Russ Roberts: Now, this is an absolutely lovely book. You are a self-professed liberal; and I’ve read and interviewed a number of people in this program about the challenge of conversation, the challenge of partisanship, the level of anger in our discourse. And, interestingly, I think all those books that I’ve read and interviewed people about are written by liberals, but yours is the most–maybe the only one–that is fair to conservatives.
There are books that pay lip service to fairness, but as a reader, I felt that you were empathetic to both sides of every issue you gave. And, often you were very careful to give examples on both sides of people who were either misunderstanding or so on. I’m sure you worked at that, and I just want to congratulate you because in many cases I find that challenging for people to do. Regardless of what part of the spectrum they’re on–of the political spectrum or the ideological spectrum–they often attribute views to their opponents that are either, I think, straw people, unfair, or the point of their book is to save the world by converting other people. And, I didn’t get that impression from you.
So, talk about why that’s your perspective and whether that was hard for you, as a self-professed person on the Left side of the political spectrum.
Monica Guzman: Yeah. This was extremely important to me. It was difficult only because I don’t see a lot of models for it, but I am convinced that we need it.
So, I thought, as I was writing the book, a lot about my parents. We’re a politically divided family. I am liberal, like you said: I voted for Biden and Clinton. My parents voted for Trump twice. And we don’t hold back when we talk to each other. And, there have been so many times where I have taken the latest outrage and brought it to my parents because, ‘Arrrgh!’ Because this has to be the thing. Right? And, then they give me some angle or some question that is a lot less malevolent than where I thought this was coming from on that side. And, it turns the volume down in my head; and I go, ‘Oh yeah, I was missing that. I was missing something. All right.’
And so, having had that experience so many times made me think: If I allow some of those impressions, the anger to go unnuanced, in my book–if I give one example and then allow the reader to say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s just obviously because the other side is crazy, evil, or stupid,’ then I’m doing a disservice because I just don’t think that’s true. I think that we fall into that trap frequently in our disagreements and also just when we look at the other side.
Russ Roberts: Well, so many people do think it’s true. I try, I mean we don’t always succeed, but I do try to be empathetic to people who don’t agree with me and respectful of them. When did that happen for you? I don’t think we’re hardwired that way. I think we’re hardwired the other way. We spend a lot of time on this program talking about tribalism and political tribes or one form of tribalism. What clicked for you that caused you to be that, I would say, respectful?
Monica Guzman: I think a fair bit of it came from journalism. All the times that I’ve approached some source–you know, not even a particularly controversial story–I’ve just had a narrative in my head of who they are and what they’re going to give me; and I prewrite the story in my head and I know what it’s going to be about. And then, we start talking and I’m fascinated by something I didn’t expect, or there’s a motivation that I didn’t see coming. And then, here we go: we’re just off on another tangent, and everything’s gotten so much more rich because of it.
And, that’s happened so many times that I guess I’ve just–it’s become sort of silly in my head to judge people without engaging them, to not approach individuals and see what they’re really about, to not have those open-ended questions. I think largely it’s been about that.
In the book, I talk about the difference between puzzles and mysteries. The author Ian Leslie, who wrote a book about curiosity gets into this. And, puzzles are problems that you solve. You already know the shape of the thing you’re making. You just have a couple of pieces you need to go find and then put in the right place, plug them in. But, mysteries, you don’t know the shape. Every piece you pick up changes the shape, draws up a bunch of new questions. You never really know where you’re going. And, that’s people.
I think that in polarized times we treat each other like puzzles. We read a thought-piece that’s written really smartly and we think we now understand this whole group of people. We now have the shortcut for why they do what they do and we can judge them accordingly, and that’s going to be okay.
But, people are mysteries, and there’s just so much we’re missing when we do this to each other–including a clear view of the world itself. I think that we are so divided, we’re blinded; and we’re not even seeing the world for what it is, but for the projections swirling in our heads.
Russ Roberts: Ian Leslie was a guest on EconTalk talking about that book. It’s a lovely book, and I, of course, love–as listeners would not be surprised–I love the puzzles-versus-mysteries dichotomy. I think it’s a really important way to look at most of life. Most of life is a mystery. Puzzles are pleasant because we can solve them. So, we tend to push a lot of things, I think, into the puzzle box when they belong in the mystery box.
