Episode 158 - Talking Politics with Sarah Stein Lubrano Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:21] David: The Podcast where two philosophers put ideas in dialogue with everyday life.

[00:00:26] Ellie: I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:28] David: And I'm David Peña Guzmán.

[00:00:29] Ellie: To hear David's and my additional thoughts on the subject of talking politics and our interview with Dr. Stein Lubrano, check out our extended version of this episode over on Substack.

David, like a lot of people, I have been feeling an immense amount of despair recently about the political situation in the US, especially when it comes to bridging divides between people on different sides of the political spectrum.

And over the summer I became aware of this book, Don't Talk About Politics by the political theorist, Sarah Stein Lubrano. And when I first read this title, I was like, what? Don't talk about politics. I thought we were supposed to be talking about politics. I thought if anything, what I needed to do, even though I'm a philosophy professor, is go back to Logic 101 and brush up on my understanding of logical fallacies in order to better point out the errors in reasoning that my opponents are making in hopes of some consensus. And then I thought to myself, well, how well has that been working for me? What I really need to do is get this book immediately and try and set myself straight a bit.

And to be clear, Stein Lubrano is not simply just saying don't talk about politics. What she's saying is that talking about politics is way less effective than we think it is, and we need to be very cautious about thinking that it's gonna help us achieve our political goals, when in fact, what we really need is a focus on action.

[00:01:56] David: Well, I also read the title and I thought, is this a defense of political apathy? Is this a defense of political silence? What exactly is the ultimate objective? But then I was walking around the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco and I ran into a friend and this was around Thanksgiving, and I said, Hey, how are you doing? And he said, oh, I'm coming back from dinner with my parents and it was wonderful, until they started talking about Charlie Kirk and reading this book made me think about that interaction where we all sort of know in the marrow of our bones exactly what's wrong with talking about politics. That those discussions feel intractable, they feel emotionally charged, and in many ways they make us feel like our relationships with our opponents just like are moving backwards. We regress and we become more entrenched in the views that we started the conversation with, without making any progress as a diad or as a group.

And I think that's what this book is ultimately about. It's about a failed conception that we have about ourselves as people who are in habermasian terms, always looking for the force of the better argument, right?

As if we were all likely to change our belief system if we were to encounter the ideal argument that convinced us and appeal to our better rational nature. In fact, the way our minds work is very different.

[00:03:20] Ellie: You used the word opponents here in a way that I don't know, maybe I used it already too, I don't know.

Okay, okay. I brought Yeah. So your use of it and not mine kind of maybe think about the fact that when we are engaging in these kinds of conversations or debates, it might seem to us initially that the goal is actually to change the other person's mind and bring them over to our side, in which case we would no longer be opponents.

We would actually be, you know, comrades to put it in Marxian terms. But that's not actually how our ideal of debate functions. We either think about it as conquering the other person. Whether that's through, you know, them coming over to our side or us just like crushing them, or we think about it as owning them.

Actually, maybe those are kind of the same thing, but it doesn't really matter here. The point is essentially that the ideal of debate, partakes of and perpetuates a tradition that Stein Lubrano calls. Politics as war. Right. And so I'm curious what you think about this, David, because you famously have a debate background. You love to talk about this. On Overthink, we always talk about how we became like a great philosophical podcasting team because we both have the philosophical training and then I have the theater background and you have the debate background. So it's like a kind of fun difference in otherwise shared background.

And so I would think that you would think that the ideal of debate is very important, right? Debate is a way that we publicly reason with other individuals and there is a winner in a debate. And so maybe it like partakes in this politics as war tradition, but there's a winner because we're in service of reasoning. Right. So I'm curious what you think about the purpose of political debate, if at all, especially after reading this book, which we will, you know, talk about in greater detail once we actually interview Stein Lubrano.

[00:05:17] David: Yeah, So I think my 19-year-old and 18-year-old self would've hated this book because when I first started. High school debate. I was deeply committed to the idea that debate is a way of developing your cognitive skills and of changing the world. And that if you become educated about what's wrong with the world, then you can convince other people to, as you said, become your comrades.

So 18, 19-year-old David was very much the person that Lubrano is talking about in this book that is actually a representative for the average political subject of our culture of argument. Then when I went to college and I continued doing competitive debate largely as a way of putting myself through college, I became deeply disillusioned with competitive debate for many of the reasons that Lubrano talks about in this book.

On the one hand, I realized that I was changing in honestly, really shitty ways. I was becoming argumentative, you know, even in high school with my parents for no reason. I started treating social interactions that were not debates as debates and as opportunities for me to like sharpen my claws as a debater.

[00:06:28] Ellie: We all know that guy.

[00:06:29] David: Yeah, and like I was becoming that guy certainly in high school and at the beginning of college and by the time my senior year came around, I realized that my character was becoming a little bit questionable and I had an epiphany that maybe that's not the person I wanted to be.

On the other hand, I also looked around me and realized that many other competitive debaters, people who like me, devoted themselves to this. I mean, the debate team, to be clear, for people who don't know, it's essentially like a sports team. We had weekly practices, we had coaches, we had training, we had a budget for traveling. We would go all over the nation. We had nationals and regional tournaments, so it was a whole thing. When you are immersed in the culture of debate for so long and so intensely you notice patterns, and as I looked around me, I realized that many of the people who were competitive debaters treat the news cycle as disaster porn. And what I mean by that is that many of us would hear of something terrible happening in the world, and deep down we would get excited and maybe not even that deep down, to be honest.

We would get excited because this offered a new weapon to use against our opponents in the next argument. Did the president say or do something atrocious? Is there a new war? Is there a new natural disaster? And we would sort of get off on the idea that bad events, though bad for the people who were experiencing were ultimately good for us as debaters.

And so I ultimately walked away from competitive collegiate debate at the end of my college career. One possibility was for me to become a debate coach because I was quite successful in that circuit, and that by that time I realized I need to move away from this community, even though I, you know, had great experiences with the people there. But it really is reflected in this critique of argument as war.

