The Social Dilemma Part 3 • Dr Rebecca Roache •

Social media is something that enables us to connect with people initially based on certain interests. It makes that very easy. We could do that a lot more easily than we can in real life. But I think just us in real life, as is interacting online, isn’t part of real life. But just us in our online interactions, we’ve often, the way that we start being friends with somebody, is not necessarily the reason that we carry on. We are captivated by the idea of looking beyond our friends, possibly unpalatable views and interests, and loving the person behind them. There’s a pervasive anxiety that true friendship is in decline, and that technology is to blame. We feel that social media enables people to present a deceptively polished version of their lives, leading us to think that real life is a poor imitation of Instagram life. The fact that the internet enables us to connect with similar people has great benefits for friendship. Social media enables us to tap into support and solidarity that might not otherwise be available. The potential friends with the right sorts of shared experiences would be so difficult to find offline. The shared experiences in question are so intimate that we might be reluctant to discuss them in real life. The first century Greek philosopher Blutark wrote, What then is the coin of friendship? It is goodwill and graciousness combined with virtue, than which nature has nothing more rare. It follows then that a strong mutual friendship with many people is impossible, but just as rivers whose waters are divided among branches and channels flow weak and thin, so affection too, naturally strong in a soul, if portioned out among many people will become utterly infeabored. Joining us this evening is Dr Rebecca Roach, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway University of London. Rebecca has written extensively about the future of friendship. Rebecca is interested in practical ethics, logic, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of psychiatry, political philosophy, metaphysics and early modern philosophy. Rebecca was a research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and worked extensively in the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy. She has an M-Fill and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Cambridge and a BA and an MA in philosophy from the University of Leeds. We hope you enjoy the show this evening. Remember to like, comment and subscribe. We love reading your comments and we’ll see you back next week. Today we have Rebecca Roach. I’ve been following Rebecca for many years now. I discovered her in 2015 when she was a guest on the BBC Moral Maze program. People claim that friendships are not what they used to be. People are always staring at their phones, even when in public. A selfie culture has turned us into narcissists who are always managing our own PR rather than being present with each other. Anziety about the negative effects of technology are as old as the written word. Is technology bad for friendships and can you have friends through screens? Does social media cause polarization and is that a bad thing? Does it promote quantity over quality? Rebecca thinks that social media and echo chambers are less ominous to friendship on closer inspection. She also thinks that future cognitive enhancement might change the nature of friendship significantly. Anyway, Rebecca, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show and welcome. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. So, why don’t you give us the elevator pitch? Are you think social media is a force for good or a force for evil in our society? Maybe I can come up with that in a slightly more restricted way. I think that the concerns that people have about it are to an extent overblown technology after technology, after technology, that when it’s been introduced in the first place, people have worried that it’s going to ruin our lives. So, people used to think that when the motor car was invented, that was a bad thing, that was going to destroy our friendships. The same for the telephone. And so on. So, that helps to put our anxieties about social media into some perspective that a lot of our concerns are going to turn out to be overblown. But at the same time, it’s like any other tool. There’s good ways and bad ways you can use it. Television is a bad thing if you spend your whole life in front of it. So, it’s reading. If you spend all your time with the nose in your book and ignore every member of your family, then that’s not a good thing either. So, there’s a distinction to be made between the technology itself and what that means and the way we use it. One of the things you pointed out in your manuscript is that Socrates said that this was back in the times when letters were being invented. And there was this idea that people will seem on omniscient and generally know nothing. And there’s a really interesting parallel with artificial intelligence because the latest natural language processing models are doing just that. They are memorization machines. They don’t actually know how to reason or abstract in new situations. They’ve just essentially learned everything on the internet. And people are saying that this is a huge problem. So, do you think that really is a concern that we’re incredibly good at memorizing things and can’t actually reason on the fly? To an extent, I can remember before I had a mobile phone, I had quite an extensive memory of, for some of my own phone number, which I struggle with now, and the important phone numbers in my life. And I think with memory of phone numbers, a lot of us have outsourced that to our mobile phones. We don’t need to remember things like that. Yeah. And the same with things like being able to spell that if you spend most of, if most of your writing time involves writing in a word document, then you don’t need to bother checking the spelling, how you spell certain words because you’ve got a spell check. So, there’s plenty of mental capacities, cognitive capacities that we have, which we use less when we have a technology that takes care of that room. How much is that? How much would you characterize this as a negative or a positive development though? Because one could make the argument that I don’t need to spell check. As long as my message comes across and the spell checker makes it such that my message actually comes across more clearly because the other person reads something that’s grammatically and syntactically correct. And I can then spend my mental focus on something that’s more important, maybe how exactly my message sounds like in terms of emotion. Yeah, I completely agree. A lot of this depends on the value you place on having that capacity internalised in the first place. As you say, if you’re not having to think about how to spell or spend time memorising people’s phone numbers, then you can devote your energy to other things. But there are some people who think that we do lose something by outsourcing skills to technology. And it’s not clear what is bad about that, whether that is just nostalgia for the way things used to be done or whether there is something to this belief that it’s just inherently good to be able to spell. That is just a skill that everybody should have. And not sure why subscribe to that. Do you see any, if we go more into social media and interpersonal relationships, do you see any dangers or do you see any instances where properties of interpersonal relationships or skills that connect us to each other relationship wise are outsourced to technology. And how does that go forward? What do you see there? Yeah, interactions on social media might have replaced with a certain extent phone calls and letter writing in the old school sense. I think the way that we can communicate on social media is quite a good stand-in for that. There’s still something nice about receiving a letter from somebody in opening it and reading it and being able to keep it. The core nature of our interactions, I don’t think, have changed that much. And in many ways, say, if being enhanced by a social media to be able to maintain contact with people without having to travel to see them or without having to spend money on what tends to go with social interactions like going to the cinema or going to the pub and buy drinks, that’s the positive thing. So, to be able to interact with people, maintain friendships without that financial outlay. And there’s also people that just may be a bit more introverted and just dislike lots of face-to-face interaction or even speaking on the phone. And then interacting on social media can be a bit more comfortable for those sorts of people. And welcome to Keith Duggan. Hey, yeah, sorry. I guess I didn’t get the memo that it was at 7 or not 730, but we’re back and nice to meet you. