Transcript
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Low Productions Value Sphere podcast, which is shot from my hideout in Syria. But apparently Gabriel is also ah coming to us from an undisclosed location in front of his car.
Gabriel: Yeah, well, I mean, it's this is my revolutionary Islamist flag right here.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: you know you said You thought it was a green screen, but you were mistaken.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes. We're all getting radicalized these days by the internet.
Gabriel: The chair is just blocking the script that says death to all infidels, but starting with Pascal.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes, that's that's usually how it goes. um yeah so Gabriel, I wanted to have you on because you're one of the smartest people I know, one of the funniest people I know.
Gabriel: Thank you.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah and
Gabriel: That's flattering given that I know you know some very smart and very funny people Like a lot of people would be like, okay, who cares but you know
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: But by day, you're a professor of sociology at UCLA. um And sociology, so I come from France, which is the land of Auguste -Cant and Émile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And so if you ask a French person,
Gabriel: my undergrads and they' invariably call him pure Bordeaux, and I always have to tell them Bordeaux was a wine, Bordeaux was a sociologist.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: and yeah Yes. ah Pierre Bardot. um And if you ask a French person about sociology, you're going to get either one or two answers, depending on whether you're interlocutor is a Marxist or not, which is either sociology is this wonderful discipline, which teaches us, you know, which scientifically proves that ah Rich people are evil and that the reason why some people have more money than others is because rich people are evil. Or if you're speaking to a non -Marxist, he will say, well, sociology is a bunch of claptrap funded by my tax monies to ah to justify stealing my money. ah So somewhat provocatively, I told you that I wanted to start the podcast by asking you to justify the existence of your discipline.
Gabriel: Yeah, so, I mean, one way would be to kind of question that. I mean, I think the best way to, it's like ah by their fruit, you shall know them kind of thing. Like, has sociology come up with insights that are valuable to tell us something about the world?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: And one of them I'd start with is to kind of like take your more populous version of the man on the street and this idea ah the idea that sociology just tells us rich people are evil.
Gabriel: um I mean, a lot of sociology does claim that, um but here's the interesting thing. you know We were talking about Pierre Bordeaux, right? That Bordeaux shows us that ah Educated people are also evil, you know, or at least educated people were also snobs ah You know, I mean he he he has a lot of insights right? he He did some very good gift on gift exchange but um The thing is most well known for in sociology as compared to anthropology where he's known for gift exchange But in sociology is most well known for his class model which is really you know, it's like if
Gabriel: Populist types gave a shit enough about coming up with like, oh, I have a citation for that to prove that I'm right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: Bordeaux is who they would point to for all their stuff about the elites, right? Because when a populist talks about the elites, they're not really talking about rich people.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: right
Gabriel: They're more talking about people with college education and powerful or better yet, graduate degrees and ah laptop jobs who think they know better than everybody else.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right.
Gabriel: And Bourdieu was the first person, well, he wasn't the first, but he was the most important person to talk about how that really is a distinctive social class that has a certain amount of class power, class identity, etc.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right, so that's actually very interesting. I did not expect this conversation to go there, but that's why I had you on. So just to explain for the audience who are not familiar with Bourdieu, one of his key ideas was precisely you know sort of complicated, this sort of Marxist notion that it's all about money.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Gabriel: yeah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And and he had this theory that education the way it and sort of especially classical education and the way it's it's traditionally done was the point of it was not so much to actually educate people but to sort of like give you this this card that says you're a member of the elite and so you know oh you can quote Cicero in conversation of course now it all sounds extremely quaint because nobody can quote Cicero in conversation
Gabriel: Yeah. Mm hmm.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah But the idea is you know we're going to teach kids Cicero, not because we believe Cicero is intrinsically ah valuable, but because the children of a certain case will be allowed well be able to sort of justify their privilege by saying, oh, I learned about Cicero.
Gabriel: Yeah, that's right. So it's it's in part an argument. ah I mean, this he called it cultural capital, but right? So Marx was obsessed with capital. you know Famously, his three -volume book was Das Kapital. And what Bordeaux points out, ah I mean, in some extent based on Gary Becker, um James Coleman, ah Glenn Lowry, you know American scholars, um but there are more forms of capital than just you know dos cappital right Das Das Kapital means wealth and it means productive machinery.
Gabriel: right So it basically means owning a factory.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: right
Gabriel: And um you know obviously, Marx was interested in stuff like that. And the Marxists thought that that was the only source of class power that really mattered in modernity. And what we're due points out is that cultural capital is extremely important.
Gabriel: And it's interesting that he, in America, when people talk about education, like American social scientists, if they they don't want to just say education, they'll call it human capital.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And human capital implies that education makes you more productive.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And that's probably a good model for something like imagine getting a degree in chemical engineering. You or I wouldn't know the first thing about how to refine gasoline.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: you know
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: Whereas a chemical engineer, what's that?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Well, speak for yourself, Rossman. Rossman.
Gabriel: Exactly, yeah. I mean, I don't know what you're doing there in the in the in the bunker, but although I hope it's well ventilated if you're ah refining gasoline. Anyway, so um so if you get a degree in chemical engineering, you actually will know valuable things that you didn't know before you got that degree in chemical engineering.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: Now, um if you get the degree in classics, Assuming you're in the vast majority of humanity who has never been sent back to ancient Rome via time warp, it's not really that valuable in terms of like actual skills that you can accomplish.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right.
Gabriel: um It's more just a way to show off. um you know and And I say this, by the way, as somebody who, um I don't speak Latin, but you know as the meme goes, I am a man and therefore I am obsessed with ancient Rome and I have you know three meters, you know like 10 shelf feet of books on ancient Rome and I've read them all. you know um and But there is a meaningful extent to which it is just kind of like an arbitrary shibboleth of class status.
Gabriel: um and
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah, I mean I have like a whole rant about classics, but I'm not going to put it there because it's it's beside the point, ah but yeah.
Gabriel: Well, actually, let let's get into it a bit.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: that's the
Gabriel: I mean, at the at the risk of throwing off your, you know, the agenda you set first, I think actually, so when the right, and I'm not sure whether this is also true in Europe, but in the United States, there's kind of an implicit right wing theory of how to solve education, which is great books and classics.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And I think that doesn't hurt. But I also think it's kind of dumb, like we, but you know, it's like, it's like, Let me put it this way.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: No, give us the conservative take against the classics.
Gabriel: That market is oversaturated. the the market is oversaturated and
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: and really the The human capital deficit is you need people who actually know how to do things. And I understand that the whole idea of great books and classics and everything is like it teaches you how to think. It exposes you to all these great thinkers, et cetera. There's also a certain pessimism in that, by the way, in that implies that you can't trust any thinker who you know ah put Quill to paper less than 200 years ago. um and like Unless they were Hayek, right? He's like the 120th century exception. but um
Gabriel: But they I mean, I think ultimately, if you if you want a movement to have power, it needs people who knows how to know how to do things. And that would include things like data science and stuff like that.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: right Right.
