TRIGGERnometry - “Activism Has No Place in Journalism” - Claire Lehmann

Episode Date: August 23, 2020

Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of Quillette.  Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisham. And this is the show for you. If you want honest conversations with fascinating people. We are delighted that our guest today is the founder of Claire Lehman. Welcome to Trigonometry. Hi guys. Thanks so much for having me.

Oh, it's an absolute pleasure. This interview's been a while in the making. We've been trying to make it happen. We're so excited. The time difference is crazy. It's Monday morning as we're recording this. you are Sunday very late at night here. So you were just having your coffee. We've had to have some coffee to stay awake. So it's all good. But so much to talk about. Listen, one of the things

that we were really interested to discuss with you is you talked in some of your previous interviews about the fact that at Quillette, which is a fantastic publication I've written for a number of times myself, you don't do the kind of, this is what happened today. Here's a new story about that. Rather, you take a step back and you look at some of the trends, some of the big things that are happening, the big ideas, the big debates and so on. So as we sit here in the middle of August 2020, what are some of the big things that you see as having happened and potentially looking forward? What is it that you kind of are thinking about at the moment? Well, that's an interesting question. I would say that all of the big

trends that I was thinking about prior to COVID-19, all of a sudden, accelerating. They're speeding up. So there was a brief point in time when the pandemic had just started where I thought that the culture wars would simmer down and we'd get over identity politics because people would realize that there's more important things to worry about, such as, you know, biomedical health, technology, you know, like real things in the real world, such as viruses. But it seems like because everybody's been locked down and looped up in their homes and they've been spending all of this time on the internet, but suddenly the culture wars have

accelerated and intensified much greater than what I would have ever expected. So all of the culture war trends that I was thinking about prior to 2020, I'm now thinking about them again because they're intensifying. And then the other patterns or trends that I find interesting at the moment are the economic ones. So the speeding up of the shift from businesses being sort of like brick and mortar shops on the street to being online businesses and how that's going to affect society and how that's going to affect politics long term. And Claire, were you surprised at the way the coronavirus has affected the culture was?

Because I was very much in agreement with you. I thought, this is the time humanity is going to pull together. We're all going to hold hands, well, gloves, but we're all going to hold gloves. We're all going to be in peace with one another. And it just seems that everybody collectively lost their minds. Well, I saw some good, there was some good signs in Australia. So I live in Sydney, Australia. And at the start of the pandemic, I felt like everybody was, you know, there was a sense of

solidarity. So we live in a fair, Australia is a fairly high trust society. We're multicultural, but everyone seems to get along with each other fairly well. and we didn't have the kind of the immediate bickering over, you know, lockdowns and that kind of thing. We had a lockdown, but everyone seemed to, you know, comply. So we didn't have this immediate bickering that happened maybe in the United States or even in the UK. And we don't have, like, we all wear, when we're on the train, we all wear masks. And the mask is not like a culture war sort of symbol like it is in America.

So in Australia, it's a little bit different, but I think as the pandemic keeps going on and people get fatigued and worn out, particularly with lockdowns and that kind of thing, they'll be more bickering. But what I've noticed is that the stress and the strain of the pandemic has really brought to, brought any kind of tensions or fractures within a country out. So obviously in America, everything, all of their divisions. I'm much more noticeable now. I don't know exactly what's happening in the UK,

but I think nations that are doing well are fairly, are the ones that have maintained their level of trust. So Australia, Japan, New Zealand, potentially. Well, it's interesting you talk about the UK. I mean, actually, you know, we talk about the solidarity. We did have a little bit of that at the beginning. I thought for the first month or two that was happening. And I think what then happened is, and I know you've talked about this in the past as well,

in terms of importing stuff from the United States, what then happened is suddenly we had, having gone from, like, you know, if you're outside sunbathing, your criminal and your killings, everyone around you, to the next week, massive riots in the streets, no one socially distancing, and nobody's saying a word about that, you know. Yeah, the Black Lives Matter, protest, is that what you're referring to? Yes. Yeah, we had one in Melbourne, quite a big one, and one in Sydney where I am.

