SPEAKER_03: All the things that we were promised, the Arab Spring, like Me Too, like all of these social media campaigns, I'm not saying they didn't accomplish anything, but like I don't think anyone looks at those and is like, yeah, like this is the model for like social media political activism is like going well.
SPEAKER_03: And so at that point, if you can't point to like politics as having improved from this massive experiment, and you can point to like all of these harms that we're seeing, often feeling disinhibited from being truthful, racial or gendered slurs.
SPEAKER_03: I think if someone wants to say that, they should have their name associated with it.
SPEAKER_03: Hi, I'm Jerusalem Demsis.
SPEAKER_01: I'm Matthew Iglesias.
SPEAKER_03: And you're listening to The Argument, a show where two friends argue about politics, policy, and whatever else we're interested in that week.
SPEAKER_01: So this week, Jerusalem, she has a plan to basically destroy the internet.
SPEAKER_03: No, I have a plan to fix the internet.
SPEAKER_03: I think anonymity is out of control.
SPEAKER_01: So why?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I guess I I hear people offer this complaint a lot, usually because somebody who's anonymous has like said something dumb.
SPEAKER_01: But I I see dumb things said by nimus people.
SPEAKER_01: This is like a lot of idiots out there.
SPEAKER_01: But what what's the problem with anonymity, really?
SPEAKER_03: I think anonymity makes people say worse things and engage more in politics in a way that is less productive.
SPEAKER_01: So, okay.
SPEAKER_01: There's like a lot of implementation questions about like how would you actually do this?
SPEAKER_01: Like, is it workable?
SPEAKER_00: We're waving a magic wand.
SPEAKER_00: Right.
SPEAKER_00: So I I just want to like I don't I don't want to like nitpick on that, right?
SPEAKER_01: As like a, you know, identity, whatever.
SPEAKER_01: If you'll concede that like Yeah, there's some serious problems.
SPEAKER_01: There might be some issues, right?
SPEAKER_01: Because then the question is, is like, is do we think the benefits of this are like big such that we should bother trying to work through the these different kinds of problems?
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, I mean, like, I think there's a lot of pretty good anonymous accounts out there that like I follow on Twitter or you know, have read on Substack, things like that.
SPEAKER_01: I don't, you know, I I like um I like Alice from Queens, I like James Medlock, I like Special Puppy, I like Cartoons Hate Her.
SPEAKER_01: There's a Yimbies account, um, there's a Yimby Land account.
SPEAKER_01: Um there's now I think like the people behind the neoliberal Twitter account are known, but they were anonymous at one time.
SPEAKER_01: Um it just seems like a lot of people like to participate on the public internet behind a pseudonym.
SPEAKER_01: And like what like what's the pro like what's the evidence?
SPEAKER_01: What's the problem?
SPEAKER_03: What so I mean I think the real problem here, and I after I like lodged this take to you kind of casually and you like pushed me on all these questions, I went to go see in my usual way if there's like any social science research that could be helpful at all.
SPEAKER_03: Unfortunately, there's like not like basically any social science research that's helpful at all this.
SPEAKER_03: That's what I like.
SPEAKER_01: I I like a truly hot take.
SPEAKER_03: Truly, truly hot takes.
SPEAKER_03: Like, there's been some stuff done, but and we might reference some of it in this conversation, but like none of it's quite good, and none of it really speaks to the fundamental things we're talking about.
SPEAKER_03: So, like this is gonna be quite a quite a vibes and theory debate.
SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, I agree that there are some anonymous accounts that are good.
SPEAKER_03: And I think that like the real question here is like how big is that benefit and what happens to those kinds of people.
SPEAKER_03: I think that the like Alice from Keep Queens of the World, the neoliberals of the world, like whatever, all those people who are like, you know, good anonymous accounts, they either keep posting under their real name or because I think that they actually are genuinely interested in politics and policy engagement, or they start doing politics more in real life, which I think is just like net positive.
SPEAKER_03: So I think most of the accounts that you think are like positive value ads in the United States of America, in democracies, et cetera, that are doing politics under anonymous names largely would either be moved in a positive direction.
SPEAKER_03: And then like, but those are like just I think not representative.
SPEAKER_03: I think most anonymous accounts are these like low value, like zero follower accounts who are just made up of like randos.
SPEAKER_03: I have no idea who they are.
SPEAKER_03: There's like no descriptive analysis of them.
SPEAKER_03: Like I don't know.
SPEAKER_03: I mean But like they're useless.
SPEAKER_03: Yes, I mean that that's true.
SPEAKER_01: But I, you know, so I I run a Substack.
SPEAKER_01: Uh it's called Slow Boring.
SPEAKER_01: Um, everyone just check it out.
SPEAKER_01: Please subscribe.
SPEAKER_01: Subscribe.
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, and so we have a comment section, um, which is I've always had somewhat ambivalent feelings about internet comment sections.
SPEAKER_01: But when I launched the newsletter, I was like, you know, we need to have some some features for paid subscribers.
SPEAKER_01: There's gonna be comments.
SPEAKER_01: Um, our comments are moderated, you know, in the section, and it's only paying customers.
SPEAKER_01: So it doesn't have the like dregs of the earth quality that certain internet comment sections can have.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm struck that like most people who participate in there regularly seem to do it anonymously or synonymously, you know.
SPEAKER_01: I I mean, and you can't always tell.
SPEAKER_03: I think that the fact that we've made it a presumption of anonymity on the internet is like both a bizarre thing and like it's weird.
SPEAKER_03: Like even in this conversation, it's almost like the burden of proof is on me to show that like anonymity is bad.
SPEAKER_03: Like the vast majority of human time has been in a place where like you could not speak to large numbers of people, or most speech that was happening in general was obviously with your face, right?
SPEAKER_03: It was obvious who you are, it's obvious like where you're coming from, like if you're talking to people in your community, if you're like writing things you're at least legible to, uh, you know, the person you're writing to, whatever it is.
SPEAKER_03: Like, it's just like not normal for this to happen.
SPEAKER_03: We've created a presumption of anonymity so people opt into it.
SPEAKER_03: And there's this question of like what it's doing to people.
SPEAKER_03: I just think that like, let's just abstract away from the internet for a second.
SPEAKER_03: If someone told you that you were no longer going to be accountable for the things you were saying to people who knew you, does that make you less or more inhibited?
SPEAKER_03: Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_03: Obviously, it makes you less inhibited.
SPEAKER_03: And the question is, with that decreased inhibition, what is most likely to happen?
SPEAKER_03: There's some things that are good, like maybe there's like more creativity, like you're saying, like there are people who just pop off in ways that are interesting or whatever.
SPEAKER_03: But largely people are disinhibited, particularly in like the political context and also engaging.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I mean, if you're we're talking about like just um you know social media in general, like on Instagram talking to celebrities or whatever, just like insane versions of themselves.
SPEAKER_00: Well, okay, but I I mean the inhibition point like seems correct.
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: Right.
SPEAKER_01: But this is why, again, like I think about the like paid commenters in a relatively high quality comment section is relevant to me, right?
SPEAKER_01: Because you sort of have a model where, you know, the disinhibition is just all kind of letting people be more psycho uh than they were before.
