Stop Trying To Be So Smart, Just Avoid Being Stupid

chilling effect when punishment for what people say becomes widespread people stop saying what they really think and instead say whatever is needed to thrive in the social environment thus limits on speech become limits on sincerity yeah so I mean so this is you know a sort of very timely thing I think because there's a lot of talk about sort of suppressing people from social media and stuff and um I think people should really realize that stopping people from airing their true opinions doesn't change their opinions it just makes them mask their opinions um and when this happens at scale it can lead to all kinds of absurd situations like the Abilene Paradox I don't know if we've covered the Abilene Paradox run it back it's basically a situation yeah it's basically a situation where everyone professes a belief that no one actually believes purely because they think everybody else believes it and so you can have a situation where literally everybody just is saying stuff that is just not true for the sole reason that they think everybody else thinks it's true an example of this um would probably be considered sort of um the issue of what a woman is um you've got pretty much everybody in the mainstream culture now pretending that they don't know what a woman is um but if you were to ask these people in private they would probably be able to tell you they'll just probably say an adult human female but because there's this sort of stigma now around knowing what a woman is people you know basically sort of they have to pretend like they don't know and uh it's just it leads to absurd situation after absurd situation and that's why I think it's it's I mean there's many reasons there's many arguments against censorship but this is definitely one of the strongest I think um you're not by censoring people you're not changing their behavior and changing their opinions you're not changing their beliefs all you're doing is just sort of sweeping them under the carpet you know and they're just going to continue just you just won't be able to see it anymore so you can't keep track of these people anymore this ties into your view about uh when people are their opinions they feel like they have to have an opinion on anything and everything and changing your opinion is tantamount to destruction of yourself so because people value their opinions so much in this situation quite rightly you're um the performative nature of having the right opinion of the Abilene paradox playing along with that has never been more important because opinions have never been more relevant to our status within the world yeah absolutely and you see this reflected most in the precisely the industries that you would expect it to be reflected in I.E the industries that are image oriented so if you have a look at people who have the most fashionable opinions I mean Rob Henderson would probably call these luxury beliefs they're sort of you know fashionable opinions that people adopt in order to sort of signal status um you know when I was a kid uh we all used to like buy sweatshirts which had like brand names stamped across the front of them like you know Fila or Nike you know when you're a kid at school because you want everybody to know that you paid paid for it so nowadays when you get older you no longer wear these labels now it's opinions instead uh you know you have the she her and the he him instead of a poor hot and poor them you know and um it's sort of like you see this in Hollywood you see it amongst Hollywood actors you see it amongst academics you see it in politics you see it in all of the industries where image is important where basically appearing to have the right opinions is more important than actually having the correct opinions yes and it's also an industry where opinions and actions have never been more diverged right you know somebody now can have a Twitter account that proselytizes the right uh beliefs and in private whole completely different beliefs or the way that they go about living their lives be totally different you could be a an online vegan who's an offline carnivore and for as long as the twine shall never meet uh it kind of doesn't really matter so much whereas in the past your ability to profess a belief that you didn't live up to in reality would have been much more difficult to diverge especially in before the internet right or before print media there is no way for you your opinions are very much your actions right there is no way to do this and to bifurcate you and what you say from what you and what you are and what you do so yeah it's um the opportunity and the motive have aligned to uh create this chilling effect yeah absolutely people have what their digital age has done is it's separated the person from the persona um so now you know there's a much wider Gulf between how you appear to others and how you actually are than there ever was because of the sort of importance of social media in our daily lives and so because of that sort of dissociation there's now big Gulf between the beliefs that people profess and what they actually believe in real life there's no consequences nowadays for what a person actually believes really most of the time anyway at least as long as you have the fashion opinions you know if you have unfashionable opinions then there is consequences but if you if you believe something like for instance um uh that it's not a problem for um like for instance there was this issue in Scotland recently about um that there was a rapist who was locked in a women's prison briefly and then there was an outcry about it over the Internet which sort of LED Nicholas sturgeon to walk it back and may have led to her resignation um but I mean if you're like a a really really sort of uh rich Hollywood actor um and you you know you you've got no you know nobody who's going to go to prison there's nobody in your life who's ever gone to prison or anything like that uh you don't need to worry about anybody you know being hurt by your opinions on whether women should because whether a trans rapist should be allowed in a woman's prison so you're not paying the consequences other people are paying the consequences and you could say the same thing about black crime rates or whatever you know people say that um you know black people are being shot at a disproportionate rate um by police um and that this is purely due to systemic racism um you know if you're a Hollywood actor you don't need to worry about uh the true causes of the sort of uh crime rates in in in like neighborhoods so you could just say yeah or the outcomes of defunding the police right defund the police perfect example of this say it but yeah yours isn't the neighborhood where you need police in any case what's happening people if you enjoyed that then press here for the full unedited episode and don't forget to subscribe face [Music] foreign [Music]