Academic Jonathan Haidt was on Joe Rogan's show yesterday. The discussion started with some talk about Haidt's new book and his arguments about the ways in which smart phones and social media are contributing to the mental health crisis among teens. (Haidt wrote a piece for the Atlantic last week which I discussed here.)

Later in a discussion that spent a lot of time thinking about the future of social media, Rogan brought up Google's Gemini and the ways in which it was obviously tuned to produced DEI friendly results, even in cases where those results made no sense.

"What's very bizarre with the initial implementation, specifically with Google's version of it, is that it's ideologically captured," Rogan said.

"That was so irresponsible of Google to do," Haidt replied. He continued, "I'm really horrified by what Google did in introducing Gemini...Google Gemini was programmed to answer in ways that, basically, the most extreme DEI officer would demand that people speak. So, if you ask for a picture of the founding fathers, they're multi-racial or all black."

And as Rogan pointed out, even Nazis were depicted as multi-racial.

Haidt argued that if you rule out the possibility that engineers at Google are personally very stupid then the most likely explanation for Google Gemini is that the company is a victim of "structural stupidity."

"I think what's happening to them is what happened to us in universities, which is what I've called structural stupidity. So you have very smart people, but if anyone questions a DEI-related policy on campus, they would get attacked," Haidt said.

I don't think what Haidt is saying is really at odds with Rogan's idea of "ideological capture" but it is perhaps a bit more nuanced. Ideological capture suggest a group in which everyone is in agreement that DEI is the only acceptable lens through which to see the world and so it naturally produces a product like Gemini that is totally committed to that viewpoint. 

I think what Haidt is saying is that there probably are a lot of Google engineers who are ideologically captured but there are also some who still have enough footing in the real world to know that all black Founding Fathers and black Nazis is absurd, but those people are too afraid to speak up. There is simply too high a price to pay for writing the memo that says, maybe we should dial back the DEI focus on this new product. Doing so would make you a target and possibly get you forced out of your job. So it's easier to just go along with with the people who are driving the DEI bus, even though some of the engineers must have realized it was heading for a crash once it got out. I think the term "structural stupidity" makes a lot of sense.

Here's the segment of the interview dealing with Gemini.

Joe Rogan and Jonathan Haidt Highlight DEI's Influence On Google's Gemini and Microsoft's ChatGPT: "Structural Stupidity"@joerogan: "What's very bizarre with the initial implementation, specifically with Google's version, is that it's ideologically captured."@JonHaidt: "I'm… pic.twitter.com/V0XQ3zNtJC

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 20, 2024

If you're interested in more, the entire interview is available here.