Welcome to the making sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris dot-org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster.
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I am back with my friend Paul Bloom Paul. Thanks for joining
me. Nice to be with you Sam. It seems like it in Earth time.
It hasn't been that long since we've spoken but in pandemic time it has been I don't know a year year and a half. How are
you time is time is moving funny. I am good since we spoke last absolutely. Nothing has happened to me higher. I stayed in my apartment I go for walks and four runs and I sit in front of my computer and watch net absolutely. Nothing interesting has happened to me. What about you?
Yeah, I've been surprisingly locked down. I'm actually more locked down than I even sometimes intend. I noticed that there are days where I can actually just sort of forget to go outside which doesn't seem entirely healthy.
So yeah. Yeah, I've learned from this that I really would not like prison. I kind of knew I wouldn't like prison is it was kind of overdetermined but but yet another reason is I got to go outside of it. I got OSI like walks. I like sitting outside. I like hanging out with friends and it's just
It's really it really taught me that that I got to avoid finding myself in prison later in
life. Okay? Well, let's talk about this situation. What would have interest we can glean from it as a bunch of questions. I've gotten from Twitter and we won't be entirely on covid as a topic. But let's just get all the covid stuff out of the way first because I want people to everyone to have access to it and hopefully some of it will be useful.
But there's this one idea that has been circulating as people struggle to figure out how and when we can reopen society and its this difficult equivalence between economic cost and lives lost or the risk of lives lost and people seem anchored to what appeared to me to be Payton Leigh false claims and and false comparisons here.
As you have someone like Andrew Cuomo who's been a superstar through this but even he will say patently absurd things. Like you can't put a price on human life, right like as though we are thinking about when to reopen Society or whether or not to close it and fully lockdown as we have its obscene and impossible to even attempt to put a price on human life, which is was just obviously not true. I mean we put a price on
In life all the time. We know companies and governments do that explicitly sometimes but even when it's not explicit, it's absolutely there and it's there whenever we decline to spend all the money in the world on the project of pushing the risk of dying as low as it can go we could make every car cost a million dollars by engineering maximum safety into them. We could treat every plane flight like it was a rocket launcher.
And we could check and recheck everything prior to takeoff. And the reason why we don't do this is that we've put a price on human life the fact that it's implicit really doesn't matter. It's still there. We've weighed some implicit price against the time and the money required to guarantee. Everyone won't die in a circumstance and this opens onto kind of an interesting ethical question because
There's an obvious price disparity when you look at a country like the United States and the developing World a human life is obviously and even necessarily worth less in the developing world because there's much less wealth and the trade-offs in the use of wealth translate into different kinds of lives lost mean when you think about what we would spend to resurrect someone.
From the dead if we could let's say we had the power of Resurrection, but it cost a billion dollars to resurrect somebody. Well we would do that in the United States at least ones to prove that we could do it and see if it works and then be a few billionaires who would probably resurrect their mothers or somebody but even in the u.s. There's no way we would spend a billion dollars per life. We wouldn't spend 300 billion dollars to bring back 300 people and then 301 and then 302 there's
Way that would that would happen even in the richest country on earth. When you look at the developing world. If it cost a billion dollars to resurrect someone in Kenya. Well, there's no way you would spend that even once because you can spend $5,000 on bed nets and save a life. So you have them is literally a something like a two million fold difference in the Y's allocation of resources there. So I just wanted to kind of open with that reflection that we're putting a price on life all the time.
And this is a just a very uncomfortable fact when you spell it out, especially in a global context where it's just obvious that we can't help but put less of a price on lives in the developing world where this pandemic is going to land and you know certainly land in now with very likely much greater consequence and you know, well over a hundred countries,
so it's certainly true you we often have to deal with this trade-off, but Italy in this case now to some extent right now.
In America and Canada and other countries the really isn't such a trade-off in that what a lot of economists would say is that that the goal of helping out the economy and the goal of saving lives. They actually lead to the same action to this point. So pretty much every Economist is saying look the lockdown is actually an end if all you care is about as business and money the lockdown still good for that. And so you have a convergence of people on the right and left agreeing that some degree of lockdown. There's going to be disagreements.
It's at the margins is right later on. There's going to be trade-offs of exactly what you're saying. I don't think anybody would say we should keep locked up in our houses until the virus is entirely gone until we have a vaccine that puts everybody out of risk. No not going to say we're going to open things up a bit and if they're honest, I'll say yeah a few more people will die but the trade-off is worth it and and I agree with you and one way to think about it is it's a mistake to think of this inherently as money verse.
Versus lives What It ultimately is is human flourishing versus human flourishing in that, you know, the people who want to lock down to be alleviated are not just saying because at least in more money it's because they want, you know, they want people to get their jobs back. They want businesses to flourish. They want people to be able to get married attend funerals and be present when when their loved one is having birth and have electable in have elected medical procedures and all of that. There's no easy answer but you're
Trading off different things but they're not different kinds of things. They all revolve around what you've been most interesting human happiness and human flourishing.
