Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.
We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Nicholas Christakis. Nicholas, thanks for joining me again. Sam, it's so good to see you again. Yeah, great to see you.
Yeah, we don't see each other in person enough or even on the internet enough, but I always love talking to you. So let's just jump right into it. I'll remind people you are the director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale. You are both an MD and a sociologist and have studied many interesting topics related to, I guess, how human beings and now technology affect one another.
And we have too much to talk about. I think I want to start with the question of, I guess I just want your postmortem on the present. This last decade, what has technology, specifically information technology, done to us?
Yeah, so I think we are going to see the other side of our present dilemma. I think it is going to take half a generation to really be on the other side of it because I think we've dug ourselves into quite a hole.
I share the opinion, I suspect, with you and certainly with people like John Haidt and others that the kind of technology that we've invented or the turns that our technology has taken, our communication technology has taken in the last 10 years, have so far been quite harmful to us, whatever other benefits they've had. I think they've contributed to this polarization.
They've contributed to anomie. They've contributed to some of the mental health crises we've had. I think they've also led to a surveillance state, not just abroad, but shockingly in our own country where these technologies are being used in ways that I would regard as, you know, quasi-totalitarian or at least pose the threat of that.
I had a friend long ago, I still have him, he's still a friend of mine. And years ago, he told me he didn't use credit cards and, you know, he refused to get a cell phone and he wanted, you know, he was trying to be off the grid because he didn't want to be surveyed. And I thought he was like a Luddite nut. Yet now, you know, I'm Worry that like my every move is being tracked by someone.
So if to the extent that you are arguing, and I think you are, that some of what ails us at present is due to some of these communication technologies and the ways they've been grafted onto very thin,
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Chapter 2: What has technology done to us in the last decade?
And he sent a long thread out about like how the tires hadn't, the trucks hadn't been moved around properly. The tires hadn't been rotated, how all the tires were exploding. I had no idea there was such a person. And I read his whole thread and I was like, oh my God, it's so interesting. All of that content, that expertise is, as far as I can tell, is gone from Twitter.
Yeah. This is being vitiated by AI slop or what is, how has it gone?
Well, first of all, whatever the algorithm is, I don't get that content. The AI slop is a serious problem. And I, one of my, my family teases me, I'm known to be particularly gullible.
Right. Yeah.
And actually my re-narration of this is that I'm not stupid and naive and gullible. I'm trusting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're a good person, in other words.
Exactly, exactly. That's my story and I'm sticking with it. But the thing is, somehow these algorithms figured out that I like to look at like baby elephants. And initially I got like real, I think, you know, like BBC photos of like baby elephants. And then I think the algorithm started feeding me slop. Like, you know, like a hippopotamus, a crocodile attacks a baby elephant.
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Chapter 3: How do communication technologies contribute to societal polarization?
Do you think it's a successful series of lawsuits, a revocation of Section 230, just a virtuous cycle of social contagion where we all begin to change our minds at once and influence the norms around using social media? Or is it just that AI slop itself will provide some cure because... Every video you see, your first question here until the end of the world is, you know, is this even real?
And it will begin to no longer care what's being presented in these non-gate-kept channels.
Chapter 4: What is the impact of social media on mental health?
So I have a few things to say about that. First of all, it's known that, as you everyone listening knows, that anonymity contributes to a lot of the problems. And, you know, this is why people used to, you know, torturers used to wear masks and
you know, and people would be disinhibited when they went to mask balls, for example, that, you know, these fancy ass balls we imagined from hundreds of years ago, you know, that the aristocracy had, you know, it's disinhibiting to hide your, and this is also why people in mobs behave awfully. They have a kind of practical anonymity while you get riots. It's sort of well in the process.
So I think that humans, of course, behave worse when they're anonymous or pseudonymous. And now I have a hard time arguing. My problem is that I think that any entity where you can't be anonymous behavior is going to be better. On the other hand, I don't necessarily want to abolish anonymity either, because I think that's a tool for totalitarianism.
So I think there will be social media companies which require or where people who use them, which afford people the opportunity to be non-anonymous and which people then privilege non-anonymous accounts, which I think will help. So I think tools to afford people the option and also to exploit non-anonymity will help.
So like the old blue check mark on Twitter was a good idea. Yeah.
Yeah. Another thing you said, 230, like I struggle with this as well, because on the one hand, I do think that 230 was crucial, actually, for the emergence of the Internet. I do think that there is an argument to be made that these social media companies are just carriers and shouldn't be responsible for their content.
On the other hand, I also think, you know, washing their hands of the content entirely doesn't make much sense either. It allows them to sort of wink, wink and just ignore content. horrible abuses taking place on their platform. So I actually don't have an answer to that struggle either.
But what I do think is going to happen, just as you said, is I think people, and maybe this will be accelerated by AI and AI slot, I think people will learn. And I think, ironically, we may have a kind of return to a privileging of reputable sources, like
you know, we've migrated so far away from, you know, the evening news with Dan Rather kind of, you know, thing to everyone is an expert and, you know, there's all this kind of good stuff, but also crap online. I think we may, ironically, people may be willing to pay a bit more for reliability. You may not believe it unless you read it in The Economist, you know, then you'll believe it.
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