[00:08:24] Ellie: And in addition to the politics as war model, Stein Lubrano also articulates a very popular myth that we in the US and the UK, which are the context that she's writing within, often have around political discourse, which is that it is a marketplace. The marketplace of ideas is a place where you can just articulate your view, and if it's good enough, it will get traction. And so the best ideas are the most popular because why would somebody believe an idea if it weren't good, right? And so this consumerist model of ideas and especially of political thinking is a very common one, but it's a very damaging view because we don't actually adopt political beliefs In the same way that we purchase goods.

We are deeply shaped by our environments, by implicit biases, by our conception of like what is an appropriate view to hold or not, especially by our friends, those that we're in community with, and that's something that we'll talk about quite a bit with Stein Lubrano herself, and so, in general, she thinks that we need to move away from both the politics as war, the debate kind of model, and the politics as marketplace, capitalistic, consumerist, ideal.

[00:09:37] David: Yeah, and I like her reasons for moving away from both of them. So in connection to the commerce model, she points out, look, we don't actually relate to ideas in the same way. We relate to commodities and we don't evaluate them in the same way. A commodity is a good commodity if it's popular and sells.

That's all is required for it to be a good commodity. We shouldn't say that an idea is good just because it's popular like a commodity, right? When it comes to politics, we need to also ask, not only is this idea widespread or popular, but is it right? Is it correct? And so that takes us outside of the domain of the marketplace and beyond that, I think our sense of agency and identity is way more tied up with the views we espouse than it is with the commodities that we purchase. And so on an existential political level, our relationship to those two is not the same. And we make a gigantic mistake when we conflate them.

[00:10:41] Ellie: Sarah Stein Lubrano is a social theorist who holds a PhD from the University of Oxford. She's the founder of the Sense and Solidarity Initiative and the Future Narratives Lab, and was previously Head of content at the School of Life. She's the author of the book, don't Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st Century Minds.

[00:10:59] David: Hi, Sarah. It's such a privilege to have you with us. Welcome to the show.

[00:11:03] Sarah: I am super excited for it.

[00:11:04] Ellie: We really, really enjoyed reading your book and are delighted to talk to you about it today. I think from the very title, you know, don't talk about politics, you had my attention and I wanna start there because many people assume that talking about politics, whether it's through sharing our opinions or debating with those we disagree with online or in real life is the solution to our political polarization today. In the face of so much disagreement, I hear this all the time, we just need to have a conversation, whether that's exposing people to views from the supposed other side or kind of reasoning things out together to come to some consensus.

But you argue that this approach is totally misguided. Politics is not about discourse. It is rather about action. Why is it that talking politics is largely fruitless?

[00:11:58] Sarah: This is a really great question, and yeah, I think you've explained part of the premise of my book really well, and I guess. Look, I'm gonna give you a tiny bit of backstory about this book, which is imagine that you are really interested in all the things you've just asked about, but you're me when I started my PhD and I was doing a PhD in political theory and I was doing it through the political theory department, so people were not applying psychology really, and I was sort of trying to figure out all these questions, like polarization, why can't people talk to each other?

And then I also just had this deep curiosity about psychology. It came from my working life. I had quit academia for some time. I had gone to work for a place called the School of Life.

[00:12:37] Ellie: Which is not in public philosophy, by the way. I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar.

[00:12:41] Sarah: Yeah, well, exactly, and it was completely by accident. I mean, you know, like I applied to the job when I didn't know what they were and their YouTube channel didn't exist. And then I was their first YouTuber researcher, so I'm kind of like a baby behind the scenes early, like YouTuber, but not you know, facing the camera.

Until now and I guess I became increasingly conscious that there's this gap in left-wing political theory, getting straight into the nerd stuff, or have any political theory to some degree where there's not modern psychology. So there are people who love to use Freud and Freud is great, by the way. There are many things I appreciate about Freud's work, even though he A, died a hundred years ago and B, got some stuff wrong.

Still there's useful stuff, but he did die a hundred years ago. And there is still a whole group of political theorists that just use psychoanalysis. And I thought, okay, but what about everything that's happened since then, for the last a hundred years? So I started to look at that research and then I started to look also at, you know, not just cognitive psychology, but social psychology and all the empirical findings we have about like, how do human beings actually behave?

And the reason that this matters to get to it is that once you start looking at those studies, it becomes uncomfortably clear that most of the time when people talk about politics, they do not move their opinions basically at all. At all. And I really mean that one of the more striking things I look at in this book is several different sort of like mega studies where they just see, okay, do people who watch debates on television change their voting intention at all?

And the answer is no. People watch political debates, even if they're undecided, and that debate does not seem to have a statistically significant effect on who they're gonna vote for. It's a random walk the day afterward, which in statistics jargon basically means whatever shift you see is just not that important and isn't caused by the debate.

And I guess the thing I then began to be very interested in was, okay, well, does that mean like all of this talking is. Pointless and fruitless. And by the way, there are a lot of other studies that show similar things about discourse. And the good news is there are many other things that do change people's minds about politics. They're just not words.

And once I got to that, I wanted to unpack this contradiction within what I would call liberalism. By which I don't mean the left half of the American Overton window. I mean like this tradition that we have since the 16 or 17 hundreds where we more or less in Western societies, believe in a certain kind of individualism as the basis for democracy.

I have increasingly come to believe that many of the cultural assumptions that underride liberalism, which is a belief system that like the right half of the American Overton window roughly used to believe in a lot, maybe less now with Trump, they have other more authoritarian bets. But, there's a culture of liberalism that has good things, beautiful things like human rights, but also unhelpful things like the assumption that words alone are enough in politics.

And I wanted to kind of use the psychological focus to unpack the reality of what changes people's minds, which is not words by themselves.

