentially, like myself, who are very strong mistake theorists are very different than people that are even a little bit conflict theorist. Is that right?

MICHAEL: No, they're not very different. People who are very strong mistake theorists, like you, are somewhat different from people who are somewhat more conflict theorists.

SPENCER: Okay, so where's the big divide then?

MICHAEL: There's a big divide between things that are more mistakes than conflict, but there's a lot of conflict, and things are so much conflict that the whole concept of a mistake is a mistake.

SPENCER: Okay, so now that's beginning to sound to me like postmodernism or something like that. Is that connected?

MICHAEL: Yeah!

SPENCER: Okay, so let's talk about that.

MICHAEL: So you might say there was a continuum from scholarship to modernity. This is a really good way of putting it. At the absolute far end of mistake theory, there's a tendency to identify with the Enlightenment, to identify with scholarship, to think that things being official, it looks kind of like what's in Wikipedia is a pretty good first pass of what's official.

SPENCER: Would you say Steven Pinker is in that camp?

MICHAEL: I would say he's an extreme instance of a conflict theorist pretending to be a mistake theorist.

SPENCER: Okay, interesting. We can talk about that later. But, okay, yeah, sorry you keep going.

MICHAEL: So someone in a situation like yours is basically regarding Wikipedia as much more credible than the New York Times, and a scholarly analysis that you do by looking at Wikipedia and using it to go to primary sources as much more credible than Wikipedia.

SPENCER: I find it fascinating the degree to which I trust Wikipedia more than most people.

MICHAEL: Right? So that's extreme mistake theory, to trust Wikipedia way more than most mistake theorists, not merely more than most conflict theorists.

SPENCER: Am I making a mistake in doing that?

MICHAEL: No. Extreme mistake theory is much better than partial mistake theory.

SPENCER: Let me assume for a moment that you're correct. I'm an extreme mistake theorist. What does that lead me to misunderstand deeply about the world? Or what kind of giant blind spots does that give me?

MICHAEL: You profoundly misunderstand the mental state of conflict theorists, which is another term for postmodernists. When I say you misunderstand it, you misunderstand it the way someone who reads a GPT-2 discussion and thinks of GPT-2 anthropomorphically as misunderstanding. You're not just kind of wrong. You're totally wrong. You are attributing a whole cognitive structure to people that is not there.

SPENCER: Okay, so teach me about how I can model people on the other side.

MICHAEL: As a first approximation, if someone is sexy, if someone is either a sexy man or a sexy woman, their mind works more like GPT-3's mind than it does like your mind.

SPENCER: In the sense of input, output reaction. Is that what you mean?

MICHAEL: Yes, but in the sense of a lot of the machinery that you assume is part of a mind is just not there, functioning at all. Did you see the GPT-3 talks to its philosophers about how I am a learning machine, not a reasoning machine?

SPENCER: Was that a David Chalmers thing?

MICHAEL: No, I should send it to you.

SPENCER: I'm a terrible dancer, and my friend was trying to help me understand why I'm such a bad dancer. Basically, he's a good dancer. He was watching me dance, and he kept pointing out whenever I would have a thought. He'd say, you're thinking again, you're thinking again. It was fascinating to me that he could tell when I started thinking.

MICHAEL: That makes total sense to me, both that he could and that you're fascinated by it.

SPENCER: And my dancing became significantly worse whenever I would think.

MICHAEL: All makes total sense to me. Regular people are not ever doing the thing that you call thinking. They are sometimes doing a thing that they call thinking, but you wouldn't call that thing thinking. You would almost call that thing being afraid or being ashamed. You would call it feeling depressed. Maybe there's a term depressive realism. Yes, you're obsessed with depression. Regular people literally never do the thing that you think is thinking. They sometimes do the thing that you think is being depressed, and that's the thing that they call thinking.

SPENCER: So that definitely sounds very implausible to me. Can you try to convince me of that?

MICHAEL: Probably not in the short time remaining, unless we've got a very long time for this podcast.

SPENCER: Okay, so what is the thing that you think I call thinking that you think is rare for people who are extreme conflict theorists?

MICHAEL: Okay, so maybe let's just call them postmodernists, rather than extreme conflict theory.

SPENCER: Okay, postmodernists. So my experience of reading postmodernism is that I feel like I'm reading poetry. Trying to interpret it as non-poetry is like trying to interpret poetry as non-poetry. That's the kind of experience I have. Am I just way off?