So you bring up what has struck me as a second fallacy here which a Time hearing many people resist the lockdown even now suggesting that this cure is worse than the disease, you know that the economic costs were too high and these costs will translate if not immediately into lives lost. There will be you know, why
Lahood lost and Sanity lost and the cost to human well-being is just to excruciating and we'll be in very short order such that we should just roll the dice and open everything up and realize everyone's going to get this virus anyway, and the reason why this seems to be a fallacy to me is these people are are not properly comparing two states of the world. They're comparing the economic costs of lock down to the
way the world used to be right before lockdown. They're not comparing the cost of lock down to even just the economic cost of doing nothing or doing much less than we are now in terms of social distancing and letting the contagion explode right? So you just have to imagine what what does the economy look like when literally everyone, you know has a story about a friend who went to a restaurant or to the mall.
Or to a movie theater and wound up on a fucking ventilator. Where is your economy? Then when we've basically just ridden the exponential curve as far as we can with contagion people aren't making that comparison. They're comparing the obviously scary and depressing effects. I'm sure they're only going to increase now in the coming months of lock down to the way they remember the world of yesteryear, but that world there's no such.
scenario under which that world exists before we get to a place where we've got a vaccine or a truly effective treatment for covid-19 where the risk of getting this thing by living normally is absolutely tolerable and economic behavior can return to normal.
Yeah. I agree. I think some people have a fantasy where you say. Well, look, let's make a hard Choice here and we snap our fingers we snap our fingers and life goes on exactly as it had we go to a sporting event.
Anson restaurants and everybody keeps their jobs and then just magically some fairly small percentage one percent half of one percent whatever of humans disappear due to the virus and they say well that's the cost we paid but that's that's bizarre. It wouldn't happen. That way everyone projections on by a serious person for instance points out that the fact is as people got sick. They would flood the hospitals and that would cause enormous collateral damage and you know, and and
And so besides being incredibly cold blooded because often this comes in was a well just two old people will get it which, you know isn't isn't true and it extends its it is true that a proportionally more likely to get it. Well some of us all level people. Some of us are old people Beyond being cruel. It's just irrational. It doesn't take into account that economic damage cannot be disentangled from all the lives
lost. What do you do with the moral non equivalence between
This kind of real-world decision and a thought experiment we could easily cook up that could Leverage The empathy module in a way that would be at minimum misleading. So like obviously people are willing to accept some number of deaths here for life to go back to normal and given the way we're anchored to certain figures and given that people have accepted that in the worst year. The normal flu can kill 80,000 people in the US right? Like what was sort of a
A thousand people died and I think it was 2017 or 2018 by the flu. That's the worst influenza A year in recent memory and more or less. Nobody noticed unless they happen to have had a loved one killed by the flu. And so we're sort of anchored to a figure like that and if covid-19 only kills 80,000 of us many people will be saying we overreacted and was no big deal. Just another flu, you know, the flu came twice this year, but when you pick
A killing 80,000 people in any other way, I mean what if what if we were given a choice that we could just perform a human sacrifice of yeah, you know 18 people in order to rid the world of this pandemic we would clearly balk at that the identifiable human life sacrificed is intolerable and yet the statistical alive from the sort of brings us back to the I guess it's the Lenin quote one death is a tragedy.
Million is a statistic. How do you think about our failure to reconcile the moral arithmetic there?
There is a framing issue which is how you put it. I heard Rudy Giuliani say something to the effect of you know, well that many thousands of death isn't that much is equal to the flu and imagine after 9/11 and you know, two planes, you know crashed into the Twin Towers and you say to Julian, you know, only about 2,800 people died as an infant at that.
Error when it comes to flow nobody should get upset at all. You would be looked at rightfully as a monster. And so so the framing serves rhetorical purpose you connect the desk to the covid due to some large number of things that we accept and not not something else in order to calm people down and get them to think this is a minor matter. But if it was any other thing, we would not think of it as minor and then of course, this is something which utterly enrages me and I've seen this morning once including by William Bennett on
Fox News where he says well 60,000 Americans we were told it was going to be much more we did all this and for 60,000 for you know, 60,000 death does not such a terrible thing ignoring the fact that it's a number as low as 60,000 if that's what is going to converge on precisely because we spent a damn month in quarantine. Yeah, you know, it's like I'm saying I'm some guy saying, you know, we really need fire extinguishers for the fire. The fire comes.
Use the fire extinguishers. There's not much damage Jesus you idiot you thought we need to fire extinguishers. Look there's not much damage.
Yeah. Yeah. That's what I referred to on Twitter is the first Paradox of quarantine if social distancing works exactly as intended by lessening the contagion the people who were against social distancing will feel Vindicated that yeah, we overreacted. So it is a it's a paradox or seeming Paradox, but it's you can
knock your brain against it and figure it out and the counterfactual is pretty clear and it's being advertised to us and will be continually advertised to us. In other countries that have not that's right or cannot affect an actual lockdown will see what exponential spread looks like and what its consequences are in some places. I'm
sure that's right and you raised before something which really is a genuine moral problem, which is a problem of how to
How to compare things that are naturally comparable so it's terrible for people to lose their jobs. It is painful. It could be humiliating it could lead to you know in this country and other country, you know starvation loss of medical treatment and so on it is terrible how many jobs loss equals one life or one death actually and that's a strange question, you know, you know it but but it's a strange question, but it's one that people actually have
To wrestle if I mean, if you knew that you could you know, save the jobs of 10,000 people but five people had to die. This isn't science fiction. This actually could be just a policy analysis will open up these restaurants in these bars and use stores and you know, you look at the numbers 5 people will probably die because of it. It's not monstrous to say go ahead it would be monsters to say dirt that there's no amount of death that's worth people getting their jaws back business is flourishing and so on that's that's crazy.
