Where the evidence of fake news is really hiding

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We all think that we're competent consumers of news media, but the research shows that even journalists struggle with identifying fact from fiction.

When judging whether a piece of media is true or not, most of us focus too much on the source itself. Knowledge has a context, and it's important to look at that context when trying to validate a source.

The opinions expressed in this video do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles Koch Foundation, which encourages the expression of diverse viewpoints within a culture of civil discourse and mutual respect.

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ELI PARISER

Eli Pariser has dedicated his career to figuring out how technology can elevate important topics in the world. He is the co-founder of Upworthy and bestselling author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ELI PARISER: There was some research recently into asking people to try to figure out which of two websites was more credible. And they asked a group of students and a group of journalists and a group of professional fact checkers. And interestingly, the students and journalists both had a kind of mixed record, and the professional fact checkers did very well. And the difference in their approaches was significant because essentially the students and a lot of the journalists were looking at these websites, scrolling through them, looking at how they appeared, reading the content on them, whereas the fact checkers were looking around the websites. So they were looking at where are these sites referred to on the rest of the web or do other experts in the field have to say about them. Kind of all of the references in, rather than the references on, the web page. knowledge exists in a context, and generally speaking, every once in a while you'll find kind of like the brilliant idea or the brilliant finding that no one on the rest of the internet has discovered. But mostly, smart people on the internet have discovered most smart things on the internet.

And so it's that process of triangulation, where you're looking for other experts who will validate that this source or this idea is credible, is really, like, the critical component of figuring out what to believe. And people think, we all think -- and this is true with human beings and it's true with news or online sources -- we all think we're very good judges of who's lying and who's telling the truth. But we're very susceptible to, you know, is it a beautiful serif font that it's presented in or is it something that looks lower grade; is the person charismatic or are they stuttering. These cues turn out not to have very much to do with whats credible or not. But we're very susceptible to them, and so that's why sort of looking at who else believes that this is credible is a really important part of the process.

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Become an intellectual explorer: Master the art of conversation

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What is a great conversation? They are the ones that leave us feeling smarter or more curious, with a sense that we have discovered something, understood something about another person, or have been challenged.

There are 3 design principles that lead to great conversations: humility, critical thinking, and sympathetic listening.

Critical thinking is the celebrated cornerstone of liberalism, but next time you're in a challenging and rewarding conversation, try to engage sympathetic listening too. Understanding why another intelligent person holds ideas that are at odds with your own is often more enlightening than merely hunting for logic errors.

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EMILY CHAMLEE-WRIGHT

Dr. Emily Chamlee-Wright is the president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies, which supports and partners with scholars working within the classical liberal tradition. She was previously Provost and Dean at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Prior to joining Washington College, she was Elbert Neese Professor of Economics and Associate Dean at Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin.

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TRANSCRIPT:

EMILY CHAMLEE-WRIGHT: So think about the last conversation you had where you thought, golly, that was such a great conversation. What did it feel like? Why did it seem like a really great conversation? And the chances are good that it was a kind of conversation that left you feeling smarter. It was the kind of conversation where you felt like you discovered something new, that it left you deeply curious about something else. It might have been a conversation that challenged you in all the right ways. That's a truly great conversation. It's one where we genuinely learn something or we come to a deeper understanding about why someone else holds a particular point of view. Right? That deeper understanding and that learning is what we're after with great conversations.

And so one of the things I'm interested in is what are the design principles of a great conversation. What are the essential elements that make a conversation truly a great conversation? And humility would be one basic design principle that we should all start from. Now with humility, I don't just mean deference to expertise, right, that you are so much smarter at that thing so I'm going to have humility with respect to you on that thing because you know more about it than I do. Now maybe that's true, right? But that's not the kind of humility I'm talking about, because that's a sort of humility that could come to an end, right? I could learn as much about that particular topic, and therefore with that kind of thinking I would say I can set aside my humility.