SPEAKER_01: But I think a lot of people again, my my inference um from participants in slow boring comments from other like more, you know, like good tonier uh comment sections is that a lot of people anonymity for tony comment section.
SPEAKER_03: No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_01: I'm saying, you know, we do this professionally, right?
SPEAKER_01: For a living, but lots of people are not professional taksters.
SPEAKER_01: They don't want to be professional taksters.
SPEAKER_01: They have some level of interest in voicing their opinions on the internet across different kinds of mediums.
SPEAKER_01: And like, I think they feel a lot of inhibition about doing that.
SPEAKER_01: And that the pseudonymity lowers the inhibition.
SPEAKER_01: And that doesn't just be braver.
SPEAKER_01: Crazy kind of more serious.
SPEAKER_03: I think we're like, there are a lot of those people.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, so like the one piece of like social science research I found that was actually useful because it's mostly descriptive, is a study that looked at what happened when Huffington Post moved from um uh anonymous to forcing its users to authenticate their accounts.
SPEAKER_03: And they're able to c look at like 45 million comments.
SPEAKER_03: So like the first order thing that happens is there's a lot less comments, particularly on political, um on political stuff, but also just that the complexity of the comments increases.
SPEAKER_03: So like I think that like if there are just fewer people commenting on politics online, I don't understand why that's like bad.
SPEAKER_03: I think I look at like research around um around like political hobbyism in general or whatever, it just seems like really clear to me that this sort of commentary is often like not actually that valuable from like a at a at a person level, at a political level.
SPEAKER_03: When you look at like most social media political activism, it's like genuinely useless.
SPEAKER_03: Like all the things that we were promised, the Arab Spring, like me too, like all of these social media campaigns, I'm not saying they didn't accomplish anything, but like I don't think anyone looks at those and is like, yeah, like this is the model for like social media political activism is like going well.
SPEAKER_03: And so at that point, if you can't point to like politics as having improved from this massive experiment, and you can point to like all of these harms that we're seeing from how people are behaving, I think it's important to like.
SPEAKER_01: What are the harms though?
SPEAKER_01: Like this is what you know.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you are talking about a relatively tiny, tiny slice of the commentariat is like.
SPEAKER_03: When you observe an anonymity online, in general, what you're seeing is people doing either very low-value things or I think often feeling disinhibited from being truthful, disinhibited from uh being non-offensive.
SPEAKER_03: I very rarely will hear like racial or gendered slurs or like anti-Semitic slurs sent my way.
SPEAKER_03: I'm not Jewish, but Jerusalem confuses a lot of people, so I get a lot of anti-Semitism online.
SPEAKER_03: And so I don't hear that stuff almost ever from like accounts with names on them.
SPEAKER_03: And again, like I don't really care that much because I like muted all my responses or whatever at this point.
SPEAKER_03: But like it's clear that it affects a lot of people to like have that kind of vitriol visible in public.
SPEAKER_03: And I think if someone wants to say that, they should have their name associated with it.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, so okay, okay, and I'm not gonna be able to do that.
SPEAKER_00: So I I I you know, I I I wanna like You want to be anti-antisemitism.
SPEAKER_01: No, normally you're uh you're more progressive than I am.
SPEAKER_01: So I wanna, you know, I wanna frame this a little bit differently.
SPEAKER_01: Because I I feel like you're almost coming at this with a like an old-fashioned, not uh an outdated view of this.
SPEAKER_01: That like the presumption is that like the problem we have on the internet is like these bad racists, and we need to like clean it up um by, you know, making people use their real names or whatever, and then they'll all be more chill and and polite and something like that.
SPEAKER_01: But like I worry that most people just have jobs in the private sector and would be concerned about like surveillance from the bosses if they, you know, you work for a company that is uh trying to kiss up to Trump, right?
SPEAKER_01: Like you're some you work at an Apple store somewhere, and you're like, I can't believe Tim Cook just like gave this guy this like fucking gold, whatever it is, and then you know, it could get back around and you could lose your job and things like that.
SPEAKER_01: It's like most people in a capitalist society are subject to this kind of like bossing influence.
SPEAKER_01: And we had, you know, five to ten years ago, this moment where I think progressive-minded people got very enthusiastic in general about the idea that censorship would be a kind of a progressive force, and the idea that if there were more mechanisms, both like formal but also informal social sanction for clamping down on how much people say, that that would like shift dialogue in their direction.
SPEAKER_01: And I think, you know, in a world where the Ellison family is buying up every media property uh on earth so that, you know, Barry Weiss can run all of journalism, like we should be a little bit skeptical about making it harder for normal people to say things without consequence, that the consequences are likely to be driven by the richest and most powerful people in society.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, the the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, clearly does not have like a large personal interest in having people not say racist or misogynistic things on the internet.
SPEAKER_01: Um he has his own his own interests, his own platform architecture designs.
SPEAKER_01: Uh so I just don't I don't really understand what the what the social benefit you're envisioning.
SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell I think that there's like a few things that happen when things are people are forced to put their names on uh what they say online.
SPEAKER_03: I want to first talk about what displaces this speech, right?
SPEAKER_03: Like let's say like you are someone who wants to do politics, like you have like left-wing views, you're at a company that wants to suck up to Trump, and your options right now are like, I guess, just like shooting off in your anonymous Twitter account at Elon Musk and calling him like anti-Semite or whatever it is.
SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, what is the value of that?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, fuck off Nazis.
SPEAKER_03: And like, what and what happens when you do that?
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's okay.
SPEAKER_01: I there I agree.
SPEAKER_01: Like people probably So I'm just my point is like you're so I think that you're like valuing.
SPEAKER_03: I'm like, I think it would be really good if that kind of energy was not given an outlet that's actually fake.
SPEAKER_03: Like, I think that not all of it, but I think some of the political speech we're seeing online right now is prov is people getting an outlet for their rage about politics that is actually in a really unhelpful direction.
SPEAKER_03: And instead, what you would end up having to see is that people who were really upset about politics that don't have this, I think get pushed towards other forms of activism.
SPEAKER_03: They are engaging more in like protests in real life, they're engaging more with like groups or uh that are that actually require them to interact with real people, whether it's in like group chats where they're talking about how to, you know, resist ICE activity in their neighborhood or they're involving themselves in um signing petitions or knowing whatever letters to the editor, whatever it is that they're doing.
SPEAKER_03: I just think that like actually what's happening here is we've given people a release valve and also lit a fire under their asses to like do more political chat online without any evidence that it provides some kind of benefit to the real world.
SPEAKER_03: And then they get to feel like they're doing political.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so if they're not so in the intro, right, we were joking around a little.
SPEAKER_01: And I said you wanted to destroy the internet.
SPEAKER_01: And you said you wanted to improve it.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: But I think there's a serious question here, which is like, should we destroy the internet?
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: Because because what you the the benefit you started coming around to, I I do think was close to like, yes, I I will destroy the internet, and that's good, right?
SPEAKER_01: That you just want to discourage people from participating in internet politics conversations because you think that's like it's a waste of time.
SPEAKER_01: It's not that you're trying to make the conversation better.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it's both.
SPEAKER_03: I think, first of all, there's a question of like, I think that many, many people will right now view things on the internet without interacting with them.