Easy that that sanctifies human life in such a way that that it treats it separately from Human happiness and human flourishing. I think to some extent we have to make these comparisons, but they're very difficult to do but they may be impossible to
do when made explicit right? I mean just like the example that's always come to mind in. This context for me is the speed limit. None of us have committed ourselves in or very few people. I'm sure there's someone out there.
Very few of us have committed ourselves to getting the government to pass speeding laws. So as to bring the risk of Death Down on our highways as low as possible, right? So the lowest possible speed limit the still compatible with the functioning of society. So as to minimize death, none of us is wanting that and yet are not wanting that is just paid for in blood everyday, right? So the reasons why
We don't want that because we just we like the freedom to drive more or less as fast as we want or you know would be to just be too boring to spend that much time in a car because it takes three times as long to get anywhere. These are incredibly Calais when held up against even a single death in a given year, right and we know we reliably have something like 40,000 of them every year. So like when it's spelled out if you had to opt-in rather than find
Elf in this system by default. But like if every time you got in your car you had to you know, sign a waiver saying yes, I'm I consent to put the lives of my neighbors at intolerable risk or a needless Risk by driving this fast if made explicit it would be somehow unsustainable and this just happens everywhere. I'm not quite sure. I know how to think about it Beyond just flagging the problem, but if you just had to on
We assess real risk and your choice to embrace it you can't help but look like a psychopath.
That's right there. You know, I'm Phil tetlock cause them to boo trade-offs and and the Paradox were in as we have to do is all the time. We have to have some sort of speed limit and any speed limit we have if it were lower it would save lives. If you have a speed limit 10 miles per hour 40,000 won't die on the roads. It is just did well what happened is you have
Millions of very pissed off people and in our heads we don't talk about it. We don't make this policy. We say well that much inconvenience that much waiting and sitting in your car and getting bored out of your skull and not getting there on time. Yeah. It's worth many many people dying so we don't have to go through that and it's it sounds Psychopathic to say this, but if you don't say you're stuck with absurdities where you demand a two mile per hour speed limit or you're stuck with absurdities where you say we
Not open up business in restaurants and bars. And so on until the coronavirus is entirely gone entirely eradicated which would be a ridiculous decision
yet. Although it will be a decision that you can't make for everyone right so we could decide to open restaurants tomorrow by Fiat but no one would go, you know a few saying people would go under the current conditions. That's right. We know there's no adequate testing. We know there's no contact tracing we know.
We're just bailing water as fast as we can and the boat is still filling up. Right? So if you flip the switch and turn the economy back on it would still be whole sectors of it where it would be dark and the only thing is going to change that is the mass and hopefully veridical perception that the risk has been diminished to a tolerable level.
That's right, but diminished to a tolerable level. Yeah, not not eradicated. Yeah.
The easiest we'll talk later about some predictions we want to make but the easiest prediction in the world is we will end the lockdown before we end coronavirus. We will it'll be a presence and we'll worry about it and we'll try to block it will test people will look for people who are immune to it will do all sorts of sensible things. But if we're honest with ourselves, we will all take some risk.
Yeah, and that's what do you think in terms of the complexion of life-changing? What do you anticipate in terms of?
The new Norms around greeting people, you know, just yeah what words the handshake go for a let's
start with an so so so let's look at a few things where would a handshake go, you know, I could imagine putting the handshakes going to stay. There's enough people shake hands, but I could imagine among certain Elite groups people who travel a lot people who worry a lot people who are wealthy maybe Hollywood which tends to come first the handshake may drop it could be
Quite a fist bump the bow other options. I don't think it's going to entirely go away but it wouldn't surprise me if five years from now. There are some people who had did handshaking don't do it anymore. I could see it actually bifurcating is along the typical political lines in the United States where the Dems many Democrats give it up and Republicans doggedly hold on to it. And the fact that each one of them each group is doing it makes two other one more extreme where you know you
And I shaking hands we saw each other be like wearing a Maga hats and you know, well, well, well, you know some some Trump supporters bowing to each other that's just get in a fist fight for trying to do that
shit. So real and Real Americans shake hands and and the latte sipping Coastal leads Namaste each other. They duped exactly Namaste.
What what could be more of a Cosmopolitan tree-hugging bullshit that Namaste what could be more a feat? That's right. Yeah, so so, I don't know.
