philosophy | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Podcast • August 11, 2016

Apocalypse Now?, Part 2: A Remade Man

Our apocalypse series began one week ago with one grim vision of the future. What if our machines managed to take control of their own code? If they began to self-regulate, even self-replicate? It’s an imaginable scenario—but ...

But it sounds familiar in the biotech capital of Boston/Cambridge. Messing with our own code: that’s exactly what we human machines are up to, right now and more and more, in labs across this city and around the world. Thanks to a number of scientific breakthroughs—in particular, the editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9—have made possible the manipulation of multiple genetic “sites,” in the service of eliminating genes that harm or hinder—or even to introduce genes that remake, strengthen, and speed up the species, or big parts of it.

The science-minded animators at Kurzgesagt have taken on CRISPR, and why it is being treated as a kind of genetic Holy Grail—or point of no return:

This show is prompted by the incredible pace of progress, and also by some fretting about what the unlocking of the genome might do. We’re inspired to live alongside George Church, the super-confident Harvard scientist behind some of CRISPR’s wildest possibilities: including reprogramming or ridding the world of malarial mosquitoes, reversing aging, and rescuing the woolly mammoth from extinction.

Church—bearded, striking—knows he’s presiding over a revolution, and speaks, to be fair, in terms of numerous safeguards against the apocalyptic possibilities.

But our guests, writer/physician Siddhartha Mukherjee and the philosopher Michael Sandel, remind us that tomorrow’s biotechnology will have an almost unimaginable capacity to surprise, that there may be Robert Oppenheimers among the genetic Edisons.

Mukherjee refers us to the 1905 prophesy of the Mendelian biologist William Bateson, who said:

“The science of heredity will soon provide power on a stupendous scale; and in some country… that power will be applied to control the composition of a nation.”

That may mean the revival of eugenics on a 21st-century, pay-to-play model. Does that make it OK?

We close with Pardis Sabeti, the biologist at the center of the Ebola fight of 2014. That wasn’t an apocalypse, but it was a serious cataclysm: a horrifying, hemorrhagic virus attacking a third-world healthcare system and against, for too long, global sluggishness and indifference. Sabeti says she works by day and worries at night on the prospect of a manmade superbug—Ebola set loose in the air.

Sabeti’s lab at the Broad Institute, like George Church’s, is full of brilliant postdocs pipetting solvents, running centrifuges, all in the service of reading and writing genomes. But in some ways, she’s playing a prudent, even heroic kind of defense to the bioengineers’ offense: trying to make the virus extinct, but without any concept of transhumanism.

Sabeti paid tribute to Dr. Sheikh Humarr Khan, who finally died of Ebola after months of tireless work with more than 80 infected patients at Kenema Government Hospital. If there’s to be hope of global readiness for a biopocalypse—a dreadful attack on human bodies, exploiting weaknesses in our genes or in our governments—it’s going to hang on ordinary human hands and hearts, like Dr. Khan’s.

Watch our guest Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene, discuss the genetic theater of the Rio Olympics:

June 9, 2016

American Hearts and Minds

With the presidential primaries practically over, let’s take a moment on the psychiatrist’s couch, with an eye on the health of American hearts and minds. We spent months and months inside two overheated political races, ...

With the presidential primaries practically over, let’s take a moment on the psychiatrist’s couch, with an eye on the health of American hearts and minds.

We spent months and months inside two overheated political races, and nearly half of all Americans are displeased with our options. We’re left without a feeling of confidence, let alone consensus.

But Marilynne Robinson—novelist, essayist, and friend of POTUS—declares that the political pandemonium is all to the good, if it can reintroduce us to ourselves, and to a country that many of us have ceased to understand.

Robinson sees the world through her own Christian moral learning. So for her, America is an old and venerable civilization that has finally come to appreciate what we had in Barack Obama. We’re often saved by human ingenuity, we make a few simple requests, for solid public education and affordable healthcare, and yet we’re tempted by fear, greed and division.

Robinson recalls that we’ve been in worse scrapes before. In 1968, after the death of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Chicago convention that nominated Hubert Humphrey was marred by the protests of young antiwar voters.

After that, Humphrey was stranded, Richard Nixon ascended—and brought with him a period of democratic decay.