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. So, I’m a gamer. I play these massive online games like World of Warcraft, for example. And when I was reading some of your blogs, I was thinking about the fact that in one of the guilds that I was in and World of Warcraft, we had people from all walks of life. Okay, there was everybody from a federal judge, and I’m in the United States, by the way, a federal judge, believe it or not, all the way to an Afghan war vet that would fly off at the handle because he had PTSD and would start ranting about all kinds of things. It gives you the chance, at least, to interact with people from a insanely broad swath of life, right? So, at least from that sense, I really enjoy those interactions. I think there is potential. We do trade, there are trade-offs, right? We’re trading off some aspects of friendship, but on the other hand, like Rebecca was saying, but the fact that you can connect to people anywhere is itself an interesting benefit of it. I think you’re leading on to talking about polarization, because I think you gave quite a nice example, Keith, of how potentially you can have cross-fertilization of ideas, and you can have diverse groups of people meeting together. But also, as we’ve discussed, there’s this concept of echo chambers. And Rebecca said in her recent manuscript that it could have serious implications for liberal democracy. But there’s nothing new, right? Long before the internet, social interactions were confined to communities of like-minded people, but does the scale and the reach of social media affect this, Rebecca? So, the implications of online echo chambers for liberal democracy, I mean, this is something that Cass Sunstein has written. Six several editions of a book about it. He keeps updating us technology advances. Yeah, so I’m more interested in the implications of the social relationships rather than exploring the political implications. I would say I’m not completely convinced by this concern, just because there has always been a degree of polarization. Before the internet, you could choose your newspaper based on your political views. Well, recognise that some newspapers were directed at a left-wing audience and some other right-wing audience. So this has always been the case, and I think it’s a human nature, too. We want the world, we want the news to be presented to us through a particular lens. That’s what the news is. The news is about you don’t have to find out about world affairs by researching them yourself. You get somebody to present a condensed version of it all to you. And by condensing it, decisions have to be made about which bits to emphasise and which bits to leave out. And I think something like journalism, there’s got to be a balance between trying to remain balanced and presenting the facts and putting a particular spin on it that’s going to interest your particular audience. And obviously you can go too far. I just want to challenge a little bit that there’s nothing new here because so one of your blogs Rebecca made this comment that people have always been in like-minded groups, but then on the other hand, you listed kind of seven examples of that or eight actually and I think seven of them actually had nothing to do with mind like it was like a sports team. People with all kinds of mindsets follow a sports team or even a church. People with all different mindsets join a church like what they have in common in terms of their mindset maybe nothing, like close to nothing in these groups whereas on the internet it actually allows the capability for you to align in a relatively large social group solely based on your mindset. And in fact it a very fractionated very narrow slice of the possible mindsets and so I think the difference is that in the physical world if we’re together because of some relatively unimportant common interests like a sports team or a video game, we’re still going to be exposed to people with very different ideas potentially whereas in the sort of social media echo chambers we’re not. We’re just exposed to a very crystallized viewpoint that everybody shares and in fact people nowadays are even booting out people if they even differ on a single bit of that mindset. So is it there actually like a functional difference there? I’m not sure I buy that difference when you talk about people forming themselves into groups based on relatively unimportant factors. There’s a judgment there about what counts as important versus unimportant and often it’s the case that people might form a group around say a sports team and so they have that interest in sport in common but they tend to grow up around that all sorts of other values as well as the idea that in the UK football has traditionally been more of a sort of working class interest and there has you know sometimes means to stay in for sort of very posh people who become big into football. It tends to be not just the not just that core interest but what goes around it as well before we could really interact effectively with people who are fairly remote from us but people sort of combine based on where they lived in the country and geographical location you might think is a pretty unimportant kind of value free basis on which to interact with people but nevertheless there’s other values that grow up around that you have prosperous areas versus non-prost prosperous areas people associate based on their social class you know within that geographical area based on their religion based on where they work and so on and I think it’s a big call to say that some of these groupings are mindset related and some of them are based on unimportant factors I think it’s much more messy than that. Could we make the argument that the advent of social media has led to this kind of atomisation or fractionation? I think I read some work by Kate Fox who’s a social anthropologist and I can’t remember exactly what she said but it was something along the lines of to develop romantic relationships you have to have a shared social space shared interest and alcohol and these things are quite horizontal whereas now because we have Tinder with these advanced matching algorithms and social media rather than as a say going for the horizontal things like religion or social class like it used to be in the old days now we are deliberately selecting on verticalised attributes. What do you mean by horizontal and vertical here? Well I would say that social class was something that was very relevant in British society about 15 to 20 years ago and people used to openly talk about it and it was presumably taught in schools and now it seems to have almost faded away entirely and people are far more unique along what I would call vertical interests. I guess maybe if I could define for the purposes of this conversation if we could define horizontal as orthogonal to ideas because like again I’m going to disagree people are in a social class because of all kinds of different social factors but I think they can have very wide ranging views on any particular topic over time they may start to align but they can start off very differently at least judging from all the knock down drag out arguments that I had growing up as a kid. Women are social group about political things are geographic social groups so can we just define horizontal as orthogonal to thought is that okay and that vertical would be along the dimension of ideas and mindset. So I might maybe add to something key for said in that maybe we shouldn’t look at this in such binary senses in that okay we have issues like sports teams where it’s like orthogonal to thought and then there is ideas but maybe we can define something in terms of how easy it is for you to exclude other opinions and because that’s when Keith mentioned the progression as well that’s where I see the really newness of social media. So even though I see what you’re saying Rebecca in the soccer team or sports fans tend to have some kind of a shared mentality so there is some kind of an idea there working class people often at least statistically have some have similar ideas and so on but if I’m the fan of a soccer team it’s not easy for me when that other person that I don’t like also is also a fan of the soccer team I can bump my hands and stomp but the person doesn’t go away that easily but on social media I can just be like click you’re muted you’re you’re out and it is it becomes so easy for me to build so maybe it’s just more maybe it’s not that it’s very binary but would you agree that some media has delivered an unprecedented power for people to make their own choices about who to exclude and how in the past we simply didn’t have that power but is there an argument to be made that today we shouldn’t in some way or another allow people to have that power because it’s detrimental. Yeah so I see what you’re saying there’s a sense in which it’s easier to exclude people because you can just block them but at the same time we worry about things we have these new problems like trolling and cyberbullying where it seems like it’s more difficult to exclude certain people so I think in some ways it’s different rather than easier of