Free Speech, Antisemitism, and Elon Musk | Robert Wright & Paul Bloom

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0:38 The biggest surprise of Paul’s intellectual life
8:13 What the three college presidents should have said about free speech
20:39 Ramaswamy’s hot mic moment: mistake or power move?
22:45 Elon’s scorched-earth moment: power move or mental break?
30:49 Paul gets fact-checked-and likes it
36:02 In aligning AI, should we aim higher than human values?
40:29 Bob DESTROYS Paul’s AI article
Robert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv, The Evolution of God, Nonzero, Why Buddhism Is True) and Paul Bloom (smallpotatoes...., University of Toronto, The Sweet Spot, Against Empathy). Recorded December 11, 2023.
Twitter: / nonzeropods

[@scarletsletter4466]

As a corp defense attorney, I can confirm that the deans’ testimony was designed to avoid admissions of wrongdoing and opening the door to potential liability. For example, if they’d admitted that university policy prohibited the rallies shouting “make Palestine free, river to sea” then that means the deans failed to properly follow their policies. They’d risk losing all sorts of funding, from government grants to private funding via contracts that always include ethical criteria & the requirement to follow university policies. Strictly speaking, they’d even be in technical breach of all their services & licensing contracts that require the university to comply with its own SOPs & codes of ethics/ conduct, as well as upholding equal opportunity standards. However, avoiding direct admission of wrongdoing by the deans really put the universities in a worse position. It drew attention to the absurd double-standard & inequitable enforcement of the speech policies. These are the same universities that have been telling us “words are v101ence” & literally banned harmless speakers like Ben Shapiro (who I attended law school with, FWIW, & can confirm he’s a true believer). There’s not much the universities can do to limit their liability at this point. The universities are facing major backlash and a legal mess that’ll go on for months. They’re being sued & accused of contract breach by all sorts of vendors & partners, from the big donors you’ve heard of, to simple service providers, to at least one corporate license partner under Bayh- Dole that I know of personally. If the universities apologize, swear to uphold their policies, & so forth, they’ll likely smooth over most of the corporate squabbles. But the lawsuits that’ll be the hardest to defend are going to be from Jewish employees who will allege (& rightly so) that they suffered discrimination & hostile work environment. These will be settled for somewhere in the range of 1-3 years’ salary.

[@MostlyPolitical]

Okay now say it in the original context like Queen Rania of Jordan said on October 8 "from the river to the sea and to find every jew hiding behind a rock tree or in a cave and Mohammed get the Jew hiding behind me" that was from the Queen of Jordan on October 8 which is the whole original from the river to the sea quote from 1967 when Palestine offered to eliminate Israel and the Arab league said it will never become a country

[@therainman7777]

@@MostlyPoliticalHow is that a response to what OP said?

[@meh583]

another call for mickey. where is my mickey? i miss mickey!

[@mikael2751]

His eccentrics are sorely missed

[@olewetdog6254]

Need to have Pinker on to discuss how to get rid of these stupid speech codes. THAT's the problem.

[@raymonddeflaviis2306]

You are barking up the wrong tree. The last time Wright was objective was back in 1994. Now, he’s tied to the University and its WOKE principles. He’s become the quintessential Ivory Tower- out of touch- egg head. What’s worse is that his guests are boring. No one’s ever heard of these people. He had Greg Gutfeld on once- 😂 That’s Robert Wright’s idea of a right winger 😂 He could have had Tucker on - just on the weight of his having written one of the most impressive books of the last quarter - of the 20th century- The Moral Animal.