Russ Roberts: But, I want to ask you about something that you didn’t write about. You write a lot about conversation per se, and we’ll come back and talk about that because I think that’s very valuable. But, I want to ask you about something that isn’t so obvious, perhaps. Your book is about political disagreements mostly and particularly partisan disagreements, ideological disagreements. But, some of the lessons here apply equally strongly to something like marriage or friendship.
And, one of the things that it took me a long time to understand is that often in our marriages or our long-term friendships, we have a narrative in our head about the other person and we fill in their lines effortlessly for them. We know what they’re going to say. In fact, that’s often a measure of, quote, “a good marriage”: People will say, ‘Oh, we can finish each other’s sentences.’
But, I think sometimes we fall down on the job as partners, spouses, friends, because we leap to those conclusions, assume–as you point out in the book, as we do sometimes about our political opponents–what they’re about. And, it’s surprisingly difficult to step outside those scripts that we have for each other. And, I just think that’s such an important part of being a human being that we don’t talk about.
Monica Guzman: Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. And, I like that you kind of use the language of scripts because we do that online to each other all the time, too. More and more people take what they see on social media–somebody makes what could be sort of an innocent remark. If you’re on the Left, you see somebody lament the looting that happened during protests in the summer of 2020; but you’ve seen this script before.
Russ Roberts: You mean someone on the Right?
Monica Guzman: Well, but it could be someone on the Left judging someone on the Left. But it could be anybody. But, yeah, it’s you see someone on the Right, perhaps, yes, lament the looting of businesses; and you think, ‘I’ve seen this movie before. What they really want to say, but can’t–they’re just trolling us or teasing us–is that they’re racist.’
Stuff like that starts to happen when we do this to each other. When we just predict and we believe we already have the whole story. And so, when we’re engaging each other less and judging each other more, that’s the swirl. We’re going to keep swirling away from each other and keep getting more and more misinformed about each other.
I find it interesting: we care a lot about facts and truth, but that doesn’t seem to apply to the truth about people’s perspectives. That’s where it seems we don’t obsess about truth. But, I just think that’s really killing us because when people feel understood, that’s when you can build trust. And without sufficient trust, we can’t collectively search for truth. Instead, we’ll have different groups of people finding their own truth and then fighting each other about it, developing their own different languages. And, again, we sort of spin apart in this really unsustainable way.
So, I feel almost–sometimes I feel like a traitor to journalism because journalism is about truth. And, I have so many conversations with people who are saying things I’m pretty darn sure are untrue, but I don’t make the conversation about that. I don’t sit there and try to convince them of something that they’re not going to be convinced by in this conversation.
Instead, I go behind the conversation about truth to the conversation about what’s meaningful. Who are they? What led them to these beliefs? What are the concerns and hopes and fears that animate, right? And then, what can I present about how I see those things and how can our perspectives sort of intermingle? And build trust, and build the kind of connection where maybe someday something could cross that makes them see something in a different light, or makes me see something in a different way.
It’s getting harder and harder to calibrate with each other in that way when we don’t seem to prioritize making sure we get each other right.
Russ Roberts: I think one of the other perspectives on this that makes it harder–one of the other facts about this–is social media, where, if I ever admit I was wrong or ever admit that I had an imperfect view of the other side, or I’ve come to believe something different, I get savaged.
I recently tweeted something about Elon Musk and Twitter that I thought was pretty innocent. It’s pretty stupid of me because–the innocent part of it, whether it was stupid to tweet, I don’t know–but I tweeted something about Elon Musk and it didn’t cross my mind that there’s an enormous–this is the naïve, stupid part–it didn’t cross my mind that there are probably millions of people on Twitter, certainly hundreds of thousands, who don’t like Elon Musk. Period. And, were going to use my tweet to express that feeling.
And, I started getting these bizarre misinterpretations of what I’d written with leaps of logic from what they claimed I’d said. And, I thought–and I’d write politely back, ‘Not my point. Not what I said.’ Sometimes I’d write, ‘I may have miswritten it, I may have communicated poorly, actually what I meant–‘ And, then I realized: They’re not interested in what I really meant. They just want to jump on Elon Musk.
And, what was fascinating for me is that emotionally, the disdain I got for my opinion, the one that they interpreted me as saying–I was surprised how much it bothered me that they had misinterpreted. Which is ironic. I’m on the web; I’m on Twitter. I’ve got–all the time. Don’t I know this?
And, I realized I don’t really go into some of those darker corners. And usually what I’ve done in that situation, I just block people who are rude or misinterpret me. And, I thought, I don’t really need to. I should just try to let this roll off me. And, it was harder than I thought, but I got to the point where it’s, like, ‘Oh yeah. They’re not arguing with me.’ They’re on a different platform over there, a different grandstand, a different soapbox than the one I was on.