The kind of humility I'm talking about is the kind that you can't set aside. Because the world is an incredibly complicated place. None of us can ever have the full lock on truth. We can only see the world from a particular vantage point. And that means that our knowledge is going to have special insight because of our vantage point, but it's also going to be limited because of our vantage point. And so that limited knowledge that we can have about the world means that we must enter into any conversation with a deep sense of humility, because I need you to help me fill in my knowledge gaps. Right? And you need me. And that's the cool thing about conversation, is that it is mutual in the sense that both of us look at the same world from different vantage points, and that means that we each have something to offer the other. And that's true whether one person is the expert or not. Right? We have the opportunity to gain in our knowledge, to learn from anyone. With this way of thinking about humility, anyone can be your teacher, whether it's your professor, or whether it's an elementary school student who's lived on the planet in different circumstances than you lived on the planet. That elementary school student can teach you something that you can only get by talking with them. That's that deeper level of humility.

Some of the other key design elements of a great conversation would be, for example, critical thinking and sympathetic listening. There's a lot that gets said about critical thinking; it's that ability and eagerness to identify gaps in logic or shortfalls in evidence-based argumentation. It is the cornerstone of what it means to have a liberal education...

To read the full transcript, go to https://bigthink.com/sponsored-institute-for-humane-studies/master-conversation

Moon mission 2.0: What humanity will learn by going back to the Moon

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July 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the moon landing — Apollo 11. Today, we have a strong scientific case for returning to the moon: the original rock samples that we took from the moon revolutionized our view of how Earth and the solar system formed.

We could now glean even more insights with fresh, nonchemically-altered samples.

NASA plans to send humans to a crater in the South Pole of the moon because it's safer there, and would allow for better communications with people back on Earth.

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MICHELLE THALLER

Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit

NASA.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHELLE THALLER: This July we're going to be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing Apollo 11. I was actually not alive for the moon landing. And I have no memory of people being on the Moon. I was alive in the very early '70s, but as a two or three-year-old, was never something that I was aware of. So I never had the chance to look up in the sky at the Moon and think there are people up there today. So in the 1960s, of course, this was a part of the Cold War. It was some of our competition with the Soviet Union. We wanted to make sure that we were ahead of them in terms of building big rockets and missiles and that kind of thing. But I think what's happened now is that we have a much stronger scientific case for returning to the Moon.

And this is something that I'm really excited about as a scientist, not just as an American, and not just as a human. I'm also very much looking forward to having the first woman on the moon, the first person of color on the moon, I think that's very important because so far, everybody who's walked on the moon is somebody that doesn't look a whole lot like me. And I would like that to change in the very near future. But why do I want to go back to the Moon? I mean, we were there before, 50 years ago.

We brought back hundreds of pounds of rocks. So why would you want to go back? And one of the things is that the samples that we took from the moon the rocks, the dust, the soil, from the moon that we took completely revolutionized our view of how the Earth formed, how the solar system formed, and even things that we see as we look out into other solar systems around other stars. Now, why? Well, what changed so much? The moon rocks were entirely different than what we expected. Specifically, anything that could possibly burn at all. What we call volatiles was gone. They were very, very dry. There was almost no water, and by water, I mean water that was actually dissolved into the minerals. I mean not liquid water, not even ice, but water that's contained in the chemical structure of the rock.

But in other ways they were almost identical to the Earth. They had the same type of isotopic ratios, chemical markers about how old the rocks were. And so how could you have something that has such a similar composition to the Earth but be so different? Almost as if you had Earth rocks, but then everything that could possibly burn was taken away. And we realized that the moon must really be something special. It seems that the moon is the product of a giant collision, a collision between planets. Something at least the size of Mars and maybe even bigger, maybe the size of the Earth today, actually hit the young Earth when it was forming. This would have happened billions of years ago.

And debris was thrown off during that explosion that eventually came together under the force of gravity and formed the moon. So in the moon rocks there's records of this giant collision. There may even be records in some of the minerals of what that other planet was like, the planet that's no longer there, what actually hit us to form the current Earth and Moon system. There's also all kinds of wonderful records on the Moon as to w...