course people who are be set by trolls on Twitter say and this is really distressing from them in a way it’s easy to extricate yourself from that because you could just close your account but at the same time closing your social media account today went so much of our lives is conducted through social media much more than 10 years ago by doing that you’re going to be missing out on a lot of the sort of social interaction that’s become important to you it might be the case to take your example of a fellow football team supporter who you really don’t like you might be able to block that person on social media but it might be also be the case that you are a member of I didn’t like a Facebook group like a community an online community centered around your football club and that if you really want never to interact with this person then you’re going to have to remove yourself from that as well so I think it is okay we don’t have a block button in meet space interactions but although we have that online it’s bound up with a lot of other important ways that we’ve come to interact with each other as well that’s really intriguing like line of thinking though because you’re right that it isn’t always so crystal easy to block somebody in in cyberspace if you will but also interesting is that often that power to do that rest in the hands of a very few other people so Twitter can easily decide to block somebody because they violate some policy that’s vaguely defined or something like that I may not be able to but there’s a very small number of people I’m wondering what are the ethics of that power to silence being held in the hands of a few who are even aren’t chosen by us versus being left to the individual how does that what’s the kind of state of the art of thinking there yeah I think that’s a really important point and I think so so this goes back to the distinction between the the good and bad of the technology itself versus the good and bad off the way that it’s used and how it’s implemented so you might think that being able to interact through something like Twitter is a good thing but that there’s good and bad ways of implementing it and a bad way could possibly be the sort of thing that you mentioned that it ends up that the people who have the power to silence some voices and magnify others are not democratically chosen and we’re just reliant on them to do the right thing and to an extent they have a motivation for doing that because people are not going to want to continue to use a platform where people are routinely silenced where they feel like they’re vulnerable to aggressive people and they’re not going to be protected from them and that they won’t hear the sort of voices that they want to hear but you know that’s at the moment it all feels pretty precarious that it’s been guided by market and market forces and I think we’re starting to see the maybe the beginnings of the development of something better when you look at when you look at Facebook and the discussion it’s gone on around that about the amount of information about ourselves it Facebook manages to get hold of the problems with the proliferation of unreliable news stories and so on and this is led to certain responsible practices new sites flagging when a story is a certain a certain age or flagging off what looked to be unreliable links this looks like the beginning of some responsibility being taken by the the people that hold power on these platforms to create an environment where to take responsibility for the sort of environment that they’re creating and it may be that in time we will have some sort of regulation about that you know the sort of thing that just us there are teachers in schools are accountable to the public in terms of what sort of information they pass to children perhaps we’ll see something like that in social media where the people that held the power to silence voices and magnify other voices are going to be held more accountable but this is really all this is a case of technology moving faster than the sort of checks that we need on it so we’re constantly playing catch up I’d love to explore that a tiny bit because Mark Zuckerberg said earlier in the year that Facebook shouldn’t be the final arbiter of truth and we are now starting to see a movement in this direction this morning Facebook made a statement that it was trying to remove the QA non conspiracy theory from from its platform and the problem is social media it’s a global enterprise and there’s a lot of different cultures have a different reality and you spoke about some of the cultural relativism about collectivist versus individualist cultures but fundamentally Facebook is optimizing on engagement growth and advertising according to the social dilemma film and the problem is as pointed out in the film misinformation travels about six times faster from an engagement point of view it’s just so much more interesting and do you think that should we be trying to ensure that information is truthful and is it even possible for information to be truthful universally yeah these are really interesting questions and I guess this is a kind of like a more extreme version of we’ve always had gossip before the internet and people like gossip and it kind of salacious stories spread faster than fairly and interesting ones regardless of their truth and obviously that can happen more online and I think there’s an interesting set of questions about who who has what responsibilities here so we might think that someone like something like Facebook or people running Facebook have some responsibility to prevent misinformation spreading but we more but we might also ask about what sort of responsibilities we as users have not to pass on information that’s unreliable and I think we’re seeing this spring up of some fairly new norms around this where you’ll sometimes see somebody will share a news story on Facebook and as we all know that sometimes if you share a story that’s a few years old and people take it to be something that’s happened this week that can put a very different spin on it so you’ll sometimes see people say in the comments below actually this story’s three years old why are you sharing it and there’s this sort of tone of disapproval that this beginning off a norm that we expect each other to be responsible and the information that we present and I guess this is something that we’ve had around in non online interactions for a long time you know we’re disapproving of people that share gossip or who or who break trust or talk about each other bad mouth people behind their back so I think there’s a conversation to be heard about what organizations like Facebook should be doing to ensure that information is shared responsibly and what we as users should be doing and I think in a way this is difficult because just naturally we’re going to be basing this on the model that we’ve grown up with which for adults is one that was established before we started interacting with each other online for adults when we see a new story online our idea of what a new story is has its roots in opening a newspaper and reading it and it’s there it’s something you can hold and you can see the date on it very easily without kind of clicking through on to anything so we just have this I guess this assumption that the news is just something that travels to you every day and and you open it and it’s there and so it’s jarring when people do things like share a story that’s a few years old because it’s news but it’s it’s not new so I think there’s some amount of from the point of view of what we as users can be doing there’s an amount of recalibration that has to go on so Rebecca it’s when you talk about the development of new norms say pointing out that somebody’s sharing an old story like the informs for example people who call that necro you necro to threat responded to a thread that was three years old what’s wrong with you what’s funny those on the internet often those those ideas or attempts at norms tend to then sometimes become memes right they become expressed as a simple picture or something like that and there’s a chance to abuse power here because on Twitter for example there came up this thing called the NPC meme and so from gaming there are non-player controlled characters these are called NPCs and because games are what they are they’re not terribly advanced in a lot of ways their dialogue is very repetitive you see the same phrases over and over again and obviously in political discourse you can have groups of people just parroting the same buzz words and party line and whatever and so on Twitter when people would do that you would start see responses back with this NPC meme like saying you’re just basically an NPC contributing no original thought to the conversation right but that meme which by itself is apolitical it’s just a statement about politics happened to be embraced by one particular side of the political spectrum and then Twitter did this mass ban on that meme because it was from a