I actually like to think I’m educating people. I’m getting people to imagine an idea. They weren’t so interested in that, I don’t think, and I just–let them be in their own world. It’s okay. But, it’s amazing how that social media response can motivate your own viewpoints and what you’re willing to say and how you’re willing to say it.
Monica Guzman: Absolutely. I think of a couple things here. The other day I stumbled on a, I think it’s from the Talmud, an old quote: Things are not–we don’t see things as they are, but as we are. And, Jonathan Haidt has done some wonderful writing and research on social media as sort of a space where we throw darts at each other.
And in your example, I thought of a game of dodgeball: something comes and if it’s a weapon, I’m going to pick it up. Even if you didn’t intend it as a weapon or something I can use to boost up my side or what have you, that’s how I’m going to use. I don’t care how you meant it. That’s how I’m going to use it. And, then I’m going to throw it at somebody. And then a lot of us are going to throw it at somebody; and you’re going to feel like, ‘What was that?’ Right? But, I think it’s so true these days that we are so in our own thoughts.
This is funny: I think that this thought just crossed my mind. I’m a big science fiction fan, and I grew up reading all the amazing science fiction that was mostly about space travel–that by now that’s what we would have worked on, is getting out, getting out of the planet, exploring. But, what we did instead was we took all that technological energy and used it for personal communication. And so, we’ve created a whole universe in our minds that connect our minds, that connect every thought, that share every thought, and zip it around the world at lightning speed, that create movements and topple governments, but also drive us insane and make our kids more anxious than ever.
And, this is the universe we’ve created, is a universe of our own thoughts.
And so, how each of us, the posture each of us takes toward that, that swirling–I mean, it’s so funny to think that we are uninformed, but we have never had more information. We’ve never had more information zipping around us. So, what’s going on?
Russ Roberts: Yeah. A number of people in the last year, I’ve noticed, have written with sadness about the naivete we had when the Internet was started. And, I had it for sure, which was, ‘All this information–oh, we’re going to be wiser.’ Right? ‘How could it not be the case?’ And, of course, there are a lot of reasons, it turns out. I’ve written an essay on it; I’ll link to it. But, that irony is so painful. Right? The idea that you and I can communicate; we’ve never met, we may never meet. Here we are talk having a real conversation. I’m in Israel, you’re in Seattle. That’s a magnificent triumph of–in a way, it’s so much better than going to Mars. Mars is a pretty tough environment, and this is amazing. And yet, so much of this kind of miraculous interaction is not turning out to be as helpful as we had hoped.
Monica Guzman: Yeah, exactly. And so, much of it is psychology. I think, thanks to a rising awareness of this, right? Because technology zips ahead real fast, and it takes us a while to understand what’s going on. We now have more information swirling around about our psychology. We are tribalistic. We do sort into groups that are like-minded; and there are consequences: when we share our instincts, we share our blind spots. And, a lot of the story of polarization is sort of that–you know, just spread out.
There’s valid disagreements, and there’s all kinds of problems to solve. But, unfortunately, where we find ourselves now is so afraid and so kind of taken by projections and hyperbole that a lot of our policy is reactionary. A lot of things are rash. They’re not that thoughtful.
And, one of the tragedies to me is when I think of the extraordinary creative and human capital we have at our disposal–you know, think of how much more educated we are. Public health, despite the pandemic, is still much better than it used to be. All these ways that: we’re here, we’re showing up. But then the filter of the way we talk to each other seems to take, like, the potential output of 100% and bring it down to 5%. Like, the good stuff coming out of this is just not that great.
When you think about everything we have here, we ought to be able to collaborate. We ought to be able to understand each other and get so much more advanced–like, level-up our thinking about these tough problems, understand why they’re tough. They put good values into tension with each other. It’s not good versus evil. Stop! This is what’s dumbing everything down. But, we allow these things to swirl and swirl and swirl because we get something out of it. We get pride, we get prestige, we get status. And it’s killing us.
Russ Roberts: I’ve often lamented on here that, what an extraordinary miracle, achievement, of human creativity it was to develop a vaccine in a weekend against COVID. And, yet that scientific achievement has become a political football. Which is really so unimaginable. Of all the things to argue about and to misunderstand, and as you point out, not to make progress. It should be easy. We have access to incredible data. We have ways of bringing people together to share experiences for the purpose of understanding what happened more effectively. And so, little of what we’ve done is devoted to that which we desperately need for, quote, “the next time.” And instead, it’s, ‘Oh, let’s punt this football around. Let me race down to your end of the field if I can, and you’ll try to race down to the other end.’ And it’s such a tragedy.