[@occisoft8082]

antisematism seems to be the most important issue in the entire world. its so tiring

[@arimoff]

It always starts with the jews. You all said the same about hitler, you thought you can throw the jews to the wolfs and survive but in the end the entire world plunged in to ww2. The same will be this time. You wont get rid of us, so suck it up loser

[@johnnywatkins]

I’ve sways liked bobs podcast but I gotta say I find the chemistry he and Paul have very entertaining

[@Bat0541]

The most interesting point being made about the university presidents will always be the shifting standard, when it comes to the free Palestine stuff, its highly contextual, but it's obvious to anyone being honest, that the same sorts of nuance do not exist if this was to do with any number of other groups or ideologies. They gave the right answer, could have been more clarifying in the statements, but I get the point of staying stringent to "lawyer" wording of it all, but it's really just a shame that this would not be the same answer all the time though.

[@c7rfnmn]

He still doesn't get the Mark Sanford Appalachian Trail reference right. He went to ARGENTINA, not Costa Rica.

[@chimpera1]

Elon musk is right

[@snoopyboobs]

As often as the proverbial broken clock.

[@endoalley680]

Another Robert Wright Paul Bloom interview. Pleasant surprise. . Score! !

[@dundarious]

The heads of universities are glorified sleepaway camp coordinators, working on the side for the main business: hedge fund. Many of the donors/investors that fund their work had constrained them to equate "from the river to the sea", etc., with genocide. Most of congress is constrained in the exact same way. Congress is structurally incapable of challenging that implicit constraint, so there was no chance for a sensible discussion/debate/investigation, and the uni heads would be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire if they followed your plan of action, Robert, even though I agree with it in principle. And Paul's suggestion is fine, but they just bravely march into the fire with dignity, but probably with the same result.

[@chrisyoung2179]

You guys described the tweet completely wrong

[@patroit2931]

Hypocrisy at it's finest.

[@j3kfd9j]

I had come to the same conclusion as Paul yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised to see it advocated. Liberalism is the answer to this nonsense.

[@wegder]

Islamic terrorists should have the right to operate in any country without any interference.

[@donaldrobertson1808]

My mind has a much stronger & quicker logic engine than average

[@HighTech636]

Best chemistry

[@donaldrobertson1808]

Natural language grammar rules are patterns that emerge after the fact

[@scarletsletter4466]

Just so everyone understands, the simplest path to liability for these universities is employment law. Workers’ right to a safe workplace trumps the students’ right to “free speech.” Universities are huge employers and legally required to comply with state, federal & local labor laws & regulations, including those prohibiting discrimination based on ethnicity, religion, & country-of-origin. If you go to your office every day for the next month & yell “make Palestine free, river to sea!” and your employer fails to enforce their HR policies & make you stop the offensive speech, they’ll be sued by Jewish & Israeli employees. Employment discrimination & harassment can take many forms, eg, quid pro quo, differential treatment, offensive conduct that creates a hostile workplace &/or material changes in employment terms. These criteria would be met if an employer allows a month of rallies where ✡️ employees hear thousands of folks chanting to eradicate their nation-of-origin and ✡️ on campus get threatened. Some of these universities even released statements & sent memos advising ways for these affected groups to stay safe on campus. So any related employment lawsuit will survive the employer’s motion to dismiss. That means the universities would have to spend so much money on legal defense that they’re better off settling. These employees have a wide range of avenues available. If they only want money, they can send a demand letter via an employment counsel & will probably get at least a year’s salary, depending on how long they worked in the role, how severely they suffered, etc. If they want the matter to be public, they can sell their story to the press. The NY Post will gladly publish it. If they care about the principle & helping all ✡️ on campus, they can go to the EEOC for an investigation and even seek a certification for a class action lawsuit. If you’re an affected employee of a university, you are likely to be contacted by HR, offered counseling & even a special bonus compensation that’ll be accompanied by a release and confidentiality terms. I’d advise that you DO NOT SIGN any such release, or any new policy they give you related to this matter. I wouldn’t want to keep working after the administration did this to me, so my advice would be to get another job, then before you quit, send a demand letter requesting 2-3 years’ salary as compensation for what you’ve suffered. They’ll settle for 1 years’ salary, & you’ll get a nice payout on your way to your new job.