Gabriel: So I actually I have a piece that will be coming out eventually in City Journal on how um you know the marginal human capital development dollar for right wing philanthropists would not be in great books education, but it would be best spent on basically encouraging conservatives to go to graduate school in the quantitative social sciences.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: I mean, I i i actually pitched some right -wing donors, let's put it that way, on creating like a right -wing MIT.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: So i I get your point. i was I was making a much more specific point about the classics, meaning Greek and Latin.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And you've heard me say see that before, which is that dead languages, and I guess in theory, you could use Sanskrit instead of Greek and Latin.
Gabriel: Sure.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: But dead languages is the only non -scientific discipline where there's an objectively correct answer and an objectively wrong answer to the test.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And therefore, it's the only non -scientific answer with a discipline where there's very little room for BS to improve your grid.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And I'm not i'm not saying that the other...
Gabriel: Well, I don't know. I mean, there are objective answers in other fields.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: are BS. I'm just saying, you know, I was a college student and the humanities, like you can, you know, you can, you can sort of BS your way through some stuff, right?
Gabriel: but you But you can't BS your way through dates.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: I'm not saying it's completely BS, but there's, there's a measure of BS.
Gabriel: So like i mean when did when did you all and ah invade England?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Whereas, what?
Gabriel: if you say ten six when When did you all invade England? If you say 1065, it's wrong.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: 1066. Yes.
Gabriel: And if you say 1067, it's wrong. 1066 is the objectively correct answer.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes, but if if you're, if you're doing a BA in history you're not answering quizzes about ah the Norman vision of you're not answering multiple choice questionnaires.
Gabriel: That's right.
Gabriel: that Well, that's in part because historians now are almost exclusively social historians, which can be really interesting.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: but
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. but
Gabriel: I mean, i most of those aforementioned classics books were actually social histories of Greece and Rome.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. I mean, the point is, if you're translating a Latin text, there's there's an objective answer grid in the way that there is on a mass test. And I mean, ah unless you're saying that you think it would be better if, you know, history and literature degrees were graded with like s SAT t style multiple choice questionnaires where there's like an objectively wrong right or wrong answer.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And so, and, you know, we can, this was basically why Latin along with math was like the the king and queen of disciplines in the traditional French education system of the third Republic, because this was, they were sort of doing Borgia before Borgia. There were the two disciplines that allowed like a poor kid to excel in the way that history literature didn't.
Gabriel: That was also true in the US in the early 20th century. um So like ah ah i mean took a kind of a stylized history of US elite education in the early 20th century is it used to be that they had a system of recruitment from prep schools.
Gabriel: And then they dropped their Greek requirement and only had a Latin requirement and also did an early version of the s SAT.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: t And then they found out that a ton of Jews from New York City were getting in ah to the top colleges.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right. So they stopped.
Gabriel: Well, they started worrying about Gentile flight ah and the the the the other Ivy's would say like, we don't want to turn into the next Columbia because apparently Columbia had this catastrophic number of Jews um that would make it unappealing for you know elite Gentiles to attend.
Gabriel: And so they introduced a system, and ah they experimented with explicit anti -Jewish quotas and they thought it was more subtle to go to a basically a well -rounded holistic admissions criteria and they'd give points for regional diversity like it was easier to get in if you were from Montana because, you know, in part because they knew, yeah it was DEI for wasps, yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah, it was DEI.
Gabriel: the the They knew that Montana was entirely Gentiles, you know.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: So the woke people in my in my Twitter mentions are right, which is that there's been DEI for white people in America.
Gabriel: Yeah, no, that's right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah
Gabriel: and And also, I mean, you can see this in that when, okay, so in the, to carry it forward into the late 20th century, right? So that was the early history of it.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: In the late 20th century, you had ah the activist Ward Connolly get a bunch of ballot initiatives in different states, starting with California, banning affirmative action and state university systems. And there was like a five -year period where they just you know did the old system where there was a lot of weight on s SAT t and grades.
Gabriel: um Because if you're admitting these massive ah freshman classes, it's very labor intensive to go through you know the but things one by one and have alumni interview people and stuff like that, like the private schools do.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right.
Gabriel: so they They just did that, and then they got admissions cohorts that were ah highly white and Asian. And then after about five years, they switched to ah an entirely holistic admissions system.
Gabriel: So the but the state university systems in the post -affirmative action era basically adopted the same system
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: in circa the year 2000 that the Ivies had adopted circa the year 1930, that they were both to solve a demographic a perceived demographic problem. In the 1930s, the perceived demographic problem, 1920s, 1930s, the perceived demographic problem was too many Jews and not enough wasps.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: right
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And then um in the um circa 2000, the perceived demographic problem was too many whites and especially too many Asians.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right, right, right. I mean, i I think that's interesting because the idea of holistic admissions is something that sounds good in theory, but in practice, it's just it's just like,
Gabriel: Mm -hmm. Well, when you make things fuzzy, you you give discretion.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Trying to do shenanigans.
Gabriel: It's one of those, what is it, the will of the sovereign? decide you know It's like, when you um when you make when you increase discretion, you increase power.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: and and And when you make things fuzzy, you increase discretion.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And that's part of the whole point.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And likewise, I wrote an article for NR, I don't know, six years ago.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: where the top prep schools in America were trying to abandon grades and go to like a holistic evaluation packet.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: And the the very explicit point was that they didn't want to have class rank because they didn't want admissions officers to be able to compare their students because then only two of them could get into Harvard, whereas all of them should get into Harvard.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right,
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: right right, right, right. Yes. ah the This is why ah also my alma mater strongly resists um ah giving um equivalent of ah cum laude and so on, on the degree because they want all of the degrees to have the same value, which is very good for me, by the way.
Gabriel: Well, the the joke in the US is that they keep having to readjust that yeah because you the the ah the missing data we can impute as you know the bottom quartile.
Gabriel: But but but in the US, they keep having to readjust what counts as cum laude and magna cum laude and summa cum laude because grade inflation is so ridiculous. So at UCLA, I think the the median grade
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: the mean grade the meat I think the median GPA for graduating senior is something like 3 .7, which is an A -.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah, no, they did ah I mean, this is, this is i I have grown so much more appreciative of the French education system over the past, you know, 20 years of interacting with the American culture.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Because, uh, yeah, we, we, well, first of all, it's a competitive merit based XM to get in. Um, and then you're graded on a curve and it causes a problem because, uh, uh, my alma mater introduced letter grades, except they did it properly. Uh, so it's very hard to get an A and a B. Um, and so they actually, if, if you want to apply to an American university.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: tell the office and they give you a special transcript.