What if we had a replay of that strange fractured moment in the 1960s and ’70s? And what if we asked the wisest Americans we know what to do in another moment of democratic uncertainty and disappointment?

With a very wise panel—of psychologist Andrew Solomon, philosopher Nancy Rosenblum, and historian Bruce Schulman—we’re talking through just what we’ve learned.

May 11, 2016

Could Confucius Change Your Life?

In an panicked moment, maybe what we need most is a new set of eyes—or a very old one. Whatever you may find to be the problem—capitalist excess or teens “keeping it real,” digital isolation, widespread anxiety, Trumpian ...

In an panicked moment, maybe what we need most is a new set of eyes—or a very old one.

Whatever you may find to be the problem—capitalist excess or teens “keeping it real,” digital isolation, widespread anxiety, Trumpian narcissism, bad governance, or all of the above—Confucius has something to say to you.

That may be why Confucius and his followers—who taught and wrote almost 2,500 years ago—are resonating anew in the hearts of Chinese citizens. One of our guests, the great podcaster Kaiser Kuo, sees Confucian thinking as “baked-in” to the so-called Chinese character, as permanent as Plato.

Not to mention at Harvard, where, in the hands of beloved professor Michael Puett, Confucius provides counterintuitive wisdom to a bunch of self-aware, overwhelmed overachievers.

Confucius raises self-cultivation to the pursuit of a lifetime. Every encounter is a learning experience; every mundane action is a ritual to be perfected. All of it is in the service of the good life—reworking your desires, constraints, and impulses to promote ren—“goodness” or “humaneness”—in all you do.

Imagine the “superior person” as like an archer:

He rectifies himself, and seeks for nothing from others, so that he has no dissatisfactions. He does not murmur against Heaven, nor grumble against men…

The Master said, “In archery we have something like the way of the superior man. When the archer misses the center of the target, he turns round and seeks for the cause of his failure in himself.”

Maybe it’s this part that makes sense to the perfection-prone Harvard student. Imagine if all that striving were less about world takeover and more about nonstop inward renovation of the mind and heart.

Confucian thinking can put one in mind of superhuman social talents: Stefan Zweig‘s lost generation of hyper-refined Viennese (or Ralph Fiennes‘s M. Gustave in The Grand Budapest Hotel)—officials, artists, peerless hosts and hostesses with not a thread out of place, kind, warm, and accommodating down to their souls.

Michael Puett argues that Confucius still points a path to that kind of orderly, rewarding mutual life. And he’s making his pitch in an exciting new book called The Path, cowritten with Christine Gross-Loh.

We’ll talk about the comeback of the great sage—long in arriving—and what it could mean for your life.

You can hear a longer version of our conversations with our favorite people living Confucianism today, at least at a deep cultural level—Tu Weiming, Gish Jen, and Kaiser Kuo—below:

June 19, 2015

Under The Algerian Sun: Camus and Daoud

It’s the rare writer who can pick up where Albert Camus — master of midcentury philosophy and fiction — left off in the modern classic, The Outsider (formerly translated as The Stranger). But Kamel Daoud, ...

It’s the rare writer who can pick up where Albert Camus — master of midcentury philosophy and fiction — left off in the modern classic, The Outsider (formerly translated as The Stranger). But Kamel Daoud, an Algerian journalist and writer, has done just that in his new novel, The Meursault Investigation, just released in English.

Daoud’s book renews L’Étranger as an Algerian story for everyone, an incandescent read already acclaimed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Nation.

Maybe you read Camus’s Outsider in college — or absorbed its frank fatalism through noir or New Wave cinema, in ‘80s rock, or in the televised angst of A. J. Soprano. The book’s antihero is Meursault, a disenchanted young clerk who murders a nameless Arab on the beach at Algiers, under the weight of heat and circumstance. Unable to defend himself or show remorse, Meursault is condemned to death — and confronts the essential absurdity of the universe.

One of Matthew Richardson’s illustrations of “The Outsider” for the Folio Society.