SPEAKER_03: Uh maybe they'll like stuff sometimes, but they don't like comment, they don't create their own content, whatever.
SPEAKER_03: That's like the I think that's a normal way of engaging with things on the internet is largely passively.
SPEAKER_03: And so I don't think that like you destroy the internet by like turning some more people into more passive consumers of content rather than like commenting themselves or whatever.
SPEAKER_01: Like you are saying some people who are now.
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's a degradation.
SPEAKER_03: If you said every single thought that you had would now just be automatically posted to slow boring, is that improving slow boring?
SPEAKER_01: It's posted to my Twitter feed.
SPEAKER_03: But no, but I'm serious.
SPEAKER_03: Like there's a clearly there's there's a curation method that you go through because there are freaking.
SPEAKER_01: Degrade is not the correct word.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: But like the volume of internet speech would decline in Demsis world.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I agree.
SPEAKER_01: And probably the total amount of engagement with internet speech would decline.
SPEAKER_03: Engagement qua comments, yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, just like I mean, engage you know, in the term of art sense.
SPEAKER_03: Engagement decline.
SPEAKER_01: And you think there's a benefit in just pushing people to use some of that energy on something else.
SPEAKER_03: Yes, and I also think that like the one part of this we haven't talked about yet is just like I don't know if you feel this way, but uh I have acclimated to a level of like rudeness on the internet that is just like genuinely, I think, degrading to like the human spirit.
SPEAKER_03: Like I think there is a lot of no, but I mean, like, really, I want to say this, like just like I think that if like you took like 15-year-old Jerusalem who had like never been on Twitter and you like exposed her to like one day of the shit I see on Twitter right now, she would like have maybe like a mental breakdown.
SPEAKER_03: Like, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_03: Whatever.
SPEAKER_03: I was more resilient to that.
SPEAKER_03: But like, I just mean like it would just be like genuinely like horrifying to realize like what I had just been like, whatever.
SPEAKER_01: What were you doing?
SPEAKER_01: What were your what were your teen internet habits?
SPEAKER_03: My teen internet habits uh were well, I was got I got Facebook at 13, and then at 14 I had like a pseudonymous Tumblr account, but it was with all my friends, they all knew who I was.
SPEAKER_03: Um and then I guess I was that was basically maybe I was like, you know, looking stuff up on Wikipedia.
SPEAKER_01: Because I'm old, you know, so I was uh I was through blogging.
SPEAKER_01: I was on the dial up and I had dial up.
SPEAKER_01: I was I was hitting Prodigy and you know Prodigy was a dial up uh internet uh service.
SPEAKER_01: And I was on kids online that every time.
SPEAKER_01: I when I was a teenager, I liked to argue about politics on the internet on these prodigy forums um and on some Usenet groups, and I did that pseudonymously because I didn't want to present myself as a kid who was 14, 15 years old.
SPEAKER_01: Um and I had did you read Ender's Game?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, like pseudonymous internet bloggers save the galaxy.
SPEAKER_01: Um has always been my inspiration in life.
SPEAKER_03: Sorry, Ender's Game, you think is like a it's like a positive tale of like using children to like do war?
SPEAKER_03: Okay, gotcha.
SPEAKER_03: No, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_00: We read that book very differently.
SPEAKER_01: Obviously, the bulk of the text of Ender's Game is at the battle school.
SPEAKER_01: But like the part that changed my life, and I think the life of a lot of my cohort of internet posters is like Peter and Valentine save the world through their pseudonymous posting.
SPEAKER_03: And and do you feel like you were doing that?
SPEAKER_01: I I wanted to.
SPEAKER_03: No, but like let's say let's say you you I think Matt, you are so you're a compulsive poster.
SPEAKER_03: I think in a world where there's no pseudonymous, you would still have been posting online.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe, but I mean I know, like, I'm just I'm just trying to tell you like where I'm coming from, right?
SPEAKER_01: Like before I had my prodigy, I read this book, right?
SPEAKER_01: And like in the book, two bright teenagers are posting on the hypothetical internet for people who haven't read Ender's Game.
SPEAKER_01: And the reason they are being pseudonymous is that people won't take them seriously if it's known that they are teenagers.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but like their arguments like stood strong on their own merits.
SPEAKER_01: I can't believe I've gone this.
SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to like not do cheap shots and be like, what about the Federalist papers?
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but that's the standard thing you're supposed to say here.
SPEAKER_01: It's important work um in the history of uh liberalism, uh, as some would say.
SPEAKER_01: And you know, so when I was a teenager, it was the same thing.
SPEAKER_01: It was like, can I go on a level playing field?
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: Can I can I shed my identity as this like random 14-year-old dork and just like write essays about politics and talk to people?
SPEAKER_01: And like I had the take, uh, you know, ahead of uh Amir Scheimer that like NATO expansion was gonna push the US and Russia into a downward geopolitical spiral and have terrible long-term consequences.
SPEAKER_01: I think I was right.
SPEAKER_01: Here we go.
SPEAKER_01: Um and it all happened exactly as I said when I was 13.
SPEAKER_03: No, um, but like to me, that was a very valuable experience.
SPEAKER_03: Like, think about the counterfactual here, Matt.
SPEAKER_03: We're saying like if you had to be anonymous or not post, what happens that's worse?
SPEAKER_01: Uh I don't know.
SPEAKER_01: Like, I'm concerned that like you just like teens wouldn't be allowed to post or something, right?
SPEAKER_01: Because it's And then what happens?
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying that I agree that's gonna happen.
SPEAKER_03: Like, what do you like I mean you're like you're gesturing at some like ephemeral?
SPEAKER_01: I guess I guess my theme across all of this, like what about the good pseudonymous accounts?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: What about the teenagers who are smart, et cetera, et cetera, is like to me the point of this discourse is the the good stuff, right?
SPEAKER_01: And that like you would be tamping down on good stuff.
SPEAKER_03: Like that most social media political commentary is good.
SPEAKER_01: No, it's mostly bad.
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
SPEAKER_03: But like But then on average you must agree that reducing it would increase.
SPEAKER_01: Wait, but I but I but I but I don't think that like averaging like I think you want a maxi max on content, and that like you have this kind of hang up about the low quality anonymous posting, which I agree there's a lot of, but like who's a lot of people.
SPEAKER_03: I want to articulate a couple more harms here because I think that like that's important.
SPEAKER_03: I I think first of all, there is I mean, especially because we're on the verge of AI making it like trivially easy for people to just spin up like tons of real sounding bots that like are not real people.
SPEAKER_03: That like the more the internet becomes where public discourse happens and like real life is the internet.
SPEAKER_03: And the more people don't trust it, like the more nihilistic political commentary I think actually gets.
SPEAKER_03: Like, I think we get to this place where like, I mean, I find myself, I'll see a comment that I think is fucking stupid or like, you know, some like insane, like old-world European like shit.
SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, oh, I bet that person's not American.
SPEAKER_03: And now Elon has made it possible for me to check with some, you know, with some error bars whether or not the person is American.
SPEAKER_03: What I'll often find is like that person is actually American, like that, or at least the account is based in America or whatever it is.