Gabriel: Translated into America where they like they raised for great by like two full letter grades Wait,
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: and and basically and basically um the of the line like All the season B's are turned into A's and the A's into A's.
Gabriel: is this your ah this is your undergrad on the matter or your your and MBA?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah This is my NBA, yeah.
Gabriel: Yeah, cuz like in America MBAs are notorious grade grubbers And so there tends to be very high GPAs for MBA programs
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah. ah Well, I mean, it, it wasn't technically an MBA. It's the so -called Grande Colle system. So, uh, yes.
Gabriel: Sure.
Gabriel: Also a major feature in Bordeaux, where like in distinction, there's all these graphs where you like labels, like, you know, grande de col, and, you know, that that's where you see people saying that like tree bark is a more appealing subject for photographs and folk dancing.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Well, I mean the the whole thing.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Well, I mean,
Gabriel: it's It's you people.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I liked about the American system was that the ranking system was more fuzzy.
Gabriel: among the higher education?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Um, yes.
Gabriel: No, I don't know about that.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Uh, yeah, I know, but like people, people take it super seriously.
Gabriel: Because we, I mean, we publish magazines that rank schools every year. And, and they'll put them on their website. So like, you cannot look at something at UCLA that doesn't say the number one public school in America.
Gabriel: Like, we're very proud of that, that we're the highest ranked public university.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah, but see, I didn't know that.
Gabriel: Yeah, but you know, if you were applying to ah undergrad in America, you would.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: and
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: i mean i'm not i'm not you know This is not this is not too ah to to take a dig on UCLA and its beautiful campus, but like if you you know if somebody tells me, oh, I went to Michigan, I don't think, oh, that's only the second best public school in America. I don't have like a strong sense in my head or if somebody, you know goes to Harvard versus Stanford versus MIT, you know, I don't, I don't immediately rank them in my head.
Gabriel: Well, people in the relevant fields do...
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Whereas in France it's very clear that there's one on the top and then there's a second and there's a third.
Gabriel: Okay, so so actually we can get back to your original thing of like, does sociology have anything to offer? Like, you know, justify our existence, because apparently you're the St. Peter of academia. um So the...
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: I was hoping to be the atoll of the Hun, but
Gabriel: Yeah, okay. You know, if we if our sins were not so great, God would not have sent you against us. Or was that Genghis Khan? some guys horses with a bow yeah yeah okay so anyway yeah but it was Attila who was called the scourge of god i think so so one expressed himself in that way and the other so basically both of them in some sense were scourge of god anyway so uh back to like the findings yeah that's right um
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: I think that one was Genghis Khan. Betilla is the one where ah the grass doesn't grow back on the ground that his armies have tread.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes. Yes. I'll take Genghis Khan. I'm an open -minded guy.
Gabriel: Larger harem too. Uh, you know, like you don't, you don't hear about, you know, 4 % of all men alive today have Genghis, uh, have, uh, told the Hunsway chromosome, you know, or whatever the number is.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Well, one reason is we have basically no sources on Natilla. We don't even know what he looked like.
Gabriel: Yeah. I mean, we just know that he was from somewhere Northeast of Rome, but we don't know how far Northeast.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes, yes, we actually know very little about the Huns, much less than about the Mongols.
Gabriel: Yeah. yeah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And so presumably he had a large harem. It would be surprising if he didn't, but we don't know anything about it.
Gabriel: Uh -huh. Who knows? Maybe it was celibate, you know. ah you know yourere You're a rare aesthetic step warlord.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Maybe, maybe that's where I'll end your game.
Gabriel: right so ah Anyway, so but so back to ah justifying my discipline's continued existence, and this will kind of anticipate the other things that we want to talk about later.
Gabriel: um One of the really interesting findings lately is uh... what was sometimes called market information regimes which is the idea that you know as if you just break it down right it's like
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Okay.
Gabriel: Markets are ruled by information like systematic structures for information control how markets work and the canonical example of that is um law schools because law schools are ranked by US News and World Report and there's this, you know, they publish a ranking every year and it's a highly salient piece of information for um People applying to law schools and law schools really care about their rankings because if you're
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah. Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah. Yes.
Gabriel: Yale, and you're competing with Stanford for the very best students, you want to make sure that in 20 years that Supreme Court justice has a Yale degree, not a Stanford degree.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: And then if you're the University of Buttfuck, and you're competing with Buttfuck State, you want to compete just to get more tuition. And so you really care not if you're number one or number two, but you want to care if you're number 67 or 68.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And because for any given student, that's a relevant choice set.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And so while schools really care about this, and there's been some good work showing that on a day -to -day basis, law school deans basically go through their day thinking not what is going to make us the best law school, but what is going to make us the best law school as measured by US News and World Report.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah. Yeah.
Gabriel: And to the extent that um US News' measurements are only loosely coupled to actual quality, it's um it's the perception or the measurement that matters more, not the reality.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah, yeah yeah i I mean, I'm not i'm not saying that they're totally irrelevant, ah but ah well, one sociological fact, ah which I thought was very interesting, I saw it on the internet, therefore it's true, although it's old and would be interesting to see if it's changed.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah If you look at students who were admitted to both Harvard and Yale, ah the ones who pick Yale over Harvard is about 30%.
Gabriel: Mm -hmm.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: If you look at Azure CNSEC, which would be the equivalence, the ones who are admitted to both and who choose the number two, it's 3%.
Gabriel: Wow. Okay. So there's more of like a strict ranking, yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: and so you Right. and so if you And so if you meet a kid and who's like, well, I got into Harvard, but I chose Yale because there's this professor or this thing, you you don't immediately think you're crazy.
Gabriel: Wait, which one is number one and number two?
Gabriel: Uh -huh. Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: if If you run into a kid who says, oh, I i got into SSI, but I chose SSI, you think, oh my God, you you made the biggest mistake of your life when you went when you were 20 and now you're 20.
Gabriel: Oh, so you did go to the number two.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: No, I went to the number one.
Gabriel: Oh, OK.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah and
Gabriel: I honestly didn't know whether HSA was number one or number two.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: i
Gabriel: I mean, I know it's a good school, but uh -huh.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Oh, it's absolutely number one, um and as acknowledged by everybody.
Gabriel: So you're talking about this issue ah so this issue of how often does somebody pick this one versus that one?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: So i I do think the hierarchy is stronger.
Gabriel: um And presumably, let's say that, ah I'm sorry, what was the second school besides HSA?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: It's called Essek.
Gabriel: Okay, so let's, okay.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: which sounds suspiciously close to Echek, which is failure in French. And we like to remind them that.
