The Constitution of Knowledge Quotes

“If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community. Other communities, of course, can do all kinds of other things. But they cannot make social decisions about objective reality.

That is a very bold, very broad, very tough claim, and it goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge: creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“Minorities are always better off in a culture which protects dissent than in a culture which protects us from dissent.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“(As Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf put it, propaganda “must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.… [P]ersistence is the first and most important”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“A poll for the Knight Foundation in 2019 found that “more than two-thirds (68 percent) of college students say their campus climate precludes students from expressing their true opinions because their classmates might find them offensive.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“27 If we go in for quackery or conspiracy theories, that is often because the personal cost of believing is low and the personal reward of believing is high. Believing that 9/11 was a government plot or that Barack Obama was not born in America does us no personal harm, but it can help us feel enmeshed in a special group of insiders with privileged information. Experiments show that a good way to help people think more rigorously and accurately is to pay them to get the right answer; when they have skin in the game, the personal cost of being wrong goes up.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“Wrong beliefs and wrong perceptions are contagious whether or not they are sincere, because dissidents tend to self-censor and act like believers. That is how entire societies, such as the Soviet Union, can be built on everyone’s publicly pretending to believe what many privately know to be false. After a while, in a community where people are struggling to conform with each other, it can be very hard, even in principle, to know whether people are sincere or faking, or even which is which.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“In the real world, however, the claim that censorship or enforced orthodoxy protects minorities and the marginalized has been comprehensively disproved, again and again and again. “Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”30 They and former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen, in her powerful book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, list the horrors and oppressions which have befallen minorities in the name of making society safe from dangerous ideas. “Laws censoring ‘hate speech’ have predictably been enforced against those who lack political power,” writes Strossen.31 In America, under the Alien and Sedition Acts, authorities censored and imprisoned sympathizers of the opposition party (including members of Congress) and shut down opposition newspapers; under the Comstock laws, they censored works by Aristophanes, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce (among others); under the World War I anti-sedition laws, they convicted more than a thousand peace activists, including the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president in 1920 from a prison cell.32 In more recent times, when the University of Michigan adopted one of the first college speech codes in 1988, the code was seized upon to charge Blacks with racist speech at least twenty times.33 When the United Kingdom passed a hate-speech law, the first person to be convicted was a Black man who cursed a white police officer.34 When Canadian courts agreed with feminists that pornography could be legally restricted, authorities in Toronto promptly charged Canada’s oldest gay bookstore with obscenity and seized copies of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude.35 All around the world, authorities quite uncoincidentally find that “hateful” and “unsafe” speech is speech which is critical of them—not least in the United States, where, in 1954, the U.S. Postal Service used obscenity laws to censor ONE, a gay magazine whose cover article (“You Can’t Print It!”) just happened to criticize the censorship policies of the U.S. Postal Service.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“An Ivy League teacher told me, “I’ve found that if students have an opportunity to jump on someone, they usually take it.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“That is why intelligence is no defense against false belief.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“Maybe Socrates would rather be right than popular, but most of us prefer to maintain our good standing with our tribe, a reasonable call when one considers that Socrates was executed by his fellow citizens.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“Tomorrow morning,” said Socrates, “let us meet here again.” The conversation he and his young protégé began 2,500 years ago continues, now spanning the world instead of just Athens, despite countless efforts to squelch it.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“the enemies of intellectual pluralism and free inquiry seem to be ten feet tall. Which is just how they want to seem.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“As Lincoln hoped, by using their hearts and their heads, Americans have kept their experiment alive long past the age when most democracies die.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“Members of the community share not just a commitment to the idea of objective reality but also an understanding that outside of that commitment lies anarchy, a zone of chaos where reality splinters and truth loses its grip.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“They may disagree on a lot of things, but they regard lying and making stuff up as a firing offense.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“But replacing a personal or tribal network, one which is small or local or familial or private or affiliative, with a liberal network, one which is large and global and impersonal and public and critical, changes the game.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison, the big three of modern liberalism”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“Once tribal lines have formed, there will be no shortage of ideologies for identity and conflicts to be “about.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“Intergroup animosity need not be about anything,”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.28 Peirce, all those years ago, got it right.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“A republic will not work if we don’t have shared facts.” Michael Hayden, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, sent a distress signal when he wrote (in the New York Times): “These are truly uncharted waters for the country. We have in the past argued over the values to be applied to objective reality, or occasionally over what constituted objective reality, but never the existence or relevance of objective reality itself.” The battle lines, Hayden perceived, made for some strange bedfellows. “In this post-truth world, intelligence agencies are in the bunker with some unlikely mates: journalism, academia, the courts, law enforcement, and science—all of which, like intelligence gathering, are evidence-based.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“In the empirical argument, so-called Neptunians and Vulcanists squared off. They debated seemingly quotidian subjects, such as the origin of granite (was it crystallized from water or disgorged from volcanos?). But, as so often happens when people divide into opposing camps, the debate became polarized and tribal animosities surfaced. Partisans took to hiding mineral samples which might support the other side; a play written by a Vulcanist was booed on opening night by an audience deliberately packed with Neptunians. As the British geologist Charles Lyell would write several decades later, in his 1835 Principles of Geology, “Ridicule and irony were weapons more frequently employed than argument by the rival sects, till at last the controversy was carried on with a degree of bitterness almost unprecedented in questions of physical science.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“A solid group of 100 or so [cognitive] biases has been repeatedly shown to exist,”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“universities need to make defending pluralism a top institutional priority, not an afterthought. If they do not, politicians—the world’s worst judges of scientific integrity—will try to do it for them.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“As I spoke with academics and university students, I lost count of the number who echoed Tuvel’s worry. In journalism and law and certain other sectors of the reality-based community, coercive conformity had made inroads, but in universities it was reconfiguring the whole intellectual landscape, for students and professors alike. As a professor told me, “There is no bigger filter bubble than any selective university in the United States. It is definitely the case that at these institutions, which are supposed to be founded on the idea of a marketplace of ideas, there are all kinds of expressions you can’t say now. Anything that relates to race or gender, you had best keep your mouth shut if you have a point of view that deviates from the predominant woke one. You’re going to get your ass in trouble.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“This letter wasn’t really about Pinker at all,” wrote a graduate student named Shaun Cammack. “In fact, it has a very specific function—to dissuade lesser-known academics and students from questioning the ideological consensus.… There are 575 people opposing Pinker for his views, and in the small world of academia that signals an extraordinarily high cost to dissent.”52 Pinker would be fine, but the smaller fry would get the intended message, which was to steer a wide berth around disapproved ideas or thinkers.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth