Ilana Redstone
speaker
45 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Ilana Redstone’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's always before you have kids. And I would think, oh my gosh, what does this person do? How is this parent, whatever the situation is, there must be something that they could be doing that would keep that child quiet and they're not doing it because they just don't care about how much it's bothering other people.
And then, you know, when I had kids and I was the person holding the crying child on the long flight and I had no idea what else I could do to try and quiet the child, like I'd done everything.
And I could imagine and I could I could easily imagine that there were other people on that flight that were viewing people that were, excuse me, that were viewing me the same way I had viewed others in those years before. That's certainty. That's that's the way it's about how we judge people.
It does seem to me like, I mean, I'm 51. It does seem to me like it is worse in the last, say, 20 years. I think people have a lot of theories about why that's the case. Social media is one of the things that is often mentioned. Social media rewards, if what you're trying to do is build a following, social media tends to reward outrage. So that creates an incentive.
I don't mean to say that that's the only factor, but I think it's probably one of them. And I also think that there have been changes in how we think about education, what's true about the world and how we treat that information that has shifted in the last 20 years.
It's that idea that the person who disagrees with me must be an idiot or hateful in some way. That's the problem that I'm trying to solve with the certainty trap. And it doesn't mean that you can't say, this is right, this is wrong, this is good, and this is bad. What it means is you need to be clear about it and clear about what those principles are that are sort of driving your opinion.
And that means, kind of as you were saying, that means not attacking someone's character.
It's a good question. I mean, so I don't wanna sound like I think there's one goal that sort of answers that question equally for everybody. I can give you one answer though. So I'm in the sociology department at the University of Illinois. And sociology, higher education, just on the political spectrum, I'm not saying anything new here. Higher education leans left.
Sociology within higher education is one of the disciplines that leans left within higher education. So that tends to be the orientation of a lot of the students that I see, for example. They, I would not say that when I interact with students, I would not say that their goal is necessarily education. to change minds, and I'm generalizing, there's obviously variability within students.
I would say that they genuinely feel certain and believe that they are doing the right thing when they are saying things this is wrong, this is hateful, et cetera, right?
Like, I think that it comes from, at least from what I've seen, not necessarily an instrumental goal of saying, I'm going to tell you you're racist and then you're going to change your mind, but a feeling that I need to call this out when I see it. And that's my, maybe they wouldn't word it this way, but that's my moral duty.
Right. Well, part of that is, well, I don't even, actually, I'm not even sure I agree with that. I don't think nothing comes with it. I think, sorry, nothing comes of it. I think that what comes out of it is more extremism, more polarization, more contempt, et cetera. Like I think what comes, and so part of what I'm trying to do is help them understand that that's part of what's going on.
So I don't think if what you mean by nothing, you know, what comes out of it, yeah, what comes out of it in terms of, As you started to say, changing minds, like making the world a better place, that I don't think is where it ends up. I think it has all of these other consequences. So in other words, I don't think that that kind of behavior is neutral.
I think it has negative consequences that I'm trying to help people understand.
It does. And it has all kinds of implications for, again, like I sort of said this, but for extremism, for pushing people to further to extreme positions, for how we use terms like
racist transphobic etc to condemn ideas um and and and all of what that means with the social consequences that go along with it in terms of cancel culture and everything else it's all sort of folded in to this idea of certainty in how we think about contentious topics really is that's the sort of through line between it and so what is the prescription if you think you're perhaps
I would love to see people start out. So what one of the things that I'll ask people to do is pick your some issue that you think and you think the person who has a different idea from you, it has to be. It's odious, it's objectionable, it's hateful, it's only some kind of moral monster would hold that opinion. And for different people, it will be different topics.
So whatever it is for you, and you can do this sitting in a room by yourself, pick that issue and challenge yourself to try and come up with a version of that person's opinion, the one that you find objectionable, that would make sense to you. And I mean something really specific by makes sense.
I mean that you can't hang on an assumption about their intent or that they just don't have the right information. So I call these, I have names for these fallacies, the fallacy of equal knowledge and the fallacy of known intent. So pick the objectionable point of view try and come up with a version of how the person could get to that point of view that makes sense to you.
And I'll just say this again. By makes sense, you're not hanging it on an assumption about their intent or that they just don't have the right information. Most of the time, for most issues, just going through that process helps people understand, wow, okay, I get it. There's a different way of thinking about this.
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