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Climate change: A slow-burn existential threat

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There are islands in the Chesapeake Bay that have already succumbed to sea level rise, one of them is Holland Island.

Even in a best case scenario, the consensus is that we'll get at least two feet of sea level rise by the year 2100.

One big question is: What will happen when flooding gets worse and worse and people decide there's no hope for them anymore to live in their respective towns.

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JON GERTNER

Jon Gertner is a journalist and historian whose stories on science, technology, and nature have appeared in a host of national magazines. Since 2003 he has worked mainly as a feature writer for the New York Times Magazine. His first book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, was a New York Times bestseller.

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We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.

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How doctors really decide who lives and who dies

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Our health care system right now prizes efficiency, rather than embedding an ethics committee throughout a patient's treatment.

The challenge of being a medical ethicist is bringing "airy" concepts into clinical practice.

Sometimes the solutions to ethical issues become established via legal precedent.

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MATT MCCARTHY

Matt McCarthy, MD, graduated from Harvard Medical School and went on to complete his internal medicine residency at Columbia University Medical Center. He is the author of two national bestsellers, "The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly" and "Odd Man Out." His newest book, "Superbugs," is on-sale now.

McCarthy is also an assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell and a staff physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MATT MCCARTHY: When I graduated from residency training, I had finished four years in medical school, three years of internal medicine residency, and three years of subspecialty training in infectious diseases. I took a job as a staff physician at a hospital in Manhattan. And it was a teaching hospital. And I suddenly found myself surrounded by every morning on rounds medical students, interns, residents, a pharmacist, a social worker, all of these people who are turning to me to make medical decisions, which I felt reasonably comfortable with.

But it was a patient who I met who challenged me with an ethical issue that made me recognize how out of my own depth I was at handling these things. And that patient was a 24-year-old woman. I'll call her Sarah. And she had end stage anorexia nervosa. And she weighed 35--she was 24 years old, and she weighed 35 kilograms. She was the size of a fifth grader. And her heart was barely pumping, and her electrolytes were a mess. And there were all of these issues that were essentially just on the verge of death. And when I went to see her with my medical team, she said to me,"I have just one request. I would like a palliative care consult. I want you to help me die."

And as I was standing before her, I said, "No, no, no. There's a lot of things we can do for you. But that's not one of them. We're going to get you through this." In fact, that's a phrase that I say to a lot of patients-- we're going to get you through this. And as I was saying these words, I felt the glare of the medical students and residents around me. And I recognized I wasn't being my best self, my best doctor self that I had dreamed of being. It just didn't feel right that I was telling this woman, "No." And I ended up reaching out to our ethics committee. And that started a long and winding process of me getting involved in medical ethics where I learned just how many ethical issues doctors were facing. And it led to a clinical research career where what I study now are the ethical issues doctors face where they don't ask for help or they don't ask for an ethicist.

Part of that is because our health care system right now prizes efficiency. And itis often inefficient to say, time out, we need to talk to a clinical ethicist and make the right decision. ButI've come to recognize how important that can be. When you join the world of medical ethics, you learn about a whole new vocabulary of terms that were never exposed to medical students like me, things like beneficence and non-maleficence and autonomy and justice. And they're very theoretical and airy concepts. And the challenge of being an ethicist is to bring those concepts into clinical practice. And so the first thing you do, if you're going to be a medical ethicist, when you're called in for a case, when I goto see an ethics consultation, is you figure out, what are the facts. And there is a saying in our hospital that good facts make for good ethics.

And often that is the big stumbling point. Doctors may be disagreeing about something or a patient and a doctor or disagreeing, and that leads to an ethics consultation. And in a third of the cases at least, we find out that there is a fundamental disagreement on the facts of the case. The other thing that's very helpful to know are legal precedents. So a hypothetical would be a 12-year-old boy needs surgery for a tumor in his liver, and he's going to require a blood transfusion during that surgery. But his parents are Jehovah's Witnesses. And they say, "No blood transfusion!" And the surgeon says, "I'm not taking this kid to the ER unless I can transfuse him bec...

