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Ruxandra Teslo is a PhD student in Genomics at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. She writes about science and culture at Ruxandra’s Substack.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ruxandra Teslo discuss Rob Henderson’s concept of luxury beliefs, its key insights, and the misleading ways in which it’s often used; the academic study of “misinformation” and why we should be skeptical of (much of) it; and how cultural ideas about progress shape outcomes in the real world.
The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: We started talking to each other in part because when I was trying to think through the concept of luxury beliefs that Rob Henderson has invented, I googled around for people who had written on this, and I thought that you had the best response to it. But I've also been in conversation with you about other things and you've really become an important voice on culture and science very, very quickly.
For listeners who may not have read my essay on this and who may not have listened to a conversation with Rob, what is the concept of luxury beliefs and why are you so critical of it?
Ruxandra Teslo: The concept of luxury beliefs is this idea that elites have replaced material-based status signaling; for example, people used to have their expensive clothes to signal their elite status. And the idea is that, especially in recent times, they have replaced this with signaling via beliefs. One that Rob gives very often is “defund the police,” right? It's pretty clear that Rob considers them mistaken. And to be honest, I also consider a lot of them very mistaken. But where we disagree is that I don't really agree with how he portrays the motivation of elites in holding these often misguided beliefs.
Mounk: And so what is it about motivation that you think is mistaken? How big and important is this disagreement?
Teslo: The main thing that we agree on is that, first of all, a lot of these beliefs are mistaken. We also agree on the fact that it's easier to hold mistaken beliefs when you don't face the consequences. But there are several things I disagree with. So first of all, I'm not sure that we can observe that there was a shift in how elites signal status from the past compared to now in this fundamental way. I think people have always used a combination of complex things to signal status. And I also think this varies to some extent—financial elites pretty much still signal using money and their compensation. Equally so in the past, a lot of elites signaled using behavioral norms and using what you would consider immaterial signs of status. And that's where the concept of nouveau riche comes from in 19th century social novels. There's always a character who's rich, but they don't really fit into the elite groups because they don't have the right manners. They don't have the right opinions. That's why they need to marry someone from an old family that would give them some respectability. So I think there's an empirical disagreement there. Elites do still signal with achievement. So for example, you could say that academics, journalists, maybe even tech bros aren't big into wearing fancy clothes, but they still signal a lot with achievements—who publishes the better paper, the most cited paper, who has raised more money for their startup (even if they're dressed in really ugly and cheap clothing). And the reason why these material and sort of achievement-based signaling methods are still, in my opinion, primary is because they have something that is very important for something to properly function as a status signal: they are scarce. Beliefs are not as scarce as achievements or material stuff. Anyone can say they want to defund the police.
Mounk: So I think your disagreement with Rob is primarily about the imputation of a certain kind of motivation behind these luxury beliefs. Where you and I agree is that Rob sometimes imputes a kind of ill will to the people who hold these luxury beliefs in a way that is mistaken. So there's a really interesting passage in his memoir, which is excellent, that I think is wrong in a small way. He says all these people at Yale with him, who claim that capitalism is a terrible political system, all end up working for Goldman Sachs; and they go around saying that capitalism is evil, in part, so that fewer of their classmates are going to apply to Goldman Sachs, and so, therefore, they're going to have less competition. And I just don't think that that's how that works. That kind of conspiratorial assumption that perhaps they're really just trying to mislead people in this way, I think, is mistaken. And what I did in my essay was to get rid of that element and to define luxury beliefs more narrowly as the beliefs that you're holding in part because, given your social position, you haven't really had to deal properly with the consequences of your beliefs. But that doesn't mean that you want other people to suffer. It certainly doesn't mean it's part of a conspiracy.
Another response I had to your essay was to say that perhaps these luxury beliefs are a useful form of social competition among people who have roughly equal status. One area that's obviously true is in grad school, before the time when you can have real achievements, where you may be insecure about your status. And so embracing these kinds of political views becomes a particularly tempting thing to do. I think that tracks with where we see some of the worst cases of those kinds of luxury beliefs.