And, but I was actually really impressed with our health officials, and they came out and said, don't go. And the Prime Minister and other elected members of Parliament said, this is ridiculous. This is an American issue. This is in Australia. And don't go on protest. So I was actually really impressed by the courage. Well, it didn't even require courage.

It's just the common sense of our politicians and saying that don't go and protest during a pandemic. Sounds pretty racist to me. But, you know, we bring up this idea of importing the culture war. How much do you think that's true? Because so many of these issues, I mean, us in the UK, over in your country in Australia, they just don't map onto what we've got in our countries at all. And yet we're all having this conversation as if this is like the United States.

Yeah. Oh, it's a, it's a concerning train. It's just, I think it's because the United States is the world's global superpower at the moment. And we obviously, you know, we all speak the same language. and we import so much of their cultural products from music to entertainment. And it's just an unfortunate side effect that we have to import their culture war issues as well. But finally enough, you know, we've never imported their evangelical kind of Christian cultural wars. Like we don't have, you know, we don't have much division in Australia over abortion.

we don't have, you know, protests about gun rights. We have gun control here. So, I mean, on the one hand, we get things like Black Lives Matter being imported here, but on the other hand, they never really take root because we have, we've already dealt with many of the issues that the United States has not yet dealt with. So is that in some ways, is that the solution to the kind of exporting of, of the culture war is to get your society sorted out. So you're not there vulnerable to all this crazy stuff.

Well, I mean, every nation has its own history, obviously, and a culture is intertwined with the nation's history, and it's not so simple as just giving everyone, you know, access to free healthcare or like universe. It's not that simple. So, like, if you take an issue like gun rights in America, I mean, that is intertwined with their nation's bounding. So it's just it's not, you can't compare the gun rights issue in the United States to Australia

because they're so deeply fundamental to that society's cultural beliefs and value system that we just can't really understand it. So I mean, it's, yeah, it is concerning that we have to deal with this identity politics, which is largely an American phenomenon being imported into Australia. but I'm optimistic and confident that our society will never really go down the same path to being so divided over identity as the United States. I mean, that could be me being too hopeful, but we'll see. And do you think part of the reason, I think it is being too hopeful, I'm going to be

honest with you. Yeah. I feel those exact same things. In the UK, though, like it's gone pretty crazy. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's gone tom-time. It really, really has. But one of the questions I wanted to ask is, how much of a responsibility do you think social media should bear the brunt for this? Because in times gone by, we would never have heard of these cases or if they would do, it'd only be a footnote in a newspaper. But now it just seems to be spread at the touch of the bottom, like a virus right around the globe in a matter of seconds.

Yeah. Well, any kind of revolutionary technology, is going to have disruptive impacts on society. And the way I think of social media and the internet more generally is that it's the equivalent to the printing press. And so the printing press, when it was invented, it brought about the reformation and then hundreds of years of religious warring. But at the same time, I mean, those things obviously bad, but we wouldn't say to ourselves,

we don't want to live in a world where the printing press was not invented. So I see the internet as being a double-edged sword. It's going to make, it's going to bring about a lot of progress in terms of technology and bringing very creative, smart people together. At the same time, it's going to disrupt our societies

and our political systems to the point where there may even be trauma and bloodshed. but in 100 or 200 years time, would we turn around and say, oh, we wish the internet was never invented? I don't think so. And I think the same goes for social media. If you think about the world's most brilliant, most creative individuals, linking them up via social media or by any kind of mechanism,

I mean, that has the potential to unleash so much creativity that can benefit humanity in the long term that I think it's worth it. I don't know. And then you go on Twitter and you think, really? Well, I was thinking, I mean, Twitter is the exact opposite of that, isn't it? Twitter is linking up all the most mentally unstable, deluded people in one big web, isn't it? Yeah, yes, it is. But I like to think of long term, about the long term.

I mean, what if the people who are working on a coronavirus vaccine are linked up via, you know, Twitter? Not Twitter, but what if the information gets shared much more rapidly than it ever could before? And it means that we can defeat this pandemic. You know, so I just, I think with any technological advancement, we have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And, you know, Colette itself is an internet phenomenon. I could never have established an online magazine without Twitter, because that's where I make my writers

and that's where we distribute our articles for free. Like, I don't have hundreds of millions of dollars to, like, send hard copies of my magazine around to all of the cities in the world. But because of the internet and because of Twitter, people in all parts of the world, students can log on for free, read Quillette for free,

and get what I think is, you know, some pretty good quality content. So, you know, we've got to have a balance for you, I think. Absolutely. On the one hand, you've got 200 years of religious warfare, another one you've got Quillette. There you go, balanced. Sorry, Francis, go ahead, mate. No, but Quillet has been such a huge success.

