[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] I'm here today with Claire Layman who is the founder and editor of quillette an
online magazine Claire is coming to us from Sydney Australia but today we're right here in San Francisco thank you for coming Claire thanks for having me Tyler let me start with my my first question a very difficult one quette has published a lot of Articles criticizing what you might call the side of political correctness what would be an
example where you would actually side with the people trying to make things more politically correct well I agree with Civility and if people Define political correctness as as being civil and being polite then um I'm on that side I'm on the side of not being aggressively provocative and overly pical with one's perceived political
opponents but I don't really think that's what political correctness is I think political correctness is the restraint on inquiry however a lot of people Define it as just being nice and being civil and respectful and so if we were to just go on that definition I I'm in perfect agreement with being nice and
being respectful you know we'd both agree in the past and still the present racism has been a problem gay individuals have not been treated well if someone wants to make the Norms tougher but they honestly told us you can never find tun a norm a norm will either be too tough or not Tough Enough and they say well I'd rather the Norms
against racists in a sense be too tough and maybe catch some cases that don't deserve to be caught because that's the only choice we have in the past injustices have been so great what would you say is it you think we can fine-tune the norm in accord with reason or the social norms right if someone says I
agree it's too tough there are unfair cases of people being punished but the norm has to be too tough why is that wrong I think having social norms that Fran upon racism and sexism are very important and useful but when we talk about political correctness we're not really talking about social norms we're
talking about people being punished for asking questions and expressing doubt and expressing uncertainty and so the Norms are just overactive they're hyperactive and the Norms where expressing a racial epithet and using race to insult someone there should be a taboo against that but I don't think that's what we're talking about when
we're talking about political correctness we're talking about the tool that's used to stop people from having independent thought and asking questions about you know social phenomena and and sort of questioning that some of the more simplistic narratives that get presented around issues of gender and race the Norms that prevent people from
using race or gender as an insult I don't think they're too tough I I think I think that they're perfectly reasonable there's a recent example Scarlet Johansson was slated to play a transgender character in a movie and she is not herself transgender uh many people complained and now she has declined the role what's your take on
that episode should the complaints have come and should she have stepped out of the role oh well that's a particularly ridiculous episode and that's and that I would say that's a good example of political correctness you've got a tiny tiny minority population that is transgender individuals and among transgender individuals only a small
percentage of those are activists it's the tiniest minority you can think of but they have all of this political power because they're very noisy and the idea that an actress cannot play someone who she isn't is ludicrous on its face that's that's the job of an actor to play someone that they are not I mean
Scarlett jansson will be playing some kind of Russian spy in her next film can she not play a Russian spy because she's not Russian the example of her being pressured to step out of that role is a good example of how the political correctness has sort of metastasized into seeking offense where the where
offense should probably not be taken inflating perceived slights overexaggerating the potential harm that might be caused so I think there's a lot of that going on in that particular instance but in the past as you know there's a long history of white actors playing black characters and putting on something like blackface and we just
don't do that anymore it doesn't seem many people are wishing for that to come back in the history of transgender characters and movies they're usually not played by transgender individuals so it's not that Scarlett Johansson is coming after a string of 20 transgender actors actresses who played transgender
characters is it not like white actors putting on blackace to play blacks and we ought to do much less of it or maybe none of it what the difference between those cases that's an interesting comparison I would just imagine that there's fewer trans actors to choose from and the whole idea of being transgender is that you can experiment
with your gender you can be gender fluid or non-binary and you can being transgender is in itself a performance it's a it's a theatrical act however being black is not a performance it's it's not theatrical so I think I think the performative nature of transgenderism itself should allow a woman like Scarlet Johansson to to play
a transgender person I have to say the messaging around transgender activism is very confusing and contradictory I mean on the one hand we've got this discourse around gender fluidity and being nonbinary on the other hand woman can't play a transgender person it it doesn't make any logical sense to me let me try
another example on you I was reading the New York Times there was an article by David Bowen talking about superhero movies and how they revise past myths this was just from about a week ago and he wrote a sentence quote they the superheroes rival Mormonism for hutzpah is that an offensive sentence should we be bothered should have