What about the Arab, though? For many L’Étranger is a miscarriage of justice. Daoud’s project is to retrieve the victim and re-prosecute this literary crime. His novel gives Meursault’s victim a name, a history, and one angry brother living in the aftermath of both death and Independence. Our guest Adam Shatz, who profiled Daoud this spring, said the result is a unique post-postcolonial work, one that lives and seethes in a truly absurd present, shaped also by the liberators:

He turns this novel into a critique of postcolonial Algeria. He really situates the absurd in post-colonial Algeria, in a country that achieved liberation after this long and bloody war of decolonization but did not render liberty to Algerian citizens. So in a sense, he’s critiquing Camus, he’s paying tribute to Camus, and he’s appropriating the whole theme of absurdity, saying, “if anyone suffers from a predicament of absurdity, it’s not settlers like Meursault, it’s Algerians after their liberation.”

Camus and Daoud, after all, have much in common. They’re both lively men who want to make words and the ethics they describe matter in the world. Robert Zaretsky reminded us that long before Daoud took aim at Meursault, the creator walked away from his own creation:

In 1942, soon after publication of both The Stranger as well as The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus wrote in his notebooks, “Absurdity teaches nothing.” At that moment, he joins the resistance and becomes one of the leading voices of the resistance press. Camus recognizes that there is — if not something autistic — something solipsistic about Meursault. And it’s time to move on. Yes, the world is absurd. But that’s only a diagnosis Now the time has arrived to find a cure, to find a prescription, some way out of this. In his complexity, in his elusiveness, he poses these perennial questions about life, about our responsibility towards others. Not just towards one’s mother or towards one’s lover, but towards one’s fellow human being, like the Arab who’s never named.

Like Camus, Daoud rails against religion, making him non grata in many parts of the Algeria he loves. Professor Kamran Rastegar wondered whether Daoud’s motifs, driven by overwhelming “ideological exhaustion,” resonate with the young, and often faithful, energy of Tahrir Square.

But, over the course of the program, we were reminded that religion is too narrow a target for either man. Worse than enforced piety is the everyday inhuman abstraction that justifies everything from colonialism, to “counter-terror” and its blowback, to the easy guns and bureaucratized violence favored by our own Meursaults.

Kamel Daoud dares Camus and his readers to name the victims, view their faces, and insist that black, brown, colonial, and postcolonial lives matter. In doing so, according to Judith Gurewich, Daoud goes back to “the root of existentialism,” saying, “when you kill someone, you kill a part of yourself.”

As our hour closed, Adam Shatz returned to the absurdity of suffering:

There is this shared history of suffering. …The story doesn’t end after Camus’s death. It very much continues in the lives of the victims of Meursault. That’s very much true in what we’re seeing today in things like drone killing. We are linked to these other histories. We’re not separated from them.

Field Recording: At Boston Latin, getting to know Meursault.

I learned in high school English that it’s always one of three things: man versus man, man versus society or man versus himself. On their first day as seniors at Boston Latin School, students have to reckon with all three.

Every year, Lynn Burke assigns an English translation of L’Étranger for summer reading. Camus’s classic is a mainstay of late high school and early college, but it’s heavy stuff. (In only one way does it really qualify as “beach reading.”)

When her students arrive, however, Ms. Burke says they’re ready to lead her into existential depths. They’re also ready to hear out Camus’s young, anomic protagonist. I wonder if, every September, Ms. Burke feels as happily unnerved as I did. It’s strange talking with four kids so good and poised, and yet so eager to confront meaninglessness.

Graduation was last month, and Isabelle, Anna, Sean, and Edwood are fanning out to colleges after one last Boston summer — this one probably Camus-free.

But Meursault is staying with them. What could they see in this guy and his strange conclusions? It’s not really that he helps the students confront evil, isolation, and meaningless. There will be time for all of that, and they have more immediate concerns. After a few years of explaining themselves — to parents, to teachers, this year to colleges — some of them like the idea of a man without an answer.

—Pat Tomaino.

Who’s Camus to you? A primer.

Take Alain de Botton‘s short video course on why Camus the thinker looms so large, then enjoy our podcast:

May 28, 2015

What Money Can’t Buy

It’s graduation time in Boston, and the Class of 2015 is asking “Now what?” If our young ones need help choosing, the market is back and ready to nudge them toward a gilded path. A new survey of Harvard seniors says that, after a dip in money jobs, fully a third of them will go to work in consulting or finance this year.

This week, we dared to enter the market for grad wisdom, rounding up a justice thinker, an historian, an entrepreneur, and a novelist to offer some last-minute commencement advice — and the latest installment in our capitalism series.