And right from its inception, its growth has been phenomenal. Why do you think that is? Well, I mean, one of the reasons is why One of the reasons why is because we have been dealing with I mean, we've been talking about what we now call cancel culture We've been talking about that trend since we started So that was back in 2015. So, I mean, now cancel culture has sort of entered into the mainstream lexicon

And there's articles about it in mainstream newspapers and magazines You know, people are discussing how bad it really is and whether it's really a thing, well, we were talking about these things five years ago. And so I think we've just been ahead of the curve in identifying some of the pathologies of identity politics and censorship and the group think that's plaguing institutions such as media, academia and maybe the arts. So I think we've just been, we were sort of the first movies on that. And then the other reason for our success is, you know, we're not limited by space because publishing on a digital platform doesn't really cost much at all. We can publish quite lengthy essays where people take a deep dive into issues, sometimes technical issues, without us saying, oh, you've got to cut, you know, you've got to, you know, cut it down. Because if you're publishing a newspaper, you often are very limited in your space.

Like columnists may only get 600 words. Everything has to be condensed down. And sometimes that means it's dumbed down. Because we don't have those limitations, we allow people more freedom, writers more freedom to explore ideas. And I mean, it's not, we don't have, our success isn't like mass. We're not successful in a mass media kind of way, but we have a niche. So we're successful in our niche. And we're lucky that that niche is big enough around the world to sustain us.

And don't you think that is essentially now the future of the internet, whereas before, if you thought about major artists, they had broad appeal. You know, if you thought about major publications, again, they had broad appeal. But very much now with the rise of the internet, it's about identifying a niche and then serving it, which is what you've done beautifully. Yeah. Yes, I think that's correct. And I mean, it might not mean that people become household names like they did prior to the internet, like Madonna and Michael Jackson.

Like we're not going to have that level of fame and stardom anymore. However, we can, lots of people can enjoy sustainable incomes just by finding an audience that likes them and they have shared values with. and they connect with. And it's a very fulfilling career to have that, have a niche audience who you can trust and they trust you and they provide you with an income and you serve them. I mean, it's very rewarding and fulfilling. And then you don't have all of the downsides that come with,

you know, being super famous like people did in the past. And Claire, don't you think as well that, you know, the success of Quillet and, let's be fair, you know, the success of this show and Rogan, doesn't it also highlight the failures of mainstream media and that people are no longer want to engage with it, they don't see it as being trustworthy, they see it as being manipulative and so on and so forth?

Yeah, and I think there's a general move away from very slick, highly produced content that people feel is inauthentic. And so, you know, when I was growing up and I was a kid, anything that I saw on TV was very highly produced, very slick, sort of scripted. By this, basically. You know, people, we're human beings and we crave connection and connect with other people if they're being themselves, if they're being authentic. So I think there's a real audiences around the world are turning towards more authentic,

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That's E-X-P. R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash trigger. You see, teaching kids how to spell for 12 years came in useful one day. And at what point, because you have a range of thinkers on, you know, you're not like some people say, like they say the same things about us, your right-wing, your bubba. And you ask them to explain what right-wing is. It's essentially a euphemism for hateful and racist, but there we go. But...

Accurate in our case. But is you ever a... point where you go, right, these ideas are simply too much or they push too far a particular thing. Like, I think you, and maybe I'm going to misquote you here, please correct me if I'm wrong. You said that you wouldn't put, for example, Mino Yanopoulos on and have him right for you. At what point do you make that decision where you go, I'm not interested in someone's viewpoint? Yeah, so I'm not really interested in provocation just for provocation, say. week. We, we're not, we're not performance artists. So we, you know, the issues that we

explore on Quillette are pretty serious issues. And, you know, we're not, we're not just into owning the lives or getting a reaction out of people. Concenton's base. Sorry, carry on. I like to own everybody. I mean, we need to look at all opportunity. But it's not. It's not about politics, it's just about basic human standards for behaviour.