Teslo: I think that's a good point. And I think it's also used by people who are maybe very similar to each other in status, but one of them feels a bit inferior in some way. And then they make the person who's a bit above them feel subtly morally guilty through some sort of virtue signaling that they do.
My point is simply that it doesn't seem obvious to me that elites today are more virtue signaling or holding more wrong beliefs just for the sake of social status than they used to. I think people have very mixed ways of signaling status. But yes, obviously this concept hasn't become so popular for nothing. It does hit at something. And I think what we're trying to do here is to not completely dismiss it, but actually improve it through debate. Maybe the proportion of signaling with beliefs hasn't changed, but the kinds of popular beliefs that are used to signal status have changed. We're much more egalitarian now, and egalitarian ideas have become much more popular in our culture. But I think that if you take that too far, you arrive at this denial of any sort of hierarchy that exists. Aristocratic people in the past might have used religiosity or liking the king or having some very aristocratic, very elitist manners to signal, but now because egalitarianism is the chic idea (which is, again, in many ways good) it leads to this weird hypocrisy in elites.
We're now much more concerned with matters of, say, whether a poor child can go to Harvard. And I think elites today are genuinely much more concerned with that than elites 300 years ago, when almost nobody cared about that. But if you take this too far, and if you combine hypocrisy with it, you get this absurd thing where you deny any hierarchy. It's like a kind of toxic benevolence. It's like when a parent wants to be good to their children and they end up not setting any boundaries. I think it's the same with society and elites. It's good to have benevolent elites, but it's also very easy to just feel good about yourself and do nothing and not check the practical outcomes of your actions. The vast majority of elites are so-called lazily well-intentioned.
Mounk: I think there's two different ways of reading elites as being lazily benevolent, which I think is a really fortuitous turn of phrase. There's a more generous reading of that and the less generous reading of that. And it's worth having both in mind. One is that elites genuinely want the best for other people, even at their own expense, but they're too lazy to think through what it would take to actually make those improvements. And I think that's sometimes valid.
I would say that there's also a less generous reading, which is that they want good things for people in general, but part of the laziness comes from the fact that they don't want to give up their own status and wellbeing. And so what they'll adopt is views which allow them to square feeling benevolent, and thinking that they're doing something good in society, without having to give up status and without having to give up material well-being, which might explain why we end up with cultural beliefs rather than economic beliefs. So every now and then you go to an anti-racist workshop and feel bad about yourself, but you don't actually have to give up your money, right? I'm slightly caricaturing. But I do think they genuinely believe in the things that allow them to have this positive self-perception, even if inquiring more seriously into that belief would force them to say something more negative.
The other thought that what you were saying inspired was that perhaps luxury beliefs are actually characteristic of democracy. People sometimes ask me “Is Xi Jinping a populist?” And that's because populism has become this slightly vague or all-purpose phrase that can denote somebody who's authoritarian. And certainly Xi Jinping is a dictator. He's certainly not democratically elected. But part of populism is an anti-elitist vein that doesn't really make sense if you are the person in charge in a highly bureaucratic state where the governing party has called the shots for 100 years. They believe that they are at the top of a hierarchy and that's a good thing for their country and for their society. But they're not anti-elitists because they see themselves as the rightful elite, which is a very different kind of attitude. Now, going back to the 18th century aristocrat, he's not going to have luxury beliefs because he doesn't feel the pressure to pretend that his beliefs need to be justified by how they serve the common people. That's a pressure that elites are going to feel much more strongly in a democracy than in a non-democracy. And so therefore the prevalence of luxury beliefs is likely to be much higher in a deeply democratic culture and society than in a different kind of culture and society.