Gabriel: Okay, so um yeah your metric of how much how often people choose HSA versus SX, this is like a, you could use this to say that there's a strong preference for this and then you could say, how often do they choose SX over,
Gabriel: um and see it right And so you could then so you could have like all these pairwise, you could basically imagine doing like a hot or not type thing for business schools where you like put up two business schools and you have people who are interested in that sort of thing clicking on which business school they choose if they were admitted to both.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah. Yeah.
Gabriel: and and um colleague at Princeton matt sogennick actually developed this algorithm where he said one way to collect data on rankings is that you just basically give people hot or not.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: where you You give them paired choices.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: then um When you do that, you can treat that as a social network. And then you put it into a um asymmetrical centrality metric, like a Bonacichen Lloyd alpha centrality or page rank.
Gabriel: And then you can use that to ah measure status. And status is, of course, a key sociological concept, very active area in the literature.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: I've done work similar to that on measuring who's the biggest movie star. and you know then validating it.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: It started out as a lecture, but I published it in kind of an informal, it's like a social magazine, all those technically peer reviewed, but I actually did this with the Iliad, where if you look at who, going back to classics, right?
Gabriel: If you look at which warrior defeats which warrior in a fight, and then you then you say like, okay, well you know ah Odysseus beat Trojan number 47, who gives a shit?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: Whereas Achilles kills Hector. I apologize for the spoilers, but you know, it's 3000 years.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: You've had to read it, right? If Achilles kills Hector, Hector kills Patroclus, but Patroclus.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Well, ah all of my viewers have read your classics. If not, get out the window.
Gabriel: Yeah. Yeah, Patroclus kills a fuckload of anonymous Trojans. that That's how you know that Achilles is the biggest badass in the Iliad. It's not because he kills most people.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: There's actually several warriors who kill more people than Achilles does. It's because he kills Hector. And Hector's a badass because Hector kills a lot of people, including um killing Patroclus, who kills a lot of people.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Patrocles.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Yes. Okay.
Gabriel: So it's the same basic idea for ranking business goals as for, you know, ranking, ah yeah, Clayos Aptiton.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Uh, right, right, right, right, right. No, yeah, it's a, it's a cool algorithm and you said a lot of math things. So we, I am therefore judging sociology, uh, a worthy discipline.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Um, I, I, I will, I will tell Elon to cut your funding by only 90%.
Gabriel: Okay.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Um,
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Uh, let's talk about social construction.
Gabriel: All right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Uh, you had a, so way back in the day, you had a very funny blog post about this and I've probably sent it to a million people over the years.
Gabriel: Mm.
Gabriel: Thank you.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Uh, and you were also writing an article about this. And so basically, okay, great.
Gabriel: Yeah, that article should be out soon and compact.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Um.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Basically, the the way I think about this is what when people talk about social construction, there's like three things people can mean. There's like the popular version.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: there's i i I wrote it in my notes as the Steelman -Lib version. So I'm going to ask you to steelman the bad version of social construction.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And then there's what social construction actually means in sociological theory.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: so
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: What, first of all, what would you say is the popular version of it?
Gabriel: Well, I'd say the popular version of it is kind of like, um, you know, oh, that's just a social construct, man. Like it's.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: the the it's It's almost hard to express verbally because you need to imagine the exhalation of cannabis smoke as you're saying it, right? It's like this idea of like, well, have you ever realized that's just a social construct?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: oh
Gabriel: And I think like bad versions of social construction almost always inappropriately include the word just. I think there are things that where you can appropriately use the word just and social construction in the same sentence, but it's, so here's my simple rule.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: I mean, outlawing alcohol and not ill outlawing cannabis or vice versa is absolutely a social construct.
Gabriel: Well, i wouldn't I wouldn't call that a social construct. I would say that we can um we have socially constructed
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Or viewing viewing one as licit and viewing the other as illicit.
Gabriel: I would say that deviance is socially constructed and um that that includes what social associations we have with different chemicals. Now, that's actually a good example because alcohol has an objective set of properties on the brain.
Gabriel: So does THC, right?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: These are these are things that if you go to a neurologist, you force rats to consume these substances, whatever, you you can scientifically measure these things.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: So it's not as if um we,
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: right
Gabriel: We could just imagine that, I don't know, seltzer water. like you like You could imagine a society that considered has a moral panic about seltzer water.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: um but But that would be a dumb thing to imagine because seltzer water is basically harmless.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And it certainly doesn't have sight.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: You know what else is objectively, medically prove proven to exist? Genitalia. And yet.
Gabriel: Well. I mean, um i I don't want to hurt myself, but wasn't it Hume who said, ah about Berkeley, I refute it thusly by kicking a rock? You know, it's like both of us that are in position to punch ourselves and refute it thusly.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: So. um Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: so Okay, so, all right, so let's, let's stop joking around. You know, if I say, for example, ah ah opening marriage to same sex couples is totally fine because even though it's unprecedented in human history, marriage is just a social construct.
Gabriel: Mm hmm.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: What am I saying?
Gabriel: Well, marriage is a sin.
Gabriel: So that's implicit in a lot of the claims about things being social constructions, which implies very often there's the implication that if this thing is somewhat arbitrary, if this thing is not completely determined by the laws of nature, like the periodic table of the elements, then we can change it any way we like.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: And I don't think that necessarily follows.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: um because so the the whole idea ah First of all, there are some social constructions you can imagine that don't follow the laws of nature as well as others. um so you know The idea that um there could be a social problem around alcohol use or the idea that there could be a social problem around cannabis use, these are somewhat plausible beliefs.
Gabriel: beliefs because these actually are psychoactively chemicals.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: like That's objectively true.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: There is a material reality to cannabinoids, opioids, alcohol affecting specific neurotransmitters, et cetera, et cetera, in various ways that are just like objectively true, and you can replicate them in lab animals, um which would not be true about, say, chewing gum, where
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: yeah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: you know You could imagine people saying chewing gum creates unattractive litter. It gets stuck to your shoe, something like that. But nobody's going to think you know people ruin their lives by becoming chewing gum addicts.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: Like, oh my god, the first thing that when that guy wakes up, he has a piece of chewing gum. What a fucking loser. you know Nobody's going to think that in the same way that they would about a wake and bake stoner or somebody who drinks before noon.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: so
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: So explain what social construction means to serious sociologists. And then maybe we can talk about how it became memed into this sort of You know, first why it's a valuable concept in sociology and then how it became memed into this instrument of social destruction.
Gabriel: Sure. So um ah social construction um really hit it big in sociology with ah Berger and Luckman's, I think it was 1967 book, The Social Construction of Reality. um Interestingly, for the way people have associations with this, Berger was actually a political conservative. And he wrote a column for a conservative magazine until very close to his death around 10 years ago.
Gabriel: um but ah So the basic idea is that there is a material reality. We all have perceptions of materiality material reality.