SPEAKER_03: And I think that what I'm what I'm trying to get at here is that like the the the prevalence of anonymous accounts, the prevalence of these bought accounts that can't be validated as real people is so disrupting to the public space that it allows people to be in denial about what real views there are.
SPEAKER_01: So can I can I ask you something about validation?
SPEAKER_01: Like would a reasonable because again, I mean, going back to my my slow boring comment section, right?
SPEAKER_01: I don't know who those people are or what their real names are.
SPEAKER_01: I could maybe go through an elaborate process of investigating their email addresses, whatever.
SPEAKER_01: But what I do know, because again, because these are paid subscribers, each account is associated with a single paying customer.
SPEAKER_01: Now, you could, of course, pay to establish many accounts, and I encourage people to do that.
SPEAKER_01: Um, but like nobody is doing that, right?
SPEAKER_01: So they are um Durable.
SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's enough.
SPEAKER_03: No, no, no.
SPEAKER_03: I don't think it's enough because I think okay.
SPEAKER_03: An analogy is this.
SPEAKER_03: You know how you see these like videos going viral online of like these people behaving like really rudely to fast food workers or to cashiers or whatever?
SPEAKER_03: And then you've never seen it.
SPEAKER_03: I don't I don't participate in the world.
SPEAKER_03: There's tons of content online of like people like being extremely rude to service workers, and then like, you know, their names go viral, and then they're like this like nice random like grandma from like I don't know, Wichita, Kansas, and she's like, oh my god, blah blah blah.
SPEAKER_03: And I'm just like, people are need to be legible to the people they respect.
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
SPEAKER_03: And it can't just be like, oh, Matt knows who like if you're like, there's no real concern.
SPEAKER_03: Like, obviously, at any given point, I'm being videotaped constantly, not just like on this podcast, but like we're walking around the world and you're constantly being videotaped, and yet you behave in ways sometimes that are rude, that are annoying, that are like mildly antisocial all the time.
SPEAKER_03: If you're what do you mean?
SPEAKER_03: Like you're like, you're like, you know, you're kind of like bored, you're in public, you're like not really like smiling, like you're not like, you know, um, if you might pass by someone who, you know, whatever, you you've seen you're like, give them a quick high or whatever.
SPEAKER_03: Anyway, my point is like, there are ways in which like if you're not actually there are ways being around your community makes you a better person.
SPEAKER_03: Like if you're in front of your kid or if you're in front of your mom or you're in front of your like friend, you end up behaving in ways that are more of like your best self.
SPEAKER_03: And so I think there's this like presumption on like the pro-anonymity side that like actually that all this extra volume is like people's real selves.
SPEAKER_03: And what it's bringing out is like, oh, it's all this content that they really is burning inside of them.
SPEAKER_03: I think it's incentivizing versions of them that are like not actually the best version.
SPEAKER_03: Like, I'm not saying it's fake, but I'm saying like I'm not my best self on social media.
SPEAKER_03: I have to like think like, okay, is this the best way to respond to someone?
SPEAKER_03: I have to like really tamp down, like, okay, if this got screenshotted and like sent to someone, is this how I want to sound?
SPEAKER_03: And like I have to institute that in my brain because these platforms make you like this.
SPEAKER_03: And that is increased when you're anonymous because there's not even the minor inhibition that like that sort of thing is gonna end up biting you in the ass later on.
SPEAKER_01: And so to me, I think like this is not like a reason, but an explanation.
SPEAKER_01: I think of part of why I feel a little allergic to this kind of take.
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: Because I I know people, and and you know, our mutual uh friend Ezra Klein does this sometimes, get into this thing where you know, the behavior of individuals in a platform starts getting attributed to the platform, right?
SPEAKER_01: And like we're not our best selves on this thing, and the anonymity and da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
SPEAKER_01: And I don't, I don't disagree with that on some level.
SPEAKER_01: Like that is a a frame that is valid.
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, uh, I I love Wallace Stevens, the poet, and he says uh things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.
SPEAKER_01: And I and I think that that's true and real and valid.
SPEAKER_01: But that being said, uh when I think about what I see as the most destructive interventions on the internet, like destructive to the epistemic climate in the United States of America, I think that these are being done by reasonably high-leverage named accounts, by professional journalists, professional think tankers, elected officials, sometimes billionaires.
SPEAKER_01: And it is mostly being done willfully, not like people acting out or not being their best selves.
SPEAKER_01: It's deliberate acts of character assassination, of misleading rhetoric and information.
SPEAKER_01: Like internet anonymity is not why uh wildly misleading levelized cost of energy charts are constantly going viral on the internet.
SPEAKER_00: No, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01: But like so I think it's kind of a cop-out and a way of like not challenging the powerful actors and the people who are doing things.
SPEAKER_01: I'm like incredibly frustrated with the behavior of like a small cabal of political science professors who are active on Blue Sky and who will like shit on me, shit on your colleague Laksha, anybody who tries to say, like, frankly, obviously true things about American public opinion and and politics, and then and not just frustrated with their behavior, but frustrated with the behavior of the audience of like other political science PhDs, professors, et cetera, who read this like organized bullying campaign whose purpose is to engage in like ideological axe grinding and intimidation.
SPEAKER_01: And it's like has nothing to do with anonymity.
SPEAKER_01: It has no people behaving irresponsibly.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think two things here.
SPEAKER_03: One is that you're correct that we will not solve all problems of the internet and like human behavior and political context by like getting rid of anonymity.
SPEAKER_03: So, like, copy on it, yes, there's a lot of like nimic speech that is like quite harmful and toxic.
SPEAKER_03: But I think that like you actually underrate how much anonymous accounts actually create the environment for people like this to behave this way.
SPEAKER_03: If you ever like look at the likes on your tweets, right?
SPEAKER_03: And you kind of like scroll through the likes or whatever.
SPEAKER_01: Love a good like.
SPEAKER_03: The vast majority of those likes are from anonymous Twitter accounts.
SPEAKER_03: Like vast majority of like in likes or condom, whatever.
SPEAKER_03: When people behave really, really badly online, I think that actually they're getting egged on by people who are not actually naming themselves.
SPEAKER_03: And I think that they're behaving worse often because they're being encouraged by a large number of anonymous accounts that would not retweet them under their normal names.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but I I think they're getting egged on to be worse versions of themselves.
SPEAKER_01: But so, like you start were talking about, you know, like the level of rudeness that you're sort of exposed to and so forth.
SPEAKER_01: And I guess to me, the people being rude, or even the people using slurs and stuff like that, is not the problematic internet content.
SPEAKER_01: It's the people It can be like one of them, right?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I sort of.
SPEAKER_01: But like, you know, there's a fine line.
SPEAKER_01: I I am not one of these people who's like everyone should just be maximally rude all the time in all their disagreements about things.
SPEAKER_01: But it's the people who are being misleading, and they're often being quite polite and quite well-mannered about it.
SPEAKER_01: And then like other people are not.
SPEAKER_03: But this is just a separate problem, Matt.
SPEAKER_03: You're just talking about a separate problem.
SPEAKER_01: We are talking about a yes.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it is it, but it is to me, if I if you just you asked me like what is going wrong with dialogue discourse on the internet, like I this stuff, the whole complex of things that exist around anonymity is just so down my list that I would not be that interested in.