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Want a shortcut to better living? Psychedelics may be it.

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Psilocybin trip may turn banal insights into "sticky" and "revealed truths" that change the way we live our lives.

For instance, LSD may be able to help smokers cut their addiction. How so? By allowing them to have a perspective shift on its effects.

Sometimes the insights made during psychotherapy, after years of counseling, can be made with an LSD trip in a single afternoon.

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MICHAEL POLLAN

Michael Pollan is the author of How to Change Your Mind and seven previous books including Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemmaand The Botany of Desire, which received the Borders Original Voices Award for the best non-fiction work of 2001, and was recognized as a best book of the year by the American Booksellers Association and Amazon.com. PBS premiered a two-hour special documentary based on The Botany of Desire in fall 2009.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHAEL POLLAN: There was work done in the '60s and early '70s to judge the role of the possibility That LSD could enhance creativity. And there was a group down in the South Bay in California. And James Fadiman is a psychologist there. And he assembled a group of creatives in various fields-- engineers, architects, musicians, all of whom Way with their work. And he gave them 100 micrograms of LSD. It's not a huge dose. He let them sprawl around the floor for a while, And he said, OK, get to your workstations. And they all got to their work tables, and they Started working on their problems.

And many of them reported a breakthrough. An architect who had some issue designing the flow of pedestrians through a mall or something figured out a novel solution. An engineer, a software engineer, designed a tool to help boys with toilet training, Tinkle Toy, where the stream of urine would drive a pinwheel. He came up with this idea on psychedelics-- not a great contribution to human civilization, but OK. He went on to design email, the mouse computer mouse and videoconferencing. So he made a huge contribution, but he doesn't credit that to LSD. But this is not a controlled trial. This is not anything we could go to the bank with. And studying creativity is very difficult. The kinds of anecdotes that I found most moving in a way were those of the addicts.

I remember talking to smoking addicts, and one in particular. Because I was a little baffled at how could a single psychedelic experience break what was a lifelong or very, very long term 30 year smoking habit in a woman who was 60. She was Irish. She was a book editor, and she wanted to quit smoking and had tried everything without success. And she had a psilocybin trip. This was at Johns Hopkins. And she said, "I sprouted wings, and I flew all through European history. And I saw the Battle of Waterloo and saw Shakespeare. And I died three times, and I saw the smoke from my body rise from the Ganges on the funeral pyres. And I thought to myself, there's so many amazing things to do and see in the world that it was really stupid to kill yourself with smoking." And she stopped.

Now, I was very struck by the fact that surely, she had had that insight before that life is too interesting to shorten it by smoking. But for some reason, in the midst of the psychedelic trip, those seemingly ordinary, even banal insights, take on an authority. They're sticky. They're sturdy. And there's suddenly something that doesn't just seem like a insider, an opinion. It seems like a revealed truth-- absolute knowledge. And this is very common on psychedelics. And it's very common in the mystical experience. William James said that-- the noetic quality is what he called it. This idea that what you Learn in that experience has a special absolute authority. It's just a factor in mystical experience.

So this is what I think allows many of the addicts to break their habit. The kind of resolution that most of us make every day and break the next day becomes something that they can actually live by. And I thought that was quite extraordinary. And I heard that from many people. And they would all say the same thing, "I realized I acquired a new perspective on the scene in my life. It was like the camera had been pulled further back than it's ever been. And I saw myself, And I realized this is really stupid." So perspective-- a perspective shift can be very powerful. And it's very hard for us to get out of our heads and acquire a new perspective. And sometimes years of psychotherapy can give us that perspective, but this can happen in an afternoon.

How neuroscience shows the highs and lows of humanity

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When humans think about other humans versus inanimate objects, that difference can be seen in activated brain regions on fMRI scans.

Studies reveal that those brain regions don't light up equally when we look at all people – we tend to humanize some people and dehumanize others when we see things like homelessness, drug addiction, different ethnicities or someone in an outgroup.