political spectrum that was not in favor at the time and so people’s attempts even at developing new norms like telling people think for yourself stop just parroting the same information can actually themselves be attacked if they’re being used by a group that doesn’t align with the power structure yeah that’s I think I mean that’s a form of silence thing I think and you see this with a lot of the terminology that’s used online so terms like snowflake social justice warrior boomer gammon I try to choose terms from across the political spectrum these all have a use that is basically when you’re when you use when you use this term to describe somebody you’re you’re basically saying nothing you’re saying is of any interest nobody has to take you seriously and especially on a platform like Twitter where you’re very restricted in how many characters you can write in a tweet it’s just a very quick and easy way to shut somebody up or to stop people taking them seriously and I think this there’s a balance here between freedom of speech and being able to say things in an abbreviated manner and this like a new form of bullying and it often turns to be people who are in oppressed groups who suffer the brunt of this I think none of us do remember the first world war but I think you as Edward Benay is who is a famous marketing guy and he pretty much invented propaganda and I think he turned us into a nation of war mungering not sure what the right word would be but anyway within about six months we all wanted to kill Germans and a lot of that was about dehumanizing the Germans and making them seem very different to us and in a way it’s very similar with these terms like boomer or social justice warrior it’s very easy for us just to assume that people who disagree with us are completely mad and their views do not need to be considered in any way and there’s something about the mass reach of social media that seems to facilitate this mode of thinking. Yeah yeah I suppose this goes back to the what we were talking earlier about polarization where it’s very easy that these terms not only can be used as a form of silencing when they’re used against our opponents but there are also ways that we can signal with other users of that term so if you see somebody on Twitter calling somebody else a social justice warrior then you’ve got a pretty good idea of what sort of person they are politically they’re somebody from the from the political right so they’re quite complex things they’re ways of silencing and their ways of signaling to others what sort of person that we are and there are also ways of signaling that we’re users of technology in a certain way you certainly know that somebody if you see somebody use that term they’re not they’re not new to Twitter or whatever it is. But what do you think about these terms being overloaded though so for example it’s very easy to be erased these days and as you said the word woke I think pretty much implies that you’re on the right now it’s been a pejorative term and freedom of speech has now become a right wing issue as well and in a certain extent the problem is that these terms have become overloaded and then they can redefine. Or redefine. Even redefine like for example where I live more than a hundred years ago we fought a war over a particular concept or at least a war partly over a particular concept called racism and we all and then in the 60s again very even violent kind of movements around again that concept which had a word called racism but the concept today that’s being called racism is very different from that and so it’s we agreed back then over this hundred years that this concept was wrong and then along came people that wanted a different expanded kind of definition of it and they associated it with a word that we all agreed was wrong to try and borrow that agreement if you will as a society but we don’t agree that some of these new concepts are wrong but they’re even redefining words to borrow the gravitas of some previous understanding of it but to bring it back to this conversation though is social media responsible for this or is it is it completely separate I mean I think it’s fair to say that people on the right are more of a monolithic group and people on the left are more fractured around specific issues and social media allows you to select your groups based on very specific attributes and that has had to you think it’s fostered this fractionation it’s tricky so I think with the term with discussions about racism I noticed that one issue here is that and I’m really generalising here that people on the right are people on the left tend to disagree about what it is to be racist so you get the impression that in a lot of cases people on especially sort of Trump supporters you’re not racist as long as you’re not actively hating a black person right now and this is the bites of the people it say some of my friends are black how can I be a racist that’s just a pretty low bar for being a non racist whereas on the on the left given that the left tends to include scholars on racism people that have been working in detail on this topic there’s a lot more complicated view about what it is to be racist there’s thoughts about implicit bias silencing how racist judgments are embodied in our laws and customs and so on so I think that some of what we see some of what Keith is talking about is centering on a kind of disagreement about what racism is and that’s something it might always have been there but that social media has just put all of the discussion of racism in one place so that we all have easier access to other people’s views but on the other hand I think there’s a sense in which part of this is about trying to polarise people you know you’re either racist or you’re not and this is nothing you I think when you look back to McCarthy era and the way that the term communist was used where it became almost a way of you can most slander somebody by calling them a communist and the bar for being a communist was quite low unless you were doing certain things to emphasise and prove that you weren’t a communist communist then you might be a communist and I think to be extent that there’s something like that going on online with regard to other terms where if you want to show that you’re not a particular type of person then you have to prove that you’re not is it possible to prove that you’re not though because I think now it’s got to the point where being called a racist is almost as bad as being called a pedophile and it’s almost impossible to prove that you’re not a racist and maybe it was different in the McCarthy area I’m not sure if to prove that you weren’t a communist or not but because the whole conception of racism is that it’s a systemic thing so as an individual you are automatically racist and all you can do is apologise for it. So this perhaps links to something else which is the idea of virtue signalling and that it’s words come easy so there is this thought of that if you’re the sort of person that turns your profile picture black for a day in support of black lives matter because there’s a hashtag going around but the rest of your time you don’t give racial relations another thought then you’re not an ally and there’s this sense that we need to be putting our money where our mouth is we need to be demonstrating our support of the causes that we say we believe in not just with words but with deeds as well and of course social media makes it very easy to just focus on the words because that’s all we see of a lot of the people that we interact with. I don’t know if somebody posts a tweet in support of black lives matter and it’s not somebody that I know personally then I’ve got no idea what else they’re doing in their spare time they could be campaigning for black lives matter and doing all sorts of things in their daily lives to support black people and other minorities or they could just be the sort of person that just posts a certain tweet because they want to be seen in a particular way and then they just forget about it the rest of the time. So I think there is this sort of distrust you know are people following through on their words by doing the stuff that is that supports the causes they say they believe in but which is quieter and less publicly visible. I suppose you could argue that social media in a way is harming grassroots activism because it’s so easy now just to have a black profile picture or something and maybe a generation ago you would have been out on the streets organising. Yeah maybe or maybe not because that in a way sort of social media does make it easy to organise in a way that it wasn’t before that you can coordinate demonstrations and marches around the world whereas you know pre social media that would have been a lot more difficult. I suppose you could argue it both ways in a sense it makes it easier to organise but in a sense it’s also a way of expending that energy that you have for change and it goes into this echo chamber and nothing really