editors have insisted that he take it out because you might say well all religions involve strong claims to single out Mormonism is unusual it's treating it as somehow especially weird and there might even be a slight objection to the juxtaposition of Mormonism with hutzpah a word associated with Judaism in some ways and yish
almost like a slap in the face that maybe the person writing this is probably himself not a Mormon offensive or not well no it's not offensive I can understand why a Mormon person might find it a little bit offensive what we have to remember with this these new rules around identity and social justice culture is that they're not evenly
applied and there's an asymmetry so whether or not you can be offended by something depends on what identity group you belong to and being a Mormon would not qualify as being part of an identity group that is entitled to feel offended by slight so Jonathan height has identified about seven victims groups
who are entitled to feel offended and slighted over sort of microaggressions so women blacks Muslims I think indigenous or native peoples LGBT and perhaps immigrants would be another one so if you don't belong to one of those identity groups these rules don't apply when did political correctness become a major issue or
become a major issue again and why do you think it happened exactly then oh that's a good question I don't know if I have the answer I know that there were lots of debates around political correctness in the early '90s for example it seems to fade away and then come back yeah yeah and so that's when Camille Pia was talking about PC and
Robert Hughes had a book the culture of complaint I've noticed in my own life that I started noticing political correctness around the Year 2007 at the time I thought it had something to do with the business model of Internet publishing so that was when Gawker and the blog Jezebel was really popular it was established in 2007 and
then it got very popular over the next couple of years and I just thought that there were a lot of clickbait kind of Articles promoting these really simplistic black and white kind of narratives of Oppression and unless one had sort of reasonable critical thinking skills I could see how young people could be influenced by that kind of
content coming out and so that I think there's something to do with the internet and the way the media has had to adapt to this new business model where you have to drive lots of um views like lots of hits Millions more than you would with with the newspapers I think this it's something to do with that but
that's probably just one variable in many other factors what do you think of the hypothesis that political correctness it's a kind of virus that's hijacked the left it's figured out some kind of weak entry point and it's come in and taken over parts of it and it will bring down many victims with it but actually it's crippling the left y yeah
yeah true or false probably true probably true so if one objects to that argument we should in a sense encourage more of it at least if we're being Pure utilitarians or not well I think the sensible left is necessary and important and and people advocating for marginalized groups and particularly lower socioeconomic groups is very
important so I think having anything that destroys the left all together is is a Bad Thing uh the way I think about it is imagine that being Progressive or being interested in social justice or being leftwing is a form of a belief system the stuff we're talking about is the fundamentalist version so you can have a
faith that is moderate it and on the whole functions well for the people who believe in it but then when you get into the extremes and it becomes fundamentalist that's when you get the trouble and I think the what we call social justice Warriors are like the fundamentalists of the progressive Faith what do you think is the closest
equivalent to political correctness on the right the political right well it's different in Australia than it is here but I would start with either place yeah okay so there I mean of course there are dogmas on the right as well questioning patriotism questioning certain dogmas around economics or the free market or
so in Australia we're quite secular and we don't really have a very strong Christian conservative contingent but I imagine here in the US it's completely different and to question um certain religious orthodoxies would just be Unthinkable in certain communities we would agree I think think that left-wing political correctness is much stronger
in Academia yeah probably in the media in general intellectual life but if you take say the United States as a whole do you think it's left-wing or right-wing political correctness that's stronger and more destructive yeah it's probably right-wing political correctness that's worse yeah yeah but what I know and what
I come up against in my life is left-wing political correctness because I live in an urban center and I mix with people who are doing their pH phds and I have friends who are academics and I'm interested in open inquiry and so if you restrict open inquiry on universities you know then I'm I'm going
to start paying attention but if you're talking about on a national scale it's it's probably right-wing political correctness that is a bigger problem can you imagine a quad of the future that has more articles criticizing right-wing political correctness albe it outside of Academia than left-wing political correctness probably not
because our audience is the is the Highly Educated Urban audience and our audience is not sort of Mainland America where people go to church and that's really not who I know the people that I know and and it's not who we're aiming for do you think the internet gives what one might broadly call the political rate a new relative