It feels to me like we agree that there is a useful concept of luxury beliefs; we shouldn't overemphasize the extent to which it's in competition with luxury goods and achievements, but all still matter very much as markers of social status; we need to be very wary about imputing a kind of conspiratorial element to the people who hold those beliefs. But if we take care to do those things, then perhaps it continues to be a useful concept. What do you think is the takeaway from this part of the conversation?
Teslo: Yes, I just wanted to first of all agree completely with you regarding luxury beliefs being more prevalent in democracy. Some might say that it's a feature, not a bug, because you might need to voice being more extreme than you actually are to some extent in order to maintain democracy. Maybe you need to exaggerate how egalitarian you are. So that's one point that I totally agree with. And obviously you shouldn't take it too far, which leads to a lot of dysfunction. But then yes, I basically agree with your description and about what we have concluded, and I think.
Whether we can continue to use the term as such as luxury beliefs—the words don't matter, per se. It's about what people attach meaning to and my personal observation is that a lot of people have attached it to this semi-conspiratorial view, that this person actually wants something bad to happen to these people, but they will pretend they don't. I think we can continue to use the term, but the fact that it has transmuted and has started to be used in this way has to be kept in mind. And it might be that, just because of that, there needs to be a new term. I don't think the term in itself is right or wrong—it's about how it has ended up being used by people.
Mounk: Let me broaden this out a little bit. You were born in Romania and still have a real sense of this legacy of communism and socialism there. You're a science PhD student, working on serious things that have nothing to do with Twitter debates and nothing to do with culture wars about luxury beliefs and so on. I have to say that about a year ago, I had not heard of you and I think most people had not heard of you. And then very quickly, you've been able to build a significant following with what I think are really great essays at your Substack.
What made you enter this set of debates? Why do you think it's important for you, of your background, to engage in these conversations? And why do these cultural debates matter to somebody whose primary identity, I think, is still as a scientist?
Teslo: Yeah, thank you. That's a very good question. I think it's a combination of things. First of all, I've always been interested in these humanities related questions. I've always read a lot of literature and philosophy in school. I did the Olympiad and I did both sciences and philosophy and literature and stuff like that. In seventh grade, I was, I think at the time, the only kid that qualified for both the National Physics and Literature Olympiad. So I always had this kind of dual nature.
Secondly, I wrote this piece called “How I Stopped Being a Culture Incel.” And it was about how as a scientist, I realized that even the extent to which people value science itself and progress and everything is in itself dependent on culture. I started to read a lot about the Enlightenment, and Deirdre McCloskey, who I really like. And she talks a lot about how a lot of what spurred the Enlightenment wasn't just material factors per se, it was also how people related to the idea of progress. They started to talk about progress in a positive light. So I think you can't really separate the two and I just saw how people were against markets, against capitalism and, as you say, as an Eastern European who has seen how hard it is to do science and how hard it is to progress in a country that is communist or post-communist even, as I've seen that, I thought “No, all of the stuff that we're doing here, all of the drugs that we're interested in, is underpinned by this machinery that really doesn't work under socialism.”
My first essay was about some issues that I had with misinformation research. And I think the fact that I'm not part of the humanities sphere and the fact that I don't do social science or whatever meant that I could just criticize this concept quite freely. It doesn't really affect my career in any meaningful way, whereas I think a lot of humanities people feel like they can't speak about things that they have a problem with because it may directly impact their career.
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Mounk: Listeners of this podcast will know that I'm also quite skeptical of that concept. There are clearly a lot of lies in social media. There's a lot of deliberate propaganda. And yet I've always been worried that this term is so vague that it can come to mean all kinds of things. It was used in order to shut down any genuine debate about the origin of the COVID virus in the middle of a pandemic. It was used to discredit reports about Hunter Biden's laptop, which turned out to be accurate. So what is your beef with this field of study and how should we talk about the world of what is true and what is false? Do we need a new set of words to have these conversations? How should we talk about this instead?
