Last week, Great Talk, Inc. held a panel discussion about how knowledge and flawed reasoning influence both the public and its leaders. The resulting conversation, moderated by Katie Curran O’Malley, covered myriad topics and conflicting interpretations of the roles of leadership, access to information, and power, leaving all participants and viewers with something to think about.
The panel of experts included Elisabeth Bumiller, writer-at-large for The New York Times; James M. Mattingly, philosophy professor at Georgetown University; Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University; and Ian Olasov, adjunct lecturer at New York University and public philosopher. O’Malley is executive director of the Women’s Law Center of Maryland (WLC) and began her 30-year legal career as a prosecutor in the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s office before being appointed to the bench in the District Court of Maryland for Baltimore City in 2001. She was named executive director of WLC in January 2024.
Kicking off the discussion with a broad question, O’Malley asked who the public should look to as the arbiters when it comes to good judgment and leadership. Answers ranged from NOT Elon Musk (Mattingly) to the recently deceased Pope Francis (Bumiller) to the public itself (Olasov).
“The people are as expert as anyone on the matters that concern them locally and when you give people an opportunity to deliver about the political problems … that affect them municipally, or that affect them in their day-to-day lives, in their workplaces and so on, they make pretty good decisions,” Olasov said.
Acknowledging that mobilizing that approach to decision-making is difficult on a federal level, he said, “I trust exactly no one on literally everything, but I trust just about everyone on matters that concern them very locally.”
Melamed’s view was shaped by his being born outside the United States and emigrating here when he was 37 years old. He was raised with a more ambivalent attitude towards the notion of leadership itself, and indicated he felt the U.S. might benefit from a more neutral view of it here.
“It’s hard to get along without [leadership], but it’s hard to use it without fetishizing it,” Mattingly said, agreeing with Melamed. “And that seems to be the kind of problem, at least in the United States right now, is that instead of using leadership to empower this kind of local, regional, municipal, taking control of your own destiny, we’re handing power to leaders, rather than using them to facilitate the exercise of our own power.”
O’Malley asked the panel what role they see fear playing in elections and politics, and how effective using fear is to gain popularity. All agreed fear plays a huge role in politics, though the way it is used has shifted dramatically in recent years.
Bumiller noted conventional wisdom used to be that politicians needed to be sunny and positive and have an optimistic vision about America, but that has not been effective lately. Mattingly felt both parties used fear in their campaigns, but that the use of fear is more effective the more personal it is. Olasov pointed out that the public spends a lot of time talking about things that aren’t necessarily going to happen, yet it is hard to make predictions.
“I think the annexation of Greenland is a plausible example of this,” Olasov said. “I think there’s approximately zero chance we will annex Greenland, but people motivated broadly by fear, maybe by a cluster of other attitudes too, but partly by fear, spend a lot of time talking about something that’s never going to happen.”
He thinks our political discourse would be better off leaving out “wildly implausible worst-case scenarios” in favor of “things that are happening right now or things that are matters of greater certainty.”
The panel also discussed issues like the prevalence of misinformation and the challenges of combating it, the role of philosophy in teaching reasoning and critical thinking, and the profound need for students to develop their own reasoning skills and media literacy in this age of misinformation and the rise of AI.
O’Malley asked the panel how they envisioned the future of knowledge, given the prevalence of students using Chat GPT and other methods in their learning, and fears that AI will one day be smarter than humans.
“We’re certainly not there yet with journalism,” Bumiller said. She described experiments wherein Chat GPT is asked to write an article in the style of two completely different journalists, and the resulting Chat GPT articles come out the same as one another. “[The articles were] completely banal and ordinary and embarrassing and thank God, because, you know, they haven’t taken our jobs yet, right?”
Mattingly acknowledged that it’s a concern in academia, but there are shifts in classroom management techniques that can help teachers and professors deal with it in fairly easy ways, in addition to programs for them to use to detect AI use in student work. Everyone agreed humans are still more creative and intelligent than computers, and computers require human supervision to operate correctly.
Mattingly helped his students absorb this by having them ask Chat GPT to write their papers for them.
“Then they corrected them, and they found that the chat was actually quite terrible at writing these philosophy papers,” Mattingly said. “And there were these terrible grades, and so they’re rewriting these papers, and they felt they were not even worth rewriting, so they were generating their own as well.”
The panelists also took questions from the audience, addressing topics that included the role of philosophy in addressing society’s problems, legal and moral issues, and more. The discussion ended with agreement on the critical need to improve reasoning and decision-making in American society.
Great Talk, Inc was founded in 2016 as a 501(c)(3) Maryland nonprofit organization to provide a forum and venue for providing Conversation With A Purpose in Maryland, and accessible to all.