[00:15:22] David: Well, and this idea that words are enough to change people at their core or in terms of their most fundamental political commitments, it really stems from a view of the individual as a rational agent, as a linguistic agent. It's really stemming from this idea that if we just manage to make the right argument in the right way, pulling the right kind of evidence in front of the right audience, we would be able to affect other people's belief system, right?

Like we could manipulate or engineer their beliefs to align with ours. And I think this is where the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas ultimately comes from something that you talk about at length in your book. This notion that we as rational agents and linguistic agents choose our beliefs in the same way that we choose commodities in the market.

You know, like if I'm looking for clothes at, at a garage sale or at a flea market, I'm looking for the most rational deal that is going to enhance my self-interest. And so I want you to talk a little bit about why this conception of the public sphere as a marketplace of ideas is fundamentally misguided. What does this metaphor ultimately get wrong about politics and about human psychology?

[00:16:34] Sarah: Firstly, let's start with psychology. Psychologically, if you look at the research on how people change their minds, they're not primarily, if at all, changing their minds just by being exposed to arguments, right? So you can look at, okay, do people who read stuff online change their views even if they're given good reasons to do so?

And the answer is no. One of the main reasons for this is something called cognitive dissonance, but there are many other psychological reasons as well. One of my favorite studies on this actually looks at people who are given good evidence to believe something different than they believe now on a number of different topics.

And I wanna point out here that it's specifically the political things that they can't change their minds about. So if there's something that isn't political in their worldview, like I don't know how they should fix their roof, is often an example I give 'cause most people don't have long, strong political views about that.

People change their minds. Fine. You know? And the reason for this is that dissonance theory in particular identifies the kind of. The bit of us that resists new information when it threatens our sense of self. And basically we struggle to change our minds when changing our minds would involve a threat to our sense of ourselves as good and competent agents.

So if I suddenly discover that I've been voting for the wrong people my whole life, and that most of my friends also have the wrong beliefs, that really threatens my sense of myself as a competent and good person. And it also, you know, importantly, has a huge threat to my sort of social life. Our brains are really good at rationalizing that stuff away because it is too difficult.

This is an ongoing finding in social psychology, one that's pretty robust. There are a lot of other things that seem to prevent people, but psychologically we are not very changeable in our political beliefs just by being given arguments. The other thing though that I try to remind people of is, look, the things that do shape our beliefs and we'll get to them, but they are very roughly our relationships with other people and our actions in the world are so powerful that it's kind of like the tide, you know? And then you can write whatever number of words you want on the sand. But the tide, the really important forces in our life, our own actions, our own experiences, our relationships with other people, those things will eventually wash those words away.

And that's basically what you see in these psychological studies. The people who receive arguments in their own, like kind of disembodied or just in the media or whatever, that's not what is shifting people's views.

[00:18:37] Ellie: Yeah. and I love that metaphor of the tide versus like, was it the waves? Was that what you just said?

[00:18:44] Sarah: Yeah. Like it's washing the sand away. Yeah,

[00:18:47] Ellie: Yeah. The words that are written on it because I think we do just focus so much on the superficial level of discourse here in political conversations, and as you point out, like that's really not where our focus should be.

And so before we get to kind of how people actually do change their beliefs, I wanted to ask you about viewpoint diversity, because as I was reading your book. I was thinking about how so much of the narrative around higher education today has been co-opted by this quasi right wing, but often masquerading as neutral or centrist idea that what universities today are lacking is viewpoint diversity.

We see that the vast majority of professors skew liberal and or leftist, and there's like not a lot of conservative representation in higher education. I think a lot of us who are actually within higher education are like, well, what kind of views are you talking about? Because a lot of the right wing views that you wish were represented aren't represented in higher education because they have been debunked. Right.

And I think you see this emphasis on viewpoint diversity and debating the other side in the discourse of somebody. Charlie Kirk, and I was thinking while reading your book about how viewpoint diversity and this ideal of debating the other side depends on the misconceptions that we have about the role of talking about ideas In politics, it's focusing on the waves or the writing on the waves rather than on the tides.

[00:20:14] Sarah: Yeah, well this is exactly it. So let's think about this because one of the things I say very early on in the book is that one of the most dangerous things about thinking that like a marketplace of ideas on its own is gonna change things or is, you know, a pretty good instrument is that it means you hide all the other mechanisms of power.

In a world where the marketplace of ideas works, you don't have to question like, why does this guy own five times as much as everyone else? And why does he own the newspapers actually? Because, because it's fine. Because the ideas will just get through if they're the right ideas, and I think to different degrees and with different strategies, and sometimes with different levels of conscious manipulation.

The right is really good at having the insights that I put in this book with lots of data, just intuitively because they like power, right? I mean, you know, not to over there are a lot of kinds of right-wing people, but if you look at people like the people behind Charlie Kirk, those people like power.

They actually have, in some ways not that much ideologically in common, beyond that, but power. And they are very good at thinking about what gets them power. And interestingly, although they say that they are, you know, getting power through words, watch what they're actually doing, watch what they do, not what they say.

Here's what they do. They get enormous amounts of money. They go and they create spaces where people can gather together. One point in my book, I actually give an interview from Steve Bannon and he's very clear that he is not interested in words and he's not interested in debate. There's like an interviewer from the New York Times, which is very funny to me.

And the guy's like, oh, don't you think Steve, that like, you know, if we just have conversations, we can see that other people are reasonable. He's like, I'm not interested in that. Fuck you. He literally swears the guy, and it's not just that he's, I mean he is a fascist, but it's not just that he's a fascist, it's that it, he's very conscious of what actually works to organize people.

And what he does is he sucks them in via portal online into a real world situation where they make new friends. And they write him thank you notes. He says, this is Steve Banon still talking. He says, Yeah, these people write me thank you notes. 'cause they're now in a space where they can make real friends offline. and then they have tasks to do and those tasks motivate them and they love it. And then he cites Robert Putnam, which is like an amazing sociological reference. A liberal, you know, political scientist about this. Power of relationships and actions. So he has this intuitively, Charlie Kirk, pretty similar.