I mean physical context of human appetite. I think we're learning this so I might be too quick to be the say that the handshake will go away in Hmong any group because people people like touching each other not everybody, you know, your mileage may vary but people like the contact the hug the kiss on both cheeks to handshake. It's a natural human expression of solidarity and friendship and love and shutting it down would be hard, but I don't think
These are going to go exactly the same and I can imagine some groups moving to other options particularly particularly, if a threat of infection lives on for next year or more than a
year. Yeah. Well, I got to think that once we have a vaccine assuming we get a vaccine that works like a normal vaccine that offers a hard reset where we just go back to who we used to be hopefully with a few durable changes interest in terms of
Are being poised to respond better next time? I think one thing we might get out of this there's a phrase that the philosopher Nick Bostrom uses in talking about how we could respond to various existential risks, and I guess he would apply to the risk of pandemic as well. But we were we were talking about it in different contexts, but he has this phrase that you know One path of mitigating risk is developing something which he calls TurnKey totalitarianism.
ISM or you can just you just know how on a moment's notice to turn Society into you know, the maximally defensible project and that entails, you know, you know Mass surveillance and you know, in this case, you know impeccable social distancing and the abrogation of all the rights that we have come to expect and it's the temporary abrogation of these rights, but it's you know, we've all signed up to survive for this.
Period of a fortnight or a month or six months or whatever it is where we're going to go into lockdown. I got to think this has been a dress rehearsal for something that could be quite a bit more deadly and we can learn something from this and become truly Adept at pivoting to the everyone get into your spaceship and seal the airlock scenario.
Yeah, I mean the idea of the stickiness of this sort of response is interesting.
In to some extent we've seen that with 9/11 where you know, our security theater at airports is right now indistinguishable from that like three months after 9/11 him any army, we just stuck we just stuck with it.
We've shaken the Etch-a-Sketch pretty hard with respect to travel so well knows what's gonna come
back. I mean interesting you can imagine this kind of a restart where maybe you know, maybe TSA is going to let me carry my liquids for on the plane because what the hell
We went through a lot. Yeah, and I don't know how much it is for habits. And this is you know my prediction about about hand shaking and like, you know, if two months from now, we're kind of back into normal I doubt it. But if that were the case, we'd probably go back to our normal habits. But if we go a long period of time then I think we're habits might change. You know, you had somebody on your on your podcast doctor. I tried to think of positive implications of this event if it were
To turn out that as you're saying now that what we've learned from covid will prepare us for the big one. The one with 60% of people died and spreads like wildfire and a species threatening then in as horrible as this as is to say this was a god-sent. This was old you're
good ya know there is a it's amazing that once you take consequentialism. Seriously your left whatever judgment you
Have about the negativity of a given experience or a given outcome. It always has to be bracketed by your uncertainty around how things will look once you get further out in time, right? So this is just like when do you actually do the math on whether something was bad, you know, you know Chernobyl. Yeah, is it too early to say that Chernobyl was definitively a bad thing for the world. Well if if something about
Noble leads us to become truly safe around the next generation of nuclear reactors, which save us from the greater evil of climate change. Well, then Chernobyl was again another thing that that actually we use to our advantage and wasn't that
good or worse if Chernobyl scared us away from nuclear power there by thereby hastening climate change because we're awesome really important form of energy. It might have been, you know a thousand
Times worse than it looks right. And for reasons that no one is even thinking about yeah.
Yeah. There's there's there's there's a Taoist prowl Parable to this which I won't because it takes too long but basically is about this farmer something bad happens to me. He says, yeah, but you know anybody so it's too bad. He's yeah, we'll see and then it turns out the bad thing turns out good thing and I think if this is the way the world works is why it's so hard to be utilitarian. I have a fun variant of a more R-rated variant of your
Kitchen, I've heard two people two, very smart people argue about this and come to different conclusions. Pretty soon. This is going to release and people are going to be dating and you know, dating or whatever euphemism you'll use Tinder will reactivate people be hooking up. Do you imagine a pent release of pent-up sexuality as never said that phrase before that that will immediately throw everybody into the arms of strangers and this explosion of promiscuous sex, or do you imagine appear to reticence?
We're for a little while people kind of holding back a little bit more more cautious.
Yeah, I guess this could be very different in different age cohorts Matt. I think the, you know people under 30 probably even now consider themselves more or less immune to this thing or the consequences of getting it will be trivial or extremely likely to be trivial and that's true and that's still seems to be sort of true. Although you can find examples of people in
Their 20s dying or being brought pretty close to death from this so it's not something that really anyone at any age should be eager to get but I think the perception could be very different there.
That's a good answer,
you know, as you get older. I'm as your you know, you get into your 30s and 40s. I have to think it's going to seem more like the AIDS crisis for people and I think you're going to want some testing prior to hooking up. Otherwise
You know, it just is going to seem like Russian Roulette the world after a vaccine and the world after in near terms probably the world after a truly effective antiviral treatment for covid. I think those are very different worlds than the one we're in or the one will be in it when we stumble out of our isolation with a regime of very arduous testing and tracing keeping us safe.