cultural Advantage because before the internet the left was already well organized through Urban Elites who live near each other yeah and now the internet has enabled people who are not so Urban or not so Coastal to suddenly coordinate and it's shifted the balance of intellectual influence do you agree with that yeah definitely I mean I
noticed it with myself I live in Sydney but I know that plenty of people in New York and San Francisco are reading our platform and because there's no barrier to entry you don't have to have a PhD you can just be have some Talent be a good writer with some insights and you can be viewed or read just as much as a
New York Times columnist so I I definitely think it's flattened out the hierarchy and and the the interesting thing is how the internet has made the right particularly among younger people's the the new counterculture in a way and I've been speaking about the raid in aggregate terms but if you think of the effect of the internet which
strands of the right do you think are favored and which do you think are falling away because of Internet discourse because it shouldn't favor it all equally correct that's right yeah so there's many different types of right-wing ideology that are coming through via the Internet there's lots of people now self-identifying as classical
liberals and they're identifying with the English tradition of individualism free market trade and um civil liberties and then when you go further out there are young people who identify as reactionary or or Catholic traditionalists so that's having a Resurgence through the internet strangely enough but are they favored
more than the classical liberals and the free Traders are the nationalists favored more the populists what's your relative assessment who's gaining within the right I'd have to look at the data and the numbers to make an accurate judgment but I I think that Classical liberalism is very strong at the moment
through the internet and then the the nationalists so people who identify as right-wing but are opposed to free trade dogmas and who want to question immigration basically and you think that particular question has been boosted by the internet as a means of discourse definitely also in Australia less so in Australia because our immigration is
different our immigration policies are different to the US in that we ex we have very high immigration we have closed borders and we have a very tough policy on a Asylum Seekers so our our policy is quite different and so immigration is it's always a topic and it always comes up before any election it's not an internet thing it's out in
the open and people talk about it on TV and in the newspapers quite openly whether deserve it or not Australia has a history of being somewhat racist or xenophobic in the 1960s immigration from places other than say Great Britain is quite low and now Australians are extremely welcoming of immigration what
is it about how Australia did immigration that accounts for this uh well people will debate this question but I'm quite persuaded by our former prime minister John Howard's perspective when he says that the people of Australia will accept very high immigration if they feel that their border is controlled so he brought in
this policy whereby anyone arriving by boat was turned away and Boats were basically stopped by the Navy before they could arrive so his General thesis is that you can have high immigration and the voting public will accept it if they feel that it's done in a controlled manner so I think that's one aspect of
it another aspect is that we also have skilled immigra very high skilled immigration so it's very noticeable that our immigrant communities are filling up professions and are very hardworking and have immediately going to the highest income brackets because we poach a lot of very talented people from all over
the world to come out to Australia I think that helps when it comes to things like assimilation and acceptance that's for sure if I think of the comparative histories of Australia and New Zealand with regard to political correctness I have the sense New Zealand gets their first they have a very mild version of political correctness Mai are
rhetorically Grant higher status much earlier than say aboriginals and and orori straight Island peoples were granted higher status than Australia what do you think accounts for that difference but yet now New Zealand has probably less immigration than Australia in percentage terms I think the difference is how New Zealand was
founded and the colonial settlers signed a treaty with the Mary straight away so that set the stage for better relations from their Inception so I don't know the very well but I do know that there was a fierce fight against the colonial settlers and then they came to some kind of truce and the colonial settlers
signed an official treaty with the mai that didn't happen in Australia so it was just more of a case of a stealing the land and committing atrocious crimes against the indigenous people and and taking a very long time to coming around to accepting that that needed to be dealt with and acknowledged and and we
still don't have a treaty with the indigenous people in Australia there's a huge contrast there's a huge gap with the way that it was done in New Zealand and the way it was done in Australia we mentioned before the internet favoring some particular ideas over others or kinds of ideas YouTube in particular what kinds of ideas do you think are
favored by YouTube and why ah well YouTube is fascinating it's the second most visited website in the World Behind Google it's much more popular than Twitter I think it's more popular Facebook if you look at just what is viewed the most often you you'll just get um kids watching other kids play video games you'll get makeup tutorials
