Modern Wisdom - #221 - Justin Tosi - The Abuse Of Moral Talk For Self Promotion

Episode Date: September 19, 2020

Justin Tosi is the Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University & an author. Moral grandstanding is the easiest way to signal your virtue without having to actually do anything virtuous. Why has it recently become so prevalent? Expect to learn why wishing that someone would get cancer isn't a good debating tactic, the different forms that grandstanding takes, why it is a moral problem, how hierarchies play into people's desire to grandstand & much more... Sponsor: Sign up to FitBook at https://fitbook.co.uk/join-fitbook/ (enter code MODERNWISDOM for 50% off your membership) Extra Stuff: Buy Grandstanding - https://amzn.to/2F8iPQo Follow Justin on Twitter - https://twitter.com/JustinTosi  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is Justin Toasty, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University and author of Grandstanding, The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk. Moral grandstanding is the easiest way to signal your virtue without actually having to do anything virtuous, so given that it's so plainly transparent, why is it recently becomes so prevalent? Expect to learn why wishing that someone would get cancer isn't a good debating tactic, the different forms that grandstanding takes, why it is a moral problem, how hierarchies

play into people's desires to grandstand and much more. I must have had five or ten conversations or episodes to do with this very topic. Why is everyone shouting and no one is listening? Why can't we just have conversations that have got nuance or complexity in them anymore? And this book, I think, is up there with the best of them in terms of breaking down what happens, but I really don't want there to have to be any more of these books. Like, it shouldn't be the case that we are so self-defeating as a species that we can't even talk to each other without bare-faced lying. So yeah, it's

a wonderful breakdown by just in the books, fantastic as well, and really gives you a great overview of exactly what's going on with language and communication, especially in the age of social media. But I really hope that this is like the back end of needing to write these books, because otherwise, there is no way that we're going to make it into the 21st. The 22nd century might even not make it out the 21st, who knows. But for now, please give it up for Justin Toecy. Brand standing. What is Brand standing?

Yeah, so if you want just a bumper sticker or description of the idea, moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self promotion. So if you see people on your social media feeds or you just encounter people in everyday life who are walking around talking like corporate press releases or are setting up like politicians

giving these carefully crafted statements about how they've long stood on the side of the disadvantaged and so on and making moral talk about them and turning it into a vanity project or a big show where they're the main character that's grand standing. Why did they do it? So human beings care a lot about what other people think about them. We're all impression managers. So there are really fun social science studies showing that, you know, if you tell people, you know, I'm going to leak to the university community that you got this really bad score on this implicit association test that reveals perhaps racial bias, they

will do horrible things. You know, that you'd see on fear factor or whatever sticking their hands in a bowl of worms and nasty stuff like that, because they care a lot about what their communities think of them. They don't want to be ostracized. And they all know that if people think that they are not very good people morally, that they run the risk of being kind of run out of their friend groups or their political groups,

things like this. People are also self-enhancers. So we all like to think that we are morally like good and more like above average, all of us. So we kind of have this impression of ourselves as, you know, I'm better than the average person. My heart is really in the right place. And we want other people to share that impression. So we take steps to present a flattering picture of ourselves to the world. And that's why we engage in grandstanding because it's a very easy way to show people We take steps to present a flattering picture of ourselves to the world.

And that's why we engage in grandstanding because it's a very easy way to show people that are hard as in the right place. So why not do it? It seems like there's kind of two types of grandstanding there. One of them is like defensive grandstanding and the other is offensive grandstanding. Is that kind of right? Yeah. So psychologists talk about two different ways that people seek status. On the one hand,

people sometimes seek status through prestige. So this is when people try to present some characteristics of themselves that actually deserves praise, that is impressive. So, that actually deserves praise, that is impressive. So, and the non-moral realm is people who, you know, post flattering pictures of themselves on Instagram. This is my new bench press PR. This is my new, my fast car, my big house, my good looking girlfriend. Yeah, yeah.

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

Think this is not someone I want to piss off, I want to stay on this person's good side. And this is another way of kind of gaining respect of gaining the esteem of others through being really aggressive. So you can grandstand in both of these ways. The prestige way is often a bit more defensive as you put it. So sometimes people won't be setting out really to impress people, but an opportunity will arise and they'll think, well, I don't

want people to think that my heart is not in the right place about this issue. Should I better say something, right, where I don't want to be accused of remaining silent or something like this and so doing violence or whatever people are saying now, white silence is violence or whatever. So they'll do a little bit of grandstanding because, hey, what's the harm? But then there are people who will go out and go looking for a fight. Look for someone who's kind of like strained from the pack a little bit and making themselves vulnerable.

The person who doesn't put their fist up at the restaurant outdoors, this happened in Washington DC recently. And these are the two you go after. So you can do a bit of grandstanding about, look, I'm out here leading this group of people all making this gesture. Why aren't you doing it? Like what's wrong with you? So the people doing that can also gain a kind of status and so they do. So all of this can be grandstanding. Do you think that some of the people