So I don't, we don't really, we very rarely publish what you would describe as a hit-pice. I mean, we have published some articles that bring up shoddy journalism or like correct the record. And that sometimes might involve, say, here, deep dive into a journalist's work or a writer's work. but we don't engage in in the kind of nasty ad hominem attack, which has unfortunately become, you know, a mainstay of mainstream media for some reason. Well, just coming back to the mainstream media, Claire, because France has kind of touched on it,

and you were talking about the fact that people like locally sourced, authentic, etc. Do you also think there's a big part of it, which is less technological and more sort of ideological, where increasingly, I can certainly speak for our country, there's increasing perception, actually from both sides of a political spectrum, that the institutions that we used to take as being the sort of neutral arbiters of the truth are no longer fulfilling that function at all.

We see a big defund the BBC movement in this country. There is a feeling among many, many people, that the mainstream media essentially are no longer doing their job. Do you think that's also been a part of it, or do you think that's exaggerated? No, I think that's definitely a part of it. And it's, so there's technological forces that are influencing the media, but I think you're correct. You're right when you say that they have,

when you imply that they have neglected some of their traditional roles. It's hard to, it's hard to determine what exactly has caused this, whether it's the fact that the talent that used to, the talent that used to go into journalism no longer goes into journalism and, you know, the smartest kids are now doing something else other than journalism or whether there's just been a lack of leadership in institutions themselves. It's really hard to pinpoint what the causal factors are. Do you not think it's more the kind of long march to the institutions

where over the last 30 to 40 years, universities have been increasingly churning out people with a particular mindset. Those people then go into these professions which attract mostly university graduates. You know, we had a journalist on the show some time ago, Mike Graham, who was talking about the fact, you know, he's probably in his 50s. When he was coming up through journalism, lots of people considered it more of a kind of traditional profession as opposed to something you went into through the academic route. Do you think maybe the transformation of academia, which is something you've talked about quite a lot, has been a big factor on that?

Yeah, certainly it would be a factor. I don't know how big, but you're right in that if you're getting a big chunk of people within a profession who all think it's the same, they're not going to notice each other's blind spots. So if you've got a big chunk of journalists who think that journalism is, basically the same as activism or that activism somehow has a role to play in journalism, which I don't think it does. They're not going to pick up on each other's blind spots and they're not going to test each other's assumptions, test each other's work. I mean, one of the biggest reasons for intellectual diversity or viewpoint diversity is not because, you know, conservatives

or libertarians just it's nice to have them included. It's to, make sure good, rigorous, robust work is done. Because when you have people who have different viewpoints or different ideological perspectives, they pick each other's work apart and find the flaws in it. And that creates better work over the long term. But if everyone's thinking the same, you get, people get lazy and sloppy and they're not having their work thoroughly vetted by their peers the way it should be. So I think that's partly the reason why we've seen a decline in standards in journalism.

And you said yourself, Claire, that activism can't be part of journalism. I mean, there are plenty of people at The Guardian who would disagree with you. Why do you say that? Also, plenty of people are bright by, just to be fair as well. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Good people on both sides. That's a reference that shouldn't offend anyone.

Well done, me. It's not that journalists shouldn't have strong convictions or can't have their own political biases and that kind of thing. But when it comes to the actual work, I mean, journalism is an empirical profession and it's about finding the truth. And so that virtue, finding the truth and documenting empirical facts has to come before everything else. So I think it's fine if a journalist puts truth up here and their political biases down here. Fine with me. That's pretty much what we do at Khaled anyway. But when that reverses, when a journalist's political goals are more important to them than finding the truth, that's a problem.