happens and nullifies that energy. There’s a discussion as well to be heard about we can disparage someone that pays lip service to a good cause by using a particular hashtag and doing nothing else but on the other hand perhaps that’s better than nothing perhaps you know every person that uses a particular hashtag is raising its profile a little bit it’s not quite as simple as whether or not you’re a virtue signaler. You reference this quote from Plutarch in your latest manuscript and he said that strong mutual friendships with many people is impossible just like rivers are divided among branches and channels which flow weak and thin affection kind of infeebles very quickly as you infinitely subdivide and you cite the anthropologist Robin Dunbar who had the famous 150 people but there’s this idea of concentric circles as well right we have much more of a moral obligation to our immediate friends and family and we have this Dunbar’s number and you also go on to hypothesise that maybe if we have cognitive enhancement that 150 number may possibly increase do you think that social media is increasing our friendship circle and watering it down. So this is something that Robin Dunbar talks about that he’s looked at French on social media and he thinks that it hasn’t actually changed the it hasn’t changed Dunbar’s number that he still maintains that we each have this kind of inner circle of three to five people and then there’s about a dozen people that we are close to people who he says that he calls a sympathy circle so people who you would care about you’d be upset if they died tomorrow and then the 150 is the number of people that you would if you happen to bump into one of them then you would be happy to go for a drink with them. Now he thinks that although on social media we can often have thousands of friends in inverted commas that this is not an example of expanding any of the the traditional circles that he has described so it’s not increasing the number of people that we would hang out with in the pub if we met them by chance beyond 150 so he still talks about despite social media us still having that number of approximately 150 people that we can maintain loose friendships with and beyond that we might have what we call friends but people that we actually don’t know very much about and he thinks that the reason that we have those numbers is to do with our cognitive limitations so he thinks that we simply don’t have the cognitive capacity to maintain significantly more friendships than that so that’s why I then say that possibly if if we became significantly cognitively enhanced then perhaps we would have the capacity to increase the amount of friendships that we had although that would still be restricted by how much time we have and that sort of consideration. As well as the cognitive limitations there are time and environmental limitations as well which might predetermine that limit. On the subject of cognitive enhancement it’s not really something that is here yet because there are some smart drugs but they don’t really in healthy populations they don’t make you any better IQ tests. It depends what you mean by cognitive enhancement I mean something like a cup of coffee, a caffeine is a cognitive enhancement that’s nicotine. There’s all sorts of things that have been around for years and years but I think what we’re talking about here the sort of thing it might enable us to increase done bars number, you know significant cognitive enhancement so things that kind of really improve our overall cognitive functioning well beyond what we have around now. This is speculative and really depends on first of all the question of whether it really is true that the number of friendships we’re capable of having is dependent on our cognitive capacities and then if that is true what cognitive functions are relevant here whether there are any other factors involved and so on. There’s a lot at stake it’s quite messy but that could be one possible way in which our friendships could change significantly over the coming decades and centuries. So I’m wondering since we have someone who’s an expert on punishment can we leave aside friends for a minute and start talking about enemies. I found a very interesting but you received some kind of a bad press with people saying just because you contemplated some ideas that they found objectionable you were there for objectionable and I think you made a good argument that looks that sort of absurd like we have to be able to as philosophers or just human beings period be allowed to contemplate concepts freely if you will. Taking that one step further what about believing concepts so maybe I’m not contemplating the concept somebody finds objectionable but I just believe those objectionable things I don’t act on them like I’m not out doing objectionable things it’s just at this point in my life I believe these ideas that half the population thinks are terrible or whatnot what are the ethics around punishing people for things that they believe but don’t act on. Yeah so acting on them is really the key thing I think there is something sinister about the idea of punishing people merely because of what they believe and it’s interesting in the when you were setting out this this idea you introduce the ideas believing certain objectionable things but not acting on them and I think that that’s an abstraction because beliefs just tend to have a link with action. If I believe that I’ve got to collect my kids from school at three o’clock then I’m going to leave my house at a certain time and if I believe that I have to collect them at a different time then my behaviour is going to alter in certain other ways. If we could just step away from punishment for moments and think about what makes us disapprove of people it have certain beliefs I think often it’s the case that we assume that their behaviour is going to be affected in certain ways so somebody says I believe that all it’s okay to harm children how about that I think we almost everybody universally agrees that pedophilia is probably a bad thing but we even have groups of people that say no like it should be allowed should be allowed so let’s suppose you’re a you believe that sexual interaction between adults and children is very young children is a good idea but you’re one of those people just make it as extreme as we can imagine but let’s suppose they believe that you said it’s when they act that the moral harm is done but what about all of the people that haven’t acted yet this is trading off between the individual agency and environmental determinism because there are all sorts of factors that predispose people to be influenced by environmental factors so for example a pedophile who lives near a school might be more likely to act or have the opportunity to act and then that person would be held accountable but what about all of the other pedophiles that are just in a different environment that haven’t acted yet I think there’s something really sinister about the idea of punishing somebody because you think they probably will do something and this has been explored in sci-fi and it’s something like my noratory report the idea that we’re going to punish you I think that if you know that somebody is going to do something bad or you have good reason to believe that somebody is going to do something bad then the appropriate thing is not to punish them but to prevent whatever it is if you know that somebody is a convicted pedophile and they’ve just been released from prison and you’re responsible for finding them somewhere to live then it’s best not to choose the house next door to the school based on what beliefs a person says that they have we make all sorts of predictions about how they’re going to act and a lot of the time we can do that pretty accurately I mean if we have somebody that says just going back to Keith’s idea about this sort of breaking the link between beliefs and action if I’m looking for a babysitter and I talk to somebody who offers to babysit my kids but tells me that they sincerely believe that children can’t feel pain and so it’s it’s morally okay to do all sorts of things to them that you wouldn’t do to an adult but they’re sure me that they they don’t act on this belief I’m probably still not going to find a different babysitter because although there is there’s a difference between merely think merely believing something and acting on it so that the idea of punishing somebody merely for believing something objectionable rather than acting on it is really sinister and there’s but there’s a fine line here between what’s punishment and what’s not punishment so for example you wouldn’t hire this person who doesn’t believe children feel pain if we broaden that out a bit the current things that go right now on in the social and political spectrum okay you can’t become a federal employee because you post as something on Twitter that said you believed some objectionable thing or whatever and this starts to become forms of punishment it’s