It's a great facade to say you want debate, but what he actually does is create a space where all the right-wing students on campus come together. They kind of see like their enemies pilloried in front of them, and they enjoy that as a spectacle. And maybe they're a bit motivated and maybe they meet each other and maybe they join Turning Point.

So it's actually about gathering people together, which is what a lot of spectacles do. It's not about the arguments and they are not changing people's minds.

[00:22:31] David: Yeah, and I think the value here is thinking about politics, not as differences in viewpoints, but really as you point out at one point, differences in interests, right? Like different people have different interests and you don't change interests, right? Like reflections of power dynamics through engaging in rational debates because ultimately interests make reference as we know from Marx to material relations.

And so it really has to do with power, it has to do with resources, and it has to do with access. Now I wanna go back to what you mentioned earlier about how we are being self relationality rather than logic, and that our worldviews, they tend to tilt or shift, or change entirely by virtue of the relationships that we have because you lean often on what is called the social contact hypothesis that says that we tend to alter our political beliefs by virtue of the kinds of relationships that we cultivate and that we nourish. And one kind of relationship that seems to be very powerful at bringing about political change in us is our friendships. So our friends tend to cause us to change how we view the world.

But you also point out that it's not just automatic. It's not that having friends with certain political beliefs means that you will mirror their political beliefs. Rather, friendships can change our views if there are some conditions in place, first and foremost. So can you talk to us about what those conditions are that make it such that our social contacts change who we are and how we see ourselves?

[00:24:05] Sarah: Absolutely. I love this theory. I think it helps me understand a lot about the world. It's a theory that was interestingly developed and, you know, empirically, let's say validated through actually the, the study of the US military. So after World War 2, they finally started to integrate the units and these sociologists wanted to understand, okay, is this going to make basically the white people less racist?

And they discovered that the answer is yes, but only in certain conditions, and here are roughly the conditions. So one of them is that you need to be relatively placed as equals. Armies are kind of funny to talk about, but like imagine you're in a workplace and all the senior people are white and all the junior people are people of color.

I've worked in many organizations like this. By the way, that doesn't work very well at reducing prejudice because obviously people. See kind of in either consciously or unconsciously that okay, but we are not equals, right. You know, we're not actually being treated as equals. Also, it seems to be important that the institution actually like informally endorses equality and, and kind of advocates for it.

That's very important for people. and then one of the other conditions is that people have shared goals, which I find really interesting. And one of the reasons that I find it really interesting is that we do not have shared goals on the internet almost ever. If you think about people who are like, I'm just gonna go onto the internet and I'm gonna like, become less prejudiced and wiser, but they're not because in many cases, most of the time, precisely because they don't have these sociological foundations, they might run into people of color on the internet or whatever group.

They're not gonna have shared goals with them. Whereas if you're in like, I don't know, the Parent Teacher Association or whatever, some other thing that's like a fundamental part of society, you suddenly see this other person, they're positioned as an equal, they're endorsed as an equal, and now you're like, Oh we actually have shared goals.

We have interest in common. We are kind of in the struggle together. Whatever you think of the US military, and I don't have much nice to say about it in the book, it is a shared struggle towards a common goal, right? And at least it's solidarity in a kind of weird suffering that the military, industrial complex places on mostly poor people.

So these people have shared goals. And then, and this is very fundamental to what you were just saying. You have the need for long-term relationships that can effectively become meaningful friendships where you really get to know each other and you really start to talk to each other and you see each other as people.

And I think the reason that these conditions are important, besides the fact that they show why the internet is so screwed up in part, is that they point to this importance of a certain kind of relationship of equals as the thing that makes our minds more democratic, right? It's not just any relationship, it's a certain kind of relationship where you have to really think about the other person and see your life and their life entwined and care about them, even if you don't really like them, which is a very different thing.

And I'm absolutely fascinated by that. And for me, a lot of my understanding of what democracy is comes from that you can live in a society that has relatively flat income, but it's despotic in certain ways. Although I really think that income matters, you can live in a society where people have certain kinds of rights, but they still don't really have to integrate their consciousness with other people, and I think the tech overlords we live in right now don't really want this form of relationship. That's not what they're building. They're building something else.

[00:26:59] Ellie: Yeah, and it also strikes me that so much of what is needed in the kind of social contact that you're talking about is the knowing each other. And even if you don't know each other on a really intimate level, you're at least like knowing about one another, even if it's like so superficial, like what somebody's race is.

But hopefully there's a lot more to it than that. But I think part of what is so distressing about so much of online discourse is that it happens with such a high level of anonymity that you might, you know, spend an entire afternoon arguing with a 12-year-old or a bot and nothing against 12 year olds. Plenty against bots, but nothing against 12 year olds. But it's like, that really a useful, you know, way to devote your time when maybe like what that 12-year-old needs is things that are very different from arguing with an adult stranger on the internet.

And so this, I think leads me into a question about social atrophy, which is something that you devote a chapter to, and social atrophy as you define it, is the weakening through disuse of the neural networks that help us navigate the social world. And when we find our social skills atrophying, we don't just experience more loneliness. In fact, as you point out, like we might not even recognize that we're lonely, but we have a weakening of cognitive functioning and a variety of other non-adaptive changes. And you talk about how even though subjective reports of loneliness are actually not rising in the way that people often assume they are given the widespread phrase, loneliness epidemic. There is a rise in isolation and that has really damaging effects for us. And so I'd love to hear you talk about social atrophy in relation to our own weakening or imperiled political functioning as citizens.

[00:28:53] Sarah: Yeah, this is actually what my next book is about, and it's almost an accident like in the sense that you know, I, I dunno about you, but if I do a big research project, I always think it's going one place and then somehow halfway through you get like derailed,

[00:29:03] Ellie: Oh, totally. I can't wait for that project. Wow.

[00:29:06] David: No imagined book ever gets written.