SPEAKER_01: I think also though you're like beginning to explore.
SPEAKER_01: But we agreed was like some potentially tricky like like I I mean, and this is worth saying, like, like like what what would you do to clamp down on anonymity on the internet?
SPEAKER_03: So like before we get there though, I think that like part of the problem here is that like your almost entire experience of the internet seems to be like largely on like Twitter and text-based forums.
SPEAKER_03: Um I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_03: Do you spend a lot of time on like Instagram?
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm an internet dinosaur.
SPEAKER_01: I do I do I do a little like like YouTube.
SPEAKER_01: But or like used to other YouTube comments.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you can find our podcasts here.
SPEAKER_01: Make sure to like and subscribe.
SPEAKER_03: Uh you're better at that than I am.
SPEAKER_03: I don't remember doing that.
SPEAKER_03: Um okay, so but I mean like on Instagram or on TikTok or on YouTube comment sections, right?
SPEAKER_03: These are not like places where people are like, oh, let me like engage in this community consistently.
SPEAKER_03: They're often just getting a re uh getting a reel in their feed or getting a TikTok in their feed, or they're you know, on a YouTube binge and following a bunch of YouTube videos, and they're just like, oh, let me comment on this one or whatever, and I may not even return to this specific person's channel ever again.
SPEAKER_03: And like this idea that like there are these like great like anonymous Twitter accounts is like so small in like the landscape of anonymous behavior online that it's like genuinely like not relevant to like most people.
SPEAKER_01: Well, but sure, but like very little of the internet is like about politics at all.
SPEAKER_01: But I thought that's what we were talking about.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think that like a lot of what's going on on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram now is very political.
SPEAKER_03: Right.
SPEAKER_03: But like But I think that the the what's what's relevant about those spaces is like A, I think that you would see the cost of some of this kind of language to be much stronger.
SPEAKER_03: Like if you're like a random person who posts on uh, you know, on uh on Instagram Rails or on TikTok and you go viral, and then you have all of these like horrible, mean things being said about you by people with anonymous accounts, like this is like costing.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, this is like when you look at Meta's uh analysis of internally of like, you know, girls wanting to, teenage girls wanting to kill themselves because they use their platform, I'm like, yeah, a lot of what's going on here is that people will say horrible shit online without putting their real names on it.
SPEAKER_03: And so, like, again, I'm not saying we solve all of this stuff this way, but I think that there's like a question of like, what kind of culture are you building when you are incentivizing like people to have zero accountability for their behavior and you're teaching everyone else who is not engaging in this bad behavior, and this sort of thing is just like normal.
SPEAKER_03: And I think that like you brought up the Federalist papers earlier.
SPEAKER_03: Love the Federalist papers.
SPEAKER_03: I know I'm trying not to like rely on that as a crutch, but I mean I just I think that like it just proves it.
SPEAKER_03: Like, hey, it's not like it's not like anonymity goes away because you can't be like a random troll on the internet, right?
SPEAKER_03: Like it just creates friction.
SPEAKER_03: I think there's like that's what's important here.
SPEAKER_03: We've made anonymity frictionless.
SPEAKER_03: We've made it the default option when you log on to some of these places, like, oh, I'm gonna be a slow-born commenter.
SPEAKER_03: Well, why why put my real name on it?
SPEAKER_03: Like, nobody does that.
SPEAKER_03: Like, that shouldn't be the default for how people are engaging with each other in public, especially if they're talking about politics, but even in other contexts.
SPEAKER_01: Well, so I mean, some of this I think gets a like broader, I do think gets back to the broader question of like, just do you think that the internet like an idea that I've been toying with, right?
SPEAKER_01: Because I was talking to people and you know, wealth tax was kicking around, and there's a lot of questions about, you know, the real economic impact of that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_01: And I was saying, look, if our conclusion, right, if the thing that is bothering us actually is that like these internet billionaires are bad, that like they are doing something pernicious, right?
SPEAKER_01: The normal way to make, you know, Mark Zuckerberg less rich if his business activities are pernicious, would be to actually tax the business activities, right?
SPEAKER_01: Not to like force him to liquidate shares that he's buying more yachts or something, but to actually make like running Instagram be less lucrative, particularly because I think all of these companies are, they're like run by bright people.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, they are employing a lot of smart people, they are doing things that they think will make them money.
SPEAKER_01: If you change the regulatory and tax landscape so that different things make money, like they will do different things.
SPEAKER_01: And I mean, this is a whole other episode, but it's like maybe we should have a progressive tax on broadband usage so that everyone is just on the internet less.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Right.
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, I mean, I was looking at the comments on YouTube uh of uh our previous podcast appearance uh together when we talked about what went wrong with liberalism.
SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm sure there's terrible comments here, but they've algorithmically lifted up, you know, an anonymous person, BR Foley76, saying this is the second time he's seen a Jerusalem Demsis video.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, one was you talking to me, one was you talking to Ross Douthit, and he thinks that you did a great job interviewing two very different people, and he really appreciated the range of perspectives.
SPEAKER_03: Uh this is just an ad for this podcast.
SPEAKER_01: No, and you know, then then Derek4412 uh says that he's a former uh Obama voter, and you know, he thought the worst part of the woke moment was something specific that happened.
SPEAKER_03: What is this?
SPEAKER_03: I mean, again, like this is the problem, obviously, this is a difficult conversation because usually me and you just like like to like go look at like what does the empirical data say, and we like can't find it, so we're relying on anecdotes to like make these decisions.
SPEAKER_03: But I just you have already established that you agree that anonymity decreases inhibition.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: You've already established that you think the majority of political speech online is useless or bad.
SPEAKER_03: You have also already established that you can't identify a social media political movement that you think was actually net beneficial for the world.
SPEAKER_03: So like, well, you know what?
SPEAKER_03: Okay, no.
SPEAKER_01: Do you know what was a social media political movement that was net beneficial for the world?
SPEAKER_01: What?
SPEAKER_01: The yes in my backyard movement.
SPEAKER_03: You think they needed the internet?
SPEAKER_01: I do.
SPEAKER_01: I think that is a large- Well, sorry, sorry.
SPEAKER_03: Do you think they needed anonymous social media?
SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know that they needed anonymity, but I think that the because anonymity increased the volume of internet activity, I think I think it was people with their real names.
SPEAKER_03: I think that like almost every single person who is like the reason behind the Yimbi movement's success is because uh real economists, real.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I guess the the big movers and shakers, yes.
SPEAKER_01: But I mean, I do think that Yimbiism, to a really substantial extent, was like uh posted into being.
SPEAKER_01: Right.
SPEAKER_01: Classified that it created no, but I mean, all the things that you were saying about amplification and anonymity of people, like that helped boost interest in the work of early Yimbi organizers in the posting and blah blah blah blah blah blah.
SPEAKER_01: So again, I guess like my basic uh viewpoint about speech, right, is that the point of speech is to get good speech, and that if you have a change that reduces the quantity of both good and bad speech, even if it raises the average quality of like utterances, that is bad.
SPEAKER_01: That like when we look back on the whole cat- I mean, one of the reasons the Federalist Papers stand out to us is that they're really excellent and important.