if you’re denied employment if you’re if all your friends ban you if you’re not allowed to participate and invite all social media platforms etc it’s like where’s the line between being put in jail versus just being ostracized and excluded to the point that you’re effectively being put in jail this is a really interesting set of issues and I think that some of what’s going here is a decontextualization of what is being said there’s some context in which we can say something horribly objectionable but nobody would ever take it seriously if you’re acting in a play and you’re playing a serial killer then you’re going to be able to say all sorts of things without anybody batting an eyelid that if you were to say to somebody who was sitting on the bus next to you one evening then they would be horrified and there’s a set of questions about what it is to take somebody’s words to be asserting a particular thing or indicating a particular set of beliefs now there’s some cases where we also a particular thing and it will be obvious from the context that we ought not to be taken seriously or literally and I think when people say things on social media you don’t get so much of that context you can see there’s a lot of people on Twitter have something in their profile retweets are not necessarily endorsements something like that which just you know reflects this anxiety about what if I retweet something and somebody thinks that I’m doing that because I believe it rather than merely because I think it’s interesting or because I’m wondering what people are going to say about it what people will think about it so I think this this set of issues is going to arise in a sort of context that you describe as well you know somebody is refused a job because of something that they once tweeted then that seems to presuppose that we are taking what they tweeted in a particular way that we’re taking into have asserted what they tweeted and that might be the case that might be appropriate sometimes but not at other times yeah but if we provide so much wiggle room like sometimes it’s okay sometimes it’s not context and we leave that decision up to a bunch of unelected people that run say a social media platform or controlling hiring of a large corporation that’s a problem that’s so right for abusive power isn’t it yeah I think it is even no matter how well intention people are right because we can have these sort of implicit biases that maybe where maybe we’re more willing to give the benefit of the debt to people who we like or who are like us um so is there any ethical problem with just drawing the line at you can say whatever you want as long as you don’t act on it there’ll be no consequences is there an ethical problem with that forget about whether that will cause political or social problems is there an ethical problem with just saying absolute free speech no problem just don’t act in ways that that we have deemed objectionable illegal whatever yeah speaking is a way of acting right you can bully intimidate harass somebody with words you don’t have to be doing anything apart from saying certain things but I suppose that one thing to note here is that this is a more general problem than social media that it’s magnified in the case of social media because it’s not obvious what the context is often somebody could be saying something on social media because it’s live in in joke or something might seem offensive but actually it’s that the reference is a mean that you don’t know about and if you did know about it then you you’ve been much less likely to take offense and we have this sort of issue in offline interactions as well in some contexts it’s completely fine to say something that in another context it would be completely unacceptable but in real life because chances are we’re interacting face to face or we’re getting more of the context in which somebody is acting we’re much less likely to take these take what they say in complete abstraction where it’s it’s not even clear how we would contextualize certain things that people say on social media and that is a problem not only is it magnified by social media but it’s immortalized so something you tweeted 40 years ago 40 years from now may cause you trouble right what are the ethics of that kind of time decay should we hold people immortally responsible for anything they’ve said or or even done or is there an ethics behind some kind of statute of limitations yeah this is a it’s a reminds me of the old sort of problem about you know Nazi war criminals should they be prosecuted when they’re cute old men yes so there’s a question that sort of what punishment is for a 90-year-old former Nazi who is seriously in the firm now is unlikely to pose a danger to people but so you might not want to be interested in punishing him as a form of deterrence but perhaps punishment is about retribution so there’s a whole set of issues about what punishment is supposed to be doing but we see the other side of this sometimes occasionally when when you see a somebody who has maybe fairly recently become a celebrity and some journalists or other unearths a load of really old like four-year-old tweets in which they said something really offensive and it’s quite common in that set of circumstances for the person to say I’m a different person now please don’t judge me I recognise that I what I did then was wrong and I’ve changed and I think especially in the case where it’s a very young person it’s it’s intuitively it seems appropriate to give some sympathy to that idea that it’ll be a shame if my words as a 15-year-old were stored for anyone to look at it will be embarrassing so yeah there’s this whole set of considerations to take into account I think so what sort of person were are we talking about the words and actions offer and the true person based on reflection and so on or are we talking about teenagers holds Twitter account in which case perhaps it’s forgivable I like something you you said before you said speaking is the form of action and if I push this further I can say contemplating is a form of speaking right in which case contemplating an idea is already a form of action and and we get into this whole notion of you say okay maybe something was uttered in some context and we don’t know the context and should we consider it but there’s another view that says the context doesn’t matter if the consequence is good or bad so let’s view this from the point of contemplating an idea if I contemplate an idea openly I speak about it and I say I’m gonna make the case four and then I’m gonna make the case against it and then you make the cases and you yourself say therefore we can reject the idea but someone else says oh no the points you made for it actually seem pretty reasonable and the points you made against it they don’t convince me and by your contemplating it I now believe this idea that I hadn’t before so this like bringing it back to the beginning where if keys that is accurately that argument is we have to be able to contemplate ideas does this conflict with this other line of contemplating is speech is action and the consequences of actions or something we should measure actions by yeah this is kind of linked to this debate about whether there are certain topics that are unspeakable whether there’s certain cases that we shouldn’t even make because they have certain effects you see this position for example in the debate about about trans issues and I think it a lot depends on who it is that’s going to be affected by this on the one hand there’s this way of thinking that says that exploring any idea is acceptable but on the other hand there’s you know if by exploring a certain idea you are dehumanising a group of people or you’re harming not all that you know some dehumanising is in another way harming a particular group of people then that’s relevant if you’re having a that was a story from a couple of years ago where I can’t remember which news channel it was but some American news channel had a discussion about our old Jews human do you remember this there was understandably outraged that this was even something that was being raised and on the one hand I suppose you can somebody might make a case but let’s just ask the question we’re not answering in any particular way we’re just pondering this but on the other hand that there’s something really objectionable about that sort of issue entering public debate and I suppose one one reason why it is just really unpalatable is we just think what sort of thought process led to this being an issue that was raised like what is it that’s leading people to think that this is something that needs to be discussed and I think that’s relevant we don’t tend to pick our discussion topics out of nowhere you don’t think for example look at a a color spectrum and say let’s pick this particular point on the color spectrum and argue about whether this particular shade is blue or purple or something like that’s who cares but if so if somebody is introducing a particular