MICHAEL: A lot of it is just poetry, and trying to interpret it as non-poetry is seriously confused. But also a lot of it, if interpreted predictively, would improve someone's ability to predict a wide range of situations in the world much more reliably than studying social science.

SPENCER: Are you saying that there's actually information to be learned in it that allows you to better understand humans? Or are you saying that in a meta way, if you can understand the process by which postmodern stuff is generated, that helps you understand the human mind?

MICHAEL: If you can't understand the process whereby it's generated; you can't learn from it. If you can understand the process by which it's generated, you'll instantly be much better at understanding most humans than you are, and also you'll be able to understand it more and get more out of it.

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SPENCER: Can you try to explain to me, I'm sure it's hard, but try to explain to me your model of how postmodernist works are generated?

MICHAEL: I tried giving you the very most straightforward postmodernist work I have ever seen, which is the review of Alex Corp's PhD thesis.

SPENCER: That literally just bounced off my brain. I was like, what am I reading right now?

MICHAEL: That is literally the most straightforward postmodernist work I have ever seen, the least obscurantist, the best written, the most clear.

SPENCER: Because when you said that to me and you said you wanted to discuss it, I kept trying to read it, and I kept saying, What are we going to discuss? I don't even understand. What would we be talking about?

MICHAEL: Okay, so I suppose the most common ways in which nerds learn postmodernism is by practicing kink, and that's an unpleasant path, extremely, but all paths to understanding postmodernism are extremely unpleasant. It might be the least unpleasant of the many extremely unpleasant options.

SPENCER: Okay, so what is kink's relation to postmodernism? I'm totally not seeing the connection.

MICHAEL: Postmodernism is talking about and thinking about kink, or as the article that I sent you said, it is talking about the phenomenology underlying conditions of domination.

SPENCER: Okay, so here you're referring to kink as essentially ways of playing with dominance. Is that right?

MICHAEL: There's no such thing as playing with dominance. There's just engaging in dominance and submission. There really is no such thing as playing with it. There are people who fail to connect to kink and end up being sex nerds, unpopular with everyone.

SPENCER: Okay, so let's talk about the connection between postmodernism and dominance and submission. Because I don't think I really understand.

MICHAEL: Postmodernism is starting from the perspective that people can cause you to be wrong through a mixture of lying and threatening, where there's no clean line between the lying component and the threat component. And I believe that you believe that that is at least somewhat true.

SPENCER: That people can cause you to be wrong by lying and threatening? Absolutely.

MICHAEL: In some mix. There is not necessarily clarity in your own mind or their mind, or even totally a fact about the matter of how much of what they're doing is persuasion through deceptive information, and how much is persuasion through a threat or a promise. They can also do it through making promises, by giving you hope, by inspiring a sense of opportunity.

SPENCER: I'm not sure that I'm identifying with what you're saying, but what it reminds me of is that there are certain people that seem to have very little connection in their mind between what they believe in and what's true in the world, and they seem like they don't care. So it seems like they're not even trying to optimize their mind to match the world, or something like that?

MICHAEL: So I would say that those people are the people who it is relatively natural for you to imagine that what I am saying is true. When I say that they never do the thing that you're calling thinking, but they sometimes do the thing that you call being depressed, and they call that thinking. Does that make sense?

SPENCER: When you say the thing that I call being depressed? What does that mean to you?

MICHAEL: There is a psychometric property called depressive realism. There's a correlation between the truth of people's statements.

SPENCER: I see. So it's depressed in the sense of seeing the world as it is, in all its flaws, without trying to put any kind of silver lining or optimistic spin on it, something like that?

MICHAEL: Right. But it is seeing the world is not as it is, but as it appears. It's still not thinking.

SPENCER: It's sort of being honest about what you're looking at, or something like that. I think about this trait that I'm pointing at of not caring about your mind's contents really reflecting reality as being linked more to things like narcissism rather than postmodernism.

MICHAEL: You're wrong. You're just assuming that this thing is much less common than it is. You're being tricked by GPT-3. The phrase design thinking is the postmodern term for what you would naturally call thinking. When postmodern people are talking about other postmodern people, like Steve Jobs, doing the thing that you would call thinking, they call it design thinking.

SPENCER: It's funny you say that, because design thinking, to me, is, oh, so you're going to try different stuff and see if it works, and talk to people to see if they like your thing. And it's strange to me that it has a terminology, right?

MICHAEL: Right. It is a postmodern term for thinking. The word thinking in postmodernism means depression. The words design thinking in postmodernism mean thinking.

SPENCER: What do you think about what Jordan Peterson is doing?