Gabriel: So far, this is just Plato's allegory of the cave, ah Paul's metaphor of the dim mirror, et cetera.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: um so But what makes it distinctly social is it's not just that I have perceptions and you have perceptions, it's that we have shared perceptions. So looking in the background of your photo, I see the French flag.
Gabriel: Now, objectively, that is not the French flag. Objectively, that's just a piece of cloth that's in three colors.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: But you and I agree that that represents you know La France.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: So we we have this symbolic association with it.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: um You can imagine somebody who doesn't know that. right it's It's very easy to imagine somebody who's never seen that flag doesn't know what country it stands for, et cetera.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: um But because um you know ah very large numbers of people recognize that flag, know what it stands for, um it has these set of associations that are completely arbitrary.
Gabriel: right You could imagine a counterfactual France where the red is on the left and the blue is on the right, and it would substantively be the same country.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And so it's completely arbitrary, ah which
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: In fact, during the revolution, there were many different versions of this sort of tricolor.
Gabriel: That's not surprising, right? um you know and sometimes And that is a thing that when symbols develop, you sometimes see a certain you know ah diversity that then gets kind of honed in on as people recognize it.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: great Right.
Gabriel: So the key concept that Berger and Luckman talk about is intersubjectivity, which is that it doesn't matter what I believe or what you believe, it matters what we believe. And once enough people believe something, it is for all practical purposes a material fact.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: Now, I'm not saying that in the sense of like the hippies thought that if they all concentrated really hard, they could make the Pentagon levitate. right i'm not I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that if we all agree on something, we have magical powers.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah,
Gabriel: But I am saying that there's a sense where if I walk around with um like Let's say that I wanted to impersonate a French soldier for some heist I was doing, and I had a flag on my arm that had the ah the red on the left and the blue on the right.
Gabriel: I would quickly be spotted as an imposter because we've all agreed that the French flag has the blue on the left and the red on the right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right. Right.
Gabriel: and likewise um you know Money is the ultimate example of a social construction. and you know like Why is a dollar valuable?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: For that matter, why is silver valuable? and it's It's not so much because the intrinsic i mean a dollar is worthless. It's just a piece of high cotton paper.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: It's not even a full A4 sized piece of paper.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: so um But it's valuable because we all agree that it's valuable. um And so the inter intersubjectivity is what makes it matter.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: um Now they further talked about things like institutions and roles, which is basically when these things become highly typified, they get worked into like concrete things. um so and And we had one example of this, by the way.
Gabriel: Earlier, we were talking about um market information regimes. So rankings matter, prizes matter. right If you're a book publisher in France, you really want to win the Goncourt because it raises your sales.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right. Right.
Gabriel: It's not quite as true as it used to be, but if you're a film studio in America, you really want to win the Oscars because it raises your sales. So so um these ways of structuring information
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: can have concrete effects on how markets work.
Gabriel: Karpik, who's, I forget which, I think he's at the mine school, ah the ground to coal mines, their business school.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: Anyway, so Karpik has done very good work on market information regimes.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Okay, so I guess my next, qui so I guess I have two questions now. ah Number one. i i I agree with everything you just said.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: It seems very nice and fine, but like, why is this interesting? It seems like a banal observation about the world. Like, oh, you know, the blue, white, red, there's nothing intrinsically about it that makes it French.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: It so it only represents French.
Gabriel: Well, yeah, that that's a very tried example.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Okay, but you know, that's true, but it's true in the sense that the sky is blue. It's not an interesting fact about the world.
Gabriel: Well, it's actually not true in the sense of the sky is blue, because the sky is blue in a way that if we a imagine, it's hard to imagine a plausible alternate universe where the Earth is fit for human habitation.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: No, I mean i mean it it's the same – it's a truth that is banal in that sense.
Gabriel: And the sky's not blue.
Gabriel: Yeah, so I'm willing to say that this the simple signifier thing is a banal truth, and it's not worth having an entire discipline that is largely organized around ah exploring it.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: i
Gabriel: I think market information regimes is a non -trivial insight. you know The idea that the way information is structured in markets matters a lot. and that On a day -to -day basis, what actually matters in markets is not quality of goods, but quality of goods as measured by highly salient pieces of information that rank the goods.
Gabriel: A restaurant being a good restaurant may matter less than whether it has Michelin stars or a good Yelp rating.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And if there are things that you can do to get Michelin stars or to get a good Yelp rating that are only loosely connected to how good the food tastes, then you're gonna see restaurants focusing on pleasing the Michelin people or courting ah encouraging ordinary people to file positive Yelp reviews.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: So so so that's one non -trivial insight.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Okay.
Gabriel: I think there's other ways also where it can be a good sensitizing concept to recognize that um kind of plausible counterfactuals about the way we understand things, um some of which can be based on historical comparisons, some of which can be based on cross -cultural comparison.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: So, um you know, in the in the compact article, um you know, I give the example of the social construction of race, where, you know, people like to say race is socially constructed
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And this is also a good example of like where do you get to the hippie example, right? Somebody says race is just a social construct.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: That's obviously dumb because you can look at me and you can tell that my ancestors are from Europe. And you know um and and it's not like you're just imagining that.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: right
Gabriel: um so <unk> So there's a way in which, you know, and, um you know, and I've spit in a tube and mailed it to 23andMe and gone on Amazon and paid them $100. And it's like, you know what, they they were able to figure out exactly where my great, great, great, great grandparents lived 500 years ago, like with amazing precision, like they know exactly where my ancestors came from. um And it wasn't because I told them.
Gabriel: you know All I did was spit in the tube and you know pay them $100. So there's a sense in which race is a material reality, um you know which is especially demonstrated by 23andMe.
Gabriel: But there's also a sense in which it's um it socially constructed. um And because there are other plausible ways to understand how people are
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: um how to categorize ancestral variation other than the way that we do it in, say, the United States.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: So the best example of these are Latino and Asian, both of which are relatively recent ah racial categorizations.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: right
Gabriel: So Latino is just a total mess, right? I mean, you can find Latino people who are mostly black. You can find Latino people who are um you know mostly white.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Taylor than you and me.
Gabriel: they used They used to be called Criollos in Latin America. um You know, ah you can find people who are mostly ah Indian, you know, mostly, ah you know, American Indian ancestry, you can find people who are, um you know, you're you're so your, your typical Mexican who, by the way, is very good at making sandwiches, um contrary to your expectations.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: a
Gabriel: I know you're a torta denialist, and I will not stand for it. ah so um the Your average Mexican is something like, I don't know, half Indian. and
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: for the For the audience, this is like an inside joke between ah Gabriel and me.