Because then it's no longer journalism. But don't you think, Claire, we've reached this stage where practically every publication now, is advocacy journalism. It's almost impossible to find a publication which actually is objective anymore. Yeah, I think it's hard to find publications according to Mars head alone, but I think that if we look hard enough,

we'll find that there still are journalists with integrity, but they're individuals. So it's hard to pinpoint a particular publication as a whole but there will be many individuals working within newspapers who are still who still subscribe to the more traditional understanding of what journalism is. Well, except some of them are now leaving the very institutions which they've been in, the Barry Weisses, the Andrew Sullivan's,

a lot of people who you would hope would be the kind of centre and the core of their institutions are actually feeling like they can't exist in those spaces anymore, which again, I suppose explains the success of publications like Quillette. Do you think that we might have entered a slightly different age, although I think Quillet is a counter example to what I'm about to say, but certainly on YouTube, people who do what we do, which essentially, like we say, well, I say I'm a centrist, Francis is old school lefty, we tell people what we think, we tell people what we're coming from, and then we have a conversation from that space.

That seems to be like a totally different shift where essentially we're not pretending to be unbiased, right? Whereas the problem with a lot of the mainstream stuff is they're saying, well, this is just the objective reality. We've got no bias at all. Here's a story about how dancing is racist or something. You know, like, do you think that's part of the shift as well is now we're kind of looking for people to go, this is who I am, this is why I'm coming from,

and here's what I think because of that. Yeah, I think that's a valid point. But, I mean, you guys are having conversations and a lot of the stuff that I publish on Colette is opinion. And when you're expressing your opinion, it helps to have some self-awareness and it helps to be up front about your political biases. But what I'm talking about in terms of putting the truth first, I'm talking about, if you're a reporter and you're going out and observing an event like a protest,

if you come back and write a story about how it was mostly peaceful, because only 24 cops got assaulted. You know, that's when you, that's when things are getting, the lines are getting a bit blurred between activism and bias and reporting on what actually happened. And it's just my view that if your job is that you're a reporter, You have to report the facts clearly and, you know, you should try and minimize bias as much as possible. It's the same with science.

I mean, if scientists are allowed to have their political biases, that's fine. But if they let those biases impact the results that they find from an experiment, then the whole process is corrupted. And then we no longer have trust in the scientific enterprise. And that's incredibly damaging long-term. But it's part of the problem as well that, you know, you may want to, you may go into these institutions and you may want to be objective and you may want to report on the facts. But ultimately, if the hierarchy and the people above you aren't interested in that, then you're doomed to

failure, aren't you? Yeah. I mean, of course incentives matter. And, you know, like I think I mentioned before, potentially in some of these institutions, the leadership is culpable. the leadership has really been strong enough to withstand some of these corrosive forces. Yeah, I think it would be tremendously difficult for any junior journalist in the ABC or the BBC or wherever who has a more traditional view of journalism going in and having to navigate all of the internal politics of these organisations, particularly when leadership might be very biased or have a different understanding of what journalism is. All right. Well, we've bashed the evil MSM enough, I feel, for one episode. Look, one of the fascinating things about Quillet is you get a lot of people from the scientific world to write about a lot of the things that have become invariably part of the culture war, you know, gender differences between men and women, you know, IQ research, all that sort of stuff.

So what have been and what will be some of the most important kind of scientific things that, Quillette has covered and will cover in relation to, you know, some of those things like the stuff that we talk about on the show. Well, I think certainly our coverage of sex differences has been quite influential. I think we were the first publication to really commission and solicit articles and commentary from evolutionary psychologists and even neuroscientists who are world leading experts in this area. And I've seen articles that look, you know, quite similar to our own articles end up at places like the Atlantic. So I think we've been a leader in that area.

I think intelligence research is certainly, you know, we've certainly contributed. to that, to more understanding, perhaps among intellectuals about intelligence research, but it's still such a taboo scientific area. I don't see that the science in that area becoming mainstream many times soon or understood at a mainstream level. I think sex differences is, used to be quite taboo, and scientists had to be really brave to even discuss it because they'd, They feared being called sexist, but I think that's broken down over the last five or ten years.