SPEAKER_01: There were lots of anonymous pamphlets in the late 18th century, most of them like not preserved, blah blah blah, you know.
SPEAKER_01: And if you if you look at like if you've ever seen like collections of them, like you know, they're not all as good as the Federalist Papers.
SPEAKER_01: Like that that's the point, right?
SPEAKER_01: But what preserves and endures and and matters is the stuff that's good, not like so-and-so had like a really schlocky, dumb even the things that are bad.
SPEAKER_03: I just want to just again say that for like most of human history, yeah, this was not necessary for people to do politics in a positive direction.
SPEAKER_03: But people were publishing anonymously.
SPEAKER_03: Sorry, I I want to be clear my take is I'm talking about online.
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
SPEAKER_00: Well, the internet didn't exist at all.
SPEAKER_03: But I'm saying, like, yeah, so there's still if people want to publish zines.
SPEAKER_01: Should the economist uh like force its writers to have bylines?
SPEAKER_03: That's an interesting question.
SPEAKER_03: I I think it's like such a small one.
SPEAKER_03: No, but I mean I I I just think that like I think that like to me the big thing here is about frictions.
SPEAKER_03: Like, yes, if you are in a place where you're like, it's really important for me to say this thing, like you are maybe you're a you're a trans teen in a state that's taking away your ability to access puberty blockers, or you're an undocumented immigrant who's afraid of ice targeting you and you want to say something, or you are, you know, even on the conservative side, like let's say you're someone who really doesn't think that trans kids should have the right to use puberty blockers, but you're in a very liberal place or whatever, and you are afraid of the public consequences of your political speech.
SPEAKER_03: And you're like, oh man, I wish I could just say my tweet to my five followers, irrelevant to me.
SPEAKER_03: Doesn't do anything stupid.
SPEAKER_03: If you're like, this is really important to me, I'm going to like publish an anonymous newsletter.
SPEAKER_03: I'm going to like uh, you know, create a zine.
SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna write a letter to the other, I'm gonna create a political activist group that's going to meet quietly at first and then try to build support.
SPEAKER_03: Like, that's good.
SPEAKER_03: That's politics.
SPEAKER_01: But like, do you think the argument should be allowed to publish an anonymous, like, first person article from like a whistleblower and it's yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: But that's on the internet.
SPEAKER_03: Well, like I said, well, I'll commit myself to just social media then.
SPEAKER_01: If you made it like a glossy magazine, then it's all I mean, I mean, yeah, I mean, this is one of those uh it's a difficult edge case here.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think that if you had to lose it, you you could lose it.
SPEAKER_03: Like it would have you I would like lose it if I could get everything else.
SPEAKER_03: But like I agree, those are the places where it's clearly better.
SPEAKER_03: Like being able to do it through an institution.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, part of what you end up seeing, I think, with the um with anonymity going away on on the internet is that you would see increased power go towards institutions, whether those are like places like the New York Times, the Washington Post, or I think a lot of new institutions that could come up that are like clearly the free press is a new institution, like lots of places, the argument, which you should also subscribe to, is a new institution as well.
SPEAKER_03: And I think that like in some ways we're in an age right now where like it's super, super easy for anyone to do um low effort things, but it's also much easier to do high effort things, and yet because it's so easy to do low effort things, like all the people who like are on the margins who might, instead of just like creating a synonymous Twitter account, might like like like why don't I make a magazine with some people?
SPEAKER_03: Like, we'll just do the first one.
SPEAKER_03: I think there are lots of these people like that you quoted in the beginning of this podcast, who I'm like would maybe do even higher value things with their speech.
SPEAKER_03: And so I think that that's like actually the question here of like what happens to that marginal user.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I think I think we should probably move on.
SPEAKER_01: Probably wrap this up, move this on.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but I'll just say I I sympathize with your view that like throwing sand in the gears might be socially constructive.
SPEAKER_01: But I feel like the anonymity lever is a weird one that is not, you know, that it's like if if we made it so that in order to post on the internet, you had to be standing on your left foot at the time that you write out the post, that might be good for society in the aggregate.
SPEAKER_01: But like the left foot standing is.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you I mean the character thing, like do you I mean I feel like this is the place you actually like agreed with me about that, like it it is like the disinhibition makes people like do things they otherwise wouldn't do.
SPEAKER_03: It makes them worse people.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm not I don't know that it's uniformly worse.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I might concede that it's worse on average, but also I think But you think it's close?
SPEAKER_01: No, because I think that some of the most high value stuff may come from people who are disinhibited, yeah.
SPEAKER_01: You know, need to disinhibit.
SPEAKER_01: So I I again I I I get the point that like probably most people are yakking too much on the internet, and we should and we should do something about it.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I I understand that you're like, you're just like we could just like throw this gears in the sand of the internet in any kind of way, and maybe that would make the world slightly a better place.
SPEAKER_03: But I do think that like this uniquely, unlike standing on your left foot all the time, uh can like bring out better versions of yourself.
SPEAKER_03: Like you agree with the disinhibition argument.
SPEAKER_01: I agree.
SPEAKER_01: And I think, you know, I I'm open to the view that anonymity makes the average post worse.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: But I still think that some of the most valuable content may be benefiting from this kind of disinhibition.
SPEAKER_01: And I think we do both agree that we don't have like a ton of super rigorous information.
SPEAKER_03: Which means we need social science to step in.
SPEAKER_01: So all right, speaking of, then do peer review.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, so peer review, this is a part of the episode where we're gonna have one of us explain, this time Matt, uh, a new piece of social science research um to the other.
SPEAKER_03: So what do you got for me?
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this is a new paper, uh, Olivia Feldman, Joshua Hyman, and Matthew uh McGann, and they are looking at um the impact of weather uh on the day that students do tours of colleges on applications, and they find a like a pretty large impact that students are 10% less likely to apply to a college that they visited on a hot day, and they're 8% less likely uh to apply to a college if they toured on a rainy day.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think almost everybody can agree that whether it happens to be raining or not on the day that you tour a college is not like super relevant to the question of whether or not you should go there.
SPEAKER_01: Um, we can see how it happened.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I remember a million years ago, I was uh visiting the University of Chicago uh and my mom was with me, and it was a beautiful day.
SPEAKER_01: And she just like kept emphasizing to me, Matt, like I have been to Chicago.
SPEAKER_01: The weather is usually not this good.
SPEAKER_01: Do not apply to this school just because it's really nice today.
SPEAKER_01: Um and I thought that was funny at the time.
SPEAKER_01: She would, but like I think I think the data backs her up.
SPEAKER_03: Well, the funny thing too is like uh, well, I was surprised that hot weather was like a stronger uh impediment to people than rainy weather.
SPEAKER_03: Um, but when you look at the subgroups in the piece, they also found that men and racial ethnic minorities are more sensitive to poor tour weather generally.
SPEAKER_03: Um, while and participants hailing from hotter states are most sensitive to cold weather, which makes sense.
SPEAKER_03: But I thought that was like, I mean, I look back at my decision, I attended the College of William Mary, which is a small public school in in Virginia.
SPEAKER_03: And um, I didn't really have like a good reason for going there.
SPEAKER_03: I actually in many ways think it was like kind of like a weird choice for me.