um in terms of political discourse I think you're getting the same ideas that you will see on Twitter but just reduced to a more simplified reduced into sound bites so you'll get classical liberal ideas but you'll also get the right-wing National ideas but reduced down to slogans and sort of yeah I mean to present a good
YouTube video you know that has to be sort of theatrical and entertaining but on the other hand we've got the this situation where someone like Jordan Peterson can present hourlong lectures on complicated topics and Joe Rogan and Dave rubben have very long interviews with a range of people so it's hard to summarize now you a background in
Psychology why is it you think there are relatively so few female Libertarians in the world uh well that's pretty straightforward I think the if you look at the personality data on Libertarians they tend towards being more systematizing in their cognitive profile so women on average tend to be more empathizing and
agreeable arguments around political issues that are based on on quantitative reasoning and um just facts and logic without an emotional layer to it are going to be less appealing to women and I've I've said to libertarian friends that if you want to be more appealing get your message across in a more
appealing way you need to wrap up the ideas into a story that has an emotional component but why hasn't this evolved more so there's a potential audience if indeed it's true women on average are more empathetic you could make an argument where libertarianism is the true empathy women on the whole don't seem to buy that argument like what
exactly is stuck in the middle empathetic people can favor markets right yeah I think it's it comes back to communication so any message can be communicated effectively if you take a narrative that perhaps has some kind of so there's something like s six narrative structures that are known to elicit emotional reactions in people
like the um the hero overcoming obstacles that that's like the most Basics narrative framework if you want to present a political argument you have to be able to put your argument into some kind of narrative structure that elicits an emotional reaction and I just I think Libertarians have been because they're very
rationalist and systematizing they're skeptical of the utility of narratives and manipulating people's emotions how did at least some parts of American higher education get so screwed up in the first place structurally what went wrong well is it that campus life is somehow toxic is it the intersection you know of the university and some new
technologies or or what's your take well I think the setting up of women's studies departments in the 1970s was a big mistake because if you look at other humani disciplines I mean they've been developed over hundreds of years and they developed scholarly foundations so history has its scholarly foundations in
things like the dialectic and then you've got philosophy and even English literature had a solid grounding and a very long history but if you create departments virtually overnight as they did with women's studies when theories come into the become popularized by the Departments and there aren't that the Departments don't have a very strong
solid grounding in scholarly principles then there's going the these fattish theor such as post structuralism and deconstruction are going to be able to take root much more quickly and easily than they would in some of the older disciplines such as history or philosophy but do those actually influence anyone I mean on your
list of worries about the United States or the world I mean how high should they be well two many people believe in post- structuralism or postmodernism young people vote at pretty low rates in the US as you probably know you know maybe they'll vote Democratic to a disproportionate degree but that possibly would be the case anyway why
does it matter so much it matters because people who go through Elite colleges and go into the professions particularly in journalism and law are often trained and inculcated with these theories and so if you're thinking about the next generation of professionals particularly in the media and and law is
not far off if you if you're thinking about the next generation of professionals who have been trained to be skeptical of objective methods and have been trained to view social phenomena through simplistic narratives of impression without looking at you know the complications in the data and that kind of thing then then it's going
to have a Toxic effect and I think we can already see the results of that particularly in some of the biggest media institutions and and I think being complacent about the effect that poststructuralism has had particularly in the humanities has has backfired and and and part of the problems with polarization is because generations of
Scholars have been complacent about about its impact so with respect to political correctness how is it that Australian universities are different well I I think the fact that they public is makes a big difference because students are not paying vast sums to go to university in the first place so students have less power if you make if
you're a student and you make a complaint against a professor in an Australian University the university is just going to shrug its shoulders and you'll just be sort of walked out of the room and and so students have much less power to to make complaints and have their grievances heard so that's one factor
another factor is we don't have this hot house environment where students go and live on campus and have their social life collapsed into their University life most students in Australia live at home with their parents or move into a share house and then travel to University but they don't live on campus