Teslo: I think in some ways the field suffers from a bit of hubris. People, since the dawn of time, have tried to discover what truth is. That's why philosophers emerged. That's why science emerged. It's trivially true that it's good to care about the truth. But what people discovered is that it's not that easy to discover the truth. People have a lot of biases, we have limited understanding, the world is very complex and so on. So a lot of groups in society want to discover the truth and a lot of people historically want to discover the truth. To me, saying that you're a misinformation expert is almost like saying that you’ve established a truth ministry.
Mounk: And this is underlined by the fact that, often, the people who bill themselves as misinformation journalists in their jobs, then on social media and sometimes in the articles spread things that are falsifiably wrong. So the people who claim to be experts have a pretty bad track record.
Teslo: Yeah, 100%. And it can very easily be weaponized for specific political goals, even with the people being unconscious. I don't believe in conspiracies. I don't think these people are evil. I think they generally probably believe in their mission. But I think it's very, very easy to lie to yourself that you are some sort of arbiter of truth when you call yourself a misinformation expert. And yeah, there have been so many scandals and people often make jokes about this: “Another misinformation expert lied about their CV!” I think what is important for people to realize is that we're all fallible in our intellect and what we actually need is good institutions and institutions that people can trust that are in a constant process of self-criticism and discovery. And I think a lot of the time the misinformation label actually serves to make these institutions lazier because it makes them feel good about themselves. I guess here I'm agreeing with Rob: we need to be harsher on the elites. We need elites to be self-correcting. We need universities to be self-correcting. The standard that we need to hold universities to is not the standard that we hold Breitbart to. And what universities need to do is to be as correct as possible in order to increase trust.
I think the root of misinformation is not misinformation per se, because untruth will always exist—it's the crisis in trust that we see in society. The trust in institutions has dropped a lot, particularly among Republicans, but also among Democrats. If you look at Gallup surveys of trust in universities, it has dropped a lot. So I think what intellectuals need to do is to face the truth that there have been failures. There have been some miscommunications, around how impactful lockdowns will be for children, around the COVID origins. It doesn't seem right to me to call someone a conspiracy theorist for advancing a theory, but that was done a lot by misinformation researchers. So I think that the failures of institutions were not being self-critical enough and just feeling good about themselves—like, “I'm so much better than the plebs.” And the right way to approach this is to do some soul-searching and think about how we can increase trust. And that includes decreasing what Matthew Yglesias calls “elite misinformation.” Elites themselves believe in false things, and they might be much more sophisticated. They won't sound like Breitbart. They won't sound like crazy conspiracy theorists. But they do believe false things.
Mounk: What are some examples of elite misinformation?
Teslo: I remember during COVID, when the lockdowns were implemented, Emily Oster, who was an economist, said “Look, we have to think about closing schools because the harm to children seems to be quite low from COVID. But the harm to their development and education could be very large, especially for disadvantaged children.” And I remember at the time she was super-criticized on Twitter. People told her that she wants people to die. And it was other elites, so not like random people. So I think that was an example of elite misinformation.
I saw recently on Twitter this study that was very popular at the time about how having a white doctor makes minority babies die at higher rates. And, because it sounded in line with liberal ideas, people propagated it. But it turns out it was based on a statistical flaw and there was a good debunking of it. And now most people basically accept that it was flawed.
Mounk: That's a fascinating paper. My understanding of that debate is that it is true that black newborns die at higher rates when they're treated by white doctors. But the reason for this turns out, upon closer examination, that when there is a greater health challenge to the baby, a white doctor is more likely to treat it. So perhaps because of some background facts in American society, more senior doctors are more likely to be white or major hospital centers are more likely to have more white doctors. And so when you have a birth where there's no risk to the baby and no particular concerns, it's more likely to be treated by a black doctor. When you have medical circumstances where the risk to the baby is much, much higher, it's more likely to be a white doctor. And so once you control for background facts about the health of the baby that is being treated, it turns out that there's no increased mortality rate.
The other major thing you said when I asked you about how you got into being a public writer and commentator was about the threat to the deeper culture that sustains a lot of our progress. Why should we be optimistic about our collective ability to make genuine progress? And to what extent do you think the social norms and the institutions that actually support and underwrite that progress are actually under threat these days?