[00:29:09] Sarah: No. always end up writing something else. And so look, I like reading things in neuroscience, but to be honest with you I am also very skeptical because most smart neuroscientists I talk to say like, we don't know most things. We don't really know. We don't know why antidepressants work. We don't know what's going on. Like they don't know. And that's an intelligent place to be from a scientific perspective in a lot of ways.

So it's very rare that I will kind of zero in on like a thing happening in the brain. But as I was writing this book. I began to, obviously I realized, oh, I'm writing about all this stuff about relationships, and there is this massive, massive sociology literature and political science literature and just empirical set of studies and data about how we are increasingly alone, alone in a lot of different ways.

So we are actually not any lonelier from the best research we have than we were 40 or 50 years ago in the sense that people do not report being any lonelier if you ask 'em a bunch of questions about loneliness using the UCLA loneliness scale, which is like the gold standard or any of the other things, right? They're not actually any lonelier. We're not. We're not reporting being any lonelier.

But loneliness is a subjective feeling about usually like, do I have the kinds of social relationships I want at this moment? It seems to be, interestingly, and I think about this a lot, as a very sociable person, it seems to be a thing that like the extroverts are the canaries in the coal mines for, or just people who need a certain kind of like contact.

But there are people who are less sensitive to a lack of social relationships, and that sounds good in that you will have a little bit less anxiety and depression in the short run, but it might be bad in the long run because even if you don't feel lonely, if you are socially isolated, if you're having less social contact, you basically just lose some of the social abilities that you actually need for a lot of different activities.

And this happens without you noticing them. Again, it's like muscle atrophy your brain actually changes shape enough that we can see this in an MRI machine. I often use the word shrinks, but I try to be very precise when I'm talking to other academics. So it's not quite shrinks, although there are areas that are shrinking.

It's a very complicated thing that's happening. And also sometimes neural shrinking is good. But anyway, look, the point is the brain loses some of its abilities and those are very fundamental abilities. And once I got into that research, I was hooked. And I also became increasingly persuaded that unlike a lot of areas of neuroscience, it's fairly robust because one of the very few things we know about neurons is that the more you use them, the more they, you know, grow these neural patterns, and the less you use them, the more they are not available. So it's a pretty solid finding compared to a lot of other ones.

But the thing that interests me is social atrophy has a lot of really weird characteristics, so they increasingly attribute negativity to interactions that are actually just neutral. Like if someone doesn't text you back, that's actually a neutral event. A million things could have happened, their boss could have pulled them aside. You know, who knows? But if you attribute negativity to that very rapidly, then you're kind of engaged in a form of social paranoia and people who are socially isolated, it's not just that they. Lose some of their social skills, their ability to read faces, their sense of when they could enter a social world. It's that they actually begin to distrust people and dislike them and not think that they're welcome and not be able to even spot when there might be a good place for them to be.

And I see a lot of that kind of paranoia in the way people interact with each other. Certainly ever since I've grown my Instagram page, people are vicious to each other in the comments. And some of that is like an intentional game, but it's also that people are deeply paranoid about the you know the motivations that other people have.

Sometimes when I stick, like the polarization discourse, which I think is a very poorly framed set of conversations, I see in that a little bit of this social atrophy. Another thing people do is they actually personify inanimate objects and animals more. They anthropomorphize them, which is fascinating, right?

So we've got all these people who are spending more and more hours alone because that's what we do have data on this. People are spending more and more hours without another human being physically present in the room and often not even doing a social thing on their phone, although sometimes. And they're losing social skills and they're probably becoming more paranoid and less adept at certain kinds of social interactions, which they also find more exhausting.

This is a negative cycle, right? And at the end of that, what you get is a different kind of subjectivity. And my opinion, which is also somewhat backed up by science, is that this is bad. It's bad for us and that we die sooner and it's bad for us and that we, you know, lose abilities. But there's some subjectivity in there as well about like what kind of creatures do we want to be?

And I'm pretty convinced that it's important that we remain highly social creatures. It doesn't mean that we're not introverts. Sometimes I can be an introvert even occasionally, but we are attuned to the needs of other humans. We live in dialogue with them in some way. You know, maybe we need to like go home and not go to the club.

Fair enough Sometimes. But we are inter subjective in a way that I think increasingly people are unable to fully access.

[00:33:21] David: Yeah, and I, so I don't think we can talk about loneliness. And paranoia without talking about social media. And of course social media is a really important theme in your book because a lot of social media platforms, I'm here thinking about X for example, formerly Twitter, have been vaunted by some people, as you know, the new contemporary public square, the place where we engage in that kind of discourse that we call the marketplace of ideas.

And I think the optimism that a lot of people had about, first the internet in general, but then about social media platforms, has waned as we've learned how hyper optimistic that was given, how many of these spaces are monopolies, they are concentrations of power. I think we really saw this, for example, when Elon Musk bought Twitter, you know, fired a bunch of engineers and then reworked the algorithm to really highlight right wing content and even to give himself a platform for reaching, you know millions and millions of people.

And you argue in the book that platforms such as X should be understood as democratic infrastructure. And you point out at some point that infrastructure is the least sexy word that one can think of to think about political theory. And I think you're right, but I also think you're right that it is absolutely foundational, right?

Because in order for us to engage in the work of. Politics. We need a social infrastructure that enables political engagement,

[00:34:48] Ellie: Which had a huge impact on public philosophy, by the way. I'm sure many of our listeners are because I think we do just focus so much on the superficial level of discourse here in political conversations, and as you point out, like that's really not where our focus should be.

And so before we get to kind of how people actually do change their beliefs, I wanted to ask you about viewpoint diversity, because as I was reading your book. I was thinking about how so much of the narrative around higher education today has been co-opted by this

[00:35:21] David: how many of these spaces are monopolies? They are concentrations of power. I think we really saw this, for example, when Elon Musk bought Twitter, you know, fired a bunch of engineers and then reworked the algorithm to really highlight right wing content and even to give himself a platform for reaching, you know.