so there isn't this compression where your entire life is the campus environment so that's another fact we don't have a history of policies such as affirmative action um to get into University in Australia you just have to score it's based on a tering entrance rank which is a score out of 100 and that's just based on your final year
academic results no extracurricular activities are considered but if I think about Australian intellectuals from my great distance in Fairfax Virginia they seem to me more left-wing than American intellectuals your media is probably more leftwing than American and you don't have political correctness and the
intellectual power Cent has turned out to be further to the left yeah does that mean political correctness isn't that important after all well I think there's a difference between political correctness and being left-wing I think one can be left-wing and not and not be politically correct and Australia to be left-wing simply means to favor more
redistributive policies and to favor egalitarianism basically so we have a strong history of egalitarianism in in our culture and there there are lots of leftwing people in Australia who are who are not politically correct in our in our characters so in in films and TV shows like if you think of someone like Crocodile
Dundee he's not politically correct but he's not right-wing he's just an Aussie bloke who you know goes out into the bush and fights with crocodiles so there's it's it's there's not this dichotomy where if you're if you're anti-pc you must be rightwing we don't really have that black and white kind of setup there's a cliche about Australia
or maybe an earlier Australia if not today that it is in some ways more sexually chauvinist than some of the other Anglo countries you mentioned Crocodile Dundee Mill Gibson not entirely Australian Robert Hughes there seems to be this tradition of gruff very manly type figures is that part of Australian culture and is it still there
yeah yeah and I I hope that it remains a part of our culture I mean Australia is a is a dangerous country to the the people who colonized and um settled Australia had to be tough the Outback is right there it doesn't take long to drive out of the city and you're in the outback and it's a harsh environment and
we have a very strong sporting culture because we have fabulous speaches so the masculinity is is very much tied up with being physically competent do you view yourself and quette you're not speaking for every author but broadly as to some extent in this tradition of Australian traditional thought the Sexes are
different tough guys are good yeah I have not actually considered that but um if someone opposed that I wouldn't disagree with it could you have done quillette here in San Francisco I don't think so I really don't think so mostly because what I sense from being here is that there's a lot of fear of rocking the boat and offending one's friends and
then if you have co-workers who have certain political inclinations you don't want to upset them by expressing one one's honest opinion so I I sense there's a lot of social politeness and social sort of etiquette that prevents one from being sort of just unashamed of having having a view now you're from Adelaide not Sydney is
that correct yeah that's correct and how has that influenced your work in quette being from Adelaide in particular well Adelaide's a smaller City and it it was founded by some Pioneers who had experimental ideas about um social life so Adela South Australia was the first state to give women the vote there was a
a a v a Visionary architect or city planner who designed the city I think just the fact that it was smaller and so Sydney and Melbourne have they're very competitive cities unless you go to a private school unless you have the right family Network it can be difficult to really be socially mobile but Adelaide because it was
smaller all you really had to do was do well in school get into University and you could quite easily be socially mobile it didn't really matter who your family was and where you came from and so just because it I think being a smaller City it allowed me to to be ambitious and to and to to not feel constrained basically what is it you
find most puzzling about the United States as an outsider well I I have been surprised by how there is this culture of risk-taking particularly in business and you celebrate entrepreneurs and courage in in making money and that kind of thing but there is a general timidity when it comes to uh expressing one's honest views about things that I
find that surprising and particularly among people who are risk-taking in all sorts of other domains they might might not be risk-taking when it comes to just expressing their their feelings about a particular Topic in public I I found that surprising and San Francisco in particular what has surprised you
basically what I've just described how someone can be a Visionary entrepreneur and and take all sorts of risks um in their career but then be very timid when it comes to anything political and sort of rocking the boat when it comes to social issues or or just expressing a dissenting Viewpoint now in many of these conversations we
have a segment in the middle called underrated versus overrated yeah and I I'll choose some partly from Australia are you game sure the city of canura overrated or underrated overrated why badly designed badly designed hard to get around you need a car to get around so very poorly designed and it's cold
Marmite you mean veggie might well take your pick either one probably overrated within Australia but it's not overrated out there in the big broad world or is it no so underrated underrated globally overrated locally what do you think is the best or most interesting Australian movie a movie called Lantana it had Jeffrey rush and it it