debate topic then it looks like somebody does care and then that can indicate something wrong yeah but there’s some silencing is just intellectual laziness it’s somebody ponders our Jews human if you can’t find somebody to utterly destroy that logically and embarrass the person for the idiocy of their beliefs then we have a bigger problem which is people are just becoming so intellectually lazy that they have no capability of making arguments whatsoever because if you can’t demolish something that obvious what are we doing here why are we bothering even speaking because we’re obviously not thinking so maybe the problem is just we’re getting too lazy with our argumentation and when finding people to present ideas and just going for the easy button of silence cancel and even let’s just split apart you have your social media I have mine we just won’t even talk to each other you believe you’re silly things I’ll believe my silly things and maybe at some point we’ll kill each other you know I think that example you gave about our Jews human I think that’s quite an easy one but the the trans one in particular is significantly more challenging because they could argue that you’re erasing their existence and certainly in that particular discussion the words have been equated to a form of violence and of course that community does suffer from from real threats of violence but my point is this is the lazy part it’s I really agree with the the sentiment of my rights end where your nose begins but that’s at least a bright line like we can physically define what it means to physically interact with you and and and we can say no that airwaves pressure waves from the air don’t count and then we’ve at least got a rock solid foundation whereas all this other kind of conversation we’ve been having it so up to judgment and abuse by power structures is my real objection to it that would be my point in the you need then someone to decide which ideas are even acceptable contemplating about right it’s not that you solve the problem it’s just you push it back one more layer and you say what ideas are even are we even allowed to ask questions about such that asking the question is not some sort of an act of violent or an end of action with bad consequences again and that is a difficult problem and so hopeless can of worms yeah it seems like again the farther down we go the more it becomes absolutely viable for abuse because if we say okay if anyone is harmed by an action which includes speech which includes even contemplation of ideas and we pair this with the reach of social media the probability that someone is claiming to be harmed is going to be one for any idea is going to be it’s going to tend towards one for anything so someone is being harmed by this conversation right here someone’s going to get harmed so I’m having a difficult time square I don’t say I have the solution like I see absolutely what all the things are saying here but yeah I don’t know where do we go and is there something what like what Keith says is there like a rock foundation that we can at least stay on or put our feet on and go from there or is it all we don’t know there is some mileage in the thought that if certain topics are a band from debate then presumably there’s going to be somebody making the decisions about what’s acceptable to debate and what’s not and we might ask okay what values are being imported there who gets to make these decisions and who are they accountable to and at the same time there’s this issue about who’s going to be harmed by a particular debate and how do we know anybody you know somebody’s going to be harmed by anything but I think that is yeah to an extent we don’t know what’s going to cause harm to people it could be that somebody is somebody’s going to be triggered by the by Keith’s background image of a tropical beach because they once had a terrible experience on a tropical beach and going people sort of traumatized by that so there’s this sort of how you don’t have to people get offended by anything these days but at the same time we do manage to most of us navigate our way through our lives without causing significant offense to people yes it might be true that you could unwittingly cause offense to somebody by just opening your mouth and saying something that strikes you’s completely not curious but on the other hand it’s not like you don’t know what sort of thing is more likely and less likely to cause offense you know that if you if you meet your neighbour and you say something you swear really aggressively at them then you’re likely to cause offense but if you ask them about what their plans are for today then chances are you’re not going to offend them so I think although there are some gray areas here and it’s not an exact science that we can make sensible decisions it’s pretty likely that if some university was to host a debate on the topic of should all children under to be tortured then that’s going to be that’s going to be offensive to lots of people with good reason yeah that doesn’t mean this it’s really not so look it’s sometimes not easy to tell when you’re gonna I’m gonna tell you a friend of mine was offended when I told him that beliefs influence actions and you made that exact same claim in this in this video he’s offended by it hasn’t taught to me for five weeks because I told him that because he didn’t like the implications of that completely sensible idea which is that if beliefs influence actions then different sets of beliefs and I’ll let you figure out what sets of beliefs those are it may influence actions he didn’t like the consequences of that completely defendable position so it’s not easy and when we talk about harms the transpopulation is maybe less than 1% of the global population so 1% is going to get offended by certain statements 99% is not so it’s difficult to tell just on that though because again I’m not sure whether this is just a moral panic because my intuition the way I feel is that 10 years ago we had actually reached a period of enlightenment where we just as you are explaining Rebecca we had converged on a fairly common view on things and the risk of offending people was quite low and now it feels that the overt and window has shifted and there are certain things that you’re not allowed to talk about and some of it is a story of conflicting rights issues between groups so that the trans exclusionary radical feminist versus the trans people for for example so it feels that we’re locked into this place where converging on a common set of views is more difficult and certainly now I think it’s not possible to say anything important without offending someone but because of this cancel culture and I’m sure you’ve read John Ronson’s book just in Sakko has just landed yet it’s very easy for people to be shamed on Twitter and it has a chilling effect on on free speech but I wanted to just slightly bring us back to AI ethics so there are large groups of people in the corporate world creating ethical frameworks around how we should be implementing AI and some of the things we were talking about earlier were really interesting so some people might think that conservatives shouldn’t be allowed to shape AI ethics frameworks for example or should your political position be a factor in job hiring you also said something interesting a little while ago which is that a young person a young person’s brain is more malleable if they took a bad position on something on Twitter a few years ago we should be more likely to forgive them because their brain is still converging but when they are 40 years old then they’re so entrenched that we can no longer forgive them because they couldn’t possibly have changed in the meantime but yeah your thoughts on AI ethics Rebecca yeah so I don’t think I would put in what I said in quite those terms I’m not necessarily making a neurological point and a sort of point about how entrenched our beliefs come but just over the teenage years we’re still maturing we don’t tend to hold sophisticated really sophisticated what maybe we never hold really sophisticated political views the views that we hold that we develop as teenagers are quite extreme and simplistic plunky so that was more the point I was making there but AI ethics yeah this is so there was there’s a case a couple of years ago about racist algorithms do you remember this when it’s turned out that it’s certainly next because we have this idea that computers yes exactly yes yeah we there’s this idea that sort of if it’s computers then it’s value-free right it’s just because computers aren’t racist computers see us as we really are but it there’s that we can get away from values by taking this sort of scientific approach and of course we can’t it’s just that the computers just adopt whatever algorithms whatever values we program into them so yeah this is this is a really important area again this is something else where you often see a polarized reaction where there’s some people so you take that the blanket view that’s