Teslo: That's a good question. I think it's a tough question to answer because we don't have that many reference points to compare it to. We've only had this sort of modern framework for less than 200 years, maybe even less than that. This whole idea of open inquiry being very important, having institutions dedicated to it, is a coherent ideology that was born in the 19th century. I do think that it is probably more under threat than 30 years ago. But I still think there are reasons to be optimistic. I do believe that this appreciation for freedom is somewhat embedded into the psyche of a lot of our culture. And I also think that, unlike maybe 40 years ago, we have more technological means to achieve it. So, for example, it's much harder to have centralized control over the media. Substack is a way in which anyone can just share their opinion, so it's much harder to completely take someone out from the public sphere.
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Mounk: There's this debate about whether progress has slowed down—whether, when you look at the technological transformation that you had in the world from, let's say, 1940 to 1980, there's been similarly fast progress from 1980 to 2020. How should we think about the speed of progress in the background culture? And what can we do to increase that speed? And why should we increase that speed?
Teslo: I guess I have this belief that a lot of our current luxuries — both moral and physical, but particularly moral — are afforded because of technological progress. I don't want to think what would happen if we were again under a sort of scarcity regime, a Malthusian regime where, like throughout history, people really didn't have an abundance of food, really did have to fight for resources. It's very hard to die of actual hunger in the US. I know people struggle with food security, but famine was a thing throughout history. So I think that a lot of our benevolence, and even the hypocritical benevolence that elites can afford to show, is underpinned by the fact that we do have a lot of these luxuries. We're not living in a scarcity world. Women's liberation was very underpinned by medical innovations like the contraceptive pill. And I think in the future, reproductive health for women is going to be very important for further expanding self-determination. So I think a lot of the things that people of very different political stripes care about are ultimately underpinned by technological progress. That's why we should want to have it.
Mounk: What does that have to do with the role of women? You've written one article arguing that if a pro-progress side is going to win, it needs to convince women in a different kind of way. How are these two phenomena related?
Teslo: I think that, first of all, in the same way that people are lazily well-intentioned and adopt their views somewhat passively, I think that everyone is influenced a lot by aesthetics when considering what to believe in. Most of the time it's not about careful consideration. It's about the aesthetics of the people who propagate ideas, and it's about the aesthetics of the ideas in how they’re framed.
The second thing is that women are very important in propagating culture. And I don't really think that you can have a healthy cultural movement without some women participating. I also think it's good for women themselves. So combining these two ideas, I think the problem is that the way in which you frame technological progress, it should be also appealing to women. And I think you can frame it in ways that are appealing to women or not appealing to women. Let's take the example of pharmaceutical companies. One can talk about the fact that pharma companies are greedy and antisocial and want to charge people too much. And maybe since women on average are a bit more prosocial, maybe that will make women dislike pharma companies more than men. But you can also talk about how pharma companies have advanced our ability to treat children, to treat people. The average life expectancy of people with cystic fibrosis has increased from 4 to 44 in the last few decades, which is amazing. So I think that the prosocial role of progress has been very underplayed in mainstream media. And I think that has particularly made women maybe less interested in progress. And I see this emerging progress movement that is in large part dominated by men, and justifications or aesthetics for it that are likely to appeal primarily to other men: We need to go to Mars because we need to conquer Mars. And we all know boys like to play with toys and conquer and be soldiers or whatever—I don't think women will be as excited about going to Mars, but I don't think they need to be as excited about going to Mars, because there's so many things about progress that are naturally appealing to women, like curing people from cystic fibrosis.
Because women are very pivotal in cultural movements and propagating culture, we need to include women. And the way to do so is to present the aesthetics of progress in a way that is appealing to them.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Ruxandra discuss how to make a positive impact on the world, and whether there is any point in being a writer. This discussion is reserved for paying members...
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