How Do You Regulate What Can Outthink You? | Gregg Hurwitz

But one of the things we should focus on very briefly with regards to equality of opportunity too is that we have to understand that opening the door to opportunity for everyone is very good for the individuals involved. But you could make a sociological case that that's not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is you want to open the doors on the equality of opportunity side because you want the broad culture to be able to benefit from the specific contributions of the most able people. Any arbitrary barriers are going to work against that.

Like, the reason that you want extremely intelligent, hardworking, creative kids at Harvard isn't so they can have stellar careers. That's part of it and good for them. That's not the issue. The issue is you want to educate those people like mad because they're going to produce products that are so useful for everyone else that if those particular people have a few privileges along the way, that's just fine. So, equality of opportunity is the best sociological solution as well as the best psychological solution.

When I was there as an undergraduate, one of the first things they told us, they gathered everyone in Sver Hall and they said, "You're going to learn more here from your classmates than from your professors." I thought that was, you know, a silly kind of old saw, but it's absolutely true. That cohort was— I mean, people all over the world, people all over the country, and it was incredible in terms of the strengthening of one's mind to see people from every reach of America internationally, all trained up under a joint narrative that continued friendships across different states of being. Every single kind of group— merit and merit-based selection is the best way to ensure that.

So we know, for example, that the alternative to merit-based selection historically has been dynasty and nepotism. There's no productivity in dynasty and nepotism because it means that, you know, your right to a position is determined by your birth—by your state of birth. It has nothing to do with your competence.

You get good China, though? Yeah, yeah, well, right, right. All right, so gratitude, not grievance; rule of law; pursuit of truth; focus on outcomes. Reality is where ideology goes to die. That's like, that's something I wrote and taped to my wall. If you're solving solutions with measurable outcomes, look, there's a lot of libertarianism that has crept into my worldview much more as I've pursued things. Yeah, right, measure something not by its intentions but its outcomes.

In a way, everything's irrelevant. I don't care what your intentions are. That's true on the social intervention side because you have to ensure that your intervention is producing the consequences that you desired. It's very unlikely because there are a million ways things can go wrong and generally only one or two ways they can go right.

So concrete steps: uphold free speech, prosecute illegal action. It's fairly easy. If people are breaking laws and throwing bottles at police officers and blocking traffic and making true threats against individuals and vandalizing buildings and people's houses, they can be arrested and actually prosecuted. We don't need to make exceptions for them any differently than were made for Harvey Milk or the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.

But people are allowed to have their opinions. They're allowed to criticize any state, that includes Israel, any leadership which includes Netanyahu. They're allowed to peacefully protest. They're allowed to compete in a free marketplace of ideas— no problem. But we don't break the law, and we know that. That's from both sides of the fence, right? We have fringes who do that on both sides.

You know, face coverings and masks at protests, if they're being used to menace and terrorize, that should be illegal. That's the purview of the KKK, right? That's not what we do. Stand behind, you know, you can't cover your face to do things that are illegal or to terrorize people.

And then the algorithms in social media— that's almost a whole other discussion for, because you and I have been talking about this a lot. There are ways to maintain freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean freedom of reach for profit, which means if I say the most outrageous, misogynistic or anti-Semitic or insane thing, that the algorithms should drive that for profit for corporations.

When the algorithms are hidden covertly behind firewalls that we don't even know who we're talking to or if they're American. We should also beware of presuming that the tech people themselves can solve these problems. Because, like I see this with Zuckerberg and with Musk— and perhaps they're on opposite sides of the political spectrum, they still have the same problem.

Corruption aside, no one knows how to regulate online discourse— like to bring the rule of law and order to online discourse. No one solved that problem. Half of online activity is criminal across the board— right, pornography, outright crime, and then the sort of quasi-crimes that constitute trolling and so forth. No one knows how to regulate that, and we shouldn't expect the tech engineers to be able to manage that without... But there's, as you've said and we've discussed, there are some concrete steps we can make.