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

representation of looking smart. They might think hang on, I can't compete in the typical dominance hierarchy. I'm gonna change the rules of the game. You want to play chess. I want to play rugby. Let's play rugby. Yeah, so I like this a lot. You're hitting on a kind of theory of mine, which is that a lot of people who engage in grandstain, if they actually had anything interesting to say, like if they were actually funny or if they had something else going for them, that's what they would do, right? They would just be funny or they would just show their wealth so they'd engage in some conspicuous consumption or something like that. But they don't, or that, or it's so much easier for them to engage in moral

grandstanding, that that's just a very simple, reliable path to status for them. So that's the stuff that they do instead. Our mutual friend, Rob Henderson, has written stuff about this about. He's a fucking king of conspicuous consumption and this is a high status goods at the moment that he's playing around with luxury good good relief sorry, yeah, he dropped sorry man So he draws this stuff from Vebblin who has this whole theory work out so Vebblin is

just this academic outsider. He doesn't fit in in all the elite circles. He doesn't have all the servants, and he's kind of puzzled by this world. So, you know, he writes this great book, Theory of the Leisure class, all about their kind of lame practices, just acquiring obscure languages and engaging in all this

pomp and circumstance. His to show people that they have the time and the money. So what Rob points out and then we're kind of brand and iron in the same vein is that he will do this also with their moral beliefs. So they'll claim at least, and very often I think they actually do have the beliefs, but they'll at least claim to have these flattering beliefs, and they'll get status for it. And, you know, so sometimes this is because they have nothing else going for them. Sometimes it seems like this is just the precondition for being accepted into polite society. So there's stuff recently, maybe you saw this about woke fishing.

So people claiming, you know, very disappointed, you know, women say, I went in a date with this guy and he said he was, you know, a good progressive. He had, he said all the right things, but then it turned out he wasn't super progressive. People are turning this into this great conspiracy that these guys are all out there pretending to be really woke, and they're not. I think actually a better explanation for this is just that people don't really think these words mean very much. And they're just, you know, they know if I'm in polite society, these are the things I have to claim to believe.

And then, but then you get them like, you know, one or two deductions away from the thing that they claim to believe. And it's like, whoa, what? I know. I mean, like, what's the difference between woke fishing? And the vast majority of people who are playing around with these brand new rules that six weeks ago were completely acceptable and today

is completely unacceptable or the reverse. But the fact that you believe that you believe doesn't make, doesn't mean that you actually fucking believe it. Like, it's just that your self-deception is so pervasive that the guy who's using woke fishing has weaponized your miscalculation of how you see things. I put it in, I put the woke fishing thing in a newsletter recently.

And thankfully I think in the UK we don't have that same polarization, at least not in quite the same way. But yeah, I think Robert put, was it Robert had identified any guy who has moderate in their Tinder profile has to be a Republican? That sounds like something, Rob.

But still like the set point basically of where people, guys are expected to be now on the Tinder spectrum is that because of walk fishing, you need to be like super, super progressive just to be now on the Tinder spectrum is that because of walk fishing you need to be like super, super progressive just to be centrist and like anything short of that is like a good turning NRA Hick that loves country music and drives a pickup truck like that's that's it. But dude the walk fishing thing's great have you got some some examples for people you mentioned this recent incident where there was a lady sat down at a restaurant

and you've got tons and tons of examples. Let's give the listeners some concrete examples of what happens, what grandstanding can actually look like when it manifests. Yeah. So let me run through it. In the book, we give everybody this this feel guide to things that people do when they grandstand. So, to be clear, it's not the case that like every time anyone does something on this list, they are grandstanding, right? It's rather that when people are grandstanding, these are the kinds of things that they tend

to do. So, just to interject them, on that to the point, the point is that it's a Trojan horse. It's you weaponizing a particular worldview point of view that other people hold truthfully, but it's you doing it in a way which is metacognizantly kind of labored, right? You're doing it for the effect rather than the fact that you are compelled and you genuinely believe it. Yeah, that's very close. So actually, we think that you can really believe the things and in fact, we can get to this.

This is why some of this is so dangerous because if people were actually just bullshitting, right, then it wouldn't be so bad if they're claiming to believe these crazy things. But because they believe it, then it takes on this new dimension. It's not just like people jerking off in public. It's like, whoa.

Like so much more extreme driving opinion. Yeah, right. Okay, so the framework, tell us. Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that people tend to do, which I'm sure everyone has seen, is that they'll engage in piling on. So they'll look for a case of someone who's violated an alarm in public, social media is

the perfect forum for this, and they'll see people getting in their digs at this person, and they'll say, either something that everyone, someone has said 100 times already or they'll attempt some new form of abuse to mock this person. And they'll do this to show other people that they are in the right on this issue, that they are part of the crowd, that they're not cautious, they're not sitting on the sidelines. They agree with everyone else about how bad this person is. Another thing that people will do is that they will engage in what we call ramping up. This is when moral talk becomes the arms race with people looking to say the most extreme

thing that the crowd will still think of as morally impressive. So in the US, I don't know if this discourse has reached the UK, but with all of these protests, people started really hitting this point of, we need to defund the police. And very quickly, this became, we need to actually abolish the police. So within a matter of 48 hours, this move from like, we need to take a good look at how we're funding these organizations. So like get rid of them and that's of course, what we meant all along, right?

So this is, I think part of the dynamic that you were hitting on earlier of things moving so quickly and it's like people haven't thought this out. And it's because grandstanders have an incentive to be really extreme and make the splashy claim that will then become the official statement that everyone argues about and says like this is, whoa, this guy's really out there or whatever.

Another thing that people do is they'll engage in trumping up. So they'll make exotic moral claims. And the idea here is, you know, a lot of people might have overlooked this problem. But I'm really sensitive, or I'm really knowledgeable about justice and how morality works. So I saw this and everyone else should take notice. Right. So if there's an incentive to do this, you'll get people becoming really creative and saying things that are just way out there because it will impress at least some members of their group. You'll also have people engaged in what we call excessive emotional displays.

