Paul Bloom

I'll Never Be Your Pizza Vernon.

Anybody know, figure out what that corresponds to? Beast of Burden.

Professor Paul Bloomfield Beasts of Burden, very good.

A Girl with Colitis Goes By.

Somebody? The ants are my friends, they're blowing in the wind.

The main types of empathy are cognitive, affective or emotional, and somatic.

Derek will be looking at the first two in segment two through the lens of Paul Bloom's work.

But given a recent book by Lebanese-born Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad, which Matthew is going to cover in segment three, we thought we'd look at how empathy is being used and potentially distorted in modern society, or, as I'll get into next, how it's being weaponized on social media by Christian nationalists.

[upbeat music] Last year saw a wave of anti-empathy content across the Christian nationalist, independent, and social media sphere, which is, sounds like an odd sentence [laughs] at first glance.

It's not possible for me to actually know the circumstances of nineteen hundred America or even modern-day India because one is impossible for me to understand, and the other is highly unlikely, as it would entail me not just visiting, but becoming part of that culture.

So even my assumption that Indian parents would be pro-vaccine is pure speculation based on my own understanding of space and time.

And this sort of bias in empathy is a problem, and that's according to Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom, who wrote Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion in twenty sixteen to point out the flaws, not against empathy per se, as he understands that that's a function of being human, but on decision-making based on empathy.

I'll break it down a little bit, but as a heuristic, think of immediately replying to a social media post without context to the person making the claim, the source and validity of information presented, or thinking through where that claim leads simply because the sentiment made you feel a certain way.

Well, there, there are other people in the field as well that are starting to, um, argue.

So I'll get Paul Bloom I, I argue with all the time about this.

Paul Bloom, um, was like, "Well, the research suggests that it's not, um, real, um, growth.

It's perceived growth, um, because statistically, we went in and we measured, and we found that people aren't actually better off after the event than before the event.

They're not actually growing, you know, um, even though they think they are." Um, it's sort of like a "Ha, gotcha" kinda thing, and I'm like-

If babies are born racist, what's...

That means we're just racist, right? Let's talk about Paul Bloom.

[laughs]

Yeah.

So whether it was Midtown Manhattan or South Brooklyn or the Bronx or Nassau or Queens, whatever, I had to teach the same material.

And one of the chapters was on human development from, you know, infancy till, you know, cradle to the grave, human psychology.

And, uh, at the time I was teaching, or around the time I had finished graduate school, Paul Bloom had published a series of studies that were, um, well, there were 60 minutes segments on it.

He got, he wrote, you know, New York Times bestselling books about it.

Okay

... which is one of my favorite writers, I had the, the pleasure of talking to him recently, is, is Paul Bloom.

He's a great-

Ooh

This part of it is so interesting to me.

I mean, I've, I've had psychologists on the show before, people like Paul Bloom, who I love.

I, I think he's, I think he's just fantastic.

Um, and I may be bastardizing his, [laughs] his argument here.

But I do think more AI practice, let's do that.

And they go out of their way in this article and in the Harvard Business School to say that the students actually really love this feature because, I mean, as you're saying, it is a ratio thing, right? And we talked about this all the time in my time at Coursera, right? Because being in an actual course with a leading faculty at Princeton, a leading faculty at The incredible schools that have been doing MOOCs for years at Yale, like the Paul Bloom psychology course, Paul Bloom, legendary psychology professor at Yale.

Like, yes, to be in that course and be able to raise your hand and comment and have him respond to you and have a conversation.

That's worth a huge amount.

So the ability to have videos of him explaining the stuff is worth some portion of that.

Maybe a small portion, but you could do it for everyone in the world.

This is somewhere in between, right? If you could take a Paul Bloom and copy him and sort him out with his knowledge, train an avatar with all of the research he's ever done, all the books he's ever published, and then have a conversation and have him talk to you for three straight hours.

I mean, there's definitely value there.