SPEAKER_03: I like love cities.
SPEAKER_03: I like to live in an urban area.
SPEAKER_03: I like didn't think about it.
SPEAKER_03: Where is it?
SPEAKER_03: It's in Williamsburg, Virginia.
SPEAKER_03: It's like in right, I I lived right in Colonial Williamsburg my first year.
SPEAKER_02: Williamsburg's cool.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, not for four years at 18, let me tell you.
SPEAKER_01: Um I I think that like in many ways, like I think that you You can go to that like weird colonial restaurant where they have like game pie and stuff.
SPEAKER_03: I don't know what that is.
SPEAKER_03: I don't think I went there.
SPEAKER_03: It's part of Colonial Williams first.
SPEAKER_01: I you went over there for four years?
SPEAKER_03: I have no idea what that is.
SPEAKER_03: Um I believe you that exists.
SPEAKER_03: But I mean, I think that like even your anecdote about your mom saying this to you, like.
SPEAKER_03: My parents, who were like very well educated, they both like, you know, they went to undergrad in uh in Ethiopia and then they went to grad school here in the United States um later on in their lives.
SPEAKER_03: But like their entire viewpoint towards how you pick a college is like you pick the best one that you get into, right?
SPEAKER_03: Like, I mean, at the University of Addis Ababa, my father was like literally told what he was supposed to study because it was under the communist dirg at the time.
SPEAKER_03: So like it was like it's like a situation where like they often did not have advice for me about like, or they I didn't even think about the axes of like picking a college that went beyond just like, is it a good school that accepted you?
SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's like some question about money, but really like I was like, we're taking out student loans regardless of what happens here, so it didn't really factor in there.
SPEAKER_01: How was the weather?
SPEAKER_01: Did you tour?
SPEAKER_03: The weather was really good at William and Mary at the day I went.
SPEAKER_03: I went there for the college, I was there for Model United Nations one year.
SPEAKER_03: But I think the thing that's interesting is that like I think that like your story indicates like a lot of um of this like information about how to make decisions as a youth around like college is like something that is like very difficult to transmit if like you don't have parents who also went to college.
SPEAKER_03: Like no, I agree.
SPEAKER_03: And it's like so it's so like difficult because like I genuinely think that like I would never have attended William Mary if someone had sat down and be like, hey Jerusalem, you really enjoy cities.
SPEAKER_03: You like walking around like urban areas and like attending like eating foods from different cultures.
SPEAKER_03: Like, do you really want to spend four years of like your adolescence in a place where like there's one Indian restaurant and one French restaurant that you can't afford, and everything else closes at 8 p.m.?
SPEAKER_03: I like never even thought about that.
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: So just to clarify, yeah, uh, the restaurant I was talking about is the King's Arms Tavern.
SPEAKER_01: Um I I was thinking of it's called the the game, a game pie spelled PYE, because it's old time eat, because it's colonial Williamsburg.
SPEAKER_01: Uh always remember that dish.
SPEAKER_01: Uh it was it was quite good.
SPEAKER_03: Um stronger memories than I do.
SPEAKER_01: But I mean, that's what I think is uh enlightening about this paper.
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like surprising because the effect sizes are large, but it's like kind of not surprising because we know actually that people are making these decisions.
SPEAKER_01: They think about it, I think.
SPEAKER_01: At least many people.
SPEAKER_01: But even when you think, it's like quasi thinking, you know, it's very who's to say.
SPEAKER_03: I think it's also that like, do we give I mean, like, I think genuinely, like most people are not given um very good frameworks for how to make certain kinds of decisions.
SPEAKER_00: Right.
SPEAKER_00: And so I what I think is sort of So you default this weather thing, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_03: Right.
SPEAKER_01: So I mean, you know, I I think this is important because in you know, in education, you know, I've been thinking a lot about K-12 education recently and you know, what things are good about it and what things are bad.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm often like mad at teachers unions as uh people sometimes are.
SPEAKER_01: But the kind of like default view of the mad at teachers unions universe is that like we should just have much more choice, right?
SPEAKER_01: That if we like had market options in education, you know, everything would work out.
SPEAKER_01: And this is like one of the topics where I feel like most left-wing on, because we know in the college context, like we have an unregulated choice architecture, and we could see in that context that like people just whatever it is they're doing, they are definitely not seeking out or obtaining information about the quality of instruction at different colleges and applying on that basis.
SPEAKER_03: That's a way too strong claim.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, at best, they are just seeking out information about selectivity and trying to get in to the most selected.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, do you think that that correlates with quality?
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think it does.
SPEAKER_01: I don't think there's any real basis for that.
SPEAKER_03: You're thinking that when you go on the U.S.
SPEAKER_03: and world report and you see the top 50 schools that are listed, that there's like no correlation with quality of instruction?
SPEAKER_03: Who knows?
SPEAKER_03: No, I'm actually asking, I'm surprised by this.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think it's I think it's very unclear, right?
SPEAKER_01: And I think that the schools are just at the I think this is the thing people from Harvard say.
SPEAKER_01: No, I mean I just think it's like the basis of competition.
SPEAKER_01: But I mean, but also that we're seeing that like if only people were just applying strictly on the basis of US news rankings, like that would be better because they're like actually really influenced by the weather.
SPEAKER_03: Um I think that if you did a study and check to see if people were if you were to decompose, have people make decisions, I think it would be a lot larger.
unknown: Choose.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I mean, it's it's in there.
SPEAKER_01: And but like also we know like there's a tremendous amount, because you were talking about, you know, it matters a lot, like who your parents are, right?
SPEAKER_01: Like there's a lot of undermatching uh when you look at like low-income kids, you know, and especially if when you're talking about, you know, people whose parents aren't educated and whose test scores are like good, but not like so good that you'd get into the very top schools, those people tend to be just like disconnected from the information ecosystem.
SPEAKER_01: They don't know that they could get into the 103rd best college in America, but we've got like a fucking billion colleges in America, right?
SPEAKER_01: The 103rd best college is like pretty good and like worth attending if you can get in.
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, it's like it's a big mess.
SPEAKER_01: So I don't want to draw like incredibly strong policy conclusions from that.
SPEAKER_03: Like, I think this take the I hear this a lot um from people who like went to very elite schools who are just like, well, I don't know, are things like better at these elite schools, like whatever?
SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, I don't even know.
SPEAKER_03: Like, I mean, I I did college debate, which means I traveled a lot to like a bunch of different colleges, and then I mean I had a lot of friends who went to a bunch of different colleges, particularly across the Eastern Seaboard, but across the whole nation.
SPEAKER_03: Um, I can tell you that like people's self-reports about how good their classes were often did quite clearly correlate with the selectivity schools.
SPEAKER_03: Like, sure, I think their teachers were smart.
SPEAKER_01: Because there's pure effects.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's going on, right?
SPEAKER_01: I I all those things are the same.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
SPEAKER_01: I I'm not like trying to do super contrarian takes about top-ranked schools.
SPEAKER_01: I'm just saying that the the student choice architecture, I think, is like a really poor lever for quality, right?
SPEAKER_01: And to the extent that it works at all, it's just it's it's a reason.