MICHAEL: Jordan Peterson is a very, very confused mistake theorist who is almost exclusively attractive to very young, confused mistake theorists and older people who are the vicious sort of postmodernists who are pretending to be mistake theorists.

SPENCER: Okay, let's talk about the people pretending to be mistake theorists. What's going on there?

MICHAEL: So what's going on there is the same sort of thing as is going on in other postmoderns, except that on top of that, there's something like GPT-3 going on, trained on something like actual mistake theorists.

SPENCER: So it's sort of like when you say it's like GPT-3 trained on actual mistake theorists. So I think that is meaning the way that an AI might process a bunch of text and then basically just try to spit out the next most probable statement, given that text conditioned on the text. They're essentially simulating a mistake theorist without actually being a mistake theorist. Is that good?

MICHAEL: Usually they're simulating a younger version of themselves without actually being a younger version of themselves, and then giving some further training data based on other people in order to stay in fashion.

SPENCER: Are you suggesting that people tend to be more likely to be a mistake theorist when they're young?

MICHAEL: Everyone is born a mistake theorist. You would die if you were a baby postmodernist.

SPENCER: Can I quote you on that?

MICHAEL: Of course.

SPENCER: Okay, so I think we're getting to the heart of that. So how does someone go from being a mistake theorist, which you're saying we all are born as, to becoming a conflict theorist?

MICHAEL: Generally speaking, people go by experiencing and perceiving injustice, by experiencing and perceiving procedural injustice. Their belief in a just world, in a procedurally just world, is lowered, and they become more of a modernist instead of a scholar. Their feelings and perceptions become softer, and they become more easily manipulated, more asymmetrically skeptical.

SPENCER: I thought mistake theorists were more easily manipulated. Or did I misunderstand that?

MICHAEL: Yes, but I also said it's better to be an extreme mistake theorist than not an extreme mistake theorist. Seeing or experiencing procedural injustice takes away your belief in a just world. Losing your belief in a just world takes away your emotional sensitivity, sensory acuity, and belief in your own memory.

SPENCER: Because essentially, it means you're doing preference falsification. Is that what you're saying?

MICHAEL: You become more easy to manipulate, more easy to gaslight, and more easy to maneuver into situations where you can be put into what Gregory Bateson calls a double bind, a situation where you are unable to fulfill your obligations and unable to share your story about what is happening with anyone without that just getting you deeper in trouble.

SPENCER: What's an example of a double bind?

MICHAEL: An example was you're in a psych ward for saying things that are reasonable. I have a friend who was put in a psych ward for saying, "Hey, it seems like the FBI assassinated Fred Hampton about 50 years ago. Maybe I should trust the cops a lot less than I already do," and she was thrown in a psychiatric institution, diagnosed as schizophrenic, is now on Abilify and unable to be highly functional in her previously extremely promising musical career.

SPENCER: So how did she get from that first point to being institutionalized?

MICHAEL: I wasn't that close to her, so I don't know, but I know a great number of people have been psychiatrically institutionalized in the last decade. "My IRB Nightmare" involved escaping from a double bind by being willfully blind to the moral implications of diagnosing people as schizophrenics, involuntarily incarcerating them, and maybe bipolar involuntarily incarcerating and drugging them, based on a paper that said that this was not to be used for diagnosis. By being dishonestly committed to the belief that people in power over him were making a mistake, not engaging in very serious crimes, he was able to feel only the compulsion to try to correct someone's mistake, not feel that he was compelled to be complicit in serious crimes.

SPENCER: Is this why you say it's actually safer to be an extreme mistake theorist? Because in some sense, you're not even looking for anyone playing these games, and so you're actually less threatening.

MICHAEL: That's not the main thing. The main thing is that you're not conditioned as much. You're trusting your mind more, and you're conditioning less.

SPENCER: I think if I was in Scott's situation, and all these barriers are being thrown up to conducting the study that seemed well worth conducting, I would chalk it up to inefficiency, bureaucracy, all these kinds of things, which is essentially what Scott did. But I think that you're also implying that that somehow is protective. Is that right?

MICHAEL: Yes, I am. Have you ever seen the movie Conspiracy?

SPENCER: No.

MICHAEL: It's a wonderful movie. It's based on the actual transcripts from the pitch meeting for Auschwitz. Yeah, highly recommend it. Most people don't know some really important things about that. It was said during the pitch meeting for Auschwitz that Hitler has not signed off on this and never will.

SPENCER: And why is that?