So these are the people you might be thinking of who are just always outraged about whatever the latest thing is. And it's always at 10 or 11, right? Like so they're always going to 11 because they want to be seen as like the most like sensitive people, the people who care the most about justice. And then finally, grandstanders are really often dismissive of people who disagree with them. So they'll say things like, look, if you don't see what's so bad about this Chris, I don't even what I don't know what to tell you, man, like you're just too far gone, you are too in the dark, you need to do some work on yourself. And then, you know, then we can talk or

whatever. But it's not my job to educate you, educate yourself. It's a stuff like this. The idea here is like, I'm so good, I can't even put myself in the frame of mind of someone like you so I wouldn't know where to start. You can grandson in other ways too. Anything that is moral talk could in principle be grandstanding people could be driven to say it by It is I or do impress others, but these are just some some really common things that the people tend to do I mean that just sounds to me like a matrix

Breaking down the like vast majority of tweets with more than 5,000 likes that I've seen during 2020. Like if it's broke for 5,000 likes and it isn't mccollie-culk in telling us that he's 40, like it's probably one of those tweets. So is Grant standing a new phenomenon? Is it just another byproduct of social media? Or how does new technology link in with all the things that you've just said? So when you asked why people do it,

I referred to some just common traits of human beings that we care what other people think of us, and we think well of ourselves and what other people to share that impression. So those are not new traits. Those are things that have probably been with us as long as we have been recognizably human working together and caring about whether we can trust one another. So the ingredients to grant stand have been with

us for a very long time and we think there is indeed nothing new about the idea or really about the behavior. What is new is that it's now so much easier for people to grandstand. It's basically costless. So you just pick up your phone and you have an audience, you know, depending on how interesting and attractive you are and all these things, you have an audience of hundreds, to thousands, to millions of people who are just ready to gobble up whatever it is that you say. And moral terms, moral, especially emotionally charged, moral claims that people might make online.

There's good social science showing these are great ways to get attention. So what social media does is that it removes so much of the cost of grants and because you don't have to go anywhere to do it. Also, it also makes it. Well, both. Yeah, so I mean, I'm being... I'm just wondering about the difference between the cost

and the effort there, because the cost of getting grandstanding wrong online, saying the thing you thought might be different to the effort required to do it, does that make sense? Good point, yeah, that's right. So yeah, so I mean, so I was thinking mostly of effort, but you're right. It also probably changes the way people grandstands, it probably makes them more careful about it.

So that's why they have something called the long caption that you're no dad familiar with. Oh, maybe this is not a thing. I thought this is it. So it's when people on Instagram will post like a thirst trap picture, and then they'll have a long caption about whatever social justice issue or Or I do that. I am a I am an absolute you have a long caption. I'm patient. I'm patient zero for that, but it won't be It won't be social justice posturing. It'll be like thirst trap photo, I have a new podcast episode now live with Justin Toecy,

Lincoln Bio. There you go. Like, that's okay. All right, fine. But I mean, if I'm part of the cool kids crowd, that's really all that I care about, man. I just don't want to feature in grandstanding 2.0. Yeah, so I think that goes to the theory

that we were talking about before I mean so you have you have something to offer people is actually interesting you have podcasts where you have brilliant people on and Talk to them about about their books and and whatever else People actually want to hear about but if you don't have anything like that you have nothing to promote You can further promote yourself by promote, you can further promote yourself by writing up some melee mouth, like really carefully measured because again, you don't want to make people mad and incur some further cost. So, right, so what, the other thing that social media adds is it just makes it so hard to

avoid other people's grandstanding. So before you could just just not go to political rallies or not go to that one coffee shop in the college town or whatever. But now it's like somebody's mom just won't shut up about whatever is in the news. And she wants everybody to know that she's long stood with the oppressed and so on.

And so we see grandstanding everywhere. So that's what's new, I guess, is just the platform makes it so on. And so we see grandstanding everywhere. So that's what's new, I guess, is just the platform makes it so easy. Mm, yeah, it's a, it's an interesting thing to think about what social media has done to people's desire for people's desire to signal, right? Because everyone now essentially is their own brand.

You wear a night t-shirt or an added-ass t-shirt or this t-shirt or that t-shirt and immediately people are saying, okay, what does that say about you that you wore that thing? What does that say about that brand? That they are the sort of brand that is worn by that sort of a person and the same thing happens with intellectual arguments and concepts and political affiliations and your favorite Netflix series that you talk about online and everything now is an opportunity to self-brand. And a couple of years ago, I had Robin Hanson, elephant in the brain, on and talking about everything is signaling. And increasingly, I just realized that Robin Hanson was always right, that it's just signaling

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

Yeah, that was, yeah. Yeah, to be fair, he was right. But I can't abuse a guy. But I think there's a few different types of moral grandstanding. The reason that I'm particularly concerned about this iteration of it is that when you get a sufficiently large minority of people speaking sufficiently loudly, they can shift the over-t and window of acceptable speech in a direction that I actually think

it's really difficult to bring it back from. Like, it's now quite hard to have a discussion online saying, well, is being pro-choice actually that smart of an idea, or is there a discussion to be had about being pro-life now around abortion? Like that, if you dig into some of the, especially Ben Shapiro's arguments around it, is really, really compelling. But to say it is like moral grandstanding, putting, like, lighting a flare or attaching yourself with one of those laser pointer things that the drones fire in.

And that's like, so the overt in window for people who don't know, it's basically a particular window of acceptable speech. And you can swing, you can speak within this window, but if you move too far to the conservative or too far to the progressive side outside of that window, you tend to be like ostracized by society and they say, oh, like, what are you talking about? Like, um, here's an interesting one, actually, I wanted to ask you, so I've had it in my head for a little while. Peter Teal, during job applications, asks people, what is a belief that you hold that most of the people think is untrue? Have you got one off the top of your head? Can you think of one that fits that? Oh man, I'm going to get in trouble. Not off the top of my head. So here's your example.

