Why are great social upheavals such as the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe so often entirely unexpected and a surprise to “experts” who spend their lives studying the societies in which they occur? In 1995, Duke University professor Timur Kuran, in his book Private Truths, Public Lies, presented the theory of “preference falsification”, in which a commonly held view (for example, “communism doesn’t work”) is not expressed in public, even in the absence of explicit repression and threats, due to social pressure and the belief, because others are silent, that the opinion is isolated or rare.
This situation can persist for a protracted period, but it’s metastable: in a phenomenon like the “slow clap” of movies, where, after hearing an heretical truth, one person begins to clap slowly, then is joined by another, then another, finally ending in a thunderous ovation, an isolated courageous person speaking an unvoiced but widely shared opinion can act as a nucleation site to trigger a “preference cascade” which can upset the unstable equilibrium almost instantaneously.
In this extended (two hour and forty-five minute) conversation Prof. Kuran and Eric Weinstein discuss preference falsification and how it contributes to the dysfunctional, polarised, and profoundly stupid political discourse in developed countries today, and the prospects for a “multi-dimensional” understanding of problems and policies which might get beyond bitterly contested and unproductive dichotomies toward actual solutions.