Monica Guzman: Let’s use it as weapons. Yeah. It’s the same thing as that dodgeball game, again: How can we weaponize this? And, yeah, it is–it is such a tragedy. And, to me, one of the things that shows is that we still have quotes, like, ‘Well, it’s not rocket science.’ Right? We have a sense in our head of what is most difficult. Well, most difficult is probably straight physics, Stephen Hawking stuff, right?
I don’t know. I think we’re in a world where good, responsible human communication is the most difficult and critical skill there is, because those doctors communicating about COVID knew their medicine. Those politicians, there were lots of good politicians that wanted to serve society in this moment, right? But the communication–I’ve talked with lots of conservatives, lots of liberals–it was the communication that needed work.
Russ Roberts: I recently interviewed Agnes Callard, and it’s not the first guest we’ve had a discussion–contentious discussion–about whether human beings are making progress. And, it’s clear to me that we’re making a lot of progress on the technological side, the scientific side. The communication side is not so clear. And as you say, those are really the hard problems. Being a better human being than you were a year ago, that’s immensely more difficult than, say, improving the mileage of a gas-powered car.
Monica Guzman: Exactly. Exactly. Maybe we should put a little more attention on helping each other get better at that.
The funny thing is: there’s this little we can do with the laws of nature to make rocket science itself harder, but we can continually make our own communication harder: because we mix together more. Because now we can talk all the way around the world. We keep making it harder for ourselves. So, that means we have to keep leveling-up.
Russ Roberts: And, of course, that’s what your book is about. Let’s come back to the–actually, I just want to add one more thing. I want to add just a little tiny bit of optimism here. We’re a little bit pessimistic right now.
I did a Twitter poll this week, for fun, on whether Steve Jobs would be happy or unhappy with how the iPhone has transformed our culture? I did it over a day and a bit. A thousand people voted. It was 53:47 or so, that Jobs would’ve been happy. And, I call that a very depressing–that’s a low number, 53%. And, of course, we have no idea what Steve Jobs would really think. It’s more of I think what people think he should feel, given the state of the world.
And, one listener, one Twitter follower of mine, wrote–I apologize, I don’t remember who it was–said, ‘It’ll turn out okay. It may be horrible now, or there may be things you don’t like now.’ And, I have to admit that for myself, if you had– I’m not, I’m happy there were smartphones in the world. I think it’s a glorious thing. But I also see a lot of downside to it. But, his point, which I think is the ideal, most optimistic it can be, is that it’s new and we will develop norms to deal with it. Those norms–he didn’t write this, I would just add this–maybe a norm will develop as Jonathan Haidt, who you quoted, mentioned earlier, Jonathan Haidt said, ‘There should be no smartphones in,’ I think he said, ‘middle school. Maybe that norm will emerge.
Maybe there’ll be a norm that, at dinner, or at meals, we will all agree to put our smartphones away. These are personal things that we’ve sometimes done in our household or in other settings. Keeping the Jewish Sabbath: we put the phone away for 25 hours. Somehow it’s easy to do that. But, the rest of the time: Full use every minute, way too much screen time! And so, that’s my only bit of optimism. You want to react to that?
Monica Guzman: Yeah. The optimism that norms will come. I think you’re absolutely right. I think you’re absolutely right about that. It’s taken me a very long time with these technologies in every way that I’ve swirled in my personal life, in and out of them, to finally come to a stage where I feel like I’m in control. It took me a long time.
Just this spring, I took social media and email off of my phone and thought it wouldn’t last, and I wouldn’t be able to do it. I did it. I did it. I did it, Russ. And, you know what? My life is infinitely better. And, here we are.
And, I think it just–my husband likes talking about the power of simplicity on the other side of complexity. Meaning, like: you’ve slogged, you’ve tried, you’ve struggled, and then you come to a simple solution that wasn’t possible before because you still had too many loose threads that you had to kind of work out.
So, it took me about a decade to find this balance. Yeah, I think you’re right. I think that we will get there, because we’re having more of an open conversation where researchers are looking at the costs, and we’re asking ourselves what really we have always asked ourselves, which is, let’s make sure that we use technology and it does not use us.
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