SPEAKER_01: Like, I do think that the college admissions process is like a reasonable sorting mechanism.
SPEAKER_01: That like the schools clearly, like on average, are like getting the better students into the the better schools, but that we would benefit from a lot more um centralization and assignment and less choice in this place.
SPEAKER_01: That like people, particularly people who don't have as much like family or guidance counselor information, particularly when you're talking about degradations of quality that are outside the realm of like famousness.
SPEAKER_01: You know, the the most famous schools, right?
SPEAKER_01: That like uh schools that do well in the NCAA tournament, like get an application boost, right?
SPEAKER_01: Because it's just getting on people's radars in arbitrary ways.
SPEAKER_01: And that that's important, that like these decisions are being made in a very information poor environment when you're not talking about, you know, there's there's like Ivy League schools that people know.
SPEAKER_01: And any given state usually has like a flagship public university that if you pay like a little bit of attention, you're aware that like that's the good one.
SPEAKER_03: But like beyond that, I I in the most the most narrow context that I agree with you on is that like a lot, I think a lot of people when they're picking between like the flagship big public school and the like private school that like is you know like a bucolic Northeast private school but is like not actually ranked that much higher than their public school, they're often like making a bad decision for the amount of money they're putting into it.
SPEAKER_03: But I think that like while I think directionally we're in the same place here, I actually I think in general, because all of these things end up correlating, like, yeah, like if most people end up making decisions that like the schools with better weather are better schools, that means you get peer effects of like people moving there.
SPEAKER_03: You also get like professors will prefer those places as well.
SPEAKER_03: And so better professors will end up there because the schools will be able to select amongst the bigger pools.
SPEAKER_03: I'm just like, there's a reason why they come to New York.
SPEAKER_03: And like New York, like in New York, for instance, this is why you see like even the like, you know, the CUNYs and the studies often have like very highly ranked professors because people want to be in New York City.
SPEAKER_03: Um and so you end up getting like really, really top professors that maybe couldn't, you know, SUNY, you know, that are upstate, like couldn't actually get those people.
SPEAKER_03: And so I mean, like, I think that like I think you're a little bit too strong on like the choice can't get us there.
SPEAKER_03: I think I agree that there's like a more information, being clear with people about outcomes from different places, being clear about the value of these things could improve things.
SPEAKER_03: But I I and and you know, maybe part of this would require uh could benefit from some centralization matching, even if it's just recommendations algorithms.
SPEAKER_03: But I don't know.
SPEAKER_03: I think you're gonna be able to do that.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, but if but I want to get back to like what the what no, just like what the finding is, right?
SPEAKER_01: Because people wanting to go to school someplace where the weather is good is like maybe not the most like academically high-minded idea, but like that makes perfect sense, right?
SPEAKER_01: Uh but but but like what happened here, right, is you know, we have a team of researchers, uh, all three of whom are at Amherst College, um, and they looked at a uh highly selective institution of higher education in the northeastern United States.
SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm not telling you that they were looking at Amherst College, but it seems like they were.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: The weather is not good in Amherst, Massachusetts.
SPEAKER_01: The weather's quite bad in Amherst, Massachusetts.
SPEAKER_01: I've I've been to Amherst, Massachusetts, I've been to Amherst College, I've been to UMass, I've been to Mount Holyoke nearby.
SPEAKER_01: The weather there sucks.
SPEAKER_01: They're not finding that like people are applying there because the weather is good.
SPEAKER_01: They're finding that if you tour on a day when the weather is good, it's making people want and so it's like even if you're obsessed with the weather, you should look it up.
SPEAKER_03: But I'm saying this is just I mean, this to me is just a heuristic.
SPEAKER_03: Like in general, people are going on multiple college tours.
SPEAKER_03: And so on days the weather are gonna more likely be good on days of the city.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but it's but this is the point.
SPEAKER_01: Like it's they they say quote unquote feel as a determinant of college choice.
SPEAKER_01: If they were uh younger or more online, they might say vibes.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's like, you know, I'll say on behalf of the University of Chicago, uh, because I did a fellowship at Institute of Politics there.
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I was there over a period of time.
SPEAKER_01: The weather was mostly miserable.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but by the end, the weather was good.
SPEAKER_01: And what I will say about the city of Chicago is that on those early spring days when the weather finally becomes good, the vibes in Chicago are so good.
SPEAKER_01: And like there's so much better than the vibes in San Diego or LA or someplace where it's like that weather all the time because it's exciting, you know.
SPEAKER_03: And like this is like your argument to me always about like why I shouldn't just like move to some like really warm area because you're like, no, you'll just get used to it and it won't be fun anymore.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01: And you know, and it's like it's Chicago, like in when the when the spring warms up, right?
SPEAKER_01: It's like everybody comes out.
SPEAKER_01: They're like, we gotta take advantage of this.
SPEAKER_01: We've got to, we've gotta live.
SPEAKER_01: And it's incredible.
SPEAKER_01: Suffering is part of the good life.
SPEAKER_01: But like you're you're you're still sentencing yourself to misery.
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I don't know, guys.
SPEAKER_01: Um Amherst is lovely.
SPEAKER_01: Please apply.
SPEAKER_01: Don't think that I'm slandering them.
SPEAKER_03: I do think that like one mode of hope here is that like there is significant research that like giving people better information about both like whether it's low-income kids, about the fact that they could like go to Harvard for free, or if they, you know, if they have high test scores, or it's like giving people information about like the quality of these schools, what they'll get out of it, like what it actually means to pay for it.
SPEAKER_03: Like, often does actually change behavior in meaningful ways.
SPEAKER_03: Um, there one uh study that I remember I talked to the um, he's actually at the University of Chicago, uh, Christopher Campos.
SPEAKER_03: He's an economist, and he did this uh study about the Los Angeles zones of choice um and about what happened when they allowed parents to basically choose between the ver uh a few different high schools um in their area.
SPEAKER_03: And you actually do see like meaningful improvement in the school quality overall because parents are meaningfully moving away from the bad schools, and then principals will institute policies at bad schools that like force better outcomes, and this has like durable impacts on the students.
SPEAKER_03: So like, I think that you should be able to do that.
SPEAKER_01: That's very often I'm because haven't you seen like aren't there all these studies about like parents just ignore information about school value add and just like check the demographics and want to go to school with white people?
SPEAKER_03: This is this is true, but like in this context, it would be not me.
SPEAKER_01: I'm a good person.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Just to be clear.
SPEAKER_03: I don't have kids, so I have not confronted these problems.
SPEAKER_01: Um you might be good or bad.
SPEAKER_01: I'm okay though.
SPEAKER_03: My kids will be black.
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: That doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_03: No, I'm just saying.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: I just want you to know that like people can do racist stuff regardless of their personal identity.
SPEAKER_03: Um, this is breaking news.
SPEAKER_01: I'm letting you know.
SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure you've ever heard on that hot take.
SPEAKER_01: I'm putting it out there.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, well, I think that's a great hot take to end on.
SPEAKER_03: Racism can come from all quarters of life.
SPEAKER_03: Um uh, but tune in next week when Matt will have a hot take.
SPEAKER_01: And you know, please uh like, subscribe, follow us uh wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_01: You you don't want to miss the next episode of the argument.