And now people can discuss sex differences quite openly, perhaps not at Google, but in other places people can talk about them. I think it will take a bit longer for intelligence research. It's still really taboo and people are still really uncomfortable talking about it. So it's interesting that you say that because I didn't realize, you know, you said intelligence research is a taboo subject. And I assumed you were talking about the race and IQ. So are you saying that like research which finds that different people have different IQs and that's somehow related to their genetics? Is that taboo? I would say that the, any research that finds that there is a genetic component.

to intelligence is taboo. Isn't that a statement of the bleeding obvious, though, that we have a lot of... Outside of academia. So people outside of academia have a lot more sense about this than within academia, in a way. Yeah, in academia, it's very tricky to argue that any form of human behavior,

I mean, we know that 50% of psychological traits are heritable. We know that from 30 years of behavioral genetic studies, but you won't find very many academics willing to say that publicly, particularly in psychology. It's fraught. It's absolutely fraught, particularly around socially valued traits such as intelligence. And why is this? I mean, because, you know, I'm a former teacher. Everybody can now drink. Sorry, that's a game we play. Constantly mentioned he's Russian. I'm a former teacher. but you could see that if if a child had bright parents or parents, you know, who had good jobs or whatever else, they were more likely to be academically capable.

That just seems obvious in that if you have two parents who are sporty, the kid's probably going to be sporty, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Why is a common sense idea which everybody accepts in the real world? Why is that taboo in academia? you? Well, I mean, people have been trying to understand that for a long time now. There's this famous book by Stephen Pinker called The Blank Slate that was written back in 2002, and he tried to explore all of the reasons why we find it hard, or not everybody, but the intellectual class of society, why we find it so difficult to deal with human nature and the heritable

nature of human nature. Sorry, that's a mouthbook. And there are various reasons, but a big one is simply that there are narratives or assumptions, particularly within progressive political ideology, that frown upon acknowledging that we are born with the human nature, because it's seen as being incompatible with this notion that if you create beautiful environment, for everyone, people can flourish naturally. So I think it's seen as an impediment to good politics, basically. So if you acknowledge that some kids will always struggle in school, then I think there's this fear that suddenly you won't pour money into schools

or something like that. I mean, you have to take a few steps to try and understand where this fear comes from. But it's been a huge part of our culture for some time now that we haven't been able to honestly deal with the fact that people differ individually and as groups. And, you know, I think some of the culture wars issues are the result of that. And do you think, Claire, as well, it's, you know, and you have children. And, you know, we give children this narrative that you can be anything you want, you can do anything you want. all you need to do is put your head down, work hard enough, and the world is your oyster. When the reality is when we're talking about IQ is there's some children, unfortunately,

you're never going to be capable of being a doctor or, you know, being a scientist. They're simply not intelligent enough, and that is brutal and heartbreaking. And if you say to these people right at the start that because of your IQ is simply never going to achieve this, isn't that an awful message to send to people? However, accurate it might be. Well, you know, I'm never going to be, I'm never going to win the 100 meters sprint, you know, race.

You're white, that's why. There's lots of things that we can't all do. I think one thing that we've lost, however, is this a notion that all human beings have the same moral worth and the same inherent dignity. And I think intelligence is a really thorny and trick. subject because we so often mistake, we so often confuse intelligence with human worth. And that's really bad. I mean, we should be able to separate that a person's ability to perform in our

modern economy from their inherent worth. You know, a person can be kind, funny, warm, loving, caring without being particularly bright, you know, and we shouldn't judge you know, we put too much emphasis and value on intelligence rather than those other qualities, such as kindness and funniness and, you know, and bravery, those types of human qualities that I think we used to value more in our society, but we've sort of lost. Well, actually, I think it goes deeper than that, perhaps, Claire, as well, which is that rather than looking at an alternative source of value, we might want to look at one of the breakthroughs of Western civilization is that everybody has value irrespective.

Everybody is valuable irrespective of their qualities of values. In other words, the three of us have different intelligence, we have different attractiveness, we have different this and that. And maybe one of us is morally good and one of us isn't, right? I point at myself, as I said, of course. But nonetheless, we're all human beings, and that means we have moral value and we have inalable rights that are protected by the state from others. That was actually quite a revolutionary idea when it became part of our civilization.

