Nicholas Christakis

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.7 • 963 Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2019

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of The Good Fight, Yascha Mounk talks to Nicholas Christakis, the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Sciences at Yale University, and the author of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, about whether human nature predisposes humans to conflict or cooperation--and what all of that has to do with populism. Email: thegoodfight@newamerica.org Twitter:@Yascha_Mounk Podcast production by John T. Williams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The historical forces are tending to the good, but these historical forces, actually, even they, are trivial compared to these evolutionary forces, which are huge and which shape us and equip us with all of these tools that in my view
0:17.8	tend to the good. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
0:23.0	Welcome to the podcast that searches for the ideas, policies and strategies that can
0:28.3	veto for a town populist like Donald Trump over the next four years and the next 40.
0:35.0	I have been thinking a lot about the really pernicious role that Twitter plays in our politics. Now there's all kinds of problems with Twitter.
0:45.5	There's the problems of conspiracy theories spreading across a portion of the
0:51.0	population. There's a problem of very small communities of people
0:55.3	getting sufficiently radicalized to inflict tremendous violence through
1:00.6	terrorism. But the biggest problem, I think, is about the way in which Twitter seduces a lot of the most influential people in the country to fundamentally misunderstand public opinion.
1:19.0	People at corporations take the views of the most devoted customers or the greatest haters to be representative of the products by manufacture and sell.
1:30.0	Publishing houses and newspaper and magazine editors try to please the followers on
1:37.2	Twitter whose views are very different from those of the great majority of their readers.
1:44.0	And perhaps most consequentially, political candidates,
1:48.0	their advisors, political journalists,
1:50.0	think that the views they see on the timeline actually stand in for the views of the broader electoral coalition.
2:01.0	But all of those things it turns out are wrong.
2:05.0	Business studies show that the views of average customers
2:11.0	diverge systematically from the views of customers who post about a product on social media.
2:17.0	And the people who post about politics on Twitter are completely unrepresentative of the wider population.
2:27.0	Only about one in 20 Americans regularly post about politics on Twitter.
2:34.0	Over 50% of all of the tweets about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012
2:40.0	were generated by less than 1% of Twitter users.
	...

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