Jonathan Haidt on “Two Incompatible Values at American Unive

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I caught this at work. He had a particularly good idea - ie. expediting the schism in US academia between truth as an aim on one side, justice as the aim on the other, and seeing if both can work collaboratively with each other in the cultural debate of ideas.

One of the really neat ideas he offered was adding something on his heterodoxacademy.org that would act like a consumer report for people who are looking for the universities with the best ideological diversity and rate the top 150 or more universities from best to worst on these metrics.

Great talk, thanks for posting this.

As the last question made clear though, it's important to distinguish between justice and social justice, which may not be compatible with truth or justice.

I found this useful in clarifying my own premises: universities should be about truth above all else.

I really liked what he said also between 1:19:30 - 1:20:00. He summed up his case quite powerfully in a few sentences.

Agreed. I also enjoyed the light bulb joke.

I highly recommend his book The Righteous Mind, it's very informative on why smart people can come to such radically different beliefs about things, and why such disagreements can be so strong. I particularly enjoyed an anecdote he shares about how uncomfortable he was putting an American flag decal on his car after 9/11 as a college professor, and his examination of why he and his colleagues were so oddly ambivalent about it.

I'll look for that book.

Based on what I've heard Haidt say in other talks, I would guess that he was torn between wanting to display a flag as a symbol of national solidarity and a protecting talisman or ward against terrorist evil after 9/11 on the one hand, and his habitual perception of flag displays as a derided and despised symbol of the Red State tribe on the other.

I remember so well that period of flag mania after 9/11. It seemed so obvious to me what it meant as a sign of solidarity and protection: we are a great nation and we stand together. You terrorists may have been able to abuse our generous hospitality and hurt us, but the great nation symbolized by this flag has the means to revisit any hurt you do to us a thousandfold on you. Don't tread on me.

I was in a bubble of somewhat shell-shocked people in lower Manhattan. There were days of silence and days of tracking down missing relatives and friends and dealing with the gratitude or heartbreak of that. In the first couple of days, everyone was very quiet on the street. The constant smoke and overflights of F-15s kept reinforcing the intensity of the situation, it took a couple of weeks for life to slowly creep back toward some kind of normalcy, though so many big systems (e.g., the subways) were disrupted that it was only a thin semblance of normal.

In the midst of that, when the flag idea came out, everyone was very ready for it. I put a flag in my office window, but I didn't feel it communicated part of what it meant to me unambiguously enough, so I flanked it with small Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps flags. I think I may have caused others to wonder about my tribal affiliation.

I wonder if the basic dynamics were the same in other areas. I have a hard time imagining what it was like to look at those issues from other areas of the country. In lower Manhattan, everything was very intense. I felt the terrorists had tried to kill me and my family and I studied them hard and took them seriously. This is why I despise Salafist jihadis and have no time for the (typically ignorant) people who apologize for them.

It's interesting to look at the division between us (the modern West in general) and them (Militant Salafists) in the frameworks Haidt uses. I still don't see a lot of scope for peaceful coexistance with such ideas no matter how one approaches them.