And that fear of seeing that people are different, it reminds me, and I know you've talked about this as well, is how you first encountered the sort of, almost blacklisting by Australian media when you wanted to be critical of aspects of feminism. And it seems to me like that issue is very strong with liberal feminism where it's like we have to pretend that men and women are the same because if they're not, we can't achieve equality, which seems like a crazy idea. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. There's this notion that if you're different, you are not equal. and there's a confusion between moral equality and empirical equality. No, we're never going to be equal empirically. We're never going to be, I'm never going to be able to run the 100 meters as fast as Hussein Bolt. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be considered equally human and have equal human worth. So we, you know, we, we've, our culture seems to have to have. lost this understanding that equality is meant to be a moral aim and a moral goal. It's about

equal human worth and dignity. And we're focusing way too much on empirical equality. And I don't really know how to wind that back or get the conversation back on track to moral equality. But it's something that we have to do if we're going to make any progress in these really thorny topics. And the thing is, these thorny topics are essential for resolving some of these cultural issues. I mean, some of the arguments that people are having are completely divorced from facts and from empirical reality. So we really need to talk about what we know as empirical facts before we can solve any of these political issues. So we need to have these honest conversations. And Claire, do you think part of the problem is as well, like you said, that we don't

value, you know, honesty, kindness, bravery? And, you know, I agree with you that we don't. Isn't it part of the problem? And I'm going to say it's with my left wing head on is that you can't monetize that. Yeah. And because you can't monetize it, it's therefore not seen as value. Whereas, you know, if you're great at, you know, programming or coding, you know, or any of these things that come with having a high IQ, you can monetize it, make a lot of money, and therefore you have value.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's something I wish we could talk about more. I mean, women, for example, on average, are more empathetic and more high, agreeable, right? But you can't scale those qualities. You can't scale up empathy like you can be a fantastic coder. Like if you look at tech billionaires, I mean, some of them have just invented a snippet of code, but that has allowed them to, you know, monetize that the ability of them to monetize that is just astronomical. You can't monetize, you know, if you're an extremely caring nurse who heals people in the hospital or who, who

You're an amazing nanny who looks after people's children. You can't scale that up. But the work that you do as a human being and even the work that you do within the modern economy is so important and so vital and so beneficial to other people that we could not go without it, but it's not scalable.

And so I wish we talked about that more because I do think certain skill sets are incredibly valuable and fundamental to our species, but they're not valued enough or they're undervalued simply because they're not as monetizable. And when you say that we should talk about them more, do you feel like there's a solution that's there to change that somehow? Well, I mean, one way to compensate people for having a skill set or doing work, which doesn't, you know, make them rich is just by affording them prestige, you know.

So if we, if, you know, carers of elderly people and aged care homes were afforded more prestige, like I'm sure that they would feel better about the important work that they do, you know. I just think that just because something is easily monetizable or can make a great deal of money, you know, that has rewards in itself, but there are other ways. to compensate people for the work that they do, particularly if it's very important vital work to our society. Prestige, those things. I mean, it's very, very interesting that you say that,

that we should bring prestige. You sometimes think, as well, it's just the incentives that are wrong in our society. And because, you know, if you have a high IQ, you naturally think to yourself, right, well, what is ultimately going to make me, successful. Is it going to be being more empathetic, being more kind, being more caring, or is it actually going to mean that I'm going to be more hyper-focused? I'm going to be more, you know,

driven, all the rest of it. That is going to take me to where I need to be. Yeah, well, I mean, I hesitate to say that the incentives in our society are wrong, but I think we can do a better job at providing people with other rewards rather than just. economic and and there needs to be more of a awareness that I mean you know people do jobs not necessarily because of the money people do jobs because they find it fulfilling and rewarding and and that sort of thing you know there are other there are lots of ways to make a lot of money but they're not necessarily good for the soul but I think if we're talking about you bankers I think if we were just, you know, if the conversation was just broader and some of these issues were, you know, we talked about them a bit more freely and honestly, that would be better.

But I mean, I don't think everyone just calculates how much money they can earn just, you know, through a particular job and only chooses that job. I think we choose the job that we do for a range of different reasons. I think most people intuitively understand that. I guess what you're talking about is a little bit like having a high regard for people in armed services, which used to be much more the case than it is now, like, you know, not necessarily well paid, but held in very high esteem in many societies. So I suppose rerouting that to, you know, as you talk about doctors and nurses and so on, or having more of that.