Safer than we would otherwise be
though this may happen sooner than a vaccine where they could test you you could turn out to have the antibodies suggesting here. You've had covid you'll be immune and then I think they were doing this in China or something Honor on your smartphone. You can get a little you know, a little red flower or something something glowing a little orange flashing light. You could happily hold up to people saying I'm clean
that person will be Axl Rose in wherever wherever he is in China and
elsewhere that is
Really that that that that sort of Avatar of
unfold our sexuality probably Axl Rose 20 years ago 30 years ago when I'm dating myself and Axl
Rose, he's there listening Center saying well, okay, your listeners will never forgive us. If we don't mention Trump is this gonna is this going to help Trump or hurt Trump come come election
time? Well, there are so many things that are conspiring to help and hurt Trump that it's hard to analyze this in isolation, but
But it should have destroyed his presidency already. I'ma just thinking the level of incompetence and dishonesty on display should be something that for those who for whom he had a good reputation. His reputation should never recover from what happened in the month of March and what we've since learned about the month of February mmm, but I mean, it's just, you know, he missed every opportunity to avoid distinguishing our country as the country in which the contagion did the most damage. I mean, that's
Is where we are we're winning in the in a very trumpian sense now and we should be tired of it. But he is only going to get stronger as our response to this becomes more effective. Right? So he's now getting credit for or will get credit. If you know, there's only 60,000 lives lost its right whatever the the number will finally be. He'll get credit for anything short of an absolute.
Just right, you know if there's two million lives lost because we come rushing out of our houses and hit the exponential again in 50 states simultaneously and can't figure out how to get back in and time. We've got nothing effective in terms of testing and we tip over into something horrific. Well, then that could make him unelectable but I think anything short of this is the worst thing that's happened on American soil and a century and a half. I think he looks like the guy
However, ineptly solve the problem. He delivered the aid it's his name on the checks that are going out to people however belatedly and part of this makes sense in that everyone wants him to succeed on some level. Everyone wants an effective remedy. Everyone wants to put politics behind them in an emergency. So the default is to give him Mulligan after Mulligan after Mulligan just to try to get things in the right place, and he just he just
It benefits from that in a way that you know that Biden can't write and so any criticism of him as I've noticed sounds to the ears of anyone who supports him like mere partisanship, you know, however, however appropriately targeted it is to his genuine mistakes. So I do think he's I'm very depressed by our political prospects of a and this is a couple that with the fact that Biden seems like he's in the Twilight of some Twilight and can barely
Played a sentence without advertising the threat of old age disease and death to everyone listening. I just think it's is a bad political season if you're hoping Trump is not going to be given four more years to Rampage through human history.
Yeah, you know, I have a similar view and watching this press conferences out of a kind of masochistic delight and you know, he's endlessly preening declaring Victory boasting and and I try to see this from somebody who hasn't been on.
Otherwise following it. I think wow he's done really well and because I think things are going to go while I'm kind of an optimist and I think that the governor's and and the people in charge and to CDC in her doing pretty rational planning for the future. I think this is going to turn out not as bad as it could've and we're going to come out in the fall and Trump is going to be declaring victory over and over again, and then people presumably Biden will point out and I'll be exactly right that he messed it up. He was far too.
It was a disaster, but they're going to come off as as nitpicking as your as you know, saying, you know, we it's like they'll say I won the war and you're complaining that very early on there was some missteps. Well, I won the war. Yeah, and and so so I worry about that.
There's one question that came in from Twitter which seems appropriately targeted to you. What do you think about the impact on children of this whole ordeal May begin?
Both the way I guess, you know, most relevantly just the experience of normal life being disrupted. And what do you think about the impact on education?
That's a great question. We've talked a little talk a bit about the first year we get to the second but we have a mutual friend and he he sent me some stuff that Freeman Dyson wrote about the blitz. So in the bless you noticed this what a 60 day long barrage of Bombs Over London by Germany and the kids of course were sent off to the
Tree, I think about half of them were sent off to the country education was gone the kids in the country basically went feral and would just spend each day running around in the woods and and indecent talks about this great Nostalgia and points out. Hey, we're fine. Hmm. There's a lot of evidence suggesting that kids are alarmingly strikingly wonderfully resilient. There's certain things that are really awful for a kid. I think the worst things turn around, you know cruel.
T by parents and stuff like that indifference, but when it comes to this sort of thing kids are great. And so I have every reason to believe that at the end of all of this there will be no, you know, we won't have some sort of generation of the corona traumatized of Corona kids who, you know have to be under special medication and so on they'll be they'll be fine
does pulling the brakes at a fourth hour of continuous FaceTiming with one's friends count as cruelty because I'm sure they'll be some Daytime my house about that.
Yeah, well, well everything people so confidently said about screen time as found out the window. Yeah, you know and and I think when it comes to the application, maybe we'll learn that we worried a little bit too much about screen time and other things. Yeah, maybe we're a little bit too much about that extra hour of school and so on. So I'm really optimistic about the kids when it comes to education in general. I'll sort of shift from from kids to to college kids and University kids. So every University every
Free college I know has gone online and Yale has gone online and I'm teaching online now and if you ask professors about this, what do you think of teaching online? I fast talk to friends. And so we hate
it, howhow are you actually doing it? What are the mechanics of
it? So so two mechanics are twofold and this is this is similar to what a lot of people are doing for intro psych which is what I teach the lecture component of the class has been replaced by online lectures. I already had some apis part of a Coursera.
Mind system. So I just tell my students which wants to take I refer them to some YouTube videos and some other things I've done and that's the lectures they watch the lectures online. But then we also have sections and we do that by zoom in small
groups. Right
right, and you know, and so it's not the same. It's really not the same as seminars not the same the lectures are not the same and professors will complain about it justifiably so but I can't help but think there are some positive.