One of them is we need transparent algorithms to know if 60% of the people who are screaming about anti-Semitism and encouraging it are Russian bots. That's a good thing to know. That's not a freedom of speech issue. The human actors from the non-human actors— and you discuss if you're anonymous and don't want to stand behind your words online, yeah, you don't need to be censored.

There's a whistleblower issue, but you could certainly be in a second tier of comments below an interface of people who are willing. That's not much different than stopping masking, because online anonymity is the virtual equivalent of masking, right? And the other thing is that you pointed to quite sanely is that everything to some extent needs some degree of human intervention. That's okay; whether it's a Tesla factory, whether it's a—you—everything cannot be automated.

Well, you can't automate the edge cases. You can't. That's what consciousness, that's actually what consciousness itself is for. Yes, right? Because as we can transform something into an algorithm neurologically speaking, we become—it's unconscious. Yes, right? We transform regulating our heartbeat into an algorithm. You're never conscious of that; it runs on its own.

Once you've got something down, it should run on its own. But there's always an edge of transformation, right? The edge of transformation can't be algorithmized. That entails a very tightly associated free speech, right? Thought is internalized speech, yes.

So the way that consciousness navigates that transformative edge that can't be transformed into an algorithm is through the mechanism of free discourse. That's the mechanism, yes. And so there has to be a wide variety of opinions because we don't know how to...

[Music] So algorithmization can't go into a private company. Can't say, "Look, we've identified 150 to 250 people who are clearly bent on sowing chaos, terrorizing America— here they are; here's processes that we have undertaken; they're completely transparent." And it doesn't necessarily mean you even deplatform them, but could you perhaps turn down their reach that you're taking advantage of for profit because they're driving outrage and hatred?

More and more people are turned into a swirl of hatred; that is not a good long-term strategy for any company or any country, not unless it wants to be overrun by manipulative psychopaths. That's right. And so any platform will get rife with it, and people will leave. Look, you and Michaela and Jordan Fuller have solved this— Peterson Academy— everybody has to have their name; who has comma.

There's a social board; people pay a reasonable but low price of entry to have access to the classes, and the discourse on there is entirely sane, approximating an honor code, which is like, if you act like a jerk, you can have your money back and leave. You might say, "Well, who decides that?" And, well, the answer at the moment is twofold; the community itself is deciding that, but we are watching too, and we've identified three people out of 30,000 who've caused trouble— three people, right?

And the discourse in there, especially as it builds out, we can have these interfaces just like kids— Jonathan Haidt is suggesting limitations on when kids have their phones. Is there any reason we need, like, to have access to them from 8:00 a.m. or 4:00 in the morning if a tweet alerts? We can have limitations on that. Private companies can also make limitations on how they want to conduct their marketplace of ideas.

What's one person in a classroom having a constant temper tantrum? That means nobody can learn. I was trying to distinguish the other day between referee and censor. There are game rules by which civilized discourse has to proceed. A referee makes sure that the rules are being applied fairly and across the board; everyone knows what they are. A censor is someone who's making arbitrary behind-the-scenes decisions.

I think we can discriminate between censors and referees, especially if you do it early and you set the ground rules. Yeah, right, right. Okay, so American control—this is fascinating. Three and a half or 3.5 more Americans believe that American news organizations and social media platforms should be owned by U.S. entities to prevent the spread of foreign propaganda and disinformation.

Of course, like, would Iran allow us to have a major networking effort through social media that goes to their entire populace? Would China allow us to do that? Does Russia? Does Brazil? Right? Yes, most notably and recently. But it's perfectly acceptable to understand that America is allowed to have a national identity, one that is shared in good and creates a lot of space for people of different groups to compete.

Though we have a lot of obstacles, we have to get right to remove those obstacles to equality of opportunity. And that's what's driving a lot of these problems. But the more we can focus on solving those real problems, we are certainly allowed to have ownership of who is educating our kids and driving our discourse in the hands of Americans.

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