Millions and millions of people. And you argue in the book that platforms such as X should be understood as democratic infrastructure. word that one can think of to think about political theory. And I think you're right, but I also think you're right that it is absolutely foundational, right?

Because in order for us to engage in the work of politics, we need a social infrastructure that enables political engagement, political commitments, and political connection. And so I want you to talk about how you view democratic infrastructure, especially in the case of something like X. Because I could imagine somebody reading your book and walking away after having heard your criticisms of X saying, we just need to delete X. We need to destroy social media platforms and go back to some other model of political participation, but you don't take that position. In fact, your view is that we need to rework these platforms into more open, democratically controlled spaces that really perform the function of democratic infrastructure.

So tell us why we should reimagine something like Twitter slash x rather than destroy it and it in what direction it gets reimagined.

[00:36:57] Ellie: Sorry, can I just add one quick point to that too is like I was worried about this as well and thinking in particular about how Twitter might perpetuate the myth that we can get somewhere with discourse, right? And whereas actually that's distracting us from the kind of action and real life interactions that you want us to move toward.

[00:37:15] Sarah: This is a great question and it's the right question. And to be fair, I think you're sort of calling me out because the reason I use Twitter is not actually that I want, like Twitter as it currently exists. I even confess that like despite all my nostalgia for early Twitter, which is kind of a fun place to be.

I think at some level you're right, like it, you know, the way it currently is in any format like that is a glorification to some degree of this kind of like marketplace of ideas, logic. But actually the reason I started with Twitter is because I noticed back during the pandemic when Musk bought Twitter, I mean, look, we're still in the pandemic in some ways, but the people, they had the right intuitions about Twitter, even though it might be the wrong technology, in the sense that people were really engaged on Twitter at a certain point, all these different communities, and they would come together and often they were doing some forms of organizing on it. You know, there was like black Twitter, which had all kinds of interesting stuff and people were also building connections on there.

I don't think those connections are strong as offline ones, but they were doing something interesting with the platform. And when Musk bought it, you could see this like collective shuttering that happened because something in people's imagination was like, this is ours because I am here every day building this beautiful thing with other people, talking to them, making friends, sliding into their dms, whatever, you know?

And the thing is, I want to emphasize here that like, even if Twitter is a bad technology, people were kind of, they were right in the, I don't know a better word for this, but like Marxist sense, right? I mean, I am a scholar of Marx and Freud, and then I just added a bunch of science on top of that, fundamentally, at some level, that's my methodology. And they're right. Like their labor made that place, a fun place to be and it should be theirs. And actually the like work of thinking about ideas should be all of ours. And the fact that some guy like Elon Musk can own Twitter is the right thing to be offended by.

And the reason I started with Twitter is because I felt that people's intuitions, a lot of people's intuitions around it were close enough that maybe they could get where I wanted them to go about infrastructure. I could say, yes, there are these things that seem like they're these engines of democracy, but they're actually owned by billionaires.

And as long as they're owned by billionaires, they will never do the beautiful thing that we imagined they would do. And I think Musk is a particularly obvious billionaire. You know, in fact, most of our media platforms, and certainly almost all of our social media platforms are owned by billionaires.

It's almost all owned by billionaires. Like if you go look at number of newspapers in America, radio stations, I mean, it's shocking. And I understand that. I sound like the guy selling you the like Stalinist newspaper or whatever, but I'm not a Stalinist, it's just a fact. And that is a really big problem for a democracy in almost every sense of that word.

So I've kinda addressed why I did that as like a rhetorical move. I think people have feelings about Twitter in a way that might get them where they need to go when thinking about what it would be like for us all to actually own something in common. Right? And then. And then, yes. I mean, should it look like Twitter now?

I mean, certainly not, but it probably shouldn't even look like Twitter when it was started. You know, something I enjoy because I also work with tech companies sometimes sort of less evil ones, like the mental health apps and stuff. You know, those can be evil too, but people always joke about Twitter, they're like, it was every function that worked on Twitter for the user was like a mistake that like was added or like was used by the users.

It was like just built so poorly and run so poorly even before Musk and everything that works about it. Like the hashtags was just made by users. It was kind of a, a mess up place. But here's what I think about, because one of the jobs I used to have when I was working in the quote real world before I went back to my PhD, something I still do now a little bit is what's called content strategy.

And a place like Twitter is a place for content, and content is not the same as arguments and it does a different thing. And it can do that for better or for worse. Content is a thing that circulates. It just goes around and around and around and around and around and around, around the loop. So I share it to you, with you, you go, ha, ha, ha, so funny. Great cat meme. And then you share it with your friend and then it generates connections between individuals. That's what it does, and it almost doesn't matter, as perverse as it's to say this, it almost doesn't matter what's in the content. It matters a lot more structurally, like where it goes and who it connects.

And I think the right is really good at recognizing this. So they're like, yes, I will create exactly the right kind of content, even if it has no internal logical consistency. The left can do this too, to be clear, but the right is really good at this. And they just electrify these little networks of people, like little networks of neurons and they get them to be like, we are together now.

This bit of Twitter, you know, that's what Twitter does and I would like to see that, except I would like to see it offline. I think offline is a better place on average for people to, again, have these conditions met where they're much more likely to humanize each other and they're much more likely to see each other as equals.

And I think that really matters. So I don't fundamentally want social networks as they currently are online. I want them to somehow become a thing where they organize people offline and we're certainly not there yet.

[00:41:28] Ellie: Well, this is a great segue into my next question, which is about organizing offline in protests. You have the most fun chapter titles, and one of them is act First. Think later. And in this chapter you describe the importance of protests, but you note that protests in the present day almost never actually achieve their objectives. So protests are important, but for different reasons than we might think. So what are these reasons? Why are protests still important, even if not for the reasons that people might think?

[00:42:00] Sarah: Okay, so here's the bit where I make, usually I write like I, you know, I give talks and then slowly the more like liberals in the room are like a bit offended, but like kind of interested and any right-wing people are upset. And then, and then I get to this part and like the leftists in the room are really mad, but here we go.