Harvard’s own rockstar philosopher Michael Sandel said that the high-dollar scramble for young minds is part of a phenomenon he sees the world over. What used to be a market economy has morphed and spread over 30 years into a market way of everything:

Because we fear the disagreement, the controversy that would result from engaging in that kind of that debate, because we worry about the majority coercing or imposing on the minority their values, we reach for what seems to be a neutral way of deciding hard public questions. Markets and market thinking have played that role, I think, mistakenly. The result is we have a kind of emptiness, a void, in public discourse and people everywhere are frustrated about it.

How did a nation of yeoman farmers and proud producers financialize its economy, and then its civics and its morality? Our historian of capitalism, Julia Ott, said that the process began in World War I when the Woodrow Wilson, desperate “to demonstrate the consent of the American population towards the war effort,” became bond salesman to the nation. War bonds and war savings campaigns encouraged Americans to see “the ownership of federal debt as a way of demonstrating that they not only support the war, but that they support a democracy, they support the foundational principle of private property rights.”

What stays with us for the rest of the 20th century and up until today are the ideas that property ownership are fundamental to American citizenship, that financial securities markets play a handmaiden to the realization of that goal, whether it’s through your 401k plan or through your house which you need a mortgage for.

Entrepreneur Semyon Dukach arrived from Russia celebrating those principles of American financial capitalism. Dukach told us he sees (and lived) the greed, but it’s trumped by good old fashioned business ethics.

Customer-first ethics seems a thin substitute for a morality, though. And what of the older, pre-commercial American values? Novelist Marilynne Robinson said they’ve been crowded out and replaced by “this weird, ideologized ‘capitalism,’ which is not a phrase that ever occurs in our early literature.”

…The word “value” has been narrowed in its meaning so that it sort of means “profit,” something you can put in the bank. But value historically, value culturally, has always meant the enhancement of people’s lives. It has always meant the arts and the sciences and all these things that we have still implicit in the culture but are turning on, because they’re anomalous in terms of this novel, mindless ideology that so many people have been persuaded of… These spectacular universities and so on that we ought to be just enjoying! This idea that everything is monetizable. You know, the sort of thing where you take the little freshmen aside and say “not everything is monetizable!”

Now that the seniors are leaving — jobs offered and accepted (hopefully) — what are the “little freshmen” to think about markets and morals? If money doesn’t buy or point to the good life, what does?

Leave a comment, and let us know what you think.

Podcast • February 9, 2015

Depression, Inside-Out

Depression—characterized by persistent feelings of sadness, hopelessness, or alienation—afflicts one of every 10 US adults. Our guest George Scialabba, a writer and public intellectual based in Cambridge, is speaking about his decades-long bout with the illness on ...

One of the things that hurts most about depression is that you don’t really believe that it’s ever going to go away, get better. It just doesn’t seem like something with a plausible cause. So you can’t imagine what the remedy is. So people should tell you: “Look, eventually, everybody gets a little better. Some people are still mildly depressed, but virtually no one is acutely depressed for decades and decades — their whole life. It’ll get a little better, and probably a lot better. So hang on.”

George found and published the various clinical notes that his doctors wrote about him and his condition over nearly 40 years. It’s the first publication of its kind—part personal journey, part modern medical history of depression therapy, drugs, and electro-shock treatments. We’re talking, now, about what the doctors tend not to write down: namely, what depression has to do with the deep philosophical and religious search about life.

One of the things George found in his own search was the humanism of D.H. Lawrence. As George reads from his essay collection, The Modern Predicament:

Lawrence believed that the universe and the individual soul were pulsing with mysteries, from which men and women were perennially distracted by want or greed or dogma. He thought that beauty, graceful physical movement, unselfconscious emotional directness, and a sense, even an inarticulate sense, of connection to the cosmos, however defined – to the sun, to the wilderness, to the rhythms of a craft or the rites of a tribe – were organic necessities of a sane human life. “Man has little needs and deeper needs,” he wrote. “We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness.”

March 26, 2014

Harold Bloom: “Emerson Speaks to Me”

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s immortality in American poetry and prose has never been in doubt. In his philosophy of self reliance, the “American Plato,” it is said, invented the American mind, and maybe the American religion in this nation of sturdy believers. The keeper of the literary canon, Harold Bloom, calls Emerson a “living presence in our lives today.”

