https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=65rMLlrwXVg

What is the one thing that you would tell young men and women in America, in American universities right now? Don’t falsify your words to please anyone, including the professors. You know, you think about it. So you think, well, I need to get the grade. So I have to tell him or her what they want to hear. First of all, you’re probably not wise enough to be that cynical. You know, there are plenty of professors who are ideologically possessed, but most of them aren’t entirely so, very rarely. That’s the case for everyone. And you have to be pretty twisted as an academic. To not recognize something of quality, even if you disagree with it. And so I have to write what they want to hear might mean I can’t write. So if I take the easy route, I raise the probability I won’t fail slightly. And that doesn’t justify your cynicism. It just means it’s direct outward instead of being direct inward, which would be the proper thing to do. And then the next thing you might think is what exactly are you learning to do at university? Maybe your goal at university when it is to some degree ideologically addled is to learn how to tell the truth in the faith is in the face of opposition. And maybe if you practice doing that for four years, you really get an education and that’s highly probable. Like it’s, it’s kind of a tough route, you know, I’ll tell you a study. This is kind of an interesting study because people think they can go along to get along and why raise, you know, why make waves and look, you don’t need unnecessary enemies and you don’t need more trouble than, than generally comes along. But, but imagine you bring people into a lab and you give them a inventory of political opinion and maybe they have a particular opinion on something like immigration policy. Maybe they’re more for open borders. Maybe they’re more for closed borders, whatever. There’s somewhere on that distribution, let’s say. And then you say, okay, write a 500 word essay about the opposite viewpoint. So they do. And then you bring them all in a week later and you have them do the same scale. And what you find is their opinions have shifted way towards the essay that they wrote. And there’s two, a couple of reasons for that, maybe three. First of all, your opinions are more shallow than you think. And so if you detail out the counter argument, maybe now you have a better counter argument than you had an argument. And so, and part of the reason, part of the way to get educated in any real sense about a given topic is to write out both sides of the argument, right? Because then you’re armed and ready for whatever you want to do. For whatever comes to you. And someone who’s really trying to educate you will have you do that. In my fourth year psychology seminar, we would take a scientific paper and I’d pull out some propositions and then I’d arbitrarily assign groups to argue one side or the other. And they got pretty good at that pretty quickly, although most of them hadn’t done anything like that in the class before. Sadly enough, it’s extremely useful to know how to detail out the arguments on both sides. But if you falsify your opinions to get along, you will pull yourself towards what you regard to be false. And so that inevitably happens. And if you do that for a long time, there’ll be nothing left of you that isn’t false. And you know, you might think, I can say what I need to say, but they’ll still be the me that doesn’t do that. It’s like to a large degree, you are what your words create. And so if you use them instrumentally, if you use them falsely, I can’t think of anything you can do to yourself that’s worse than that. You know, I really believe that for those of you who have a religious bent, let’s call that Christian bent for the time being. There’s a sin that’s laid out in the gospel. That’s the sin against the Holy Ghost, and it’s unforgivable. And I thought about that for a long time, trying to figure out what I was doing. I thought about that for a long time, trying to figure out what that is. And I think what it is, is willing, willing falsification of your own words. Well, you can’t recover from that because, first of all, you make yourself false. And worse, you compromise the process by which you adapt. Now, there’s an idea that’s deeply embedded in our culture. It might be the most fundamental idea, which is that the divine word creates it, and that’s really true. And so if you violate that, well, good luck to you. It’s a really bad idea. And so when you go to university, what should you do? Learn to write, write about what’s important, write truthfully, right? Diligently, this program Tammy talked about that my son and I have developed along with some other people. I looked at how I wrote because I’ve written a lot. I tried to figure out how I was doing it. And then I tried to teach my students what I did. And then we built that into this program. So it’s not a guide. It’s a program that actually helps you write. And so if you’re writing. Well, first of all, you want to write down what you think about something. Maybe you have to do some research and maybe you need to write twice as much or three times as much as you need. And so you just get it down. Bad first draft, get down what you think. And then you get rid of what’s not good. Shorten the sentences, throw away the second rate thoughts, cut it, cut it, cut it, cut it. And what do you do? You look at every word and you see, is that the right word? You look at how the words are put together in phrases. Is that the right phrase? Do the phrases link together to make a sentence? Is this does the sentence have an idea? Are the sentences? Arrayed properly in a paragraph is the paragraph a unit? Is the idea solid? Are the paragraphs sequenced properly? And you edit it every single level of analysis and maybe repeatedly write the same sentence over and over. Try different words. And why are you doing that? Well, we talked about this already. You know, you’re trying to map the world and you’re trying to map the world. And you do that with your words and if you get the word right, it’s solid, right? You can jump up and down on it. It won’t move. And so you can go to university and you can learn to write, which is the same as learning to think. And then you have these words at your disposal that are, they’re solid. They’re solid. And that’s like a, that’s the platform upon which you confront the world. No one. So not only does that straighten you out, but no matter what you do in your life, you’re going to be inviting other people along for the ride in some cooperative, maybe competitive endeavor. And to the degree that you’re able to communicate, well, you can explain to people what you want and why, and you can negotiate for yourself and you can negotiate for your family and you can figure out how to market and you can speak in front of a crowd and you can write recommendations for the people who work for you so they can advance and so on and so forth. And I can’t understand for the life of me, why none of this is going to work. Why none of this has ever taught people in schools like why write? Well, how about to think? Why think? So you don’t fail. That’s why.