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LinkedIn Presents.

Thank you. LinkedIn Presents. Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation

of the tech world and beyond. Jonathan Haidt is our guest today. He's the professor of ethical

leadership at New York University School, Stern School of Business, the author of The Codding of

American Mind, a very popular book that you may have heard of, likely have heard of. And he wrote a

terrific story in the Atlantic called Why the Past Ten Years of American

Life have been uniquely stupid. We're going to get into that and much more as we discuss

the role of social media in our society and how much it's contributed to how bad things have

gotten. Professor, welcome to the show. Thanks, Alex. It's a pleasure to be talking with you.

Great having you here. Let's start with this Google Doc that you put together. It's called social media and political dysfunction. And it's pretty fascinating how it has some arguments for why social media has been bad and then some arguments for maybe the role of it as being overblown. So can you tell us a little bit about the origination of this

document and sort of, yeah, how it came to life and what you learned from it?

Sure. So I'm a social scientist and I have this naive belief that if we just do the right

experiments and studies and gather all the data, we can figure out what things will lead to the

best outcomes. And this is something that

has, I guess, been thought by many people, particularly on the left for the last 300 years,

and it actually doesn't have a very good track record. And the reason is because we all suffer

from confirmation bias. We all are very good at finding evidence to believe whatever we want to believe. And so what I found is when I get into a debate, you know, my natural impulse is to just say why I'm right and find evidence why I'm right. But I'm a great fan of John Stuart Mill who said he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. Okay, this is a very roundabout way of saying.

I found that the best way to actually make any progress on something is you try to get all

the evidence on all sides and you invite people in who are your critics and you cite your

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