Jurors of this it's not that bad for one thing. It's very egalitarian. It's egalitarian at the level that you see everybody's faces at once exactly the same size. You're not sort of Trap by the structure of a seminar room are to be distance of a lecture hall, but it's also egalitarian and that you can take a Yale course and you don't have to be in New Haven, Connecticut. Hmm. You can be anywhere and you know, there was a big push for these moocs these massive online courses many years ago, and I don't think that much came of it. I don't know very few.
University shifted to them and so on but having tasted this I wonder whether it's going to change the way universities work. I think maybe to the better to some extent we're more stuff we made online and more stuff will be available to the 99% of humans who don't get to be, you know, close to a great University or college
but wasn't the issue with moocs and again, I don't know this firsthand, but my sense was always that the lesson learned was that it's just harder to
Be motivated in solitude interacting with screen based content and being asked to do a lot of hard work to get through a course. There's something about physically showing up with other people. Even if it's only a the ritual of moving your body from one place to another that makes it easier to just actually get the work done. Is
that so I think that's the truth. I think that's the correct observation. You know, my office is right next to a large lecture hall on Young campus and
The Salman Rushdie was coming to give a talk. Hmm. Hell I'd go see that I wait in line for that. But if somebody told me what are you doing on YouTube? There's the same talk right? Well who wants to see on YouTube whatever I can see anything on YouTube being in person matters a lot. But but in defense of the moocs, the experiment has never been properly done because you're comparing kids who are at a university say are a college and they have to take courses they signed up for them. They get grades. They had scholarships rests on them. This is there a cure.
Career versus people who are taking moocs, like they're picking up paperback book. They bought which is you know new and look through and then toss it aside if it's boring, right? So the proper experiment would have a university course with the same requirements and Grays and commitment than exams. But this time it's run long distances to flip classroom and I agree with you that the in person matters and I think we're seeing this more generally. I've been talking a lot of friends over zoom and having an occasional drinks the regular drink.
Friends, it's not the same. Yeah, you know, you know, I'm not kissing them. But and when I'm in person we're not touching but it's not the same.
So I don't think that it'll be a full replacement think something is lost. But I also think that this might really transform higher education may be in a good way and and I'm thinking about this more generally. So now if I want to see my doctor, I'll FaceTime with him. He sent an email saying you want to meet with me. Here's how to do what we're doing. It's through FaceTime. Here's the procedure and it occurs to me for a lot of things. That's actually really efficient.
You know some things gasps something to you got to touch. You got to touch the person so on but some but if I tell him, you know, look I needed a I like a renewal for this prescription, you know, she's going to talk to me and that could be done online. Do you think
there are many universities that might not survive a long Hiatus here and if this drags on into next year, I might know their major ones have endowments that I would imagine make them bulletproof over a much.
A longer time span, but is there talk about just the failure of colleges in the near term? There's always
been smaller colleges that are on the brink and that rely on tuition money and they don't have million or billion dollar endowments and we're going to lose a lot of those. We don't know what's going to happen in the fall enrollments definitely going to go down for many of them. Whatever endowments caught these colleges have been, you know, damaged by the financial downturn I think places are going to go broke.
And even you know, and so so nobody's going to cry for for details or to Princeton's and everything nor should they but you know, but where we have a hiring freeze we have a salary freeze and I know at Yale School of Management, the the tenure faculty are actually devoting some of their salaries and shifting it to help out untenured faculty and staff who might lose their jobs. So so even at the higher levels of very very rich places are hurting this is really going to damage that led the smaller and less
us financially flexible places.
So today even in a place like Yale untenured faculty are losing their jobs or at risk of losing their
jobs. No, they wouldn't be at risk of losing their jobs. This is in some way the school of management works differently and I think the money might actually go to staff who may get laid off. Hmm But The untenured Faculty are not going to lose their jobs. They are we're not going to 10 year fewer people or anything like that that that never happens, but I think a lot of people work for Yale.
At risk I think the graduate program is going to be maybe taken fewer graduate students. This is had all sorts of ramifications. I mean, you know, look, I feel awkward saying this because you know, I know people have lost their jobs. I know people who loved ones have gotten sick. So but I have students who have research projects and their research careers have been set back by ear.
Yeah. Yeah, or if they're lucky a year. It's just so when you think about the right the economic environment into
To which people graduating now or soon to graduate will be seeking to start their careers and how long it takes for us to dig out from this strangely to watch the stock market respond with with a rally as it did yesterday. I think it went down again today.
But yeah,
you'd think there's been good news that decides, you know, the Winds of the economy of shifted, but I mean, we're just the very beginning of understanding.
How bad this is and will be economically. Yeah, and it just seems like you know, it could be years before people get back to zero certainly in some sectors. It's I don't see how it could be anything other than
years. Yeah. It could be it could be devastating for people early in their careers for a lot of different careers and you know more generally I you know, I've heard economists talk about it and nobody's quite clear on what projections to make it's not like the Great Depression everybody all these people lost their jobs, but
In some way the job will be waiting for them are waiting for somebody when when lockdown ends, you know, you don't expect this this this huge leap in unemployment to remain once this is over.