This podcast is a short excerpt from Emerson Redux, a full hour show on Ralph Waldo Emerson created in 2006.

Podcast • February 21, 2012

David Weinberger in “the smartest room in the house”

The start of our David Weinberger conversation, with Mary McGrath, in Bob Doyle’s studio, 2003 I take it as self-evident that the truth about being human is that we’re always interpreting; and we’re disagreeing ...

The start of our David Weinberger conversation, with Mary McGrath, in Bob Doyle’s studio, 2003

I take it as self-evident that the truth about being human is that we’re always interpreting; and we’re disagreeing with other people’s interpretations. And that’s both the bane and the greatest joy of life. That’s what knowledge is.

David Weinberger in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Harvard Law School, February 17, 2012.

David Weinberger has made it his job to deal with the Internet as a philosophical event — as a radical turn in human understanding of understanding itself. Our conversations began a decade ago, between The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) and his own sparkling treatise Small Pieces Loosely Joined (2002), which promised that the new information hardware and software would change everything. His new book Too Big to Know is an occasion here for a Ten Year Report on the Digital Age and how it has dismantled old taxonomies of learning, old hierarchies of expertise.

We’re talking about why (paraphrasing his subtitle) on finding “the smartest person in the room,” our first instinct is to look for a smarter room. We’re talking about how “knowledge” (conceived as libraries of information, even wisdom, like our old dining-room Book of Knowledge) got re-imagined as fluid, accessible galaxies of often contentious conversation. We’re talking about a Top 10 list of sites that make his point: Wikipedia, of course, but also Reddit, a favorite of his, and Chowhound, a favorite of mine. Also: Jazz on the Tube, a search tool for lost-and-found jazz videos; Trip Advisor; and Nate Silver’s hard-core political site 538, now part of the New York Times coverage online.

Arxiv.org turns out to be the site that reveals David Weinberger’s argument most significantly. It’s a scientific research journal I’d never read before — a serious but wide-open site, as David Weinberger explains, where “any scientist of any standing can post any thing.” It’s a site, furthermore, that made major news just recently about the speed of light.

“That’s where these findings are posted. Very responsible scientists. And over the course of a couple of months, over 80 other papers were posted there in response and it spread out immediately across the web, in posts and tweets – the whole ecology jumped in. And as a result, the ecology of knowledge got filled out far more than it ever could be before… First of all, it shows how you scale knowledge. Had this gone through the peer-review process to get published in an important journal – which this paper certainly would have in the old days – had they chosen that route, it would have taken a year, a year and a half… The old idea that we have the peer-review process to protect us so that we only got good science – well, yeah, it does that – but it also restricted science so severely that it couldn’t work as quickly or as broadly as we want it too… The knowledge lives in that network. The pieces are connected and arguing with one another – not agreeing – and that’s where the knowledge is not only developed, but that’s where in any real sense knowledge lives. And it has value because it includes not just the original paper but all of the responses to it, all of which are different from, and in many cases disagree with that original paper. Knowledge lives in networks; these networks have value because of the differences and disagreements among the pieces — which is an inversion of how knowledge used to work.”

David Weinberger on how the new knowledge networks of Arxiv.org invert the old models of scientific discussion.

We’re speaking also of gaps in the transformation — gaps, as it seems to me, in empathy, “wisdom” and the applied power of the new information. In the potentially universal “social web,” we can all feel the tendency to “stay local,” not to leap boundaries. I’m wondering if we’ll ever look to the Web for anything like the pleasures of deep reading. And I’m complaining that the Web is a political tool of uncertain utility. The SOPA restrictions on Internet freedoms died in the Congress as soon as Internet took notice and rose up against it. On the other hand, the glib (and to my mind insane) rationales we read for a US and/or Israeli preemptive attack on Iran have not been confronted in any systematic way by the “wisdom of crowds” online around the world.

Podcast • November 4, 2010

Reading Obama’s Mind: Pragmatism and Its Perils

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with James Kloppenberg (38 minutes, 19 mb mp3) If there is a problem with Barack Obama’s thinking, his “intellectual biographer” James Kloppenberg is saying on the morning after Obama’s ...