MICHAEL: Because that would be implicating him in something. The point is there is a sense in which mistake theory can be applied even to the Holocaust, and the sense in which mistake theory can be applied even to the Holocaust is exactly the same as the sense in which mistake theory can be applied to claiming that you are diagnosing people as mentally ill, involuntarily incarcerating them, drugging them, and resisting this behavior being corrected.

SPENCER: I assume you're saying, basically, that's just totally implausible in both cases.

MICHAEL: It's not totally implausible. It is, in some sense, true. It is, in some sense, the Holocaust is the normal implementation of bureaucracy. I've been to concentration camps. There are really weird things, like having a movie theater where people can watch the latest comedy hits from America while they're waiting to be gassed.

SPENCER: What does that mean? Explain that. That seems completely insane.

MICHAEL: Yes, it's completely insane. The point is, you end up with these bureaucracies that are doing completely insane things, and where everyone is incredibly aggressively looking the other way around the fact that the things that are being done all around them are completely insane and completely ultra violations of people's rights.

SPENCER: Germany is obviously a really intense example where many people must have known that the Holocaust was occurring, and presumably very few of them are sociopathic or actually indifferent to human suffering. So do you believe that what was happening is sort of mass preference falsification occurring?

MICHAEL: I think it is conventional wisdom that totalitarian regimes are the standard example of mass preference falsification. Another really noteworthy thing to pick up in concentration camps is that they have these secret windows which people can quietly slide away a board and shoot someone in the back of their head without the person knowing. So people are trying to protect themselves from feeling bad about the emotions of the people who they're about to murder. The Holocaust involves just an enormous amount of that. Trying to trick people about the gas chambers, trying to trick people about the fact that they're about to be shot, just trying to not have to empathize with the people who they are killing in these really silly ways.

SPENCER: But they give some kind of psychological deniability. Is that the idea? Because a normal person would never do such a horrible thing in a normal circumstance.

MICHAEL: They just don't want to feel bad. They want to feel bad as little as possible. And murdering people makes you feel bad.

SPENCER: I want to understand the purpose of postmodernism. I feel like I still don't understand it.

MICHAEL: People find themselves in a situation where they are not believed, whatever they say, where they cannot cause people to believe the situation they are in, literally, not figuratively. Okay, for instance, in "My IRB Nightmare", the honest thing to do would be to complain to people outside, to notice that patients' rights were being very severely violated, patients were being very severely deceived, and that really quite bad things were happening to them, and that this was not a mistake by any natural meaning of the word mistake, because the paper says right on it "not to use for diagnosis". So the honest thing to do would be to not regard using something that says "Do not use for diagnosis" as being mistakenly used for diagnosis. There is something like an attitude that people have who are remotely normal, that behavior is only really culpable if it is both against the rules and strange and selfish.

SPENCER: That's interesting.

MICHAEL: If it's merely against the rules and selfish, going along with being complicit in rather than fighting against this standard practice in the hospital is not really blameworthy. And if the hospital's practice is not really selfish, they're not trying to get something by misdiagnosing people; that's also regarded as not really blameworthy. So I would like you to say whether you would agree with me that in the literal sense, the hospital is kidnapping and drugging innocent people, deceiving them into thinking that they are being given medical equipment, kidnapping them and drugging them.

SPENCER: I don't remember the details of the story in that article well enough to know whether I feel that that's true. It might be.

MICHAEL: People are being diagnosed with bipolar disorder by a psychiatric institution, and bipolar disorder is the basis for incarceration and for involuntary drug consumption.

SPENCER: I thought only if you're having a manic episode at that time.

MICHAEL: People definitely tell you to take drugs regardless of whether you're having a manic episode, and say that you are obliged to take drugs on legal authority, which includes the legal authority to involuntarily incarcerate. It includes medical recommendations to voluntarily be incarcerated at this time when you're not having a psychotic episode. It does not actually mean that you can be incarcerated if you're not having an episode at the time, but we've already established that the letter of the law is not being followed in this situation. So it seems like if you incarcerate someone through fraud, you tell them that you've diagnosed them as a danger to themselves and others when you have not, in fact, diagnosed them. Incarceration through fraud is also not very different from incarceration through not being seen. There are further possible assaults that would be involved in stealing or incarceration by force. But if you regard incarcerating someone by fraud as still incarcerating them, as still kidnapping, and if you regard drugging people with authority and fraud as still forcing people to take drugs, then we're talking about very serious felonies being committed by all of the residents at this hospital.