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

And as soon as I had that, I was like, there is no other reasonable solution to this. Other than that, if anyone is listening and they're interested and wants to go back and listen to it, it was the seven deadly sins episode, around about 170, something like that. So that was one thing. But basically, my point there is that we're mimetic beings and this is the reason the Peter Till put it in his job application is he's constantly looking for people who are outliers who are prepared to see outside of the overton window and

By us being mimetic beings the beauty of that question What is a belief that you hold that most other people think is untrue or abhorrent or weird or wrong? And thinking in that sort of a way allows you to say, actually, that person has a very unique world view that has it's different. But yet to get back to the overt and window thing, people can, if you have a big enough majority of people,

they can shift the entire window of acceptable speech so that something last week, which was, you see this with the way that you may now have to refer to transitioning men and women online, all of the different terms to do with people who have different sexual orientations to do with different gender identities to do with this. It's like, if you do it for long enough, people kind of can't remember the old thing. It's very 1984. Yeah.

Yeah, that's all really good. So one of the things that we talk about in the field guide to Grancing is this thing I called ramping up. And I think ramping up explains why the Overton window can shift as it does. Because as you say, you get just a group of people who are loud enough, and they circle around this extreme moral view, once it catches on, you can't say anything to them that's very far from that

position. So, you can have multiple phenomena here. One is you can shift the window to be wider, because you'll have multiple groups polarizing in this way. And so, we now have to talk about all of their beliefs. And I think that can be fine. Some extreme views, it's actually really helpful to talk about all of their beliefs. And I think that can be fine. Some extreme views, it's actually really helpful to talk about them.

But you can also have multiple origin windows, where it's like, in front of this one public, because you can have a divided public, it's only this thing that can be talked about. In front of this other public, it's only this, because you said you can't talk about like the Ben Shapiro views on abortion with the pro-choice people, you know, you also can't talk about some of the pro-choice arguments with the people who really like the Ben Shapiro stuff. So this really

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

And these two groups don't even actually ever end up interacting. Yeah, neither group wants to talk about the other's hard case for their view, right? That's a real loss. Everything's in the middle. The same goes with the gun rights, right? Like it's one person's talking about,

should you be able to have an AR-15 with a semi-automatic turning stock on the back? And the other person's saying, well, I just want someone, like I wanna have a handgun that can protect myself in the home. Like those aren't the same, they're not talking about the same thing. Yeah, yeah, and I mean, like you said earlier,

if you try to stay out some position in the middle where you actually want to talk about a sensible nuanced view, it's like you're putting a target on your back. So you're putting Chum in the water to introduce even more metaphors for both sides. They're both just like, if we agree on anything, it's this guy sucks. Yeah, because he's not you, but he's not us. Douglas Murray hit the nail on the head about this in a conversation I had with him.

And he said that a subtle or nuanced view to the opposition seems like a lack of conviction about your ideology wholesale. Yeah, I think that's totally right. So one thing that we talk about in the book is what psychologists call the black sheep effect. So the black sheep effect is this kind of strange on the face of phenomenon of people really disliking the kind of weekly committed members of their group. So the way it works is they see these people as not trustworthy, right? So they think like they don't really get the principles.

So in the US, I mean, I'm sure there are examples of this in the UK and UK politics too. John McCain used to be this guy who like, the Democrats actually kind of liked him. He was a Republican senator. The Democrats are like, this guy's okay, because sometimes he votes with us. But the Republicans, whenever John McCain

would defect, he's like, this son of a bitch, like this guy, we can't count on this guy for anything. Right? So he's their black sheep. So no one wants to be the black sheep of their group because they know that makes them like, you know, well, the black sheep, right? It makes people not like them, not trust them. And so it is why it's so dangerous for people to express any doubt about the strongly held

beliefs of their group. So they're grandstand instead. John Peterson in his conversation with the lady from GQ that was like when they got that Kathy Newman and they sent her away, it wasn't Kathy Newman, but it was like they'd sent Kathy Newman away, put her on a course of steroids and research for like six months and then she came back like we've made her stronger faster, bigger. And he does this wonderful point where he says, I shouldn't be able to guess the rest of your views when I only know one of them.

And that appears to be the converse of what we're discussing here that you need someone to take their ideology wholesale, not piecemeal. And the reason for that is that it allows the rest of the tribe to better predict their future behavior. Look, we don't need to worry about Jim. Jim's fucking sweet. It's Tom that we need to worry about because Tom likes free markets, but actually he's pro-choice or Tom likes restricted gun control, but actually he's a little bit more right-leaning. What do you know whatever it might be? Because it's the chin can the armor. Right, yeah.

So this is just such a puzzle to me. To anyone who's ever read philosophy, it's like, well hold on, like your position on free markets and your position on abortion, these things should have almost nothing to do with each other, right? But in general, if you find out what someone thinks

about the one thing, you can guess pretty reliably what they think about the other thing. So how can we explain this? So it's just, it seems, because the ideas aren't really doing the driving here. It's the tribalism. It's that people, you know, they might feel really strongly about the one issue, and then they fall in with a group who feels strongly about that issue, you know, they might feel really strong about the one issue and then they fall in with a group who

Feel strongly about that issue and then they have all these other commitments in order to remain like in the good graces of this group people have to even some belief in all of the other orthogonal issues that are popular or that people tend to take a particular position on within their network. And that can continue to go further and further toward the extreme and drag the people with it.

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

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

Another don't. When it's safe for people to speak up and express doubt, they're more likely to do so. And the result is people then get to engage with a challenge to their view. And what you emerge with, hopefully, is a more strongly justified belief, rather than just a comfortable orthodoxy that becomes what John Stuart Mill would call a dead dogma. So it's something people believe, they forget why they believed it, but they're not gonna question it. I love that a dead dogma.