Because I like protests, by the way.

[00:42:14] Ellie: Succeeded in angering all, as any good political thinker does.

[00:42:20] Sarah: I looked at the data on, okay, cool, like debate doesn't work. Does protest work? And again, if you measure from the perspective of does it change the minds of either the public in general or the politicians and or decision makers, the answer is no.

There is not a good evidence base to suggest that, you know, even if you have a very popular protest movement, like Black Lives Matter was a key one, right? Because it was the biggest protest movement, I believe the US had ever seen in terms of number of participants.

And for a little while there was a shift in public opinion and it was bigger than usual. And it tracked in various ways that are like kind of too boring to relate on a podcast about statistics in such a way that some sociologists thought, Oh maybe actually the protests themselves are changing the public's opinion. And the reason they were excited about that is that you almost never see that in a significant way.

So usually what you see when a protest happens, even a big one, is like there's a little bump in awareness and maybe there's some like weird wobbles around what people believe. And then as soon as the protest ends, like, maybe even two weeks in people's opinions are back to where they were before. And Black Lives Matter had a big arc where for about three or four years, people seemed to have their opinions changed and we now see no arc anymore.

So Americans are back to where they were on questions like, you know, are the police racist? What should we do about it? Et cetera. And actually it's even more depressing. What's happened is that conservatives and white people have become more entrenched in what they like. They've actually become more reactionary. And other people of color are a bit more activated, but in, in the way that I would like them to be.

But, yeah on average, we haven't made any progress, basically as a nation about black people and violence in police violence. And sadly, that is the sociological finding that you get with pretty much all protests.

It does not change the public's opinion in the long run for all kinds of reasons that will perhaps become apparent. And also it doesn't change the decision makers. And by the way, when I talk about protest here, I mean something really specific, which is demonstrations that are A, nonviolent, and B, not blocking any of the means of production.

Because when you look at other forms of protest, for better and worse, and I'm not endorsing violence here necessarily, they do seem to have other effects. Sometimes counterproductive ones, but for example, strikes are a lot more effective. Right. They actually seem to achieve their decision maker because they've got basically held something hostage, you know, sorry to use that phrase, but they hold something hostage that the people in power want and they have to give you something back to get what they want, which is for you to go back to work.

[00:44:28] David: Yeah. Well that's the difference between interests and viewpoints, right? Like strikes hit at interests.

[00:44:33] Ellie: Yeah. and so that's the thing is that protests are not changing the public's opinion. They're not changing the government's mind. Who are they changing? the thing is they are changing one group of people a lot. A lot. And that group of people are the protestors. The protestors people who, let's say, have the same political views and live in roughly the same area and have other similar things in common, but one of them happens to join a protest movement.

The person that becomes a protestor. A demonstrator, that person has changed for life. And the data on this is amazing. There's lots of sociological data on this. There's called the biographical effects data. People who join protest movements are, their views change fundamentally in a lot of ways politically, they shift and that shift seems to last throughout the course of their life in a lot of ways.

They also have other effects, which whenever I list than people groan, if they've been an activist. So they are more likely to get divorced, they're less likely to have kids, they're more likely to go back to graduate school, which as we know is a terrible idea and shouldn't it. You know, and, and all these other things.

And they become like you know, the, the leftist at the party that you've all met. And I guess the reason I use this example besides to piss off people that I otherwise politically often agree with. No, I'm kidding. Is that, that makes sense when you look at the arc of my book, right? My, my book is an arc about, okay, we're not gonna have a marketplace of ideas 'cause that's a bad capitalist analysis of what is actually happening. And it obscures power and debate is not the thing 'cause it's very counterproductive. But there are things that change people's mind. Those things are having new networks of relationships, which is definitely what happens to people when they join protest movements.

They have all kinds of new friends and they're deeply committed, and they get beat up by the police together. And then they become, you know, more and more aware of certain things together and they have these transformative experiences. And the other thing is our own actions and experiences. And if you're an activist in the long run, you have all these new actions and relationships. I know. 'cause you know, even recently, I, in the last five years, that is, I became a mutual aid organizer and suddenly I know all these people in my neighborhood, they're in a totally different class position to me, a lot of the time I've talked to so many old people on the phone and know things about their lives that I would never have bothered to learn otherwise, let's be honest.

So it really changed me as a person because it changed my actions and my relationships. No amount of argument could have done that.

[00:46:26] David: Yeah, and I think this coheres with, you know, the stereotype of the individual who gets radicalized specifically at protests, right. Joining a movement, seeing themselves taken over by that wave of affect, seeing their concerns kind of reflected in other people and just the effervescence, the political effervescence, I think is, is deeply transformative.

I certainly was changed by the protests that I attended when I was, you know, 18, 19 years old in college and in a really significant, sort of like fundamental way. And this brings me to the question of what to do. 'cause I mean, one answer already would be go join a protest and be politically engaged.

But I think that a lot of people feel hopeless about politics and for that reason, they don't know where to begin either to pursue political engagement or even, feel disconnected from their very close circle of friends and choose not to talk about politics leading to that kind of isolation and loneliness that we talked about earlier.

And so I want you to say more about what kinds of things we might benefit from having in our culture that enable us to perform these political actions that motivate us that change us, because you talk about what are known as affordances, a term from psychology, that there are certain things in the world that are primarily action enabling objects of perception, right?

Like you see something and what you see primarily is the possibility for carrying out a certain action. So what sorts of affordances do we need to bring into our world so that we see ourselves as. Possible agents who feel motivated to act in the world, you know, to do more politics and to do it better.

[00:48:14] Sarah: Yeah, great. What do we need? We need a couple of things One of the things which I talk about a lot in the book is social infrastructure. And this is just the word that is used for places that enable us to form new social connections. and of course you can have relatively democratic ones like, you know, where you're having the kinds of conditions we discussed earlier.