SPENCER: But to be fair, I think the vast majority of people would not treat it as blameworthy, which I think is what you were suggesting.

MICHAEL: Yes, and the vast majority of people in Nazi Germany would not treat working in a concentration camp as blameworthy. They would treat it as, oh, man, I have such a shitty job. I am so pissed at the lieutenant. He made me shoot six Jews today. You know how this causes my back to act up. I feel terrible. I've got to take a bath.

SPENCER: What do you think that people believe about factory farms when people are eating meat and there's abundant evidence that animals are in horrible conditions?

MICHAEL: That's a great question. I think that for the most part, people think that it is more virtuous to do the thing that is better virtue signaling. In many circumstances, the better virtue signaling is not to eat meat, but in some circumstances, the better virtue signaling is to eat meat.

SPENCER: In which case, when would it be better virtue signaling to eat meat?

MICHAEL: If you are in a more Republican or MAGA type context; for instance, it would probably be better virtue signaling to eat meat. I think that when you think about what they're thinking, you're thinking that they think their thoughts represent reality. What I'm trying to tell you is that postmodernists do not think their thoughts represent reality.

SPENCER: So what do they think about their thoughts?

MICHAEL: They think their thoughts are a psychiatric disorder, like depression, that they are attachment in the Buddhist sense, that there's something that they should let go of, like their ego, that their thoughts are part of their ego, part of depression, part of attachment, something that they should try to not have.

SPENCER: For what reason? Why would you try to get rid of your thoughts?

MICHAEL: Because all thoughts do is hurt you. Thoughts don't ever bring you closer to truth. There's no such thing as truth. Thoughts just hurt and cause you to hurt others.

SPENCER: How do they hurt you?

MICHAEL: Because it hurts to think. Remember what they mean by thought is what you would call being depressed, the exact same connotations with the idea of thought as you have with the idea of being depressed, because it's the exact same idea.

SPENCER: So I think if I can try to summarize what you're saying, you're saying that to postmodernist thinkers, what they think of as thinking is sort of like seeing presumed reality in its banal, raw, unimproved form, which is unpleasant to do, and so they basically are trying to expunge that mode of being.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

SPENCER: So what is postmodern writing then?

MICHAEL: Postmodernist writing is telling you how to be better at being postmodern and telling you why being postmodern is better than not being postmodern. And remember, they still can do real thinking. It's called design thinking or poetry. There are a number of words for it. Poetry is one. Design thinking is one.

SPENCER: It's a mode to flip into, the design thinking mode or the poetry mode, or whatever.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

SPENCER: Okay, when someone's writing a really obscure postmodernist, let's say academic paper, actually this, I feel like is a deep misunderstanding for me. I don't even understand what they're doing. They're sitting at the computer typing, but what is happening in their mind?

MICHAEL: So for the most part, nothing is happening in what you're calling the mind. Mostly what is happening in their cortex is very similar to what is happening in a transformer network with one-shot learning almost for sure.

SPENCER: What's the objective function? Right? What's the thing being optimized for?

MICHAEL: Central tendency, for postmodernist papers, for someone with their academic lineage and institutional affiliations.

SPENCER: You're claiming that it's just trying to replicate what they view as the cluster of postmodernist stuff.

MICHAEL: There's a novel instance in a cluster that they are part of, and if they have some new thoughts, they might include some of their own new thoughts as well, but they're going to mix in their own thoughts with a sludge of the central tendency of that cluster, and most of the things they're saying are only going to be slightly influenced by their new thoughts, the way GPT-3 might be slightly influenced by a few sentences of new thoughts that you put into its 2048-word memory.

SPENCER: I think what confuses me about that claim is that it seems to imply that it's just random what they're producing, in the sense that---

MICHAEL: GPT-3 is not random.

SPENCER: You're saying that they're just trying to aim at producing something that's in the central tendency. But then the central tendency could be anything, right? It doesn't even matter what it is. It's just whatever it happens to be they're trying to reproduce. Is that what you're claiming?

MICHAEL: The central tendency was at least significantly produced by other people who were also, to some degree, thinking about these things and were trying to make these things more intelligible to other people. Being postmodern and not having digested a lot of advice for how to do a good job at being postmodern is going to get you less far than being postmodern and having digested a lot of this advice. The content you might call poetry, but that poetry is going to be way higher density and very information-rich and useful poetry. The non-content could be random; it could be anything, but it's inspired by previous people's poetry, at least at some level of the game of telephone.

SPENCER: You're saying there is an arbitrariness to the central cluster. It could have been different.