Man, Ian sharpens, Ian. That's why having good conversations is real important. What were some of the most extreme examples of grandstanding that you found? The one where someone tweeted that a two-year-old eaten by a crocodile shouldn't deserve sympathy because she was sick of white men's entitlement seems a bit mental. Yeah, right. So what this is like a kid got killed by an alligator and then like because like. I think there had been a shooting or something recently and people will get well I mean we're down mean, we're down on white people right now. So like to the credit of the mob, like this, this was seen as finally too far.

Okay, all right. So that one was outside of the Overton window in terms of extremity. Yeah, well, but within a certain group, probably fun. It was like, great, yeah, exactly. Yeah, white men, I'm, yeah, time for some of these white men to get even biologators, right?

No, the white men are two year old daughters. Yeah, and their children. Yeah, too. Exactly. Right. What was some of the other ones? What was some of the more extreme or the extreme examples that you found? Yeah. So gamer gate is always a good one for this. So this was, this is still very difficult for me to explain. Because I think this is one of the first nerd culture things that became sort of mainstream. And it was just not explained very well. But this is basically people started getting worked up

about two things, about both cozy relationships between game publishers and game critics. So that like the reviews were just sort of like industry pieces about like why this is a great thing and you need it. But also about games becoming too political. So games like shoe horning and representation of trans characters or lesbian characters or things like this. Anyway, a feminist media critic called attention to a lot of the toxic responses from people who didn't like the politics, at least. I'm going to get emails now if people are correcting me.

No, that's not what it is about. It's really about everything. The internet corrects everyone. Just the way he had to be corrected. Yeah, I know it. But anyway, so if people were sending her death threats, just like, oh, everyone's calling her bitch online, and saying she needs to get raped.

And you know, she's an easier keys, and she's collected all of these like horrible responses. And you know, so how do you explain this? It's not all grandstanding. Right? Some of it is actually just people being crazy and like psychos. But you know, you can see why for someone in a certain community, the thing to do is express like extreme disdain for this person who is a threat to their like Cherish beliefs about

what video game should be here. Something like this. So yeah, so it's like a high status move within that group to come up with like the most misogynistic thing or whatever to say to this woman. And so as a result, you get these like horrible pylons where someone has stepped out of line. It's time, at least within our group, to correct them.

Wasn't it like the lawyer from a big TV company had tweeted after the Las Vegas shooting, saying that 847 people have been injured, 120 people have been killed, but most people that listen to country music are gun-toting Republican Hicks, so I don't really care. Yeah. Yeah, right. So this is another one that finally went too far. But yeah, there are still people, it was a viral treat people like this, right? Because it was like,

like, I mean, okay, finally, someone willing to say what the rest of us are thinking, this group is so bad, and they want everyone to have guns anyway. They should get killed by the guns. So yeah, this is like moral talk, run a mock. Right? So the thing that we point out, the reason we talk about these crazy examples is that we think people have this kind of naive view that whenever someone is talking about justice or whenever someone is talking about what people deserve, anything that sounds like social justice or forget, it's not like it's a right left issue. Anything that sounds

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

rather than to do good. And that's what they're doing with their grandstanding. Is ground standing a moral problem then? It is. Yeah. So we give arguments from every major moral theory. So, we point out that grandstanding has bad consequences. Some people think morality is all about the consequences of actions.

And if that's your view, you should be really worried about the polarization that we've talked about with grandstanding, about people becoming really cynical, about morality, and people just, you know, feeling outrage exhaustion. Like, oh god, I just can't, you know, I, everything's outrageous all the time. I can't do it anymore. I can't tell what like is actually outrageous. And so it all stops working. There are also arguments that we give about respect. There are also arguments that we give about respect. So we say, for instance, that one of the things people do when they grandstand, again, is to like pick a target, and use that person as like a display model,

or it's like no one's, no one needs this thing, can just beat the hell out of it, just to show everyone a demonstration of our moral credentials. And it doesn't matter. But of course, it does matter. You're not supposed to treat people that way. And even if they deserve it, even if they've done something

bad, first of all, you're probably going to go too far. Mobs are not known for their restraint. And you're also just going to be on the lookout for opportunities to beat people up like this. So to use people as an opportunity to showcase how good you are. And then finally, we give some arguments about moral virtue. My favorite of these is we draw on this, this philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Some of your listeners may be familiar with it and we say, look, people like a challenge,

right? So Nietzsche says we all have something he calls the will to power. So we all hate obstacles in a way, right, because they're in the way of us getting what we want, but we also need them because we need that satisfaction that we get from overcoming an obstacle of beating a challenge. So, you know, we all have opportunities to do this in all areas of our life. We can actually do something that's a real achievement. We can, you know, do really well at work. We can hit a new personal record in the gym, whatever else. We can also kind of make up a challenge that's just sort of invented for the purpose of us achieving something.

And this is sort of like a cheat. And this is what people do with grandstanding, we think they act as if it's an achievement to say something morally charged that shows what a good person they are. But of course, this isn't a real achievement. It's actually just an abuse of morality. So, morality is supposed to be about helping other people, being kind to them, about resolving

important social problems. But what grandstanders do is they term morality, integers, and opportunity to show other people how good they are and what an achievement for me to have such pure moral beliefs. But this is an empty achievement. It's actually kind of pathetic, if you think about it that way. This weaponizing of the... Something which at its core should be really, really virtuous is really worrying and we're seeing it a lot at the moment. Moving into an area that I know sweet fuck all about. Why is grandstanding a particular problem in politics. Because I can talk about the way that someone perhaps should maximize their own agency

in life and use their sovereign will to become the things that they can be. I just haven't started to draw that perspective out to kind of the collective, and I found it really interesting that you guys did discuss how Grand Sonding acts as a problem in politics. Sure. So politics is heavily moralized now. Everyone wants to see that their politicians have good character. This isn't really new again, but now I think it's probably even more common because people like to feel

like they have this personal relationship with their politicians probably because of social media. So politicians have this strong incentive to show people how good they are. Now that might be good, right? It's good for people to be informed. It's good for people to know what they're getting when they vote for someone. But again, just because someone says something doesn't mean that it actually is good information, or that it sets up good incentives for them to actually do their job once they're in office. So a couple of problems that come up here.