On the other hand, humanization can be increased by something seemingly trivial: human touch. Studies show that NBA teams who touch more on the court play better together, and that the touch of a loved one can reduce pain.

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ADAM WAYTZ

Adam Waytz is an award-winning social psychologist and associate professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He is the first person to receive twice the Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He is also the winner of the SAGE Young Scholar Award and the International Social Cognition Network’s Early Career Award.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ADAM WAYTZ: What I like about studying humanization and dehumanization is that we now have a variety of methods at our disposal. And neuroscience is often not the perfect method to study a lot of things, but it offers a great insight to humanization and dehumanization because we now know that there is a prescribed set of regions that tends to come online, or be preferentially active, when people are thinking about people -- thinking about people versus objects, playing a game with a person versus a machine, thinking about others' mental states -- their thoughts, their preferences, their desires, rather than thinking about physical aspects of themselves. And we know that these brain regions are responsive to a lot of different stimuli, but they also seem preferentially active toward human beings, or cues to human beings. So that signal of these brain regions that we could call the mentalizing network, or some people call it the social brain network, operates as a nice measure of: How much are you deeply engaging with another person as fully human, or are you engaging with another person's mind? And what the studies have shown is that not all groups are perceived to be equally human.

So to the extent that you are less engaged with another person as a human being -- so this could be viewing, in the fMRI scanner, someone who is homeless, or someone who you believe is addicted to drugs, oftentimes the signal in these brain regions is lower. Or at times, if you're viewing an outgroup member, someone of a different ethnicity or a different geopolitical background from you, oftentimes you get reduction in these brain regions as well. And so the neuroscience offers us a way to nicely gauge the extent to which we're really perceiving another person as fully human, or whether we're turning our humanization down a notch and seeing them as somewhat less than human.

One of the reasons that humans seem to be psychologically important comes from the mere power of human touch. So there are several studies that suggests that human touch has an almost, say, magical power. So there are studies showing that people experiencing pain, if they hold the hand of a loved one, they actually experienced the sting of that pain less aversively. There are studies showing that NBA teams that touch each other more on the court -- more back slapping, more handshaking -- perform more cooperatively on the court and perform better. Something about touch signals cooperative intent. And then there are studies showing that people value objects and goods that are handmade more than objects and goods that they believe are machine-made. And the reason why they value handmade goods to a greater extent, even when it's the exact same good, whether it's a scarf or a coffee mug, if you tell people it's handmade, they believe that the good was somehow made with love. So human touch signals cooperation. It signals care. And it also signals authenticity. And so human touch can give a lot of meaning to mundane experiences and objects as well.

What do mentors do? They introduce you to your future self

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What kind of work does a mentor do? Many expect that mentors can only help others that have been in the same situation as their mentees, but this is not the case.

What matters is that mentors can see their mentees' potential so that they can help them move away from the situation that they are in and towards the person that they actually are.

The opinions expressed in this video do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles Koch Foundation, which encourages the expression of diverse viewpoints within a culture of civil discourse and mutual respect.

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BISHOP OMAR JAHWAR

Bishop Omar Jahwar is a Pastor and internationally renowned community leader dedicated to ending senseless violence, strengthening communities and promoting strong families. His efforts to revive Urban Culture began over 20 years ago on the streets of Dallas, TX.

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TRANSCRIPT:

BISHOP OMAR JAHWAR: Real mentors are always sending -- it's like this, character coaches don't negate your characteristics trying to build you up, they're trying to build on your characteristics but also build your character. So, if you see LeBron at a young age, you say, man, you could change the NBA, but you need to work on your jump shot; you need to work on your endurance. You need to -- and so, you are always affirming that you are what I see, but you've still got to work to become what you are, you've got to work to become that person that is a little ahead. So, I tell them all the time, one of the things that young people laugh at, I say, I'm going to introduce you to your future self and then I'm going to bring you back to who you are right now. So, we're going to do an introduction; I'm going to show you who you are, but now you've got to come back and work on where you are. And so good mentors are always trying to use their gift of sight. A mentor does not have to have gone through what you've been through; it's good, but it's not a prerequisite. A mentor can just cause you to react differently to the environment that you are stuck in. See, my mentor was not a gang leader, he was a person that could see potential and build it and build it and build it. And before you knew it, those philosophical words that I would say became ideas that I would do, and then they could see me walk this out. And that's what we're trying to do, when I'm using mentors in my work, I'm saying I want you all to get very, very close to the individuals that we serve, so you can't be afraid of the environment, you cannot hate that that you're trying to change.