Yeah, except when you picture all of the smaller smallish businesses that have failed in the meantime. Yeah, turn the lights back on but some significant percentage of restaurants no longer exist, right? You know, that's just space now available for rent.
As a restaurant, you know, they to reboot that is difficult. You know, I don't know what the time course of that is, but
yeah, and we talked before about you know, how do you compare death to misery and and each of these stories of a person losing your job of business doesn't get startup is just misery you could spend your whole life trying to create something and have it dashed I find myself struck by all of the small stories about, you know, women giving
birth without her partner being present. Hmm.
Yeah, somebody's loved one dying and he can't be in a room with them.
Yes without for that one. That one's ubiquitous and that's really brutal. I don't know if anyone I'm sure in the context of some other pandemic or epidemic that's been a common experience. But that really is the The Experience now of people anyone who's going into a hospital whether they're going to be there for weeks recovering or they're going to die. It seems like it's the universal experience that they're waving goodbye to their loved ones and
Hoping to see them at the end of all
this I mean this gets to the bigger question where a lot of my colleagues lot of people on social media and talking about what are the long-term psychological effects of this will list cause, you know a sharp increase in to depression and anxiety disorders. Will it be sort of just Collective trauma the lot of people suffer from and I think the answer is yes, but not only yes, it gets complicated. There's we also have psychological
Isms that are protective against these things. I said kids are resilient but adults could be resilient to but one thing that strikes me which is kind of trying to struggle my way home to think about this. There's a literature on how we deal with with sort of collective disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the September 11 bombing or the Blitz and the answer typically is Rebecca solnit has a great book haul a Paradise built in hell.
She talks about this. Is it brings people together it brings people together. They work together. It becomes rich and poor black and white everybody works together. There's this and there's a feeling of joy and Bliss and a common purpose and a common goal. So you read about these cases and and and people talking back about what it was like to be in a bliss what it was like in these circumstances a it was wonderous we lost our house. So and so died, but it was
Was wonderous it was a moment of my life. I can't recapture and you think well, there's a bright side people will look back on the pandemic this way, but the cruel thing about them pandemic is we can't get together. Yeah, we get together. We're getting together now over Skype but you look at every other case and there are people physically together in large groups helping out working together and and the cruelty of this pandemic is it blocks us from I think
A process that would leave us far more resilient to the suffering that would make us better.
Yeah, I mean putting your shoulder to the wheel here is synonymous with social distancing that is what you can do. It is the opposite of bringing people together
and write and if what I can do is is help pull the rocks from people who have been crushed by their rhetoric. We kind of work on it day and night is horrible, but it's also such a thing to do but if what I could do is sit at home and and
bake bread and watch Netflix. It doesn't scratch the same
hitch. One thing that's interesting for me is the prospect of having one's perception of the risk of contagion and its consequences permanently reset by really, I don't know if this is going to happen. I do think that it's possible that once we have a vaccine will then the world essentially goes back to where I was and you and I never really were worried about ebola and we're not going to worry about
Now we're not going to worry about the next pandemic until it's sufficiently well advertised to us that were convinced. We need to get back in our houses and hunker down so I could imagine a perfect reset there. But currently I'm looking at a video, you know shot in the distant past of six months ago and you just see normal social behavior. You see a crowd of people shoulder to shoulder you see a politician weight in into that.
Crowd and shaking hands and you know, I feel like I now have the agoraphobia module in my brain fully installed where I think that just looks fucking crazy like what it what are those people thinking don't they know about aerosolized contagion? That is the thing that is astonishing about the circumstances that this was not a maybe this is something like this was more or less guaranteed to happen. Right? It's like we're open systems.
With respect to the rest of the world and it's novel viruses. And once we solve this particular problem, we will be absolutely sure that the next one is coming now, whether it's coming in four years or 40 years. We don't know but this is like the next tornado arriving in Tornado Alley. You can't pretend you don't know about tornadoes if you live in Kansas.
Yeah. Yeah, and and and there's two possibilities for what happens when you get hit by a tornado.
One is a it's always the safest bet when somebody says how will this transform us to answer? It won't we'll just go back to normal. Yeah, and you know and I think this is true for some aspects of this. I hear people say this will give us increase respect for the value of science. I know won't know won't you know, if you would care about science will care and then others will forget about about it. Even anti-vaxxers will come back. I bet after a
while. You don't think we can quash that one
for good. Well, I was thinking of the the one group at risk is probably
Anti-vaxxers. It's just it is very hard to be an anti-vaxxer display. But but wait, but wait, I I just think the most natural answer is the safest answer is always it won't change S. My predictions about handshakes are fantasies, you know people shake hands because they always show can watch this make a difference. It's it's months. It's a year, it's not enough, but but I have some sympathy for your kind of analysis to take it at an individual level you go for a nice walk.
Around a neighborhood, you know every night you're all happy and everything and then one day you take a walk in the neighborhood and a vicious dog bites you and your hospitalized you come back.