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with James Kloppenberg (38 minutes, 19 mb mp3)

If there is a problem with Barack Obama’s thinking, his “intellectual biographer” James Kloppenberg is saying on the morning after Obama’s mid-term “humbling,” it’s not what he thinks, deep in the Democratic mainstream. Neither is Obama over-thinking his confoundingly broad assignment. Rather it may be the way he thinks, never so meticulously delineated as in Prof. Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope and the American Political Tradition.

The teachers that critically shaped Barack Obama’s habits of mind — especially in the cauldron of social theory 20 years ago when Obama was editing the Harvard Law Review — come typically out of philosophical Pragmatism, the tradition of the American master mind, Williams James (1842 – 1910). Of James it’s been said that his first impulse on spotting an unlabeled fluid in a chem-lab beaker was to taste it — and see what happened! Pragmatism at this level is not deal-making opportunism. It is James’ spirit of experimentalism and his insistence on judging ideas, good and bad, by their results — by fruits, not roots. It is the spirit that William James’ friend in the Metaphysical Club, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. brought to the immortal line: “The life of the law has not been logic. It has been experience.”

The leading figures in James Kloppenberg’s catalog of Obama’s mentors all share in that heritage of Pragmatism: notably his devoted law professor Laurence Tribe who preaches the Constitution not as fixed revelation but as an organic document — “a conversation,” as Barack Obama used to say in law school. The real source of that view, Kloppenberg observes, was James Madison who came out of the Constitutional Convention saying, in effect: nobody got the Constitution he wanted; what happened was that we all learned to think differently as a result of the process of having to confront each others’ ideas. “I think,” Kloppenberg says, “that is how Barack Obama sees the democratic process.” John Rawls was another huge influence in the near background of Obama’s Harvard education — as Rawls’ masterpiece, A Theory of Justice, evolved into an understanding that a pluralist democracy is built not on unchanging principles but on “an overlapping consensus” around conflicting doctrines. In a different dimension but not far removed, Obama’s Chicago pastor, now eclipsed, Rev. Jeremiah Wright showed Obama a non-dogmatic Christianity: a transcendent God and a zeal for this-worldly activism, but not a direct answer to every political question.

Dominant threads in the skein of Obama’s thinking, in the Kloppenberg reading, are experimentalism, the rejection of dogma and ideology, Christian humility ahead of Christian militancy, skepticism and the embrace of philosophical uncertainty. It seems fair to ask if Jim Kloppenberg is describing the ideal attributes of a judicial mind but not of a political captain in howling storm. Has Barack Obama become Robert Frost’s caricature liberal, “too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel”? Jim Kloppenberg would turn it into questions about us citizens: can American politics deal with more than a short litany of selected slogans out of our past? Are we capable of embracing a modern man with a modern mind?

Humility is not a virtue we associate that much with the Christians who call themselves Christian most loudly in 21st century America. So I think we have difficulty understanding him because he doesn’t have the same confidence that he’s got the answer that many Americans expect their politicians to voice, perhaps even to believe. And it seems to me a mark of his maturity — his self-consciousness, his sophistication as a thinker — to know that these are issues about which reasonable people may disagree. Now, that may not serve him very well in the era of Fox News, when what the people who attract attention like to do is simply shout louder than the other person and declaim, with ever more self-rightousness, that they are the only ones who have the answers…

When people treat Obama’s discourses on the importance of equality as somehow un-American or socialist, they’re betraying what I see as a really frightening ignorance of what was striking to contemporaries in the late 18th century about American politics. When European observers came to the United States, what struck them more than anything else was that outside the slave South, there was very little difference between the most prosperous and the least prosperous Americans. Compared to European nations, this was the nation of economic equality. When Thomas Jefferson goes back to Virginia after writing the Declaration of Independence, the first thing he does is to file legislation in the Virginia House of Burgesses ending primogeniture and entail, which were the tools by which European aristocrats kept intact their fortunes, so that they passed down to the first born son. Jefferson, Adams and Madison understood that, unless there were rough economic equality in the United States, a democratic form of government would not survive…

Harvard History Chairman James Kloppenberg with Chris Lydon, November 3, 2010

Podcast • June 10, 2008

Dan Ariely: Confronting Irrationality

Dan Ariely’s genius in Predictably Irrational is for simple social experiments that become giant public parables. Here’s how playing with the taste of beer, for example, takes him to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse: in the student ...