Watch this: if you hate every characteristic about the person you're trying to help, how then can you give them encouragement to be what they're supposed to be? We tell them like this: only inspired people can inspire people. If I'm an urban mentor, I hate hip hop, I hate how they dress, I hate all that loud stuff, I hate this, and they say but you can be your best. How? You have to at least admire my light even if I'm using it the wrong way, we're just trying to shine it different. So there are some ways that we kind of figure out how to create good mentor/mentee relationships.

Like a guy who mentored me, his name was Ahman Rashidi, he used to say to me, "Omar, proof of behavior is in what you do, not in what you say. Your mouth can say anything, but your behavior won't lie." He'd tell me that no matter what happens to you, you are responsible for what you do for you. Whatever someone is going through, whatever you're going through currently, someone went through it before you, and if they made it, you can make it. See, only inspired people can inspire people. Powerful people don't teach powerless people how to take their power away, they will pity you, but this they'll only do for a moment; you must show signs of life in order for any individual to respect the life that's left in you. So we are always affirming: you have to restate, reset, and it might be a hell of a situation you landed in. It's on you to get up. So yeah, it gets tough, but you can be that tough when someone knows you care. When I'm trying to get the best out of you, I might have to speak some of the things that you feel are worst, tough, but I'm trying to get you to respond because I know how serious one idea is when it takes you down the wrong road, especially in the world that we live in.

Mental communication and infinite knowledge are on the horizon

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Eventually, computer chips, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku avers, will cost a penny, which is the cost of scrap paper. They'll be so pervasive, they'll even be attached to your eyeball.

They'll be in your contact lens, allowing you to blink and go online — you'll have access to the internet and will be able to access the knowledge stored on the internet.

In the future, Kaku says, we'll be able to convey emotions and memories to one another via "brain net." This will render emojis and current forms of entertainment, such as sound-and-screen movies, obsolete.

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MICHIO KAKU

Dr. Michio Kaku is the co-founder of string field theory, and is one of the most widely recognized scientists in the world today. He has written 4 New York Times Best Sellers, is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning and has hosted numerous science specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery/Science Channel. His radio show broadcasts to 100 radio stations every week. Dr. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York (CUNY), where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as New York University (NYU).

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHIO KAKU: Eventually, a computer chip will cost a penny, which is the cost of scrap paper. They'll be everywhere and nowhere, including your eyeball, in your contact lens. You'll blink, and you'll be online. And who are the first people to buy internet contact lenses? College students, taking final examinations. They will blink and see all the answers to my exam right there in their contact lens.

And this can be very useful, if you're at a cocktail party, and there's some very important people there that could influence your future. But you don't know who they are. In the future, you'll know exactly who to suck up to at any cocktail party. On a blind date, they could be great. Because, of course, your blind date could say that he's single, he's rich, and he's successful. But your contact lens says that he pays child support, that he's three times divorced, and the guy is a total loser.

So yes, we're going to have almost infinite knowledge. And then beyond that, we will communicate mentally. That is, we'll be able to think about emails, think about images, memories, and send them on the internet. Already, we can record memories. This was done two years ago at Wake Forest University and also in Los Angeles. We've been able to record small memory, short memories, in mice. Now it's being done on monkeys. Next, Alzheimer's patients, they'll push a button, and memories will come flooding into their hippocampus. And maybe one day, you'll push a button and have that vacation that you've never had.