MICHAEL: The central cluster was generated from a large body of poetry being thrown together in a haphazard manner. So it's arbitrary, but it's not content-free.

SPENCER: So how did it start? What was the initiation? Why did people do postmodernism in the beginning, when there wasn't something to copy?

MICHAEL: As I've said before, one becomes postmodern by being in a double bind. One becomes postmodern by being in a situation where you are surrounded by people who are pretending they can't understand what you're saying, even if what you're saying is actually quite straightforward.

SPENCER: It reminds me of Kafka. Is Kafka writing about this?

MICHAEL: Yes.

SPENCER: So then you're saying, basically, there's a natural thing that happens in societies that turns people into postmodern people, and then those people generate stuff that we call postmodern stuff, and then eventually that stuff forms enough of a cluster that now people could just start imitating it. They don't have to generate it from scratch.

MICHAEL: Yep.

SPENCER: So then what can one learn from reading postmodernist works?

MICHAEL: I would say it depends on who you are. The thing that people most want to learn in practice, to a pretty high degree, is how to feel better about hurting people who are not postmodern because they feel bad about hurting people who are not postmodern, but they also feel like they have to do it in self-defense. So they want to feel that the people they have to defend themselves against are as blameworthy as possible, and so they are, to a high degree, learning ways of explaining things that are incredibly straightforward and that could not be misunderstood without willful blindness, so that they can be really clear that the people are, in fact, being locally blind.

SPENCER: Who are the people, the readers?

MICHAEL: As an example, I gave you a postmodernist text. It was incredibly clear. It bounced off of you---

SPENCER: Was that you playing a trick on me in some way?

MICHAEL: I'm trying to cause you to be informed of something that you are reluctant to be informed of, which is really worth being informed of, especially given that you're doing really good GPT-3 experiments. It's really high priority for you to be informed of this stuff. You're still trying to ask what the people might learn. Part of what they're learning is how to fit in better. Part of what they're learning is that there is this other game beyond just fitting in of maneuvering for power within a postmodern context, and how one goes about maneuvering for power within a postmodern context.

SPENCER: So you're saying, by reading postmodernism, you can learn about this power dynamic?

MICHAEL: Yeah.

SPENCER: And you're looking for ways of talking in the postmodernist literature that---

MICHAEL: No, there are straightforward explanations of what's going on, but you would be disposed to experience them as poetry and as lacking in precise content. Even though the content is extremely precise.

SPENCER: It seems like it's extremely imprecise. It seems like it's ---

MICHAEL: No, no, no. It's extremely precise. The paper I sent you is extremely, extremely precise, as precise as a technical paper in basically fields other than mathematics.

SPENCER: So you're saying that the terms that they use are actually really well-defined terms.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

SPENCER: Interesting, because I have almost the opposite experience reading postmodernist stuff.

MICHAEL: The fundamental difference is that you're not able to enter into a mind state that doesn't implicitly assume that things are for the most part just.

SPENCER: What are they trying to explicitly communicate, not implicitly? What's the general theme that is in the explicit communication?

MICHAEL: They are trying to explain that modernism and Enlightenment thinking are both false and somewhat insincere, and they're trying to explain how society learns together and comes together around somewhat insincerely held but somewhat useful beliefs. They're trying to explain how power works among people whose beliefs are somewhat insincere, which is to say they're trying to explain more or less everyone, certainly everyone who has any power. They're trying to reduce the degree to which people are accidentally hurting one another with partial truths, despite the fact that they know that the overall context is a lie.

SPENCER: That seems potentially useful.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

SPENCER: Seems like if that's true, I have interesting things to learn from postmodernism that I was not aware of.

MICHAEL: If I were to guess, my guess is that we would both get a lot more out of Kant than out of anything postmodern, and in particular, out of Kant's most postmodern text, the Philosophy of Religion, I believe is its name. Now I haven't read it myself. I've only looked at some of these. And Kant is impenetrable, awful reading.

SPENCER: I read, or I should say, attempted to read his, what is it? The Metaphysics of Morals, and it's just incredibly hard to read.

MICHAEL: But it does feel like there's content there, right?

SPENCER: There's content. It's just very, very hard to unravel what it is.

MICHAEL: My guess is that you would get more out of Kant's Philosophy of Religion, which is considered his hardest piece, I think, and his most controversial piece. It's the piece where he goes most postmodern.

SPENCER: Interesting. Thanks so much, Michael, for coming on. Really interesting to talk to you.

MICHAEL: You're welcome. It was great talking. Bye.

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