has interweaving narratives of different couples and it explores themes like trust and openness in marriage and it's just a very well crafted film it it was made recently probably about 10 years ago or 15 years ago I would strongly second that recommendation rugby overrated or underrated I think probably overrated why head
injuries what is most interesting to you in Australian music there was some interesting groups back in the 80s that I've been listening to recently a band called The goet and the church and we had we had a really cool underground music scene a couple of decades ago I'm not sure what what going on at the moment though Australian
fashion what is most interesting in that area we have some great designers who do swimwear and Resort Wear and that kind of thing Zimmerman is a great brand which is known all over the world but I don't know what it is about them that's particularly Australian probably they're just yeah I'm not sure
how how I could how I could characterize it as Australian and who is an intellectual ual or public intellectual in Australia that you would draw our attention to as especially worthy or possibly underrated one of our Deputy old Deputy Prime Ministers John Anderson has been having conversations with people from around the world like Jordan
Peterson and Jonathan ha and I think he's really trying to move discourse in a more intellectual open he he's he's trying to bring back these long form discussions and and grapple with the big Ideas if you had to draw our attention to something in Australian fiction what might it be Australian fiction I haven't
read any Australian fiction in some years but if International listeners aren't aware of Patrick white he's probably our best novelist that we've ever produced I'd like to ask you a few questions just CLA Layman as manager so if you're looking for heuristics to figure out who is a good writer and also a good writer for
quette what do you look for other than just reading their work how do you think about figuring out who will be a writer worth investing time in networking with helping them become better so courage to express ideas without qualifying them in all sorts of disclaimers and um weasel words Clarity in Pros being able to
structure an article so structuring an article is extremely important a lot of people have a a good Pros style and and have interesting ideas but their articles just go on and on and they don't really have much of a narrative structure so if anyone has an the ability to have a a story arc in their article that's an instant indicator that
that person's that writer is a winner so if I think of the Clare lemman production function so to speak you were not obviously trained to do what you do but what which of your own talents did you invest in to get in a position to be able to run Start Finance do everything with quette do the editing well building
up Social Capital is a big part of it so I've developed friendships with people sort of loose affiliations with people over the years and so being able to draw on those affiliations when a certain new story comes up for example when the James deore controversy broke I was able to draw on some friendships that I had
built up over the years and so we were able to publish a piece straight away on that topic and then things that I've had to invest in is well I I now Outsource a lot of the editing work to professional editors you have to be aware of your own the limits of your own competence so my competence stops that proof reading I'm hopeless
proofreader and Leadership and managing is is somewhat a common sense you you either have it or you don't I think and but you can fine-tune certain techniques and and articulate your vision more clearly and that kind of thing what is the most significant constraint for making quillette bigger and better so of course you might wish
for more money but if you had in some way more resources how would you invest them is it that you want uh bigger staffs more editors or what's your wish list what's number one so the biggest constr straint is time so we have you mean your time my time but also the time of my two co-editors because they have judgment that cannot be replaced or
substituted I can't just ramp up by hiring a whole bunch of people to to replicate the work that they do because it can't be replicated the real constraint is the the talent and the time of the individuals that I have at the moment that being said we could it would be very beneficial for us if we had more proof readers more sub editors
and more administrative support but when it comes to making decisions about the submissions that we get and then helping authors refine their work that skill level can't really be replicated easily but do you think it could be scalable say you had 20 editors as good as the few you have now just's just say you
found them could that work or is there something about the number 20 where you're overloaded they don't know each other something breaks down I think there would be too many and the other constraint would be that we wouldn't receive enough pieces we wouldn't receive enough articles and there probably wouldn't be enough writers for
us to commission to produce the kind of work that we're after but you know we could we could scale up a little bit more and commission more writers but I I don't think to to the level of having a a staff of 20 editors I think that would be too many and then and then the internal communication would break down
and then there would be power plays amongst people and yeah let's say you were in charge of the anglo-american world and you could make one change in education broadly defined so that we would produce more good writers what would that be well I would defund departments that incourage students to use too much postmodernist jargon so I
