Peter Boghossian: Having Impossible Conversations
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My guest today is Peter Boghossian (@peterboghossian). Peter is a professional philosopher and professor with more than 25 years of teaching experience. His primary research areas are moral reasoning and critical thinking.
Peter is the author of several books, including his most recent, How to Have Impossible Conversations. He is also responsible for the infamous Grievance Studies Affair, which is the subject of a forthcoming documentary.
Peter and I discussed how to expose ignorance, moral stereotypes, the inevitable decline of universities, and much more. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.
Selected links from the show:
Show notes:
2:00 - Why Peter and James Lindsay decided to write How To Have Impossible Conversations
8:25 - The Unread Library Effect - people don't understand as much as they think they understand
10:30 - Discussion of Morgan Housel's Degrees of Confidence
14:35 - How to expose a person's Unread Library Effect
18:00 - The value of assigning scales to confidence in beliefs
"I have a fairly high confidence level that my wife isn't fucking all the members of the Portland Trailblazers at this moment. But I'm less confident in that than I am that the world existed before I was born."
24:53 - Using scales to convince people to quit smoking
32:05 - The "Yes, and" technique
35:50 - Why you shouldn't bring evidence to a conversation
37:48 - Moral foundations theory
"Part of my job is to ask tough questions. Part of my job is to engage issues."
44:20 - Speakers being dis-invited from college campuses - is it an issue?
"We've created a culture in which asking for evidence is a trauma."
55:35 - Peter's thoughts on the collapse of universities
"The universities are the gems of American exceptionalism, and they have been so catastrophically mismanaged by a combination of an ideological takeover and gross ineptitude that now, when we need them most, we don't have the products of those universities upon which we can rely to make better decisions."