One is that in democracies, we have kind of split representation of viewpoints in government. We need our representatives to be able to work together and compromise to give up, you know, something that's kind of on the periphery of what we care about in order to achieve a solution to the really big problem. So we need them to have a little bit of leeway, a little bit of flexibility.

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

Everybody sees you're not reliable. You seem not principled because you're willing to compromise. And so this is really dangerous, right? So it makes democracy really dysfunctional. The other thing that happens so much in politics is that if you turn political action into a morality pageant, you create incentives for politicians

to look like they're doing something really morally good that people can see immediately. Their heart is in the right place. Even if it turns out for complicated like nerdy reasons, it doesn't work. So effectively, then, politicians start to propose what we call expressive policies. So these are policies that on the face of it sound really good. They make it clear, well at least if the person is sincere, that the person proposing the policy, their heart is in the right place, they care a lot about the issue, but they don't

actually work. So all they end up doing is being a symbolic gesture. So a good example of this is rank control. Every economist recognizes rank control does not work. So all they end up doing is being a symbolic gesture. So a good example of this is rent control. Every economist recognizes, rent control does not work. It does not actually rent control. Rent control is setting a limit on how much landlords can raise the price of rent, basically on putting a ceiling on what people end up paying for rent. So, I mean, what could be bad about that, right? It sounds great. Like, you look at your lease, you're like,

I wish that number was lower, and rent control promises to give you that very thing. But the problem is, when, and you see this over and over again in cities that have imposed rent control, the result is a shortage in affordable housing, which is exactly the opposite of what we're supposed to get. But for complicated reasons, at least sort of complicated reasons,

landlords then see rent, see, housing developments and investing and making places good places to live, they see this as not a good investment, because the return is limited by their rent control policy. So, at least in the long term, what you get is no more new housing, crumbling old housing, and people rushing to fill the affordable spaces. So, you get somewhere like New York City where people have lived there for like 80 years or something or are lying about, you know,

still living there when it's their great aunt or something that is on the lease and it's just like gifted it to them. You get people like this having their, you know, $300 a month apartment subsidized by people who have just moved there paying like, you know, $3,000 a month or whatever. So, back to politics, I mean,

the incentive for politicians is not to like go through all of this because it's really boring, right? For most people who just want to pay lower rent, the incentive is for them to make people feel like, finally, someone is addressing my needs, they're doing something about something I need addressed. And so you get these policies that sound good and don't work. I identified a problem with Sargon of a card a few weeks ago about Joe Biden's response

where he flipped flopped from saying that the travel ban from China at the beginning of COVID was xenophobic and racist and some other words, and then two and a half months later said that Trump had done it too late. This to me, this entire situation, and that as a particularly simple example, is so worrying because politicians should be the best of us. They should be the most virtuous, the most truthful with the most transparency. They should be held to the highest levels of rigor. They should be the most precise with their speech. Everything should be fact checked. Everything should be right. Well, that doesn't follow on from the thing that you said before. Whereas when things are simply said for effect right now,

there is, I can't trust what comes out of people's mouths. And unfortunately, as you identified with social media, the people at the top of the tree are examples for those further down it. And if in an increasingly politicized society at the moment, people are taking that to be, well, Joe Biden, presidential candidate, democratic nominee, if he's able to flip flop around his sort of points of view, then why can't I weaponize

my points of view? And I don't want to live in a world where people lie. Ideally, I'd have everyone read, take the red pill online and read some Harris's book and never lie. At least I'd know where a fucking stand. But in this situation, it seems like as long as the, as long as the recourse isn't greater, it's like a mathematical equation, if recourse isn't greater than moral outcome, and there's an if function of like like is not too conservative, then okay to get away with. Like, you know, it's like a weird sort of gated beast of computer code. But I don't want the politicians to be able to say stuff and not be called out for it, man.

At all. Yeah, I mean, that's right. So we do want to hold people to account. The worry is that the incentive is not good for them when they're helped to a media account. So here's something no one wants to hear when they're upset about something. We don't have all the information yet. We need to look into this and then do some investigating figure out what actually happened and then we'll figure out what to do.

Because if you say that, the people who are screaming for blood immediately, they want a solution right now, will be really mad. We see this problem with politicians as primarily one about incentives. So we get what we ask for from politicians in democracy. So if what we want is just to be comforted, to be reassured that the people in power are good, we'll get these irresponsible moral proclamations rather than people being willing to take a little heat and take their time and do their job right in ways that we won't immediately recognize as them doing their job right. How do we fix this?

Big problem, lots of layers to it, there's political implications, there's personal implications, I'm really, really concerned about self-deception, wildly concerned about self-deception because I think that that restricts an individual sovereign agency over themselves, which is really, really, really pernicious. So what do we do? Can you fix it for us? Just a sec. I can't, right? I can tell you how to help fix it. So the most tempting thing to do here, probably for most people is you want to pick up this book, grandstanding, and figure out how to find these grandstanders, and go after them,

and humiliate them, make them stop it. Call them out. But that is exactly the thing that you should not do. Why? So, if one thing it won't work, it will just be turned right around on you. People will say, well, actually, you're grandstanding. First of all, because people will think any use of moral terms at all now is grandstand, which is not good.