would I would clear out a lot of of these studies courses cultural studies gender studies critical race studies not that the content shouldn't be taught but a lot of these schools really train students in poor writing skill like poor writing techniques using opaque jargon to express ideas and a and not putting
emphasis on clear thought logical thought and yeah I I would clear them out just stop funding all together when you see writing under a pseudonym or Anonymous do you think on average it's better writing or Worse writing than writing with real names on it I actually think it's probably better writing why more Fearless Fearless if more liberated
so that's how cowed and cowardly we've become yeah I think so I mean not you'd have to assess a piece of writing on a case-by Case basis but I think some of the best writing that is coming out at the moment is is is by people under pen names what would you say is an issue you've changed your mind on well I
changed my mind on issues to do with the welfare state and inequality and whether inequality is the right metric to be looking at or social Mobility I changed my mind on that issue quite a lot and it's in which direction well just backwards and forwards so I might think that inequality is an important topic that we
need to focus on reducing and then I might listen to another argument and think that it's poverty that should be the the central metric that we should be looking at and inequality doesn't really matter but so I find arguments on both sides of that debate to be compelling and I don't really know where I stand but I know that I've I changed my mind
on that issue quite a quite a bit what would be an example of a Doctrine in Psychology one that may maybe has some Credence I don't mean Blank Slate that you either reject or are quite skeptical of relative to the mainstream cognitive behavioral therapy is known to Be an Effective therapy but I am aware that
because it's much more difficult to standardize other therapies like extended talk therapy because we can't standardize them it's hard to measure their effectiveness so there are things in Psychology in in the therapy side of things that could be quite effective that we don't know about because we can't accurately measure so I think
there's there's a general just because there isn't evidence doesn't mean something isn't working I think we should be more aware of that yeah absence of evidence is not evidence of absence how would you change how psychology is taught I think for people who want to be clinical psychologists and working with actual
clients which is not all psychologists but for people who want to be clinical psychologist ol they should start working in a mental health setting much earlier on so at the moment it's in Australia at least it's three or four years of cours work and uh heavy course loading statistics which is important but you don't get into a clinical
setting until your fifth or sixth year and I think that's too late I think students who want to be on that track should start working in a mental health setting earlier do you think Australia should have more foreign ter of affirmative action for aboriginals and Tory straight Islander peoples possibly we already have all of those policies
but because the Aboriginal population is so small it's not really a political issue because an Aboriginal individual um receives air some kind of affirmative action no one's missing out no one's going to miss out on a university place because of it because it's such a tiny minority population anyway so it's
really a non-issue when should contrarians give up and join the resistance the resistance against what I don't know but simply stop trying to work within established structures yeah such as the world of media or world of higher education yeah and uh split off do something different well I think that Creative Solutions are always superior
to destructive Solutions so I don't I'm encouraging people who are disenchanted with media or with universities to think about building their own institutions so I mean it's difficult for people to imagine setting up a university however people can set up book clubs and reading lists and websites where they encourage sort of
academic type material and I think I think anyone who's who's cynical or disenchanted can if you can come up with creative way ways to to if if you imagine a a learning environment that would be just how you wanted it to be why not create it why not give it a go and build what you want to see in the world when should
contrarians give up and simply join the establishment when they want to be very strategic and they want to win let's say a younger person comes up to you and says I want to be the next Clare Layman not an exact copy of what you've done but to do something creative in media outside the mainstream but read by many
people who are in the mainstream to have an impact represent some kind of definite point of view work on one's own to a high degree what pieces of advice would you give that person it's something that I landed into as an accident so there isn't an actual Pathway to get to where I've come I would say to anyone who wants to have an
impact in the media space is to probably not study journalism or media but study something where you get some scientific training it might be economics it might be psychology might be biology but I think people who have some kind of scientific training and can bring that training to communication definitely have an edge
over those who have gone through journalism school and may have only taken English courses I think if one can understand statistics and read scientific papers and can pouch arguments in a scientifically literate way then they their their skills are going to be in demand I think because there's just a scarcity of people who
can do that at the moment CLA Layman thank you very much thank you Tyler thanks thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a view this helps other people find the show