Fact, Fiction, and the Fight

In this episode, David and Sarah continue their August tradition of looking outside the world ...

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In this episode, David and Sarah continue their August tradition of looking outside the world of legal nerdery with Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of the book The Constitution of Knowledge. Rauch has been warning about the dangers to free speech for a long time. What is the state of free speech? And how much of a threat is illiberalism?

Show Notes:

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  1. Avatar photo
    BW

    The media’s coverage of coronavirus has been terrible. Especially on the origin of the virus. I’m glad we’re all invested in polls that keep getting things wrong and tweets. But this virus has killed 600,00 Americans. This is the story of this generation. Not the media Twitter bubble. I’m completely baffled that’s a take out there. Johnathan definitely lives in a bubble if he doesn’t get more pushback for a take like that.

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    Ben Connelly

    I really enjoyed this discussion, but I have to say: after Jonah’s interview with Rauch about the book I thought I was going to read it, but this interview convinced me not to. Nothing to do with the Remnant vs AO. More that the more I learn about his thesis the less interested I am.

    Also, I have to say, I know it was all in good fun and not at all intended this way, but the Francis Collins fan club stuff at the end sounded very uncomfortable. That’s just one listener’s opinion but after the Cuomosexual stuff and the fetishization of Fauci, it just did not sound good. I know it wasn’t intended that way. Please don’t kill the messenger. Just wanted to put that out there. Collins is a good man and I’m glad you respect him. Fan club just sounds awkward is all.

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    Dwayne

    Sarah - Re: Fiorina's secretary-to-CEO fact check on the washington post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/09/25/carly-fiorinas-bogus-secretary-to-ceo-career-trajectory-fact-checker-biography/) I find it the article to be fair. It is true that she was employed as both as secretary and a CEO at different stages in her life.

    However:
    -get an undergrad from Stanford
    -drop out of law school
    -work for a year as a secretary
    -go back to the masters (that one has always expected)
    -join the management track at AT&T.

    That doesn't follow any sort of career progression from a secretary. It was a short hiatus from a very standard career path.

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  4. DRHanson

    I am a big fan of Jonathan Rauch’s writing and really enjoyed this podcast. However, Rauch repeated a common error that, while somewhat trivial, really bugs me. Two or three times he stated that something like 77% of President Trump’s “checkable statements” were shown by factcheckers to be false, or words to that effect. This would only be true if every “checkable statement” made by Trump was analyzed by fact checkers, which of course doesn’t happen. Not every “checkable statement” is checked—not by a long shot. Trump certainly provides a target-rich environment for fact checking, but a lot of the stuff he says is still true (if only by accident). Rauch should instead have said that 77% of Trump’s statements checked by factcheckers were false. To illustrate this conceptual error, consider NFL referees. A referee might make 100 or more reviewable decisions in a game. Let’s say 10 of those decisions are actually reviewed, and his decision is reversed in 6 of them. If we said “60% of his reviewable decisions were reversed,” we would not only be wrong; we would create the false perception that he usually makes bad calls. This conceptual error would be compounded if we compared one referee’s reversal record to another. Let’s say another ref had 10 of his decisions reviewed and 3 were overturned (for a 30% rate), we’d never say that the first ref made twice as many bad calls as the second ref. Yet I have seen big name pundits make that type of conceptual error with politicians’ factchecking percentages. If 20 of politician A’s statements were checked and 8 (40%) of them were labeled false, and 5 of politician B’s statements were checked and 4 (80%) were labeled false, there’s no way to know just from those numbers which of them was more honest, because we don’t know if one of the politicians just happens to have more statements checked by fact checkers than the other one. And we certainly couldn’t claim that politician B was twice as likely to lie as politician A because of the difference in percentages, or that politician A told twice as many lies as politician B because of their difference in raw numbers. But I’ve seen a bunch of columnists make just that type of claim based on that type of incomplete data.

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  5. Icarus213

    I want to like Rauch, but I just can't. Every time I listen to him, it's clear that he isn't qualified enough to give a true "both sides have a problem" argument, since whenever he describes the Right, he will grab examples that shows he is ignorant of what those people actually said. (And I say this as an anti-Trump conservative, not a Magahead). He says Rush Limbaugh said that "you can't trust anything" that the scientific community says. I listened to Rush for a decade, and I didn't hear anything like this, ever. He says Sarah Palin "completely made up" death panels in the health care debate, when she was talking about how health care rationing would surely result from nationalized health care. You could say she was wrong, but he says she "completely made up" something that was demonstrably false and "got away with" it, framing the debate as a factual one rather than a political one. Time after time, it's clear to me that he isn't familiar enough with figures on the Right to do a proper take-down of their arguments, which speaks of a certain laziness, and what Jonah might call "stealing a base:" acting as if you are simply using Science and Rationality, and your opponent is the one being subjective. That's excusable if he were just some guy on the internet, but to be the thinker that Rauch is trying to be, I think it falls unacceptably short to effectively do what he is trying to do.

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    Jason Gibson

    This was a fantastic podcast. Jonathan Rauch is a model human being in terms of how to be yourself and fairly assess your fellows. Just a very measured guy

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    Jason Gibson

    This was a fantastic podcast. Jonathan Rauch is a model human being in terms of how to be yourself and fairly assess your fellows. Just a very measured guy

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  8. KateBird

    While I am a fairly new listener to AO, I have to say that I thought this was an amazing podcast. I have thought about it long after I listened, delved deeper into researching the topic and the guest, and have come out on the other side far more informed. Upon reading the comments, I understand the knee-jerk reaction to turning it off as, on the surface, at one point it seemed to be very "conservative-right" bashing. However, for me, that was an even bigger hook to continue to listen. Honestly, I was not that familiar with Jonathan Rauch. He made many points that I agree with, some I did not. But his measured, civil tone persuaded me to delve deeper. After listening to AO, I listened to the referenced Andrew Sullivan/Rauch podcast that was mentioned. I found that I agreed with both Rauch and Sullivan. But like Rauch and David, I appreciate and continue to ruminate on the "cancer vs. heart attack" analogy. In the age of instant outrage, this has given me a lot to ponder. Thank you for an hour or so well spent.

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    Denise Cote

    Sigh. It seems Doctor Fauci has something to hide, so when he is cited deflecting about WIV I roll my eyes.

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  10. Keith Schooley

    The problem in framing a discussion as, "Which is more dangerous, the woke left or the illiberal right?" is that it ignores how the two sides feed off one another. This swerves into how Rauch discusses Vladimir Putin stoking both sides of societal strife for his own consolidation of power. The left and right are both using one another's disinformation to prove how invested you MUST be on their side and how FUTILE it is to try to hold the center and historical liberalism. That is the real target--the push toward disinformation and illiberalism on both sides by trying to force everyone into choosing a tribe and surrendering liberal values in the process.

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