Gabriel: if yeah Well, it started out as an inside joke, and then you you offended me so much, you realized that you decided to offend all of Twitter with it, and you were the main character for like a day.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: um
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: you know anyway
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes. Well, yes. I i also i also went ah went viral on Twitter one day for saying bad things about Mexican food, which I quite enjoy.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: I enjoy many cases of many types of food. For example, I noticed that there are examples
Gabriel: In fact, we've enjoyed it together. I was thinking that was a joke pickle.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: is on the screen, which is very bad of me.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: But I told you this was a Low Production Values podcast, and I really, really enjoy Russian -type pickles, which are large like this, and which are hard to find in France.
Gabriel: Uh -huh.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: So I found one last week, and I've been nibbling on it ever since, and I should have kept it out of screen. And now you you gave me a perfect segue to mention the very awkward jar of pickles.
Gabriel: ah
Gabriel: Uh -huh. I can think of more awkward things that could be in the frame. But as embarrassing things that happen on your webcam about Go, jar of pickles is pretty low on the list.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Uh, yeah, well, I, you know, I had no comment.
Gabriel: and Anyway, the point is, ah you know like ah you're you're your typical Mexican person is something like half Indian, 45 % European, and 5 % Black.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Um, Yeah.
Gabriel: you know so it's like it So there's a way in which And then you are your typical Chilean person is basically the same three ancestries, but a very different ratio where, you know, they're probably more like 80 % European, you know?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: So there's, a you can ask like, and then there's ah other countries like the Dominican Republic where people are like half European and half African. So.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: in the United States we call all these people Latino even though they don't look anything like each other some of them look just like me and some of them um look very much like the people who are living there ah before Columbus and you know ah so but we categorize all these people as Latino and it's it was completely actually my office mate in grad school wrote a very good book on this I think it was called Creating Hispanics I remember the original title was in Spanish it was
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right. Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: I think it was like the Muchos Unidos or something like that. Anyway, but um Christina Moore at Berkeley. So it's like, where do you get this racial category? And there's a specific story about that. But at some point now, there are some people, I mean, I think it is actually more salient now that people will think of themselves by their national origin categories, right?
Gabriel: People are more likely to think of themselves as I'm Salvadoran or I'm Mexican or I'm Colombian or, you know, I'm Cuban or whatever.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: um But there is a sense in which if you, They don't roll their eyes when they check the box that says Latino. They they do think of themselves as Latino in some meaningful sense.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: um Asian is an even better example because, I mean, in the United States, we decided, I think for the 1970 census, to put East Asians and South Asians together under the category Asian.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: yes
Gabriel: And you can look at a Pakistani and you can look at a Korean and they don't look anything like each other, right? The Pakistani basically looks like a European with darker skin. And, you know, whereas the Korean has a very different, ah you know, very different hair texture, ah different ah eyes, different incisors, right?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: okay so how
Gabriel: And there's all sorts of...
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Okay, so we socially constructed categories like Latino and Asian.
Gabriel: Yes.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Sorry to, but you know, sorry to, to like stability harp on this. Why is it interesting? Why is it interesting to notice this?
Gabriel: It's interesting because the the bullshit categories matter.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Why is it interesting to write about it? Why is it interesting to investigate it?
Gabriel: So it's interesting because when you ah treat the categories real, it becomes real in some meaningful sense. So there are institutions that are premised on the notion of Latino or that were premised on the notion of Asian. And even though those categories basically didn't exist 50 years ago, they do now.
Gabriel: And over the course of 50 years, things can become kind of entrenched. And so, you know, many universities will have like an Asian American Studies department. And you will see people in these departments who, ah you know, don't look like each other ah come from parts of the world that ah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: you know don't ah you know So some people will broadly be within the broad Chinese cultural sphere of influence, you know um you know Korea, Japan, ah places that you know um would use Mandarin characters for at least some ritual purposes and you know have a certain amount of technological cultural overlap.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: And then you also have people from South Asia who don't look anything like them, but they're all in the same departments and they they will kind of like They'll talk about the great diversity of Asians and the right to, but they'll also, like at a certain point, kind of assume that these things have something in common.
Gabriel: so it you know And this was basically the reason, not so much with the origins of Asian, which actually originated when South Asian small business people wanted to be eligible for small business loans.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: it which which you know because it And you can't do that if you were categorized as Caucasian.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Well, I mean, given the, given the service of rooftop Koreans, I think that's, uh, that's one of the more different.
Gabriel: Well, this was South Asians, not East Asians.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: right East Asians were always categorized so separately from white people.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Well. and Haven't we just established that all Asians are the same? No, wait, was I was i not listening?
Gabriel: no but The census has, right? I mean, the census does assume that implicitly, especially if you've got the short -form census where it just asks you your race, it doesn't ask you your specific ah ancestry.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: the
Gabriel: but
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Okay, so all right, we've established that social construction is a real concept in sociology.
Gabriel: ah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: We've established that it's interesting to look at the way things are socially constructed. How did we get from that to men in dresses ah demanding that I put pronouns after my signature?
Gabriel: Well here's the ironic thing is that um I think particularly with gender you can see cases where people who embrace the concept of the social construction of gender reject its implications and people who um are skeptical in the abstract of the concept of the social construction of gender,
Gabriel: um you know actually embrace certain hypotheses that are strictly speaking social constructionist hypotheses. so the the way that we treat it so so I'm not interested in what people say.
Gabriel: I'm interested in what they, well, I'm not interested in what shitless people adopt. I'm more interested in like what ideas people substantively have.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And um one of the emerging ideas about, well, actually emerging, it may pass its zenith, but one of the ideas that is relatively recent about gender is that people have a deep, well, recent in Western culture.
Gabriel: um You can actually, so here's the ironic thing. We see um the growth of trans as like a novel thing. But in many ways, there are it if you look at the broad sweep of comparative gender and sexuality, it's probably more common to have trans people than it is to have gender conforming homosexual people.
Gabriel: Like your typical, yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: and In some cultures maybe, although i would i would I would dispute that they're trans, but ah that's that's that's a much broader and different thing.
Gabriel: Well, so ah and So there are, let me put it this way, there are many, many cultures, there are many, many traditional cultures that have a culturally understood category for a third gender, which very often consists of male attracted males who adopt feminine dress and feminine social roles.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: i
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes. Right. And the third gender is not the same thing as transgender. Right.
Gabriel: So
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Uh, no, but I, I guess.
Gabriel: So it's the closest analog to such people in our cultures, at least until recently, would be trans.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah. Yeah.
Gabriel: Whereas you know um in the 1990s in the US, and I imagine also in France, there were some trans people, um most of whom were male attracted males.
Gabriel: But it was much more common to have um
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: males who saw themselves as men, everyone else saw themselves as men, they just were sexually attracted to other men, right? So the concept of a gay man in some cases, in some sense, is the weird ah concept, right?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: Weird in the Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic exceptionalism thing.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: yeah Yes, yes.
