心理与人性

"If there was no religion, humans would have invented religion, because think about it. Think of the early humanity. You’re a caveman or whatever, and then you see your family members killed and then you say, “What? I’m going to be the sheep or the gazelle that just ends and perish? I am more important.” I think with the development of consciousness, humans thought that they are much more precious and important than the other animals because they have now intelligence. So my life will not end like that. My death will be even more important. There’s consequences for that. There’s consequences for what I do."

"And its most important tenet is that if the goal is the project of human knowledge which is to know the world as it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think and what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know. So every time you’re actually saying, “You can’t say that,” you’re actually depriving yourself of the knowledge of what people really think you’re causing… What Timer Kran, who’s on our board of advisors, calls preference falsification. You end up with an inaccurate picture of the world, which by the way, in a lot of cases, because there are activists who want to restrict more speech, they actually tend to think that people are more prejudiced than they might be."

"I think you should be able to study what people think and I think it’s important that we actually do. So I think that… Let’s take for example, QAnon. Yeah, QAnon is wrong. But where did it come from? Why did they think that? What’s the motivation? Who taught them it? Who came up with these ideas? This is important to understand history, that’s important to understand modern American politics. And so, if you put your scholar hat on and which… You should be curious about everyone, about where they’re coming from."

"I guess there’s always that chance, but I am an optimist. I think you’re an optimist too. I think exactly as you just said. I think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate. And we are never more innovative than when we’re under distress. I think that a lot of the developments of humans over the last thousands of years have been about we didn’t change the world when we were comfortable. It was when we were in crisis. Necessity is the mother of invention. But I think we’ll be all right. I think that this impending climate crisis is real and happening. I actually personally think that I’m going to answer a question that you didn’t even ask me."

"Daryl Davis, who I’m sure you’re familiar with, part of his goal was just simply to get to know where people were coming from. And in the process, he actually deradicalized a number of Klans members when they actually realized that this Black man who had befriended them actually was compassionate, was a decent person. They realized all their pre-conceptions were wrong. So it can have a deradicalizing factor, by the way. But even when it doesn’t, it’s still really important to know what the bad people in your society think. Honestly, in some ways, for your own safety, it’s probably more important to know what the bad people in your society actually think."