So we're entering a new era, where the internet itself could become brain net. Brain net could replace digital internet. Instead of zeros and ones, you'll send emotions, feelings, memories, on the internet. And of course, teenagers will love it. Instead of putting a happy face at the end of every sentence, they'll put the entire emotion-- their first dance, their first date, their first kiss, right there on the internet. And that's going to revolutionize entertainment.

Because remember the talkies? When the talkies came, the silent movies went out of business. No one wanted to see Charlie Chaplin when you could hear actors talk. So movies are nothing but sound and a screen. Think of what will happen when you can feel emotions, sensations, feel what the actor is feeling. Then the movies will seem so barbaric. They'll seem such like a dinosaur technology, once we have brain net capable of sending emotions, feelings, on the internet.

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How to defeat moral grandstanders (and stay classy while doing it)

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Moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion. Moral grandstanders have egotistical motives: they may want to signal that they have superhuman insight into a topic, paint themselves as a victim, or show that they care more than others.

Moral philosophers view moral grandstanding as a net negative. They argue that it contributes to political polarization, increases levels of cynicism about moral talk and its value in public life, and it causes outrage exhaustion.

Grandstanders are also a kind of social free rider, says Brandon Warmke. They get the benefits of being heard without contributing to any valuable discourse. It's selfish behavior at best, and divisive behavior at worst.

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BRANDON WARMKE

Brandon Warmke, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University. He is currently writing two books, Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk and Why It’s OK to Mind Your Own Business, both with philosopher Justin Tosi.

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TRANSCRIPT:

BRANDON WARMKE: If you had a bumper sticker and you wanted a quick, dirty definition of moral grandstanding, it's the use of moral talk for self-promotion. Grandstanders are moral showboaters. They use public discourse as a vanity project. They're less concerned about saying what's true. They might be less concerned about helping other people. They're less concerned about contributing to a conversation that might be productive.

More specifically, someone might want to be seen as having spectacular, superhuman insight into what is just. Some people might want to be seen as caring the most about the poor or about the troops. Some people might want to be seen as the most affected by some injustice. So grandstanding doesn't always look like the same sort of animal. Grandstanding sometimes looks like piling on. You often see cases of piling on when a lot of people join in on a shame fest for someone who's misspoken or engaged in a small minor infraction. In order to signal to their in-group or to their enemies that they have a heightened sense of justice, they pile on in cases of public blaming and shaming.

Another form that grandstanding takes is what we can call ramping up. Ramping up involves trying to out-do each other in moral discourse. You can think of it as a kind of moral arms race. So I might say something like, 'The senator's behavior was highly unacceptable. She should clearly be censured for it.' Now you, not wanting to be outdone, might say something like, 'Yes, I agree that her behavior was wrong, but it's clearly way out of bounds. She should no longer hold her office. She should be impeached.' And then someone else, again, not wanting to be outdone, might say, 'As someone who has long stood on the side of injustice, we should look into the criminal law. This cannot go unpunished. We must remember the world is watching.' And you can think of ramping up in terms of what psychologists call social comparison. Social comparison theory says, roughly, we think of ourselves in comparison to others. So if I think of myself as caring deeply about the poor or about the troops, that's going to be important to me, I'm going to think of myself as a more just person or a more caring person than my peers. What happens in conversation is that once people reveal their positions about how much they care about or how affected they are by some problem, you can now look like you don't care as much as others about some problem. And so in order to beat someone else in the moral race, you have to outdo them. And so this often results in people taking more extreme stands than they might otherwise do on reflection, because when the world is watching, you must show that you care more.

Moral philosophers tend to think there's three main ways for something to be morally good or bad: One, it could have morally good or bad consequences. Two, it could be morally good or bad insofar as it mistreats other people, or shows them respect or disrespect. And that's irrespective of the bad or good consequences it might have. And third, philosophers will often say something like: Something is good or bad if a virtuous person would do it or not do it. So we think about the virtues, like honesty, courage. We think that grandstanding is bad according to all three ways of thinking that something could be morally good or bad. Grandstanding has bad consequences. We argue that it...

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