And that is not our view, by the way. But also because they want to defend the person in their tribe, right, or the person they agree with, and they don't want to be called grandstanders themselves. Another reason not to do this is you're giving the grandstander exactly what they want. They want public discourse to be about how good they are. So if you start calling them out for grandstand, they're like, oh, that's very interesting. Let's talk about whether I'm a good person.

That's, you know, that sounds like a great thing for us to be arguing about, right? So that's no good. So what we say instead is you should treat this problem as an opportunity to examine your own behavior. So what you should do about other people, you think their grandstanding is just ignore them. Right, because ignoring someone you think is grandstanding is probably no worse than just like not being on social media at all, which is not bad. But what you can do is when you're about to contribute to some political discussion, ask yourself, am I trying to do good here, or am I just trying to look good? So to give a slightly more fine-grained test, you can run. You can

say, okay, let me imagine I say this thing, I type out this like, you know, 3000 word post or whatever. And then suppose I learn, you know, a day later, nobody really cared about me at all. They didn't think anything better of me because of this. I failed to like impress them. Would I be disappointed? Or would I instead be comfortable? Well, at least someone saw something important, morally. Because if you would be disappointed that you didn't get anything for yourself,

you were probably grandstanding. You were motivated to say that thing because you wanted recognition. And that's precisely the thing that you should avoid doing. So in other words, you know, you should take this book as an opportunity to examine your own behavior. And if you don't like what you see, maybe sit one out. Right. Self-policing. When there are so many group incentives to go along with the group, I mean, the solution

is to sell 7.9 billion copies of grandstanding, which I'm sure that you would be fantastic. I think that sounds ideal. Yeah, I know. Everyone wins. Usually affiliate link in the show notes below please, because I can retire along with you. We can just, come in islands, just grandstanding to fuck on the top of the new plane that we bought. Hell yeah. But like that's a good way for the people that are listening who are reasonable, intelligent human beings that want to try and make themselves

and discourse better. But that doesn't actually get at the group think problem that we've got going on here. Are you hoping that simply by not giving them our attention that they're going to stop doing it, that seems a little short-sighted? Well, I am taking the long view here. So it probably looks short-sighted, but here's what I think. So imagine you did that, right? Imagine you, like, you rode out a big put,

look, to be honest with you, I've done this. I've engaged in grandstanding, it's just a human thing. It does not feel good when you, like take a stab at it and you get no attention at all, right? So the thinking here is that if enough of us start to ignore this attention-seeking behavior, it will come to be seen as embarrassing. So an example that we give in the book is think of, or rather look into, because people generally don't know about this, look at medieval

this, look at medieval dining etiquette guides. So there are actually books in the middle ages about how to behave at the table, and it's things like don't blow your nose in the tablecloth. Don't pick up a bone off the serving dish and like, no, on it, and then put it back on the food everybody else is going to eat. It's stuff that's like, what the fuck? Like, what were these people doing? Why did they have to be told any of this in a book? By the way, that like only educated people are gonna read. So it's like unthinkable that any of this was ever normal behavior, but apparently it was.

So the hope is like, as crazy as it sounded then like to get people like stop blowing their nose in the tablecloth, maybe that's a position So the hope is, as crazy as it sounded then, like to get people stop blowing their nose in the tablecloth, maybe that's the position we're in now with grandstanding, the norms just haven't yet caught up to the social conditions, and they can. So people will come to see it as really gauche to engage in moral grandstanding. It'll be seen as shameful, the sort of thing

where you see your partner doing it at dinner party or something like, okay, we need to go home. You've had enough, right? That's enough wine, Justin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's not very satisfying, but what we need is for these good norms to emerge. And I, in the long run at least, I'm hopeful.

So if Grant standing doesn't destroy the world first, I think we will get there. So here's a little conception that I was playing around with recently. I think that the people who are the funniest critics and have created the framework that grandstanders go through. I'm thinking the James Lindsay's of this world,

the Douglas Murray's, the Andrew Doyles of this world, they have weaponized ridicule and insight to counteract this. Now it's all well and good us saying, right, I'm just gonna, you know, you want my fucking attention, may I'm not giving it to you, we can chill out. What you need to do is also have a, that is the, how would you say? That is the guy who is getting shot with paintballs and has a full metal suit

on and just doesn't engage in the game. But what you also need are a couple of nuclear warheads who can go in and completely decimate the battlefield and make it so toxic for anyone to go into that area again. Perfect example of this. Think of the word woke. Uh-huh. The word woke now has been flipped on its head the same way as the N word got flipped in reverse, woke has been flipped on its head again, right? Progressive now is almost a term of like an insult to call someone a progressive, like it's kind of, it brings up these, which is stupid, right?

Because people have turns of progressive views about all sorts of things. And it'll flip back eventually, too. Well, that's a, was it good? Was it good? That says about we vacillate between different extremes. No, it wasn't. It was someone else with a weird name, some of the sort of Germany philosopher saying that we vacillate between extremes of society. And then we kind of end up falling into the middle. I can't

remember who it was. But yeah, people like Douglas Murray, people like Andrew Doyle with his titanium agraft account and his Jarvis DuPont account and blah blah blah blah blah And particularly people like James Lindsay, I think Pascal's on this show wonderful dude who has the playbook of What's going to happen because when he can Show you that he knows what that person's going to do say say, think next before they do say, I think it. You actually go better than they do themselves. Holy shit. This guy, this guy isn't playing in matrix. He's playing in source code. He's playing. Do you know what I mean? Like he's