I often give the example of, you know, do parents pick up their kids in a line of cars outside of the school. If so, they're probably on their phones waiting for their kids. They're not talking to other parents. They're certainly not like strategizing about how the school could be better. If, however, they have to go onto the playground and like watch their kids push each other or whatever, know, like negotiate that and then talk about like what the school is like, then you have a democratic infrastructure or potentially democratic one, especially if they get off their phones. And I'm very interested in the design of social infrastructures and I think the important thing to notice early on is that social infrastructure is often inconvenient and it's inconvenient for the user when they start.

It's kind of inconvenient to have to park your car and go inside and then run into someone you don't really totally like, but then have a conversation that's inconvenient. And I do I am kind of committed to this, even though it doesn't win any favors with anyone, is that I think most interesting forms of social and democratic life are inconvenient.

And that's fine. That actually they are not geared towards convenience. They're geared towards something else, and they have to be that way most of the time. But if you have the good social infrastructure, it enables you just enough. One of the more famous writings about this, I think is, is Habermass writing about coffee shops, right?

There's enough of a draw in a coffee shop. Of course it's inconvenient compared to your house, but it's also like kind of fun. 'cause you can go in, people watch, or back in the day you could go and there'd be like newspapers and you could figure out what was happening in another part of the world. And then you could like argue with the people next to you, which again is just a form of entertainment.

But now you have a friend and you know. That's a social infrastructure. It's relatively cheap. You can go there a lot at that time. Anyway, certain kinds of people could, and they could form conversations. And of course importantly they're being drugged with coffee, which was a new and exciting drug.

So they're having a good time, you know, but they're not drunk, so they might actually plan a revolution. And this is the other group of people that Inconvenient for social infrastructures, especially offline ones that encourage sort of like semi democratic conversations are inconvenient for the people in power. And this is why in my view, you often get very half-assed attempts at best by governments to build social infrastructure because it's not actually good for them. And equally, it's not necessarily good for capitalists. Or capitalism. It's like, what you and I do when we like chit chat with our kids on the playground or we like have five coffees in a row and complain is very unlikely to be good for either the government or employers. And that's precisely why I like it, so we need it. And then I think the other thing I've been thinking about a lot, and you mentioned it with affordances, is so we need to build these social affordances and we need to make it likely that we would have certain kinds of social relationships that are inconvenient, way less convenient than Netflix and chill.

So much less convenient than Deliveroo guy and you ignore him. We also need to learn other kinds of skills. I mean, I'm very interested in the social skills. I could go on and on and on, and I think it's super important, especially given social atrophy, but we also have to learn other skills. And that's part of why I'm interested in social movements, right?

Which I'm using as a broad phrase to describe, like actually organized groups of people trying to change the world about a particular topic. Because once you join a social movement, if it's doing its job, which it often isn't by the way, but if it is, there's an ask of you ideally and very well organized and disciplined movements, everything from, you know, let's say the Civil Rights movement, as we commonly understand it, to the Black Panthers, to, you know, they ask something of the people involved, right?

And they say, Yeah and now we need you to go learn to, like my co-teacher, max Haven, his parents were in a Maoist cult at one point and then they left 'cause it was a mouse cult. But rather it fell apart for some reasons too. But, they had to learn to drive a bus, right? And, look, I'm not endorsing Maoist cults, but I am saying that it makes sense that if you engage in a certain kind of activism long enough, you are gonna have to learn some skills.

And I think we see less and less of this kind of useful activism these days, but you're gonna learn skills. You're gonna learn to deescalate conflict. You're gonna learn to motivate people. You're gonna learn, you know how to cook for huge groups of people. You're gonna learn how to get in the way when someone in power tries to blindside you or bullshit you, you're gonna learn these kinds of skills.

And those affordances are built by practice and they're built by social relationships, and they're built by training. I think a lot about the civil rights protestors who practiced harassing each other, and I think a lot of us don't have this practice when we get online, right? So nowadays, if someone comes and harasses you online, most people are not ready for that.

But the civil rights guys knew, like if they sat at the lunch counter, people were gonna put out their cigarettes On their skin. I mean, they really prepared and, they sat there and they mocked. They like practiced on each other, which is, I mean, they didn't burn each other's skin, I don't think. But they did like a lot of the other stuff.

They blow cigarettes smoke in your face, right? They say Get ready and you learn these skills, I guess. For me, I'm very interested in the work that spaces can do for this that social movements can do For this. We have to be doing this stuff because democracy isn't convenient and the way that you get there is through that stuff.

[00:52:45] David: On this note of defending inconvenience.

[00:52:49] Ellie: Yeah, this leaves us with so much food for thought.

Sarah, thank you so much. Don't talk about politics with such a joy to read, and so I hope our listeners will check it out as well, as well as your work through the sense and solidarity lab and great work that you do online. Thank you so much for everything.

[00:53:06] Sarah: Oh, it was a pleasure and I love this interview. You've helped me think through some things that I'm gonna now like furiously scribble some notes. People can always follow me online and, I always say buy my book for someone you hate.

[00:53:18] David: I think that should have been the subtitle of your book.

[00:53:21] Sarah: Yeah, yeah. It's a great, it's a great passive aggressive book because if you're like a conservative father-in-law, you know, you can just give it to him for Christmas.

[00:53:26] David: And , and buying is a of action, and it's about interests.

[00:53:29] Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. All kinds of things. It's a great like subliminal message to him.

[00:53:33] David: Thank you so much, Sarah.

[00:53:35] Ellie: Thank

[00:53:35] Sarah: Thank you so much.

[00:53:39] Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our substack for extended episodes, community chats, and other additional overthink content.

[00:53:47] David: To connect with us, find episode transcripts and make one-time tax deductible donations. Please check out our website, overthink podcast.com. We also have a thriving YouTube channel as well as TikTok Instagram and Twitter accounts at Overthink_pod.

[00:54:02] Ellie: We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.