For the rest of your life walking on a bird is different. Yeah, it's different. It's fraught with anxiety. Maybe you know you do you do therapy as you work on it, but it's always there and in fact the next time the dog bites you it comes back like wildfire and I wonder whether this touch with disease and contagion. I guess I'm saying that there's some chance you're right just touch with diseases that agent will forever reconfigure us where you know right now you're fine and
Then in a couple years later someone loudly sneezes at a party and everybody flinches we find ourselves washing our hands more often people with obsessive disorders get
worse that has to be an irony of of anyone who's far along on that Spectrum. I mean just this the compulsive hand-washing behavior is the order of the day
now, yeah, it's like it's introverts revenge and also to obsessive washers Revenge. I know a guy on friend of mine and on Twitter he was saying so this is another take on it saying that
He's normally a very anxious person when I know him and he self-medicates with marijuana and kind of but he's busy an anxious guy. He says this has been the least anxious period of his life because a everything he worried about his happened and be everyone else is sharing. His feelings is experience
to the constellations of I told you so that's exactly right. That's
exactly the happiness of the paranoid person who finally sees the black helicopter circling his house and says see her history.
And and in fact, I mean that's something which is just amazing. I don't even I don't know if we talked about it last time or this time, but but one of the things which is unique about this is how shared at this how we for the first time in my life and maybe I will never experience this again. I'm experiencing something that everyone else in the world is in different ways, but pretty much the same.
Yeah, although I keep having to remind myself that on the one hand we're having a shared experience.
Just take the United States something like I think it's 97 percent of us are under something like lockdown orders, but they're very different experiences to be having in that context. I mean, there are people like me who are extraordinarily fortunate to be one lockdown in a condition of relative comfort with family who I'm experiencing the silver lining of you know, lots of enforced quality time, which
Each that we're all enjoying, you know, there are people who are even in my yeah in similar circumstances, but they're not having a happy family life at all. Right, you know, they're figuring out how they can get divorced the moment the quarantine lifts, but then they're just add all these other variables. There are people like me who can continue working and they're people who have just seen their economic life completely implode because you know work is synonymous with not being locked down and then there's just
Other permutation of this in other contexts like you know, what's going to happen in the developing world where you can't even lock down, right? And yeah, there's so much crowding and kind of hand-to-mouth economic necessity where it's just you know, you just have to try to keep living normally because there's not much of a health system that you're going to crash in the first place. Right? So people are just going to get this virus and you can try to avoid it but it's more or less hopeless. So it's just a range of experiences under this.
Common condition is impressive and we don't have shared Fates here. And
that's no that's yeah, that's true. I'm I'm in Toronto now and there's a lot of controversy about people people of wealth in Toronto typically have a summer Cottage by the lake. And so and there's a bit because the mayors of these Cottage communities are saying don't come we don't want you to come you and you know, you risk getting sick your risk infecting people. We don't have to resources and everything that and then you know, but if you who I pay taxes and I bought this place so on the one hand
You have that on the other hand, you know, I can walk down, you know Queen Street where I'm at and I see clusters of homeless people.
And they're not obeying social distancing because because they're almost don't have anybody, you know did are protecting each other and they have no, you know, and so but but I still say, you know, I read something in New York Times and the headline was something that effect of half of the world under lockdown and him. Yes, we experience it very differently. But still when have you had an experience when have you thought about something and knew of some certain day that people in in Kenya and
And Tokyo and Saskatoon are thinking about the very same
thing. I can name those occasions there impressively few, but I think the first moment like that that seemed like it was a truly a global moment where everyone is paying attention to the same thing or nearly everyone strange to say it that it was the first thing in my lifetime that seemed to rise to that level was Princess Diana dying. Oh, yeah, that was just an order of magnitude bigger than
Than anything else that had happened in terms of his media coverage. And then you had 9/11 and then you had Trump selection. Then you have a you know, a fair amount of trump and then you have this and I don't know what I'm sure there's something else on that list, but they're pretty few and far between these events
but a lot of those things I don't think they compare nothing that that you know, when Crown was elected there was probably a snapshot where the whole planet was going. Oh fuck but you just for a moment.
But but then two days later, you know, if you're if you're you know a real estate agent in Beijing you point I think about drama, you know, you weren't think about 9/11 people in New York thought about 9/11, but how much the people in Nebraska two months later think about 9/11, but now we're thinking about us all the time. Yeah, and and so on the one hand is this enormous Collective communal thing, but on the other hand we experience it alone and and and I'm worried that the aloneness is going to block.
He positivity about that. You might get from the shared experience. Hmm But you're totally right people. Do you know I don't want to diminish that you're very fortunate. I'm fortunate as well to be to be stuck with somebody. I love there's a lot of people even people aren't having terrible experiences are stuck with people they hate and imagine being stuck in a place in a match. It's not a big place with somebody who hates you and you hate
them. Yeah or just completely isolated right? I'm in the people who are isolated and are not well designed for isolation.
Okay. So let's go do a few more topics. We had a bunch of topics from Twitter related to the election the prospect of Bernie supporters refusing to vote for Biden we should touch that. So in my last podcast with Kaitlyn, if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris dot-org you'll get access to all full-length episodes of making sense podcast and two other subscriber only.
Only content including bonus episodes and amas and the conversations. I've been having on the waking up app. The making sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listeners support and you can subscribe now at Sam Harris dot-org.