Gabriel: Whereas trans in some senses, like almost like a reversion to the cultural norm.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: i
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. I mean, what so let me let me rephrase my question.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah i I wasn't asking about trans specifically. I guess my question was more how did the notion of social construction became to be socially constructed as a sort of license for delegitimizing and eventually destroying every sort of
Gabriel: Yeah, that's right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: hallowed or historic cultural institution, including the gender binary, including marriage, including whatever.
Gabriel: So I think they said what social construction. hey So what social construction does
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: like but how what What was the conceptual shift or what was the the the the move that led to that?
Gabriel: So the conceptual shift is that if you recognize something as culturally contingent, It holds out the possibility that it could be arranged in another way.
Gabriel: um And so if you don't like the way something is currently arranged.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: um Now, there's a lazy version of this, which is what I think people are doing, where they just assume that just flagging something as ah social construction means that they can do whatever they want with it.
Gabriel: You know, and and i in the in the blog post you were mentioning, I refer to this as the Ruby Slippers conception of ah ah social construction that's simply recognized.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: So like in the Wizard of Oz, once Dorothy learns that her ruber so Ruby Slippers are magical, all she has to do is click her heels and she goes back to Kansas.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: She's had the shoes the whole fucking time. It's just she only, at the end, realizes that they're magical.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: so um Or at least how to use them. so This idea of social construction, some people take it as like, well, if you realize that race is a social construction or gender is a social construction, you could just do it any way you want.
Gabriel: And there can sometimes very often people will do this with kind of a denial of material reality, which was not present in Berger and Luckman.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: Berger and Luckman were very clear that material reality exists. right that like there There is something there that like if i if you walk off a cliff, even if you don't believe in gravity, you will still die.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: so
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: um But sometimes, yeah the lazy way that both its critics and its advocates will use social construction and is the idea that it's somehow mutually exclusive with material reality.
Gabriel: That if you simply recognize something as a social construction, you can do anything you want with it because it's completely...
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah. Right.
Gabriel: Well, that's not true because material reality is a constraint. there are certain ah There's limits to how much you can modify things. you know Because ultimately, material reality is there.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: And some social constructions that we can imagine are more compatible with the underlying material reality than the other.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: so you know So science is a social construction. So is astrology. But science is one that is a much closer fit with the underlying material reality than is astrology.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. That's hate speech, by the way.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah Yeah, no, I mean, I guess I guess the. the ah this this is This is my take on it, and I haven't seen anywhere it anywhere else, even though i it seems like a perfectly banal observation, which is, you know if you if you look at something like gender, ah it's a social construction, but it's a social construction that exists not just over, but in response to.
Gabriel: Mm hmm.
Gabriel: That's right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: an underlying biological reality, which is that you know men and women have their different physics physically and physiologically. therere you know There are also new neurological differences, ah which is there there's a trans sidebar there too, because for decades,
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: but for a decade, I was, you know, insulted on social media for saying that there are neurological differences between men and women. And now it's been taken up by trans people to say, Oh, no, I have a female brain.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: brain
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: um
Gabriel: well Well, this is this is the one of the interesting ironies with trans is that um in some ways, so ah people who advocate for trans will say gender is a social construct and people who will call themselves gender critical and their critics would call them TERFs will say gender is not a social construct.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: But then the gender critical people will say things like um rapid onset gender dysphoria spreads as a social contagion.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And it's like something can't spread as a social contagion, unless it's social construction, right? So it's like, you know, COVID is not, well, I mean, everything in some sense, but like COVID is not in any material sense, socially constructed.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. And yeah. Okay.
Gabriel: It's like you're at COVID statistics are, but the actual virus is not right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. The virus. by Right.
Gabriel: So like COVID spreads because it's a respiratory virus, whereas, you know, and so, um,
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: Whereas if ah the ROGD hypothesis holds that it spreads because it's a meme, you know, and it's like, well, something can't spread socially unless it's socially constructed.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right. um That's my co -host, by the way.
Gabriel: yeah Yeah, yeah. So, um and ah related to this, right, the the The view that you'll see of, like oh, this is my real brain, or you know maybe thell know like you could show neurologically.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: If you gave me an MRI, you'd be able to show this.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: and know I don't know. Maybe for some people it actually is true.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And by the way, studies have tried to show this and they've consistently showed that, no, that's not true.
Gabriel: so um
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Small samples though, the the studies I'm aware of, small samples, so it's usually like 10, 15, 20 people. ah Maybe there have been more, but like all of them have shown the same results.
Gabriel: I'd want to see it based on like the different causes, right?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: and
Gabriel: Because there's many different types of trans people and it would not surprise me if some of them, their neurology is a little bit shifted towards the opposite sex.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes. Yes.
Gabriel: And then others are just like super typical of their natal sex.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: I mean, that's that's possible. You should you should you should apply for an A9H grant.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: um
Gabriel: If if any still exist. correct
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Hopefully not.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah we're We're getting close to the end of our hour.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: There's ah there's an amazing AI school schoolwork story that I won't be able to to tell. ah But I'm going to ask you the last question that we ask of of every guest, which is recommend a book.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: It can be any book, fiction, nonfiction, whatever, outside your area of expertise.
Gabriel: Oh shit, so I like I don't have anything on the top of my head I was gonna say well of course I should just recommend Peterson burger cuz it's so much better than people think like I expected to hate it when it and then I read it I'm like this is totally sensible everything makes sense um man um yeah Well, I don't know I mean I would i would have prepared this but I'm just gonna go on my Kindle account and
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: yeah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah, that's why it's an interesting question, because otherwise it's too easy.
Gabriel: And, oh, you know what? Okay, so the Kindle book I'm reading now is Greenberg's construction of sexuality. Now that is social science, it is, but I'm not a, I am not a, ah well, actually I think, okay, so first of all, he's an anthropologist, not a sociologist.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah, that's still sociology, sorry.
Gabriel: And second of all, I'm not a specialist in sexuality. So, but if that's still too close for you, right? If that's like, you know, if I say, what's your favorite country? And it can't be France, you say, I don't know, Belgium.
Gabriel: you know you know then ah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: I mean, if you want, if you want to make that your final answer, you know, you can make that, but like, try you know, it play, play, play along.
Gabriel: Well, yeah, I'm happy to play it along. I just need to look...
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: I've, I've socially constructed this test that so now reality.
Gabriel: Oh, okay, so so here's one. ah Okay, so a very good book I'm very fond of is Ronald Hutton's The Witch.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Okay.
Gabriel: So Haunton is one of the top historians of the occult, and he in The Witch, he gives this huge overview of a comparative study of witchcraft.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Okay.
Gabriel: And so he synthesizes 20th century ethnographies in ah Asia and Africa of modern witchcraft,
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Wow.
Gabriel: and um and the Americas, um so basically you know modern ah peoples who still practice witchcraft, and then he compares that to classics and how was witchcraft practiced in Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Wow.