Dan Ariely’s genius in Predictably Irrational is for simple social experiments that become giant public parables. Here’s how playing with the taste of beer, for example, takes him to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse: in the student pub at MIT, where Ariely taught, drinkers much preferred the “MIT Brew” to straight Budweiser — unless they were told in advance that “MIT brew” was Budweiser doctored with a few drops of balsamic vinegar. If they knew beforehand what they were drinking, a sour expectation overrode the pleasure of the experience. Moral: preconceptions rule. Application: since memory and preconditioning are so irremediably different between Israelis and Palestinians, only a strong and fair third-party can lift them to a resolution.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with

Dan Ariely (37 minutes, 14 mb mp3)

Dan Ariely’s measure of irrationality

What could he learn at Duke University from the prolonged test of wills by which “Final Four” basketball tickets were alloted to rabid student fans? When the lottery was over and the tickets awarded, Professor Ariely tried to make a market with students who’d won and others who’d lost out. But there was no price point to be found. Students without tickets wouldn’t pay more than $175 for what they’d missed. Students who had tickets wouldn’t take anything less than $2400 for what now felt invaluable. Moral: we overprice what we already have. Application: commentators and Congress folk are stuck (hopeless, but still stuck) with an Iraq war in which they signed (irrationally) for what are now “sunk costs.”

Neither does war remorse necessarily restore rationality, as Dan Ariely observes in our conversation. The Iraq war has set a new “anchor” price for foreign adventure, just as Starbucks re-set the price of your morning coffee. At $1-trillion or more, the Iraq war could make a sequel look like a bargain. Beware also what Ariely calls the “decoy effect.” We all shop by comparision, and tend to go for the less-flawed version in a pair. The “decoy effect” is the reason why Dan Ariely suggests that for success at a singles’ event: bring along a friend who looks like you but is slightly less attractive. It’s the decoy effect that’s being used to suggest that a mere air attack on Iran, without a ground invasion, would be a cinch compared to Iraq.

Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational reads to me like a catalog of the Bush follies and how a lazy great nation fell for them. In the book and in our conversation there may also be a rough map of the road back to American Pragmatism and the William James test of policies and ideas: how do they work in practice?

On Leaving Iraq: It turns out that the bigger and more effortful thing that you have done – the more attached you feel to it. Partially it’s regret. If we have invested $400 billion dollars and we will just leave it as it is and we haven’t achieved anything, we will feel like it’s a real waste. So what do we do? We keep on investing more and more in the hope that it will achieve something in the future. We can speculate evolutionarily how much [the attachment process] makes sense. You do want a mechanism that gets us attached to our kids, family, community and ideology, but it turns out it’s a very strong force and even when we adapt a wrong path, we have a very hard time overcoming this. This is the place where you can actually think of what the role of democracy is, reflecting people’s opinions versus people’s best interests. If we have people that are extremely attached to the war in Iraq, and the cord was severed, in two months they would not be attached any more. I don’t think people are able to predict how quickly they would get over this feeling of complete waste of this war. Right now, people think that if we stop [the war], it would have all had been for nothing. And how long would it take them to get used to the fact that it will have all been for nothing? I think it’s much shorter than they would have guessed. It’s a real dilemma about who you’re serving for a politician. The people of the moment who think that they will feel that it’s gone to waste or the people in two months who would be relieved that the war is over.

On Obamania: I’ll tell you another thing that worries me about Obama. We wrote a paper about a year ago on online dating. What we basically found was that when people describe themselves in less precise terms, they are more popular. The reason is that when you are vague, everyone can read into them what they want. You say you like music. It turns out that everyone thinks you like the same music that they like. Vagueness translates into liking. It turns out that the same thing happens with pictures, by the way. You put up pictures that are slightly more fuzzy and people think that you are more attractive. The second thing that we discovered is that people get crushed when they meet for coffee… I think Obama has been relatively vague compared to Hillary. We’ve known her for a very long time and she’s been more clear. People can read into Obama what they want, which is one of his appeals. At the same time, I think that we’ll have coffee with Obama at some point. The only question is when will we have coffee with Obama? The truth is that no human being can stand up to the expectations that the public has for Obama. At some point we will get disappointed. The question is how much and when.

Dan Ariely of Predictably Irrational, in conversation with Chris Lydon, June 9, 2008