Yeah, that's an interesting conversation. just I wonder how you how you engineer that socially. I don't think you can. I don't think you can from a top-down point of view. You can't, you can't organize that by fear. It has to come from the grassroots and it has to come organically. But I think we used to do a better job, particularly for women. I think, for example, mothers were more highly regarded

in a few generations ago. and, you know, it's sad that that, I just think it's sad that some of that has been lost. And, you know, we talk about intelligence, and we had Noah Carl on the show. And Noah was saying that there's really, and maybe I'm misquoting him, I hope not, but essentially there's only one real type of intelligence. Whereas when I was in teacher training college, they said there were multiple types of intelligence. There was also emotional intelligence, et cetera, et cetera. We all know that person who could ace math exams.

and then when it comes to a human interaction, they'd fall apart. Where do you stand on this? Well, I mean, I study psychology at university, and I would have learned the same things that Noah has learned, although his education is probably more recent than mine. But yeah, I think there's only one type of general intelligence, but I would qualify that in saying that, a person can have, there are different cognitive profiles.

So some, particularly when it comes to people on the right-hand side of the bell curve. So if you're getting into the gifted areas, people can be gifted in very different ways. And I think Jordan Peterson has spoken about this as well. So if you, if you suspect a child or an adult is gifted, they might be gifted in just one area and then have average abilities in other areas or they might have just very spiky profiles. I think this turns up in people who have Asperger's they have what's called a spiky profile so they're very they have high scores maybe on arithmetic or some other you know subset of an intelligence scale and then lower scores on others so I think

I mean so I so I think both views are right it's it's it's not correct to say there are different types of intelligence but simply that when we test people people can have different cognitive profiles and particularly when we're getting into the gifted areas people can have very divergent kind of results and that's it's not unusual but one when we're getting into the left hand side of the bell curve when people are struggling with an intelligence test, the profiles are more similar. So that, I mean, that, I don't, I don't know the reason for that, but that's, that's, I think that's a general finding. And do you not worry that, I mean, that these sort of tests could be misused, you know, like companies or whatever else,

or, you know, if you want to move to another country, they'll say, right, if anything below, like, a 1-2-8 IQ score and you're not moving in, could that eventually be a possibility? Francis, don't worry, I'll never fire you, mate. Well, I mean, they could be misused, but I think there's a lot of, I mean, one thing that, I mean, it could also save people a lot of time and money if they were used. Like if you didn't have to go to university and get a four-year degree just to prove that you're moderately intelligent and you could just do a test, I mean, that would save you four years of your life and a whole lot of money. and then you could get a professional job and they could train you up in the job while paying you. Like I think, yes, there is potential for tests to be misused,

but also it could be a really cheap way to, you know, give people opportunities that they otherwise wouldn't get. So, I mean, I don't know. I don't see it as being that simple. And the other thing about intelligence testing is it's one of the only ways that, smart kids from poor disadvantaged backgrounds have been able to really, not intelligence tests,

but having standardized tests in education settings has been one of the best ways to enhance social mobility. So I think there's, yeah, there's obviously situations where the test could be misused and people could be treated unethically because of it. but same goes the other way. Makes sense, Claire, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure talking to you. And as always, we have one final question for you,

which is what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Wow, how great Trigapod is. That's definitely important, but increasingly people are talking about it. So have you got another one for us? Well, I think I mentioned them earlier. I think that other rewards for jobs that aren't economically rewarded, such as nannying and age care work and that kind of thing,

I think we should talk about that more. And also, we should talk about the costs involved in not acknowledging that we differ as individuals and as groups. So the high cost of denying human nature. Claire, thank you so much for coming on. If people want to find you online, if they want to find Quillette, what do they need to do? Well, go to Quillette.com. That's Q-U-I-L-E-T-E dot com.

And you can support us via Patreon. So Quillette at Patreon. We have a podcast as well. So you can find us in your podcatchers if you look for Quillette. and you can subscribe to our newsletter, so you should be able to find a subscription button on our newsletter, and you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram. So, yeah.

Perfect. Thanks for coming on the show, Claire. It's been absolutely fantastic chatting with you. And if you've enjoyed the show, we will see, well, actually, even if you haven't enjoyed the show, we'll still see you tomorrow with another live stream and very soon with another brilliant episode. So take care and enjoy the rest of it.

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