Gabriel: and And then he compares that to his main area of expertise, which is the um the early modern witch hunt. And he points out that some things you can find in common with all these witch scares um and witch hunts and practices of witchcraft and other things are totally arbitrary.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Gabriel: So for instance, in the West, we very often have this assumption that because we're basing ourselves on the model of the early modern European witch hunt, which is an outgrowth of the Protestant Reformation, um that, you know, um witch hunts were femicide, right, that witch hunts were about misogyny.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: um Interestingly, by the way, the Nazis believed that too. um there There was an SS officer who put like 12 man years into cataloging every witch trial in the history of Germany with the aim of showing that it was um Semitic Christianity's final attempt to suppress, um you know, you know ah pagan survivalism as like the authentic German spirit
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Oh my God.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: That is high -tier German autism.
Gabriel: well Well, yeah, that's right. so ah i mean there There are certainly worse things that SS officers could have been doing at the time than cataloging um witch burnings. so um But the but they i mean the funny thing now is that if you talk to somebody today and you...
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: i
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: There's a Norma Donald joke in there.
Gabriel: and Yeah, exactly.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: like I thought the worst things was the obsessive cataloging.
Gabriel: Yeah. so yeah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: No, I thought there were
Gabriel: Yeah, the worst thing was Shoah. Yeah, exactly. So, and and, you know, trying to conquer all of Europe. So, um yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes, and ah ah for further record, the the mass genocide of Jews and other minorities was worse.
Gabriel: yeah so Yeah, and I agree. So my but by so many orders of magnitude. um you know if anything you So it was a bad dissertation, but so it was just a dissertation. so But the the ironic thing is that if you talk to somebody today and they tell you like, oh, um the witch hunts were a final attempt by Christianity to suppress um you know ah
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: The ancient.
Gabriel: European pagan survivalism, that person is usually a feminist, usually sees themselves on the left, but you know they agree with the handler, which doesn't mean it's a, well, it is a bad idea in the sense that it's incorrect, but it that it doesn't mean that it's an evil idea.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: you know I'm not saying that you know um the the person, well, going to do the occult bookstore is probably not the greatest thing to do for your soul, but it doesn't make you a Nazi. So anyway, um so he talks about um
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: you know the early modern European witch hunt, but this idea that witch hunts were fundamentally about ah patriarchy is an ethnocentric idea um because it's premised on the idea that it's basically accurate that most of the early modern European witch hunt was accusations against women.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: But that's simply not true comparatively.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: There's many, many cultures where the average witch trial victim or the average person lynched as a witch is a man.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Oh, okay.
Gabriel: So um in Africa, every 10 years or so, there's a scare about penis theft.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Oh, okay.
Gabriel: um
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Gabriel: And anthropologists call this choro, which is the Malay word for turtle, because it's the idea of like, if you imagine like a turtle pulling its head back into its shell, like, and this occurred in the early modern European, which it was a very common feature of witch hunts.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: All right. Right.
Gabriel: It's not something you see when you watch the crucible performed or something like that. But there's a very common belief that witches steal penises. Every 10 years or so in modern Africa, there'll be a scare that witches, usually men, are stealing penises, and a mob will just go and lynch the person.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: By the way, ah a quote unquote red bill ah is if you sort of semi -regularly go to Google news and just type human sacrifice Africa. There's always new.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Anyway, go on.
Gabriel: Okay, yeah, I, i yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah human Human sacrifice is ongoing in Africa and and sort of regularly occurs.
Gabriel: Yeah, but I mean, a probably an important fact would be that it's seen as deviant locally. I don't think there's any cultures where it's seen as like a a socially accepted thing. like It may be something for like obscure cults to do or something like that.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: it would it well you know i mean It depends whether you're talking about the the actual culture or the government, which is dependent on $8.
Gabriel: Mm -hmm.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: um i've ive honestly I honestly don't know. Certainly in Muslim countries, it would be considered ah deviant.
Gabriel: Mm -hmm.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: um Anyway, no, finish your point about the witches. I thought the point, my assumption, see, I i i was just too bathed in feminist queer studies.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: My assumption was that ah quote unquote witchcraft was linked to, um, I, I forget the expression, uh, doulas.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: I mean, it's not typically, but like women who help women over and med, who are also medicine women who are also sort of associated with occult practices.
Gabriel: Oh, like Manichaeism?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And that's why it was sort of like female dominated.
Gabriel: So it could be. i mean there there way And that that might have been the case in early modern Europe. um yeah Now, it was definitely not the case that all, but that's part of the the, right, so in order to make the what's called the the Murray thesis, because Murray, who was an Egyptologist, but she got asked to write this thing on witchcraft for Encyclopedia Britannica, that's how this theory got popularized, although it wasn't the only reason, because like I said, the Nazis believed it too.
Gabriel: um The Murray thesis, in order for it to make sense, it couldn't be that these people were accused for no reason whatsoever, just like personal grudges or something like that. It had to be that they were doing something that it was superficially resembled witchcraft.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: And so that hones in on the idea that these were all like traditional herbalists or folk so medicine people.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: right
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right.
Gabriel: Some of them were, right?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right.
Gabriel: There were some people who were ah practicing folk medicine, folk herbalism, um and those people got accused.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And some of them were practicing something that they believed was switchcraft.
Gabriel: Such people were often women
Gabriel: Well, many of them were doing things that they believed, some of them, not all of them, believed that they were doing things which they considered to be white magic. um
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Great.
Gabriel: they very Very few, if any of them, well, there probably were a handful, but very, very few people who were accused in the early modern era actually believed themselves to be having made pacts with Satan to um grant themselves supernatural power over their over their neighbors.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Okay. Yeah. But they were engaged in sort of occult practices.
Gabriel: Some of them were, yeah. So, but they saw themselves as engaging in benign ah magic that would very often include Christian prayers.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Right. Right.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Interesting.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: All right. Well, see, I prodded you to come up with with a recommendation that fit the thing, and that was excellent and fascinating.
Gabriel: yeah
Gabriel: Cool.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: ah All right. i Thank you very much. I want to take up more of your time, so it turns out that not all sociologists need to be thrown into a volcano.
Gabriel: Yeah. Go talk to you.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: That's very good news for...
Gabriel: So now you believe in human sacrifice? but ah or or Or is it that you don't think we're people?
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: No, just just just retribution.
Gabriel: OK, I see. So so you so it's not it's not to help Pele, it's just to hurt us.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Yes.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: yes Yes, exactly.
Gabriel: OK.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: um you know Joking aside, this was all fascinating. Thank you very much for your time.
Gabriel: Yeah, go talk to me.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: And maybe we can do this again sometime soon.
Gabriel: Yeah, sounds good.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: All right. Thank you.
Gabriel: All right, see you.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Bye.