got the CSS terminal up and he's bootstrapped himself into what's going on Here's another thing as well that I thought when reading grandstanding that thought was really interesting I don't think that everybody Should be allowed to express an opinion on the internet. I think that previously I think that there needs to be at the very least like an over 70 internet. I don't know. I just think that the world previously in order to be able to publish your work online and have lots and lots of people see it, you had to have justification for that to happen. There shouldn't be a reason that any caranokeath can say a thing which is sufficiently x, pick your reason that cloud occurs, sufficiently outrageous or insulting or racist or homophobic or progressive

or conservative or whatever it might be, and it be seen by a couple of hundred thousand or a couple of million people. That is not the way the human brain is not designed to consume the entire world's news instantly. It's too much information, both incoming to the people that have to see what Karen Archeath just wrote, and it's too little friction for people to be able to get their thoughts out. People are too detached from the words that they write in the effect that they have Which leads them to be able to say stuff that they wouldn't usually like the number of times that yeah Yeah, the ultimate answer to most things most insults is would you say that to my face?

Like I've caused you wouldn't and then look at the the particular Instance that we saw with the lady that was sat down in that restaurant last week in America, like, would you say it to my face? Yes, but only if you've got 150 friends with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Who are also saying it. Yeah.

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

Being morally outspoken is not in itself an achievement. So stop saying that it is, stop thinking that it is. That's right, man. Let me say one thing about the titanium agraths of the world and James Lindsay. So I mean, look, my view is that like, this actually might be my most unpopular belief by the like absolutely anything can be funny if the person is like talented enough.

So I'm a big fan of this podcast, Come Town, which I think is exemplifies this MO of absolutely anything can be funny, if you're funny enough. So there are people who are actually really good at going after and shaming grandstanders. And look, norms are really complicated. I don't have a full view about how they develop.

You probably do need some people who are enforcers. But for every, so here's all I say about this though. That behavior is often emulated by people who are not very good at it. So for every actually funny titanium agraft post, if you look at the replies, it's full of devastatingly unfunny, like cringy replies of people who think they're doing it too and they suck at it.

So it's like, it's okay, right? I mean, so this is like, people like moral rules to be like one size fits all, you know, they want to, well, why is it okay for them? But I can't do it. It's like because you're not fucking funny, man So I think it is still probably like good general advice and you know even if people were good We don't want people doing that all the time like is you also need people who are like polite and You know good at building bridges and society if everyone was Andrew Doyleman, Jesus. Yeah, oh my God.

Yeah. And then it probably actually wouldn't even be funny because the stick would get worn out so quickly. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I do still think like it's just not a good general turn for us to start like all policing each other, at least about things like grandstanding. So moral criticism is really important, even fitting, even when it's like done badly sometimes.

But I think the general response to this probably should be humility, rather than going after other people, as fun as it might be. I couldn't agree more. The self-deception thing, I just want to finish on that because I think it's really, really, really important. And again, it's the scariest part of all of this for me. And upon realizing all of this for me Yeah, and up on

Realizing all of the different layers that our evolution has left in us That means that we really really are significantly unconscious about why we do so many of the things that we do with regards to reciprocal Altruism or why we're attracted or disattracted to our partner and blah blah blah blah blah like or why we're attracted or disattracted to our partner and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, the murky waters of stepping into your own programming and choosing your wants and desires carefully is made worse when you allow people to weaponize morality and you start to go along with it. Like, our job should be a should be to try and see our desires and the way that we operate as transparently as possible, as far as I'm concerned. You want to live a life which is very consciously designed, because there's a ton of stuff which you really, really don't want. And if you're not careful, you'll end up in a place not only that you didn't mean to get to, but you don't want to be.

And yeah, if you are to the mercy of group think and this kind of moral grandstanding, you make the waters murky rather than clearer. That's my thought. What were you going to say? Yeah, I mean, I tend to agree with you. So I find a lot of like the evolutionary psychology stuff kind of unsettling for the same reason. Like, you know, nobody likes to, especially to be told, you know, you think you're in the driver's seat here,

but like actually, it's like your lizard brain, you know, it's like these deep seated impulses that you're completely unaware of. I think, so I think, I guess I agree with you that up to a point, it's good to be in control and actually aware of what you're doing. It's an important part of being an autonomous human being. But there are also things about us, like there's a reason we are this way.

So it is an adaptive trait still for us to engage in a little bit of self-deception. So, I mean, yeah, I mean re-edering it, like, it is, I think, good to be in control of your life and not just a complete slave to your impulses and things that are beneath your subconscious, but it's also an impossible goal to chase complete awareness and control. I mean, yeah, I didn't think you... I agree, I think that's actually a really good point that I haven't considered. And I think it's partly because I'm swimming

in Eve's psych at the moment. So I'm like, I don't have... I have such little faith in my own constitution because of it. But you are right, it is an adaptive trait and having faith that the wisdom of whatever, a couple of 10,000 generations or whatever of humans are a thousand generations, you know, 10,000, 10,000 generations of humans, 250,000 isish roundabout, right? Yeah.

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

The book, grandstanding, will be linked in these show notes below. Any other stuff that you want to drive people to, any other places on the internet that they should go to check out your stuff? You can follow me on Twitter or my co-author, Brandon Warmke. We're easy to find. We will post our op adseds and other public things there if you want to follow our work. So we're still working on grandstanding stuff. We're doing a lot of empirical work now testing some of the speculative but well-founded of course claims that we make in

the book and you know so far. We're just right about everything. So don't you love it when the happens? Dude, it's great. Yeah, it's so satisfying. Philosophers would mostly just make things up and make it untestable, but for this project brand and I were like, no, let's engage with reality and put ourselves out there. And it's working so far.

I hope I keep some working, dude. Thanks, Dan. Thanks so much for your time. Hey, thank you.