[@raymonddeflaviis2306]

I’m not interested in Robert Wright’s politics. He’s disappointed what was once his base for a long while now! He wrote The Moral Animal, which I believed at the time was a counterweight to what was -ideologically driven Anthropology. Now - and for the past 3 decades- Wright has allied himself with the Left. Wouldn’t it be grand if Robert Wright had a retrospective on the ideas he disseminated so well in 1994? As for the topic being discussed- there was a time when academics and college administrators made a healthy balance- today they vie with who can be more WOKE!

[@strongforce79]

what I took out of his planet Earth comment was, the world will regret X being gone despite all of it's faults, it is one of the few places despite all the trash on the site, that disenfranchised people and communities can post their grievances openly, unlike say a Facebook where they will be immediately censored.

[@HonestSonics]

The 'trash' aspect has increased markedly since the takeover

[@therainman7777]

@@HonestSonicsNot really. It was always a cesspool; the only thing that’s changed is that now there’s trash from both the right and the left, because the lunacy coming from the right is no longer censored.

[@daheikkinen]

Today I learned that Biden is old.

[@Nic______]

Haircuts abound

[@Zidana123]

The university presidents acted correctly If anyone ever demands you answer with 'yes or no only' that is a declaration of their hostile intent The moment it happens, whatever topic at hand becomes of secondary importance; the primarily importance must be to defend yourself and your interests against the hostile party

[@arimoff]

But if you change from jew to muslim or from jew to trans or conservative... your hypocrisy is showing.

[@Zidana123]

@@arimoff oh no, not the generic accusation of hypocrisy! Sure, I'll happily expand on what I said using the categories you provided. If a Jew, Muslim, Trans, or Conservative gets hit with a demand for 'yes or no,' their response should also to be to recognize the hostile intent of the interlocutor and disengage in the same way as the university presidents did

[@therainman7777]

No it’s not. That’s a crazy thing to say. Nine times out of ten, when someone says “yes or no” when asking a question they are only doing so because the person they’re questioning has been refusing to answer the questions-which is EXACTLY what happened here. To flatly state that anyone asking for a yes or a no to a question-even a question which is, in fact, a yes or no question-is being hostile is nuts. You’re simply running cover for people who are being deliberately evasive and having a discussion in bad faith. Whether you intend to be doing that or not, it’s what you’re doing.

[@arimoff]

@Zidana123 Generic hypocrisy? Typical Leftist hypocrisy is your answer. You wrote a paragraph of nothing. No one is falling what that bs anymore. It's a fact that conservatives, Jews eho are not Leftists are not allowed to speak on campuses. The same goes for trans and gender confused ideologs. As if there isn't enough evidence for the same pro palestine crowds and universities shutting down opposing opinions to a point of a physical threat. When was the last time a pro Jewish opinion was allowed in Harvard? But islamonazi professors can preach hate. Why is islam allowed in harvard but jews are instructed to hide the menorah? I can go on and on with examples... the point is, these Leftists are full of sh.t with their hypocrisy so save the brainwashing for someone else. The unholy alliance of Leftists and islamonazis, what unites them since their values are in conflict? Their violent ideologies and their jew hate unites them. Islam and Leftism are violent ideologies.

[@Zidana123]

@@therainman7777 "because the person they’re questioning has been refusing to answer the questions-which is EXACTLY what happened here" No, that's not what happened here What happened here was, the congresswoman asked them a question, and they didn't give her the answer she wanted, so she attempted to force them into the answer she wanted via the "yes or no only" demand. And in response they disengaged "You’re simply running cover for people who are being deliberately evasive and having a discussion in bad faith" Oh, please. Let's not pretend this incident took place in like some neutral forum dedicated to the pursuit of Truth or something. This was a _congressional hearing._ These things always involve people using the podium as their weapon to signal politically and hammer their opponents.

[@snoopyboobs]

Damn Paul Bloom full free speech absolutest, who knew.