sort of AI is bad and evil and robots are going to steal our jobs and all this sort of thing which has by the way people have been saved for decades so I think we have to take this seriously into account and and there’s this complex issue which is that we often don’t understand all the implications of our moral beliefs and arguably a lot of academic philosophy in this area the the area of moral philosophy is about focusing on exploring the implications of our moral beliefs and maybe adjusting our moral beliefs if we realize that they have unacceptable implications now a problem here with AI referring to the ethical issues is that if you try to program an ethical AI and it’s not going to it’s just going to follow what you program into it it’s not necessarily going to do the the kind of reverse engineering that we do sometimes when we encounter intuitions that tell us that a wrong turn has been taken programming an AI to an extent might be like if you had to program something with with all the ethical beliefs that you hold now on the to the best of your knowledge then it’s just going to inherit all the mistakes that you that you don’t even realize that you’ve made one possible way out of this is if if computers were intelligent enough that they were actually better at moral reasoning than we are people like Mick Bostrom talked about this where if you’re able to create it it’s not only better at sort of cognitive capacities that a lot of the time we’re interested in you’re sort of interested in information processing but also more capable than we are at practical reasoning and moral philosophy then it could be that you’ve solved that problem you’ll just have just have a new breed of AI philosophers who do it all better than we can of course that is some way off and for now imperfect us we are and imperfect us the technology is this is a real problem and I think it’s in a lot of cases this is about thinking through what the possible implications are going to be of using technology that doesn’t work the way that we think it’s going to work and being cautious with regard to what sort of values we program into it. When interesting application here is a discussion it’s going on about autonomous vehicles which is they said if you have self-driving cars on the road then there’s a whole set of issues about what should happen if the car is about to be involved in an accident should the priority be the safety of the driver or should the priority be the the safety off as many people as possible. Now if it’s the latter then you could have situations where the car sacrifices the life of the driver in order to save other people’s lives so maybe it crashes into a brick wall in order to avoid mowing down half a dozen children. Now there’s something unpalatable about this maybe makes people not on to own a self-driving car because of course when we’re driving ourselves we we just usually prioritize our own safety thankfully we’re not usually faced with a choice between plowing down half a dozen children versus driving into a brick wall but you know we are despite often trying to do the right thing or sort of mostly trying to do the right thing we do have obviously a sort of egotistical streak where we are more concerned about our own well-being than about certainly the well-being of strangers and that’s just human nature but it’s not obvious that’s from a taking a sort of more universal non-personalized point of view whether that is the right way to go or whether it’s even coherent because you can’t prioritize everyone so that is something that has to be taken into account in AI ethics as well that what it’s right to program into an AI is not necessarily going to map onto our own individual values. Our software is buggy. On the subject of Nick Bostrom you you cited a wonderful thing actually called the the eternal Facebook world as a thought experiment but Nick Bostrom had this thing didn’t he he said that if a parameter is seen as bad consider the reverse direction and if this is also bad then the only season those who reach those conclusions to explain why our position can’t be improved who changes to this parameter if they’re unable to do so then they suffer from the status quo bias and this is quite an interesting thing so you propose this reversal test on Facebook so imagine it’s always been around even in the times of Aristotle they were connecting to all of their friends on Facebook and then would they have a lesser version imagine in this eternal Facebook world we just suddenly pulled the plug on the Facebook what would happen? Yeah yeah I think what I’m trying to get at there is the the extent to which some of our fears about the negative effect of social media on our friendship is just a reflection of the fact that our friendships if we’re adults that our friendships have our earliest friendships have been established without social media and so attached to that way of doing things that could be that the next generation sees things very differently. There’s some interesting thing things there because my experience has been that a lot of my online relationships are very different than my in-person relationships even to the extent where if we do make the effort to say have some online people meet up physically it’s really quite awkward because we’re not we’re not used to being together in the same room physically and it’s quite different than when we’re interacting online and we a lot of times we just mutually decide yeah it’s better just to keep this online so there seems to be very different forms of interaction honestly I don’t know where it’s going to all lead to but it’s quite interesting. It’s not necessarily a mad thing though so I think again you wrote Rebecca that you were talking about your experience during the pandemic and you hadn’t seen anyone face to face in months and had it happen many decades earlier you might have had to resort to letter writing and phone calls but you said that your kids got noticeably more shy during lockdown but you felt that this was cured to some extent when they were playing online games and doing video conferencing and so on. It’s a positive side of technology. Yeah and the school district I’m in did a very interesting what everyone want to call it back to school program what they did is they have half the kids going to school just alphabetically Monday, Tuesday and every other Wednesday and the other half going every other Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and then they live streamed the half that’s there with the half that’s not there and actually it’s working out quite well like the kids feel very connected because they’re still seeing the other half of the kids during the day live in class there’s a lot of flexibility there where somebody does need to be quarantined then they just stay in the cohort or they just stay out the whole time but they can still participate in the live stream but sometimes it just takes a little bit of virtual but live interaction to make the children feel like they’re still connected almost in reality. Just coming back to the general topic of friendship do you have any sort of recommendations for us the end users how do we as individuals maximize the value of our friendships on social media like how do we behave to get the best out of it? You’ve asserted that friendships ought to be deeper than just the shared interests and experiences that we have and you also say that we’re captivated by the idea of looking beyond our friends interests and views and loving the person behind them and so to tag on to Janik’s question how can that be realised on social media? Yeah that is just a widespread conception that we think our connections deeper than our love of effects why it and zed so you’ll connect initially based on initial conversation or a shared interest but if you stay friends it’s going to be because you have a deeper sort of connection and I don’t see why that should really be any different online compared to offline that you might find somebody because you’re part of the same online community but you know you can still converse with them and share conversations in much the same way that you would offline we’ve done this and through various media before the internet face-to-face phone calls letter writing and despite sort of Socrates’ aversion to the written word letter writing now is viewed as a really whole some way to connect to people even though it’s not face-to-face I think that there’s no reason to think that we are we’re going to be less able to form really deep connections with people that we interact with online amazing well Dr Rebecca Roach thank you so much for joining us today it’s been an absolute honor thank you very much it’s been lovely talking to you all yes and certainly I’m a passionate learner and I feel like I could talk to you for many hours and learn a great deal so really appreciate you being here no thank you thank you maybe I didn’t I didn’t hang out on World of Warcraft but I’d see you there if I did thank you bye